cfp.english.upenn.edu

Listening Spaces: 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture seeks proposals for writings to be included in a volume of new critical essays. The Listening Spaces Project is funded by a multi-year grant in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Arts in Society (http://www.cmu.edu/cas/media%20initiave/listening%20spaces/index.html) and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/projects/listening-spaces.)

Our goal is to examine the multiple ways people listen to, consume, and produce music and sound in an increasingly digital world. Technologies such as social networks, recommendation algorithms, virtual cloud storage, and portable listening devices increasingly mediate both personal and communal experiences with music; while such technologies may be convenient, their unexamined use raises ethical, socio-political, and philosophical questions. The Listening Spaces anthology seeks essays engaging with these questions and others posed by emergent musical and social technologies.

The volume seeks essays in the following areas:
• Modern media listening, storing, and sharing practices in comparison to past methods (mix tapes, portability, headphone culture, physical versus digital media)
• The social and/or psychological motivations for sharing or recommending music
• The relationship between, social networks, on-line identity formation and music discovery and consumption.
• Human music recommendations versus algorithm-driven recommendations, music recommendation algorithms and marketing, or trust and accuracy in recommendation.
• Factors influencing recommendation: tagging, FOAF descriptions, personalization, social networks, catalogued music content, mood
• Media formats and playback technologies
• Sampling, mashups, file-sharing, and other legal issues pertaining to digital music use
• Online musical communities (forums, message boards, Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, etc.)
• The impact of social networks and digital technologies on the creation of music and/or artists’ interactions with listeners

The volume’s editors will consider submissions across a range of writing styles and scholarly methods in order to achieve a collection of the most compelling and readable essays. Scholars at any rank, advanced doctoral students, journalists, and independent intellectuals are invited to submit.

Submissions: Send C.V. and 500 word proposal (with contact information) to Richard Purcell and Richard Randall at listeningspaces@gmail.com.

Deadline: November 1st, 2012