Song, Stage and Screen 2025

Meet Us in the Middle
June 25-28, 2025
Hosted by the College of Communication at DePaul University

Song, Stage and Screen 2025 will convene in Chicago, Illinois, at DePaul University’s College of Communication from June 25-28, 2025. Sometimes referred to as the “Second City” or “Heart of America,” Chicago is a vital (and often unsung) incubator for musical theater, dance, and opera productions.

The location of this year’s conference invites us to contemplate the notion of “the middle,” and to suggest ways that “middles” inform the creation, circulation, consumption and study of musical theater. In recent years, scholars in musical theater studies and adjacent fields have demonstrated that “middlegrounds” can be a robust site for analysis. Stacy Wolf and Jake Johnson have directed our attention to the existence and importance of musical theater in the “middle” of the United States, while Derek Miller has encouraged study of “average” commercial productions and theater careers that are neither especially glorious nor terrible, but that ultimately drive the industry. Colleen Rua has addressed how musicals like West Side Story and In the Heights portray quotidian aspects of Latinx life, while Koritha Mitchell has argued that low or fair-to-middling standards enable and elevate white mediocrity.

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Music and Mediation

Conference at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide
9-10 June 2025

Keynote speaker: Naomi Sunderland, Director, Creative Arts Research Institute, Griffith University
Deadline for abstracts: Monday 16 December 2024

Mediation, in all its senses, from transmission to conflict resolution, is particularly relevant in times of technological innovation, sustainability challenges, forced displacement and struggles for equality or survival. This conference, generously supported by the Musicological Society of Australia (MSA), is concerned with the ways music and the study of music may contribute to the many theories and practices around mediation.

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Creativity, Subjectivity, Relocation

15-16 April 2025 | University of Aberdeen

Context
This event engages with the dynamics of ‘culture’ and the (re)formation of identities through the creative practices of artists moving between places or are born in multicultural households. Driven by Amin Hashemi’s current Leverhulme Early Career fellowship, Integration and the Making of Subjectivity via Musical Creativity that explores such dynamics among musicians with an Iranian background working and living inside the UK, this symposium invites scholars from across the UK who had worked on migration, integration, cultural exchange and musical creativity to present ideas, engage in debates and open discussions. Creativity, Subjectivity, Relocation addresses some contentious questions of socio-cultural homogeneity, assimilation and isolation in Britain that often subliminally or implicitly communicate a predetermined sense of incompatibility of cultural backgrounds or the impossibility of assimilation between the East and the West. This event takes music making amongst migrants as a dynamic, rather than static, practice. The discussions could address any other aspects of migration – including but not limited to integration, identity, or cultural communication – while focusing on the confluence of the processes of creativity and subjectivity with equal attention to the social and the individual.

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Journal of Music Production Research (Inaugural Edition)

The Journal of Music Production Research (JMPR) is delighted to announce its call for papers for the inaugural edition. JMPR is a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to defining, exploring, analysing, and advancing scholarly discourse and practice in the multifaceted field of music production. With a primary focus on the artistic, technical, and innovative practices that shape the discipline, JMPR serves as a leading forum for rigorous research and critical inquiry at the intersection of technology, creativity, and industry practice.

We welcome submissions from scholars, practitioners, and industry professionals who contribute to the growing body of knowledge in music production. Research from all relevant methodologies and disciplines is encouraged, particularly on interdisciplinary approaches bridging the gap between music production’s scientific and artistic aspects.

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Joint SMI and ICTM-IE Postgraduate Conference 2025

Trinity College Dublin
16–17 January 2025
Deadline: Friday 8 November 2024
Email: [email protected]

The Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI) and the Irish National Committee of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD-IE) are pleased to announce their annual joint postgraduate conference will take place at Trinity College Dublin on Thursday 16 and Friday 17 January 2025.

Postgraduate students working in all areas of musical research are warmly invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers or 30-minute lecture recitals of research conducted under supervision at a third-level institution. Poster presentations are also welcome. Areas of research include but are not limited to, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory and analysis, composition, music technology, music pedagogy, popular music studies, performance studies, musical practice as research, psychology of music, and music and gender. Attendees should convey research findings and professional conclusions honestly and in alignment with established research integrity principles, including those relating specifically to the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).

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Research Convention for the Night Time Economy Summit 2025

Convened by the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA)

From Wednesday 5th to Thursday 6th February the NTIA, in conjunction with other sector stakeholders, will be convening the fourth major Night Time Economy summit at Hockley Social Club, Birmingham. The event will discuss the important role that the Night Time Economy plays in economic and cultural recovery both across the UK and internationally. It will consider challenges, opportunities, and what the future holds for the sector.

