In the crucial decades of the development of the piano at the start of the 19th century, essential musical questions centered on sonic and performative nuances embodied in the contrast between different school of piano building in Vienna and Paris. For this ACTOR funded research project realized at the end of May 2022 at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold, two replicas of historical keyboard instruments that Beethoven employed to compose some of his major piano works are being contrasted. Replicas of an 1803 French Erard Frères piano and a ca. 1800 Viennese Walter piano were alternately played by historical performer and researcher Tom Beghin. A multitrack immersive sound recording captured the most characteristic sounds of both instruments in the close and mid-range. Simultaneously acoustical recordings and measurements were realized to analyze the origin of the sound waves in different distances. Perceptual analysis of the microphone signals in comparison with the acoustical data collected as well as materials from a pilot project served to describe in detail the timbral characteristics. The evaluation of all the recorded audio takes as well as acoustical investigations of the timbre, directivity, and the effect of the second sound board of the Erard are ongoing. Educational audio materials have been developed.

The composition of sound is a complex process that requires the implementation of numerous strategies and circumstances to achieve a successful outcome. Each musical work is the result of countless preliminary stages, prerequisites, and chance occurrences. The complexity of creation cannot be easily reduced, and the development of specific concepts for the direct experimentation with sound is necessary to navigate through the vast array of creative approaches found in the contemporary instrumental and electroacoustic repertoire. The gestation of a musical work is a mysterious process that surpasses our understanding. Working directly with sound allows us to follow a portion of this process, whether it begins with an idea seeking a sound to materialize or with a "found" sound emerging from an unexpected accident.

The following essay and derived sonic system were produced by Victor Burton through a collaborative interinstitutional effort with Jeremy Tatar, supported by the Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) project in Montréal. An excerpt of the text, intertwined with the first sonic system, was presented remotely at the Y6 ACTOR Symposium held in summer of 2024 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. A subsequent lecture also paired with the presented system was performed live in Berlin at Cashmere Radio in July 2024.

Accurately capturing individual sound sources when recording a multi-musician performance requires a crucial balance between obtaining “acoustically clean” signals from each instrument and preserving musicians' visual and auditory feedback from co-performers and the room acoustic environment. This balance is crucial for research on orchestral and ensemble sound, particularly in studies on musical blending between instruments in ecological conditions, as well as applications in virtual reality orchestra simulations and music recording techniques. 

The acoustic characteristics of a performance space significantly influences musicians' auditory experience, influencing the ability to interact and synchronize within an ensemble. Understanding how room acoustics affect musical performance is crucial for optimizing acoustic attributes of performance spaces, and supporting musicians in various performance settings. This study explores how changes in room acoustic conditions impact musicians’ awareness and perception of their surroundings, with a particular focus on ensemble performance. To achieve this, we employ virtual acoustics, a technique that allows precise manipulation of room acoustic properties through the process of auralization. By systematically adjusting acoustic characteristics of performance space, this pilot study aims to assess musicians' sensitivity to environmental changes, determine preferred acoustic conditions, and investigate the role of acoustic feedback in performance. Through this approach, it seeks to offer insights into the perceptual and cognitive effects of varying acoustic conditions on ensemble performance and musical blending. 

Accurately capturing individual sound sources when recording a multi-musician performance requires a crucial balance between obtaining “acoustically clean” signals from each instrument and preserving musicians' visual and auditory feedback from co-performers and the room acoustic environment. This balance is crucial for research on orchestral and ensemble sound, particularly in studies on musical blending between instruments in ecological conditions, as well as applications in virtual reality orchestra simulations and music recording techniques. 

A work of haunting beauty and mystery, And Suddenly It’s Evening (1966) is a cantata for tenor and orchestra by English modernist pioneer, Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983). The cantata is highly representative of Lutyens’ serialism of the mid 1960s, and is similar to other works of this period, especially The Valley of Hatsu-Se (1965), in terms of scope, the serial structure, lyricism and the approach to orchestration. The evocative poetry of the cantata was written by Sicilian modernist poet and Nobel prize laureate (1959), Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968), and translated into English by Jack Bevan in 1965.[i] Lutyens first wrote the work to the English translation, later adding the original Italian (as determined from examining the composer’s autograph).[ii] In this work, Lutyens sets four poems by Quasimodo, each in its own movement, with instrumental interludes on either side of each poem. The cited recording was conducted and sung by Herbert Handt (who premiered the work) with members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1967. In this analysis, I examine how Lutyens creates and demarcates form through orchestrational groupings in her cantata, which alongside pitch serialism, is the main compositional determinant.

The Real-time Timbral Analysis for Musical and Visual Augmentation project explores the potential of real-time machine learning (ML) techniques to create dynamic visuals in the context of musical improvisation and composition. This artistic research aims to enable musicians to interact with visuals that respond directly to their performance, thereby guiding listeners' perception through visual representations of changes in timbre and spectrum. The project incorporates software tools such as sp.tools, FluCoMa, Max MSP, and TouchDesigner to achieve real-time instrumental augmentation for musicians, offering a unique way to visualize musical parameters.

