Program

Proceedings

The proceedings can be downloaded here.

Opening address

 

Stephen McADAMS, McGill University — 'What is timbre?' vs. 'What can we do with timbre?' Picking the right questions.

Keynote addresses

 

Research Keynote Lecture, July 5th: Emily DOLAN, Harvard University — Timbre eternal

 

Musical Keynote Concert, July 5th: ANDO Masateru, Kisoukai Koto Association — Perception and cognition of playing the koto; and with ANDO Tamaki, koto and 17-gen — The world of the koto

 

Research Keynote Lecture, July 6th: Vinoo ALLURI, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad — Timbre in the brain

 

Musical Keynote Concert, July 6th: Shawn MATIVETSKY, McGill University, tabla  with Pankaj MISHRA, sarangi — Rivers: A rhythmic journey to Varanasi

 

Research Keynote Lecture, July 7th: Cornelia FALES, Indiana University — Playing with timbre

 

Musical Keynote Concert, July 7th: Jean-Baptiste BARRIÈRE, Image Auditive, composition/video, with Camilla HOITENGA, flute — Timbre and synthesis, the promises of freedom

 Preliminary Schedule (click on lines with + for more details)

July 4: Tutorials, Round Tables, Registration, Opening Reception

Tutorials and round tables (Library Seminar Room A-510 — enter library on 3rd floor of Elizabeth Wirth Music Building)
09:30-11:30 Tutorial on Computer-Aided Orchestral Simulation: Denys Bouliane, Félix Baril — OrchPlay (OrchSim): The orchestra in your classroom and research center! A new software for pedagogy and research
12:00-14:00 Tutorial on Computer-Aided Orchestration: Philippe Esling, Carmine Emanuele Cella — The computer as an orchestra
15:30-17:00 Round table: Robert Fink, Cornelia Fales, Melinda Latour, Catherine Provenzano, Paul Théberge, Steve Waksman, Zachary Wallmark, Simon Zagorski-Thomas — The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: A round table on timbre, technology, history, and genre in popular music
17:30-19:00 Round table: John Rea, Victor Cordero, Fabien Lévy, Laurie Radford, Lasse Thoresen — Orchestration pedagogy in the 21st century

Registration and opening reception (Elizabeth Wirth Music Building Lobby)
18:00-21:00 Registration
19:00-21:00 Opening reception

July 5 (Tanna Schulich Recital Hall)

07:30 Coffee and registration
08:00 Welcoming address: Lloyd WHITESELL, Associate Dean (Research and Administration), Schulich School of Music, McGill University
08:05 Opening address: Stephen McADAMS, McGill University — 'What is timbre?' vs. 'What can we do with timbre?' Picking the right questions
08:45 Research Keynote 1: Musicology - Emily DOLAN, Harvard University – Timbre eternal

9:45 Talk Session 1: Chair Lloyd Whitesell

  • 09:45 Heather Buffington-Anderson - Black power voices: Examining timbre and polyvocality in Oscar Brown, Jr. and Nina Simone
  • 10:10 Rebecca Flore - The social life of timbre: Discussing sound color in online guitar communities
  • 10:35 Isabella van Elferen - Timbre: Aesthetics of vibration

11:00 Coffee break

11:30 Talk Session 2: Chair Lloyd Whitesell

  • 11:30 Federica Di GasbarroTimbre and formal functions in Edgard Varèse’s Amériques
  • 11:55 ​Pascal DecroupetPhrasing through timbre: Timbral variety, figural coherence and formal evidence in Stockhausen’s Kontakte and Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study II
  • 12:20 David Blake & Alessandro Bratus - Timbral syntax in Björk's Utopia

12:55 Poster Session 1 & Lunch

  • Christoph Reuter, Isabella Czedik-Eysenberg, Saleh Siddiq & Michael Oehler - The closer the better: The role of formant positions in timbre similarity perception and timbre classification
  • Matthew Zeller - Timbral function in Klangflächetechnik
  • Song Hui Chon & Sungyoung Kim - Understanding the perception of acoustic space from the perspectives of timbre
  • Simon Waloschek, Aristotelis Hadjakos & Axel Berndt - Score and sound-based interface for exploring music performances
  • Sergio Giraldo, Rafael Ramirez, George Waddell & Aaron Williamon - Computational modeling of new timbre dimensions for automatic violin tone quality assessment
  • Etienne Richan & Jean Rouat - Towards translating perceptual distance from hearing to vision using neural networks
  • Moe Touizrar - Sound signifying light: The sunrise topic as a transmodal perceptual metaphor
  • Margaret Schedel & Erika Honisch - New wor(l)ds for old sounds
  • Laurent Pottier - Local sound signatures for music recommendations
  • Saleh Siddiq, Christoph Reuter, Isabella Czedik-Eysenberg & Denis Knauf - The (obvious) influence of pitch and dynamics on the perceptual dimensions of the timbre of musical instruments
  • Mattson Ogg & L. Robert Slevc - An investigation of the acoustic features supporting the perception of timbre and other auditory objects
  • Robert NormandeauTimbre spatialisation
  • Jack Kelly, Julian Neri, Diego Quiroz & Alejandro Aspinwall - Communication through microphone choice and placement

