Tuesday, October 28, 2014


CFP: "Technologies of Sound: Systems, Networks, Modernities"


The Stony Brook Music Department announces its Fifth Annual Graduate Music Symposium, “Technologies of Sound: Systems, Networks, Modernities,” to be held February 13-14, 2015.

The Stony Brook Graduate Music Symposium aims to engage emerging scholars from various disciplines in dialogue about the relationship between music and technology. In this conference, technology is conceived as a broad discourse shaping music history and theory, not only in reference to the tools of music making, but also to methods and procedures in the creation and performance of music, the ethics of various music technologies, and effects of technologies on performers and listeners. We welcome symposium participants to explore these various conceptions of technology and how it relates to historical, social, political, philosophical, and scientific manifestations in music. The topics may include, but are not limited to:

● Electronic music, electro-acoustic music, acousmatic music
● Notation and theoretical systems as technologies
● Performance practices and organology
● Technology and its effect on soundscape and/or aurality
● Technological mediation, reproduction, and distribution of sound and music
● Sounds and technologies of conflict and power
● Sounds and technologies of gender, sexuality, race
● Audio-visual production and multimedia
● Acoustics, amplification, sound systems
● Audio recording technology, including musique concrète and digital methods

The symposium will also feature a keynote address by Arved Ashby (Ohio State University), and will coincide with a performance by the Stony Brook Opera. We invite graduate students to submit 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers and 30-minute composer presentations, and 40-minute lecture recitals. We welcome proposals from scholars in music history, theory, ethnomusicology, and other areas within the humanities and social sciences, as well as performers and composers whose work resonates with our theme. Proposals for composer talks should include a description of the proposed work and a short biography.

Please submit proposals to musicgradsymposium@stonybrook.edu by Friday, December 19, 2014 (please note a deadline extension). Stony Brook is accessible via JFK, the Long Island MacArthur Airport, the Long Island Rail Road, and the Bridgeport/Port Jefferson ferry. Housing with Stony Brook graduate students may be available for presenters staying overnight.