Music, Sound and Silence in Videogames

Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT)
Issue editor: Lidia López Gómez

Number: 3 (December 2020)
Deadline for full articles: 1^st October 2020
Issue date: 22^nd December 2020

The scientific publication the Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT) grew out of the research group of the same name (SSIT), which is linked to the TecnoCampus university centres, affiliated with Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The journal seeks to bring together academic debate and scientific research on the relationship between sound as a broad concept and an audiovisual context.

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IASPM UK&I London Calling Conference

IMPORTANT INFO FOR THOSE PLANNING TO ATTEND THE ONLINE CONFERENCE:

1. If you haven’t registered on Eventbrite by 5pm UK time on Monday 18th May (Click Here To Register) we can’t guarantee we can process you in time for the first keynote on Tuesday with Mykaell Riley – although you will still be able to watch it on the website – just not participate in the discussion. You can continue to register after that and we will process people as quickly as we can.
2. On Tuesday morning we will email everyone who has registered with the conference login details. People who register later will be emailed separately.
3. We can only let 100 people into the keynote Zoom sessions but you can also watch the session live on the website and use the comments section to ask questions. (There are nearly 200 people registered at the moment and still rising). Details of the ‘door policy’ for the Zoom session will be announced in the login email on Tuesday morning.
4. Every week there will be some streamed performances after the keynote and, for the most part, they are musicians without other income so please support them by contributing something through the PayPal.Me links under the YouTube Live screens on the website.

The website for the event is here: https://london-calling-iaspm2020.com

Masters scholarship for BAME students at Goldsmiths

Goldsmiths Department of Music offers a MA/MMus scholarship for BAME students.

There is a dramatic under-representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) music scholars at the academic professional level. The same is true throughout British academia. This full tuition fee-waiver scholarship aims to support a BAME student who intends to progress through postgraduate study and into an academic research position.

The deadline for applying for this scholarship is 9am, 13 July 2020.

Full details: https://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/fees-funding/departmental-awards/music/

Born to Be Alive: Live Music as a Crucial Dimension of 21st Century Popular Music

Ethnomusicology Review Special Issue (more info here)

Savage (2019) paints a devastating portrait of the music industry’s current state. In the United States, record sales have dropped about 80% in the last decade: from 450 to 89 million, and its plight continues. From 2017 to 2018, worldwide record sales percentage plummeted an additional 23%. At the latest Grammy Awards, two of the nominees for best album never had a physical release. The situation becomes more acute when analyzing 2018’s top selling records: the vast majority relates to film soundtracks. How can the music industry react? We must first consider that this is a very recent reality and that the actors’ adaptability cannot keep up with the constant technological progress in music digitalization and that, these days, anyone with a computer or smartphone is able to download hundreds of albums and stockpile thousands of songs. We sometimes forget that those processes only started back in 1998 with the evolution of the MP3 player. At the time, the MP3 format allowed a revolutionary audio compression. It was a clear example of an action’s non-intended consequences: a tool which was supposed to help the music industry ended up harming it in the long run. As we know, after MP3 came sharing websites like Napster, KaZaa with peer-to-peer downloads of free music. If, on the one hand, the number of downloads was ever-growing, the music industry’s reaction was to potentially sue any and all people who illegally downloaded a file (Morris, 2015). The most recent example of this phenomenon in everyone’s mind may be Metallica’s quixotic struggle.

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21st Century Music Practice Research Network – Session 2

Seven Practice-Research Online Symposia – Summer 2020

Session 2: Restrictions and Affordances

This is a call for audio or audio-visual work which explores this practice-research theme in some way. The work will be presented online through YouTube and the http://C21MP.org website and additionally promoted through the IASPM UK & Ireland online conference hosted by the University of West London this summer. Discussion of the pieces (and/or practice-based responses) will also be presented through the website. The work can be in any style (from the highly commercial to the highly experimental) and be any combination of vocal, acoustic, electrical and electronic. It has, of course, to illuminate the theme and can include:

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Popular Music and Society Special Issue: Jazz Diasporas

