Projects

Welcome to the Projects page! Here you can find links to projects taking place as part of the Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project.

These Projects include:

• Active Projects, that are key components of ACTOR’s Workgroups

• Funded Projects, that represent new research proposals and projects by ACTOR Collaborators and Student Members

• Projects with External Collaborators that ACTOR Members are involved in

• Past Projects

These are the current Workgroup-based Active Projects. Some of these projects pre-date the ACTOR Project; they represent some of the fundamental research questions that brought together the founding members of the Project, in their goal to bring to timbre- and- orchestration-based research to the forefront of scholarship, practice, and public awareness. See the Research Axes page to understand more on how the ACTOR Project’s research was initially organized; these Sub Axes became the foundation for the current Workgroups, as each group has cross-axis mandates and outputs (see this visualization on how workgroups topics span the three main research axes ).

This section is **Under Construction** and will feature these projects soon. See the Workgroup homepage, which links to individual pages with Research Objectives and Active Projects.

The purpose of ACTOR Project Funding is to encourage innovative research and/or pilot projects by members of the ACTOR project, across the Workgroups, that could lead to external funding opportunities. Strategic Projects are research-based projects; Research-Creation Projects involve a creative element along with scholarly research; Student Collaborative Projects are interdisciplinary projects involving two students from two different institutions.

Possible outcomes are joint publications, new modules for the TOR, and/or other public presentations of ACTOR research, and/or musical compositions/premieres/recordings. Projects with an interdisciplinary focus, relevant to the ACTOR project’s mandate, were chosen.

See the All Funding page for more information about ACTOR’s funding for members.

Below is a searchable list of all funded projects, linking to the each project’s abstract and including a list of researchers. Each project has one Principal Investigator (PI) and can include external collaborators.

These are the current Projects with External Collaborators. These external links are to projects that ACTOR members are currently involved in with external collaborators — either funded by the institution or government where the institution is located — but are important to ACTOR’s mandate.

VRACE: Virtual Reality Audio for Cyber Environments

ACTOR partners at the Detmold University of Music are part of the EU FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECT “VRACE”: “The ITN project ‘VRACE – Virtual Reality Audio for Cyber Environments’ establishes a multidisciplinary network that will train the next generation of researchers in the audio part of virtual and augmented reality. The aim is to raise Virtual / Augmented Reality to a next level beyond gaming and entertainment by benefiting from the critical mass of expertise gathered in this distinguished consortium.” https://vrace-etn.eu/

The Music Performance Markup Format (MPM)

A musical performance of some symbolic music data (e.g. the score, MusicXML, MEI) is the entirety of all transformations necessary to make the music sound. This includes the temporal order of sound events as well as their specific execution. The Music Performance Markup format (MPM) is dedicated to describe and model musical performances in large detail in the manner of a construction kit. It comes packed with a series of performance features from several domains incl. the following:

• Timing features: tempo (incl. discrete and continuous tempo changes), rubato, asynchrony, random/non-systematical deviations from precise timing,

• Dynamics features: macro dynamics (incl. discrete and continuous dynamics changes), metrical accentuation, random/non-systematical deviations from precise dynamics,

• Articulation: absolute and relative modifications of a tone's duration, dynamics, timing (e.g. agogic accent), and intonation, random/non-systematic variations of tone duration and intonation.

Each feature is designed on the basis of a mathematical model that was derived from empirical performance research. These models not only reproduce the typical characteristics of their respective features. Two musicians may perform the same features (say an articulation, a crescendo, or a ritardando) very differently. Thus, the models are also equipped with expressive parameters to recreate the whole bandwidth of such variations.

These are completed projects that were undertaken by ACTOR members, in collaboration with various institutions and external collaborators.

MAKIMOno

Multimodal analysis and knowledge inference for musical orchestration (MAKIMOno) [NSERC (Canada), ANR (France)]

This project brings together IRCAM-CNRS-Sorbonne Université, McGill University, and OrchPlayMusic, Inc. to address scientifically one of the most complex aspects of music: the use of timbre—the complex set of tone colours that distinguish sounds emanating from different instruments or their blended combinations—to shape music through various modes of orchestration. This first-of-its-kind project will lead to the creation of information technologies for human interaction with digital media that will radically change orchestration pedagogy, provide better tools for the computer-aided interactive creation of musical content, and lead to a better understanding of perceptual principles underlying orchestration practice. 

e-Orch

Research into orchestration at the Haute école de musique Genève – Neuchâtel

Orchestration can be described from several angles: it is mainly represented as the art of writing, from symbolic data, musical pieces for several instruments, by combining them which each other, the size of the ensemble being variable. We can therefore deduce that it exploits instrumental timbres with the aim of producing orchestral effects; yet the very act of mixing the timbral and acoustic properties of instruments also falls within the domain of signal processing. This dual symbolic/signal view is not to be seen as an opposition, but as an illustration of the complexity of this practice; it lies at the heart of the relationship between art and science, two disciplines whose intersection is particularly relevant to the present time.
Read more…

Orchestration and Perception Project

This research program seeks to create a psychological foundation for a theory of orchestration practice based on perceptual principles associated with musical timbre. It involves an international collaboration between McGill University, Ircam-Centre Pompidou and the Haute école de musique de Genève. The four thematic research axes include:

1. the role of timbre in instrumental fusion and in the differentiation of musical voices,

2. its role in the creation of musical structures,

3. the perception of orchestral gestures as meaningful units in a musical discourse, and

4. the historical evolution of orchestration techniques across epochs.

Each theme will be addressed by analyzing orchestration treatises, analyzing musical scores and cataloguing and classifying orchestral effects, automated mining of symbolic digital representations of scores, creating sonic renderings of scores by an orchestral rendering environment allowing for the comparison of several versions (original and reorchestrated) to test specific hypotheses, conducting perceptual tests on orchestral effects, integrating the results into a theory of orchestration, and transferring acquired knowledge to computer-aided orchestration systems and to the development of new pedagogical tools for orchestration.

This Project was part of the foundation of, and evolved into, the ACTOR Project.