Composition d'oeuvres pour hyper-flûtes et traitement audionumérique interactif

La version intégrale de cette thèse est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la Bibliothèque de musique de l’Université de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU).Cette thèse présente la démarche compositionnelle relative à six œuvres de musique mixte interactive pour hyper-flûtes, soit des flûtes traversières munies de capteurs gestuels électroniques reliés à un ordinateur. Le jeu instrumental est ainsi augmenté par des composantes électroacoustiques qui peuvent être contrôlées par l’interprète. Une grande partie de cet ouvrage est consacrée à la recherche autour de ces œuvres. On peut y lire un bref historique de la musique mixte qui souligne l'apport de la flûte à la musique électroacoustique. On se penche sur les défis de synchronisation du son instrumental et électronique auxquels font face les compositeurs depuis les années 1950, pour ensuite déterminer en quoi consiste la composition interactive. Après avoir défini la notion de geste instrumental, en particulier en ce qui concerne le jeu de la flûte traversière, on aborde les détails de la lutherie électronique de l’hyper-flûte et de l’hyper-flûte-basse. Ces descriptions techniques sont précédées de commentaires sur différents instruments augmentés et spécifiquement sur les différentes flûtes connues. Cette partie se termine par un exposé concernant l’interaction et les stratégies de mappage des données gestuelles vers les correspondances sonores. La suite est consacrée aux compositions. On peut d’abord y lire mon point de vue sur la composition interactive et l’improvisation. Six chapitres décrivent ensuite en détail chacune des œuvres. On y présente les sources d’inspiration et une analyse formelle sommaire de chaque pièce, puis on élabore sur les composantes instrumentales et électroacoustiques, en explicitant les types d’interactions utilisés. Soulignons que quatre de ces œuvres ont été élaborées autour de textes poétiques. Finalement, une courte conclusion résume les objectifs artistiques réalisés dans le cadre de ce doctorat et les pistes envisagées pour la poursuite de mon travail créateur avec les hyper-flûtes.This dissertation presents the compositional processes of six pieces with live interactive electronics for hyper-flutes: flutes equipped with electronic motion sensors connected to a computer. Instrumental techniques are thus augmented by electroacoustic components that can be controlled by the performer. A significant portion of this document is focussed on the research framing these works. A brief history of «musique mixte» is presented, underlining the contribution of the flute to electroacoustic music. The challenges associated with the synchronization of instrumental and electronic sounds with which composers have been faced since the 1950’s are then addressed, providing the context for establishing the essential nature of interactive composition. After having defined the notion of instrumental gesture, particularly as it concerns flute techniques, details of the electronic design of the hyper-flute and the hyper-bass-flute are considered. The descriptions of these techniques are prefaced by observations about other augmented instruments and more specifically the different known flutes. This part concludes with a presentation of the interaction and mapping strategies of gestural data as it relates to the corresponding audio elements. The sections that follow focus attention on the compositions. I begin by elaborating my own perspective on interactive composition and improvisation. Six chapters then provide detailed descriptions of each of the pieces, starting with the sources of inspiration and a brief formal analysis. I go on to explain their instrumental and electroacoustic components, detailing the types of interactions used. Of particular note is the fact that four of these works were developed based on poetic texts. Lastly, a short conclusion summarizes the artistic objectives realized during my doctoral tenure as well as the potential opportunities for the continuation of my creative work with the hyper-flutes

Objects that Sound

In this paper our objectives are, first, networks that can embed audio and visual inputs into a common space that is suitable for cross-modal retrieval; and second, a network that can localize the object that sounds in an image, given the audio signal. We achieve both these objectives by training from unlabelled video using only audio-visual correspondence (AVC) as the objective function. This is a form of cross-modal self-supervision from video. To this end, we design new network architectures that can be trained for cross-modal retrieval and localizing the sound source in an image, by using the AVC task. We make the following contributions: (i) show that audio and visual embeddings can be learnt that enable both within-mode (e.g. audio-to-audio) and between-mode retrieval; (ii) explore various architectures for the AVC task, including those for the visual stream that ingest a single image, or multiple images, or a single image and multi-frame optical flow; (iii) show that the semantic object that sounds within an image can be localized (using only the sound, no motion or flow information); and (iv) give a cautionary tale on how to avoid undesirable shortcuts in the data preparation.Comment: Appears in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 201

Time's Arrow New Music Ensemble, April 12, 2006

This is the concert program of the Time's Arrow performance on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 at 8:00 p.m., at the Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were "Composer's Holiday" by Lukas Foss, "Three Poems of Sylvia Plath" by James Radford, "Short Suite for Piano" by Samuel Headrick, "Lament for John" by Richard Cornell, "East Wind" by Shulamit Ran, "Two Songs on Poems by Anne Fessenden, "Six Piano Pieces" by Richard Cornell, "Lament for Manos" bu Theodore Antoniou, "wind(ows)" by Ketty Nez, and "Comedia" by David Liptak. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Time's Arrow: New music ensemble

