There exists an abyss on the subject of the history of orchestration pedagogy, and this project proposes a first step in approaching this topic through the orchestration exams from initiation and end-of-curriculum classes at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris (CNSMDP). Many student orchestration exams have been destroyed at the National Archives since the orchestration classes were introduced at the Conservatory in 1977. However, a significant number of scores remain to be collected. The recordings of these scores by the Conservatory orchestra have largely been preserved on various supports according to the audiovisual service at the Conservatory.

On a fundamental level, we ask what differentiated a “French” from a “Viennese” sound; but taking into account the skills of both builder and player, along with the complex affordances of a particular type of instrument, we also ask what made Beethoven a “fast learner” on a new instrument and his Paris-based rival Steibelt an “expert” of a familiar one—one that lent itself well to what in France was known as son continu, or the skill of sustaining or “spinning” sound.

Our project will document and explore the timbres of the instruments of the orchestra, and the instrumental techniques used to create vast ranges of timbres, by recording the orchestra (video and audio) and interviewing the artists who play these instruments, and will culminate in multiples series of short, bilingual, educational videos around each instrument.

The DATE project will expand on the combined composed and improvisatory environments by providing a dancer/choreographer with the tools to blend and process the sounds of two musicians in real time using physical gestures. This project will make use of the Kinect Controlled Artistic Sensing System (KiCASS), a UBC-developed motion capture system which uses infra-red tracking to generate data from 20 points on multiple dancers.

This project develops a streamlined resource for emerging composers seeking to introduce live electronics into their instrumental orchestration practice. It focuses on two topics. 1. Accessible and stable performance frameworks 2. Straightforward strategies for orchestrating with electronics in chamber and orchestral context.

Timbre is an important stylistic and structural parameter in popular music, yet its specific functional roles in this repertoire have not yet been theorized. Most music-analytical scholarship on timbre in popular music to date consists of case studies of individual artists, bands, studios, or genres. There have been no broad corpus studies establishing timbral norms for genres or eras of popular music.

Brightness is among the most studied aspects of music perception, and arguably among the most important timbral cues actively shaped by performers, composers, and audio engineers.

Creation of an internet-based guide for musicians that describes in layman terms the fundamentals of acoustic features of musical instruments, stages, performance and rehearsal rooms using visual and auditory examples

The historical Chapelle du Grand Séminaire de Montréal presents the acoustical canvas for a choral recording. 32 microphones will be placed strategically, 18 spot microphones, one for each singer, 8 highly positioned ambient microphones in varying distances, and 6 height microphones will capture the immersive sound above the choir.

We propose to create an advanced 3D audio and video recording of Jason Noble’s fantaisie harmonique for two guitar orchestras which was premiered at the inaugural 21st Century Guitar Conference (August 2019, Ottawa, ON) with 3D projection art by Kurt Laurenz Theinert.

In three recording sessions taking place at the Haute école de musique (HEM) de Genève in October, 2019, different orchestral extracts were recorded so as to study several facets of orchestration and acoustics, such as timbral equilibrium and contrast.

The team seeks to develop new digital means to analyse and interpret audio data generated by performances and collected using an ambisonic microphone (sub axes audio analysis, music analysis). Over the next twelve months the team will work to develop digital, analytical methodologies to better understand how timbre is manipulated and deployed in performance.

A large scale, online study of timbre semantics is being planned in which participants will be presented with sound stimuli and asked (a) to identify the sound source, (b) to rate it on a battery of semantic scales (e.g., warm, hollow), and (c) to list any additional semantic associations they wish to report.

Robert Hasegawa and colleagues from McGill, Université de Montréal, the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT) and local new music ensembles planned an edition of the IRCAM Forum Workshop hors les murs in Montreal (April 2 to 5, 2020). This event brings together diverse Montreal institutions and offers an opportunity for exchanges between researchers and artists from IRCAM and their counterparts in Canada and the United States.

An interdisciplinary symphonic recording for the study of orchestral sound. With the aim to study orchestral blending effects, a joint music production and evaluation of an orchestral recording was realized. Excerpts of the work were recorded in the full orchestral setting or in variable combinations of single instruments, partial or complete orchestral sections performing together, which illustrated timbre blending between the groups.