STAVE/OFF: Non-traditional Modalities of Musical Training in Popular Musics

One-day symposium at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK
15 July 2026

Laying the groundwork for an emerging regional network of scholars, this one-day symposium seeks to examine what musical ‘training’ means outside of the traditional binary of reading vs not reading music notation. With an emphasis on popular musics, we invite all kinds of music thinkers, makers, and facilitators to submit an abstract for a 15-minute talk, workshop, or demonstration. STAVE/OFF will be a jam-packed day of networking and brainstorming.

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RETROFUTURISM 4

Online Symposium, 27 & 28 August 2026

Since 2022, we have held a series of online symposia addressing ‘retrofuturism’, a term we use to denote the ways in which internet aesthetics invoke visions of utopia and nostalgia. From vaporwave and hauntology to chiptune and frutiger aero, music, sound, and audiovisual media have been central to these present-day entanglements of past and future possibility. Our previous symposia have looked at microgenres, nostalgia, and anemoia. For our fourth symposium—held in association with the Nostagain Network—we turn to the issue of materiality.

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«Everybody calls me Giorgio»: Moroder across media, arts and communication

Brixen, Faculty of Education, University of Bozen-Bolzano
10-12 September 2026
IASPM Italia + IASPM D-A-CH

Giorgio Moroder’s biographical and professional history is remarkable and quite peculiar: belonging to a linguistic minority, raised in a region culturally and geographically removed from the main centres of the music industry, without any formal musical education, he nonetheless managed to become one of the most innovative and successful musicians on the planet.

This conference will be an opportunity to take a closer look Giorgio Moroder’s role in music and media, as well as broader, interconnected themes such as dance music, studio production, arts entrepreneurship, film music, intermediality, and remix cultures. The conference will also explore cultural heritage, sociolinguistics and migration routes in music and the arts, drawing on Moroder’s history as an artist born and raised in the predominantly Ladin-speaking Val Gardena/Gröden/Gherdëina in South Tyrol, Italy, then professionally matured in Germany and eventually relocated to the United States.

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The DJ Set

Special issue of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Music and Dance Culture
Edited by Lorenz Gilli, Johannes Hentschel, Dennis Mathei, and Ivan Mouraviev

https://dj.dancecult.net

This special issue of Dancecult aims to expand and deepen scholarly discussion of the DJ set: the live event and musical object around which much of electronic dance music culture revolves. We intend to continue the conversation catalyzed by musicologist Mark Butler’s study Playing with Something that Runs in 2014 about how DJ sets are prepared, performed, conceptualised, and mediated, following this journal’s own special issue on the DJ in 2011 as well as Kai Fikentscher’s (2000) and Butler’s earlier work (2006). We invite proposals for research that will build on these and more recent efforts by taking analysis of the DJ set and DJ performance, broadly understood, into new territory with respect to genre, space, sound, technology, identity, history, music and cultural theory, and more. In doing so, we identify a need for more scholarship that specifically explores what DJ sets are and what people do with them as musical events and objects that are shaped by power and social forces. This call recognizes, in turn, that DJ culture is undergoing significant transformations that may be changing the nature of DJ sets themselves. An estimated 37% of clubs have closed since March 2020 in the UK, while musical histories are only gradually being written for—and clubs are largely failing to secure the safety of—DJs and partygoers who are women, queer, trans, and people of colour (Garcia-Mispireta 2023: 191; NTIA 2024: 27). Livestreaming and digital DJ tools are also more abundant than ever, with the dominant market players that produce them attempting to consolidate their power further (McGlynn 2024).

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Circuits to Culture: Synthesizers as Instruments, Interfaces, and Ideas

12-13 September 2026 | Townshend Studio | University of West London, UK

SYNTHposium 26 will be an in-person only event this year.

We invite submissions for SYNTHposium ’26, bringing together practitioners, researchers, engineers, musicians, and scholars – interested in synthesizers in all their forms – historical, technical, cultural, and creative. We welcome proposals for paper presentations, performance-demonstrations or other initiatives over a two-day event bringing together practitioners, researchers, engineers, musicians, and scholars. Presenters will also be invited to a distributed creativity event on the evening of 11 September for a unique chance to use the historic instruments in the collection.

