Year 7 Workshop | Geneva, Switzerland

Jul 7

ACTOR Y7 Workshop

July 7-9, 2025

Haute école de musique de Genève (HEM)

Welcome | About | Schedule | Information

“I‘m looking forward very much to welcoming ACTOR members to our final workshop at the Haute école de musique (HEM) in Geneva. Many thanks to our collaborators at HEM for their hard work towards hosting the event, to Gilbert Nouno for raising the funds to make this happen, and also to Marc Garcia Vitoria who’s taking care of our local arrangements along with André Martins de Oliveira who has been working tirelessly as Project Coordinator. This workshop will wrap up the seventh and last year of our partnership, and there are many activities to report on and progress to take stock of as we look forward to the Timbre and Orchestration Network (TONE) Partnership, which will have an expanded focus on research creation and study of global musical approaches to timbre and orchestration. I’m particularly encouraged by the many collaborative activities that took place over the last year among faculty and student members across different ACTOR institutions, ensuring that this year’s slate of workgroups will once again demonstrate the resourcefulness and devotion of our research-creation community. I look forward to seeing everyone either in person or virtually and hearing about your work over the course of the workshop, and most importantly to celebrate an amazing seven years of collectively and collaboratively pushing the frontiers of timbre and orchestration research, creation, and learning!”

— Stephen McAdams

The Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) partnership involves musicians, humanists, scientists and engineers to deepen the understanding of the many roles that timbre and orchestration play in music in interaction with all the other musical parameters. Every year, this group of orchestrational aficionados gets together to have updates on the progress made by its various workgroups and to plan on the year to come. Aside from building the ACTOR community, facilitating networking, and fostering collaboration, the annual workshop also includes presentations given by student members during the plenary session and reports of activities presented by the Project Director, the Training and Mentoring Committee (TMC), the Knowledge Mobilization Committee (KMC), and the Diversity Committee (DC).

This year, we will be holding our final workshop , concluding the activities of the ACTOR partnership project. The main goal will be to wrap-up, review accomplishments and results obtained over the last year, and plan how research will continue under the Timbre and Orchestration Network (TONE) project.

The ACTOR Y7 Workshop will be organized in a hybrid format (online/in person), in Geneva, Switzerland. We hope that this format will enable the majority of members to participate.

More info:
Workgroup Leaders | Student Presentations | Note-Takers | Travel and Accom.

The Y7 Annual Workshop will be hosted by the Haute école de musique de Genève, located at Rue du Général-Dufour 2, Genève, CH 1204.

Activities will take place in rooms GD10 and GD20. The concert on July 8th will be held in La Blackbox (room GD40).

Contact: +41 22 558 60 50

More information: www.hesge.ch/hem/

Download PDF version here

July 7 (Monday)

* All times are listed in CET (UTC/GMT +1 hour)

8:00 Welcome Coffee
9:00 Opening remarks
9:05 Admin Session
9:55 Student Presentations (1)
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Student Presentations (2-4)
12:30 Lunch (on site)
1:30 Student Presentations (5)
2:00 Lightning Talks (1-7)
3:20 Coffee break
4:00 Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR) Session
5:30 Closing remarks
6:00 Dinner (on site)

July 8 (Tuesday)

8:00 Welcome Coffee
9:00 Timbre and Orchestration Analysis
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Orchestration Pedagogy
12:30 Lunch (on site)
1:30 Timbre semantics
3:00 Coffee break
3:30 Host Highlight Session
6:00 Concert
8:30 Dinner (on site)

July 9 (Wednesday)

8:00 Welcome Coffee
9:00 Acoustics of Musical Instruments and Performance Rooms
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Arts, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Methodologies
12:30 Lunch (on site)
1:30 Timbre, Orchestration and the Human Voice
3:00 Coffee break
3:30 Composer-performer orchestration research ensemble (CORE)
5:00 Wrap-up
6:00 Dinner (La cave valaisanne - At own expense)

Concert

[More information soon]

All Workgroups

Here is a complete list of workgroups and their respective leaders. Links to supporting materials will be posted as they become available.

*Please note that the links to supporting materials will take you to ACTOR’s repository in Sharepoint. If you experience problems accessing it, contact actor-project.music@mcgill.ca

Acoustics of Musical Performance Rooms (Malte Kob, Martha de Francisco). [Room_Acoustics]
Arts, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Methodologies (Moe Touizrar, Jason Noble, and Rebecca Moranis) [Interdisciplinary_Methodologies]
Composer-performer Orchestration Research Ensembles – CORE (Stephen McAdams, Roger Reynolds, Caroline Traube). [CORE]
Orchestration Pedagogy [Orchestration_Pedagogy]
Timbre and Orchestration Analysis (Robert Hasegawa). [Timbre_Orchestration_Analysis]
Timbre and orchestration Resource (TOR) (Ben Duinker, Andres Gutierrez Martinez, Kit Soden). [TOR]
Timbre Semantics (Lindsey Reymore, Lena Heng, Jason Noble). [Timbre_Semantics]
Timbre, Orchestration, and the Human Voice (Juanita Marchand Knight). [Voice]