Call for Submissions for a Special Issue of Computer Music Journal, “Spaces, Places, and Sonic Traces: Considerations in Computer Music”

[Douglas Keislar]

[apologies for cross-posting]

Call for Submissions for a Special Issue of Computer Music Journal, “Spaces, Places, and Sonic Traces: Considerations in Computer Music”

 
Guest Editor: Tae Hong Park
Publisher: MIT Press

Soundscapes have a rich history in both research and practice, beginning with early writings by Buckminster Fuller and Michael Southworth in the 1960s. These were followed by pioneering contributions from R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, and Hildegard Westerkamp, culminating in the establishment of the World Soundscape Project around 1969. As an art form, soundscapes have not only left a significant mark on music but continue to shape it today. Some works employ a hybrid approach that balances recorded and synthesized sounds, such as Jon Appleton’s Times Square Times Ten (1969). Others, like Barry Truax’s Riverrun (1986), feature entirely synthesized sinusoidal soundscapes, while pieces like Judy Klein’s The Wolves of Bays Mountain (1998) preserve original recordings in their unaltered form. Soundscapes –ranging from ambient textures to foreground “sound events” – have also made their way into popular music. Examples include The Beatles’ Back in the USSR (1968), Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust (1980), U2’s Beautiful Day (2000), and more recently, Billie Eilish’s bury a friend (2019).

On the technical side, soundscape studies have expanded significantly, fueled by advances in computational power, communication bandwidth, and recording technology, as well as reductions in hardware size and cost. The rise of deep learning has further stimulated this field, making it possible for AI to automatically detect sound events in soundscapes – a task once performed manually – thus making the process both feasible and efficient. Historically, soundscape research relied on “not-so-portable” recording devices, which were often limited to just a few hours of audio. In contrast, recent developments have enabled scalable methods for capturing and analyzing soundscapes, including long-term continuous recordings, low-cost custom devices, mobile computing, crowdsourcing, and smart noise sensor networks.

This call for submissions to a special issue of Computer Music Journal invites timely explorations of soundscape studies from musical, technical, social, ecological, and cultural perspectives. We encourage contributions that examine, through the lens of computer music, the roles of decoding, encoding, recoding, and generation in soundscape studies. Topics of interest include but are not limited to: (1) soundscape-centered research in compositions, performances, and installation works, (2) systems for capturing, classifying, and analyzing soundscapes and environmental noise, (3) soundscape analysis, synthesis, and resynthesis, and (4) soundscape-centric machine learning and AI, including generative AI approaches to soundscapes.

The initial deadline for manuscript submission is September 1, 2025. The issue is scheduled to appear in 2026. Submissions received after the deadline will be considered for publication in a subsequent issue. Submissions should follow all CMJ author guidelines (https://direct.mit.edu/comj/pages/submission-guidelines), except that manuscripts should not be submitted online at cmjdb.com. Instead, submissions and queries should be addressed to guest editor Tae Hong Park at t...@purdue.edu, with the subject starting with [CMJ Spaces | Places | Traces].