Call for Submissions – Volume 30, Number 3
Issue thematic title: New Strategies for Music Notation and Representation in Electroacoustic Music
Date of Publication: December 2025
Publishers: Cambridge University Press
Issue co-ordinators: Cat Hope (cat.hope@monash.edu), Ken Fields (ken.fields@gmail.com), Craig Vear (craig.vear@nottingham.ac.uk), and Sandeep Bhagwati (sandeep.bhagwati@gmail.com)
Deadline for submission: 14 February 2025
New Strategies for Music Notation and Representation in Electroacoustic Music
2025 is the 10th year anniversary of the founding of the annual International Technologies of Music Notation and Representation (TENOR) conference, which began as an offshoot of NIME. At the time, it reflected a growing interest in the strategies and technologies engaged for the notation and representation of music. It has steadily grown into a community of scholars, artists and industry representatives engaged in composition, performance, musicology, education, programming, archives and analysis. The growth of artistic research in the university sector has seen more artists writing about their own processes and systems, while the constant evolution of technological innovation continues to provide new possibilities in how we describe, prescribe and interact with music.
This issue focuses on electroacoustic music specifically and new notational practices broadly. Given the consensus amongst many electronic musicians that common practice notation, to use Roger Dannenberg’s term, is no longer fit for purpose, what is? On the other end of the spectrum is recent scholarship aiming too broadly perhaps, in recognizing how the music score has transformed from a place of documentation to simply a spacefor creativity. While much of contemporary electroacoustic music performance is hybrid, still involving tonal instruments and intentional sonic experience, the form is also likely to incorporate emergence, random operations or planned and unplanned collisions of autonomous algorithms, sometimes requiring responsive improvisation from instrumentalists or operators of sound controllers. Is there any headroom left for even more mediational intrusion into our already highly mediated musicking processes? Can a score communicate the complex processes of machinic conceptualization, providing human musicians with more of an equal footing given their evolved facility with language and representation, allowing for more of a dialogic/dia-intuitional celebration with artificial systems?
Many consider some kind of notation practice useful for organising sounds, augmenting memory in a performance, representing authorship of a work, and preserving works into the future; but traditional practices are contested. Are there still possibilities for new languages, techniques and interfaces that provoke a broadening of participation in music reading and authorship? Maybe we don’t need aids for performance; maybe we need to artificially provoke or interrupt human musical habits; -but that would then still be a score...
Topics for consideration include:
- AI/ machine learning and notation
- New forms of graphic notation
- Modes of music representation
- Computer environments for music notation
- History and aesthetics of notation
- Non-visual notation systems (aural/audio-score, tactile, etc.)
- Animated notation
- Generative processes and computer-assisted composition
- Computational musicology, and musicological perspectives on technology for notation
- Notation in interactive performance systems
- Notation for electronic music, gestural controllers and spatialisation
- Notation and robotics and motion capture
- Notation and performance
- New interfaces for music notation
- Notation in relationship to information visualisation
Furthermore, as always, submissions unrelated to the theme but relevant to the journal’s areas of focus are always welcome.
Please note that Organised Sound seeks submissions that are issue-driven and of relevance to the journal’s readership. It neither seeks artists’ statements or work/project descriptions without an underlying central question or broad contextualisation.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 14 February 2025
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: os@dmu.ac.uk, not to the guest editors.
Accepted articles will be published online via FirstView after copy editing prior to the paper version of the journal’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, Eduardo Miranda, Garth Paine, Mary Simoni, Martin Supper, Daniel Teruggi, Ian Whalley, David Worrall, Lonce Wyse