Music and Sound at Work

London Conference in Critical Thought
University College London, 26-27 June 2015

This conference stream seeks to provoke discussion around ways in which music and sound could be considered ‘at work’. This construction has two distinct but overlapping and complementary senses.

1. The acoustic ecology of the world of work: encompassing instances in which workers have soundtracked their labour; or used music to comment on working conditions.
2. Sound and music that has been put to work: emphasising the exploitation of aural properties for specific social, economic or (bio)political ends (to drive the labour of consumption, for example).

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Equinox Studies in Ethnomusicology

Book series editors: Simone Krüger and Britta Sweers

Equinox Studies in Ethnomusicology publishes monographs and edited collections on contemporaneous explanations surrounding the nature of music and human beings in a (post-)global world. Books in this series encompass a comprehensively wide selection of subject matters alongside a shared interest in fieldwork—physical, virtual, historical—and its complex challenges and fascinations in a postcolonial age.

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PERFORMA – Conference on Musical Performance Studies

The University of Aveiro and INET-MD (Institute of Ethnomusicology – Centre for Music and Dance Studies) and the Brazilian Association of Musical Performance (ABRAPEM) will host PERFORMA’15, a conference on performance studies, from June the 11th until June the 13th, 2015 in Aveiro, Portugal. The organization is with the collaboration of the Graduate Studies Program of the Instituto de Artes of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. The keynote-speakers will be Prof. Marcel Cobussen, from the Leiden University in the Netherlands (and from Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium), and Prof. Tia DeNora, from the University of Exeter, UK. This conference seeks to generate and present new perspectives on musical performance through interdisciplinary dialogue. The main theme for the 2015 edition will be performance practice as research with three specific research topics:

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U:Pop – The First International Popular Music Studies Undergraduate Conference

The University of Northampton, United Kingdom
Saturday 30^th May 2015

As the academic study of popular music has developed over the last thirty years, reaching both across disciplines and across the globe, our understanding of the economic, social, political and cultural significance of this most ubiquitous of forms has only become ever more sophisticated and dynamic. Whilst the discipline(s) has developed both scholars of international repute and a thriving postgraduate research body, the work produced by undergraduate students studying relevant courses has had little opportunity to be recognized outside their own institutions.

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Journal of Music, Technology and Education

Special issue on Technology and Performance in Popular Music Education

Guest editors: Gareth Dylan Smith and Bryan Powell

Performance in popular music education is an increasingly technologised space. As guitars, drums and microphones are gaining greater acceptance in school music curricula around the world through performance-based pedagogical models, such as the Modern Band curriculum of Little Kids Rock, and Musical Futures’ informal learning approach. Turntablism, music production and rapping have a growing presence in programmes from primary school to graduate level. Songwriting courses, rock camps and international collaborative pop projects sprout up globally in physical spaces and on line, while children and young people write, produce and release multi-media popular music artefacts from their bedrooms and basements. Popular music has always relied on, grown through, and pushed innovation in technology. With students embracing change faster than many teachers can imagine relevant pedagogical approaches, new paradigms of performance are emerging: drummers become musical directors at the helm of a plethora of technologies, bassists play synthesizers as much as guitars, and front-people are masters of Ableton, loop pedals and computerized gloves. As performance and production skill sets thus diversify and converge, so other technologies democratize the music-making landscape.

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Tacet – Sound in the Arts

Sounds of Utopia

Utopia is one of those concepts that haunt the history of ideas as well as the history of artistic practices. This persistence conveys both a contemporary malaise and the need, if not urgency, for the ideas about difference that are shaped in part by the conception and enactment of a utopia, ephemeral and circumstantial though they may be. The history of sound art and experimental music is no exception: in it we find reflections on utopia, understood in terms of space (enclave, island, or heterotopia) or of time (uchronia, heterochrony or projection of a possible future, based on present concerns). But the concept of utopia might present itself firstly as a radical alternative to the dominant musical and artistic forms, or even to the traditional aesthetic categories intended to distinguish among practices according to the media used. This gap is as much a matter of the creative processes used as of the sounds produced, heard, recorded, installed, organized, or improvised, but also of their mediation. In all cases, it seems that utopia comes into play at the heart of the dynamics that nurture experimental sound practices, past and present.

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Edited Anthology on ‘Music in Comedy Television’

Philip Hayward and Liz Giuffre invite expressions of interest in an anthology they are proposing for publication on the theme of Music in Comedy Television.

International scholars interested in genre, television, screen soundtracks, audience studies and/or cross media engagement are invited to pitch potential chapter ideas for the collection.

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Special Issue of Popular Music: The Critical Imperative

This special issue will address what we call the critical imperative: the demand that academic writing on popular music place new primacy on sounds as made and heard, and for that writing to be styled in a way that foregrounds not just its academic rigour, but also imaginative description, creative interpretation and bold evaluation.

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Special issue of Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture on Music and Discovery

Co-Guest-Editors: Tom McCourt (Fordham University) and Nabeel Zuberi (University of Auckland)

The editors of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture invite submissions for a special issue on the topic of Music and Discovery. We are aiming for a multi-disciplinary issue that draws on the many resonances of the word “discovery” in music as popular communication, and we welcome critical approaches in music education; musicology and ethnomusicology; film, television and cultural studies; media and communication studies; sound studies; popular music studies; global media, and other fields. We seek manuscripts that examine the politics and aesthetics of musical discovery, and how the tropes of discovery are invoked in disciplines, research methods and the production of knowledge related to music. How is “discovery” represented in musical production and sounds, in the uses and social meaning of music?

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Court and Spark: An international symposium on the work of Joni Mitchell

July 3rd, 2015, University of Lincoln.