Lena Heng is currently a PhD student in the interdisciplinary stream, and their research addresses how people perceive and make sense of music. Lena’s research interests include music perception and cognition, timbral functions in musical communication, and musical semiology and hermeneutics. Originally from Singapore, Heng plays erhu with the Ding Yi Music Company in Singapore. Lena will illustrate their research to the audience during this presentation with a live performance on the Chinese erhu.

In this presentation the audience will experience in real time how the analysis of a musical score can enrich a performance, explored through a movement of Brahms' first clarinet sonata, performed live by Edward and Nicole on viola and piano.

Having recorded great pianists for over 30 years as a record producer, Martha de Francisco is in a unique position to offer insight into what makes a beautiful piano recording. Join her for the first Research Alive event of the season, where she'll guide you through many audio and video examples of her work.

Videos of the Opening Address and Keynote presentations

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.

Removing the Imaginary Boundary Between Score and Work: Interactive Geometrical Notation

Jason Noble (Ph.D in Composition) and Steven Cowan (D.Mus in Guitar Performance), winners of the Research Alive student competition, describe the project that they've been working on back in their home province of Newfoundland.

An in-depth presentation of his research in music theory focusing on pieces written by George Benjamin. Live piano excerpts and performances are played by pianists Chris Goddard and Zhenni Li.

Music psychologist Stephen McAdams talks about the role of perception in orchestration practice. He is joined on stage by conductor Alain Cazes and the full McGill Wind Symphony.