Orchidée

This interesting system called Orchidée, developed at IRCAM by Grégoire Carpentier and Damien Tardieu under the supervision of composer Yan Maresz, is capable of providing one or more orchestrations of a given sound.

In practice, this means that a composer can submit a sound and have it analyzed by the system, which then provides various combinations of orchestral sounds that approximate the given sonority.

An example, taken from those provided by IRCAM, says more than many words. You can listen:

a sound produced by a rooster is orchestrated by the system
car-horn orchestrated with various solutions solution_0, solution_1, solution_2

This is Computer Aided Orchestration and is a further example of how computers can now assist composers in many phases of their work.

The system is based on a large database of orchestral sounds that have been analyzed and cataloged according to a series of descriptors, both perceptual (e.g., brightness, harshness, presence, color, etc.) and notational (instrument, pitch, dynamics, etc.).

A genetic algorithm then identifies various solutions, each optimized with respect to one or more descriptors. This means that there is no ideal solution, but rather several, each of which closely approximates one aspect of the sound in question, while being weaker in other respects. For example, one could obtain a set that closely approximates the color of the sound, but not its evolution. It's up to the composer to choose the one that seems most appropriate for their compositional context.

The complete description of the Orchidée system can be found here. Various other examples can be heard here.

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