DASH Archives - November 2004

Call for papers

Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS)
International Conference Series


EMS05 - Electroacoustic Music Studies.
A century of innovation involving sound and technology
Resources, Discourse, Analytical Tools


Scientific Committee

Marc BATTIER (MINT-OMF)
Joel CHADABE (EMF)
Philippe DEPALLE (McGill University)
Leigh LANDY (MTI - De Montfort University)
Stephen McADAMS (CIRMMT/ McGill University)
Rosemary MOUNTAIN (Hexagram/Concordia)
Philippe DEPALLE (CIRMMT)
Jean PICHE (CCIRMT/UdeM)
Daniel TERUGGI (INA/GRM)
Marcelo M. WANDERLEY (CIRMMT/ McGill University)

Time and place: 19-22 October, 2005 - Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The EMS conference is organized every two years 
through the initiative of the Electroacoustic 
Music Studies Network, an international team 
which aims to encourage reflection on the better 
understanding of electroacoustic music and its 
genesis, appearance and development over the span 
of a century. The organizers are all engaged in 
the key areas of debate and actively seeking the 
development of solutions.
The first conference, in October 2003, was a 
result of the initiatives of DeMontfort 
University (UK), the University of Paris-Sorbonne 
(France), and INA/GRM (France). It took place at 
the Georges-Pompidou Centre in Paris, within the 
auspices of IRCAM's Résonances 2003 festival. 
Selected papers were published in issue 9/1 of 
Organised Sound.

Organization of the EMS-05 conference

Concordia University (Canada)
De Montfort University(G-B)
Electronic Music Foundation (USA)
INA/GRM (France)
McGill University and CIRMMT (Canada)
Université de Montréal (Canada)
Université de Paris-Sorbonne (France)

Electroacoustic Music Studies Network

EARS (Leigh Landy, ElectroAcoustic Resource Site, 
MTI Research Group, De Montfort University)
INA/GRM (Daniel Teruggi)
MINT (Marc Battier, Musicologie, informatique et 
nouvelles technologies, OMF), Université de 
Paris-Sorbonne

The special theme of EMS-05 is:

Electroacoustic Music Studies - Sound in Multimedia Contexts

From the advent of the first electric 
instruments, the phonograph, radio, telephone, 
and subsequent electronic and digital inventions, 
the approaches to technologies relevant to the 
art of sound have been limited only by the 
imagination of the musician. In recent years, 
there seems to have been a proliferation of 
studies relating to music incorporating these 
technologies. However, the investigation of such 
a varied musical repertoire raises a number of 
issues that the EMS conferences wish to examine. 
The themes of the conference therefore emphasize 
questions of resources, discourse, and analytical 
tools relevant to electroacoustic musics.

1) Sources and resources
- What types of materials are being or should be documented?
- How does one create, expand, preserve and offer access to collections?
- What opportunities exist for exchange and collaboration?
- How can we help make the electroacoustic music repertoire more accessible?

2) Discourse / analysis of electroacoustic musics
- What types of discourse are relevant to electroacoustic works?
- Which forms of representation and which approaches to analysis are useful?
- Which analytical methods are currently being developed?
- How can one adapt existent analytical methods 
of music to elec-troacoustic works,
many of which involve no prescriptive notation?
- How can we further develop the field of study of electroacoustic musics?

3) Analytical tools
- How are analytical tools being produced and disseminated in the community?
- What means are available for communicating the 
sonic form through symbolic and graphic 
representations?
- Does the study of electroacoustic musics 
require specifically-designed tools or can it 
take advantage of methods conceived for other 
musics?

4) Taxonomy, terminology, and aesthetic diversity
- What systems of classification are in use or should be developed?
- How can we become more consistent in our use of 
terminology in a field as dynamic as 
electroacoustic music?
- Are there aesthetic questions that are specific to electroacoustic music?

Spoken presentations

Proposals for spoken presentations should be 
submitted in the form of an extended abstract 
(minimum 2 pages) accompanied by a detailed C.V. 
and list of publications. The abstract should be 
ready for publication if the proposal is 
accepted. The duration of each paper will be 30 
minutes (not including the question period). The 
papers may be given in English or French. It is 
anticipated that simultaneous translation will be 
provided. Multimedia support will be provided in 
the form of video projector (for laptops), 
overhead projector, CD player, and sound system. 
A programme containing the paper abstracts will 
be distributed.

Posters

Proposals for poster sessions are also invited; 
selected posters will be presented in the 
conference area at McGill University. The 
deadline for poster proposal submissions is the 
same as that for paper submissions.Dates
19 October, 2005 - Opening of EMS-05 at the University of Montreal
20-22 October, 2005 - Conference sessions (McGill 
University) and concerts (Concordia University)

Guidelines for submissions

Deadline for receipt of proposals (abstracts and 
CVs of contributors): Tuesday March 1, 2005
Submissions are to be made electronically. Send 
abstract (in French or English, 2 pages maximum) 
+ 1 detailed CV + a list of publications to the 
following e-mail address: 
ems05-papers@music.mcgill.ca.

Please ensure that your name, institutional / 
organizational affiliation (if any), contact 
address, telephone, and preferred e-mail address 
are included on the abstract. If your proposal is 
accepted, you will need to submit a brief 15-line 
biographical note to insert into the conference 
programme.

