Inaugural editorial

Abstract

We are delighted to take over the editorship of the Journal of New Music Research. We would like to start this editorial to our first issue by thanking Alan Marsden for his excellent stewardship of the journal for nearly two decades. During his tenure, he oversaw the expansion to five issues a year from its previous four, allowing for a greater range of articles to be published each year. Through this and other editorial actions, the readership of the journal grew, with full-text downloads increasing from 3,554 in 2005 to 51,999 in 2022. Alan also guarded and expanded the journal’s interdisciplinary legacy, publishing high-quality work from a range of disciplinary orientations, including musicological, compositional, psychological, and computational. As we enter a new era for the journal with new editorship, we would like to reaffirm our commitment to maintaining the journal as a home for in-depth reports on research that is innovative and empirically grounded, while also exploring how we can broaden the journal’s diversity. We recognise that academia as a whole is strugglingwith issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, raising questions as to whose work is being published, whose voice is being included in the discourse, and whose culture is being studied. We are dedicated to diversifying both the content in terms of the range of musical traditions engaged with, as well as the methodologies adopted, while keeping true to the journal’s stated aims and scope. We also aim to broaden the reach and relevance of the journal in terms of its geographical range and the backgrounds and identities of the authors. In addition to diversifying the papers published in the journal, we will also be working towards refreshing and diversifying the editorial board and reviewer pools. So we welcome offers frommembers of the relevant research communities to contribute to the journal’s future in either of these capacities. In this issue, we are very pleased to be able to present five fascinating studies on a broad range of topics, including drumming performance practice, sound sculptures, computer-assisted orchestration and music generation. The first paper is by Guilherme Schmidt Câmara, George Sioros and Anne Danielsen from the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion at the University of Oslo. This study reveals that drummers adopt one of three general strategies when differentiating laid-back or pushed from on-beat performances when expressing a simple ‘back-beat’ pattern. The authors analyse the relative frequencies with which different types of onset asynchronies and intensities occur in the drummers’ performances, and show that performances can be classified using hierarchical clustering into three onset and intensity archetypes that are visualised using phylogenetic trees. In the second paper in this issue, Leonardo Salzano and Manuel C. Eguia from the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes in Buenos Aires, present a fascinating musical sound sculpture, called IRIS. IRIS consists of two 1.8m diameter, periodically perforated disks with independent rotation, based on an acoustic double-fishnet structure. IRIS acts as a purely acoustic, spatial filter that modulates the harmonics of an input sound to transmit different timbres in different directions. The authors present two musical applications, showing how IRIS can be used to modify in a controlled way the timbre and spatiality of acoustic sources in a performance situation. The third paper in this issue is by Carmine-Emanuele Cella from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)/Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Cella focuses on the problem of target-based computer-assisted orchestration and presents a new computational framework to solve this problem called Orchidea. The target-based orchestration problem consists of discovering a combination of acoustic instrument sounds that, when played together, create a sound that is as similar as possible to some predefined target sound. Unfortunately, the naïve solution of iterating over all combinations of instruments and pitches in order to find the solution that is closest to the target takes time exponential in the size of the sample database and is therefore not practical. There are also other difficult problems to solve such as measuring the perceptual distance between a candidate sound and the target sound and defining features that are relevant for the orchestration task. The Orchidea system attempts to solve these problems by using a two-stage algorithm that performs a preliminary estimation of the solutions using semi-greedy search, and then improves them by mono-objective evolutionary optimisation.