Welcome to The International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK and Ireland Branch

Fringes, outsides and undergrounds: The aesthetics and politics of unpopular music

Posted: September 29th, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

One-day conference to be held at Goldsmiths on 7 May 2016 

Musical forms such as noise, extreme metal, performance art, experimental techno, free improv and more take inspiration from both popular and art traditions without being fully identifiable with either.

These forms exist either on the fringes of, or outside, these commercial and cultural mainstreams, both in conventional musical centres such as London and Berlin and further afield, in South America, Japan and China.

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Hear The Music, Play The Game: Music And Game Design: Interplays And Perspectives

Posted: September 20th, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

GAME – Games as Art, Media, Entertainment
www.gamejournal.it
Call for Papers – n. 6/2016

Hear The Music, Play The Game: Music And Game Design: Interplays And Perspectives
Edited by Hillegonda C. Rietveld and Marco Benoît Carbone

http://www.gamejournal.it/n-62016-hear-the-music-play-the-game-music-and-game-design-interplays-and-perspectives/#.VbCbv4cn91M

Music composition and sound design in video games are important dimensions in the experience of play, gaining increased acknowledgement and attention within the game industry. The growing relevance and success of several kinds of music-based games, and their codification in novel genres and sub-genres, illustrates one tendency in this shift of focus towards the aural in relation to the usually visual dominance of the medium. This calls for an attempt to reconsider the often-overlooked impact of music and its role in defining games. Arguably, a distinction can be made between games in which music functions in the background, and games in which music is an integral part of the game mechanics. For example, attention to game music demands a reconsideration of the importance of sonic content in past productions, and to look at practices like the revival of chip music, associated with early arcade, console, and home computer games. Meanwhile, the music industry has recognized the importance of game music, as demonstrated by the growing amount of releases of game sound tracks as well as occasional in-game music sales in and across new and different markets. Composers and sound designers have too often been regarded as contributors to the final phases of game development, despite the central affective power of music production in game design and the experience of play.

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From a Whisper to a Scream: The Voice in Music

Posted: September 1st, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

2016 EMP Pop Conference
April 14-17, 2016, Seattle, Washington

The voice in music goes beyond singing: “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs,” Roland Barthes wrote. Voices insert the self into music, Billie Holiday stopping poet Frank O’Hara’s breath with choices of tempo and timbre, Neil Young transfixing rock fans with his “Old Black” Gibson electric guitar tone, the sentimiento expressed in the sung bolero resonating across the Americas. Finding their voice, performers – on stage and camera, recording in studios – make us identify, naturalize change. But voices embody community too, as in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “Black National Anthem” written by (pioneering popular music scholar) James Weldon Johnson, and they are the foundation of protest, the megaphone for social change. A switch in voice, from croon to rasp to rap to Auto-Tune, alters meaning and social statement.

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Conference on ‘Island Music and Dance’

Posted: September 1st, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

ISIC 12 , June 17-20 2016 Naha (Okinawa)

The 12th International Small Island Cultures conference will be held in Naha (Okinawa) from June 17th-20th 2016 at the Okinawa Prefectural University of the Arts. The main conference theme will be ‘Island Music and Dance’ and paper proposals will be invited on any aspect of this topic (traditional or modern).

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