This year’s theme is inspired by Georgina Born’s Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience(2013), as read through a German lens. How do music and sound shape our understanding of space and how we experience it? How have music and sound traveled through different spaces? The Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association invites proposals from scholars investigating these broad questions. Bringing together scholars in diverse fields such as musicology, sound studies, history, German studies, anthropology, and media studies, we welcome proposals that consider how German-speakers have created and considered unique spaces through their musical and sonic experiences.

Possible topics could include (but are certainly not limited to): musical and sonic depictions and soundscapes of geographical spaces, ranging from the countryside to the city; the role of concert halls, museums, galleries, and other spaces in creating musical and sonic experiences; sonic and musical mapping of spaces; the relationship between sound objects (instruments, recordings, loudspeakers, electronic devices, etc.) and spatialization; music, sound, space, and the subjective self; the function of music and sound to create social gatherings in different spaces.

Taking up Born’s callto think globally about how sounds and music travel through space, we also invitepapers that consider German sounds in global spaces as well as global sounds in German spaces.

Abstracts of 200 words are due to network coordinators David Imhoof and Kira Thurman by Friday, January 22, 2016.

David Imhoof: imhoof@susqu.edu

Kira Thurman: thurmank@umich.edu