ACTOR is an interdisciplinary partnership involving more than 20 academic, artistic, and private-sector institutions working to develop a 21stcentury approach to orchestration.
The ACTOR Partnership proposes to enhance attention to timbre and orchestration by bringing its musical use to the forefront of scholarship, practice, and public awareness with world-class artists, humanists, and scientists. This Partnership links North American and European orchestration practice and pedagogy, stimulates the development of new creativity-enhancing digital tools for learning, creating, and studying orchestration practice in concert, club, film, and video-game music, and sensitizes young audiences to the wonders and complexities of highquality music.
ACTOR aims to transform music scholarship both through the application of novel analytical tools to uncover the untheorized mysteries in over four centuries of music and through the development of sound-based music analysis tools that can be applied to un-notated music or recordings of notated music.
ACTOR will transform research in the fields of musicology, music theory, music psychology, popular music studies and ethnomusicology where the role of timbre in music has been either ignored or only rarely addressed systematically.
ACTOR will enhance the education of composers, arrangers and orchestratorsby providing technological tools for learning the associations between symbolic representations in scores and the sonic result. ACTOR will create tools to enhance musical creativity related to timbre and orchestration in the many genres of music on stage and at home through computer-aided orchestration environments that integrate cutting-edge signal-processing and machine-learning techniques. To achieve these aims, ACTOR activities are structured into three axes of research dealing with Analysis, Technological Tool Development andInnovative Outputs in several domains. The team is responsible for the second research axis (tool development), and implements a series of studies in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning based on the analysis and generation of orchestration, such as the .Live Orchestral Piano.which automatically arranges piano sequences for large orchestras and synthesizes the result, or which can conversely reduce an orchestral score.
IRCAM's Teams : Représentations musicales, Analyse des pratiques musicales
