One of the most curious aspects of timbre and its manifestation through orchestration is its ability to create what is known as a timbral emergence: the synthesis of a new timbre whose component instruments are unidentifiable as themselves.

Successful musical interpretation in performance involves the ability to go beyond the written notation, to “take the music off the page,” so to speak. Music theoretical analysis often stops at written notation, where performers only begin their interpretive processes.

Technology and Timbre: An autoethnography on the influence of electronics on the composer's orchestration practice.

Analyzing the Perceptual Effects of Orchestration through the Lens of Auditory Grouping Principles.

A video presenting non-guitarist composer Jason Noble's approach to timbre-based composition for the guitar, discussing issues of notating timbre with various types of mappings. Including musical examples from many pieces created collaboratively with guitarist Steve Cowan.

In this video made for the 2020 meeting of Music Theory Midwest, Reymore describes some of her timbre research: building a cognitive linguistic model of timbre qualia, using the model to construct profiles for orchestral instruments, and applying these findings in analysis of the first movement of Mahler's first symphony, where Reymore looks at form and at the climactic breakthrough, or Durchbruch, moment.

Removing the Imaginary Boundary Between Score and Work: Interactive Geometrical Notation

Ayò Olúrántí is a composer, conductor, organist, and music theorist specializing in pre-colonial Yorùbá music and culture. He has published research on tonality of African languages, polyrhythm in African pianism, intercultural music composition, and orality as a compositional technique.

Minister, musician, and musicologist Braxton D. Shelley is a tenured associate professor of music, of sacred music, and of divinity in the Department of Music, the Institute of Sacred Music, and Yale's Divinity School. A musicologist who specializes in African American popular music, his research and critical interests, while especially focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology.

This talk will consider how the timbre of string band music has been racialized through the legacy of blackface, while recovering some of the performed histories (past and present) of Black string band musicians.

Combining original compositions and traditional Haitian tunes with historical broadcasts and contemporary interviews, Leyla McCalla’s remarkable new album, Breaking The Thermometer, offers an immersive sonic journey through 50 years of racial, social, and political unrest as it explores the legacy of Radio Haiti—the first radio station to report in Haitian Kreyòl, the voice of the people—and the journalists who risked their lives to broadcast it.

Joel LaRue Smith is a pianist, composer, arranger, and educator who seamlessly combines jazz, classical, and Afro-Latin music traditions. He has toured the world extensively and performed alongside artists such as Tito Puente, Ellis Marsalis, Kenny Burrell, Mario Bauza, Junior Cook, and Wayne Andre.

Andile Khumalo is a senior lecturer in music theory, orchestration, and composition at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. His compositions are influenced by jazz, different African musics (e.g., the Amhara people, the Nguni people of South Africa, the Amadinda from Uganda), French spectralism, and more.

This research project is supported by a 2021 Global South Fellowship awarded by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. His talk is titled “‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’: An Afrological Approach to the Study of Sonic Representations from the African American Band Tradition”

His current book project is an ethnographic study that draws heavily on Africana studies, musicological analysis, linguistics and performance studies in order to discuss crunk, a subgenre of Atlanta hip-hop, as a performed response to hypersurveillant policing of black youth in the city’s public spaces in the 1990s. This research has direct implications for analyzing contemporary hip-hop subgenres like trap and political movements like #blacklivesmatter.

Dr. Stephanie Shonekan is an ethnomusicologist specializing in popular music of both Africa and the African diaspora, race and identity in music, and protest music. She is the newly appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland

The series will launch with a talk by Dr. Bibian Kalinde entitled, “Unraveling timbre in the music of the marriage ceremony of the Chewa and Bemba in Zambia.”

Finding Consilience in The Vibrato Wars: Hearing, Seeing, & Analyzing the Spectrum of Variability Across Genres.

The Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) Project and the Schulich School of Music invite you to a lecture about the the Composer-performer Orchestration Research Ensemble (CORE) project presented by Professors Stephen McAdams (Music Technology) and Guillaume Bourgogne (Orchestral Conducting) on April 8 at 5:00pm EDT as part of the Research Alive Series.

We often reach for crossmodal metaphor to describe music--it sounds warm, or velvety, or rough, spiky, jagged, smooth, glassy, or bright, etc. What if these metaphors were not as subjective as we might think, but had a scientific, neurological basis?

Step into the mysterious world of composition as John Rea unveils secrets in the art of writing music, how these secrets may lead to lies, and what happens when a composer’s memory starts playing tricks… The presentation will also include a live performance by pianist Stéphane Lémelin.

Lena Heng is currently a PhD student in the interdisciplinary stream, and their research addresses how people perceive and make sense of music. Lena’s research interests include music perception and cognition, timbral functions in musical communication, and musical semiology and hermeneutics. Originally from Singapore, Heng plays erhu with the Ding Yi Music Company in Singapore. Lena will illustrate their research to the audience during this presentation with a live performance on the Chinese erhu.

In this presentation the audience will experience in real time how the analysis of a musical score can enrich a performance, explored through a movement of Brahms' first clarinet sonata, performed live by Edward and Nicole on viola and piano.

Having recorded great pianists for over 30 years as a record producer, Martha de Francisco is in a unique position to offer insight into what makes a beautiful piano recording. Join her for the first Research Alive event of the season, where she'll guide you through many audio and video examples of her work.

Jason Noble (Ph.D in Composition) and Steven Cowan (D.Mus in Guitar Performance), winners of the Research Alive student competition, describe the project that they've been working on back in their home province of Newfoundland.

An in-depth presentation of his research in music theory focusing on pieces written by George Benjamin. Live piano excerpts and performances are played by pianists Chris Goddard and Zhenni Li.

Music psychologist Stephen McAdams talks about the role of perception in orchestration practice. He is joined on stage by conductor Alain Cazes and the full McGill Wind Symphony.