"Organised Sound" Issue 22/1 Call for Submissions

[Leigh Landy]

Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music and Technology

 

Call for submissions



 

Volume 22, Number 1

 

Issue thematic title – Context-based Composition

 

Date of publication: April 2017

 

Submission deadline: 15 May 2016

 

Issue co-ordinator: Barry Truax (tr...@sfu.ca)

 

Electroacoustic compositional practice has had a varied and often troublesome relationship to the “real world.” A dominant trend among acousmatic composers has been to create abstract sound shapes that reveal little about their real-world sources, whether recorded samples or synthetic material. Even when a real-world sound is identifiable, the compositional context usually makes it clear that the work is not particularly about the social or environmental emplacement of that sound.

 

Soundscape composition has become a relatively well-defined genre, often characterised as being intimately located to place. Although that may be true in many instances, it can also be understood as a range of approaches within an even broader concept, namely what this issue proposes to term “context-based composition”. One of the aims of the issue is to provide not only a survey of contemporary examples of this approach and concept, but to think more seriously about how it can be defined, what are its implications and affordances, and what emerging practices seem most fruitful.

 

A key distinguishing feature of context-based composition appears to be that real-world contexts inform the design and composition of aurally based work at every level, that is, in the materials, their organisation, and ultimately the work’s placement within cultural contexts. Perhaps most significantly, listeners are encouraged to bring their knowledge of real world contexts into their participation with these works. As such they fundamentally differ from an approach that utilises sounds related only to each other in an apparently autonomous form. Context-based practice can, among other approaches, range from sonification, phonographic uses of field recordings, to site-specific installations and abstracted soundscape compositions based in real-world or even virtual, imagined spaces.

 

This issue therefore calls for a potentially wide range of contributions and perspectives that might include, but is not restricted to:

 

-       sonification practices that successfully map real-world data into a form amenable to listeners

-       site-specific sculpture and installations

-       phonographic approaches to ethnographic documentation

-       soundscape composition

-       composition as environmental activism

-       acoustic design within urban or other spaces that is informed by those spaces

-       aesthetic strategies designed to address contested social and political issues such as gender, sexuality, social justice, political protest, etc.

-       incorporating documentary and/or narrative elements within a musical structure

-       de-contextualizing influences of the internet and trends in globalisation

-       invoking memory and aural imagination within context-based approaches

-       interaction of the virtual with the “real”

 

As always, submissions related to the theme are encouraged; however, those that fall outside the scope of this theme are always welcome.

 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 May 2016

 

SUBMISSION FORMAT:

 

Notes for Contributors and further details can be obtained from the inside back cover of published issues of Organised Sound or at the following url:

 

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayMoreInfo?jid=OSO&type=ifc (and download the pdf)

 

Properly formatted email submissions and general queries should be sent to: o...@dmu.ac.uk, not to the guest editors.

 

Hard copy of articles and images (only when requested) and other material (e.g., sound and audio-visual files, etc. – normally max. 15’ sound files or 8’ movie files) should be submitted to:

 

         Prof. Leigh Landy

         Organised Sound

         Clephan Building

         De Montfort University

         Leicester LE1 9BH, UK.

 

Editor: Leigh Landy

Associate Editors: Ross Kirk and Richard Orton†

Regional Editors: Ricardo Dal Farra, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Schedel, Barry Truax, Ian Whalley, David Worrall, Lonce Wyse

International Editorial Board: Marc Battier, Manuella Blackburn, Joel Chadabe, Alessandro Cipriani, Simon Emmerson, Kenneth Fields, Rajmil Fischman, Eduardo Miranda, Rosemary Mountain, Tony Myatt, Jean-Claude Risset, Mary Simoni, Martin Supper, Daniel Teruggi

 

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