CfP: Special Issue Music and Data (University of California Press)

Music and Data (University of California Press) is pleased to welcome proposals for thematic (special) issues that explore how data—broadly conceived—shapes musical practices across global contexts and histories.

The journal seeks to position music and data as a critical humanistic field, bringing musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, media studies, anthropology, data science, and computational methods into sustained dialogue.

 Scope and Orientation

We are especially interested in proposals that:

  • Engage critically with algorithms, platforms, AI, metadata, archives, and infrastructures

  • Address ethical, political, and social questions, including power, labor, inequality, and data justice

  • Foreground global and transnational, especially from the Global South

  • Experiment with methodological innovation, including collaborative, practice-based, or multimodal approaches

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

  • Music streaming, platforms, and algorithmic cultures

  • Generative AI, machine listening, and creative automation

  • Music metadata, archives, and historiography

  • Data justice, extraction, and inequality in music cultures

  • Computational music analysis in dialogue with critical theory

  • Sound, data, and governance (states, corporations, NGOs)

  • Experimental methods at the intersection of music, sound, and data science

Proposal Guidelines

Thematic issue proposals should include:

  1. Provisional title and rationale (1–2 pages), outlining the intellectual stakes and coherence of the issue

  2. List of proposed contributors and abstracts (where possible)

  3. Guest editor(s) biography (short)

  4. Indicative timeline for submission and review

We welcome proposals from early-career and senior scholars, and strongly encourage collaborative and interdisciplinary editorial teams.

Submission & enquiries should be directed to: mad[at]ucpress[dot]edu
Further information about the journal can be found at: https://online.ucpress.edu/mad

Music and Data is committed to inclusive, international scholarship and to advancing new conversations at the intersection of music, sound, and data.

 

CFP, NewsHelene Heuser