This report presents the fourth ODESSA recording session, which involves a string ensemble performing selected musical excerpts under controlled acoustic conditions. The study aims to analyze the artistic and acoustic factors contributing to musical blending, incorporating room acoustic variations and ensemble performance attributes.

Evoking the human voice through instrumental music has been a perennial goal for composers, appearing in traditional and historical performance instructions such as cantabile and contemporary practices such as formant modeling (e.g., Jonathan Harvey, Speakings, 2008; Peter Ablinger, Deus Cantando, 2009). Performers also make extensive use of vocal metaphors in their discourse (Healy, 2018). But do general listeners perceive instrumental music in terms of vocal qualities or metaphors? Here we address this question by asking listeners to rate their perceptions of vocality in music intended to emulate it. Listeners provided real-time continuous slider data indicating how “voice-like” they perceived our repertoire excerpts to be. These excerpts included contemporary vocal mimesis techniques, traditional approaches to vocality, and control stimuli (i.e., music that is materially similar to the memetic excerpts but not explicitly intended to evoke the voice). This study provides perceptual validation for a phenomenon that has been important to musicians for centuries. Based on these findings, a new composition by Louis Goldford has been commissioned and is currently in development, incorporating the vocality features identified in our analysis. Although the composition has not yet been performed, it represents a future application of our methodology within a creative practice.

This module documents an ACTOR research-creation project bringing together six composers with the musicians of the Quasar Saxophone Quartet for a yearlong series of meetings and workshops culminating in a concert on May 9, 2024, “Vacillations harmoniques en six tableaux / Harmonic vacillations in six pictures.” The project, organized by ACTOR members Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez and Robert Hasegawa, featured six McGill-affiliated composers (Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez, Chelsea Komschlies, Anita Pari, Lila Quillin, Jonas Regnier, Louis-Michel Tougas) with research assistance from saxophonists Tommy Davis and Kirby Leitz and the inexhaustible dedication and generosity of the members of the Quasar Saxophone Quartet: Marie-Chantal Leclair (soprano saxophone), Mathieu Leclair (alto saxophone), André Leroux (tenor saxophone), and Jean-Marc Bouchard (baritone saxophone).

The music of Rebecca Saunders (b. 1967) is all but absent from theoretical and musicological discourse with the notable exceptions of two recent publications: Dubiel’s (2017) analysis of Crimson and McMullan-Glossop’s (2017) application of color theory terminology to describe Saunders’ timbral and textural approach to composition. An active composer since the early 1990s and the 2019 recipient of the Von Siemens Prize, Saunders’ work is written in a distinct idiom, drawing equally upon “postwar German fastidiousness and expressionism and experimental, Cageian concentration…” (Service, 2012). Her music is marked by the exploration of noise, pitch, and silence, the use of extended instrumental techniques, and uncommon combinations of instruments. Traditional music theoretical analytic techniques are insufficient to fully describe the prominent features of Saunders’ music: timbre, texture, noise, and silence.