ACTOR
Timbre and Orchestration
Summer School

About

The Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) Project is pleased to announce our second Timbre and Orchestration Summer School (TOSS2), held at the University of British Columbia’s School of Music in Vancouver, Canada, July 12–15, 2024. Building on the first edition's success — TOSS1 in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2023 — the second edition again foregrounds the rich and interdisciplinary world of timbre and orchestration research, engaging with questions related to musicology, history, music theory, composition, cognitive neuroscience, and acoustics. The Summer School is designed for graduate students (or advanced undergraduate students), postdocs, and early-career researchers in any field of music-related research with a keen interest in timbre and orchestration. The first three days of the Summer School involve lectures and tutorials (including small group work). The fourth day overlaps with the ACTOR Project’s Year 6 Annual Workshop, where students can attend ACTOR lightning talks and research presentations. Over the course of the summer school, students can participate in a research roundtable and will have the opportunity to present posters at the Summer School poster session.

Schedule

This schedule is preliminary and may change prior to TOSS2. Registered students will be notified when the final schedule is confirmed.

Friday, July 12

9:00–9:30 Welcome and Introduction
9:30–12:30 Tutorial 1 – Music Analysis and Timbre (Daphne Tan)
12:30–13:30 Lunch
13:30–16:30 Tutorial 2 – Timbre Worlds (Emily Dolan)
18:00 - TOSS Dinner (details TBC)

Saturday, July 13

9:30–12:30 Tutorial 3 – Sound as Material: Perspectives on a Timbral Discourse (Anthony Tan)
12:30–13:30 Lunch
13:30–16:30 Tutorial 4 – Deciphering Timbre Through the Prism of Acoustics and Psychoacoustics (Caroline Traube)
Dinner on own

Sunday, July 14

9:30–12:30 Tutorial 5 – Ethnomusicology of Orchestration (Michael Tenzer)
12:30–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Research Roundtable (TOSS students and tutors)
15:00–16:30 Unstructured time for one-on-one or small-group meetings with tutors
Dinner on own

Monday, July 15 (overlap with ACTOR Y6 Workshop)

The schedule for this day is still being finalized. The events officially part of TOSS2 will all occur in the morning, and are listed below. Some afternoon events are also open to TOSS students, but they are not officially part of the school schedule. If you are planning to depart Vancouver later this day, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss your travel details before booking them, to ensure you do not miss any TOSS2 events.

The morning schedule will include:

Welcome
TOSS poster session
ACTOR student research award presentations

Tutors

Emily Dolan (Brown University)

Timbre Worlds

Much scholarship on timbre has emphasized its ineffability, as well as the failure of theory and language to account for timbre’s power, function, and effect. And yet, despite these challenges, we still manage to talk a lot about timbre, in both formal and informal ways. In this pair of workshops, we will delve into classic and recent readings in timbre studies to think about the intersections between timbral theory and timbral convention. Sessions will unfold with a mix of large and small group discussions. In addition to the assigned readings, participants will be asked to do a small interview project in preparation for our session.

Daphne Tan (University of Toronto)

Music Analysis and Timbre

It’s an exciting time to attend to timbre: in recent years, music analysts have employed new tools, technologies, and approaches to capture and describe timbral experiences. This workshop surveys a range of published music analyses with timbre as a central focus, including those for specialists and those for the general public. Together, we will study how analysts convey their observations (through words and visual representations) and consider the interpretive rewards and limitations of different modes of analysis. We will also broaden our discussion to ask about relationships, overt or inferred, between music and the analyst.

Michael Tenzer (University of British Columbia)

Ethnomusicology of Orchestration

An ethnomusicology of orchestration historicizes the concept to encompass traditions in which orchestration is not (or only minimally) an expressive choice, but something constrained by nonautonomous factors. Among these are environmental and technological affordances shaping organology, place-based acoustics of performance contexts, social structures in which ensemble makeup affirms group identity or community function, and invariable musical roles developed for different instruments in a given ensemble or genre. All of these must adapt to the laws of human cognition. They also hang on each tradition’s construal of the musical entity itself, that is, the ontology of the inner thing we call “music” in each culture, and how its transformation into performed sound materializes these factors. A still broader view suggests an evolutionary thread connecting the timbral strategies evolved for animal biophony, to the worldings of traditional music, to the rise of timbre as an individual’s identity marker in contemporary life.

Anthony Tan (University of Victoria)

Sound as Material: Perspectives on a Timbral Discourse

Considering timbre as the salient dimension of compositional practice raises questions about materiality, transformation, organization, and expression. In this session, I will present artistic and conceptual approaches to timbre in my own music and from diverse genre repertoire. Participants will engage in creative exercises exploring timbre translation and typological orchestration.

Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal)

Deciphering Timbre Through the Prism of Acoustics and Psychoacoustics

From the point of view of psychoacoustics, timbre is a perceptual attribute of sound that depends on many spectro-temporal characteristics : the shape of the dynamic envelope, the duration and more or less noisy nature of the attack, the harmonic or inharmonic nature of the frequency components, the sustained or unsustained nature of the source, the distribution of energy in the various frequency regions of the spectrum, the presence of formants or particular resonances, modulation effects, and so on. In this workshop aimed at participants from all disciplines (not requiring any prior knowledge in musical acoustics), all these parameters will be clearly defined and illustrated. ACTOR's Timbre Lingo project will serve as a source of pedagogical material. Timbre semantics will also be discussed in relation with the acoustic nature of sounds. As an application, students will be guided in the use and exploration of spectral analysis software such as Sonic Visualiser.

Registration Fees and Logistical Information

Registration for TOSS 2024 will open for successful applicants following the communication of application results in March.

There are two pricing options available:

Option 1: $678 CAD — includes: tuition, accommodation for four nights (check in: July 11, check out: July 15), breakfast and lunch for four days (July 12–15), and one dinner (date TBD).

Option 2: $415 CAD — includes: tuition, breakfast and lunch for four days (July 12–15), and one dinner (date TBD).

Students are responsible for covering the costs of their travel to and from Vancouver, local connections (travel within Vancouver), and dinners for all but one day of the summer school schedule.

The Venue

The University of British Columbia's School of Music is situated in an idyllic location in Vancouver, Canada. TOSS2 offers participants not only a deep dive into the realms of timbre and orchestration but also an opportunity to experience the unique ambiance of this prestigious institution. UBC's School of Music, renowned for its academic excellence, is nestled in an environment that blends natural beauty with a vibrant cultural scene. The campus offers breathtaking oceanic and coastal mountain views, and is surrounded by the 1,890-acre Pacific Spirit Regional Park — a lush temperate rainforest typical of BC’s West Coast. The city centre is around a half hour bus or bike ride away.

ACTOR Y6
Annual Workshop

The ACTOR Project's Annual Workshops are a cornerstone event for partners to engage and collaborate each summer. Alternating locations between academic partner institutions in North America, Europe, or held online, these workshops serve as a hub for interdisciplinary dialogue on cutting-edge timbre and orchestration research. Within these workshops, focused workgroup sessions are dedicated to evaluating ongoing studies, discussing future directions, and setting clear, actionable objectives. Additionally, the program is enriched with lightning talks, student-led presentations, musical concerts, and an informative director's report. Embracing a hybrid format, the workshops facilitate both in-person and remote participation, ensuring extensive and inclusive involvement from the global community.

TOSS2 students will participate in the first day of ACTOR’s Y6 Workshop, which occurs at the University of British Columbia July 15–17. The Y6 webpage will launch in early 2024, but for an example of what happens at this workshop, please visit the Y5 (Strasbourg, 2023) page here.