Y4 | Student Presentations
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Y4 | Student Presentations
Congratulations to the student members selected to present at the plenary session (July 9) of the Y4 ACTOR Workshop
Timbre perceptions of vocal vibrato
Theodora Nestorova (McGill University), Lindsey Reymore, Kit Soden, Juanita Marchand Knight, and Elie Manousakis
Tone colour differences across diverse singing voices are more readily apparent than tone colour differences across players of the same instrument. Although experienced listeners can differentiate between performers of the same instrument, existing research suggests that there are greater changes in tone colour, or timbral variation, across different singing voices. Vibrato is commonly accepted to be a distinctive feature of singing, inextricably tied to expression and tone colour.[i] Previous studies have shown that the addition or subtraction of vibrato changes people’s perception of the timbre of the sound. [ii, iii] Therefore, vibrato constitutes a significant component of tone colour and may be a significant distinguishing factor of timbral variation in different singing voices.
The purpose of this research was to gather information about how singers and instrumentalists experience and describe the timbres—or sound qualities—of different singing voices. One study (from two overall) is reported concerning timbre qualia (description semantics) of the singing voice. Across the study, open-ended interviews were conducted with 30 participants, including 15 vocalists and 15 instrumentalists. The participants were asked to use as many adjectives or descriptive words (without prompting) to express their experiences of the timbres of unaccompanied vocal excerpts sampled from three genres (classical, jazz, musical theatre). These unaccompanied vocal sample data were gathered from a singing voice protocol with genre-fluid repertoire designed specifically to target style-specific vibrato from the individual singers.
Selective content analysis of the interviews suggests discrete qualitative categories underlying the participants’ descriptions. Further analysis examines hypothesized differences in descriptive strategies in the survey participant demographic between instrumentalists and vocalists regarding attention to vibrato variability. The results of the study are compared to those of Reymore and Huron (2020), who collected descriptions of musical instrument timbres. This research raises awareness of the audience’s perception of vocal timbres within the same material performed with stylistic variations, especially vibrato. This benefits all musicians in expanding their educational practices, considering the effect of vibrato variability on timbre and audience tone colour reception for optimal singing, compositional, and artistic practices.
i Sundberg, J. (1987). The Science of the Singing Voice. Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, IL, 170.
ii Almeida, A., Schubert, E., & Wolfe, J. (2021). Timbre Vibrato Perception and Description. Music Perception, 38(3), 282–292. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2021.38.3.282
iii Loni, D. Y., & Subbaraman, S. (2018). Timbre-Vibrato Model for Singer Identification. Information and Communication Technology for Intelligent Systems, 279–292. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1747- 7_27
TBA
Deep audio learning for novel timbre generation
Ninon Devis (IRCAM)
Deep learning models have provided extremely successful methods in most application fields by enabling unprecedented accuracy in various tasks. For audio applications, although the massive complexity of generative models allows to handle complex temporal structures, it often precludes their real-time use on resource-constrained hardware platforms, particularly pervasive in this field. The lack of adequate lightweight models is an impediment to the development of stand-alone musical instruments based on deep models, entailing a significant limitation for real-life creation by musicians and composers.
The main goal of my PhD is to develop specifically-tailored approaches that could allow to enable a larger use and a simpler control of deep generative models. This lead to the development of completely novel tools that would allow to democratize deep models on innovative instruments, thus initiating a new path for creativity.
Hence, we recently built the first deep learning-based music instrument by implementing a lightweight generative musical audio model on an adequate hardware platform that can handle its complexity. By embedding this deep model, we provide a controllable and flexible creative hardware interface. More precisely, we focused our work on the Eurorack synthesizers format, which offers Control Voltage (CV) and gate mechanisms allowing to interact with other classical Eurorack modules. As a timbre case study, we decided to focus our research on impact sounds, as they are notoriously hard to create with traditional audio synthesis methods. In the future, we aim at developing similar deep-based hardware instrument, tackling the problem of mixing and orchestration for electro acoustic music.
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Did Messiaen draw from shared crossmodal correspondences within his synesthetic colour system?
