Other Events

A special symposium dedicated to the ACTOR project, convened by Kit Soden and Jason Noble, took place on August 7, 2019, as part of the 2019 biennial meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition in New York City.

Folk Suite by ACTOR Postdoc Jason Noble was featured on the album Resonances by Stick & Bow, also known as Juan Sebastien Delgado and Krystina Marcoux!

Facebook Event

ANTISHOW #17

At Productions Antichambre, we mix arts and music in original and unique formats. For our new Antishow series, we invite you to transform an unusual venue into a concert hall, where we'll meet every Friday throughout the summer for good music, good times, and...good beer.

Anticafé Vieux-Port and Productions Antichambre are joining forces to present up-and-coming and established artists, talented musicians who take words to heart and notes to heart.

We have received help and material support from Long & McQuade (Longueuil), and we would like to thank them because their contribution will help us make our events more profitable AND, by extension, give more money to Dans la rue, an incredible organization that helps young people aged 15 to 25 who are experiencing difficult situations. Throughout the summer, we will keep you informed of our/your donations and we will ask for your help in all kinds of ways!

Stick&Bow

The duo Stick&Bow was formed in the vibrant city of Montreal, when two passionate, energetic, and complementary young musicians met. Both classically trained, Canadian Krystina Marcoux and Argentine Juan Sebastian Delgado joined forces to present a wide range of musical styles, from rock to gypsy jazz, and from baroque to tango. Through original arrangements, their eclectic repertoire features some of the most celebrated works in history, while transforming the listening experience with their unique combination of marimba and cello. Stick&Bow is a strong advocate for contemporary music and enriches the repertoire of their unusual ensemble by commissioning new works. They aim to present bold and accessible creations by composers such as Luis Naon, Camille Pépin, Luna Pearl Woolf, Jason Noble, and Marcelo Nisinman.

First prize winner of the Latin American Cello Competition (2008), Juan Sebastian holds a doctorate from McGill University. Krystina, first prize winner of the OSM Competition (2012), obtained her PhD at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Lyon. Thanks to music, they have had the opportunity to share unique moments from Banff to Colombia, via Armenia, Italy, the United States, Ecuador, France, and two significant Canadian tours in 2019 and 2020, as “young emerging artists” of Jeunesses Musicales du Canada.

Doors open at 8 p.m. and the show...L'Antishow starts at 8:30 p.m. Don't forget our Friday happy hour: Apéro piano, which will take place just before the show. Take the opportunity to enjoy some delicious microbrewery beers!

$10 tickets

$25 at the door with album

Alcohol available for purchase on site ;)

Release of the album Focus, by the duo Cicchillitti-Cowan! Featuring the piece River and Cave by ACTOR Postdoc Jason Noble.

Five ensembles joined forces at the first edition of the Festival Ensemble(s) from 11 through 13 September 2020 in Paris to honour composers of different nationalities and generations. The event included 6 concerts involving 26 composers. On the 13th, ACTOR member Guillaume Bourgogne conducted "Au clair d'un croissant" by Japanese composer Noriko Baba, performed by all five ensembles: 2e2m, Cairn, Court-circuit, Multilatérale, and Sillages. The piece is available online on YouTube.

This Timbre Analysis Workshop will feature talks by two of ACTOR's new post-docs, Matt Zeller and Lindsey Reymore. If you've been curious about the ACTOR project, what our colleagues at CIRMMT do, or timbre analysis as it relates to your own music theory research, you won't want to miss this event!

Jorge Ramos' “Hidden gem” for vibraphone solo was premiered by Sergio Yraita from Ensamble NEO in Buenos Aires, Argentina on the 21st of November 2020.

Nathalie Hérold organised a workshop, “Étudier le timbre et l'orchestration: rencontre de présentation du partenariat ACTOR,” at Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l'Homme Alsace, Strasbourg.

Jorge Ramos' “Plug-in” for mixed quartet was chosen for the project Das Tripas Coração! Project by the Cat's Cradle Collective Ensemble in London. This work will be premiered live at the Radio Portuguesa UK on Thursday, 3rd December at 3 pm.

As part of the 50th Anniversary of the New Music Concerts - Commissioning Series, Eliot Britton's Hyperscale Landscapte for distanced chamber orchestra is presented. The work uses machine learning to integrate macro and micro scale audiovisual materials.

Guillaume Bourgogne announces the live concert broadcast to take place on February 3 at 20h CET on France Musique. The concert will feature the Ensemble Cairn, including Jean Barraqué's La nostalgie d’Arabella for voice and ensemble (premiere), and Pascal Dusapin's Jetzt Genau ! Concertino pour piano et six instruments.

Event program

International Conference organized by ECLLA laboratory (Études du Contemporain en Littératures, Langues et Arts): Analysis and Description of Timbre in Music

The ECLLA laboratory organizes an international symposium on the "Analysis and Description of Timbre in Fixed Music", at the Jean Monnet University of Saint-Etienne, Tuesday 9th and Wednesday 10th of February 2021. This conference is organized jointly with the research group on "Analysis of Electroacoustic Music", supported by the French Society of Musical Analysis (SFAM). This event is also involved in a ECLLA research project on "Sound Signature of Music", with the contribution of researchers from the Hubert Curien laboratory (UMR 5516).

The purpose of this symposium is to bring together researchers working in different disciplines to exchange and present recent works to better understand, describe and analyze the characteristics of timbre, in relation to the perception that can have a listener.

“Future Directions of Music Cognition,” a collection of events consisting of a three-month long weekly online speaker series and two-day virtual conference, will take place this Spring. The event is hosted by The Ohio State University and co-chaired by ACTOR postdoc Lindsey Reymore.

We would like to invite you to join us for the Timbre Geeks Networking (TGN) Meet & Greet, an event dedicated to help people with similar research interests connect and form collaborations. TGN’s main goal is to enable students to develop collaborative projects and apply for the newly created Collaborative Student Project Grant.

Dominique Lafortune, Philippe Macnab-Séguin and Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière presented “Introduction to the Analytical Methods of Aural Sonology (Music-as-Heard)” as part of Denys Bouliane’s graduate seminar “Semiotics and Composing: A Cross-Fertilization, or X-rated vs. IN-rated music in the ShoeBox Cauldron” on Friday, Feb. 26. The theory of Aural Sonology, developed by Lasse Thoresen over the course of his career, studies music as a perceived phenomenon rather than how a piece is constructed or notated.

Lena Heng presented "Timbre's function in the perception of affective intents" at the online conference "Future Directions of Music Cognition."

Timbral and auditory scene analysis in the Adagio of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 106

Traditionally focused on systems of pitch organization, the field of music analysis and theory has gradually opened up to consider the timbral dimension of music, which benefits from being viewed in relation to the principles of auditory scene analysis. After a few theoretical reminders, this presentation will offer a timbral analysis of the third movement of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 106, “Hammerklavier,” based on a system of annotations that aims to identify different types of timbral and orchestral effects resulting from simultaneous, sequential, and segmental auditory groupings. This analysis offers a new perspective on the formal organization of this sonata-form movement, highlighting various correlations between the timbral and tonal-thematic dimensions of the form.

With the goal to stablish a close collaboration between performers and musicologists thus triggering a circle of mutual enrichment, the webinar "Istantanee—Collective Improvisation in Europe: Techniques and Styles" was broadcasted by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini via Youtube and Zoom.

Last April 5th, 2021 IRCAM made available a recording of the Concert "Mécanique de l'intuition" conducted by Sébastien Boin & Guillaume Bourgogne and performed by Ensemble C Barré. The event had the technical support of IRCAM and included works by Francisco Alvarado, Giulia Lorusso, Mikel Urquiza and Francesca Verunelli.

Dear ACTOR members, 

For the past four months, Lena Heng and I have been organizing meetings of an ACTOR workgroup focusing on Chinese and East Asian music. Our meetings so far have included discussions and presentations on Chinese music theory, the contemporary Chinese orchestra, and analysis of traditional music for Chinese instruments as well as new compositions by Jia Guoping and Guo Wenjing. And in an upcoming workgroup meeting (April 8, 13:00 EDT), we'll be welcoming Lei Liang (UCSD) to talk about his piece Tremors of a Memory Chord for piano and Chinese orchestra... if you'd like to attend, send me an email (robert.hasegawa[at]mcgill.ca) and I'll share the Zoom link!

We'd like to organize a meeting later this April to plan future workgroup sessions, research directions, and publications. If you'd like to get involved with the group, it's not too late to join: you can send me an email to be added to our workgroup list. Be sure to include your full name and your preferred email. Once we determine the time that works best, we'll get in touch with everyone who responded to the poll with a meeting date and time.

Best wishes,

Bob

The Urban Sound Symposium is organized as an interactive 3-day virtual event, bringing together practitioners and experts from around the globe that are confronted with urban sound in their professional activities. It is organized simultaneously in Ghent, Montreal, Nantes, Zurich, London and Berlin by researchers from Ghent University, McGill University & CIRMMT, Université Eiffel, EMPA, UCL and TU Berlin.

Assaf Shatil’s composition MIDRASH: Three etudes for remote percussion ensemble (2020) was premiered online by UCSC percussion ensemble, directed by William Winant, during the Santa Cruz Festival on April 16th.

