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

Musical and media connectivities: practices, circulation, interactions

Posted: May 27th, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Musical and media connectivities: practices, circulation, interactions

Edited by Hélène Laurin & Andréane Morin-Simard

Kinephanos is a bilingual web-based journal. Focusing on questions involving cinema and popular media, Kinephanos encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The journal’s primary interests are movies and popular TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan cultures . The preferred approaches include cinema studies, communication theories, religion sciences, philosophy, cultural studies and media studies.

Theme

Technological and industrial upheaval significantly changes the way we produce and interpret music and media. The Internet is the catalyst for much of this change. Applications and websites like Spotify, Songza, and 8Tracks offer the opportunity to build playlists or stream music on demand. Others, such as YouTube and Soundcloud, allow for indepedent music distribution without a record company as the mediator. The recommended-listening algorithms employed by these sites raise many questions. How does this effect the user’s relationship to the music? How is this relation different from the ones shaped by listeners of previous generations? What is the impact on the social and unifying aspect of music? How does this change the power relations between producer and audience? Changes in media consumption habits change music reception.

Binge watching is increasingly popular. How does this effect the musical production for a TV series? How does it play on composition strategies used by producers of these television series and on its reception by the viewer? For example, how do leitmotifs and ending/cliffhanger music, eliciting an emotional impact, propel the audience to tune in immediately? Also, as American Idol reaches its last season, The Voice is growing more popular in global markets. While these shows broadcast a significant volume of music during prime time, MTV and MTV2 air quizzes and reality shows that bear little relevance to music. This seems to be one of many symptoms of the decentralization and the gradual multiplication of distribution platforms of music, and another indication of the segmentation of genres and audiences.

The ageing artists of popular music compete with the younger generation, but on unequal terms. While older musicians benefit from large media coverage, young musicians struggle to establish themselves. Genre and audience segmentation does not help their cause. This invites a return to the streamingwebsites that encourage personal listening. Some musicians often complain of little monetary compensation offered by these sites. Why has the music industry not evolved to keep pace with changes in listening habits? What kinds of interactions are constituted by the industry to make people buy music again? Is purchasing music desirable anymore? Social media is central to these new practices; how can we adequately theorize social media to account for their constant changes? How can popular music memory be perpetuated on such changing platforms?

This issue of Kinephanos attempts to pursue the discourse about the strong links between music and media. We want to offer a space to think about the undeniable influence of technological and media changes on the production, distribution and consumption of music.

The article proposals may address the following topics (but are not limited to):

  •  mediation of music in the media
  • creating a memory of music in the media
  • politics of discovery of new music on the Internet (algorithms, peer recommendations)
  • cultural history of the relation between media and music
  • analysis of a video game or TV show soundtrack
  • sharing and connectivity in practice and music creation tools
  • netlabels and digital distribution portals
  • analysis and comparisons of software and music creation plug-ins, from open architectures to professional standards

Submissions

Please send an abstract, between 750 and 1000 words, in English or French, by July 1st, 2015, to:
[email protected] and [email protected]

The abstract must include the title, the topic and the object(s) of study, and the methodology. Please include bibliographical references, your name, email address, and your institutional affiliation. Following our approbation sent to you by email (September 1st, 2015), please send us your completed article by December 1st, 2015.

Editorial rules

Kinephanos is a peer-reviewed Web journal. Each article is evaluated by double-blind peer review. Kinephanos does not retain exclusive rights of published texts. However, material submitted must not have been previously published elsewhere. Future versions of the texts published in other periodicals must reference Kinephanos as its original source. For the editorial guidelines, refer to the section Editorial Guidelines.

Kinephanos accepts papers in English and in French.