Guest Editors: Bruce Johnson and Adam Havas

Submissions are invited for a special issue of Popular Music and Society on jazz diasporas. This special issue is about how jazz circulated beyond its accepted sites of origin. This can be both international and intranational; that is, jazz outside the United States, but also jazz outside New Orleans. The latter has received extensive coverage in jazz historiography through geographically based stylistic typologies: Chicago, New York, Kansas City, West Coast. While there is also a growing literature on the international diaspora, both are dominated by essentialist metropolitan and national taxonomies. These approaches elide the dynamics of micro-localized scenes, how and why they are formed, what sort of networks they emerge from and develop. So, by way of example, more might be learned about the circulation of jazz by the study of international port cities and shipping routes than by generalisations based on an individual nation, or by the study of sub-urban scenes than under the rubric of a large city. To understand jazz, one must understand its diasporic reinventions.

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Sound Stage Screen (SSS)

We are pleased to announce the launch of Sound Stage Screen (SSS), a new biannual peer-reviewed journal devoted to historical and theoretical research into the relations between sound, performance, and media. SSS will address a wide range of phenomena, practices, and objects pertaining to sound and music in light of the interconnections between performing traditions and media archaeologies: from opera to musical multimedia, and from cinema to interactive audio-visual platforms.

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21st Century Music Practice Research Network

Seven Practice-Research Online Symposia – Summer 2020

Session 1: Deductive and Inductive Working Methods

This is a call for audio or audio-visual work which explores this practice-research theme in some way. The work will be presented online through YouTube and the C21MP.org website and additionally promoted through the IASPM UK & Ireland online conference hosted by the University of West London this summer. Discussion of the pieces (and/or practice-based responses) will also be presented through the C21MP.org website. The work can be in any style (from the highly commercial to the highly experimental) and be any combination of vocal, acoustic, electrical and electronic. It has, of course, to illuminate the theme and can include:

• Performance
• Composition
• Studio Recording
• Sound to Picture work
• Pieces for Radio
• Sound Art

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Independent Music Labels: Histories, Practices and Values

03-04.12.2020 | Lisbon | NOVA FCSH

Within the field of popular music studies, little attention has been given to the impacts of independent music labels outside the Anglo-Saxon context, particularly in the production, dissemination and consumption of music in semi-peripheral countries such as Portugal. On the other hand, when the scope of the reflection goes beyond the Anglo-Saxon context the study of major record companies has been privileged over small structures of local / national scope which operate independently from these large companies and/or media groups with a transnational reach. Starting from broader discussions about the relationship between the local and the global in music production, this colloquium proposes a discussion on the impact of independent music labels with a particular focus on the Portuguese context and/or in contexts that are similarly located outside the main production centers. We will take as a starting point some recognized (yet open to scrutiny) assumptions about independent labels in the field of music production: the dissemination and making available of local musics and artists in opposition to the hegemony of global (mostly Anglo-Saxon) artists and genres released by multinationals; the valuing of aesthetic and artistic dimensions in music making at the expense of its commercial potential; the forms of organization and work that are innovative and adaptable to the changing contexts in the record sector, particularly in the new millennium. This is an inter and multidisciplinary colloquium accepting proposals in disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology, anthropology and history, among others. We also hope to establish a dialogue between the academy and the record sector with the presence and participation of independent label managers.
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Special issue on Contemporary Issues in Live Music 

Call for papers from Arts and the Market

Guest editors:
Dr Chris Anderton, Solent University, Southampton, UK
Dr Sergio Pisfil, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, Lima, Peru

Arts and the Market is pleased to announce a Special Issue focused on the intersection of live music with contemporary social and cultural issues.

The past ten years have seen significant global growth in the live music sector, and a burgeoning interest in academia, exploring aspects of live music history, business, technology, culture, reception and space. Recent book-length publications include a three-part series by Simon Frith et al., with monographs in preparation/press from Fabian Holt and Steve Waksman, and forthcoming edited book collections from Angela Jones & Rebecca Jane Bennett, Ewa Mazierska et al. and guest editors Chris Anderton & Sergio Pisfil. The available literature has most strongly focused on music festivals (such as Robinson 2015; McKay 2015; Arnold 2018; Anderton 2019), but the broader field of live music studies is rapidly expanding with a particular interest in areas such as economics, work practices, spatiality and gender.

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