MIDRASH deals with a musical structure where timbral choices are open for the performers. Each etude is made of the structuring of one particular percussive gesture—an “attack” in the first etude, a “swell” in the second etude and a “fast knock” in the third etude. Each etude is both a “study” of the performative and timbral choices of each individual and also the entire assemblage of all parts put together.

Concert conducted by Guillaume Bourgogne which includes on the program Chopin's 24 Preludes for piano in dialogue with the world premiere of Ramon Lazkano's 19 Preludes for ensemble.

“Future Directions of Music Cognition,” a collection of events consisting of a three-month long weekly online speaker series and two-day virtual conference, will take place this Spring. The event is hosted by The Ohio State University and co-chaired by ACTOR postdoc Lindsey Reymore.

April 26 at 4pm EDT:

Empathic listening: Music and the social mind

Zachary Wallmark, Assistant Professor of Musicology and Affiliated Faculty of the Center for Translational Neuroscience, University of Oregon

“Future Directions of Music Cognition,” a collection of events consisting of a three-month long weekly online speaker series and two-day virtual conference, will take place this Spring. The event is hosted by The Ohio State University and co-chaired by ACTOR postdoc Lindsey Reymore.

May 3 at 4pm EDT:

Analyzing the perceptual effects of orchestration practice through the lens of auditory grouping principles

Stephen McAdams, Canada Research Chair in Music Perception and Cognition; Professor of Music, Schulich School of Music, McGill University; Director, ACTOR Project (Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration)

Nova Contemporary Music Meeting (NCMM) is a biennial, 3-day international conference launched by the Contemporary Music Research Group (GIMC) of CESEM (Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Musical Aesthetics at Nova University, Lisbon) and focused on a variety of questions relating to music since the beginning of the 20th century. The NCMM 2021: “Music Performance as Creation”, to take place from 5 to 7 May 2021 in Lisbon, will be preferably in person, however presentation by video-conference will be allowed. The conference will be streamed on a dedicated YouTube channel.

Jorge Ramos’ work Plug-in for violin, clarinet, trombone, and contrabass had its second performance at the Portuguese Embassy in London, UK, on May 6th, and was live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

Concert conducted by Guillaume Bourgogne which includes on the program Chopin's 24 Preludes for piano in dialogue with the world premiere of Ramon Lazkano's 19 Preludes for ensemble.

The National Association of Teachers of Singing (Chapitre Montreal) is hosting a Student Symposium on Friday evening (21 May from 7pm-9pm Eastern). The event is called Research & Cocktails - those of us not presenting can sit back with a beer and listen! We will be hearing 5 papers, including one by ACTOR student member Louis Goldford, “Tracing the Spectre of the Voice: How the Voice Continues to Inform Compositional Practice,” and one by incoming McGill student and likely-to-soon-become-an-ACTOR-student-member Theodora Nestorova, "Confronting the Variability of Vocal Vibrato by Genre: A Novel Parametric Approach." Here is the Zoom Link, if you would like to attend! Full program will be available soon on the NATS Montreal website. Zoom link

ACTOR Member Markus Noisternig will be presenting at the AES Show in the spring 2021. His talk 'What’s old and what’s new: Introduction to the spatially oriented format for acoustics 2.0' will be features in the Game Audio/AVAR/Spatial Audio session of the event.

The first Timbre and Orchestration Taxonomies Workshop was held virtually 29–31 May. Organized by ACTOR Postdocs, Lindsey Reymore, Kit Soden, and Matthew Zeller, the workshop brought together eleven scholars actively working to develop a variety of timbre and orchestration taxonomies. Over the first two days, participants gave presentations using Maurice Ravel’s Alborada del Gracioso as the shared reference for each method. This pluralistic approach brought up engaging questions and facilitated discussions about the unique qualities of each taxonomic system. The third day was devoted to group discussion and proved to be intellectually stimulating and invigorating for all.

Presentations included:

• Félix Baril, “Orchestration Techniques
• Victor Cordero: “Metatimbre and Orchestration”
• Nathalie Hérold, “Timbre Analysis of Piano Music”
• Dominique Lafortune, “Aural Sonology”
• Fabien Lévy, “Functional Orchestration”
• Stephen McAdams, “Taxonomy of Orchestral Grouping Effects”
• Kit Soden, “Orchestrational Combinations and Transformations”
• Matthew Zeller, “Timbral Function in Music”

Additional participants included Lindsey Reymore (moderator), Bob Hasegawa, and Jade Roth, and research assistant Holly Faria taking notes. Discussion topics included how we define taxonomy and how taxonomies are useful in timbre research, areas of methodological overlap, and where each method is situated among the pillars or axes of timbre and orchestration research. We discussed a number of terms and concepts that occur frequently in a variety of meanings and made a collective effort to determine how we can best move forward as practitioners in a complimentary fashion. Finally, we initiated discussions on how to collectively move forward, potential research outputs, and the development and expansion of the Timbre and Orchestration Taxonomies Workshop. We look forward to sharing future plans with all of ACTOR.

Dear CIRMMT community,

I'm excited to announce the symposium Dialogues: Analysis and Performance.

Please find below the call for proposals.

Hope to see you (virtually or in person) in October!

Ben Duinker

Faculty of Music, University of Toronto

//

*Call for Proposals*

The inaugural edition of the symposium Dialogues: Analysis and Performance will be held October 7–9, 2021, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. We invite proposals on any topic related to the analysis and performance of music, especially encouraging those who engage with repertoire or performance practices from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Applicants may choose—but are not obliged—to base their proposal around any of the following questions:

• How can the concerns, choices, and pursuits of music performance inform the practice of music analysis?
• How can the concerns, choices, and pursuits of music analysis inform the practice of music performance?
• What sites of intersection provide promise for collaborative research between music theorists, musicologists, and performers?
• How can research in contemporary music appeal to a broader segment of the artistic and academic communities?
• How do trends and conversations in contemporary culture influence the intersection of analysis and performance?
• What challenges or appeals does contemporary music (in particular) present to the scholarly integration of analysis and performance?

Proposals can be submitted for paper presentations (20 minutes) or lecture recitals (30 minutes). All presentations will be appended by a 10-minute question period.

Detailed submission information

The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2021. 

Questions regarding the submission process should be directed to analysisandperformance2021 [at] gmail.com (analysisandperformance2021[at]gmail[dot]com).

We are pleased to announce that the New Images Festival has selected the Berlioz Trip AR experience, Dream of a Sabbath Night, co-produced by ACTOR partner Sonic Solveig and Les Clés de l'écoute, to be featured in the Forum des Images in Paris from June 9 to 13. The project consists of a unique experience of spatial immersion in the heart of an orchestra. part of the XR Competition of the NewImages Festival.
This prestigious festival celebrates every year the immersive creation (augmented reality, virtual reality, mapping, binaural sound, etc.) and proposes to the public to discover innovative works with inventive narrations. We are particularly happy to have been nominated among world-class cultural institutions (Musée d'Orsay, France Télévisions, Ubisoft, National Film Board of Canada) and ambitious artists (Adrien M & Claire B, Camille Duvelleroy, Erick Oh).
More information
We would be delighted to welcome you and accompany you in the discovery of this 360° acoustic experience that will make you live the dreams and fantasies of Hector Berlioz, and physically walk in the heart of a symphony orchestra!

Three ACTOR members will be presenting in the upcoming 32nd annual conference for Music Theory Midwest from June 10th to 13th:

• Lindsey Reymore: “A Timbral-Motivic Analysis of Obermüller’s different forms of phosphorus for Solo English Horn”
• Joshua Rosner: “Opening the Door: A Multifaceted Approach to the Analysis of Text Setting in Kate Soper’s Door (2007)”
• Jeremy Tatar: “Emergent Timbres in Screw Music”

Results from the ACTOR Strategic Project Grant: Orchestral Timbre Semantics Validation Study and Database will be presented at the next ICMPC. The presentation title is "Mapping the semantics of timbre across pitch registers" and includes authors Lindsey Reymore, Jason Noble, Charis Saitis, Caroline Traube, and Zachary Wallmark. 

Other presentations by ACTOR members include:

• Lindsey Reymore, Characterizing prototypical musical instrument timbres with timbre trait profiles.
• Iza Korsmit, Yuval Adler, Behrad Madahi, Bennett K. Smith, and Stephen McAdams, Multidimensional scaling of timbre dissimilarities across pitch registers at different dynamics.
• Jason Noble, Kit Soden, and Zachary Wallwark, Comparing semantics of individual and combined instrument timbres.

Yuval Adler recently had several compositions performed at the IMPULS festival and academy for new music in Graz, Austria (August 16–27, 2021). Some of his Musical Poems were interpreted by members of the local PPCM ensemble, and his quartet "Four Strings" was performed by Latenz Ensemble from Switzerland. One of the poems performed, "Nashov," for solo piano, was recently released by Hagai Yodan. The piece is a short timbral meditation for piano. Links from more performances are forthcoming.

Jorge Ramos' wind quintet "Prometheus" was performed on August 19th by the Bracara Quintet at Festival Solidário organised by Orquestra do Alto Minho in Auditório Professor Lima De Carvalho, Viana do Castelo, Portugal. The piece was written in 2013 as part of Ramos' composition portfolio at Conservatório de Música Calouste Gulbenkian in Braga.

