Newsletter no. 2
ACTOR Newsletter
Awards and Honours
April 2019
Jeux de Chromes by Dominique Lafortune (DMus, Composition, McGill University) was premiered by the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble, under the direction of Guillaume Bourgogne in Montreal on April 12, 2019. The piece was written on the basis of Lasse Thoresen’s work on form-building patterns, processes, and transformations as laid out in his book Emergent Musical Forms.
May 2019
Philippe Macnab-Séguin (DMus, Composition, McGill University) has been awarded the 2018-19 Andrew Svoboda Memorial Prize for Orchestral Composition. His orchestral piece will be premiered by the McGill Symphony Orchestra in the 2020-2021 season.
June 2019
Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière (DMus, Composition, McGill University) has been awarded the 2019 “Prix d’Europe en Composition” from l'Académie de musique du Québec, providing him with funding to study in Oslo with Professor Lasse Thoresen over the coming year. His thesis piece, Dériver, for sextet, was premiered on April 3, 2019 by Ensemble Paramirabo in Montreal and uses many of the dynamic form principles elaborated by Thoresen in his book Emergent Musical Forms. In addition, Gabriel has been commissioned to write a work for ensemble in the framework of the 2020 ECM+ Generation program, to be premiered and toured starting in October-November 2020.
Eliot Britton (Assistant Professor in Composition, Music Technology & Digital Media University of Toronto) won a DORA award for his work on TRACE produced by Red Sky
September 2019
Emily MacCallum (MA, Musicology, University of Toronto), student of Sherry Lee, is the first recipient of the ACTOR Student Exchange funding. She will visit McGill University in Montreal, Canada to participate in graduate seminars on the perception and analysis of timbre taught by Professors Stephen McAdams and Robert Hasegawa.
Hochschule für Musik Detmold has hired a new scientific co-worker, PhD student, Jithin Babu P. Thilakan, for 3 years to work on ensemble sound within the Marie-Curie funded VRACE project.
ACTOR Outcomes
Conference Participation
Spectralisms 2019
“Spectralisms 2019,” a three-day conference, was held at Ircam from June 12 to 14, 2019, as part of the activities of the ManiFeste 2019 festival. Read more
ACTOR at ManiFeste 2019
ACTOR scholars and artists introduced the project to a French public this June with “Orchestration and the ACTOR Project,” a study day hosted by the Paris research center IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique). Read more
Pattern - Algorithmen -Symmetrien: Strukturen und ihre Verfügbarkeit in musikalischer Theorie und Praxis
Nathalie Hérold’s paper, "Patterns, Algorithms and Symmetries in Timbre and Orchestration Analysis: Some Considerations in the Context of 19th- and 20th-Century Music", was presented at the International Conference "Pattern - Algorithmen -Symmetrien: Strukturen und ihre Verfügbarkeit in musikalischer Theorie und Praxis", held at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, Germany, on the 28th and 29th of June, 2019. Read more
ACTOR Year 1 Workshop
The ACTOR Year 1 Workshop took place in Paris from 13-15 July 2019 and was hosted by IRCAM. Read more
ACTOR Symposium - SMPC
A special symposium dedicated to the ACTOR Project at the 2019 Biennial Meeting of the Society of Music Perception and Cognition in New York.
CogMIR
ACTOR director Stephen McAdams gave a keynote speech and ACTOR member Aurélien Antoine presented.
Last April 5th, 2021 IRCAM made available a recording of the Concert "Mécanique de l'intuition" conducted by Sébastien Boin & Guillaume Bourgogne and performed by Ensemble C Barré. The event had the technical support of IRCAM and included works by Francisco Alvarado, Giulia Lorusso, Mikel Urquiza and Francesca Verunelli.
Publications
Antoine, A., Depalle, P., Macnab-Séguin, P. & McAdams, S. (2021). Modeling human experts' identification of orchestral blends using symbolic information. In R. Kronland-Martinet, S. Ystad & M. Aramaki (Eds.), Perception, Representations, Image, Sound, Music, pp. 363–378. LNCS 12631, Springer Verlag, Cham, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70210-6_24
Michel, P.(2020). Towards a consideration of the contemporary musical work as ‘a work in progress’ ; Closing the gaps between the score, the form and the work’s ‘becoming’, in Borio, G., Giurati, G., Cecchi, A., & Lutzu, M. (Eds.),Investigating Musical Performance, Routledge, pp. 124—135.https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429026461
Michel, P.(2020). Melody, repetition, and periodicity: A study of parallels between György Ligeti, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. In Temes, B.T., & Agawu, K., (Eds.),A tribute to György Ligeti in his native Transylvania n° 1 & 2, Cluj-Napoca : MediaMusica, pp. 133–159. https://www.academia.edu/44915048/Melody_Repetition_and_Periodicity_A_Study_of_Parallels_between_Gy%C3%B6rgy_Ligeti
Reymore, L. (2021). Characterizing prototypical musical instrument timbres with Timbre Trait Profiles. Musicae Scientiae (online first publication).https://doi.org/10.1177/10298649211001523
Presentations
Pierre Michel contributed to the webinar “Istantanee–Collective Improvisation in Europe: Techniques and Styles", March 18–20, 2021. Recordings of the webinar can be found here:
Student member Jorge Ramos passed the Doctor in Music Transfer-Exam (1st Year); his video presentation of “Technology and Timbre: An autoethnography on the influence of electronics on the composer's orchestration practice” can be viewed below, or on the ACTOR Video Series page.
Timbre perception was featured on the cover of the high-impact journal Nature Human Behaviour, highlighting an article by French colleagues Etienne Thoret and Baptiste Caramiaux with ACTOR members Philippe Depalle and Stephen McAdams.
Lena Heng received a Student Paper Award, Honorable Mention for her presentation and proceedings in the Future Directions of Music Cognition conference for “Timbre's Function in the Perception of Affective Intents” (authors Lena Heng, Stephen McAdams). The presentation can be viewed here: https://osf.io/ct9fx/
Upcoming Events
Urban Sound Symposium
Catherine Guastavino is co-organizing the second edition of the Urban Sound Symposium (April 19–21; https://urban-sound-symposium.org/), which includes sessions on sound art in public spaces. The Urban Sound Symposium is organized as an interactive 3-day virtual event, bringing together practitioners and experts from around the globe that are confronted with urban sound in their professional activities. It is organized simultaneously in Ghent, Montreal, Nantes, Zurich, London and Berlin by researchers from Ghent University, McGill University & CIRMMT, Université Eiffel, EMPA, UCL and TU Berlin.
Future Directions of Music Cognition
Hosted by The Ohio State University and co-chaired by ACTOR postdoc Lindsey Reymore, ‘Future Directions of Music Cognition’ is taking place from February 22 through May 31. The event includes a weekly online speaker series with talks by ACTOR members Zachary Wallmark (“Empathic listening: Music and the social mind,” April 26) and Stephen McAdams (“Analyzing the perceptual effects of orchestration practice through the lens of auditory grouping principles,” May 3). For a full schedule and to register, click here.
