Recording of an album for guitar and electronics in 3D audio, with a 3D video

Recording of an album for guitar and electronics in 3D audio, with a 3D video

Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal) [PI] with Martha de Francisco (McGill University), Jason Noble (Université de Montréal), and external collaborators Steve Cowan (McGill University), Denis Martin (McGill University), and Simon Rouhier (Université de Montréal).

Description:

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 including the IRCAM hors les murs forum (2021), Cowan’s dissertation and doctoral lecture recital (2019), and McGill’s Research Alive series (2017). Traube and de Francisco will oversee the project, Martin will be the recording engineer, and Rouhier will be the multimedia artist. The repertoire is:

  1. fantaisie harmonique (2019)

  2. we never told nobody (2019)

  3. take me back (2017)

  4. one foot in the past (2016)

  5. [new piece, title TBD]

fantaisie harmonique was recorded last year with support from the ACTOR Strategic Project Fund. Our state of the art 3D recording has been extensively documented, widely disseminated, and
enthusiastically received. We produced a digital animation video for this piece; we now seek additional support to integrate the animation with images of Cowan performing in a 3D video / VR experience. Images of Cowan will be captured in a one-day session at UdeM in late spring or early summer 2021.

Pieces 2 to 4 have been performed, but have yet to be professionally recorded (scores and live recordings available upon request). They will be recorded at McGill in Studio 22 and / or Pollack Hall in August 2021.

Piece 5 will be composed later this year, following original empirical research. It will draw on dialects of Newfoundland and Quebec, building upon Noble and Cowan’s previous work on dialect based musical creation. The new research component will consist primarily of an online experiment to be conducted in early Fall 2021, evaluating the perceptual robustness of analogies between guitar timbres and spokenvowels as theoretically outlined in Traube’s dissertation. We will record guitar timbres and spoken vowels that correspond in acoustical structure, and ask participants to match them. We will thereby learn which vowel analogies are most likely to be recognized by listeners, and use this knowledge to invoke dialectal patterns in the new composition, which will be composed in late Fall 2021 and recorded at McGill in Winter 2022.

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Short geometric pieces (A geometry of sound and music)