Note from the Director
I would like to welcome all ACTOR members to the workshop wrapping up our third year of activities. I hope that all ACTOR members managed to maintain their activities in spite of the challenges presented by the pandemic. Many of the collaborative activities of course had to go virtual as did this year's workshop (again!), but everyone rose the challenge as best as circumstances allowed, and this year's slate of workgroups is a testament to the resourcefulness and devotion of our community. We are looking forward to hearing about your work over the course of the workshop and hopefully a return to an in-person meeting in Calgary in 2022.
—Stephen McAdams
About the workshop
The Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) partnership involves musicians, humanists, scientists and engineers to deepen the understanding of the many roles that timbre plays in music in interaction with all the other musical parameters. Every year, this group of timbre aficionados gets together to have updates on the three main axes of the project (i.e., Analysis, Tool development, and Output innovation) which translates into research projects, technological development, artistic productions, and pedagogical initiatives. Aside from building the ACTOR community, facilitating networking, and fostering collaboration, the annual workshop also includes presentations given by student members during the plenary session and reports of activities presented by the Project Director, Professor Stephen McAdams, the Training and Mentoring Committee (TMC), and the Knowledge Mobilization Committee (KMC). Due to the circumstances, the ACTOR Y3 Annual Workshop was held online via Zoom again in 2021.
Workgroups
Here is a complete list of workgroups and their respective leaders.
*Please note that the links to supporting materials will take you to ACTOR’s repository. If you experience problems accessing it, contact actor-project.music [at] mcgill.ca (actor-project[dot]music[at]mcgill[dot]ca)
- Orchestration analysis taxonomies and the Orchestration Analysis and Research database – Orch.A.R.D (Stephen McAdams).
- Diversity working group (Robert Hasegawa).
- Artificial intelligence and computational tools for orchestration (Philippe Esling).
- Computer-aided and target-based orchestration – Orchidea (Carmine Cella).
- Acoustics of musical performance rooms (Malte Kob).
- Composer-performer orchestration research ensembles – CORE (Stephen McAdams).
- OrchView (Félix Baril).
- Timbre and Orchestration Resource – TOR (Kit Soden).
- Timbre semantics (Caroline Traube and Zachary Wallmark).
- Voice working group (Juanita Marchand Knight).
- Timbre and orchestration analysis (Robert Hasegawa).
- Timbre Course Design (Alex Rehding and Emily Dolan).