Call for submissions - Organised Sound - Phenomenologies of Electroacoustic Music and the Sonic Arts
Leigh Landy
ORGANISED SOUND
Call for Submissions – Volume 33, Number 1
Thematic Issue Title: Phenomenologies of Electroacoustic Music and the Sonic Arts
Date of Publication: April 2028
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Issue co-ordinators: Blake Stevens (blakec...@pku.edu.cn) and Annie Yen-Ling Liu (ylliu...@pku.edu.cn)
Deadline for submission: 15 May 2027
Phenomenologies of Electroacoustic Music and the Sonic Arts
The relevance of phenomenology for the field of experimental electroacoustic music seems self-evident, not least due to its prominent role in Pierre Schaeffer’s formulation of his theories of acousmatic sound, reduced listening, and the sound object in the Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines (original French version, 1966; English version 2017). Through its emphasis on first-person perceptual experience and the structures of consciousness, phenomenological methods may help us to understand the challenges posed by new and complex sound experiences when conventional supports, such as standard Western musical notation, theoretical concepts, and recognisable signs and topics, are no longer sufficient. Don Ihde, for instance, claimed that ‘The examination of sound begins with a phenomenology’, that is, it begins with ‘an intense examination on experience in its multifaceted, complex, and essential forms’ (2007: 17).
One of the recurring themes of phenomenology is that the close-at-hand is often difficult to grasp, precisely because of its immediacy and familiarity. Perhaps, too, our disciplinary familiarity with phenomenology has rendered it deceptively familiar. To refer to “phenomenology” in the singular as we have done is already a precarious move. Ihde, for instance, distinguished between ‘first’ and ‘second’ phenomenologies represented by the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, with the first centred on perceptual procedures of reduction and bracketing and the second broadening out in existential meanings and contexts (17–18). Applications of phenomenological methods to music studies have drawn from diverse figures, extending from Husserl and Heidegger to Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Mikel Dufrenne, among others.
Reception and critical assessments of Schaeffer’s theoretical project have explored the extent of his phenomenological inheritance from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, as well as the various tensions and contradictions associated with his application of these methods to acoustic research, composition, and listening (Solomos, Augoyard, Larivière, and Molino in Bayle and Dufour 1999, Kane 2007 and 2014, Demers 2010, Chion 2016, Steintrager and Chow 2019, and Nadringy 2021). Schaeffer’s work, however much contested, has strongly influenced phenomenological methods in sound studies and theories of listening and auditory culture. This expansion beyond Schaeffer also represents an expansion beyond “music” into “sound art” and related practices, with some of this literature directly positioned against Schaeffer and elements of phenomenology (Kim-Cohen 2009 and Cox 2018) and other writers grappling with the question of which “phenomenologies” are of greatest salience for the sonic arts (for instance, an emphasis on Merleau-Ponty in Voegelin 2010 and 2014, and Heidegger in Andrews 2021).
Far from being limited to a Schaefferian model, phenomenology in music and sound studies seems more open and diverse than ever before. It has been deployed over the past two decades as a subject and method in explorations of improvisation (Benson 2003), ‘sonic worlds’ and ‘phenomenological possibilism’ (Voegelin 2014), analysis and description (Herrmann 2015 and Norman 2016), instrumental interfaces (De Souza 2017), musical absorption (Høffding 2018), atmospheres (Schmidt 2019), field recording (Findlay-Walsh 2019), historiography (Steege 2021), ‘sonic environments’ (Nitsche et al., 2024), cognitive science (Clarke 2011 and 2019), and the turn to critical phenomenology (Elliott 2025).
We therefore possess multiple phenomenologies, offering different methods, objects, and priorities of inquiry. We should ask, as a point of departure, which phenomenology or phenomenologies we will adopt, and whether we will treat a given model in rigorous theoretical terms or in more informal and adaptive ways. David Clarke, for instance, has invoked Eugen Fink’s argument that the ‘authentic’ and ‘central’ perspectives of Husserlian phenomenology remain largely unknown in contemporary research (2019: 145). We might react with some scepticism toward the notion of a single ‘authentic’ position, yet Clarke’s observation stresses that even with the abundance of research on (and applications of) phenomenology, Husserl’s phenomenological project itself is difficult to exhaust, let alone the diverse field of his successors.
Why phenomenology now? What can phenomenological methods offer to researchers, musicians, and artists working with sound and technology? Are there particularly acute challenges to auditory perception posed by AI systems, virtual reality, and the assertion of visuality in digital culture, multimedia and intermedial art? We invite contributions that consider these and other issues relating to electroacoustic music and the sonic arts.
