Introduction

This one-day conference will gather together postgraduate researchers in Live Electronic Music and allied disciplines to explore issues and challenges around practice-led research in this area.

In addition to paper sessions and opportunities to network with fellow researchers, the conference will feature a workshop on collective electronic play, open equally to beginners and the more experienced.

Keynote speaker Leigh Landy will share with the conference the benefit of his extensive experience of, and insights into, practice-led research in electronic music.

In the evening an exciting concert will feature a collective performance of various compositions by a group of special guest researchers from the University of Edinburgh, including Martin Parker, Jules Rawlinson, Sean Williams and Lauren Hayes, in collaboration with conference convener, Owen Green.

By Way of Explanation

Live electronic musical practice has a highly interdisciplinary nature, the types of knowledge that make up practices are embodied in a diffused way across a diverse range of different artefacts, sites and experiences. This presents challenges to researchers in the field when it comes to devising documentary and discursive strategies, especially with respect to collaboration.

Whilst discussion and research of technical aspects of practice is well developed and catered for, the collaborative potential and cultural sustainability of the field could be greatly enhanced by the development of recognised good practice in developing research and communication methodologies that address the other aspects of live electronic musicking, especially the interrogation of meta-technical ideas.

This conference sets out to explore this issues discursively and practically by considering the following questions:

• Practice: Is live electronic musical culture fragile with respect to external technological change, incompatibility, obsolescence? Is this exacerbated by an absence of languages (sonic, gestural, verbal) for communicating substantively about our practice to fellow players, other colleagues and audience members?


• Participation: To what extent are the challenges of collaborative and participatory practice in live electronic music rooted in interpersonal, cultural issues rather than just technical? Could an improved meta-technical discourse help us improve our musicality and our instruments?


• Method: How might the sites and ways in which knowledge is embodied vary with disciplinary focus? How do colleagues from allied disciplines think about live electronic music?
  

The event is made possible with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), as part of the Beyond Text Programme and City University London.