Juanita Marchand Knight, Joshua Rosner, and Jason Winikof would like to invite all interested people to the first organizational meeting of the African and Afro-diasporic Music Subgroup. We will meet on Friday August 20th at 10am Pacific (11Mountain / 12Central / 1pmEastern). We apologize for the late notice. However this is just an organizational meeting and the plan is for there to be more substantial meetings moving forward. So, if you can’t make this, don’t fret! We will report back after this meeting and look forward to hearing from anyone who can make it then.

Fabien Levy's work À propos, for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello will be performed by Das neue Ensemble and conducted by Stefan Meier. In the program notes, Lévy states: "Four visual artists illustrate the four movements of 'À propos'. With the exception of Giuseppe Penone, these artists do not claim to be part of Arte Povera, but all could belong to it. I appreciate each of them for their aesthetic singularity."

The Sub-Saharan African & Afro-Diasporic group will meet at 10:30amPST (11:30MST/12:30CST/1:30EST) on Friday September 10. Please pay attention to timezones.

Hi everyone,

Our next East Asian subgroup meeting will be happening next Monday 27 September at 11am.

Zoom Link

See you all soon!

Lena

This talk will present my recent work in searching for good signal representations that permit high-level manipulation of musical concepts. After the definition of a geometric approach to signal representation, I will present my theory of sound-types and its application to music. Finally, I will propose musical applications including assisted orchestration and augmented instruments.

More information

The inaugural edition of the symposium Dialogues: Analysis and Performance will be held October 7–9, 2021, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music.

This will be a general planning and discussion meeting. It would be great to hear a quick update/report/forecast from each of the workgroups if possible (especially since we're now expanding with the addition of the Sub-Saharan Africa/Diaspora group and the Middle Eastern/South Asian group as well as the original Chinese/East Asian, Pop Music, and Gender Diversity groups).

Since we'll all be meeting together, this will also be a good opportunity to talk about questions of diversity in the ACTOR project more broadly... and especially areas where we could propose new initiatives or plan collaborations across the subgroups. Looking forward to seeing you on Monday the 25th!

SMT's annual meeting will be held online and will feature presentations by ACTOR members: 

• Ben Duinker (University of Toronto) — "Unpacking Interpretive Difficulty in Contemporary Music"
• Jason Noble (Université de Montréal) — "Comparing Temporal Fictions in Tonality and Triadic Post-Tonality: Chopin's Fourth Ballade as a Link Between the Ages"
• Lindsey Reymore (McGill University) — "A Timbral-Motivic Analysis of Obermüller’s different forms of phosphorus for Solo English Horn"
• Jeremy Tatar (McGill University) — "Emergent Timbres and Motor Mimesis in Screw Music"
• Joshua Rosner (McGill University) — "Opening the Door: A Multifaceted Approach to the Analysis of Text Setting in Kate Soper's Door (2007)"
• [PANEL] Provincializing Western Art Music Syntaxes: Chris Stover (Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University), Anna Yu Wang (Harvard University), Organizers: Michael Tenzer (University of British Columbia), Noriko Manabe (Temple University), Co-Chairs
• [PLENARY SESSION] Teaching Music in the 21st Century: Leigh VanHandel (University of British Columbia) — "The 21st-Century Theory Graduate Student"

Several ACTOR members will be presenting at the 22nd International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, which will be held virtually November 7–12: 

• Axel Berndt—"The Music Performance Markup Format and Ecosystem"
• Ben Hayes, Charalampos Saitis, & Gyorgy Fazekas—"Neural Waveshaping Synthesis"
• Néstor Nápoles López, Mark R H Gotham, & Ichiro Fujinaga—"AugmentedNet: A Roman Numeral Analysis Network with Synthetic Training Examples and Additional Tonal Tasks"
• Lindsey Reymore, Emmanuelle Beauvais-Lacasse, Bennett Smith, & Stephen McAdams—"Navigating Noise: Modeling Perceptual Correlates of Noise-related Semantic Timbre Categories with Audio Features"

Robert Hasegawa, in collaboration with Luis Velasco-Pufleau and Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis, is hosting an online speaker series, "Poetics and Politics of Twenty-First Century Music." Fabien Lévy will be presenting a talk titled "Chroniques responsables, chroniques déchantées" on November 11 at 10am EST. All lectures will be presented via Zoom and are open to the public with registration at the following webform.

The ACTOR Diversity (East Asian) subgroup is having a meeting to discuss Xu Yi's Plein du vide, in conjunction with the live@CIRMMT performance by the McGill Contemporary Ensemble on 13 November. The meeting is open to everyone in ACTOR and CIRMMT who might be interested in discussing the piece from an analyst, conductor, performer perspective.

Our meeting will take place at 6pm on Friday 12 November via Zoom. This will be the Zoom link.

A quick update on the next meeting of the Chinese/East Asian workgroup... thanks to Lena, Linglan, and Mengqi for setting this up!

We'll be meeting on Friday, November 12 at 6:00pm (Montreal time, EST) via Zoom.

We will be discussing Xu Yi's Le Plein du Vide, a follow-up to our initial conversation back in May, in conjunction with McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble's live@CIRMMT performance on November 13. 

Note that CIRMMT and the CME have agreed that we can sit in on rehearsals if we like: these will be taking place at 9:05am on Tuesday, November 9 and Friday, November 12 in the MMR. They'll set aside some seats for listeners during these sessions.

Jimmie LeBlanc will be presenting "Musical Minimalism and the Powers of the False: Gilles Deleuze's Falsifying Narration in Two Pages (for Steve Reich) (1968) by Philip Glass" on November 16 at the Narrative and Music conference in Brussels.

Robert Normandeau's piece for orchestra and speaker dome, Bourdons, was performed by the Orchestre de l'Université de Montréal (OUM), conducted by Jean-François Rivest, on December 4th in the Salle Claude-Champagne at the Université de Montréal.

Want some help crafting successful conference proposal abstracts?

On December 6, at 9:30am (EST), the ACTOR Training and Mentoring Committee (TMC) will be hosting an online workshop on conference proposal abstract writing with professors Robert Hasegawa (McGill University) and Malte Kob (Detmold University of Music). The event is open to all ACTOR student members and includes three short presentations followed by breakout sessions for small working groups. Breakout sessions will be available in English, French, and German (depending on submissions) and will discuss abstracts submitted in advance by participants.

Bring an abstract you are working on now, or one you submitted in the past, to work through in the breakout sessions!

Pre-registration is required by 30 November - REGISTER HERE. 

Tomás Díaz Villegas' piece 'De vuelta al terruño' for string quartet will be premiered online (pre-recorded broadcast) by Q-Arte (leading chamber ensemble in Latin America) on December 16 at 6 pm EST through the Facebook page of the Luis Ángel Arango Concert Hall (Bogotá, Colombia). This piece was chosen with three other compositions in the first version of Jóvenes Compositores, a national composition competition organized by the National Bank of Colombia in 2021.

Jorge Ramos’ BLUR — commissioned by UNESCO

The second edition of the innovative online collaborative project initiated by the UNESCO Creative Cities in Media Arts is launched in the presence of the artists, UNESCO officials, and civic representatives. Five artworks have been produced by 13 artists working collaboratively across borders and time zones, on the theme of Play! The Media Arts Cities asked artists to imagine a fairer, more sustainable future, to consider how we can use our technologies to help us learn to play again. In short, what will happen when we press Play? The 13 UNESCO Creative Cities of Media Arts participating in the project are Austin (United States), Braga (Portugal), Cali (Colombia), Changsha (China), Enghien-les-Bains (France), Guadalajara (Mexico), Gwangju (Korea), Karlsruhe (Germany), Kosice (Slovakia), Sapporo (Japan), Toronto (Canada), Viborg (Denmark) and York (United Kingdom). The guests at the City to City launch on 9 February will be welcomed by the Secretary of the Mayor of Cali, Mrs. Liliana Sierra Chavez, the UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture, Mr. Ernesto Ottone, and the Coordinator of Media Arts Cities, M. Dominique Roland. This is followed by an interview with the artist, curator, and Executive Director of the International Symposium for Electronic Art, Sue Gollifer, and all the presentations of every artistic team and respective artwork. 

The City to City launch event will be live-streamed on the Braga Media Arts Facebook page on the 9th February 2022 / 1:00 pm (GMT Lisbon/London). Afterwards, the artworks will be made available online at the website of the Media Arts Cities.

Anthony Tan's Ways of Returning for amplified string quartet and electronics won the Canada Council 2021 Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music. The work explores timbre through the historical abstraction of modal and tonal counterpoint. The first movement builds timbre through the imitation of acoustic strings by sampled and synthetically modelled strings. The second movement is a timbre fugue. The third movement explores the micro-synchronicity within a pulsation and its effect on timbral blend. Aesthetically, this work represents the mixing of the classical string quartet genre with Noise, and Dark Ambient genre signifiers.

At Espace Orange | Édifice Wilder
Those in Montreal will be able to hear the work in concert on Feb 23, performed by Quatuor Bozzini in partnership with Le Vivier.

The Orchestre Métropolitain will present a symphonic adaptation of Simon Boulerice's children's book Le pelleteur de nuages, a beautiful and immensely poetic tale telling the story of young Elliot, a little boy with an overactive imagination who has vitiligo. The book, illustrated by Josée Bisaillon, addresses themes of difference, diversity, stigma, inclusion and self-esteem. The performance will take place on February 26, 3pm EST, at the Maison symphonique de Montréal.

