Manufacturing Audible Truth | Call for Contributions | September 9th 2023

Since 2016 Anton Bruckner University has been hosting the ‘Sonic Saturday’ as part of the Ars Electronica Festival. For this year’s festival we will organize an artists’ meeting to allow for an
informal, hands-on, in-person exchange of ideas of artistic researchers working on relevant projects.

Theme
In accordance with the festival theme ‘Who owns the truth’ the Ars Electronica digital music focus at Anton Bruckner University will focus on how the audible arts research and question the manifold concepts of truth.

While music is a tool quite unfit for reporting the factual it has again and again proven to be rather successful in helping to bring its audiences into agreement. Which is quite understandable given
that it is a lot easier to feel part of a big group while marching (or dancing for that matter) to the beat of the same drummer, this classical tool for drowning out opposition as well as for the synchronization of movement, breath, and heartbeat. Sound design on the other hand can play important roles in the creation of ever more ‘truthful’ reproductions as well as substitutes for the
(hyper-)real than the purely visual ever could.

With new AI tools for the automated generation and custom tailoring of the individually optimized sonic feed on the horizon so is its potential for the (ab-)use of music for highly differentiated crowd control. Or is musical truth simply the optimal signal to feed to the receiving system, the always needy organism that the human body is?

Call for Contributions
As an academic institution, we mainly seek proposals from researchers and (research) students in related fields. If you are an artist not affiliated with any university wanting to contribute, please
feel free to still drop us a line.

We welcome proposals in the form of:

• Lecture performances (duration 20 mins) Submit a PDF document in the form of a short paper of artistic research projects involving immersive audio in relation with the Symposium theme. Include technical requirements. Lecture-performances will be held in the morning of Saturday, Sept. 9th 2023.
• Workshops
  We aim for interactive workshops involving audience members. Maximum duration: 1 hour. Submit a PDF document with: Title, technical requirements, number of possible participants, content, and structure of the workshop in relevance to the Symposium theme. Workshops will be held in the afternoon of Saturday, Sept. 9th 2023.
• Fixed media works (audio only, up to 20.2 channels) Submit a binaural or stereo version of the work (48 KHz.), preferably less than 20 min. of duration through a password free cloud link. Add a PDF document with the following information: Title of the work, composer, year of composition, duration, program note, relevance of the work with the Symposium theme. Selected pieces might be selected for the Listening Room or the Medium Sonorum concert at Sonic Lab.

Topics of interest:

• Recording media as/and the mirror of nature
• Truthful vs. idealistic sonic representations
• Overwhelming and synchronising
• Sound in (dis-)agreement with reality
• Immersive audio as representation of reality
• The sonic hyper-real
• Composing virtual worlds & soundscapes
• Machine learning and AI in music
• Immersion vs. coercion
• Sound as vehicle of manipulation
• Chronology & causality
• Construction of meaning through sound
• The musicking crowd as faith-based community
• Social media as massively multichannel delivery & control systems
• Spatial music & composition
• Technologies to enable & reflect (spatialisation, computer music, 3D audio/mixing/recording, binaural reproduction, ambisonics, live electronics/coding, etc.)
• All the other relevant fields we failed to put on this list.

Send your proposals to:digitalmusicfocusbruckneruniat
Submission deadline: June 4th, 2023 (you will hear back from us by June 12th)
Organization committee: Helga Arias, Isabella Forciniti, Jorge Gómez Elizondo, Tobias Leibetseder, Enrique Mendoza
Coordination: Enrique Mendoza
Supervision: Prof. Volkmar Klien