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Music in the (sub-)Arctic

Monday 7 – Tuesday 8 September 2026
Faculty of Music, Schwarzman Centre for Humanities

Keynote Speakers

Professor Tina K. Ramnarine (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘Artifact and Aspiration: Notes on Music, Minorities and Cosmologies in the Subarctic’

Professor Philip Ross Bullock (Wadham College, University of Oxford)
‘Fire and Ice: Sonic Survival and Soviet Pianism in the GULag’

Dr Aimar Ventsel & Dr Eleanor Peers (University of Tartu; Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
‘Singing the Universe: the Political Ecologies of Sakha Popular Music’

Rationale

Despite the perceived quietude of the vast empty white spaces of the Arctic and the boreal forests of the sub-Arctic, music has had and continues to occupy a central place in the lives of its inhabitants. The regions are home to some of the world’s most popular composers, musicians, and pop groups. For the (sub-)Arctic’s Indigenous communities, music can function as a form of empowerment, identity expression, community healing and linguistic and cultural revitalisation.

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Creative Industries: Technologies, Tools, and Transformations

AC[M] Creative Industries Futures Symposium 2026
Date: Thursday 11th June, 2026
Venue: Rich Mix, 35–47 Bethnal Grn Rd, London, E1 6LA

This call for contributions invites academics, industry professionals, researchers, practitioners and students to submit proposals to present at our fourth annual event addressing the future of the creative industries. This year’s theme, Technologies, Tools, and Transformations, explores the integration and application of innovative technologies within the creative industries/practices, spanning music, games, film, and beyond.

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IASPM Journal Special Issue: Mental Health in Popular Music

This Special Issue is motivated by the increasing visibility of mental health discourses in popular music. From long-standing myths of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll”, the “27 Club”, or the “tortured genius”, to recent disclosures by artists across genres, health-related themes have shaped the history of popular music cultures around the world. The tragic deaths of Avicii, Lil Peep, Amy Winehouse, Kim Jong-Hyun, Liam Payne, and others have placed mental health at the centre of public and industry debates. At the same time, contemporary stars such as Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar, and Justin Bieber have significantly altered the visibility of how psychological struggles are communicated and negotiated – both artistically and through practices of self-representation in online and offline contexts. Their work reflects and, in turn, influences wider societal debates and experiences of mental health.

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Producing Music, Producing Knowledge: Practice, Technology, and Culture in Music Production

Society for Music Production Research 3rd Annual Conference
September 9-11, 2026,  University of Huddersfield, UK

Overview
The 2026 Society for Music Production Research (SMPR) Conference, Producing Music, Producing Knowledge, brings together the international music production research community to explore the creative, technical, and cultural practices that define how music is produced, experienced, and understood.

SMPR is an international society dedicated to building knowledge and dialogue among practitioners and scholars of music production. Its work spans creation, technology, pedagogy, aesthetics, and reception—bridging research and practice across diverse musical and cultural contexts.

Hosted at the University of Huddersfield, home to one of the world’s largest communities of music production and popular music researchers, the conference provides a forum for critical, creative, and professional exchange.

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Music at the Edges: Peripherality in the practices of popular music

June 29 – July 1, 2026
University of Aberdeen, Kings College, Aberdeen, Scotland

For this meeting of the UK and Ireland branch of IASPM we invite scholars to explore and reflect on the conceptof peripherality as it relates to the diversity of practices undertaken in relation to music making anddissemination. We consider peripherality here in both its literal (spatial and geographical) forms and in themore metaphorical ways that attitudes and behaviours are shaped by a perceived distance from an impliedcentre. To this end, we encourage considerations of the ways in which peripherality may influence how musicis created, performed, recorded, and disseminated within and from such locales. This may include locationsthat are geographically isolated, taking into consideration the positive and negative influences on the localmusic scenes and their functioning. Peripherality may also refer to the ways in which the music markets withinsuch locales might be considered satellite markets for other centres of production. We also recognise theways in which specific genres of music may be considered ‘underground’ when positioned in relation to‘mainstream’ genres and hence are considered peripheral within specific markets. Furthermore, we recognise the ways in which digital and internet technologies can break down traditional barriers between the centre and the periphery and the tensions which may arise as a result of this.

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