Evoking the human voice through instrumental music has been a perennial goal for composers, appearing in traditional performance instructions such as cantabile and contemporary practices such as formant modeling. Performers also make extensive use of vocal metaphors in their discourse. But do general listeners perceive instrumental music in terms of vocal qualities or metaphors? We will address this question by asking listeners to rate their perceptions of vocality in music intended to emulate it, followed by a proof-of-concept composition and performance.

The purpose of the Space As Timbre (SAT) project, is to collect qualitative data in order to analyze and understand the perceptual effect of timbre in composing new spaces for an acoustic ensemble, thereby creating the opportunity to treat space as a form bearing element in music.

Computer-assisted orchestration can be thought of as the process of searching for the best combinations of orchestral sounds to match a target sound under specified metrics 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.

We propose an album of music for guitar and electronics composed by Noble and performed by Cowan, culminating their longstanding collaboration which has been presented in many contexts. Traube and de Francisco will oversee the project, Martin will be the recording engineer, and Rouhier will be the multimedia artist.

This project is a special composition for a place, or rather the sound composition of a particular place, in the sense that it is the place that physically composes the piece. The place is the Ariana Museum, Swiss Museum of Ceramics and Glass, in Geneva. The composition is that of the place and its objects. It reveals the space of the building, its geometries, its volumes, it is sensitive to the objects that are placed there because they will influence the listening as much as the walls of the rooms.

The purpose of the Musician Auditory Perception (MAP) project is to collect quantitative 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 practices that reinforce hierarchical education.

The central pillar of our research questions traditional relationships between acoustic instruments and the electronic. Through the use of transduction technologies including precisely tactile exciters and bass shaker transducers, we incorporate a third actor into the acoustic-electronic relationship.

The term "orchestration" is rarely used in reference to the string quartet, but when we define it broadly (after Stephen McAdams) as "the choice, combination, and/or juxtaposition of timbres in a musical context," it becomes clear that the quartet is a rich and highly flexible vehicle for the exploration of orchestrational ideas.

Recording a string ensemble which plays certain musical excerpts composed by project members for a blended sound impression under the ODESSA framework, and analyzing the resulting ensemble sound by introducing variations in room acoustic parameters.