Chelsea Komschlies (McGill University)
Olivier Messiaen, famous for having sound-color synesthesia, describes his complex yet consistent colour system in his Traité de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie (1994). Although much existing research focuses on his personal colour system, one finds evidence in his descriptions that he also draws from crossmodal correspondences, or intuitive and unexpected connections between sensory modes shared by most people and even some animals. This isn’t surprising, as research suggests synesthetes experience crossmodal correspondences more strongly than do the general population, yet such a claim about Messiaen has not yet been made. If Messiaen drew from crossmodal correspondences in addition to his synesthesia, it could dramatically change the way we listen to his work. Elements of his style which had been deemed inaccessible to most listeners would not actually be so, as we can experience the sensory elements which come from crossmodal correspondences: the spectrum of darkness to light, of warm to cold, of saturation or intensity of colour, and of texture and shape. Whereas his synesthesia is based on pitch class/chroma, when he ventures into the shared world of crossmodal correspondences, one finds an increasingly crucial role for both timbre and orchestration. I examine both Messiaen’s own descriptions of his experience and many examples of crossmodal correspondences he intuitively used in his published analyses of Debussy, connecting both types to published psychological experiments. I will also show evidence that Messiaen’s personal colours seem to be strengthened when they coincide with crossmodal correspondences.
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Principles of Gestalt psychology as a means for emergent orchestration
Ehsan Fard (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn)
In my presentation I would present part of my master's thesis, which I wrote in 2021-2022. In my thesis ""Timbral emergence in orchestration after 1950"" I examine the different ways of generating a genuinely new timbre, the emergent timbre, in orchestral music after 1950.
The part of my thesis that I would be presenting for ACTOR is about using gestalt theory (gestalt psychology) principles as a technique of emergent orchestration to create genuine new timbres and timbral structures. I take the music composed after 1950, because in the post-war period the sound quality and timbre become the central idea of the compositions. The timbre was understood and applied as the primacy of the composition, while the traditionally more important musical elements, harmony and rhythm, would serve to underline it.
The Gestalt theoretical disciplines I would examine are phase transition, grouping tendency, zero-point shift and primacy effect based on the pieces ""Serendib for 22 instrumentalists"" by Tristan Murail and Ligeti’s Violin concerto. Furthermore, I explain the formation of ""Virtual Instruments"", for which these principles are mostly responsible, with a partial analysis of the orchestration of ""4 Adagi per flauto dolce e orchestra"" by Salvatore Sciarrino. In this regard, I use both the research in the field of music and the research in the visual field of gestalt theory.
TBA
Compound figures in my CORE piece "Étude for ensemble"
Louis-Michel Tougas (McGill University)
My piece ""Etude for ensemble"" for seven performers was written in the context of the 2021-2022 Composer-Performer Orchestration Research Ensemble [CORE] Seminar at McGill University, directed by Profs. Stephen McAdams and Guillaume Bourgogne. This two-semester seminar takes the form of a research-creation project where performers and composers work together on a specific timbre and orchestration-related topic.
The piece explores the compositional idea of what I call “compound figures”, where motive-like units are formed by the perceptual aggregation of multiple gestures distributed across different instruments. This idea draws from several compositional and theoretical concepts, including Brian Ferneyhough’s figure/gesture. Gérard Grisey’s instrumental synthesis and Marco Stroppa’s Musical Information Organisms [OIM], as well as Dennis Smalley spectromorphology and Albert Bregman and Stephen McAdams’ work on auditory streaming.
For this project, my goal was to use timbre in a way as complex and flexible as I would normally deal with pitches and durations. To achieve this, I tried to think of timbre as a multi-layered complex rather than a single dimension. For example, I tried to apply the way chord progressions are built from chords and chords from individual pitches to the timbral parameter. While this approach greatly favoured my use of timbre as a form-bearing parameter and not only as surface feature, it also raised many issues linked with performability, notation and perceptual factors.
I propose to discuss these issues, the way I dealt with them and the potential for further exploration."
TBA