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.

Dr. Stephanie Shonekan is an ethnomusicologist specializing in popular music of both Africa and the African diaspora, race and identity in music, and protest music. She is the newly appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland

The series will launch with a talk by Dr. Bibian Kalinde entitled, “Unraveling timbre in the music of the marriage ceremony of the Chewa and Bemba in Zambia.”

Learn about timbre and orchestration with the ACTOR project! In Episode 1, Stephen and his assistant Cameron Chameleon explore what goes on inside the ACTOR labs.

On September 26, at 1:00pm (EDT), the ACTOR Training and Mentoring Committee(TMC) hosted an online workshop on CVs and cover letters with professors Robert Hasegawa (McGill University), Pierre Michel (Université de Strasbourg), Lindsey Reymore (Arizona State University), and Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal).

• Timbre perceptions of vocal vibrato | Theodora Nestorova (McGill University)

• Deep audio learning for novel timbre generation | Ninon Devis (IRCAM)

• Did Messiaen draw from shared crossmodal correspondences within his synesthetic colour system? | Chelsea Komschlies (McGill University)

• Principles of Gestalt psychology as a means for emergent orchestration | Ehsan Fard (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn)

• Compound figures in my CORE piece "Étude for ensemble" | Louis-Michel Tougas (McGill University)

Often referred to as tone quality or color, timbre is what makes different instruments sound unique, even while playing the same pitch. We use words like smooth, gritty, and warm to describe the characteristics of timbre.

The Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) Project and the Schulich School of Music invite you to a lecture about the the Composer-performer Orchestration Research Ensemble (CORE) project presented by Professors Stephen McAdams (Music Technology) and Guillaume Bourgogne (Orchestral Conducting) on April 8 at 5:00pm EDT as part of the Research Alive Series.

We often reach for crossmodal metaphor to describe music--it sounds warm, or velvety, or rough, spiky, jagged, smooth, glassy, or bright, etc. What if these metaphors were not as subjective as we might think, but had a scientific, neurological basis?

On December 6, 2021, the ACTOR Training and Mentoring Committee (TMC) hosted an online workshop on conference proposal abstract writing with professors Robert Hasegawa (McGill University) and Malte Kob (Detmold University of Music).