The Music Graduate Student Organization at the University of Pittsburgh welcomes proposals for 20 minute paper presentations, performance demonstrations, or work that integrates research and practice for its 2026 conference, “Sonic Power: Speculation, Surveillance, and Strength.” We invite students, researchers, musicians, sound artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to consider how sound organizes power and how people reorganize power through sound. Sonic life shapes worlds, whether in the hush of archival erasure, the loudness of protest, or the sorting of listening within media infrastructures. We seek work that brings speculation into the present tense, that treats sound as a way to model futures otherwise, and that interrogates strength as more than endurance, for example as collective capacity, infrastructures of care, and techniques of shelter and repair.

We take sound as method, material, and metaphor, and we aim to deepen the conversation across critical theory, ethnographic research, and creative practice. Contributors might map the infrastructures of listening that underpin surveillance capitalism, examine algorithmic recommendation and moderation as acoustic governance, or analyze sonic policing, border acoustics, and the evidentiary life of audio in courts, platforms, and public inquiries. Mixed methods are welcome, including multi-sited ethnography, media archaeology, critical interface studies, participatory action research, and practice based research that treats making as thinking.

We invite contributors to ponder speculative imagination as a political and methodological resource. How might speculative sound worlds model care, refusal, or repair within extractive listening economies? What forms of resonance enable collective strength when visibility is risky, and what kinds of quiet enable survival without disappearance? How does sonic harm reduction operate in protest, incarceration, and migration? Where do acoustic leakages, glitches, or mishearings open cracks in systems that promise total capture? We welcome work that links concrete cases to conceptual stakes, that moves from situated scenes to larger abstractions of power and perception, and that treats sound not only as an object of study but as a way to think about our present and to rehearse futures otherwise.

Possible topics include:

• Archives
• Silences
• Listening infrastructures
• Platform economies and politics
• Protest and resilience
• Mutual aid and care
• Labor
• Pedagogy and institutions of musical knowledge
• Access and disability
• Sonic ecologies and the environment
• Ethics of fieldwork, consent, and community
• AI voice cloning, authorship, and consent
• Voice biometrics
• Codec politics, compression artifacts, and cultural loss
• Noise ordinances, zoning, and urban governance
• Acoustic environmental justice
• Sounded surveillance
• Diasporic telepresence and distant togetherness
• Queer timbres and trans futures
• Sonic branding and behavioral nudges
• Crowd sounds
• Audibility and public legibility
• ASMR economies
• Vibrotactile media and haptics
• Data sonification

Formats we welcome

• Individual papers (20 minutes)
• Performances and soundworks (up to 15 minutes; lecture recitals with live or pre-recorded materials welcome)
• Combinations of research and performance are encouraged.

Submission and contact

Individual Papers: Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words.

Performance demonstrations: Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words that describes your performance and its relevance to the conference theme. Performance and soundwork proposals should also include a link to a streaming sample of up to three minutes (audio or video) or a score excerpt

Please use the following form to submit your abstract with five keywords and a short bio of no more than 100 words. There will be a space to include other technical needs you may have. For questions, please contact us at MGSOinfo@gmail.com 

Form

Important dates

Submission deadline: December 1, 2025, 11.59 pm EST

Notifications: by January 12, 2026, 11.59 pm EST

Confirmation of participation needed: by January 30, 2026, 11.59 pm EST

Program posted: February 10, 2026 11.59 pm EST