Sounding Space and Place: New Directions in the Geography of Sound and Music

Organizers:
Luke Leavitt (Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison); Arun Saldanha (Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota);
Rashad Shabazz (School of Social Transformation/School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning, Arizona State University)

Though geographers have been doing research on music for decades, there has recently been a flourishing of new perspectives emerging between cultural geography, popular music studies, and sound studies. This series of panels builds on the momentum at previous AAG meetings to create community and exchange. “Space and place” are more than just the “where” of the production, dissemination, and consumption of particular sounds. When we listen to music and other sounds we’re hearing history, migration, power, industry, race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, climate, language, and a host of other social and environmental factors. No musician, listener, or sound-maker lives outside these forces, and the experiences of music and sound in turn help shape these contexts. How do the multiple crises heaping up in the world today come to inflect soundscapes and the sonic arts? This series of panels provides cases and concepts for demonstrating how music and sound are spatialized.

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Politics in Music and Song

Queen’s University Belfast, 8-10 September 2023

Music at Queen’s University Belfast in collaboration with the network ‘Songs of Social Protest’ is hosting a conference from 8-10 September 2023 that will explore the great variety of musical and lyrical expression within the field of protest song.

Over the past few decades protest song has become a burgeoning field of academic study. Significant publications have captured the international variety of protest song, such as Dillane, Power, Devereux and Haynes (2018), Friedman (2017), Illiano (2015), Kutschke and Norton (2014) and Peddie (2020, 2012). Other work has been more nationally focussed, such as that of John and Robb’s The 1848 Protest Song Tradition in Germany (2020), Millar’s Sounding Dissent on Irish rebel songs (2020), and Lebrun’s Protest Music in France (2009). As well as ‘Songs of Social Protest’ (Limerick, 2015) other networks have arisen with publications reflecting both national and international perspectives such as ‘To the Barricades. Popular Protest in Europe 1815-1850’ (Warwick, 2018) and ‘Our Subversive Voice. The History and Politics of the English Protest Song’ (UEA, 2021). We invite papers from a wide international field and additionally welcome case studies on transnational protest song.

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Sounds of the End of the World

III International Conference on Sonorities Research (CIPS)
June 7th to 9th, 2023
Fluminense Federal University (UFF) – Niterói/RJ – Brazil

In recent decades, we have witnessed changes on a global scale that can be seen as threats to human existence itself – threats caused by ourselves, as the Anthropocene theories demonstrate. Climate change, pandemics, food shortages and wars are the result of the brutal exploitation of the planet, the struggle for control of natural and economic resources, as well as the denial of the ongoing crisis.

The end of the world means, of course, not only a nuclear or climatic hecatomb, but also the end of worldviews, models of knowledge or even cognitive, affective and social patterns. A new world emerges outlining its creative powers and its dystopias of control, automation and depletion of natural resources necessary for technological development.

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Global Digital Music Studies

A Conference in honor of Dr. Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale RILM
New York City, NY, USA
April 12–13, 2023

UNESCO has argued that the Covid-19 crisis is a reminder “that we should nurture the socially-beneficial applications of digital technologies and focus on improving access and uses in countries where it is lacking.” Building on this and keeping true to its mission, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) seeks to bring together researchers, educators, and librarians interested in the ways digital technologies intersect with music studies worldwide and in its broadest sense, encompassing all branches: historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, as well as popular music studies and other fields.

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Popular Song in Europe in the 1920s

University of Rouen-Normandie, France, 8-9 June 2023
Organizer : John Mullen
Popular Song in Europe in the 1920s

The 1920s was a key period for popular song. The slow rise of recorded music, and the arrival of radio, brought to the end that era when live performance was at the centre of the music industries. Meanwhile, ongoing urbanization in many countries continually changed the relationship between song, everyday life, fantasy and identity.

In Britain in the 1920s, the urban music hall suffered terribly. The rise of records and then the radio meant that the competition between songs was far stronger, and in general US production was more sophisticated, faster, more modern. Al Jolson, and later Cole Porter, were more impressive than the old-time singers: for the first time in history British popular song was threatened by US domination. The rise of the dance hall did damage too. Younger people wanted to go out and dance, not sit in a theatre singing along. Jazz reinforced the dance halls, while, at the end of the decade musical cinema could provide a more sophisticated song and dance show for a fraction of the price of a music hall evening.

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Just Can’t Get Enough: Synth-Pop and Its Legacies

Editors: Geoff Stahl, Nabeel Zuberi & Holly Kruse

If one were to nominate a pivotal moment for synth-pop, 1978 is a strong contender: Kraftwerk switches on Die Mensch-Maschine; Gary Numan’s group Tubeway Army and the Yellow Magic Orchestra release their debut albums; The Human League, Japan, The Normal (AKA Daniel Miller of Mute Records) and Telex release their first singles; two lads from Liverpool eschew their guitars for synths and a tape machine and form Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark; the group Berlin forms in Los Angeles, Duran Duran in Birmingham, and Soft Cell begins to record in Leeds. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the sound of synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines becomes an indelible part of the pop soundscape, manifested in music-making across the globe.