As part of the Summit, we will be holding a research convention. This presents an opportunity for scholars to share research and to connect with industry.

Context
The Night Time Economy (NTE) is comprised of a diverse range of businesses that operate between 6pm and 6am. Consumer spend in the UK Night-time Economy was £136.5bn in 2022, up from £95.7bn in 2021, showing a strong post-Covid desire to socialise. However, adjusted for inflation, there has been no real growth in turnover over the last three years, despite the significant rise from £121.3bn in 2019. Rather, due to the pandemic and inflation, the UK NTE lost approximately £95bn, impacting investments in customer experiences, marketing, programming and sector resilience (NTIA 2024).

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2025 PopCon/IASPM-US Joint Conference

March 13-16, 2025
University of Southern California

BABY, IT’S A LOOK
Pop Music, Fashion, and Style at the Edge
Proposals Due: Friday, November 15th, 2024

There’s an enduring relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. As an example, in the past five years, the cowboy hat has once again gone viral, after figures like Gene Autry and Herb Jeffries helped make it a country music staple many decades ago. Iconic album covers, visual albums, music videos, and platform visualizers use looks to tell the story of the music, while fashion runways from Paris to Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg embrace pop music to stage the fantasy of a designer’s vision. Earlier connections between pop music, fashion, and style range from the likes of Josephine Baker and her banana skirt to Billie Holiday’s gardenia hair pin, to the Beatles’ mop-top haircuts, to the 70s glitter and glam of groups like Queen and Labelle, to the activist traditional attire and make up of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti and Lagos 70. Pop musicians design fashion and streetwear collections, and pop music genres produce all kinds of subcultural media and other alternative means of expression through street style and beyond.

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The Platformization of Music Production

Symposium on the platformization of music production
May 2–3, 2025, University of Oslo, Department of Musicology

The PLATFORM-project at University of Oslo’s Department of Musicology invites paper contributions to a symposium on the platformization of music production.

This symposium asks how contemporary platforms of music production are developed and what their significance might be for music making. We thereby invite explorations of platformization in terms of the technological platforms as well as the implications for “platformized” creative practice.

The basic meaning of “platform” is a “raised level surface on which people or things can stand” (Oxford English Dictionary), and it has been associated with networked services that are able to accommodate a growing range of users and somehow transform the relationship between them (e.g. Gillespie, 2010). The notion of platformization of music making has perhaps primarily been associated with distribution services, such as Spotify, and the way songwriting is influenced by recommendation systems and mood-based playlists that promotes listening (e.g. Morris 2020, Kiberg 2023). Recent research has also engaged with the platformization of production resources, such as online services offering automated mastering (Landr; see Sterne and Razlogova 2020) or royalty-free samples (Splice; see Arrieta 2021). Digital audio workstations, such as Apple’s Logic Pro or Ableton’s Live, increasingly resemble what Foxman (2019) calls “platform tools,” that are “integral to the entire production process’ and able to ‘act as an intermediary between industries and platforms.” These technologies increasingly offer opportunities of online production and real-time collaboration while also providing networked distribution facilities. Social media platforms, such as TikTok, are also integrating creative and distributive activities in new ways, while AI-based platforms offer new opportunities (and challenges) for music producers as well as consumers of music.

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IV International Conference on Sonorities Research (CIPS)

Silences

Dates: June 4-7, 2025
Location: Federal University of Espírito Santo – Vitória/ES – Brazil

Online stage: May 31, 2025
The story of composer John Cage is well-known, as he underwent an experience of deep silence in an anechoic chamber and found that he could still hear the internal sounds of his own body. This story confronts us with the inevitability of a complex phenomenon, of a multiple and inexhaustible nature: silence.

Silence, which would seem, at first, to be a counterpoint to sound, a kind of negative, reveals itself as an overflow of the audible boundaries. Western music makes explicit the inescapable importance of silences, from the staff to sound synthesis. In the score, the pause is a marked and significant element, a fundamental part of the composition itself. In digital audio workstations, silence is a block of time without a pulse that is added to the compositional timeline. The absence of sound, it can be concluded, is not a nullity of meaning, but rather the partial result of a broader communicational machination of power games to be mapped from interdisciplinary perspectives.

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New Metal Worlds: Building Bridges and Mending Broken Backs

The International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS) and Metal Music Studies-Spain, in collaboration with the University of Seville, the Complutense University of Madrid, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Granada, the University of Córdoba, the University of Jaén, the University of Oviedo, and the University of La Laguna, invites applications in response to the Call for Proposals 2025 for ISMMS’ 7th Biennial International Research Conference. The event will be held in Seville, Spain, 3-6 June, 2025 (and virtually) under the theme:  NEW METAL WORLDS / BUILDING BRIDGES AND MENDING BROKEN BACKS

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