Research

A major achievement of ACTOR was the development of OrchARD, an interactive, open-access relational database built on work in music information research, integrating score annotations and music clips according to our perception-based taxonomy. Analysts use our custom platform OrchView to annotate scores based on the Taxonomy of Orchestral Grouping Effects, which can then be integrated automatically into OrchARD. TONE researchers will expand the scope of OrchView and OrchARD by adding new taxonomies, including functional orchestration and tools for the analysis of non-score-based traditional, improvised, and electroacoustic musics. OrchARD will serve as a repository of analytical results from other sub-axes such as machine-readable scores, annotations of scores and audio clips, analyses of recorded excerpts, and results from perceptual experimentation and semantic studies. We will adapt and integrate existing technologies for the study of recorded sound including iAnalyse 5 and Sonic Visualiser, which combine spectrogram analysis with symbolic annotation tools such as Aural Sonology. New tools developed by TONE researchers will use recent techniques in audio information retrieval such as automatic segmentation and machine learning to identify and categorize significant patterns in audio data. Auralization tools such as AMISE, make it possible to hear orchestrations in different virtual acoustic spaces.

The analysis of timbre and orchestration in notated musical traditions extracts patterns and concepts that are implicit in musical scores (but not explicitly stated in orchestration writings) and reframes them as declarative knowledge. Which orchestration techniques produce the musical functions that engender perceptual effects? Repertoires using notation—including Western staff notation as well as non-Western notation systems such as gongche (China), jeongganbo (Korea), and the contemporary graphic notations of composers such as Anthony Braxton—will be analyzed using flexible taxonomies of orchestration techniques, functional orchestration, and perceptual grouping effects. Our approach encourages bringing multiple analytical methodologies to bear on our objects of study, privileging collaborations and shared expertise across the Partnership. We will incorporate a wide range of new approaches to notation-based analysis that focus primarily on timbre, orchestration, and texture and explore the relationship between these approaches and existing methods. All three Partner orchestras will allow researchers and students to attend dress rehearsals for in situ studies of score interpretation and to interview musicians, conductors, and guest composers on the role of timbre and orchestration in their practice.

While historically the study of orchestration has focused almost exclusively on scores in Western staff notation, a major innovation of TONE is the analysis of musical practices not based on scores (free improvisation, oral traditions, acousmatic music) or for which scores provide only rough approximations of the complete sound (jazz, mixed electronic/acoustic music, popular music). TONE will develop new theories and analytical techniques to describe the functions and perception of timbre and orchestration in these non-notated musics, including aural analysis, computational audio descriptors, and visual representations such as annotated sonograms and form diagrams, using tools such as Sonic Visualiser, Audio Timeliner, the TIAALS (Tools for Interactive Aural Analysis) toolkit, and custom digital tools developed in Sub-Axis 1.1. Recent corpus studies by Partners have explored timbral tendencies in various popular-music genres over time and in relation to form, using an “Anti-Discriminatory Alignment System” that compensates in the corpus selection for underrepresentation of marginalized groups. This corpus study will be expanded in TONE to include global pop, starting with highly influential genres in East Asia and Latin America, and drawing on the knowledge of graduate student RAs with expertise in these genres. Of particular interest are the interactions between musical practices and the timbral resources of specific traditional instruments and vocal techniques across cultures. Four Co-Applicants (CA) study traditional music in the southwest Pacific, western Africa, South Africa, and the Middle East, significantly expanding the diversity of musical genres studied within TONE while still maintaining a manageable research scope and allowing our researchers to work closely with musical communities and practitioners in accordance with EDI best practices. Other major themes in this sub-axis include the development of analytical approaches to experimental improvised music and electroacoustic music genres including soundscape composition and field recording.

Recent advances in cognitive psychology have transformed our understanding of the perception of timbre in complex orchestrational contexts. Experimental studies have greatly increased our understanding of the perception of timbre spaces, blends, “sound masses,” and orchestral gestures. Cognitive principles derived from perceptual data now explain how timbre can be used as a carrier of pattern and form in music, with instruments blending together or forming separate melody lines as outlined in our Taxonomy of Orchestral Grouping Effects. Perceptual studies, previously conducted primarily on Western instruments, with some studies of Chinese instruments, will be extended in TONE projects on Asian, African, Arab, Persian, and Indonesian instruments. We will analyze acoustic parameters related to timbre perception, and other musical elements, to model the perceived grouping effects of various orchestral combinations and their changes over time. We will also continue to develop techniques to measure listeners’ emotional reactions and link them to musical structure, timbral properties, and cultural factors. Experimental work involving students in six Partners’ labs will provide a rich environment for learning about experimental design, data analysis, and modelling of timbre and orchestration perception.