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. The event will take place in the Music Multimedia Room (Elizabeth Wirth Music Building) and will be followed by a concert at 7:30pm (EDT) involving musicians and composers from two iterations of the project. The lecture portion of the event will be webcast.

Admission to both the lecture and concert is free.

PROGRAM:
Stephen McAdams, scientific director
Guillaume Bourgogne, artistic director
Martha de Francisco, sound recording director
Yuval Adler (CORE 1 & 2), Tristan Alantar (CORE 1), Hyunjoung Yang (CORE 1), Ying-Ying Zhang (CORE 1 & 2), Yangwanqing (Viola) Zhou (CORE 2), audiovisual assistants

CORE 1 (2019-2020)

Pedram Diba (McGill University), Reaching for the Unreachable Point of Desire
Alexander Blank (McGill University), Flow
Quentin Lauvray (McGill University), ...for narrow is the door...

Charles-Eric Fontaine, conductor
Jeanne-Sophie Baron, violin
Victor Mangas, bass clarinet
Eric Bourgeois, trombone
Martin Daigle, percussion

Intermission

CORE 2 (2021-2022)

Jihyoung Lee (McGill University), The Fingers of a Shaman
Darren Xu (University of British Columbia), Prayers and Curses
Louis-Michel Tougas (McGill University), Étude
Mariah Mennie (University of British Columbia), Phantasmagoria
Anita Pari (McGillUniversity), To a Lullaby

Frédéric-Alexandre Michaud, Guillaume Bourgogne, conductors
Bailey Wantuch, violin
Amelia Smerz, cello
Alex Huyghebaert, flute
Alexander Ortins, bass clarinet
Micah Kroeker, trombone
Donglai Shi, piano
Huizi Wang, percussion

For more information, visit Research Alive

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. The event will take place in the Music Multimedia Room (Elizabeth Wirth Music Building) and will be followed by a concert at 7:30pm (EDT) involving musicians and composers from two iterations of the project. The lecture portion of the event will be webcast.

Admission to both the lecture and concert is free.

PROGRAM:
Stephen McAdams, scientific director
Guillaume Bourgogne, artistic director
Martha de Francisco, sound recording director
Yuval Adler (CORE 1 & 2), Tristan Alantar (CORE 1), Hyunjoung Yang (CORE 1), Ying-Ying Zhang (CORE 1 & 2), Yangwanqing (Viola) Zhou (CORE 2), audiovisual assistants

CORE 1 (2019-2020)

Pedram Diba (McGill University), Reaching for the Unreachable Point of Desire
Alexander Blank (McGill University), Flow
Quentin Lauvray (McGill University), ...for narrow is the door...

Charles-Eric Fontaine, conductor
Jeanne-Sophie Baron, violin
Victor Mangas, bass clarinet
Eric Bourgeois, trombone
Martin Daigle, percussion

Intermission

CORE 2 (2021-2022)

Jihyoung Lee (McGill University), The Fingers of a Shaman
Darren Xu (University of British Columbia), Prayers and Curses
Louis-Michel Tougas (McGill University), Étude
Mariah Mennie (University of British Columbia), Phantasmagoria
Anita Pari (McGillUniversity), To a Lullaby

Frédéric-Alexandre Michaud, Guillaume Bourgogne, conductors
Bailey Wantuch, violin
Amelia Smerz, cello
Alex Huyghebaert, flute
Alexander Ortins, bass clarinet
Micah Kroeker, trombone
Donglai Shi, piano
Huizi Wang, percussion

"For a Reason" will be screened in Tanna Schulich Hall at 17:00 and simultaneously broadcast via Zoom, followed by an online Q&A with composer Roger Reynolds and filmmaker Kyle Johnson moderated by Prof. Stephen McAdams. 

Immediately afterwards, there will be a reception in A-832.

We welcome you to share this event via Facebook. 

Location:
Tanna Hall, 527 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest
More Info:
cirmmt.info [AT] mcgill.ca

FOR A REASON

Documentary film by Kyle Johnson on the music and world of Roger Reynolds;
63 minutes

View Trailer

Observing an artist at work is perennially fascinating. Strangely, however, whenever composers are the topic — above all, those writing music today — a persistent mystification about the creative process lingers. This poses a stumbling block to potential new audiences — to audiences who should find discovering composers every bit as captivating as they do their counterparts in the visual arts, technology, or science.

Kyle Johnson’s new film offers a way past this stumbling block when it comes to new music by opting for two strategies. First, he has chosen as his subject the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds, for many decades a trailblazing figure who bridges the worlds of traditional instruments and voice, computer-processed sound, and multimedial collaborations. Reynolds has a gift for articulating his interests and practice with engaging clarity. At age 86, Reynolds remains infectiously curious, always in search of what doesn’t yet exist rather than what is already known. Distilling the wisdom accumulated over a lifetime, he is left with questions, not answers — questions that vibrate with insight, excited discovery, and humor.

Second, Johnson’s own aesthetic as a filmmaker rejects a linear, academic documentary approach in favor of continual and surprising juxtapositions of Reynolds and his colleagues. This is an emphatically collaborative composer, and the film’s focus shifts between rehearsals, snippets of live performance or recording sessions, and shots of the composer at his home in Del Mar, California, overlooking the Pacific.

“I wanted to make something for people who are interested in art generally but who maybe don’t know about this particular corner of the musical world,” explains Johnson. “The idea is to give them a window to see why anyone should care about it — to see that composers like Roger are doing this for a reason.” Johnson came

to know Reynolds almost 20 years ago when he was still a high school student in San Diego; in addition to his career as a filmmaker, he is himself a composer.

Johnson’s deep personal knowledge of his subjects gives FOR A REASON

a special intensity and sense of connection: Johnson provides a genuine insider’s perspective on how this composer thinks, showing the joy and creative spark that accompany his encounters with the musicians who interpret his compositions. Elements from Reynolds’s biography are expertly threaded into the narrative. He grew up in Detroit, began to pursue a career in composition relatively late, and made the momentous decision to settle in California (where he has taught for over 50 years at the University of California, San Diego). Glimpses of the relationship with his partner Karen, a flutist who has collaborated on projects throughout their life together, enhance the sense of being invited into Reynolds’s personal world.

“It seems to me that at the very least, many conservatories, university music departments, and contemporary music groups would really benefit from being able to share this film with students — it is so inspiring,” Kathryn Knight, the incoming president of the storied Peters Edition music publisher in New York, remarked after seeing FOR A REASON. The film allows a unique glimpse into the workings of a composer who remains devoted to an art he defines as ultimately about “getting rid of anything that impedes complete submergence into the experience.”

—Thomas May

Elizabeth Wirth Music Building Tanna Schulich Hall , 527 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 1E3, CA

Price: Free Admission

Childhood daydreams, shimmering textures, meteorological phenomena, and traditional Persian music were inspirations for four new string quartets written for Quatuor Bozzini. These were workshopped over a multi-phase research collaboration with four composers— Chelsea Komschlies and Marilou Buron from McGill University, plus Miko Sabatino and Showan Tavokol from Université de Montréal—and four researchers (Robert Hasegawa, Jimmie LeBlanc, Jade Roth, and Emanuelle Majeau-Bettez) who tested and developed strategies for timbre-based approaches to string quartet composition. Four unique and colourful approaches to string quartet writing. A co-production of ACTOR (Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration) and Quatuor Bozzini.

Free admission

ACTOR Training and Mentoring Committee

CV & Cover Letter Workshop

Want some help crafting successful CVs and cover letters?

On September 26, at 1:00pm (EDT), the ACTOR Training and Mentoring Committee (TMC) will be hosting 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). The event is open to all ACTOR and CIRMMT members and includes a panel discussion followed by breakout sessions* for small working groups where participants will get a chance to have their materials workshopped.

Registration is required. In the registration form, you will have the option to submit your CV and cover letter ahead of time as well as topics or specific questions to be covered by the panelists.

*Breakout sessions will be available in English and French (depending on submissions) and will discuss materials submitted in advance by participants.

Zoom access via internal pages

The Canada Research Chair in Opera Creation, in partnership with the Opéra de Montréal, cinEXmedia and the GRAFIM invite you to: 

Opera and XR: Democratization, Innovation, Transformation

October 30th, 2022, 9am to 6pm
Centre Phi, 315 Saint-Paul Ouest road, Montréal
Register for Free
The aim of this interactive study day is to bring together researchers, performers, and creative teams working with new technologies of mixed, virtual and augmented reality (XR), and to reflect on the future of opera as a genre together with the general public. What possibilities do virtual and augmented reality offer artistically and in terms of dissemination? How can opera be democratized and updated for the 21st century? What happens when opera, cinema and video games converge?

This day will be an opportunity to build bridges between groups of various interests; people knowledgeable about XR but not opera, opera audiences unfamiliar with XR, creators in the arts, and researchers focusing on the impact of new technologies on the performing arts. Together, they will reflect on the future of opera.

For more information, visit the event website

Dear ACTOR student member,

We would like to invite you to join us for the 2022 ACTOR Onboarding Meeting, which will be held on Zoom, on Monday, October 31, 10:00-11:30am (EDT) | 16h00-17h30 (CET).  

