Detailed accounts of ACTOR-Project-funded research projects, workshops, and collaborations focused on timbre and orchestration, highlighting methodologies, findings, and potential implications for the field.
As an ensemble of four instruments from the same family, the quartet has an exceptional capacity for blending but can also sharply differentiate the timbres of its members when desired. Ans an uncoducted ensemble, the string quartet depends on close non-cerbal communication between its members, and quartet members are accustomed to making subtle variations in their playing to achieve timbral and orchestrational ends. The purpose of this project is to explore how composers can orchestrate for the string quartet, examining strategies for timbral blend, stratification, modulation, and contrast.
“Timbrenauts” is a cross-institutional collaborative student research-creation project. We employed experimental designs from timbre perception research to generate data models that will inform the creation of new musical compositions for an atypical instrumental duo of cello and trombone, while leveraging extended techniques rarely explored in traditional musical repertoire. In this TOR module, we discuss our motivations, data collection process, similarity judgment experiment, and the resulting data we want musicians to use as a basis for their creative output.
The primary objective of the Space As Timbre (SAT) project is to conduct meticulous experiments on orchestration solutions and playing techniques, to achieve timbral effects that closely approximate the perceptual characteristics of diverse acoustical spaces. To this end, SAT endeavors to illuminate the intricate interplay between the spectral content of a sound, its resynthesis through orchestration, and the resulting perception of the quality of the acoustical space where the sound seems to have been produced.
How do Luvale musicians tune their drums with heat and tuning paste? How does this tuning process change a drum’s timbre? How do practitioners describe these timbres? And what acoustic properties are encoded in these semantic, descriptive terms? In this collaborative and interdisciplinary module, we address these questions through the case study of a two-step tuning process among Luvale drummers in Zambia.
This module offers a streamlined resource for emerging composers seeking to introduce live electronics into their instrumental orchestration practice. Accessible and user-friendly software and hardware platforms offer a pathway for emerging or (technologically curious expert) composers to experiment with electronics in a low risk, low-cost context.
This project spurred the development of an internet-based guide for musicians that describes, in layperson terms, the fundamentals of acoustic features of musical instruments, stages, and performance/rehearsal rooms using visual and auditory examples. The guide also aims to explain what and how parameters can be assessed along with the audio recordings to document a musical performance.
The DaTE project investigated the use of dance tracking to control electroacoustic processing of acoustic timbres. To this end, the project involved a composer/ programmer, a dancer, a flautist, and a cellist, and used the UBC-developed Kinect Controlled Artistic Sensing System (KiCASS) to track the dancer and generate movement/position data. T
This project analyzes the understudied parameters of timbre and texture and their interactions with musical form in a new popular-music corpus, Timbre in Popular Song (TiPS). This study addresses two problems in popular-music scholarship: lack of research on timbre and texture, and underrepresentation of non-male and non-white artists in both popular music and its scholarship.
In late August of 2022, the rich sonority of the historical Chapelle du Grand Séminaire de Montréal presented the acoustical canvas for a multifaceted choral recording and research project. Under the baton of Andrew Gray, Montreal choir Voces Boreales performed Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles for mixed chorus (2005) and percussion, a musical pilgrimage for 17 voices, inspired by the millennial Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
The purpose of the Musician’s Auditory Perception (MAP) project is to collect qualitative data via sonic ethnography in order to promote and analyze, both literally and metaphorically, (a) sonic collaboration between auditory learners, (b) modes of sound information gathering, and (c) the creative expression of musicians, while disrupting common pedagogic methods that reinforce hierarchical education practices.
"Masque de fer" (Iron Mask) is a module for exploring extended techniques on the drum kit, created by Gabriel Couturier and Martin Daigle who were awarded the ACTOR Project’s Collaborative Student Project Grant. The recording session generated an open-access extended technique resource that includes a stereo mix, the entire recording session, and the stems in 96 kHz or in 48 kHz. This session was filmed from the first-person point of view to allow researchers and composers to step into the world of the drum kit performer. This tool will allow composers to familiarize themselves with the sound possibilities which are presented in the research.
Composers make use of their knowledge of different orchestration techniques in creating certain effects and sonic outcomes. These effects may be comprehended by listeners to a greater or lesser extent depending on the amount of shared understanding with the musical tradition, style of music, and other factors. In this project, we look at how the success of these effects depends on both prior knowledge and experience, and how they are perceivable by listeners. Successful orchestration is built upon the fact that regardless of the instruments used or the musical or cultural connotations of the music, they adhere to universal mechanisms of auditory perception and cognition.
