Report on the activities of the CORE workgroup

Report on the activities of the Taxonomy Workgroup.

Report on the activities of the OrchView workgroup

Overview of a grant proposal to the FNS Sinergia program in Switzerland, entitled the Machine Orchestration Semantics Acoustics (MOSA) Project.

Brightness is among the most studied aspects of music perception, and arguably among the most important timbral cues actively shaped by performers, composers, and audio engineers. In this Strategic Project, we examine how timbral brightness modulates perception of pitch, visual brightness, and numerical comparison. Combining behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms, we investigate how ubiquitous metaphorical structures for timbre influence processing in other cognitive realms.

Compositions for a solo Chinese instrument with the Western orchestra require the composer to consider ways in which orchestration techniques might function in different ways so as to either bring out the solo instrument or to have it blend with the orchestra. Many Chinese composers have attempted such a combination and through experience have accumulated knowledge on unique techniques of orchestration and composition to achieve the desired consequences. Zhu Shirui is a composer and professor of

Tone color differences across diverse singing voices are more readily apparent than tone color differences across players of the same instrument. Although experienced listeners can differentiate between performers of the same instrument, existing research suggests that there are greater changes in tone color, or timbral variation, across different singing voices. Vibrato is commonly accepted to be a distinctive feature of singing, inextricably tied to expression and tone color.[i] Previous studi

Deep learning models have provided extremely successful methods in most application fields by enabling unprecedented accuracy in various tasks. For audio applications, although the massive complexity of generative models allows to handle complex temporal structures, it often precludes their real-time use on resource-constrained hardware platforms, particularly pervasive in this field. The lack of adequate lightweight models is an impediment to the development of stand-alone musical instruments b

Olivier Messiaen, famous for having sound-color synesthesia, describes his complex yet consistent colour system in his Traité de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie (1994). Although much existing research focuses on his personal colour system, one finds evidence in his descriptions that he also draws from crossmodal correspondences, or intuitive and unexpected connections between sensory modes shared by most people and even some animals. This isn’t surprising, as research suggests synesthetes

In my presentation I would present part of my master's thesis, which I wrote in 2021-2022. In my thesis "Timbral emergence in orchestration after 1950" I examine the different ways of generating a genuinely new timbre, the emergent timbre, in orchestral music after 1950. The part of my thesis that I would be presenting for ACTOR is about using gestalt theory (gestalt psychology) principles as a technique of emergent orchestration to create genuine new timbres and timbral structures. I take the m