Towards a treatise on interactive orchestration

One of the most complex and mysterious aspects of musical composition is its reliance on orchestral timbre. While orchestration practices rely largely on empiric knowledge, collective advances in the psychology of perception and computer music have resulted in new tools to analyze the repertoire, study the perception of orchestral effects, and elaborate general models to facilitate teaching orchestration (and orchestrating) using new technologies. During this session, an international team of scientists and musicians will present a project based on these scientific concepts that aims, in the end, at the production of a treatise on interactive orchestration, based on the state of the art of computer tools for orchestration assistance. Composers associated with the project will illustrate the issues of this study for contemporary creation using examples made with existing tools.

Coordination: Stephen McAdams (McGill University, Montreal), Éric Daubresse (Haute école de musique, Geneva), Philippe Esling (Musical Representations team at IRCAM-STMS).

Project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).