14:45 Musical Event: Bruno DeschênesThe tone-color melodies of the Japanese shakuhachi

15:25 Talk Session 3: Chair Philippe Esling

  • 15:25 Kai Siedenburg - Testing relative perception and context-sensitivity of timbral brightness
  • 15:50 Charalampos Saitis & Kai Siedenburg - Exploring the role of source-cause categories in timbral brightness perception

16:15 Coffee break

16:45 Talk Session 4: Chair Philippe Esling

16:45 Etienne Thoret, Baptiste Caramiaux, Philippe Depalle & Stephen McAdams - A computational meta-analysis of human dissimilarity ratings of musical instrument timbre
17:10 Sven-Amin Lembke - Measuring temporal interdependence between duet performers along timbre, dynamics, and pitch
17:35 Jonathan Berger & Talya Berger, Eoin Callery, Elliot Kermit-Canfield & Jonathan Abel - Timbre, texture, space and musical style: The interplay of architecture and music in Rome’s Chiesa di Sant’Aniceto

18:00 Continuation of poster session 1

20:00-21:30 Musical Keynote 1: ANDO Masateru, Kisoukai Koto Association — Perception and cognition of playing the koto
                                                                  
ANDO Masateru & ANDO Tamaki — The world of the koto

July 6 (Tanna Schulich Recital Hall)

08:00 Coffee
08:45 Research Keynote 2: Vinoo ALLURI, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad — Timbre in the brain

09:45 Talk Session 5: Chair Zachary Wallmark

  • 09:45 James O'Callaghan - Rupture of timbre and source-bonding as musical aesthetic
  • 10:10 Stephen Spencer - Arthur Lange and the spectrotone system of orchestration
  • 10:35 Laurie Radford - Locating timbre: Challenges of timbral design in multichannel electroacoustic music

11:00 Coffee break

11:30 Talk Session 6: Chair Zachary Wallmark

  • 11:30 Carmine Emanuele Cella & Philippe Esling - Open-source modular toolbox for computer-aided orchestration
  • 11:55 Léopold Crestel, Philippe Esling, Daniele Ghisi & Robin Meier - Generating orchestral music by conditioning SampleRNN
  • 12:20 Tristan Carsault, Axel Chemla-Romeu-Santos & Philippe Esling - Learning spectral transforms to improve timbre analysis

12:55 Poster Session 2 & Lunch

  • François-Xavier Féron, Catherine Guastavino & Benjamin Carat - Acoustical analyses of extended playing techniques in Pression by Helmut Lachenmann
  • Nathalie Hérold - Studying timbral structures in 19th-century piano music: Overview and challenges
  • Victor Cordero, Kit Soden & Éric Daubresse - New perspectives in orchestration pedagogy
  • John Sheinbaum - Timbre, early cinema, and the perception of time in Mahler's Symphony No. 5
  • Amit Gur - Timbre and texture: Overlapping phenomena
  • Adrien Bitton, Axel Chemla-Romeu-Santos & Philippe Esling - Timbre transfer between orchestral instruments with semi-supervised learning
  • Aurélien Antoine, Eduardo Miranda, Jean-Michaël Celerier & Myriam Desainte-Catherine - Generating orchestral sequences with timbral descriptors
  • Frederic Le Bel - From timbre decomposition to music composition
  • Megan Lavengood - A musicological approach to the analysis of timbre
  • Sarah Schoonhoven - Gender, timbre and metaphor in the music of Wendy Carlos
  • Flora Henderson - Cross-cultural gestures: Timbral juxtapositions in Takemitsu’s November Steps (1967) for shakuhachi, biwa and orchestra
  • Pierre Michel - Instrumental timbre, groupings and texture: Analysis of form and expression in pre-spectral European ensemble and orchestral music
  • Lindsey Reymore & David Huron - Identifying the perceptual dimensions of musical instrument timbre
  • Thiago Roque & Rafael Mendes - Towards timbre solfège from sound features manipulation

14:45 Musical event: Miller Puckette & Kerry Hagan - Who was that timbre I saw you with?

