The 11th Art of Record Production Conference: The Spaces in Between

December 2-4, 2016
Hosted by the Music and Sound Knowledge group (MaSK), Aalborg University, Denmark

Our conference committee is pleased to invite proposals for papers dealing with the following broad themes:

A: Between music production and sound design

How is record production related to producing sound for film, television, radio, computer games and other media? How can scholars and practitioners within these diverse fields benefit from each other? What are the differences between producing sound for linear and interactive media? How can theoretical models be used to elucidate these connections and differences?

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Fringes, outsides and undergrounds: The aesthetics and politics of unpopular music

One-day conference to be held at Goldsmiths on 7 May 2016  

Musical forms such as noise, extreme metal, performance art, experimental techno, free improv and more take inspiration from both popular and art traditions without being fully identifiable with either.

These forms exist either on the fringes of, or outside, these commercial and cultural mainstreams, both in conventional musical centres such as London and Berlin and further afield, in South America, Japan and China.

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EUPOP 2016

Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, July 20th – 22nd, 2016

Individual paper and panel contributions are welcomed for the fifth annual international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), to be held at the Université Paris Ouest in Nanterre, just outside Paris (Faculty of Foreign Languages and Cultures), July 20th – 22nd, 2016.

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Popular Culture Association of Canada (PCAC) 6th Annual Conference

In association with McGill Institute for the Study of Canada
May 12-14, 2016

The sixth Annual Conference of the Popular Culture Association of Canada will be held in Montreal, Canada from Thursday, May 12 to Saturday, May 14, 2016.

We invite proposals for papers and/or panels on theories of popular culture, research methods in popular culture, the teaching of popular culture, forms and genres of popular culture, and any epiphenomena of popular culture, past or present. We also invite presentation and exhibition proposals from visual and multimedia artists whose work engages with popular culture.

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Dark Leisure and Music Symposium

16th September 2016
Leeds Beckett University
Headingley Campus, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

Deadline for submissions: 15th May 2016

‘Dark Leisure and Music’ is an interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Leeds Beckett University, Centre for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that aims to address issues related to dark leisure research and encourage dark leisure scholarship in music. Dark leisure may be defined as leisure activity that sits on the fringes of modern society tastes, and activity that rejects the mainstream. Around the turn of the century, Chris Rojek started looking at dark leisure as ‘deviant’ and chose to interpret this type of leisure mostly as detrimental to the individual, in line with criminological approaches. While dark leisure has been investigated by criminologists and psychologists as abnormal behaviour, recent scholarship in this area such as the works of Karl Spracklen, Philip Stone, and D. J. Williams has shown the need to take dark leisure from a different moral perspective than previous research. Moreover, this type of leisure has been scarcely explored in relation to music cultures. Music worlds ‘on the edge’ could be important spaces for dark leisure activity which have Habermasian communicative rationality at heart; and in effect, they could provide essential channels for performing liminal identities.
We invite submissions addressing following issues and others:

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Music, Health and Wellbeing: African Perspectives

Special Issue of the Legon Journal of the Humanities (LJH)

Knowledge about the relationship between music, health and wellbeing is probably as old as humanity itself. Ritual specialists across the African continent and elsewhere have been making use of the therapeutic and curative potential of music and dance for millennia, just as ordinary people have used song, dance and play to enhance individual and collective wellbeing. Various philosophers have tried to come to terms with the healing powers of the performing arts, emphasising the close connection between art and human nature. More recent research in musicology, dance and performance studies, psychology, neuroscience, and medicine – to mention but a few of the relevant fields – has added much to our understanding of the socio-cultural, psychological as well as biological foundations of human-music interaction, shedding light on the influence of music on affective behaviour and our basic brain chemistry. Against this backdrop, music, dance and related art forms are increasingly employed in both informal and formal therapeutic settings to treat illness, alleviate pain, cure mental disorders and, more generally, to promote wellbeing.
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Hip-Hop Activism and Representational Politics

Proposed Special Issue for Journal of World Popular Music
Guest Editors: Adam Haupt, H. Samy Alim & Quentin Williams

Hip-hop has mixed and sampled languages, dialects, styles, sounds, and media from diverse sources and localities. Beyond its ability to articulate resistance to hegemonic discourses and practices, it has also been able to support activism for positive social change – from activism for the upliftment of youth in post-apartheid South Africa to hip- hop activism in Palestine

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Sound Thought 2016

Dialogues: Sound and Music across the Arts
Centre for Contemporary Arts
March 30th – April 1st, 2016

Sound Thought, the University of Glasgow’s annual postgraduate conference and concert festival, will exhibit the work of researchers and contemporary practitioners exploring the intersections of music, sound, and other artistic genres.

This year’s festival, “Dialogues”, will take place between 30 March and 1 April 2016, primarily at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, and at select other performance venues throughout the city. This year’s festival is being programmed in collaboration with GLEAM (Glasgow Audiovisual and Electronic Media), LUX Scotland, the Pipe Factory, and the Red Note Ensemble.
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Corrupting Desires! Technique, Performance and Control

We are currently accepting submissions for Issue 2 of Cesura//Acceso, to be published in June 2016.

We want to think about how music is made and experienced – revealing limits, exclusions, desires, strategies, optimism and pessimism. Frustrations, constraints and manipulations of makers and listeners often condition the ways we can feel or think through our engagements with music. We want to prise these contradictions in music open, revealing some of its fractures, as well as its generative and emancipatory possibilities. Some of these might be related to:

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Occupied! Popular music, capital, state and society

In the times of privatization, regulation and bureaucratization, the main problem, regarding activities related to music, is who controls music in terms of its digital sharing, international free-trade and diminishing power of society in shrinking nation-states.

The main streams and potential topics of the proposed conference, though not exclusively, are:

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