Automatic Orchestration in Practice

We report here on the recent use of the Orchidée software by three different young composers in various compositional and instrumental contexts. Orchidée is a computer-aided orchestration environment designed to aid musicians exploring the space of instrument timbre mixtures and finding timbre combinations that fit a set of user-specified perceptual requirements. The first beta version of the software was released by the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique's (IRCAM's) Music Representations Group in 2009, after four years of intensive research, and it can already handle a small range of real-life situations, typically timbre imitation or orchestral synthesis, under instrumental constraints. Detailed examples, including score and audio excerpts, are provided.