Call for Contributions: BioSphere – TechnoSphere

Contemporary popular musics realize themselves in what has been called the technosphere. Major developments in musics, especially popular musics (from the Global North as well as from the Global South), have been caused and accelerated by digitalization, encompassing digital production, distribution and reception of music. Production and distribution have thus undergone a broad democratization process that has been enabled by the development and accessibility of inexpensive digital production tools and the establishment of streaming technology. The latter phenomenon, through the permanent storage of digital audio files in web-based platforms, has led to the change (or even disappearance?) of music canonization processes. Moreover, recycling and re-framing of preexistent music have dynamically increased through digitalization. Critical aspects of these developments include questions of copyright, the ethics of appropriation, and the dimensions and consequences of samplingbased de-contextualization and re-contextualization. And we have to ask how listening experiences and reception behavior change because of the ubiquity of streaming music. What does it mean for the development of musical taste? And does inflationary consumption of streamed musics lower the sensuality of musical experience?

However, musics in the Anthropocene can and should not be seen as a practice,  behavior or product belonging exclusively to the technosphere. The severe ecological crises of the early 21st century, including climate change and biodiversity loss (the so-called sixth extinction), have reminded artists, scientists and scholars that earth systems play a central role and that technosphere and biosphere are not categorically separate, but can be seen as entangled domains (cf. Haraway 2016, Latour 2017).

The acceptance of these entanglements between technology and the organic world demands a new political behavior, a change in power hierarchies, and new ethical approaches to put anthropocentrism in question. This is obviously a challenge musicology shares with the humanities in general: Music and sound as emanations of Western democratic societies have traditionally been seen as uniquely human. However, several factors recently have contributed to the transformation of this view into a more integrated approach, emphasizing the inclusion of actors beyond the human. Among these contributing factors are digitalization, especially the rise of artificial intelligence, but also ecological crises like climate change and biodiversity loss (culminating in the ongoing sixth extinction). Consequently, in the Anthropocene biosphere and technosphere are no longer categorically distinct. Co-creativity in music and sound extends to other biological species as well as to artificial actors. Recently, musicology has already developed concepts that take in account more-than-human settings, e.g. zoomusicology, ecomusicology, and AI music studies.

Presentation formats:

• Paper presentations (30 min. + 15 min. Q & A)
• Poster presentations
• Project presentations (digital screen presentations, slideshow or short
  video, max. 5 minutes)

Conference languages: English/Deutsch

Deadline for proposals: 15th March 2025

• Abstract: max. 300 words
• CV: max. 200 words
• To/An: Yvonne Wasserloos (yvonne.wasserloos@moz.ac.at) & Martin Ullrich (martin.ullrich@hfm-nuernberg.de)
• You will receive notification until: 1 April 2025

We are planning to publish an edited volume (English/German, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) and ask for submission of the finished papers until 15 August 2025.

Concept and organisation:
Yvonne Wasserloos & Martin Ullrich (Nuremberg University of Music)

An event organised by the research focus ‘Music and Power’ (AMUM) at the Department of Musicology in cooperation with the Nuremberg University of Music