Innovation In Music 2026

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

Music Beyond Tools and Rules
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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.
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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?
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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Post-digital Practices in Music Teacher Training

Post-digital practices such as producing, DJing, sampling and remixing are as much an expression of contemporary music culture as making music on the web, in virtual spaces, or with artificial intelligence (e.g. Haenisch et al., 2023; Mazierska et al., 2019; Miranda, 2021). The qualification of these practices as post-digital indicates that (1) they could only emerge under conditions shaped by digitalization; that (2) at the same time they cannot be understood as exclusively digital, but are intertwined with analogue practices and processes in multiple ways; and that (3) researching these practices requires considering not only their technical dimension, but also their social, ecological, cultural, aesthetics and economic aspects, among other (e.g., Buchborn & Treß, 2023; Clements, 2018; Weidner & Stange, 2022).

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BFE and RMA Research Students’ Conference 2026

6th-8th January 2026, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK
Email: [email protected]

The British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) and Royal Musical Association (RMA) Research Students’ Conference will be hosted by Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC, part of Birmingham City University), on 6th–8th January 2026. This will be an in-person event to allow networking and social interaction to take place, and to foster connections across a variety of music sub-disciplines.

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Retrofuturism & Utopia in the 21st Century

Symposium to be held online 28 and 29 August 2025

The 21st-century internet has provided avenues for the exploration of both nostalgic and utopian visions, often intertwined. Since 2022 we have held a series of online symposia on ‘retrofuturism’—a term we use to denote an embrace not just of lost sensations and imaginaries, but also of lost possibilities and transformation. Music and sound are often central to these ideas of elsewhere, from vaporwave and chiptune to hauntology.

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