This resource contains an array of computer-based analytic, creative, and pedagogical applications to promote novel knowledge-discovery techniques in the analysis, creation, and teaching of timbre and orchestration.
Orchidea [intelligent assisted orchestration]
Assisted orchestration can be thought as the process of searching for the best combinations of orchestral sounds to match a target sound under specified metric and constraints. Although a solution to this problem has been a long-standing request from many composers, it remains relatively unexplored because of its high complexity, requiring knowledge and understanding of both mathematical formalization and musical writing. Orchidea is an evolution of the Orch* tools and performs static and dynamic assisted orchestration. Orchidea performs mono-objective optimization on various features and requires a little number of parameters for orchestration. Tutorial videos are available here.
Orchview
OrchView is a software platform for score analysis. It is the first software of its kind to offer features and tools specifically designed for orchestration analysis. OrchView includes annotation tools built for the orchestral grouping effects taxonomy. The orchestration techniques tools are currently being implemented and will be made available in 2022. The data for each annotation is collected as a user progresses with their analysis. This includes the bar numbers, selected instruments, audio time-codes for the reference recording used in the analysis, tool used and tool parameters. OrchView annotations can be labelled, displayed or hidden. The resulting score including its annotations can be exported as a new PDF file. Once an annotation has been validated the data are then uploaded to the OrchARD database (add link if for web). From the OrchARD website researchers can make queries and search through thousands of OrchView annotations. The results will then be available to download as an OrchView file. It is then possible to listen to the recording at the precise location indicated in the score.
Orcheil
Orcheil is a web app for the visualization of orchestration. The goal is to provide a clear and immediate representation of when an instrument is or is not performing in a piece of music. This can reveal, for instance, the instrumentation of a composite timbre, or the role of orchestration in articulating form. It is a timbre-first visualization of music. http://orcheil.ca/
Orchard
A major achievement of previous McGill-led grants, Orchard is a queryable database derived from work in music information research.4,39,118 It currently integrates score annotations and music clips according to our perception-based taxonomy. Orchard will be expanded over the course of the grant and beyond and made open-access to the full Partnership and other interested users on our Partner Calcul Québec/Compute Canada's platform, which provides the necessary storage space and high-powered computing for database searches, data mining and machine learning.5,119 Large-scale data from the Analysis Axis will be entered into Orchard, including machine-readable scores and texts, annotations of scores and texts, modes of playing, and perceptual effects, recorded or rendered audio clips, acoustic analyses, and perceptual experimentation on audio excerpts. Metadata on the time-varying acoustic properties of sounds produced by musical instruments playing at different musical dynamics and pitches with various play techniques will also be integrated into Orchard to provide acoustic information for the data mining algorithms, seeking, for example, to determine the degree of spectral overlap between sounds that conditions how strongly they will blend together.