Ayò Olúrántí is a composer, conductor, organist, and music theorist specializing in pre-colonial Yorùbá music and culture. He has published research on tonality of African languages, polyrhythm in African pianism, intercultural music composition, and orality as a compositional technique.

Minister, musician, and musicologist Braxton D. Shelley is a tenured associate professor of music, of sacred music, and of divinity in the Department of Music, the Institute of Sacred Music, and Yale's Divinity School. A musicologist who specializes in African American popular music, his research and critical interests, while especially focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology.

This talk will consider how the timbre of string band music has been racialized through the legacy of blackface, while recovering some of the performed histories (past and present) of Black string band musicians.

Orchestration is a tricky business. How do composers take a simple melody and harmony and spin it into an orchestrated web of multitudes of instruments? What techniques are available, and what effects do they achieve?

Timbre is a pretty complicated concept when it comes to the sound of the singing voice. The way we perceive vocal timbre has much to do with our visual perception of the vocalist's appearance. What perceptual biases are entwined in this process, and how can we combat them?

Combining original compositions and traditional Haitian tunes with historical broadcasts and contemporary interviews, Leyla McCalla’s remarkable new album, Breaking The Thermometer, offers an immersive sonic journey through 50 years of racial, social, and political unrest as it explores the legacy of Radio Haiti—the first radio station to report in Haitian Kreyòl, the voice of the people—and the journalists who risked their lives to broadcast it.

Ever wonder how Weezer's cover songs sound nearly identical to the originals, yet unmistakably like Weezer? EduFilm 4 explores this question, and the answer, naturally, has something to do with timbre.

In EduFilm 3 we explore the roles of timbre and culture in determining how we respond to the music we love.

Joel LaRue Smith is a pianist, composer, arranger, and educator who seamlessly combines jazz, classical, and Afro-Latin music traditions. He has toured the world extensively and performed alongside artists such as Tito Puente, Ellis Marsalis, Kenny Burrell, Mario Bauza, Junior Cook, and Wayne Andre.

Andile Khumalo is a senior lecturer in music theory, orchestration, and composition at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. His compositions are influenced by jazz, different African musics (e.g., the Amhara people, the Nguni people of South Africa, the Amadinda from Uganda), French spectralism, and more.

Finding Consilience in The Vibrato Wars: Hearing, Seeing, & Analyzing the Spectrum of Variability Across Genres.

In the second ACTOR / TOR EduFilm, Lab partners Cameron Chameleon and Stephen McAdams (director, ACTOR project) explore cross-modal correspondences between sound and colour.

This research project is supported by a 2021 Global South Fellowship awarded by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. His talk is titled “‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’: An Afrological Approach to the Study of Sonic Representations from the African American Band Tradition”

His current book project is an ethnographic study that draws heavily on Africana studies, musicological analysis, linguistics and performance studies in order to discuss crunk, a subgenre of Atlanta hip-hop, as a performed response to hypersurveillant policing of black youth in the city’s public spaces in the 1990s. This research has direct implications for analyzing contemporary hip-hop subgenres like trap and political movements like #blacklivesmatter.