There are all kinds of festivals coming up this year. You have to pay a small registration fee for most, but student fees are modest ($25-50), and the concerts and presentations are free once you get in.

SEAMUS 2007 National Conference

The 2007 National Conference of the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States will be hosted by Iowa State University of Science and Technology. http://www.music.iastate.edu/seamus/main.html

Organisation of the EMS07 Conference
Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University (UK) in collaboration with members of the EMS Network. The theme of EMS07 is: The 'languages' of electroacoustic music

While the theme of EMS06 (Beijing) concentrated on a crucial aspect of language, namely terminology and attendant questions of translation and local knowledges, EMS07 (Leicester) aims to look at some perennial questions of language and analysis with respect to the electroacoustic field. Are there parallels with how language works or is this an unhelpful metaphor? There have been many different approaches to analysing works in an attempt to find out 'rules' (a 'syntax') common to a composer, genre or culture.

In 2007 it will be twenty-one years since the publication of The Language of Electroacoustic Music (edited by Simon Emmerson) (Macmillan (UK) and Harwood Academic (USA), 1986). This brought together writings on a cluster of ideas around electroacoustic music 'language' - such as spectromorphology, sound symbolism, soundscape-landscape, 'abstract and abstracted' syntax, and the influence of (then recent) developments in computer technology on language. Have any of these strands 'come of age' in the intervening years? Much has challenged many of the definitions and assumptions of the 1980s: hybridisation with other musics (techno, non-western) and new technologies (audio-visual); new listening habits, venues and media of dissemination and exchange; the identity of the work itself may be open form, fluid, real-time. And then there are the increasingly blurred distinctions of composer and performer, venue and studio, 'live' and 'machine', performance and installation. Finally the emerging and emergent properties of the internet as both source and site of new developments. But are these developing new 'languages'? Do these new musics 'express' anything new?

Keynote speakers

Denis Smalley (City University, London)
Katharine Norman (Pender Island, BC)

Registration for this workshop will be part of the registration for the EMS07 conference. Details will be available from January 2007.

Simon Emmerson
Professor of Music, Technology and Innovation
Faculty of Humanities
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH

Tel. 0116-207-8238
email: S.Emmerson@dmu.ac.uk
http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/