Music, Crisis, Memory

An International Interdisciplinary Conference
School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University, 8-9 May 2026

Music can act as an essential tool for accessing and even shaping memories, particularly in times of crisis or when experiencing grief and loss. Music can also trigger vivid memories, including those related to specific events, emotions, or individuals. In various published studies, scholars demonstrate that music has long served as a powerful medium for communal mourning and remembrance in times of crisis, providing a way to process grief and make loss audible.

When we discuss the relationships between music, crisis, and memory in depth, many questions arise: How does music support people through times of crisis and loss (e.g. global pandemic, fatal warfare and natural disaster)? How do we remember or forget crises musically? How can music function as a memory carrier as well as a healer? What remarkable crisis has the music industry dealt with? How does the crisis inspire music composition and create musical memory?

Read the rest of this entry »

Cyborg Voices: Identity, Artistry, and Performance in the Age of AI

Editor: Chloe Kirson-Jones
Publisher: Jenny Stanford publishing distributed through Taylor and Francis
Projected Publication: January 2027

Overview

How does the voice change when it becomes digital, disembodied, and co-created with machines? This edited volume examines the shifting landscape of vocal identity and artistry in the era of artificial intelligence. Bringing together scholars, artists, and practitioners, Cyborg Voices explores how AI-generated and technologically-mediated voices are transforming performance, authorship, and embodiment in popular music and digital culture.

The collection builds from practice-based research in which the editor develops and performs with an AI-synthesised version of her voice. Through this lens, the volume investigates the cyborg voice as a site of resistance, hybridity, vulnerability, and creative reinvention.

Read the rest of this entry »

‘Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein’ (Dick Rowe, 1962): the Impact and Influence of the British Invasion (1964-1967)

University of Orléans, France, Friday May 29th 2026

Dick Rowe’s famous rejection of the Beatles in 1962 couldn’t have been further from the truth and while guitar bands like the Shadows were indeed about to be sidelined by a new wave of largely Liverpool Beat Groups, the guitar remained central to the sound and success of what eventually became known as the British Invasion. Rowe must have accepted the inevitability of eating his own words when George Harrison encouraged him to sign the Rolling Stones in 1963, a tip off that quite possibly saved him his job at Decca Records and further consolidated the guitar as central to the instrumentation of the mid-60s. Keith Richards, Dave Davies, George Harrison, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton – to name but a few – all kept the guitar very much within the sonic foreground of recorded music and live performance in a decade that saw the UK supplant, if only for a brief window of time, the dominance of popular music from the USA. None the less, the fact that most of the instruments played by British guitarists were American models was a reminder of where the original inspiration for bands like the Beatles and the Stones came from, as well as a visible manifestation of the transatlantic-cross-town-traffic of influence that characterised the period.

Read the rest of this entry »

Innovation In Music 2026

Aalborg University, City Campus, Rendsburggade 14, Aalborg, Denmark
12-15 June 2026

Music Beyond Tools and Rules
​
Have you ever experienced the thrill of creating music with an instrument, software, or interactive system that seems to listen, respond, and even inspire you in return? At InMusic’26, we want to explore the mutual relationships between humans and non-human systems in music, where listening, interaction, and co-creation open new possibilities for sound, composition, performance, and sonic experience.
​
We invite researchers, practitioners, creatives, producers, artists, industry professionals, technology developers, and equipment manufacturers to examine how technology can become a collaborative partner—not just a tool—in music-making, listening, performance, and interactive sound experiences. How do humans and technology resonate together? How does the act of listening and the conditions for creative decisions change when mediated by algorithms, AI, or interactive systems? How can co-creation with technology generate new forms of musical expression, perception, and experience?
​
Read the rest of this entry »

Popular Music Methodologies Conference

Middlesex University, London, UK
18th – 19th June 2026

Following the publication, in 2025, of The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies, edited by Mike Dines, Shara Rambarran and Gareth Dylan Smith, a hybrid conference will be held at Middlesex University in June 2026 to continue the discussion. The Popular Music Methodologies Conference will address the diverse ways we study, interpret and engage with popular music methodologies, bringing together researchers, scholars, practitioners and students across the disciplines and field that enable us to reflect on the tools, theories, and practices that currently shape the research of popular music.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literature and Popular Music

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary handbook will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2027.

This collection explores how literature and popular music intersect, influence each other, and create new possibilities for artistic expression, and seeks to map the rich terrain where these two cultural forms meet. We will work from broad definitions of both literature and popular music, encompassing work from traditional novels and poetry to digital narratives and graphic novels, from classical and folk sound traditions to electric and contemporary electronic music.

We welcome contributions from both academics and practitioners that explore historical connections, contemporary developments, and future possibilities. The handbook will be organised around key themes, including historical practices, crossovers and transgressions, lyrical poetics, and technological convergence.

Read the rest of this entry »

Histories of Electronic Musical Instruments

A Routledge/Focal Press Series

Series Editor: Prof. James Newman, Bath Spa University, UK.

Proposals are sought for books to be included in the series, including authored monographs and edited collections. This is an ongoing, open call for projects and we welcome proposals from prospective authors year-round.

The goal of Histories of Electronic Musical Instruments is to cut through the hype, hyperbole, mythologies and misinformation associated with electronic musical instruments. Books in the series will offer authoritative and accessible histories of the design, operation and creative uses of seminal instruments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amplification and Everyday Life

Two-day conference at the University of Huddersfield
4th-5th June, 2026

The Amplification Project, a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project housed within the Music and Music Technology division of the University of Huddersfield, invites proposals on the theme of “Amplification and Everyday Life.” As the first large-scale research project dedicated to the study of amplification, we hope this conference will help to identify and define key issues and debates that are of core importance to the topic and will advance our mission to make amplification into a key subject in the cultural study of music and sound.

Read the rest of this entry »

Artificial Intelligence and Popular Music

We invite submissions for a special issue of Popular Music and Society on the theme of artificial intelligence and popular music.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is spreading rapidly through creative and cultural sectors, including popular music, and is already proving to be a disruptive technology. The recording industry, recalling earlier technological upheavals such as MP3 files and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, has moved quickly to urge lawmakers to regulate AI. This can be seen in recent U.S. legislative proposals to establish intellectual property rights protecting artists’ voices (the “NO FAKES Act” and the “No AI FRAUD Act”) and the widely publicized EU AI Act, which outlines risks associated with AI systems and which has faced backlash from many stakeholders in the European cultural industries.

Read the rest of this entry »

wildpop 2025

Corporate interests dominate how we consume culture, what we listen to, what we watch…. Yet underground, DIY and fringe cultures have the grass-roots spontaneous intensity that can challenge that dominance. Don’t they?

November 6-8 2025
Newcastle University, Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle Upon Tyne

Wild Pop is performance and production in music, film, beat-making and the immediacy of online platforms; it collapses formal distinctions between composition and improvisation, between invention and appropriation… between consumption and production, taking and making…

Read the rest of this entry »