Category: Conferences

Sound as Art – Sound in History, Sound as Culture – Sound in Theory
Conference on sound studies
University of Aarhus, Denmark
September 23–25, 2010

Call for papers

Today, sound studies provide an important framework for furthering cultural research related to a broad range of historical and contemporary issues. Also, sound studies contribute to the understanding of currents in social and global activity increasingly determined by auditory, sonic, and communicative materiality. At the same time, the exploration of auditivity and auditory cultures raises a series of significant aesthetic, medial, historical, cultural, and theoretical questions.

Cultural changes related to globalization and digital media have questioned traditional paradigms of vision containing notions of visual representation, semiotics, and a hermeneutics based on reading. Such changes suggest an auditive paradigm in which modes of interaction, mobile communications, and spatial and geographic fluidity lead to a renewed sense of orality and listening. In research this new paradigm is establishing itself as the interdisciplinary field of sound studies. It draws on disciplines such as musicology, performance studies, art history, anthropology, cultural studies, urban studies, and histories of technology and media while influencing these disciplines with new modes of reflection on and examination of their respective methodologies and subsequent political effects.

The aim of the conference is to profile contemporary sound studies as an interdisciplinary field of studies and to contribute to the discussion and development of the auditive paradigm in general. Key concepts like ‘acoustemology’, ‘acoustic space’ or ‘sonic environment’ might be reflected upon and developed as well, both at a theoretical level and with regard to specific cultural, medial and aesthetic contexts.

The programme of the conference will consist of keynote lectures, plenary roundtables, thematic workshops and individual presentations. Individual presentations and entire workshops may draw inspiration from the following array of questions:

• What is the experiential framework of listening and auditive culture, and how is the world constituted (identity, locality, sociality, culture etc) through auditive practice?
• How has musical and technological sound production and perception changed through the last century and how has it contributed to everyday soundscapes, the concert hall, and the media?
• What can we know, i.e., what types of knowledge, identity and meaning are made possible through acoustic practice – are there any limits to sound taken as an experiential framework and as cognition?
• What perspectives might arise from current studies of auditory modes of relating to space, of appropriating, expressing and designing social environments?
• How does sound help define urban environments, and how might issues related to urban planning, architectural design, and noise benefit from a deeper and more complex understanding of sound?
• What are the correlations between listening and other sensory modalities, the body, sociality, materiality, technology and media (sound viewed as a cognitive paradigm isolated from actual resonating sound).
• How do auditive practices appear to be conventional or normative? How do auditive practices, in conjunction with other sensory modalities, articulate value, aesthetics, ethics and morals in culture?
• How do we further the development of academic terminologies for dealing with sound?
• How can transgressions of traditional distinctions between sound, music and art be understood in a socio-cultural perspective?
• What do the specific aesthetic aspects of sound art seek to achieve in contrast to the predominance of visuality and modes of seeing within the arts?
• How is artistic and academic education in sound competence developing?

Proposals for presentations (20/10 mins) or workshops (90 mins) must be submitted to the conference organisers/programme committee by April 1, 2010 as an email attachment (rtf/pdf/doc) to soundstudies@hum.au.dk.

Please include the following information: Paper abstract and title (max. 200 words), name(s), affiliation, e-mail, and technical equipment required (PC/DVD/CD/data projector/over-head projector/etc.).

Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than May 3, 2010.

Keynote speakers are Dr. Penelope Gouk (University of Manchester), Dr. Jean-Paul Thibaud (CRESSON), and professor Adam Krims (University of Nottingham).

The official language of the conference is English. The conference fee is 1.000 D.Kr/€135. Please contact one of the organisers mentioned below in case you need more information.

The conference is organized by the “National Research Network on Auditive Culture”(http://auditiveculture.ku.dk/), the research project “Audiovisual Culture” (http://www.ak.au.dk/en), and the Nordic Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.

April 7, 2010
KTH, School of Computer Science and Communication, Stockholm, Sweden
http://interactive-sonification.org/ISon2010/

The overall number of attendees will be *strictly limited* (to about 40), and priority will be given to attendees that submit and present novel and interesting work on Interactive Sonification.

It would help us to hear very early if you plan to attend or/and to submit work.

This workshop is intended as a forum for newcomers and all those interested in tightly-closed loop human-computer systems involving sonification. Work in progress is also very welcome, if there are relevant novel ideas, new approaches, techniques or applications to report.

Deadline for abstracts: October, 31 2009

Please see the above website for full details, and the call for papers.

EvoMUSART 2010
8th European Workshop on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design

7-9 April, 2010, Istanbul, Turkey

http://www.evostar.org

INTRODUCTION

EvoMUSART 2010 is the eight workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events and the growth of interest in the field, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2010 is to bring together researchers who are using biologically inspired techniques for artistic tasks, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in this area.

The workshop will be held from 7-9 April, 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey as part of the EvoStar event.

Accepted papers will be presented orally at the workshop and included in the EvoWorkshops proceedings, published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

EvoMUSART 2010 important dates are:

Submission deadline: November 4, 2009
Conference: 7-9 April, 2010

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The papers should concern the use of bio-inspired techniques (Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Life, Artificial Neural Networks, Swarm Intelligence, etc.) in the scope of the generation, analysis and interpretation of art, music, design, architecture and other artistic fields. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– Generation
o Biologically Inspired Design and Art-Making Systems that create drawings, images, animations, sculptures, poetry, text, objects, designs, webpages, buildings, etc.;
o Biologically Inspired Sound-Generators and Music-Systems that create music, aggregate sound, or simulate instruments, voices, effects, etc;
o Robotic Based Evolutionary Art and Music;
o Other related generative techniques;
– Theory
o Computational Aesthetics, Emotional Response, Surprise, Novelty;
o Representation techniques;
o Comparative analysis and classification;
o Validation methodologies;
o New biologically inspired computation models in art, music and design;
– Computer Aided Creativity
o New ways of integrating users into evolutionary computation art and music frameworks;
o Analysis and evaluation of: the artistic potential of biologically inspired art and music; the artistic processes inherent to these approaches; the resulting artifacts;
o Collaborative distributed artificial art environments;
– Automation
o Techniques for automated fitness assignment;
o Systems that exploit biologically inspired computation to analyze artistic objects and artifacts;

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND SUBMISSION DETAILS

Submit your manuscript, at most 10 A4 pages long, in Springer LNCS format no later than November 4, 2009. Formatting instructions available at:

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0

The papers will be peer reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Authors will be notified via email on the results of the review by 20 December 2009.

The authors of accepted papers will have to improve their paper on the basis of the reviewers’ comments and will be asked to send a camera ready version of their manuscripts, along with text sources and pictures, by 10 January 2010. The accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, published in Springer LNCS Series, which will be available at the workshop.

Further information, including the Online Submission Details, can be found on the following pages:
Evo*2010: http://www.evostar.org
EvoMUSART2010: http://dces.essex.ac.uk/research/evostar/EvoMUSART.htm

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission: 4 November 2009
Workshop: 7-9 April 2009