Timbral exploration of sonic resources is often carried out by musicians interacting in a particular environment, often involving improvisation or the execution of compositionally directed sonic gestures. The Dance And Timbral Exploration (DATE) project will expand on the combined composed and improvisatory environments by providing a dancer/choreographer with the tools to blend and process the sounds of two musicians in real time using physical gestures.

A newly built replica of Beethoven’s 1803 Erard Frères piano (Orpheus Institute, 2016–present) has allowed for a study of “Frenchness” through the sonic and embodied explorations of a well-known and all-important Viennese pianist-composer. Relevant to the ACTOR mission, the proposed collaborative research now builds on questions that emerged from a recording on the instrument in 2019, which featured music by Beethoven and French contemporaries Louis Adam and Daniel Steibelt.

On a fundamental level, we ask what differentiated a “French” from a “Viennese” sound; but taking into account the skills of both builder and player, along with the complex affordances of a particular type of instrument, we also ask what made Beethoven a “fast learner” on a new instrument and his Paris-based rival Steibelt an “expert” of a familiar one—one that lent itself well to what in France was known as son continu, or the skill of sustaining or “spinning” sound (which turned Steibelt into a widely recognized champion of the technique of tremolo).

Our project will document and explore the timbres of the instruments of the orchestra, and the instrumental techniques used to create vast ranges of timbres, by recording the orchestra (video and audio) and interviewing the artists who play these instruments, and will culminate in multiples series of short, bilingual, educational videos around each instrument.

This project develops a streamlined resource (TOR module) for emerging composers seeking to introduce live electronics into their instrumental orchestration practice. It focuses on two topics. 1. Accessible and stable performance frameworks 2. Straightforward strategies for orchestrating with electronics in chamber and orchestral context.

Timbre is an important stylistic and structural parameter in popular music, yet its specific functional roles in this repertoire have not yet been theorized. Most music-analytical scholarship on timbre in popular music to date consists of case studies of individual artists, bands, studios, or genres (e.g., Blake 2012, Fink et al. 2018, Lavengood 2020, Scotto 2017, Womack & Davis 2006). A recent corpus study by White et al. (2021) of a 665-song subset of the McGill-Billboard corpus demonstrates that timbral and textural changes serve as important formal markers but identifies only general trends. There have been no broad corpus studies establishing timbral norms for genres or eras of popular music.

Creation of an internet-based guide for musicians that describes in layman terms the fundamentals of acoustic features of musical instruments, stages, performance and rehearsal rooms using visual and auditory examples

Brightness is among the most studied aspects of music perception, and arguably among the most important timbral cues actively shaped by performers, composers, and audio engineers.

Timbral exploration of sonic resources is often carried out by musicians interacting in a particular environment, often involving improvisation or the execution of compositionally directed sonic gestures. The Dance And Timbral Exploration (DATE) project will expand on the combined composed and improvisatory environments by providing a dancer/choreographer with the tools to blend and process the sounds of two musicians in real time using physical gestures. This project will make use of the Kinect Controlled Artistic Sensing System (KiCASS), a UBC-developed motion capture system which uses infra-red tracking to generate data from 20 points on multiple dancers.

We propose to create an advanced 3D audio and video recording of Jason Noble’s fantaisie harmonique for two guitar orchestras (one classical, one electric; score enclosed; https://youtu.be/Sd5FWqmPbU8), which was premiered at the inaugural 21st Century Guitar Conference (August 2019, Ottawa, ON) with 3D projection art by Kurt Laurenz Theinert (https://theinert-lichtkunst.de/).

Orchestration et ré-orchestration: Une étude des combinaisons et contrastes

Évaluation des propriétés spatio-temporelles de la musique de Hans Tutschku par l'utilisation d'enregistrements ambisoniques d'ordre élevé

Étude et base de données de la sémantique du timbre orchestral

Robert Hasegawa and colleagues from McGill, Université de Montréal, the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT) and local new music ensembles planned an edition of the IRCAM Forum Workshop hors les murs in Montreal (April 2 to 5, 2020). This event brings together diverse Montreal institutions and offers an opportunity for exchanges between researchers and artists from IRCAM and their counterparts in Canada and the United States.

Creation of an internet-based guide for musicians that describes in layman terms the fundamentals of acoustic features of musical instruments, stages, performance and rehearsal rooms using visual and auditory examples