Just Can’t Get Enough: Synth-Pop and Its Legacies

Editors: Geoff Stahl, Nabeel Zuberi & Holly Kruse

If one were to nominate a pivotal moment for synth-pop, 1978 is a strong contender: Kraftwerk switches on Die Mensch-Maschine; Gary Numan’s group Tubeway Army and the Yellow Magic Orchestra release their debut albums; The Human League, Japan, The Normal (AKA Daniel Miller of Mute Records) and Telex release their first singles; two lads from Liverpool eschew their guitars for synths and a tape machine and form Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark; the group Berlin forms in Los Angeles, Duran Duran in Birmingham, and Soft Cell begins to record in Leeds. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the sound of synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines becomes an indelible part of the pop soundscape, manifested in music-making across the globe.

Synth-pop is a loose rubric that includes DIY electronic music, post-punk and sounds shot through with the tropes of futurism and dystopia during the Cold War and early neoliberalism that Mark Fisher has called “the eerie.” Synth-pop also refers to melodic hits and chart toppers such as those by a-ha, Bronski Beat, The Buggles, Eurythmics, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Tears for Fears, Ultravox, Visage and Yazoo. This collection aims to cover synth-pop broadly defined, considering everything between its most rough-hewn and naive forms to its glossier, sophisticated incarnations. Along these lines, this collection aims to map out the distinctive synth-pop sound, its imagery and its global circuits, from its early experimental days to how its aesthetics have been recollected and refashioned in the decades since. We are particularly interested in contributions that counter synth-pop’s white, male hegemony and explore the genre beyond the Anglo/American axis.

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Videogame Music and Sound: Approaches from Latin America

JSMG Special Issue Call

Edited by: Karina Moritzen (Universidade Federal Fluminense / Universität Oldenburg), Ignacio Quiroz (National University of Litoral), Ariel Grez Valdenegro (LUDUM/University of Santiago de Chile).

This special issue intends to provide a meeting ground for the knowledge produced in Latin America on the topic of sound and music in video games. Latin America here will be understood in a broad sense that is not limited to its geographical area: it will also be regarded as a wide fertile space in which cultural objects, creative processes, currents of thought, aesthetics, epistemologies and methodologies are constructed through multiple perspectives.

Due to the uneven global videogames circulation (as most of the AAA games are created in the Global North and distributed globally), the studies that focus on the issue of sound and music in this media have mostly covered titles from the large games industry, and the theoretical production in this field has mostly been written from the Global North through eurocentric points of view. This had an impact on the theoretical direction that research has taken, and on the way in which questions have been proposed and dealt with. There are many epistemologies still missing from the conversation, as there are varied ways of comprehending the particularities that emerge around video game music given the cultural context in which it is perceived.

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Music in Non-Digital Games

Special Issue of JSMG (Journal of Sound and Music in Games).

The planned issue, ed. by Christoph Hust (Leipzig, Germany) and Martin Roth (Kyoto, Japan), focuses on music in non-digital games – board games, dice games, card games, pen-and-paper role-playing games – within a global perspective. Its aim is to give a first overview of a broad topic that largely has not been explored before. Proposals that deal with sources from the 20th and 21st century are especially welcome. The aim is to consider games as cultural artifacts that store information about how music is conceptualized in a certain historical and cultural environment. Among others, possible topics might include:

• games that include practical music making
• quiz games about music
• depiction of musical canon formation in games
• atmospheric background music for pen-and-paper role-playing games
• music as a plot device in P&P games
• depiction of individual musical genres in games
• games about the musical market
• music games as a means of product placement, marketing, and advertising 
• depiction of cultural and/or gender stereotypes in music games
• games in the service of music pedagogics
• music games and TV

For further inspiration, a small collection of relevant games can be found via this link: https://katalog.hmt-leipzig.de/Search/Results?lookfor=spiel&type=Signatur Read the rest of this entry »

Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives

The Seventh Biennial
Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference
Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, United Kingdom
1–4 August 2023

Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. It reflects, informs, and articulates convictions and concerns that are irreducibly local even as it flows along global networks. The goal of the Christian Congregational Music conference is to expand the avenues of scholarly inquiry into congregational music-making by bringing together world-class scholars and practitioners to explore the varying cultural, social, and spiritual roles music plays in the life of various Christian communities around the world. We are pleased to invite proposals for the sixth biennial conference at Ripon College in Cuddesdon, near Oxford, United Kingdom, from Tuesday, August 1, to Friday, August 4, 2023. The conference will feature guest speakers, roundtables and workshops that reflect the ever-broadening scope of research and practice in Christian congregational music-making around the world.

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Voices of Women: Materialities, Cultural Transfer and Musical Authorship

VOW Erasmus+ Educational Symposium for researchers, music educators, and graduate music students
Dec. 1-2, 2022
University of Groningen

The Voices of Women project, an Erasmus+ funded joint project with the University of Groningen, The University of Stavanger, The Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø), and The University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar invites paper presentations from teachers, graduate students, and scholars interested in the theme of musical authorship in connection to women’s voices. We understand voices metaphorically, artistically, and literally to include women or women-identifying genders in a variety of roles whose creative Read the rest of this entry »

PGR Popular Music Studies Workshop

NOTE: Deadline extended to 19th September 2022.

On the 20th October 2022, The Institute of Popular Music (IPM) at the University of Liverpool is hosting a Popular Music Studies Workshop for postgraduate researchers (PGRs).

Designed as a small event for focused discussion, the Workshop will bring together PGRs from various disciplines to discuss their research and the study of popular music. Participants will be invited to:

• Gather for lunch and informal conversation (1pm-2pm)
• Participate in an ‘open masterclass’ session, sharing details of their own individual research projects and a particular issue, problem or challenge they are looking to manage or resolve (2pm-3pm)
• Contribute to a general discussion on the study of popular music (3pm-4pm)

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XXII Biennial IASPM International Conference

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
June 26–30, 2023

Theme: Popular Music in Crisis

It is not hyperbolic to claim that crisis characterizes the state of the world in the 2020s. The COVID-19 virus still rages across the globe. In many countries, this public health crisis intersects with a crisis of political legitimacy caused by increased polarization and the rise of right-wing populism. The refusal of many to vaccinate themselves against COVID-19 has led to the continuing spread of the disease. Elsewhere, similar dynamics are exacerbated by lack of effective vaccines, little-to-no capacity to make them, and the hesitancy of wealthier countries to distribute vaccines beyond their national borders. An ever smaller number of people control most of the world’s wealth as the gap between the wealthy and the poor has become a seemingly unbridgeable chasm. The ongoing crisis of climate change manifests in many ways: increasingly dangerous storms, displaced populations, out-of-control fires, financial and material devastation, rising sea levels, and more, unfortunately exacerbated by politics and the destructive impact of late capitalism. Wars, civil and otherwise, have also increased the numbers of migrants whose home countries are devastated but who are not welcomed elsewhere, leading to a crisis of the displaced and, with the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine compounding continued struggles in Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Syria, and many other regions, heightened tension between global powers that at times evokes the Cold War. The rise of neo-fascism has accompanied the return of dangerous nationalisms that attempt to disenfranchise certain members of society, often by race, gender, and sexuality, while reinforcing existing social and racial constructions. Other crises abound, as white supremacy rises again in North America and Europe, women’s rights are under attack in various repressive regimes across the globe, and we learn of human rights abuses perpetrated during military crises and civil unrest.

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