The event aims to help new student members get acquainted with ACTOR and will include a brief presentation about the project, funding opportunities available, and ongoing research projects. We believe this is a good chance for you to connect, collaborate, and take full advantage of this great community of artists, humanists, and scientists. We also have some great updates about the Student Exchange Funding.

Whether you are a newcomer or simply want a refresher on all the activities organized within ACTOR, this is the meeting for you.

Please see the Zoom information below:
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 835 5151 8907
Passcode: 761285

Space As Timbre enables the collaboration between student composers and performers from two ACTOR partner institutions in the creation of new works for an ensemble of 6 instruments. The purpose of SAT is to use computer-assisted orchestration, as well as the creativity and practical knowledge of instrumentalists in recreating spatial effects of particular target sounds with the medium of an acoustic ensemble, thereby creating the opportunity to treat space as a form-bearing element in music.

We invite you to join us for a public presentation of our research followed by the premiere of three works on October 11th, 2022 at 18:30 in Clara Lichtenstein Hall of McGill University, C-209 at 555 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1E3.

Timbre Geek Networking Meet & Greet 2022

We would like to invite all ACTOR Student Members to join us for the Timbre Geeks Networking (TGN) Meet & Greet, an event that connects students with similar research interests. TGN’s main goal is to enable students to develop collaborative projects and apply for the Collaborative Student Project Grant. This funding opportunity offers $8,000 (CAD) per project distributed as $4,000 (CAD) per student. To be eligible, applicants must be from different ACTOR academic institutions and at least one of the applicants must be from a partner institution. The deadline to apply is February 1, 2023. For the complete eligibility and to access the application form, visit ACTOR Internal Pages.

The TGN Meet & Greet will be held virtually (Zoom link) on Friday, November 4 from 1:00-3:00pm (EDT). In order to get to know each other and find potential collaborators, please come prepared to briefly talk about your timbral and orchestrational interests. If you already have research ideas and are looking for collaborators, great! If this is your first time doing collaborative research and are looking to learn more, that’s great too!

You can also start learning about other ACTOR members’ research on the internal directory. If you haven’t filled out the directory yourself, please do so at your earliest convenience – ACTOR internal directory.

If you wish to start connecting NOW, please join the ACTOR community on Slack! We have created a channel specifically for student members (actor-student_members) to facilitate the exchange of ideas. If you are not part of it, let us know and we’ll add you ASAP.

Carol Krumhansl: Geometries of pitch and time in music

A distinguished lecture from Carol Krumhansl, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University.

Distinguished Lecture

November 07, 2022

17:00 - 18:00

Tanna Hall, 527 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest

The lecture will take place in TANNA SCHULICH HALL, followed by a wine and cheese reception in the lobby of the Elizabeth Wirth Music Building. This event is free and open to the general public.

We invite you to share this event via Facebook. 

Abstract

This lecture explores the seemingly natural affinities between music and geometry. Various kinds of geometric representations have been applied to music: low-dimensional spatial representations, (sub)groups and group transformations, and Quinn’s balance pan representation of Lewin’s Fourier properties. Results will be presented in which these geometric representational are applied to tonal and rhythmic hierarchies, key distances, and harmonic expectations.

Biography

Carol Lynne Krumhansl is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. The Music Cognition Laboratory, founded in 1980, has studied a wide range of topics.  The experiments on tonality helped establish the psychological reality of music-theoretic concepts. Contemporary proposals on melodic structure and musical tension have been tested and extended to music from other cultures and post-tonal music. Recent research has used popular music to study memory representations and associated autobiographical memories. A long-standing interest is the application of mathematical models to represent patterns in music.

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will be holding a meeting on Zoom on February 27 at 10am EST at this link shared in the members Slack channel. All ACTOR members are welcome to join, whether or not you have been to previous semantics events!

We are currently working on updating the Semantics Workgroup project list for the ACTOR website. If you have a project or collaboration you would like to add, please send the title of the project, names of project leaders, and a one-line description to lreymore[at]asu.edu & jason.noble[at]umontreal.ca. Recently completed projects can also be included under our “past projects” section.

If you would like to present your recent timbre semantics research at the Feb. 27th meeting, email lreymore[at]asu.edu & jason.noble[at]umontreal.ca! Presentations can be given at any stage of research, and may be as prepared or informal / conversational as you wish. They are intended to give ACTOR members a chance to learn about one another’s interests and projects.

The meeting will also include a more informal opportunity to share research updates and new collaborative opportunities.

-Lindsey Reymore & Jason Noble

FluCoMa workshop

“The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMa - flucoma.org) instigates new musical ways of exploiting ever-growing banks of sound and gestures within the digital composition process, by bringing breakthroughs of signal decomposition DSP and machine learning to the toolset of techno-fluent computer composers, creative coders and digital artists.” (Fluid Corpus Manipulation, n.d.). 

On April 14th, the FluCoMa Workshop will take place at CIRMMT in collaboration with the ACTOR project and the support of composer Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, one of the developers of the library. The aim of the workshop is to bring together creative practitioners currently working with FluCoMa and to exchange ideas in a constructive and collegial environment in order to learn about different approaches and uses of the library through the presentation of ongoing projects.  Participants can apply to present their projects, to address some potential problems or issues, and find solutions and alternatives.  

The workshop will be bilingual with presentations both in English and French and is intended for advanced users. As stated above, students and interested participants will present their current projects that make use of the FluCoMa library. For those who are new to FluCoMa but are still interested in attending the workshop, there will be a preparatory meeting (on zoom) at the end March. The goal of this introductory session is to provide guidance in the installation process and to briefly introduce the library. Following the initial setup, the participants can continue getting acquainted with the framework by watching the available video documentation available online or following the tutorials available in the release. 

The proposed dates are March 23, 24, 29, 30 from 3pm to 5pm.  If you’re interested in participating in the preparatory workshop in March, please send an email to andres.gutierrezmartinez [at] mcgill.ca (andres[dot]gutierrezmartinez[at]mcgill[dot]ca) no later than March 17 and provide —if possible— more than one date option. 

If you are interested in participating in the workshop on April 14 (10Am–4pm, TBC), please send an email to the same email address stating your interest in participating in the workshop before the 1st of April so we can plan the day.

Concert of the seminar “Composing, performing, and analyzing contemporary orchestration” and presentation of the projects of the Contemporary Orchestration Research Ensemble — EROC 3 (2022–2023) at the University of Montreal

Wednesday, April 26, 2023, at 7:30 p.m.

at Salle Claude-Champagne,

Faculty of Music, University of Montreal

As part of the seminar “Composing, Performing, and Analyzing Contemporary Orchestration” given by Jean-Michaël Lavoie, Jimmie LeBlanc, and Caroline Traube, in collaboration with Pierre Michaud, five ensembles were formed and works were composed with the help and creative contribution of the performers from each ensemble. This concert will feature the premiere of two mixed works for septet and electronics by Simon Grégorcic and Hans Martin, doctoral students at the University of Montreal, as part of the activities of the Contemporary Orchestration Research Ensemble — EROC 3 (2022-2023).

Hi All! The Voice Timbre Group will be meeting on Monday 29 May at 11am EST.  We’d like to catch up, hear about ongoing projects, and decide how to structure our session at Y5.

Université de Strasbourg
19 rue du Jura, 67000 Strasbourg
La Pokop

Entrée payante
 

Concert donné par FraKCtal et organisé par Florian IOCHEM, Vincent KUSTER, Pierre MICHEL, avec le soutien du CREAA, du projet ACTOR (University McGill, Canada) et La Pokop (Université de Strasbourg), dans le cadre du workshop ACTOR Y5 du projet ACTOR organisé par Mathieu SCHNEIDER du 3 au 5 juillet 2023 et lié au groupe de travail « Timbre et orchestration (ACTOR) ».

     FraKCtal se replonge dans les albums de King Crimson sortis en 1973 et 1974. De Lark’s Tongues in Aspic à Starless en passant par Fracture, FraKCtal rend hommage à ce groupe fondateur du rock progressif pour célébrer le cinquantenaire de leur formation. More information

The 3rd International Conference on Timbre

10–12 July 2023

Including the first ever Timbre and Orchestration Summer School 8–12 July 2023 — a synergy with the ACTOR Project

Location: Thessaloniki, Greece

Hosted by the School of Music Studies and the Sound & Music Technology Lab at the Artistotle University of Thessaloniki

About

Timbre poses multifaceted research questions across the scientific spectrum, from hearing and music to psychology and neuroscience, to acoustics and artificial intelligence. The triennial International Conference on Timbre brings together a cross-disciplinary community of scholars, researchers, and practitioners interested in timbre, and provides a joint forum for exchanging novel insights and forging collaborations across disciplines to help address challenges in our understanding of timbre from empirical, theoretical, and computational perspectives.

Timbre 2023 will feature a program of new research and work in progress, panel sessions and tutorials, headlined by keynote talks discussing timbre from ‘unexpected’ perspectives: Nina Sun Eidsheim (UCLA) on timbre and vibration, Makis Solomos (Paris 8) on timbre and listening, Charles Spence (Oxford) on timbre and crossmodality, and Jesse Engel (Google, likely remote) on timbre and artificial intelligence. In foregrounding the interdisciplinarity of timbre and its application as an important parameter in orchestration, the ACTOR Timbre and Orchestration Summer School will engage with current perspectives on acoustics, analysis, composition, perception, semantics, and voice.