Publication

A selection of the papers will be published in 
Organised Sound (Cambridge University Press) in 
2006.


EMS-05 Website
http://ems05.musique.umontreal.ca/index.html (bilingual call)



--
Marc Battier
http;//www.omf.paris4.sorbonne.fr/MINT

 From the e-flux list.  This looks really interesting.  Has anyone seen it
already?

11/23/04 

CENTRE POMPIDOU




Sons & Lumieres
A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century
22 September 2004 - 3 January 2005
Gallery 1, Level 6

CENTRE POMPIDOU
75191 PARIS CEDEX 04
00 33 (0)1 44 78 12 33

http://www.centrepompidou.fr






"Sons & Lumieres" exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is the largest
event devoted to the relationship between music / sound and 20th
century art since the "Vom Klang der Bilder" show in Stuttgart In
1985.

In his poem Correspondances, Baudelaire wrote that "scents, colours,
and sounds commune", and the 20th century, often considered the era
when the Arts converged and entered into dialogue, provides countless
illustrations of this notion. After the rise of Abstraction around
1910 and painting's strivings to commune with music - the abstract
Art par excellence - the new electric media kept up the pursuit of
this ancestral myth. Down through the century the arts of light,
cinema and later video, were fertile ground for experiments in
bringing image and sound together, while at the same time other
approaches drew extensively on theories running counter to the
possibility of any match between sight and hearing: using processes
involving notions of chance, random noise and silence, new
performance-art musical gambits challenged the "correspondences"
ideal. To the question raised by the Romantics and then by the
Symbolists - "Can images be translated into sound and vice-versa?" -
the century came up with a host of different replies, some of them
utopian and others emphasising the purest sensory pleasure.

The 2100 square metres of the Sons & Lumieres exhibition are divided
into three areas, with over 400 works - many of them on show for the
first time - providing an enormous range of sensory experiences and
highlighting the crucial moments of the interaction between
music/sound and the visual Arts.

PRESENTATION OF THE EXHIBITION
The exhibition is built around three successive themes. The first of
these themes -Correspondences, abstraction, colour music, light in
motion - is the evolution of Baudelaire's notion of "correspondences"
within a form of pictorial abstraction drawn - as in the case of
Kandinsky, the Synchromists and Klee - to the intangibility of music.
Painting very early cut free of the fixed support, becoming
temporally inflected colour in movement via Vladimir
Baranoff-Rossine's famous "optophonic piano" (an idea going back to
the Baroque period), Viking Eggeling's "scroll pictures", Thomas
Wilfred's play with light, and other systems culminating in the early
masterpieces of abstract cinema by Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger,
Len Lye and others.The abstract works presented in this first segment
point up a quest for musical analogies that sometimes involved
instrumental accompaniment. Their musical field of reference extends
from the classical - Bach was an enduring model - to the avant-garde
work of Arnold Schonberg and jazz and boogie-woogie as used by such
artists as Stuart Davis and Piet Mondrian.

The second part of the exhibition - Imprints, conversions, syntheses,
remanence - takes us into a markedly different world, where the
notion of giving visible expression to sound - by transcription,
imprint or conversion via the new technologies - makes sonic
vibration one of the work's raw materials. In the 1920s the cinema,
newly endowed with the sound track, undertook the "photography of
sound" to be found in the works of Rudolf Pfenninger and Norman
McLaren. Photoelectric cells and oscilloscopes were put to work by
artists like Raoul Hausmann and Ben Laposky in experiments with
translation of sound into image. The Sixties and Seventies went
deeper into the question: with the coming of the "environment" the
work became a means of global perception that plunged the viewer into
the actual physical experience of sound and light vibration. Drawing
on a dreamlike suspension of consciousness, James and John Whitney,
Brion Gysin, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Paul Sharits and
other artists offered a meditative experience in which waves, whether
of light or sound, shaped the vocabulary of a new audiovisual
landscape open to the full gamut of sensory experience. By contrast
other artists, for instance Bill Viola and Gary Hill pushed the
energy and impact of acoustic pressure to the limits of what the
senses could bear. At this time the idea of writing with sound was
taken up - by Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others -
in the first video works, which made bold play with interaction
between sound and visual signals and pointed to the advent of new
audiovisual languages.

The third segment of the exhibition - Ruptures, chance, noise,
silence - takes the form of a questioning: via the Futurists "noise",
the work of John Cage, and the Fluxus movement, it focuses on the
overall theme's most iconoclastic aspects. Working from the jumbled,
uneven textures of urban noise, Luigi Russolo offered a musical model
that found tangible equivalents in collage and the tactility of
matter, while Marcel Duchamp set about using the laws of chance to
pare down compositional procedures. This dual vein would triumph in
the tutelary figure of John Cage and in the 1960s with Fluxus, the
latter advocating a philosophy of commitment in which the frontiers
between art and life would be totally abolished. The works in this
part of the exhibition bring real irony to their dismantling of the
correspondences myth: chance and accident dictate interaction between
the arts and lead in the final analysis to the experience of silence
in the work of artists like Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman.

The exhibition concludes with two very recent installations, one by
Rodney Graham and one by Pierre Huyghe, that hark back to ideas
raised in the preceding sections. Firmly anchored in the 21st
century, this epilogue leaves the way open to fresh interpretations.

Conception of the exhibition
Sophie Duplaix, curator of the exhibition
Marcella Lista, associate curator