Call for papers for Sound as Art – Sound in History. Sound as Culture – Sound in Theory Conference :: organized by Ansa Lønstrup, Morten Michelsen and others :: September 23–25, 2010 :: University of Aarhus, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark :: Call for Papers — Deadline: April 1, 2010.

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. Continue reading

From Pedro Rebelo’s Blog :: Network Performance issue of Contemporary Music Review Vol.28 Nos 4/5 August/October 2009 Out Now:

This issue of Contemporary Music Review is in itself a network of different materials and approaches which attempt to provide ‘nodal’ views on performance in the network. From the theoretical to the anecdotal, from the score to the historical timeline each article focuses on a particular view of the network, addressing practices which are sometimes new and other times instances of dreams and fantasies of centuries.

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[Image: Cover of Brian Eno’s 1974 album “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)”] Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics by Geeta Dayal, Rhizome.org:

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like “control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. “Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking… a whole system is a living system is a learning system,” as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Continue reading

[Image: Gil Alterovitz’s translation of genes (circles) into music … via A Musical Score for Disease] EvoMUSART 2010 - 8th European Workshop on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design :: April 7-9, 2010 :: Istanbul, Turkey :: CALL FOR PAPERS - Deadline: November 4, 2009.

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.

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. Continue reading

[Image: Max Neuhaus, Radio Net, 1977] “Although historical and contemporary artistic and theoretical discourse regarding radio art is scant to say the least, there has been, and continues to be, audible evidence of artists and writers whose considerations on the subject begin to shape a theoretical body. The combination of influences shaping this history sheds valuable light on radio art practices today, as there appears to be a clear relationship between early explorations and more recent theoretical considerations. From the beginning, artists were prone to considering radio as a material as opposed to merely a distribution apparatus, as is evidenced by the writings of Bertolt Brecht, F. T. Marinetti. and others. However, when compared to the other arts, namely the visual, there is a marked absence of historical radio art works and theoretical writings. Continue reading

IEEE International SocialCom-09 Conference :: August 29, 2009 :: Vancouver, Canada :: Social Behavior in Music: Final Call for Papers — Deadline: May 17, 2009.

Music making and listening are a clear example of human activities that are above all interactive and social. On the one hand, however, nowadays mediated music making and listening is usually still a passive, non-interactive, non-context sensitive, and non-social experience. The current electronic technologies have not yet been able to support and promote these essential aspects. Continue reading

Interrogating Ideas: Christoph Cox and Chris Kubick — Anything But Sound Art :: March 13, 2009; 8:00 pm :: New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA.

New Langton Arts presents a conversation between Christoph Cox (philosopher, writer, and co-curator of Langton’s current exhibition) and Chris Kubick (artist, composer and sound designer). This discussion will draw upon the independent research and ongoing correspondence between Cox and Kubick into audio culture, vanguard music, and the ontology of the audible, weaving in sound samples selected by Cox and Kubick for this exposition and multimedia event. Continue reading

Music, Language, Thought :: February 28, 2009; 10:00 am -5:00 pm :: New York University, Silver Center of Arts and Science, 100 Washington Square East, Department of Music, Room 220, 2nd Floor (Enter at Washington Place Doors).

Music, Language, Thought is a new interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Music and Comparative Literature Departments. Broadly speaking, the series focuses on the relationship between music and language, and our speakers will examine its theoretical ramifications for politics, aesthetics and historiography. The project stems from ongoing conversation and collaboration between graduate students within these two departments, and will continue on an annual basis. Continue reading

“… In contemporary discussions of the body in space, of information highways and virtual realities, radiant sound establishes a `ground’ in the discourse of the future - be it utopian or dystopian - built from sound’s long history of transmission (telephony, radiophony) and `spirit’ (electrified by composers such as Cage, Varese and Stockhausen). This ‘ground’ has also been adopted to some extent by the contemporary philosophers Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard, who use aural, spatial and incinderal metaphors to raise questions about being, technology, and the future. Thus radiant sound becomes a figure in different but related cultural fields: as a trope for many of the great modernist reconciliations, its history in organicism, romanticsm and individualism, provides a model for the individual dispersed across the electronic field. Continue reading