New proceedings online

7th Sound and Music Computing Conference
The papers presented at the 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference that took place at the UPF from the 21st to the 24th on July 2010 are now online at http://smcnetwork.org/resources/smc2010. The papers have been published on the smcnetwork.org website under a Creative Commons license.

Interactive Sonification workshop - ISon 2010
The proceedings of the Interactive Sonification workshop - ISon 2010 are now available on-line at http://www.interactive-sonification.org/ISon2010/proceedings/. The proceedings are licensed as an Open Access publication.

Call for abstracts: Sound Experience – Experiencing Sound

A new open access journal, SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, calls for articles:

Call for abstracts: Sound Experience – Experiencing Sound
The first issue of SoundEffects raises the question of the epistemological potential of sound. How does sound provoke and influence the way in which we experience the world? How can we talk about the phenomenological, bodily experience that sound produces? More than ever, everyday life is mediated by a multitude of digitized and mechanically reproduced sounds. In Michael Bull's words: "Waking, walking, driving, working and even falling asleep are all done to music or some other acoustic accompaniment" (Bull, 2003). Never has urban life been noisier. Yet within philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic frameworks, the world is still mostly conceived of as a visual reality. Sound produces meaning in numerous ways, both through the phenomenological, bodily experience of sound and through emerging and changing discourses of cultural practice. Responding to this condition, contemporary sound research must reflect upon the various ways in which the world is experienced through sound.

We welcome scholars from any discipline within the humanities and the social sciences to reflect upon this complex yet crucial aspect of contemporary life.

Topics of interest may include (but are not limited to):

• Sound experience within the arts
• Sound in media and communication
• Sound and social interaction
• Historical perspectives on sound
• Cross-modal experiences of sound

An abstract of 300 words should be sent by e-mail to aestng(at)hum.au.dk no later than October 15, 2010. Full articles are due on January 15, 2011.

Poet and text-sound artist Bengt Emil Johnson dead

Bengt Emil Johnson was born 1936 in Saxdalen, Dalecarlia, and was one of the pioneers of Swedish text-sound composition and electroacoustic music. He studied piano and composition for Knut Wiggen, but later become more interested in poetry. Johnson worked at Sveriges Radio (the Swedish national radio), and edited the contemporary music journal Nutida Musik for many years. He passed away on July, 14, 2010.

Johnson's text-sound compositions have been released on e.g. Text-Sound Compositions - A Stockholm Festival and The Pioneers (PSCD 63) from Phono Suecia, and some of them are available at UbuWeb. There are also some material available at konkretpoesi.se (in Danish/Swedish).

Update 2010-07-25. Some press voices (in Swedish only):

• Poesins gossen Ruda tog sig an det svåra enkla by Tommy Olofsson
• Bengt Emil Johnson till minne by Jonas Ellerström
• Blues för Bengt Emil by Ulf Lundén
• Poet full av djärvhet by Per Svensson
• Över sista gränsen by Magnus Haglund

There is also a recent dissertation (in Swedish) on Johnsons poetry: "Tro mig på min ort" : Oöversättligheten som tematiskt komplex i Bengt Emil Johnsons poesi 1973-1982 by Johan Alfredsson, published by Holzweg.