Technology plays a crucial role across a broad spectrum of sonic activity, offering new cognitive frameworks and reshaping social networks in ways that challenge the conventional binary of the individual subject versus the collective. It mediates performance and listening, provides new modes of analysis, and inspires musical creation. It conditions our perception of sound as well as our ability to change it, and is thus both an appropriate tool and topic of aural research. The nexus of social, cultural, and political issues in and around music, cognition, and technology encompasses a range of interdisciplinary approaches to the question of musical meaning.

How can music "speak" and how do we have knowledge of it? What is its potential to express, represent, and communicate? How has changing expertise concerning sonic and musical knowledge shaped these questions across time and space?

Whether through studies of perception and performance, psychoacoustic experimentation, computational or linguistic analyses of musical texts, or ethnographies of musical collectives, scholars have sought to investigate the complementary issues of how music is constructed and received. The increasing—and occasionally controversial—importance of technology to this project raises a host of related questions: What are the possibilities and limitations of technology in exploring music cognition and social meaning, and how does it influence our approach to this exploration? What impact does it have on new music, and how does this feed back into our understanding of what "music" is?

This international conference will draw on a wide range of scholarship from across multiple disciplines, including musicology and composition, cognitive science, science and technology studies, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, performance studies, and anthropology. We hope to integrate, rather than simply collate, these different methodologies, inviting papers that attempt to reconcile the hermeneutic and the performative, the empirical and the abstract. To this end presenters will share their papers with the other participants in their session two weeks prior to the conference, in order to foster productive discussion. Similarly, relevant performances of new works that explore conference themes will be an intrinsic feature: an interactive sound installation will run throughout the weekend, a concert, including a pre-concert talk, will take place on the Friday evening, and informal performances will take place throughout the day on Saturday.

Keynotes will be given by Eric Clarke (University of Oxford), Ichiro Fujinaga (McGill University) and Robert Gjerdingen (Northwestern University). The guest composer will be Tod Machover (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Call for Music

The inaugural 2012 "Music: Cognition, Technology, Society" Conference at Cornell University is pleased to announce a call-for-scores. Selected works will be performed during the conference, May 11-13, 2012. Works that respond to the conference themes are highly encouraged.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions must fall under either of two categories:

Deadlines

• February 1, 2012: Abstracts Due
• March 15, 2012: Call for Music Deadline
• April 15, 2012: Deadline for Receipt of Performing Materials
• April 26, 2012: Papers Due from Presenters
• April 27, 2012: Registration Deadline

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