This is the concert program of the Time's Arrow New Music Ensemble performance on Saturday, December 8, 2001 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed "Appartitions" by Dennis Riley, "Genesis" by Eun Hee Shin, "Mecanismos" by Jorge Villavicencio Grossman, "Chansons madecasses" by Maurice Ravel, and "Music for Invisible Cities" by Melissa J. Mazzoli. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Marco Fusi, violin and viola, March 19, 2015

This is the concert program of the Marco Fusi, violin and viola performance on Thursday, March 19, 2015 at 8:00 p.m., at the Hillel House, 213 Bay State Road. Works performed were ITI. KE. MI. for solo viola by Pierluigi Billone, L'Âme Ailée - L'Âme Ouverte for solo violin by Giacinto Scelsi, and 6 Capricci for solo violin by Salvatore Sciarrino. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

A microtonal wind controller building on Yamaha’s technology to facilitate the performance of music based on the “19-EDO” scale

We describe a project in which several collaborators adapted an existing instrument to make it capable of playing expressively in music based on the microtonal scale characterised by equal divsion of the octave into 19 tones (“19-EDO”). Our objective was not just to build this instrument, however, but also to produce a well-formed piece of music which would exploit it idiomatically, in a performance which would provide listeners with a pleasurable and satisfying musical experience. Hence, consideration of the extent and limits of the playing-techniques of the resulting instrument (a “Wind-Controller”) and of appropriate approaches to the composition of music for it were an integral part of the project from the start. Moreover, the intention was also that the piece, though grounded in the musical characteristics of the 19-EDO scale, would nevertheless have a recognisable relationship with what Dimitri Tymoczko (2010) has called the “Extended Common Practice” of the last millennium. So the article goes on to consider these matters, and to present a score of the resulting new piece, annotated with comments documenting some of the performance issues which it raises. Thus, bringing the project to fruition involved elements of composition, performance, engineering and computing, and the article describes how such an inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration was co-ordinated in a unified manner to achieve the envisaged outcome. Finally, we consider why the building of microtonal instruments is such a problematic issue in a contemporary (“high-tech”) society like ours

Introduction to Gestural Similarity in Music. An Application of Category Theory to the Orchestra

Mathematics, and more generally computational sciences, intervene in several aspects of music. Mathematics describes the acoustics of the sounds giving formal tools to physics, and the matter of music itself in terms of compositional structures and strategies. Mathematics can also be applied to the entire making of music, from the score to the performance, connecting compositional structures to acoustical reality of sounds. Moreover, the precise concept of gesture has a decisive role in understanding musical performance. In this paper, we apply some concepts of category theory to compare gestures of orchestral musicians, and to investigate the relationship between orchestra and conductor, as well as between listeners and conductor/orchestra. To this aim, we will introduce the concept of gestural similarity. The mathematical tools used can be applied to gesture classification, and to interdisciplinary comparisons between music and visual arts.Comment: The final version of this paper has been published by the Journal of Mathematics and Musi

Guest Artist Recital: Wolfgang David, violin, David Gompper, piano, September 25, 2007

This is the concert program of the Guest Artist Recital: Wolfgang David, violin, David Gompper, piano performance on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 at 8:00 p.m., at the Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were "Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment" by Arnold Schoenberg, "Passions" by Ching-Chu Hu, "for violin and piano" by Noel Zahler, "Much Ado About Nothing" by Erich Korngold, "Chaconne" by Johann Sebastian Bach, and "Echoes" by David Gompper. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Time's Arrow Ensemble, December 11, 2008

This is the concert program of the Time's Arrow Ensemble performance on Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 7:30 p.m., at Boston University Concert Hall, 855 Commmonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Aa by Aaron Krerowicz, From Five Rilke Songs by John Muniz, From Pierrot Lunaire, op. 12 by Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot by Thea Musgrave, It's Just a Schale... and Initials by Aaron Krerowicz, to EH by Jacob Mashak, and Lantern of the Eternal Flame by Brian Buch. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Justifications of a 21st century wind ensemble transcription of Mozart\u27s Overture to The Magic Flute based upon late eighteenth century ideology

I will create a transcription for wind ensemble of the Overture to The Magic Flute by WA Mozart. By completing this transcription, a standard orchestral work will be available in comparable quality and difficulty for wind ensemble. Although several simplified and one large concert band transcriptions have been made available during the 20th century, these arrangements were not consistent with late 18th century ideals of size and balance. This transcription will remain loyal to the original work through embracing the ideology of the 18th century musical mind. Through treatises, period writings and performance practice of Mozart\u27s time, I will create a transcription that is both authentic and employs 21st century knowledge of the wind ensemble capability