Displaced Sounds: Music and Algorithms

Contemporary music is increasingly shaped by digital circulation and algorithmic mediation. Streaming platforms, recommendation systems, AI-assisted and machine-learning tools, and data-driven listening practices are transforming how music is created, distributed, archived, analysed, and experienced. These developments challenge established frameworks of authorship and rights distribution, while driving new technological infrastructures for music and the cultural and creative industries.

The theme Displaced Sounds addresses multiple forms of displacement: sounds detached from their original contexts; musical works reconfigured through digital circulation; listening practices shaped by opaque recommendation systems; archives reorganised through metadata and computational classification; cultural materials transformed by algorithmic mediation; and creative processes negotiated between human agency and automated systems.

Algorithms can amplify visibility while obscuring alternative voices. They may democratise access to music while reinforcing economic concentration, aesthetic standardisation, and platform dependency. Although they can support creativity and experimentation, they also raise questions concerning authorship, labour, agency, bias, ownership, copyright and neighbouring rights, and control. Artificial intelligence and generative systems further challenge conventional distinctions among composer, performer, listener, archive, and machine.

This conference welcomes critical, historical, philosophical, artistic, technological and empirical approaches to the relationships among music, sound, digital circulation, and algorithmic systems. It particularly welcomes contributions exploring how artificial intelligence, digital platforms, computational infrastructures, and automated processes affect musical creation, performance, circulation, pedagogy, preservation and listening practices.

Suggested topics:

1. Algorithmic Creation, AI, and Artistic Practice

  • Algorithmic and AI-assisted composition
  • Human–machine association in artistic practice
  • Algorithmic listening and machine perception
  • Critical and philosophical perspectives on musical automation
  • Resistant, alternative, and experimental technological practices

2. Platforms, Streaming, and Digital Music Infrastructures

  • Digital circulation and platform cultures
  • Streaming systems and recommendation algorithms
  • Platform governance, interoperability, and music infrastructures
  • Technological innovation for music and the cultural and creative industries

3. Archives, Data, Preservation, and Computational Classification

  • Sound archives, metadata, and computational classification
  • Digital preservation and cultural protection
  • Sampling, remix, reuse, and recontextualization

4. Rights, Ethics, Labour, and Governance in Digital Music Environments

  • Authorship, copyright, neighbouring rights, and ownership in algorithmic environments
  • Copyright and rights management in digital environments
  • Bias, ethics, and cultural diversity in computational systems
  • Automation and musical labour

We welcome submissions from researchers, musicologists, composers, performers, scholars, philosophers, artists, technologists, and other researchers engaged with contemporary music and sound practices.

Students, postdoctoral researchers and early-career academics are particularly encouraged to submit proposals

NCMM permanent themes:

The conference also welcomes papers on a wide range of topics related to contemporary music studies and practices, including:

1. Composition, Performance and Reception

  1. Composition techniques and experimental practices
  2. Electronic music, live coding, and interactive systems
  3. Collaborative composition, improvisation and open forms
  4. Practice-based artistic research
  5. Performance and reception of contemporary music

2. History, Theory and Analysis

  1. Historiography and analysis of contemporary music
  2. New analytical paradigms, methodologies, and tools
  3. Theory and analysis of present-day repertoires
  4. Relationships among analysis, history, and artistic practice
  5. Critical approaches to contemporary musical forms and practices

3. Philosophy and Aesthetics

  1. Philosophical and aesthetic approaches to music and sound
  2. Ontology, embodiment, mediation and musical meaning
  3. Technology and the transformation of musical aesthetics
  4. Semiotic, phenomenological, and epistemological perspectives

4. Musicology, Intertextuality and Authenticity

  1. Intertextuality, quotation, appropriation
  2. Authenticity and authorship
  3. Critical, empirical, computational, and systematic musicology
  4. Interdisciplinary musicological methodologies  

5. Auditory Perception and Cognition

  1. Music cognition and listening practices
  2. Perceptual approaches to contemporary music and sound art
  3. Relationships between listening and compositional intention
  4. Cognitive and embodied approaches to listening and sound

6. Notation, Representation, and Transcription

  1. Contemporary notation and representation systems
  2. Graphic, alternative, and experimental notation
  3. Computational transcription and score analytical tools
  4. Sonic representation in artistic creation and research

7. Sound Technologies and Music Industries

  1. Recording, production, broadcasting and distribution technologies
  2. Digital infrastructures, technological innovation, and professional practices
  3. Metadata, interoperability, and technological standards
  4. Copyright, licensing, and rights management
  5. Internet communities, telematic performance, and networked collaborative music environments

8. Music and Image

  1. Music for film, television, video games and multimedia
  2. Audiovisual and intermedial practices
  3. Relationships between music, sound, image and moving media
  4. Critical approaches to audiovisual music and sound

9. Sound Art, Installations and Exhibitions

  1. Sound art and music beyond the concert hall
  2. Curatorial, exhibition, and installation practices
  3. Music and sound in museums and public spaces
  4. Musicological approaches to sound installations
  5. Critical approaches to audiovisual music and sound

10. Soundscape and Sound Ecology

  1. Soundscape studies and acoustic environments
  2. Sonic ecology and sustainability
  3. Spatial sound, virtual auditory spaces, and immersive environments
  4. Environmental sound practices and sonification

11. Documentation and Preservation of Musical Heritage

  1. Archives and documentation strategies
  2. Preservation of contemporary musical and sonic works
  3. Performance documentation and performability
  4. Digital preservation, technological obsolescence, and archival infrastructures

12. Music, Culture and Society

  1. Music, sound, identity, and cultural transformation
  2. Diversity, plurality, and inclusion in musical practices
  3. Cultural heritage, hybridity, and global circulation
  4. Sociological, anthropological, and cross-cultural approaches to music and sound
  5. Cultural studies, music criticism, and the sociology of music and sound practices

–Guidelines for submission —

–NCMM Proposals Award —