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

Labora[R]tio: Collaborate, Articulate, Integrate

Posted: January 24th, 2017 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

[lat.: work, effort]
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
May 10–12, 2017     

Sound Thought is an annual festival of music and sound research, composition, and performance run by postgraduate students from the University of Glasgow. Sound Thought presents a unique opportunity for postgraduate researchers by providing them with a platform to present their research in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment alongside the work of contemporary practitioners. Sound Thought 2017 marks the 10th anniversary of the festival, having been initially established in 2007.
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Music by Numbers: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in the Music Industry

Posted: January 23rd, 2017 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Editors
Dave Laing and Richard Osborne

Call for Chapters
Proposal submission: 31 March 2017
Full chapters due: 31 October 2017

Introduction
The music industries have always been concerned, even obsessed, with numbers, whether those of chart placings, sales awards, website hits, ticket sales or listener figures. They operate on a premise that only a small ratio of artists will succeed. They issue statistics that show the importance of their contribution to GDP or the need for protection from pirates and touts. There are also numbers that are not made public: streaming royalties; breakeven points; the division of profits; algorithms. And there are numbers that they cannot deal with yet: big data is accumulating but there are problems with accessing it, sharing it and making the best use of it. Read the rest of this entry »


New Bloomsbury music book series

Posted: January 16th, 2017 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Alternate Takes: Critical Responses to Popular Music is a series that aims to examine popular music from critical perspectives that challenge the accepted ways of thinking about areas such as popular music history, popular music analysis, the music industry, and the popular music canon. The series ultimately aims to have readers listen to – and think about – popular music in new ways.

The series is edited Matt Brennan and Simon Frith along with editorial board members Daphne Brooks, Susan Fast, Sarah Hill, Marcus O’Dair, Ann Powers, Tracey Thorn, Oliver Wang, and Eric Weisbard.
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Electric Music, Music and Electricity

Posted: January 5th, 2017 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Symposium organized by MUSIDANSE (E.A. 1572) / JAMM May 9th & 10th 2017, Université Paris 8

“I Sing the Body Electric”: this statement by the American poet Walt Whitman at the end of the nineteenth century (reprised a century later by the writer Ray Bradbury, and then by the jazz-funk group Weather Report), evoking the communion of bodies, seems to point toward a connection between artistic expression and electricity.

This symposium proposes to study this connection, by examining first the archipelago of electric music, starting with the “electric harpsichord” (“clavessin électrique”) project of the Jesuit priest Jean-Baptiste Delaborde (1759), so at the beginnings of electrical science, and going from there to the development of electronic technology, digital technology (from Schaeffer to dub, then to sampling, and to the latest uses of computer music).

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