The Timbre of Early Blackface in the Making of (Black) Americana
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.
How the Cello Became a Vehicle for Arranging Haitian Songs
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.
ACTOR Y5 Student Presentations
The role of timbre in source identification in atypically combined excitations and resonators of musical instruments | Erica Huynh (McGill University)
Instrument identification and blend in virtual acoustic scenes - a case study of the Tristan prelude | Simon Jacobsen (University of Oldenburg)
Choreographing Orchestration: A Novel Method for Analyzing Orchestration through Ballet | Rebecca Moranis (CUNY Graduate Center)
The Voices of Ancestors: Vocal Timbre Descriptors in Zambian Luvale Makishi Masquerade | Jason Winikoff (UBC)
Comparison of perceived and imagined instrumental blend | Linglan Zhu (McGill University)
Orchestration: a functional approach to sound organization in African music
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
Finding Consilience in The Vibrato Wars: Hearing, Seeing, & Analyzing the Spectrum of Variability Across Genres.
“Do You Hear What I Hear?”: An Afrological Approach to the Study of Sonic Representations
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”
Crunk, Trap, and Compositional Representations of Embodied Experiences
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.