ACTOR’s Training and Mentoring Committee will host a workshop on Designing and Delivering Effective Research Presentations. Aimed at graduate students and early-career scholars, this event features as guest speakers ACTOR Partners Lindsey Reymore (Arizona State University) and Eliot Britton (University of Toronto) as well as Mithura Sanmugalingam (McGill University Teaching and Learning Services).

Topics will include, but not be limited to:

• strategies for effective oral presentations
• handling audience questions
• slide design
• time management
• adapting your presentation to different audiences

Date / Time: 27 September 10:00am-12:00pm (EST) | 16h00-18h00 (CET)

Registration is required, and can be done online: Registration

The event will be held on Zoom

Meeting ID: 898 3448 4226

Passcode: 455016

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Collaborative approach to music creation: Compositional research and analysis process around the EROC3 project

Hello to the whole community,

This week, the Graduate Colloquium in Composition and Sound Creation is pleased to welcome Simon Grégorcic and Matthieu Galliker, who will be giving a presentation at the Faculty of Music on Thursday, January 25, from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. in B-521. Admission is free! Everyone is welcome!

A Collaborative Approach to Music Creation: Compositional Research and Analysis Processes in the EROC3 Project

Our study examines the creation of Simon Grégorcic's Accords secrets for seven instruments and electronics. As part of a seminar associated with the third edition of the Contemporary Orchestration Research Ensemble (EROC3) project of the Analysis, Creation, and Teaching Timbre and Orchestration (ACTOR) scientific group, this collaboration brought together a team of seven performance students, Matthieu Galliker (musicology), and Simon Grégorcic (composition) to reflect on, experiment with, and implement issues related to timbre and orchestration through a participatory creative process that culminated in a concert in April 2023. This process quickly focused on the ideas of soundscape and musical space. Based on each member's suggestions regarding poetic and technical issues (instrumental playing modes, resonance and spatialization, instrumental writing, technology), the work gradually took shape, resulting in Accords secrets. Throughout this collaboration, musicological monitoring was carried out in order to document the creative strategies that were employed. Guided in particular by the concepts of “workshop” and “space,” this presentation will aim to show this working context, its challenges and limitations, and will put them into perspective through an analysis of the piece to highlight the collaborative process.

After studying piano at the Conservatoire de Versailles in François Chaplin's class, Simon Grégorcic began his career in France as an accompanist and music teacher. In 2014, he began studying instrumental composition at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, and is currently pursuing a doctorate at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of Caroline Traube and Jimmie LeBlanc. He has collaborated on various projects with the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal (Véronique Lacroix), the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (Kent Nagano), the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (Julian Pellicano), and the Orchestre de la francophonie (Simon Rivard), among others.

After studying musicology, musical theater history, and art history at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, Matthieu Galliker began a doctoral thesis in 2022 at the Faculty of Music of the University of Montreal, focusing on the imitation of bird songs in human music from 1950 to the present day. A member of the Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique (OICRM), the Analysis, Creation, and Teaching Timbre and Orchestration (ACTOR) group, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), his interests range from zoomusicology—particularly the relationship between human and non-human cultures—to the semiology of music, with a particular focus on integrating reflections on both the compositional process and the perception of music.

Hello ACTORians!

Our Analysis Workgroup will hold its next meeting via Zoom on Friday, January 26, 11:30-13:00 ET. All interested ACTOR members are welcome to join us, whether or not they've been to meetings of this group before.

Workgroup participants are welcome to bring topics for discussion, including any ongoing or new projects involving music analysis and timbre/orchestration. This session will include an update on the analysis of our CORE (composer-performer research ensemble) pieces, including the use of the OrchView application for annotation and data coding, plus plans for an issue of the Revue Musicale OICRM on CORE.

Looking forward to Friday the 26! Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

CIRMMT Spatial Audio and Immersive Sound Workshop

We are eager to share our first CIRMMT RA4 event in 2024, on February 23rd. 

The CIRMMT Spatial Audio and Immersive Sound Workshop will bring together experts from across the CIRMMT community, including students, as well as industry partners to cover various aspects of Spatial Audio and 3D Immersive Sound. 

Description:

The Workshop will consist of a full day of lectures on several topics relevant to the core themes of Spatial Audio and 3D sound. Besides, there will be a variety of practical demonstrations ranging between an open hardware design for a new multidirectional loudspeaker array for spatial sound reproduction, 3D Ambisonic recordings including live demos with composers/performers with the possibility to listen to the resulting recordings immediately afterwards, as well as listening sessions of intricate multichannel music recordings in 7.1.4. Dolby Atmos in the immersive sound labs. 

The workshop will consist of lectures on spatial audio in the morning and activities, performances, and demonstrations in the afternoon.  

Spatial Audio Workshop Details 

Date: February 23rd, 2024 

Time: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM  

Location: A-832, MMR and the immersive labs in -2 (527 Sherbrooke O. Montreal, QC) 

Seating is limited and registered attendees will have priority.

Event

Registration

Analyzing Heterophony: Theory, Perception, and Performance | Jonathan De Souza (Western University)

Dans le cadre du projet « Hétérophonie » (CRSH) dirigé par Jonathan Goldman

Jonathan De Souza holds a PhD in music theory and history from the University of Chicago, an MMus from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a BMus from Western University. He joined the faculty at Western in 2013.

De Souza’s research combines music theory, cognitive science, and philosophy. It examines the interplay of technology and technique in both classical and popular repertoire. His book, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, asks how instruments affect music’s sounding organization and players’ experience. De Souza often collaborates across disciplines, and he is an Associate Member at the Brain and Mind Institute.

At Western, De Souza teaches a range of undergraduate theory courses. Recent graduate courses have explored the history of music theory and science, phenomenological aspects of music analysis, and music theory pedagogy. From 2017–2019, he served as the director for Music, Cognition, and the Brain, an initiative at Western that brings together faculty members and graduate students from music theory and music education, cognitive neuroscience, audiology, and related fields.

Conférence de prestige de la Faculté de musique 

Jennifer Iverson (University of Chicago) | ‘Porous Instruments: Synthesizers and the Circulation of Cultural Value’

Synthesized sound pervades our experience: A futuristic sci-fi thriller opens with electronic whirrs, clicks, and hums. Top-40 radio resuscitates the sounds of the analog Moog and the digital Yamaha DX-7 synths. Teenagers gather at clubs to lose themselves in the trance-inducing loops of DJ-produced electronic dance music. Hip hop producers create sick beats from samples, layered over the mechanical thumps of drum machines like the TR-808. How did synthesized sound become so ubiquitous? Culturally speaking, why does synthesized sound matter?

Porous Instruments investigates the production, flow, and meaning of synthesized sound. I argue that electronic music technologies—synthesizers, studios, turntables—fuel the emergence of raced, gendered, and classed sounds, as well as the circulation of social capital. Synthesizers might appear to be black boxes, but they are in fact porous tools for self-fashioning: users constantly intervene with new design affordances, hacks, and off-label (mis)uses. As listeners encounter new synthesized sounds, they navigate a continuum from novelty to ubiquity, ever-inventing new meanings for the electronic sounds that swirl around them. This talk works through several examples, from TPain to Janelle Monae, from Wendy Carlos to J Dilla, and from Deniece Williams to John Chowning, showing how cultural value accrues to synthesized sound. I attend to the outward-moving processes of mobility and circulation, as well as the inward-moving processes of subcultural definition, as I analyze how synthesized sounds flow through several different instruments. Porous instruments mediate the social synthesis of identity, prestige, and cultural value.

Jennifer Iverson is a scholar of electronic music, sound studies, and disability studies. She is an Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is currently writing a book titled Porous Instruments: Synthesizers and the Circulation of Cultural Value, which explores the complex histories and (mis)uses of synthesizers such as the vocoder, Moog, the DX7, and the TR-808. Her first book is Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Timbre Semantics Workgroup

Hello all! 

 The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will be holding a Zoom meeting on Thursday, March 21 at 3:00pm Eastern time. You will be able to join the meeting here: Zoom link. 

All are welcome, whether or not you have been to a previous semantics workgroup meeting. 

 If you would like to share a project update, brainstorm an idea, or put a call out for collaborators (this can be as formal or as informal as you'd like), email Lindsey Reymore at lreymore [at] asu.edu (lreymore[at]asu[dot]edu). We’ll also be sharing informal updates and discussing future projects for the workgroup.

Hope to see you there!

Timbre and Orchestration Analysis Workgroup Meeting

The Timbre and Orchestration Analysis Workgroup will be meeting via Zoom from 10:00 to 11:30 (EDT) on April 5. All ACTOR members with an interest in music analysis are welcome to attend. The agenda for this meeting will include planning for our session at the Y6 workshop in Vancouver and lightning talks on ongoing analysis-related projects by ACTOR members—anyone who'd like to present should contact Robert Hasegawa (robert.hasegawa [at] mcgill.ca (robert[dot]hasegawa[at]mcgill[dot]ca)).

Zoom Link

Hello everyone,

There will an upcoming concert co-organised by the QUASAR saxophone quartet and ACTOR called "Vacillations harmoniques en six tableaux", featuring premieres by 6 McGill composers (2 from our lab). The concert will take place in the MMR (Elizabeth Wirth Building, -2) on Thursday May 9 at 7:30pm. After several months of research, meetings and creative workshops, the QUASAR musicians and composers are ready to present the fruit of this new collaboration.

