Following the successful Screening Melbourne Symposium in February 2017, the Melbourne Screen Studies Group now seeks to solicit new abstracts for the Sound-Tracking MelbourneSymposium that will take place on 15-16 June 2018.
While it is recognized that screen media form the connective tissue of Melbourne’s artistic and cultural life, the importance of sound to the way the moving image is brought to life, is relatively less well acknowledged. The Sound-Tracking Melbourne Symposium not only intends to give due critical and creative weight to the interlocking dimensions of sound design found in Melbourne screen culture, but to address the lack of sustained scholarship on the ways in which the city and its environs are imagined and brought to life on screen through particular ‘tracking’ soundscapes, from music videos to audiovisual art installations, and from film and TV to games and documentary. Sound-Tracking Melbourne is both a recognition of the importance of sound to moving image culture and an intervention – asking delegates to hear and see sound in newly important ways. The symposium will do this through delegate presentations, panel discussions, industry events, and performance-screenings.
We invite critical and/or creative abstracts, including non-traditional research presentations, for individual 20-minute papers, or pre-constituted panels of 3 x 20-minute papers, on any topic or theme related to the relationship between screen and sound in Melbourne. Industry and medium specific presentations are welcome, as well as those that adopt a broader view of Melbourne’s screen-sound cultures and which make comparisons with national and international case studies.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following areas:
- The Melbourne sound-vernacular on screen – accent, tone and pitch
- ‘Sound-tracking’ gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality – hearing and (not) seeing identity
- Melbourne’s music-image music scene
- Documenting Melbourne life through the sound-image
- Melbourne’s music video culture
- Melbourne’s installation art and video work: sounding experimental
- Sounding the everyday in documentary filmmaking
- Locations and settings: the ‘sound-track’ of place and space
- Melbourne film soundtracks
- Indigenous soundings in Melbourne screen culture
- Melbourne’s local news: ‘sound-tracking’ news in the cities and regions
- Film and television genre soundings. Melbourne as an audio-visual genre.
- Migration, home and exile: the sights and sounds of Melbourne’s populations
- YouTube Melbourne
- Historicising ‘sound-tracking’ or the ‘sound-track’ in Melbourne screen culture
- Technologies and interfaces of ‘sounding’ Melbourne on screen: analogue, digital, post-human
- Exhibiting sound in Melbourne screen culture – exploring the acoustics of ‘venue’
- Composing scores for Melbourne-based film and television
- The art of ‘sound-tracking’ Melbourne
- Gaming sound in a Melbourne context
- Games and cities: sounding Melbourne as an apocalypse
- Starring the Melbourne sound
Deadline for individual and panel abstracts: 5 February 2018
Individual Abstracts: 250 words, plus a 50-word biography. Please indicate if a postgraduate student.
Pre-constituted Panels: 150-word overview, plus 3x 250 word abstracts, and 3x 50-word biography, plus name of lead contact.
Delegates will be notified of decisions by: 5 March 2018
We will award a small bursary for the best PhD abstract submitted (also notified on 5 March)
Please direct all abstracts and any enquiries to: screeningmelbourne@gmail.com
On behalf of the organisation committee
David Chesworth
Toija Cinque
Adrian Danks
Glen Donnar
Claire Perkins
Sean Redmond