Research Project: The Digital Orchestra

The McGill Digital Orchestra is a research/creation project with a duration of three years that will culminate with a performance of new works. The current proliferation of new musical applications of digital technologies is comparable to the flourishing of new instruments that accompanied technological developments during the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century these advances led to the appearance of, for example, the saxophone, the Wagner tuba and the modern Boehm flute. The objective of the Digital Orchestra research-creation program is similarly to develop new creative resources that allow composers and performers to expand and renew their artistic practice through the interaction of live performance and digital technologies, and to utilize these tools in the composition and performance of a number of new works in a concert given by the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble as part of the 2008 MusiMarch Festival. These works will be composed by members of the research-creation team and by graduate students in composition, in an attempt to find innovative musical solutions to the significant aesthetic, compositional and performance-practice challenges associated with the integration of live performers and technology. In doing so, the development of new means of expression for creative and interpretive artists will be encouraged.

The Digital Orchestra will be a collection of software and hardware tools dedicated to enabling the performance of works incorporating digital technology in live performance. Generalized solutions to technical issues will be sought that will allow musicians who are not experts in computer technology to access these resources. At the same time, the Digital Orchestra will serve as a real-world testing ground for advanced research in gestural control, digital signal processing, and sound synthesis.

The objective is not to replace traditional orchestral instruments, but rather to find avenues for the continued development of performance practice for these instruments and to allow advanced performers to use new music technologies that have been designed to take advantage of their many years of artistic practice.
The approach to be used in the Digital Orchestra is based on real-time digital information from a performance. This information may be gleaned from two paradigms of performer/instrument interaction: musical instruments, either acoustic or electric, that generate an audible sound, and gestural control surfaces, either modeled on traditional instruments or based on alternative models, that do not generate an audible sound. In the latter paradigm, the production of musical sound relies exclusively on the mapping of gestural data to the control parameters of a digital synthesis algorithm. In the former, the digital signal sampled from a transducer may be transformed using digital signal processing techniques in order to create new sonic results. Both of these types of information may be thought of as signals that can be reproduced, stored, analyzed, recreated and/or transformed.