Race, Sound, and Technology Issue

Deadline: January 29, 2016

Current Musicology invites submissions for a special interdisciplinary issue on the intersections of race, sound, and technology. While scholars have written at length about the cultural uses of sound and music technology, many of these discussions exclude race as a category for humanistic and scientific analysis. We seek critical writing that instead turns to the acoustic and technological as key modalities for thinking through the place of race and ethnicity in everyday life, and how the construction of racial and ethnic difference shapes definitions of sound and technology.

The editors of Current Musicology are offering a broad call unrestricted to time period, geography, or methodology. Authors are encouraged to engage geopolitical perspectives beyond the United States and Europe, as well as larger interdisciplinary discussions that migrate ideas from sound and music to nonmusical domains.

The following [are] examples of some possible avenues to explore:

• Human-machine interaction, sound synthesis, and listening at the juncture of the human and non-human, as well as at the limits of “life” as a category of analysis
• Interpretive, theoretical, and historical essays centering on particular practices and works in improvised music, electronic and computer music, sound installation and sound art, film scores, experimental music, popular music, global EDM cultures, and hybrid musical forms—among other possibilities
• Intersections of technology, science fiction, speculative fiction, utopia, and futurisms in transnational, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and/or decolonial contexts (i.e., Afrofuturism, Latin American Futurism, Indigenous Futurism, Queer Futurism, etc.)
• The political and cultural significance of failed technologies, as well as other historiographic questions that complicate narratives of the “evolution” of sound technology
• Participatory culture, interactive digital media, gaming, and the “home” studio as a new kind of musical space
• Sonic warfare, hacking, online/hashtag activism (e.g., #blacklivesmatter), and other appropriations—or resistances—of new technologies for political action
• Technologies that facilitate communication in sacred and secular contexts, ritual performance, modern shamanism, cyberculture, virtual reality, and alternative spiritualties
• Larger engagements and framings of technologies and their relation to networks of power, modernity, decolonial thought, and alternate possible worlds

This call is open to submissions from all disciplines. We especially welcome writers seeking to amplify the stakes of racial politics in acoustic, musical, and nonmusical domains.

We also welcome submissions in alternative formats, including, but not limited to, dialogic articles, multimedia composition, digital performance and performativity, social networking and social media, blogs and blog posts, Storifys, Twitterchats, archives, and exhibits.

For submissions guidelines, please click here. For questions, please contact [email protected].