Call for Papers

Infractions of the Musical Paradigm: Practices, Technologies, and Reconfigurations of the Sonic



Editors:
Luigino Pizzaleo, “G. Rossini” Conservatory, Pesaro
Antonio Mastrogiacomo, Academy of Fine Arts of Reggio Calabria



Submission deadline: August 20, 2026
Notification of acceptance: September 10, 2026
Publication date: October 30, 2026



Contributions should be sent to the following email addresses: divulgazioneaudiotestuale[@]gmail.com



Twentieth-century musicology has revealed the complexity of the musical beyond the limits of the work, elaborating within the field of semiology the notion of a “musical fact” — a concept that includes, within the musicologist’s perspective, not only “texts” and their grammars but also the contextual phenomena that make those texts the nodes of a complex anthropological, social, and epistemological network.
There have also been attempts to apply to more complex musical systems the conceptual structure of so-called scientific paradigms — notably in the case of the “Stockhausen paradigm” described by Alcedo Coenen in the 1990s, following the analogous concept discussed earlier by Thomas Kuhn. This structure is articulated in terms of values, models, generalizations, and exemplars. It is precisely the values of the paradigm—explicit and implicit, encapsulated in a culture’s responses to fundamental questions such as: what is music, who produces it, for whom, where, when, to what purpose, and with what motivations and instruments—that form the focus of our inquiry.

Among the countless consequences of musical experimentalism (especially of Cagean origin), the impact of technology on the anthropological profile of the musician (in the broadest sense of the term), and the rise of ethical claims within digital culture (free software, hacking), we find, at the end of the twentieth century, practices that profoundly alter the value systems of the musical paradigm. The new culture of digital lutherie, institutionalized at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the NIME conferences, for example, raises questions about a possible inversion of the traditional means–ends relation between instruments and the music produced through them. Similarly, the expansion of the musical into the territories of (variously defined) sound art seems to dismantle the traditional boundaries of the temporally dominant musical work, replacing them with spatially oriented forms that allow the listener to dynamically reconfigure their temporal boundaries.

Live coding and the Toplap Manifesto’s injunction to “show your screens,” Pietro Grossi’s playful, private practice of algorithmic composition, or the music created for video games—where continuously generative and variable forms blur the distinction between performer and listener—are further examples of this paradigm transformation. Finally, many improvisational or aleatory practices seem to replace the consolidated communicative schema of the concert (sender, code, message, medium, receiver) with entirely different anthropological archetypes such as play, travel, conviviality, ritual, or political utopia, while in many contexts music tends to become more a matter of events than of messages.

All the examples gathered here share some form of infraction against the values of the paradigm but by no means exhaust the wide landscape of “niches and microworlds” (to borrow Massimo De Carolis’s term) through which the modes of musical production and reception, in the post-digital era, seem to fragment and disperse into innumerable streams.

Relevant areas for contributions—which may take the form of theoretical reflections, documentation of experiences, or critical and technical inquiries, always from the perspective of some alteration, manipulation, or rewriting of the values of the musical paradigm as described above—include but are not limited to:

Sound installations, sound sculptures, and other unclassifiable forms of sound art
Live coding
Innovative or anomalous forms of live electronics and new digital lutherie
Networked and collaborative performances
Multi-, poly-, and intermedial practices
Hacking of musical technologies (or of non-musical technologies forced into musical use) and sonification.