Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal) [PI] with Martha de Francisco (McGill University), Jason Noble (Université de Montréal), and external collaborators Steve Cowan (McGill University), Denis Martin (McGill University), and Simon Rouhier (Université de Montréal). 

Description:

We proposed an album of music for guitar and electronics composed by Noble and performed by Cowan, culminating their longstanding collaboration which has been presented in many contexts including the IRCAM hors les murs forum (2021), Cowan’s dissertation and doctoral lecture recital (2019), and McGill’s Research Alive series (2017). Traube and de Francisco have overseen the project, Martin was the recording engineer, and Rouhier was the multimedia artist. The repertoire was:

  1. fantaisie harmonique (2019)
  2. we never told nobody (2019)
  3. take me back (2017)
  4. one foot in the past (2016)
  5. [new piece, title TBD]

fantaisie harmonique was recorded with support from the ACTOR Strategic Project Fund. Our state of the art 3D recording has been extensively documented, widely disseminated, and enthusiastically received. We produced a digital animation video for this piece and now have integrated the animation with images of Cowan performing in a 3D video / VR experience. Images of Cowan were captured in a one-day session at UdeM in late spring/early summer 2021.

Pieces 2 to 4 have been performed, but had not yet been professionally recorded (scores and live recordings available upon request). They were recorded at McGill in Studio 22 and / or Pollack Hall in August 2021.

Piece 5 was composed following original empirical research. It draws on dialects of Newfoundland and Quebec, building upon Noble and Cowan’s previous work on dialect based musical creation. The new research component consists primarily of an online experiment conducted in early Fall 2021, evaluating the perceptual robustness of analogies between guitar timbres and spokenvowels as theoretically outlined in Traube’s dissertation. We recorded guitar timbres and spoken vowels that correspond in acoustical structure, and ask participants to match them. We thereby learned which vowel analogies are most likely to be recognized by listeners, and used this knowledge to invoke dialectal patterns in the new composition, which was composed in late Fall 2021 and recorded at McGill in Winter 2022.