15:25 Talk Session 7: Chair Stefan Weinzierl

  • 15:25 Robert Hasegawa - Timbral hybrids in Philippe Hurel’s Leçon de choses
  • 15:50 Lasse Thoresen - Timbre-as-heard: Spectromorphological considerations

16:15 Coffee break

16:45 Talk Session 8: Chair Stefan Weinzierl

  • 16:45 Julie Anne Nord - Wagner’s associative orchestration in the Orchesterskizze for Tristan und Isolde
  • 17:10 Jason Noble, Max Henry, Etienne Thoret & Stephen McAdams - Timbre and semantics in sound mass music
  • 17:35 Asterios Zacharakis & Konstantinos Pastiadis - Examining the influence of tone inharmonicity on felt tension and timbral semantics

18:00 Continuation of poster session 2

20:00-21:30 Musical Keynote 2: Shawn MATIVETSKY, Tabla, McGill University, with Pankaj MISHRA, sarangi — Rivers: A rhythmic journey to Varanasi

July 7 (Tanna Schulich Recital Hall)

08:00 Coffee
08:45 Research Keynote 3: Cornelia FALES, Indiana University — Playing with timbre

09:45 Talk Session 9: Chair Vinoo Alluri

  • 09:45 Simon Zagorski Thomas - See me, feel me: Timbre as a multi-modal experience
  • 10:10 Paul Théberge - Timbre, genre, and the reframing of analog processes in digital audio production
  • 10:35 Zachary Wallmark - Effects of cross-modal Stroop interference on timbre perception

11:00 Coffee break

11:30 Talk Session 10: Chair Vinoo Alluri

  • 11:30 Marcelo Caetano - The sound morphing toolbox
  • 11:55 Ben Luce & James W Beauchamp - David A. Luce’s research on musical instrument timbre and its subsequent application to analog synthesizer design and digital analysis/synthesis
  • 12:20 Charlie Sdraulig - The effect of loudness on the perceptual representation of voiceless vowel and fricative timbres

12:55 Poster Session 3 & Lunch

  • Jennifer Beavers - A case for Ravel: Timbre, neurological decline, and Ravel’s last compositions
  • Danilo Rossetti & Jônatas Manzolli - The emergent timbre in live-electronic music: Volume and spectral liveness estimation from audio descriptors
  • Noah Kahrs - Consonant and dissonant timbres in two works of Sofia Gubaidulina
  • Nora Engebretsen - Acousmatic listening, chimeric percepts, and auditory hallucinations: Conceptualizing “perceptualized” timbre through the “predictive processing” model
  • Axel Chemla-Romeu-Santos, Adrien Bitton, Philippe Esling & Goffredo Haus - Unsupervised timbre spaces through perceptually regularized variational learning
  • Gregory Lee Newsome - Visualizing orchestration with Orcheil
  • Luca Guidarini - Drowning into synthesis: The role of timbre in Fausto Romitelli’s compositional techniques
  • Lauro Pecktor de Oliveira - The sound of colour in R. Murray Schafer’s (1933-) Seventh String Quartet (1998)
  • Maria Perevedentseva - Timbre as ‘structuring structure’ in underground electronic dance music
  • Ivan Simurra & Marcelo Queiroz - Comparative analysis between verbal attributes of timbre perception and acoustic correlates in contemporary music excerpts
  • Tanor Bonin - 箏の唱歌: Phonetic encoding of musical contour in the traditional Ikuta scores of Japan
  • Michael Mandel & Song Hui Chon - Using bubble noise to identify time-frequency regions that are important for timbre recognition
  • Amy V. Beeston, Alinka Greasley & Harriet Crook - Implicit timbral assessments of recorded and live music with hearing aids

14:45 Musical event: Anthony Tan & Noam Bierstone - Pose IV: In situ (2016) for solo percussionist on amplified piano and electronics
15:05 Musical event: Robert Normandeau - StrinGDberg (2001-03)

15:25 Talk Session 11: Chair Cornelia Fales

  • 15:25 Eric MaestriTimbre is a technomorphic thing: A comparative analysis of three case studies
  • 15:50 Shen Li & Renee Timmers - The communication of timbral intentions between pianists and listeners and its dependence on audio-visual listening conditions

16:15 Coffee break

16:45 Talk Session 12: Chair Cornelia Fales

  • 16:45 Jason Winikoff - The mikakaji: Timbre in Zambian luvale percussion
  • 17:10 Hazel Burns & Gabriel Ferreyra - A comprehensive guide to recording the Kichwa instruments of Ecuador

17:35 Conclusions: Perspectives on future timbre research-creation: Roger Reynolds (composer), Isabella van Elferen (musicologist), Stefan Weinzierl (acoustician)
18:05 Continuation of poster session 3/Closing reception
20:00-21:30 Musical Keynote 3: Jean-Baptiste BARRIÈRE, Image Auditive, composition/video, with Camilla HOITENGA, flute — Timbre and synthesis, the promises of freedom

 
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