Announcements

International Computer Music Conference and Sound and Music Computing 2014, Athens, Greece

The International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) and the Sound and Music Computing conference (SMC) will be held jointly for the first time this year. The conference will take place in Athens, Greece, 14–20 September 2014. It will include lectures, special sessions, a “summer school,” and indoor and outdoor concerts, demonstrations, and installations, in locations ranging from concert halls and university auditoria to museum lobbies and archaeological sites. Venues include the University of Athens, the Onassis Cultural Center, the Acropolis Museum, Plato’s Academy, and the Roman Agora. There will be five keynote speakers: Jean-Claude Risset, John Chowning, Peter Nelson, Gérard Assayag, and Curtis Roads.

Calls for papers and music are present on the conference Web site. The deadline for paper and music submissions is 1 April 2014; acceptance notifications will be sent 31 May 2014; camera-ready papers and all performance material are due 30 June 2014; and the registration deadline for authors and composers is 30 June 2014.

This joint conference’s theme is “Music Technology Meets Philosophy: From Digital Echos to Virtual Ethos.” (Echos is the Greek term for “sound,” singular.) Researchers in sound and music computing, composers, musicologists, and philosophers are invited for a dialogue in order to redefine the past, present, and future of computer music and sound computing. The conference focuses on (1) the redefinition of digital echos from different philosophical approaches in computer music and interactive music systems, (2) the origins of sound and music computing, and (3) the pedagogy and anthropology of music technology.

Regarding virtual ethos, the main focus will be the impact of technology on contemporary composition and education as well as on musicology (historical musicology, systematic musicology, ethnomusicology, and archeomusicology), in order to provide society with wider and more direct access to knowledge, creative learning, and cultural heritage. Digital echos and virtual ethos inquiries will be expressed in fields such as aesthetics, ethics, the philosophy of technology and media, the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence, the phenomenology of sound perception, the philosophy of nature and sound technologies, and philosophical values in computer music. The organizers also encourage discussions on contemporary technological practice in music, with a holistic approach ranging from the Pythagorean to the Xenakian models, in order to shed light on the diachronic relationship between music and technology from the time of ancient Greece to the present.

The joint conference seeks to promote interdisciplinary cooperation between diverse research activities and areas such as: computer music; interactive music systems; music technology education; anthropological approaches to music technology (e.g., regarding the development of micro-cultures and the redefinition of digital music within them); philosophical approaches in aesthetics (e.g., regarding the function of music in the post-digital era), ethics (e.g., regarding the use of technology in music), and the philosophy of technology and media (e.g., regarding the development of open-source music technology); and, finally, alternative approaches to the creative use of music technology, such as applications to the preservation of world musical heritage (e.g., the soundscapes of small communities, ancient cultures from China to Latin America, ancient Greek music theory, Byzantine music, and Greek folk music).

The joint conference is organized by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (department of music studies and department of informatics and telecommunications), the Onassis Cultural Center, and the Institute for Research on Music and Acoustics. The organizing committee consists of conference chair Anastasia Georgaki (music department, University of Athens), scientific program chair Georgios Kouroupetroglou (department of informatics and telecommunications, University of Athens), concert chair Cristos Carras (Onassis Cultural Foundation Center), music chair Kostas Moschos (Institute for Research on Music and Acoustics), music co-chair Ioannis Zannos (media department, Ionian University), and summer school chair Christina Anagnostopoulou (music department, University of Athens). The organizers may be contacted at icmc.smc.2014@gmail.com.

Web: icmc14-smc14.net