Dear all,

The Music and Sound Workshop is excited to announce its first call for papers for the 2024–2025 academic year. This workshop provides a forum for graduate students and faculty across the University of Chicago to discuss works in progress that focus on aspects of musical and sonic cultures past and present. Our workshop examines sound’s multiple facets, which include material, music-historical, music-analytical, technological, filmic, environmental, perceptual, and social perspectives. Our goal is to offer a rich interdisciplinary space for participants to experiment with and refine approaches to the analysis of music and sound.

This year, we are planning to host a number of exciting events: conference-style workshop sessions to discuss works in progress, guest speakers, conference paper run-through sessions, flashtalks for students working on their dissertation proposals, hopefully a writing workshop or two, and some Listening Room/Reading Room sessions!

We will be featuring projects at all stages and in all formats, from article/chapter drafts and paper presentations to sketches and hunches. If you are submitting a paper session proposal, we encourage you to consider who you might want to be a respondent for the session. We also welcome participants to sign up to present their work along with peers and/or collaborators working on related topics, especially those whose projects are in an early stage of development.

In additional to the paper session format, we are also continuing the focused group work introduced last year as “the Listening Room,” and hope to expand upon this format by adding a “Reading Room” option. The aim of these sessions is to listen and think together to provide each other with insights into the sounds and sources that form the backbone of our research. Each quarter, we will solicit suggestions for objects, which might include songs, albums, pieces, sounds, audio clips, film scenes, music videos, TikTok clips, advertisements, recordings of music at events (festivals, sporting events, etc.), podcast soundtracks OR (this year) new articles or book chapters that you think are worth discussing in a group.

Submissions should be emailed to both workshop coordinators, Anne Monique Pace (apace@uchicago.edu) and Alejandro Cueto (cueto@uchicago.edu) by 11:59 pm CST on Sunday, October 6, 2024 and then on a rolling basis. Please reach out to the organizers after this deadline.

For a paper session proposal, please provide:
A working title for your project
An abstract or description of the project (up to 400 words; very nascent work welcome! DCS, DPS, and DPPS participants welcome!)
Any necessary info about format and AV requirements for your presentation
Preferred quarter to share your ideas
Co-presenter and/or respondent names, if relevant

For a Listening/Reading Room proposal, please include:
The title, date, and artist/writer of the work
A brief description of why you would like to discuss this work
Preferred quarter for the session to take place

In the meantime, we welcome your questions and look forward to hosting you at our workshop! Wishing you a productive and inspiring beginning to the school year.

 

Yours,
Anne Monique and Alejandro