PROGRAMME (free admission)

Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez - Ebb and Flow (Premiere, 2024)

Chelsea Komschlies - Beneath the Old Power Plant (Premiere, 2024)

Anita Pari - A Flickering Glow (Premiere, 2024)

Lila Wildy Quillin - Amortisseur Harmonique (Premiere, 2024)

Jonas Regnier - En s'effaçant (Premiere, 2024)

Louis-Michel Tougas - Cinq miniatures (Premiere, 2024)

More info

Facebook

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Hello all! 

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will be holding a Zoom meeting on Thursday, June 13 at 12:30pm Eastern time. You will be able to join the meeting here: Zoom link

All are welcome, whether or not you have been to a previous semantics workgroup meeting.

If you would like to share a project update, brainstorm an idea, or put a call out for collaborators (this can be as formal or as informal as you'd like), email Lindsey Reymore at lreymore [at] asu.edu (lreymore[at]asu[dot]edu). We’ll also be sharing informal updates and discussing future projects for the workgroup.

Hope to see you there!

On this coming Saturday, September 7th 2024, Kjel Sidolski, organist and master student in composition at University of Montréal, will perform his piece Élégies at Église Saint-Édouard in Montréal (6500, rue de Saint-Vallier - map), in the context of the Religious Heritage Days

« Élégies is a work for hyper-organ and voice. Inspired by the Duino Élégies of Rainer-Maria Rilke, this piece attempts to explore the continuum between the acoustic and the synthetic, as well as between inner and outer worlds. By calling upon the sonic icons of the church, such as the sounds of bells, footsteps, and the opening of doors and the keys that open them, I hope to pay hommage to the vast heritage of this space that has nurtured me during the creative process. — Kjel Sidloski. » 

Entrance is free. 

The concert starts with the presentation of the project and creative process, at 6:30 pm.

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will meet four times over the course of this semester. All are invited to attend any or all of the meetings, whether or not you have been in previous semantics meetings. If you’d like more detail about what the topics below are, I recommend looking at the  Y6 meeting documentation, and you’re also welcome to message/email Jason and I with questions.

All meetings are on Mondays at 1pm Eastern for this semester, based on the results of the general availability poll. We will take notes and record at all meetings. If there’s one you’d like to be at but can’t attend, let us know, and we’ll keep you updated/in the loop. 

All meetings will be hosted on Zoom.

• September 16, 1pm Eastern - Semantics Pedagogy Project
• October 21, 1pm Eastern - Cross-linguistic Semantics Project
• November 25, 1pm Eastern - Data Organization and Tool Development
• December 9, 1pm Eastern - General meeting; updates & discussion

Best,

Lindsey Reymore (LREYMORE[at]asu.edu) and Jason Noble (jason.noble[at]umoncton.ca)

The Arts, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Methodologies workgroup will hold its first meeting on Wednesday, September 25th at 10:00 AM EST. 

We will reserve time to discuss projects at any stage, from conception to completion.

All are welcome!

Functional orchestration: principles, recent findings, prospects

Fabien Lévy, composer, professor for composition at the University of Music and Theater "Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy" Leipzig 

October 24, 2024, 12:00-14:00 (EDT), 18:00-20:00 (CET)

Zoom: Functional_orchestration_Zoom.url

An online lecture and discussion organized by the ACTOR Timbre and Orchestration Analysis Workgroup

Functional orchestration is an approach to orchestration (orchestration practice as well as music theory and orchestration analysis) that attempts to link orchestration techniques with perceptual effects by considering their musical and perceptual goals (functions). Although its origins date back to the 90s (Marc-André Dalbavie at the CNSMDP), the discipline has considerably evolved over the last ten years, thanks to exchanges between various ACTOR experts.

In this short session, I will take a quick look at the general principles underlying this approach, as well as recent findings (e.g. conceptualization and categorization of various known techniques such as doubling, coupling, texturing, “tree-logic,“ “rhizomatic“ orchestration, sound mastering techniques, etc.) and discuss still open research questions and possible future developments with other ACTOR researchers.

McGill Doctoral Colloquium

• Jade Roth, “Orchestration Semantics: How Tailleferre’s Orchestration Conjures Imagery in the Ballade (1920)”

Workshop on voice, timbre, metaphors and materiality in contemporary music

An event organized in collaboration with CIRMMT Research Axis 3 (Cognition, perception and movement) and the ACTOR partnership.

• November 12, 2024, 9:30am-5pm
• A-832/33 and Tanna Schulich Hall
• Event Information

Description 

Following Nina Eidsheim’s Distinguished Lecture "Metaphor as material practice" on November 11, 2024, this joint CIRMMT/ACTOR workshop will focus on vocal and instrumental timbre in relation to the metaphors used to describe them and to the concept of materiality in contemporary music. 

We invite 20-minute presentations on any aspect of these topics, as well as on the music of composer Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023), particularly (but not limited to) research on vocality and timbre in her compositions. 

The workshop will close with a musical presentation on performing Saariaho's solo and chamber works featuring Brigitte Poulin (piano), Jocelyne Roy (flute), and Julie Trudeau (cello), a preview of their November 13 concert "Sur les traces de Saariaho" (Tanna Schulich Hall). 

Registration and call for presentations

Registration is required by Tuesday Oct. 15 at 12:00 p.m. Lunch will be provided for those who register in advance. Late registrations will be accepted if there are remaining spaces. 

Please fill out the registration form for this event indicating whether you will be a presenter or a participant.

Presenters should use the form to submit their title and an abstract of 250 words or less. Accepted presenters will be notified by October 22.

Guest Conference:

Daniel Skála & Matěj Číp 

The project EROC (Ensemble de recherche en orchestration contemporaine) invites all to a special talk by Daniel Skála and Matěj Číp presenting the cimbalom on November 13th, 1:00-2:30pm at Université de Montréal, room B-520. The workshop is being organized in the context of the course "Composer, interpréter et analyser l’orchestration contemporaine" (MUL 6249) taught by ACTOR members Jimmie LeBlanc, Caroline Traube, and Kit Soden.

Description

The intention of the workshop named "Cimbalom on the Stage" is to introduce the cimbalom as a fully fledged concert instrument whose specific sounds and far-reaching possibilities are increasingly coming to be appreciated in the world of both traditional and contemporary music. Daniel Skála, one of the most striking cimbalom players in the world today, along with leading player of the young generation Matěj Číp, will introduce the cimbalom in its paramount performance form.

In addition, they will also explain the instrument´s layout, tuning system, the functionality of the damper, or various types of hammers used on the cimbalom and their respective techniques. Partly through transcriptions, but especially in more recent music written specifically for the instrument, they will prove that the cimbalom´s universality and unique sound can speak to a broad spectrum of listeners.

Bio

Cimbalom player, composer, and conductor Daniel Skála was born in Ostrava in 1981. He studied the cimbalom at multiple institutions including the Liszt Academy in Budapest with renowned teacher and player Ilona Szeverényi. He also studied composition at the Janáček Conservatory in Ostrava and choral conducting at the University of Ostrava. As a composer, he also took lessons with Czech and international composers and visited several international composition courses (including Ostrava Days and Trstěnice). In 2013, he completed his PhD at the Ostrava University with a focus on music theory and pedagogy. He has taught the cimbalom at the Janáček Conservatory since 2008 and is also a lecturer at the University of Ostrava.

Daniel Skála is also an active composer. In the last fifteen years, he has written numerous pieces for solo cimbalom as well as many chamber, vocal, and orchestral groups. He has also created several feature-length projects based on carefully controlled improvisation.

McGill Doctoral Colloquium

• Louis-Michel Tougas (Composition), “Issues and Cognitive Limits of Polyrhythm: A Multidisciplinary Approach”
• Theodora Nestorova (Applied Performance Science), “Vocal Vibrato Variability: Novel Analytical Tools & Diagnostic-Pedagogical Approaches in Diverse Genres”

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will meet four times over the course of this semester. All are invited to attend any or all of the meetings, whether or not you have been in previous semantics meetings. If you’d like more detail about what the topics below are, I recommend looking at the  Y6 meeting documentation, and you’re also welcome to message/email Jason and I with questions.

All meetings are on Mondays at 1pm Eastern for this semester, based on the results of the general availability poll. We will take notes and record at all meetings. If there’s one you’d like to be at but can’t attend, let us know, and we’ll keep you updated/in the loop. 

All meetings will be hosted on Zoom.

• September 16, 1pm Eastern - Semantics Pedagogy Project
• October 21, 1pm Eastern - Cross-linguistic Semantics Project
• November 25, 1pm Eastern - Data Organization and Tool Development
• December 9, 1pm Eastern - General meeting; updates & discussion

Best,

Lindsey Reymore (LREYMORE[at]asu.edu) and Jason Noble (jason.noble[at]umoncton.ca)

McGill Doctoral Colloquium

• Valérian Fraisse: From Sound Art to Soundscape: A research-creation approach for designing and evaluating public space sound installations
• Viktor Lazarov, “Creating and Analysing Baroque Performance Practice on the Piano,” Lecture-recital

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will meet four times over the course of this semester. All are invited to attend any or all of the meetings, whether or not you have been in previous semantics meetings. If you’d like more detail about what the topics below are, I recommend looking at the  Y6 meeting documentation, and you’re also welcome to message/email Jason and I with questions.