Potential topics:
• Historiography of phenomenology in electroacoustic music, sound art, sound studies and auditory culture
• Analytical and descriptive methods, including the role of visual perception and representation in the analysis of auditory experience
• Phenomenological aspects of composition in acousmatic music, sound art, field recording and intermedial works
• Generative AI and questions of agency, intentionality and human expression
• Practices of diffusion, live performance, improvisation and instrumental design
• Global perspectives and developments of phenomenological methods, particularly outside of Western contexts
• Phenomenology in ecology and ecological perception
• Neurophenomenology and connections to psychoacoustics and cognitive science
• Critical appraisals of the limits of phenomenological methods
Furthermore, as always, submissions unrelated to the theme but relevant to the journal’s focus areas are always welcome.
Please note that Organised Sound seeks issue-driven submissions relevant to the journal’s readership. It does not seek artists’ statements or work/project descriptions without an underlying central question and broad contextualisation.
References:
Andrews, I. 2021. Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics: Heidegger, Derrida and Contingency in Twentieth-Century Art. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Bayle, F. and Dufour, D., eds. 1999. Ouïr, entendre, écouter, comprendre après Schaeffer. Paris: Buchet/Chastel and Bry-sur-Marne: Institut national de l’audiovisuel. [M. Solomos, “Schaeffer phénoménologue” (53–67), J.-F. Augoyard, “L’objet sonore ou l’environnement suspendu” (83–106), R. R. Larivière, “L’objet, le chant” (107–118), and J. Molino, “La musique et l’objet” (119–136).]
Benson, B. E. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chion, M. 2016. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Trans. J. A. Steintrager. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.
Clarke, D. 2019. Music, phenomenology, and the ‘natural attitude’: Analysing Sibelius, thinking with Husserl, reflecting on Dennett. In R. Herbert, D. Clarke, and E. Clarke (eds.) Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 143–69.
Clarke, D. 2011. Music, phenomenology, time consciousness: meditations after Husserl. In D. Clarke and E. Clarke (eds.) Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–28.
Cox, C. 2018. Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Demers, J. 2010. Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
De Souza, J. 2017. Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.
De Souza, J., Steege, B., and Wiskus, J., eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press (in development; selected articles available online).
Elliott, R. 2025. A Critical Phenomenology of Music: Disclosing/Transposing the Habitual Body Schema. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Findlay-Walsh, I. 2019. Hearing How It Feels to Listen: Perception, embodiment and first-person field recording. Organised Sound 24(1): 30–40.
Herrmann, M. 2015. Unsound Phenomenologies: Harrison, Schaeffer and the sound object. Organised Sound 20(3): 300–307.
Høffding, S. 2018. A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ihde, D. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2nd ed. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Kane, B. 2007. L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, sound objects and the phenomenological reduction. Organised Sound 12(1): 15–24.
Kane, B. 2014. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Kim-Cohen, S. 2009. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. New York and London: Continuum.
Nadringy, P. 2021. Le Voile de Pythagore: Du son à l’objet. Paris: Classiques Garnier.
Nitsche, M., Gutierrez, I., Zelenka, J., and Polorný, V. 2024. Phenomenological Investigations of Sonic Environments. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Norman, K. 2016. Some questions around listening: Vancouver Soundscape Revisited by Claude Schryer. In S. Emmerson and L. Landy (eds.) Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 376–99.
Schaeffer, P. 2017. Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines. Trans. C. North and J. Dack. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Schmidt, U. 2019. Sound as Environmental Presence: Toward an Aesthetics of Sonic Atmospheres. In M. Grimshaw-Aagaard, M. Walther-Hansen, and M. Knakkergaard (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 517–33.
Steege, B. 2021. An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Steintrager, J. A. and Chow, R., eds. 2019. Sound Objects. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.
Voegelin, S. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York and London: Continuum.
Voegelin, S. 2014. Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 May 2027
SUBMISSION FORMAT:
Notes for Contributors including how to submit on Scholar One and further details can be obtained from the inside back cover of published issues of Organised Sound or at the following url: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/organised-sound/information/author-instructions/preparing-your-materials.
General queries should be sent to: o...@dmu.ac.uk, not to the guest editors.
Accepted articles will be published online via FirstView after copy editing prior to the full issue’s publication.
Editor: Leigh Landy; Associate Editor: James Andean
Founding Editors: Ross Kirk, Tony Myatt and Richard Orton†
Regional Editors: Liu Yen-Ling (Annie), Dugal McKinnon, Raúl Minsburg, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Schedel, Barry Truax
International Editorial Board: Miriam Akkermann, Marc Battier, Manuella Blackburn, Brian Bridges, Alessandro Cipriani, Ricardo Dal Farra, Simon Emmerson, Kenneth Fields, Rajmil Fischman, Kerry Hagan, Eduardo Miranda, Garth Paine, Mary Simoni, Martin Supper, Daniel Teruggi, Ian Whalley, David Worrall, Lonce Wyse