Organised Sound - call for submissions - issue 32/3 'Art and Craft in Electroacoustic Music'

18 views
Skip to first unread message

Leigh Landy

unread,
5:42 AM (14 hours ago) 5:42 AM
to Leigh Landy

ORGANISED SOUND

 

Call for Submissions – Volume 32, Number 3

Thematic Issue Title: Art and Craft in Electroacoustic Music

Date of Publication: December 2027

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Issue co-ordinators: Manuella Blackburn (m.bla...@keele.ac.uk) and Adam Stanovic (a.sta...@lcc.arts.ac.uk) 

Deadline for submission: 15 January 2027

 

Art and Craft in Electracoustic Music 

Electroacoustic music has long been framed through the lens of Western “art” music traditions, inheriting assumptions about authorship, autonomous works, enduring objects, and artistic mastery. Yet many of the practices that constitute electroacoustic creation - listening, shaping, manipulating materials, adapting tools, and refining techniques - also resonate with ideas of craft. This raises a key question: how might we understand the relationship between art and craft within electroacoustic practice?

This special issue invites contributors to explore electroacoustic music as a field in which art and craft intersect, overlap, and sometimes diverge. What happens when we consider the electroacoustic practitioner not only as composer, artist, or researcher, but also as a maker whose practice is situated, process-driven, embodied, and material? Conversely, what might be lost if we overemphasize craft at the expense of other artistic or conceptual dimensions? How can attention to making - as practice, process, labour, and embodied knowledge - reshape our understanding of creativity, technology, authorship, and learning in this field?

The proliferation of AI, machine learning, and increasingly “intelligent” music tools intensifies these questions. If systems can now automate musical decisions and generate sonic materials, how do we discern the roles of artistic vision and craft knowledge? Which forms of artisanal skill persist, adapt, or disappear - and where might mastery now reside: in human agency, in system design, or within their entanglement? Craft may be understood as “an approach, an attitude or habit of action” (Adamson, 2019: 4), while craftsmanship has been described as “being at ease with all the tools available” (Belkin, 2018). How might these notions operate within AI-augmented music making, and how does the electroacoustic musician position their creativity alongside - or in tension with - tools that promise efficiency yet may threaten the visibility of human making?

Academic institutions, research centres, and community studios function as contemporary guilds that organise knowledge, transmit technique, and legitimise particular modes of practice. Is electroacoustic work still research-driven and experimental, as in Schaeffer’s era, or has it developed its own craft traditions where excellence is measured through refinement, technique, and lineage?

The electroacoustic studio has been described as an ecology of physical and virtual implements mediating skill and knowledge (Radford, 2015: 11). How does this ecology evolve today? Are new or alternative sites emerging for making - on stage, in coding environments, DIY workshops, or online communities - and how do these shape the art/craft balance?

This issue also invites reflection on value and evaluation: is electroacoustic music still centred on process as a living practice of sound work, or do completed pieces and polished outputs now dominate cultural and institutional recognition? In an age of repeatable workflows and shared toolsets, does the field risk becoming “craft-like,” or might it instead reveal a productive continuum between art and craft?

Kurlinkus contrasts craft with industrial production, associating it with “small-batch, artisan-made, handmade, bespoke” work tied to rarity and connoisseurship. Rattan emphasises the “connection between the hand and the resulting tangible product” (2022: 10), while Patel (2024) observes that “craft is resurgent” across creative industries. Within these contexts, it becomes crucial to ask: who evaluates the craft - or art - of electroacoustic music? Where do value judgements emerge, and how might they influence festival programming, concert curation, awards, and assessment processes?

Finally, this call foregrounds the relationship between craft, labour, and artistic value. What labours constitute electroacoustic craft today, and how might they be understood, shared, or obscured? Does technology’s mediation in performance distance audiences from the material and human labour behind electroacoustic work? What forms of craft remain visible—and which remain mysterious?

Potential topics: 

We invite theoretical, historical, ethnographic, artistic, and practice-based submissions addressing questions and topics such as:

  • How do we define craft in electroacoustic and sonic arts practices?
  • What are the relationships—and tensions—between art and craft?
  • Hand-made versus automated/generated audio
  • The electroacoustic studio as workshop: prototyping, experimentation, finishing
  • Sound sculpting as artisanal practice; materiality and the “material turn”
  • Tools, implements, and DIY ethics: from Max and SuperCollider to circuit bending
  • Skill, mastery, apprenticeship, and transmission of knowledge
  • Craft lineages, heritage, and emerging or vanishing artisanal techniques
  • Contemporary “guilds”: universities, labs, communities, online networks
  • Authorship, anonymity, collective making, and team-based production
  • Live coding, live electronics, and performance as public workshop
  • Aesthetics of craftsmanship: evaluation, refinement, finesse, time investment
  • The shaping of identity and professionalism through notions of making
  • Craft in the age of AI: augmentation, automation, and resistance

     

    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:

     

    Adamson, Glenn. Thinking through craft. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

     

    Belkin, Alan. Musical composition: Craft and art. Yale University Press, 2018.

     

    Kurlinkus, William Campbell, ‘Crafting designs: An archaeology of craft as god term’, Computers and Composition, 33, 2014, 50-67.

     

    Patel, Karen, Craft as a Creative Industry. Routledge, 2024.

     

    Radford, Laurie, ‘Artisans and Implements: the craft of electroacoustic music’, Proceedings of the electroacoustic music studies Network Conference, Sheffield, 2015.

     

    Ratten, Vanessa, ‘Defining craft making’, in Entrepreneurship in Creative Crafts, Routledge, 2022, 29-38.

     

--- 

 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 January 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


 

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages