Y3 | Student Presentations
Student Presentations
Anqi Liu
I would love to present my most recent practices of incorporating the psyche in the compositional process. This is to use the score as a heuristic to provoke the maximal unknown and uncertain potential possibilities of sound via the performers' interpretations. This includes considering further what kind of harmonic design, and which particularities of tuning, would maximally trigger the inner psyche space embedded in performers’ minds. I will use a bass flute solo piece as an example to address this practice in detail. In this bass flute solo, the question I asked myself before I even wrote down one note for this piece was, how could I create a space for the player that he/she could breathe freely but simultaneously strugglingly. Time is essential: the player needs a relatively freer time zone but with certain crucial constraints; although those constraints are not from the rhythm/tempo or time calculations but rather, directly coming from the sphere of muscle gestures on playing the instrument. Flutists naturally sing vowels into the flutes when they play. This is an idiomatic language embedded. The experiment I tried was what if I require them to sing vowels with specificity, particularly in a relatively already challenging tuning space. I will also talk about my ensemble piece "Etude of Echoes" which was composed in the "Actor" seminar at UC San Diego, led by Roger Reynolds. In this piece, the practice is further addressed in four instruments as well as in the ensemble sonority.
Recordings of examples:
Jorge Ramos
This research explores new methods of orchestration, focusing on the influence of electronics on orchestration practice. By drawing upon electronic music composition techniques and timbral-shaping tools, this project challenges the boundaries of orchestration and explores processes that inform orchestration decisions. I will be using new approaches to timbral blend, spatialization and acoustics, real-time orchestration, computer-assisted orchestration and extending the timbral palette by rethinking the ideals of spectral composition. Through the resulting portfolio, this project aims to create new sound worlds and audience experiences while situating my distinctive approach in relation to other existing practices. Furthermore, a supporting commentary will illuminate the deep pre-compositional research that informs my orchestration practice by identifying the techniques and evaluating their application To explore such concepts, it is vital to conduct practice-led autoethnographic research. This allows for full, creative exploration and application of site-specific and acoustic/electronic tools. This practice-led approach tackles a gap in current research where there is a lack of documentation focused on the musical aspects of orchestration in the computer era. To date psychoacoustic studies have been the driving force, but these overlook the creative application of electronic-informed timbral techniques. Finally, by acknowledging the influence of electronics on my orchestration approach, mainly due to my career as a composer and electronics performer, I hope to uncover new findings in this area by combining electronic (computer-assisted orchestration) and non-electronic systems (intuitive and/or traditional orchestration concepts) into what I consider to be my orchestration discourse.
Victor Rosi
There are several key attributes designated by sound experts to characterize timbre. Their use is common but varies greatly depending on the professional field. It is therefore not always guaranteed that their understanding is similar. In this work we want to better understand the perception of four subjective attributes of timbre and try to propose an acoustic definition. By using a subjective annotation method called Best-Worst Scaling on a large sound database, our results show differences in understanding of these attributes within and between four professional groups (i.e. sound engineers, conductors, sound designers and composers). Basically, Best-worst scaling allows to associate latent scores to each item of a corpus according to a studied subjective concept. The exploitation of these scores, coupled with the extraction of audio features from the sound database, will allow the emergence of the acoustic code of each of the studied attributes in the framework of a feature selection process. Our results will inform us about the relationship that may exist between the terms. The methodology is also presented as a potential solution to the annotation and processing of a large number of sound stimuli in an experimental setting.
Joshua Rosner
Current timbre research has focused overwhelmingly on what George Lewis (1996) describes as Eurological traditions; musical traditions that are based in European-derived beliefs, behaviors, and logics. Non-Eurological traditions remain understudied and offer the opportunity to study timbre’s role in new contexts. My research on timbre and orchestration of big bands and jazz orchestras, a Creole of Eurological and Afrological practices, brings in new perspective on timbre and orchestration. First, I present two interrelated Afrological ideologies of timbre: the transmission of personhood, character, or personality through instrumental timbre and what Olly Wilson (1992) calls the Heterogeneous Sound Ideal of African-American music: an aesthetic preference for timbral contrast yielding a mosaic of diverse elements that combine to form an unblended but unified whole. Drawing on examples from composers such as Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Thad Jones, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Bob Brookmeyer, and Maria Schneider, I demonstrate how these ideologies affect compositional, arranging, and performance practice. Additionally, my research has yielded new insight into timbre semantics unique to jazz musicians and writers, term that reinforce the aforementioned ideologies. Furthermore, in keeping with McAdams, Goodchild, and Soden (in prep) as well as Touizrar and McAdams (2016), I have adapted the taxonomy related to auditory grouping principles for orchestration practice for this music so these examples and timbral phenomena can be incorporated into future ACTOR research.
