Conservatory of Music
Article: Orchestration with FFTs
L’analyse spectrale comme ressource à la technique orchestrale contemporaine
Francois Rose and 
Jim Hetrick from the Physics department have co-authored the article "L’analyse spectrale comme ressource à la technique orchestrale contemporaine" that will be published this coming Fall in the Cahiers de la SQRM (Société Québécoise de Recherche en Musique).
Over the last four centuries the technique of orchestration has evolved empirically. Based on aural perception, intuition, and the taste of the epoch, composers developed the skill of combining the sounds of instruments. The advent of technologies in the 20th century has opened the door to a new approach. It is now possible to use the computer to analyze sound mixtures and view them as if under a microscope. This method is referred to as spectral analysis because it shows, among other things, the energetic pattern of a sound, or in other words, its spectral strengths and weaknesses.
We introduce a computerized aid to orchestration that greatly extends the use of spectral analysis in orchestration. It is made of two parts: a bank of Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) accessed by a group of sub-routines designed to either perform sound analysis or propose different orchestrations that imitate the energetic pattern of a reference sound.