Presentations by ACTOR Collaborators and Student Members at the

IRCAM Forum Workshops hors les murs

Montreal (online), February 4–5–6 and 11–12, 2021

To provide a tool for researching the role of auditory grouping effects in orchestration practice and thereby the role of timbre as a structuring force in music, a first-of-its-kind online database was created, and an analysis taxonomy and methodology were established.

We present an interdisciplinary collaboration between McGill, Audiotopie and Plateau-Mont-Royal borough around the design and evaluation of spatial sound installations in Montreal.

Orchestration is defined by Stephen McAdams as “the choice, combination or juxtaposition of sounds to achieve a musical end.” This typically invokes a palette of heterogeneous sounds, especially those of the instruments of the symphony orchestra, but McAdams’ definition equally applies to homogeneous sound palettes encountered in ensembles of uniform composition, such as the guitar orchestra.

In this presentation concentrating on my latest two works from 2019, I will discuss my extended use of Orchidea, the latest assisted orchestration platform in the Orch* tools lineage, and spatialization using OpenMusic and the Ircam Spat~ package for Max.

Recent developments in the field of computer-aided orchestration have provided interesting approaches for addressing some of the many orchestration challenges, supported by advances in computational capacities and artificial intelligence methods. Nevertheless, harnessing the many sides of this musical art, which involves combining the acoustic properties of a large ensemble of varied instruments, has not yet been achieved.

Human acquisition of skills and knowledge about the spaces they inhabit is linked to our development of proprioceptive skills from the earliest moments of physical and psychological negotiation with the world around us. The acquisition of “spatial intelligence” extends to the development of skills in comprehending the acoustic spaces through which we move, unconsciously and consciously measuring, comparing and committing to memory the sound signals and sources fleetingly inhabiting these spaces while building a library of sounding spaces to which we return and reference.

Computational musicology is emerging out of the necessity of finding methods to deal with music (both art and popular) that escapes conventional Western notation. To better understand this music, we use computational methods to decompose recordings of performances of contemporary music into digital musical objects.

Timbre has been identified by music perception scholars as an important component in the communication of affect in music. While its function as a carrier of perceptually useful information about sound source mechanics has been established, studies of whether and how it functions as a carrier of information for communicating affect in music are still in their infancy.

Depuis 2008, le groupe de recherche en immersion spatiale (GRIS) de la Faculté de musique de l'Université de Montréal développe des outils de spatialisation destinés à des environnements immersifs de multiples haut-parleurs.