The ACTOR Year 1 Workshop took place in Paris from 13-15 July 2019 and was hosted by IRCAM.
Forty ACTOR members from seven countries gathered in Paris, France from 13-15 July at IRCAM/Centre Pompidou for the second annual ACTOR Workshop. This year’s activities included a special session devoted to the work of student members. Papers presented at the student session were: “Seeing new colors: Devices of Scriabinian and post-Scriabinian orchestration” by Nicholas Farmer (Undergraduate student in Composition and Horn Performance from Southern Methodist University); “Acoustic characterisation of concert halls illustrated by the Salle Claude-Champagne” by Dorothea Lincke (Master’s Student in Engineering, with a background in music and specializing in room acoustics, at the Technical University Berlin); “Advancing the state of the art in real-time acoustic modeling and reconstruction for source separation” by Louis Pisha (PhD Student in Electrical Engineering (Signal & Image Processing) at the University of California, San Diego); and “Orchestrational prolongations and transformations in operatic and symphonic music” by Kit Soden (PhD Candidate in Composition at McGill University). In addition to the Student Sessions, Day One also included Lightning Presentations giving all attendees updates on various ongoing projects and a plenary session led by ACTOR Project Director, Stephen McAdams, which included reports from the Training and Mentoring Committee co-chair, Jason Noble, and the Knowledge Mobilization Committee chair, Zachary Wallmark. Day one videos may be accessed on the IRCAM website:
Days Two and Three were devoted to cross-axis working groups focusing on active projects such as: Taxonomies (led by Denys Bouliane and Stephen McAdams), Artificial Intelligence (led by Philippe Esling), Compositional Applications (led by Jason Noble), Recording Protocols (led by Martha DeFrancisco), ACTOR Website and Online Orchestration Resource (led by Jason Noble and Kit Soden), Timbre Semantics (led by Jason Noble and Zachary Wallmark), 20th-21st Century Analysis (led by Robert Hasegawa and Pierre Michel), Composer-Performer Orchestration Research Ensembles (CORE) (prepared by Keith Hamel and Roger Reynolds, and led by Roger in Keith’s absence), Generative Orchestration (Orchidea) (led by Carmine Cella) OrchView Score Annotation Platform (led by Félix Baril and Baptiste Bohelay), Performance Applications (led by Julie Delisle and Nathalie Hérold), 18th-19th Century Analysis (led by Sherry Lee and Ryan McClelland), and Discussion on Journal of Orchestration and Timbre Studies (JOTS) (led by Robert Hasegawa). ACTOR members will reconvene in July 2020 at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Many thanks to IRCAM for graciously hosting the Year 1 Workshop and Sylvie Benoit for all of her hard work on the event. Thanks also to everyone at UCSD for the work that has already begun on the Year 2 Workshop.
