Throughout the CORE project, the creative processes of exploration, orchestrational problemsolving, and the realization of new music were recorded, documented, and archived for consideration. This presentation will describe the project’s goals, aims and methodological approaches at the five partner institutions, certain facets of which will be detailed in other presentations.

Through score and audio analysis using a perceptually based taxonomy of orchestrational effects, we studied three compositions written by McGill University graduate students in collaboration with the ensemble’s performers. Our analytical approach considered perceptual issues of auditory fusion, segregation, integration, and stratification, focusing largely on the strategies developed by each composer to achieve their desired textural effects.

This paper discusses preliminary analyses of the data collected during the initiation phase in the Fall of 2019. Verbatim extracts from the interviews were manually coded on the basis of a qualitative research method inspired by grounded theory. The analyst assigns a “code” to each verbatim segment, thus attributing a significant evocative attribute to each portion of the verbal data.

E-Rock is a composition for violin, bass clarinet, trombone, and vibraphone/small percussion that explores klezmer-inspired music while complexifying it and imitating different instruments and musical styles.

This paper is in ternary A-B-A form; that is, it has two themes and three sections. The A-theme consists of thoughts on the treatment of timbre in ethnomusicology, historically, at present, and in an ideal future. It reviews the infamous problems timbre presents to all scholars of music, and then discusses the special problems of timbre for ethnomusicologists.

Timbre, in its very nature, is abstract. The brain, as we all know, is the most complex system that exists. So, one can only imagine the challenges that can be encountered while investigating timbre processing in the brain. The central focus of timbre research from a neuroscientific point of view, until recently, has been typically on brain responses to changes in acoustic structure or related to sound source categorization (ex: violin vs piano)

In this talk, I first reflect on the “timbral litany” in today’s scholarship: timbre has no standardized language; it lacks a systematic theory; timbre is defined negatively, and so forth. In particular, I focus on the tension between the many claims of timbre’s central important to musical experience, on the one hand, with the reality that we often, on the other hand, talk over and past timbre, abstracting music from timbre’s specificities.

A glance through these proceedings testifies to a rising interest in musical timbre across a multitude of fields, as well as to its under-explored richness, at least until very recently. It also makes evident that timbre is many things to many people and has many functions.