Showan Tavakol
This research is generally focused on strategies for integrating and adapting the aesthetic elements of particular Middle Eastern modes into a contemporary Western language. While exploring and analyzing the important aesthetic elements of the Eastern modes (Maqam and Dastgah systems) from the modal music of the East (and particularly the Middle East), I will discuss the different forms of adaptation and transformation of these aesthetic elements in my Western contemporary compositions.
To illustrate the modification of traditional Eastern language into contemporary Western language, I will discuss stereotypical patterns, nuclei and modal morphemes, and new concepts of amodality through :
specific oriental forms and hermeneutics of musical concepts
short practical studies for Western instruments that belong to the same family as their Eastern counterparts, which will highlight some unusual playing patterns from Eastern instruments
some common trends between these two languages
the exploration of the concept of amodality through atonalism and serialism
long-duration melody, Eastern rhythmic modes (iqa and osul), and rhythmic-temporal meter
infra-chromaticism
Jithin Thilakan
The blending between sound sources in a joint performance is an important feature relevant in the evaluation and reconstruction of the sound field of an orchestra/ensemble in real life and also in virtual reality domain. It is also relevant in fields such as music composition & orchestration, stage/room acoustic adaptation, and music production. Followed by a macroscopic assessment of blending using a live listening test, microscopic level investigation, i.e. signal analysis of the blending is presented in this work. The violins played in a joint performance are recorded using spot microphones, and a listening test with Tonmeisters and musicians is carried out using sound samples extracted from the recording. Musical and audio signal features have been extracted from the sound samples to investigate those potential features that contribute to the impression of blending. The higher dimensional audio feature data is analyzed using statistical dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA, LDA, etc. The first findings report that the MFCC features analyzed using LDA support a hypothesis to predict the blending impression in microscopic levels.
The second part of this presentation includes an investigation of the conservation of blending impression in simulated environments. A room acoustic simulation of Detmold concert house is developed using the commercial software ODEON and optimized using the traditional room-acoustic parameters measured from the concert hall. A violin ensemble played in the concert hall is auralized using the room acoustic simulation. Finally, the sound field in simulations and real measurements are compared using perceptual evaluations to check whether the blending impression is conserved in simulations.
Kathleen Zhang
The Orchestral Distribution Effects in Sound, Space, and Acoustics (ODESSA) Project creates abundant multitrack material of large ensembles playing harmonically complex repertoire. As fully mixed and realized recordings, they portray a blend of timbral perspectives: from the precise musical decisions of the conductor and the orchestra, to the reflections of the hall, and the sonic designs of the engineers who placed each microphone. This “Anatomy of a Mix'' project will be integrated into the new ODESSA web module in the Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR). It deconstructs the idea of a blended, orchestral sound into the various microphone systems that serve as its capture points. Using the perspectives of each of these sources: from a contact mic that rides the body of a violin to a pair of small diaphragm omnis facing the wall at the very back of the hall, this web series provides commentary and context for every capture point of orchestral sound and explains what it provides to the timbre of the mix as a whole. Each excerpt (“Subject” in ODESSA terms) is explored from different points of view. For example, a Subject that features the entirety of the orchestra could be examined from the point of view of a mixing engineer summing systems together to create a cohesive stereo mix, but one that concentrates more on an individual instrument line could hone in on how the timbre of that instrument changes given different capture points throughout the room. So far, the Anatomy of the Mix explores Montreal recording but it will expand to encompass later ODESSA iterations as well.