The Mobile Music Workshop

Combining music and mobile technology promises exciting future developments in a rapidly emerging field. Devices such as mobile phones, Walkmans and iPods have already brought music to the ever-changing social and geographic locations of their users and reshaped their experience of the urban landscape. With new properties such as ad hoc networking, Internet connection, and context-awareness, mobile music technology offers countless new artistic, commercial and socio-cultural opportunities for music creation, listening and sharing. How can we push forward the already successful combination of music and mobile technology? What new forms of interaction with music lie ahead, as locative media and music use merge into new forms of everyday experiences?

This series of annual workshops began to explore and establish the emerging field of mobile music technology in 2004. This fourth edition of the Mobile Music Workshop in 2007 offers a unique opportunity to participate in the development of mobile music and hands-on experience of cutting-edge technology.

This year’s workshop is hosted by STEIM and Waag Society in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and partners with the Futuresonic Festival in Manchester, England, taking place later the same week. The programme of the workshop will consist of keynote presentations from invited speakers, peer-reviewed paper presentations, poster sessions, in-depth discussions about the crucial issues of mobile music technology, demos of state-of-the-art projects, break-out sessions and live events. Registered participants will take part in hands-on sessions conducted by leaders in the field. In addition to traditional presentation sessions, the programme includes events open to a general audience, facilitating the presentation of artworks and technological breakthroughs to a wider public.

The Mobile Music Workshop sets the stage for a collaboration that brings together leading institutions in both experimental electronic music and mobile media. STEIM (the studio for electro-instrumental music) is a centre for electronic music production well known in the performing arts. STEIM promotes the idea that Touch is crucial in communicating with electronic and digital arts technologies, a vision that over the years has given birth to physical, sensor-based musical instruments. Waag Society is a research and development institute in the fields of networked art, education and creative industries. Waag develops platforms for artists to reach society through networked collaboration, media streaming, and locative media.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS AND WORKS

We invite practitioners, artists, designers, hackers and researchers from all areas, including music, technology development, new media, sound-art, music distribution, cultural/media studies, locative media and industry to submit work and register to attend. Don't miss this chance to help shape the mobile music landscape of the future! Participants are encouraged to submit their work in mobile music technology to the categories below. The partnership with the Futuresonic Festival allows those coming to Europe to make a single trip to attend both events.

* Papers

We invite submissions of workshop papers presenting new projects, approaches or reflections exploring the topic of mobile music. Potential submissions could include but are not limited to mobile music systems or enabling technologies, interface design, legal issues, user studies, ethnographic fieldwork, social implications, art pieces and other areas relevant to mobile music.
Accepted paper authors will be given a time slot during the workshop for presentation and discussion of their work. Format: up to 8 pages in ACM SIG publications format (shorter papers welcome). For templates, see http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

* Posters

We also invite the contribution of posters that document work-in-progress projects or ideas in similar areas of mobile music technology as the papers.
Posters will be on display during the duration of the conference. We will arrange a poster presentation session where attendees will be able to discuss the works with the authors. Format: 2 pages in ACM SIG publications format

* Demonstrations

We also invite submissions of work to the demo category. Besides encouraging paper and poster presenters to bring a demonstration as a complement their presentation, we encourage submissions of stand-alone demos of mobile music systems or enabling technology. Their implementation should be ready enough to be demoed, and will possibly be shown to the general public during open sessions depending on their robustness. Format: 2 pages in ACM SIG publications format.

SUBMISSIONS

Please email your submission as a PDF file in the appropriate format to submissions[at]mobilemusicworkshop.org In the subject line, state MMW SUBMISSION followed by PAPER, POSTER or DEMO and the name of the main author. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by a committee of international specialists in the fields of mobile music, interactive music, and locative media.

DEADLINES

Submission deadline: 12th March 2007
Notification of acceptance: 2nd April 2007
Registration deadline: 16th April 2007
Final submission deadline: 16th April 2007

REGISTRATION & FEE

This year’s workshop will have both closed sessions for registered participants and sessions open to the general public. The number of participants for the closed sessions of the workshop is limited to 50 places. Accepted submitters are given priority, other participants are accepted on a first-come first-served basis. Registered participants will have automatic access to all sessions of the workshops. The closed sessions of the workshop will be charged both a regular and a reduced student fee, similar to the last edition’s fees.

Registration deadline: 16th April 2007

The open sessions will be advertised in more detail closer to the event. The fee for the open sessions will be event-based. Scheduling and registration fees will be coordinated with Futuresonic to allow participants to easily attend both events.

ORGANISERS

* International Steering Committee

Atau Tanaka (Sony CSL Paris, France)
Frauke Behrendt (University of Sussex, UK)
Lalya Gaye (Viktoria Institute, Sweden)

* Local Organising Committee

Kristina Andersen (STEIM, The Netherlands)
Robert van Heumen (STEIM, The Netherlands)
Ronald Lenz (Waag Society, The Netherlands)