All meetings are on Mondays at 1pm Eastern for this semester, based on the results of the general availability poll. We will take notes and record at all meetings. If there’s one you’d like to be at but can’t attend, let us know, and we’ll keep you updated/in the loop. 

All meetings will be hosted on Zoom.

• September 16, 1pm Eastern - Semantics Pedagogy Project
• October 21, 1pm Eastern - Cross-linguistic Semantics Project
• November 25, 1pm Eastern - Data Organization and Tool Development
• December 9, 1pm Eastern - General meeting; updates & discussion

Best,

Lindsey Reymore (LREYMORE[at]asu.edu) and Jason Noble (jason.noble[at]umoncton.ca)

McGill Doctoral Colloquium

• Benjamin Lavastre: Interactions Strategies in Mixed Compositions Between Acoustic Instruments and Digital Musical Instruments: Case Study with the Karlax

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will be meeting on Monday, February 10 at 10am Eastern time on Zoom: Zoom_Timbre-Semantics.url

This will be a general meeting with updates and discussion. All who are interested or intrigued are welcome—no prior involvement is necessary. We will also have the opportunity to connect and share research updates, ideas, etc.

If you’d like more info about current projects:

Semantics Pedagogy Project

Cross-linguistic Project

Tools & Output

Q&A session with conductor Tianyi Lu

Dear ACTOR students,

We would like to invite you for a Q&A session with conductor Tianyi Lu. The event is being organized by Prof. Alexis Hauser and his conducting students and will take place on Monday, March 10th, from 2PM to 3PM, in A832 at McGill.

Admission is free and no registration is needed.

McGill Doctoral Colloquium

Student member Gianluca Grazioli (PhD candidate, Sound Recording) will be presenting his research, “Virtual Acoustics and Performance Spaces: The Impact of an Immersive Real-Time Auralization System on Music Performance”, at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, in room C-201 at 16:30.

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will be meeting on Monday, March 17 at 10am Eastern time on Zoom: Zoom_Timbre-Semantics.url

All who are interested or intrigued are welcome—no prior involvement is necessary. We will also have the opportunity to connect and share research updates, ideas, etc.

If you’d like more info about current projects:

Semantics Pedagogy Project

Cross-linguistic Project

Tools & Output

McGill Doctoral Colloquium

• Joshua Rosner (PhD candidate, Theory)

The Arts and Humanities Interdisciplinary Methodologies Workgroup will meet on Monday, March 24, at 10 a.m. Eastern time (11 a.m. Atlantic; 3 p.m. CET).

Zoom_Interdisciplinary_Workgroup.url
 

All ACTORians are welcome to attend and participate. We will discuss issues that arise in developing interdisciplinary projects, particularly the benefits and pitfalls of methodological appropriation.

Attendees will also be able to discuss their own current or future projects.

Best,

Moe Touizrar

McGill Doctoral Colloquium

Shared Simulations: A Case for Virtual Acoustics in the Recording Studio

• Ying-Ying Zhang (PhD candidate, Sound Recording)

Composing, performing and analyzing contemporary orchestration” seminar concert

This concert will present works created by graduate students in composition, performance and musicology, as part of the interdisciplinary seminar “Composing, performing and analyzing contemporary orchestration” given by Jimmie LeBlanc, Kit Soden and Caroline Traube at the Université de Montréal's Faculty of Music.

Resulting from a collaborative creative process aimed at exploring work on timbre and the perceptive effects of orchestration, these works will cover a wide spectrum of instrumental combinations including voice, flute, shakuhachi, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, gheychak, viola, cello, piano, accordion, bandoneon, electric guitar and electronic device.

This seminar is a follow-up to the Ensembles de Recherche en Orchestration Contemporaine (EROC) projects carried out as part of the SSHRC ACTOR (Analysis, Creation and Teaching of ORchestration) partnership.

 Come and join us!

PROGRAM

Petite forêt de sons

 Gabriel Schwartz, composition et flute

Julie Boutrais, voice

Nicolas Jobin, voice

Guo Qi Li Tan (Traverser le banc de sable de Qi Li)

 Yue Wang, composition and digital processing

Xinjing Liu, shakuhachi

Invoking the Sound of Wind

Edwin H. Ng, composition

Nicole Ross, voice

Annie Noël-de-Tilly, flute

Mariana Segura Valencia, flute

Daniel Black, guest conductor

 
Quatre états de la matière 

Charles-Vincent Lemelin, composition

Annie Noël-de-Tilly, flute

Renaud Brunelle-Gauthier, flute

Maïa Nespoulous, cello

Félix Nunes, cello

Daniel Black, guest conductor

Zone

Alexandre Amat, composition

Alexander Bridger, electric guitar

Amichai Ben Shalev, bandonéon

Éveil, Regard, Embrasement

Antoine Bustros, composition

Charlotte Layec, bass clarinet

Omar Abou Afach, Alto

Reza Abaee, gheychac

*** ENTRACTE ***

Musée

Alexander Bridger, composition, sound conception and electric guitar

Amichai Ben Shalev, bandonéon

Ravi Shankar Domingues, oboe

Félix Fortin, trumpet

Alexandre Amat, French horn

Deux vents

Jakub Tokarczyk, composition

Nicole Ross, voice

Julie Boutrais, voice

Nicolas Jobin, voice

Lamentations de l’oiseau claustrophobe

 Julien Régol, composition and piano

Mariana Segura Valencia, flute

Clio Theodoridis, saxophone

Ravi Shankar Domingues, oboe

Aera

Hugo Duguay, composition

Julie Boutrais, voice

Clio Theodoridis, saxophone

Strokes and Shades

 Amichai Ben Shalev, composition, images and bandonéon

Ravi Shankar Domingues, oboe

Félix Fortin, trumpet

Alexandre Amat, French horn

Alexander Bridger, electric guitar

The third round of the CORE project at McGill in 2024-25 included the original quartet plus electronics. The final concert/presentation will take place in the Schulich School of Music's Music Multimedia Room at 527 Sherbrooke Street West at 4:00pm on Thursday, April 10, 2025.

Admission is free! Tickets will not be necessary.

PROGRAM

Yulin Yan, The scent blind

Lorenzo Paniconi, monochrome

Jonas Regnier, Que le vent sonne les échos du paysage

Quartet: Olena Kaspersky, violin; Ostap Kuchmiy, bass clarinet; Erynne McPhee, trombone; Joseph Chang, percussion.

Conductors: Charles-Eric Fontaine, Jeremy Ho

Pedagogical team: Charles-Eric Fontaine, Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez, Stephen McAdams, Joshua Rosner, Louis-Michel Tougas

The Marvin Duchow Music Library and Prof. Stephen McAdams invite you to a book launch celebrating his new publication, Perception and Cognition of Music: The Sorbonne Lectures (Oxford University Press, 2024). 

The event will be held in the Music Library on Friday, April 11, 2025, from 6pm to 8pm. Registration/RSVP

Perception and Cognition of Music: The Sorbonne Lectures presents a revised and updated edition of a book originally published in French in the MusicologieS series, which is based on distinguished lectures at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (2009) and Université de Montréal (2010). It bridges music psychology, theory, and analysis by exploring music listening through cognitive psychology. Auditory grouping processes help organize sensory information into musical units, while timbre, an often-overlooked parameter, is highlighted as a structuring element in orchestration. The development of abstract systems of musical knowledge focuses on cognitive processing of pitch systems and their role in forming hierarchical event structures. Finally, the temporality of music is examined through a collaborative project involving a composer, psychologists, and musicologists in creating The Angel of Death by Roger Reynolds and exploring its affective impact in a live-concert experiment. Each chapter ends with reflective elements to encourage a transdisciplinary approach to music scholarship. 

Please join us in launching the publication of Perception and Cognition of Music: The Sorbonne Lectures. During a program beginning at 6:30pm, Stephen will speak about and read from his new book, and he will then be interviewed by Chris Paul Harman in what promises to be a phantasmagoric dialogue. Refreshments will be served.

A special final CORE symposium and concert event is being organized by the University of California, San Diego in collaboration with the Talea Ensemble from New York City April 25-27 in La Jolla, CA.

Panel presentation/discussions: 

• Performance: Guillaume Bourgogne (Haute école de musique de Lausanne, formerly of McGill), Peter Ko (UCSD), Berk Schneider (UCSD), Bailey Wantuch (McGill)
• CORE: Stephen McAdams (McGill), Caroline Traube (UMontréal)
• Semantics: Lindsey Reymore (Arizona State University)
• Computer processing and spatialization: Pierre Michaud (UMontréal)
• Analysis: Robert Hasegawa (McGill)
• Presentation of works: Roger Reynolds (UCSD), Rand Steiger (UCSD), Roman Carvajal Pardo (HEM), Snežana Nešić (UMontréal), Louis-Michel Tougas (McGill), Ni Zheng (UCSD)

Concert program:

Louis-Michel Tougas, Dégradés

Snežana Nešić, Musica ficta I: Chromaton

Roman Carvajal Pardo, Grammaire de l'intuition

Ni Zheng, Pleasure of refusal

Roger Reynolds, CO-EXISTENCE

Rand Steiger, Liminalities