CFS: 2025 SEM Sounding Board

The SEM Sounding Board, an annual curated collection of field recordings and sound pieces organized by the SEM Sound Studies Section, cordially invites contributions for the 2025 annual meeting. This year’s exhibition will take place in the evening of Saturday, October 25, during the SEM annual conference in Atlanta, with an open theme designed to foster diversity and innovation.

We invite submissions of all forms of sound art, audiovisual installations, and performative or experimental work, particularly those forged from field recordings, audiovisual compositions, and sonic interventions. Our aim is to delve into the myriad ways sonic practices—whether analog or digital, human or nonhuman, remembered or simulated—can generate counterhistories, challenge dominant knowledge systems, and disrupt normative modes of listening, sensing, and remembering.

We seek thoughtful exploration of the potential reactivation of forgotten or obsolete media—such as cassette tapes, CD-Rs, MiniDiscs, and early mobile recordings—as archives that weave together past and present. How does sound emerge not just as a sensory event but as a potent instrument of political critique and a medium for representing marginalized knowledge?

We are particularly drawn to work that investigates the transmission of sound across generations, examining how it may be misunderstood, misremembered, or reframed through processes of familial, community, or social inheritance. We invite reflections on the politics of listening, engaging with themes of disability and access: who listens, in what contexts, and under which constraints? How do deaf or sonically sensitive communities navigate and challenge prevailing auditory norms, proposing alternative listening practices? Additionally, we encourage submissions that delve into the ways sound evades or resists visual representation, crafting presence independent of visibility, or tracing the pathways of sonic memory through migration, borders, and displacement.

We welcome innovative projects that challenge the contours of the sonic archive, considering how environmental sound, animal vocalizations, hydrophone recordings, or climate-based sound data may act as ecological testimony or avenues for multispecies communication. In a world reshaped by AI, we probe how machine-generated or machine-restored voices redefine our conceptions of memory, authenticity, and authorship, questioning the voices that emerge from these technological reconstructions and those that are rendered silent.

From cassette tapes to climate acoustics, and from field recordings to algorithmic echoes, the 2025 Sounding Board seeks works that resonate with material, temporal, and multispecies intersections. We invite contributions that recognize sound as a site of entanglement—across body, memory, media, and environment—challenging us to engage with listening in both archival and political dimensions.

Our commitment to inclusivity emphasizes collaborative engagement as we collectively navigate the evolving community of sound studies and (ethno)musicology. We encourage submissions from all—students, scholars, artists, archivists, field recordists, and practitioners at the confluence of sound, politics, aesthetics, media, and memory.

Submissions may include:

• Field recordings or sound art pieces

• Audio essays or sonic ethnographies

• Critical reflections on archival or recording practices

• Multimodal media works exploring the theme

To submit, please provide a link along with a 250-word abstract (contextual description of the work) and a 150-word short biography of the creator(s) in the link to the Google Form provided below.

Deadline: Sunday, August 31, 2025, 23:59 (EDT)

Submit to: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdZ_mQ3ACKHEy2Dbk0zlBl0NY5TtW4Tjfxir6EvTzYxNFpKeA/viewform?usp=dialog

For questions or further information, please reach out to us at semsoundstudies@gmail.com.

We eagerly anticipate your resonances and contributions.

SEM Sound Studies Section