The repertoire of Chinese composer Wenchen Qin is often characterized by immediate connections to the topics of nature and religious spirituality. For Qin, the religious connotation in his music often serves specifically as the medium connecting humans and nature. One only needs to look at the titles of his works to see the prevalence of these two topics: Pilgerfahrt im Mai (Pilgrimage in May) (2004), The Nature’s Dialogue (2010), The Border of Mountains (2012), The Cloud River (2017), The Light of the Deities (2018), Poetry of the Land (2020), among others. Qin’s proclivity for these topics can be traced back to his childhood in Inner Mongolia where he was born. The vast landscape of Inner Mongolia, with its endless grassland interspersed with surging mountain ranges, bears a palpable trait of ruggedness and broadness of space, of which one can often identify musical counterparts in Qin’s music almost viscerally.

As an ensemble of four instruments from the same family, the quartet has an exceptional capacity for blending but can also sharply differentiate the timbres of its members when desired. Ans an uncoducted ensemble, the string quartet depends on close non-cerbal communication between its members, and quartet members are accustomed to making subtle variations in their playing to achieve timbral and orchestrational ends. The purpose of this project is to explore how composers can orchestrate for the string quartet, examining strategies for timbral blend, stratification, modulation, and contrast.

“Timbrenauts” is a cross-institutional collaborative student research-creation project. We employed experimental designs from timbre perception research to generate data models that will inform the creation of new musical compositions for an atypical instrumental duo of cello and trombone, while leveraging extended techniques rarely explored in traditional musical repertoire. In this TOR module, we discuss our motivations, data collection process, similarity judgment experiment, and the resulting data we want musicians to use as a basis for their creative output.

The primary objective of the Space As Timbre (SAT) project is to conduct meticulous experiments on orchestration solutions and playing techniques, to achieve timbral effects that closely approximate the perceptual characteristics of diverse acoustical spaces. To this end, SAT endeavors to illuminate the intricate interplay between the spectral content of a sound, its resynthesis through orchestration, and the resulting perception of the quality of the acoustical space where the sound seems to have been produced.

How do Luvale musicians tune their drums with heat and tuning paste? How does this tuning process change a drum’s timbre? How do practitioners describe these timbres? And what acoustic properties are encoded in these semantic, descriptive terms? In this collaborative and interdisciplinary module, we address these questions through the case study of a two-step tuning process among Luvale drummers in Zambia.

Professor Bad Trip: Lesson III (2000) is a piece for small ensemble composed by Fausto Romitelli, constituting the last part of his Professor Bad Trip triptych (1998–2000). As suggested by the title, Romitelli sought an aesthetic that evokes hallucination, plunging the listener into a state of illusion and bewilderment.

In raising the question of form-bearing dimensions in music, we are trying to understand the possibilities and limits of the apprehension of musical form in terms of the psychological mechanisms that operate on a received acoustic structure.

In the aftermath of World War Two, Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975) was famous for a few major works that conveyed a humanist message, particularly the Canti di Prigionia (1938-1941) and the opera Il Prigioniero (1944-1948), which rank among his better-known works to this day. The composer’s personality should, however, not be reduced to this one aspect of his output. Likewise, we should not merely see him as a practitioner of twelve-tone techniques inherited from Schoenberg and Webern, a facet that has been extensively explored by theoreticians and historians of music.

We might think about how a single voice part within a composition expresses a mode (one of the prevailing systems governing the organization of pitch in this period), or how multiple voice parts move against one another (counterpoint, from the Latin contrapunctus—literally means note-against-note), creating successions of intervals. This essay focuses on the amazing moments ensconced in those intervals: the way they are arranged, the spaces between them, and ultimately, the sonorities they create.

Roger Reynolds is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of music composition at the University of California, San Diego. In 1989, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for the string orchestra composition, Whispers Out of Time. His more than 150 compositions have been exclusively published by Edition Peters New York for over five decades.

Nicolas Ellis is Music Director of the Orchestre National de Bretagne, Principal Guest Conductor of Les Violons du Roy, as well as Artistic Director and Conductor of the Orchestre de l’Agora, which he founded in Montreal in 2013. Known for his versatility in a vast repertoire, Nicolas has distinguished himself with the Orchestre de l’Agora by the conception of concerts with a dramaturgical approach.

This paper proposes an examination of the intersections of materiality, acoustics, and musical performance practice through the prism of instruments of the tuba family. Investigation into the symbiotic relationship between instrumental evolution and performance practice is a crucial facet of any study of timbre and orchestration.

This module offers a streamlined resource for emerging composers seeking to introduce live electronics into their instrumental orchestration practice. Accessible and user-friendly software and hardware platforms offer a pathway for emerging or (technologically curious expert) composers to experiment with electronics in a low risk, low-cost context.

This project spurred the development of an internet-based guide for musicians that describes, in layperson terms, the fundamentals of acoustic features of musical instruments, stages, and performance/rehearsal rooms using visual and auditory examples. The guide also aims to explain what and how parameters can be assessed along with the audio recordings to document a musical performance.

The DaTE project investigated the use of dance tracking to control electroacoustic processing of acoustic timbres. To this end, the project involved a composer/ programmer, a dancer, a flautist, and a cellist, and used the UBC-developed Kinect Controlled Artistic Sensing System (KiCASS) to track the dancer and generate movement/position data. T

This project analyzes the understudied parameters of timbre and texture and their interactions with musical form in a new popular-music corpus, Timbre in Popular Song (TiPS). This study addresses two problems in popular-music scholarship: lack of research on timbre and texture, and underrepresentation of non-male and non-white artists in both popular music and its scholarship.