TONE will pursue the organological and acoustic analysis of musical instruments and voices in diverse traditions, and the sociocultural analysis of the communities that use them, as a basis for understanding the affordances that constituent instruments offer to orchestration practices. Decentering Western orchestral repertoire, we seek to explore how instruments,  environments, and people shape timbre and orchestration over time in various cultural contexts, musical genres, and global musical traditions. For example, our team includes Althea Sully-Cole (McGill University), a specialist in ethnomusicological organology from the perspective of both sound and material culture. TONE will conduct a timbre-focused analysis of wide-ranging instrument collections at the Conservatoire nationale supérieure de musique et de danse de Paris and Université de Montréal, as well as Balinese gamelans at Université de Montréal and UBC. Collaboration with the Musical Instrument Museum (Phoenix), the Musée de la musique in Paris (associated with Partner Sorbonne Université), and Université de Montréal’s museology program will offer venues for public scholarship through exhibitions as well as sharing of best practices for a global approach to organology. Re-examining our Taxonomy of Orchestral Grouping Effects in a diversity of cultural contexts offers a lens through which orchestration practices can be compared and theorized, in relation to organology, the social roles of music, and the people that create and consume it. To connect with Axis 2, one focus will be the analysis of new works involving instruments and performers from different musical traditions. Artistic residencies by expert musicians in global traditions (invited and hosted by the CMM) will allow the organological and acoustic study of their instruments, the commissioning of recordings for further research, and interviews from an insider perspective on orchestration within their musical traditions. We will also collaborate with the CMM to create teaching materials on global instruments and genres for outreach to public schools. Our online lecture series Afrological Perpectives on Timbre and Orchestration will continue to present talks by leading voices in African and Afro-diasporic music.

Timbre and orchestration topics are not currently integrated into most music theory and musicology curricula. This sub-axis examines how timbre and orchestration can be taught in music curricula at all levels and seeks to translate TONE research findings into open-source resources for educators. We will survey existing curricula and develop innovative listener-oriented frameworks in music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology. The pedagogy of timbral and orchestrational listening skills across diverse genres will be an important part of this project. Our multicultural, polystylistic research will offer diverse examples of orchestration practice for use in music classrooms, responding to calls to re-evaluate our curricular overreliance on a narrow canon of Eurocentric classical music. Resources to be developed include a three-week module on acoustics and timbre that can be easily integrated into existing undergraduate curricula and theory teaching materials using Gestalt perception principles, allowing discussion of all parameters (including timbre) as significant contributors to musical experience. Tasks of pedagogical interest include paraphrase/deconstruction, reductions to smaller ensembles as well as expansions to larger ones, and exploring the particular challenges of homogeneous ensembles (flute choirs, string orchestras, etc.) which lack the timbral range of the symphony orchestra.

In contemporary classical music, where timbre has become a primary structural parameter, computer-aided orchestration (CAO) tools help composers find instrumental combinations that fulfill desired musical goals. Orchidea (developed by Co-Applicant Carmine Cella) uses time-series data mining and matching techniques: a composer provides a target sound and Orchidea proposes several possible orchestrations that approximate it. Another recent development is the “machine-listening” exploration and sorting of large corpora of musical sounds through applications such as Collaborator Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay’s FluCoMa (Fluid Corpus Manipulation). AI tools developed elsewhere will also be adapted to the needs of TONE creators, including “improvising” machine agents such as IRCAM’s Dicy2, which draws on a library of timbrally categorized sounds to respond to a human co-creator in real time. Such AI technologies are framed in TONE as tools for cocreation in experimental genres, not as generative tools to mimic or replace human artists.