Synth-pop is a loose rubric that includes DIY electronic music, post-punk and sounds shot through with the tropes of futurism and dystopia during the Cold War and early neoliberalism that Mark Fisher has called “the eerie.” Synth-pop also refers to melodic hits and chart toppers such as those by a-ha, Bronski Beat, The Buggles, Eurythmics, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Tears for Fears, Ultravox, Visage and Yazoo. This collection aims to cover synth-pop broadly defined, considering everything between its most rough-hewn and naive forms to its glossier, sophisticated incarnations. Along these lines, this collection aims to map out the distinctive synth-pop sound, its imagery and its global circuits, from its early experimental days to how its aesthetics have been recollected and refashioned in the decades since. We are particularly interested in contributions that counter synth-pop’s white, male hegemony and explore the genre beyond the Anglo/American axis.

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Videogame Music and Sound: Approaches from Latin America

JSMG Special Issue Call

Edited by: Karina Moritzen (Universidade Federal Fluminense / Universität Oldenburg), Ignacio Quiroz (National University of Litoral), Ariel Grez Valdenegro (LUDUM/University of Santiago de Chile).

This special issue intends to provide a meeting ground for the knowledge produced in Latin America on the topic of sound and music in video games. Latin America here will be understood in a broad sense that is not limited to its geographical area: it will also be regarded as a wide fertile space in which cultural objects, creative processes, currents of thought, aesthetics, epistemologies and methodologies are constructed through multiple perspectives.

Due to the uneven global videogames circulation (as most of the AAA games are created in the Global North and distributed globally), the studies that focus on the issue of sound and music in this media have mostly covered titles from the large games industry, and the theoretical production in this field has mostly been written from the Global North through eurocentric points of view. This had an impact on the theoretical direction that research has taken, and on the way in which questions have been proposed and dealt with. There are many epistemologies still missing from the conversation, as there are varied ways of comprehending the particularities that emerge around video game music given the cultural context in which it is perceived.

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Music in Non-Digital Games

Special Issue of JSMG (Journal of Sound and Music in Games).

The planned issue, ed. by Christoph Hust (Leipzig, Germany) and Martin Roth (Kyoto, Japan), focuses on music in non-digital games – board games, dice games, card games, pen-and-paper role-playing games – within a global perspective. Its aim is to give a first overview of a broad topic that largely has not been explored before. Proposals that deal with sources from the 20th and 21st century are especially welcome. The aim is to consider games as cultural artifacts that store information about how music is conceptualized in a certain historical and cultural environment. Among others, possible topics might include:

• games that include practical music making
• quiz games about music
• depiction of musical canon formation in games
• atmospheric background music for pen-and-paper role-playing games
• music as a plot device in P&P games
• depiction of individual musical genres in games
• games about the musical market
• music games as a means of product placement, marketing, and advertising 
• depiction of cultural and/or gender stereotypes in music games
• games in the service of music pedagogics
• music games and TV

For further inspiration, a small collection of relevant games can be found via this link: https://katalog.hmt-leipzig.de/Search/Results?lookfor=spiel&type=Signatur Read the rest of this entry »

Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives

The Seventh Biennial
Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference
Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, United Kingdom
1–4 August 2023

Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. It reflects, informs, and articulates convictions and concerns that are irreducibly local even as it flows along global networks. The goal of the Christian Congregational Music conference is to expand the avenues of scholarly inquiry into congregational music-making by bringing together world-class scholars and practitioners to explore the varying cultural, social, and spiritual roles music plays in the life of various Christian communities around the world. We are pleased to invite proposals for the sixth biennial conference at Ripon College in Cuddesdon, near Oxford, United Kingdom, from Tuesday, August 1, to Friday, August 4, 2023. The conference will feature guest speakers, roundtables and workshops that reflect the ever-broadening scope of research and practice in Christian congregational music-making around the world.

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Voices of Women: Materialities, Cultural Transfer and Musical Authorship

VOW Erasmus+ Educational Symposium for researchers, music educators, and graduate music students
Dec. 1-2, 2022
University of Groningen

The Voices of Women project, an Erasmus+ funded joint project with the University of Groningen, The University of Stavanger, The Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø), and The University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar invites paper presentations from teachers, graduate students, and scholars interested in the theme of musical authorship in connection to women’s voices. We understand voices metaphorically, artistically, and literally to include women or women-identifying genders in a variety of roles whose creative Read the rest of this entry »