Our innovative CORE program brings together student composers, performers, and analysts, supervised by artists and researchers from different disciplines, to co-create musical works and solve orchestration problems. Central goals of CORE are dehierarchizing the relationship between composers and performers,encouraging and studying distributed creativity, developing theory and methods, and offering rich learning opportunities for student composers, performers, and analysts. Scientific concepts (acoustic, perceptual, and cognitive) developed in Axis 1 will drive experimentation in CORE, and reciprocally, CORE processes and outputs will provide material for studying orchestrational problem-solving in the Analysis sub-axes.

CORE ensembles will explore new techniques of timbre production and orchestration, with an emphasis on the integration of novel sounds, extended playing techniques, and the use of live electronics, CAO, and AI. In keeping with TONE’s commitment to exploring orchestration across a wide range of global musics, we will also host CORE ensembles of non-Western instruments including Balinese gamelan (already an active practice at UMontréal and UBC) and mixed ensembles bringing together musicians from different traditions, including professional guest artists from the CMM and the AsianArt Ensemble (Berlin). These mixed CORE ensembles will frame new orchestration research questions about intonation, blend, and communication across different traditions.

While orchestration is often discussed from the composer’s viewpoint, it also happens in real time through musicians’ artistic interpretations and sonic adjustments. Researchers and artists in this sub-axis will record, quantify, and analyze performances while developing innovative techniques for new musical creation. The study of performance will include both quantitative approaches to recorded music and qualitative approaches based on interviews and reflections by creative artists. Aspects to be explored include the role of synchrony, intonation, and balance in the blending of instruments, the notation, development, and reproducibility of extended techniques, and the interaction between timbre and intonation. We will also examine the role of technological mediation such as guitar effects pedals and Auto-Tune in popular music and live electronic performance and synthesizer/laptop ensembles in experimental music. Singing is a particularly rich area for timbre research, and a number of TONE scholars and artists explore the voice as a uniquely embodied sound source, drawing on perspectives from acoustics, speech science, vocal pedagogy, and gender studies. Finally, HEM and UMontréal will explore improvisation as an essential part of compositional and orchestrational research-creation. The development of sound palettes through group improvisation will also be part of the CORE ensembles (2.2) and our pedagogical sub-axis (2.5).

The acoustics of the physical or virtual space in which music is heard plays a crucial role in the success or failure of orchestrational effects. A blend that works well in a resonant space, for example, may separate into its constituent parts in an acoustically dry recording studio. Expert acousticians, recording engineers, and Tonmeisters within TONE will study such acoustic effects in detail through acoustic cameras, multiple microphone arrays, measurements of performance space acoustics, and expert perceptual evaluation. The virtual space of a stereo or multichannel recording can also have a substantial impact on the perception of orchestration, and this axis will explore the effects of sound capture (microphone choice and placement) and post-production audio engineering in recorded media. Producers in popular-music genres often create complex aural spaces that go beyond realism to allow novel, technologically mediated spatialization effects that add to the music’s expressive impact. Artists in this sub-axis will explore the position of sounds in space as a compositional parameter, using multispeaker arrays to control orchestrational grouping and in conjunction with virtual and augmented reality to create multimedia artworks. Field recordings of natural environments, biophony, and soundscape composition are also important areas of creative activity within TONE. Finally, researchers in this sub-axis will consider performers’ interactions with the acoustics of spaces, quantifying and explaining how expert performers adapt the nuances of their interpretation (timing, dynamics, articulations, etc.) to real and virtual performance spaces to achieve particular timbre and orchestration aims.

This sub-axis considers timbre and orchestration pedagogy for creative practice across a wide range of styles and genres, including digital orchestration, jazz arranging, studio work with digital audio workstations, soundscape composition, and creative recording/mixing techniques. Like Sub-Axis 1.6, this pedagogical sub-axis will develop new pedagogical approaches and evaluate their effectiveness. Soundpainting and Conduction, two well-established approaches to guided improvisation, will be used as pedagogical tools to explore timbre and orchestration in real time. Research-creation projects such as the CORE ensembles will offer interdisciplinary pedagogical perspectives drawing on ethnography, semantics, acoustic simulations, and discourse analysis. We will also teach the use of creative exploration tools such as CAO and AI environments and draw lessons from our new findings in music notation (1.2), music perception (1.4), and organology (1.5). Pedagogical outputs will include online resources on the TOR, including pages for individual instruments and an open-source textbook for advanced students.