Call for Papers - Volume 31, Number 3

Thematic Issue Title: Electroacoustic Audiovisual Composition and Intermediality: Reconceptualising media relationships

Date of Publication: December 2026

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Issue co-ordinator: Antonino Chiaramonte (antonino.chiaramonte@conservatorio-frosinone.it)

Deadline for submission: 15 January 2026

Electroacoustic Audiovisual Composition and Intermediality: Reconceptualising media relationships

Electroacoustic audiovisual composition has long explored the interplay between sound, image, and technology. However, the perceptual and conceptual phenomena arising from their integration remain only partially explored when the two media are regarded as equals. This thematic issue seeks to critically examine how intermediality—the dynamic combination and integration of distinct media—reshapes the creation, perception, and theorisation of audiovisual works. Rooted in practices that transcend traditional multimedia juxtaposition, intermediality redefines composition as a fusion process, where sound and moving image interact to generate new perceptual, aesthetic, and narrative dimensions. By situating electroacoustic practices within this intermedial framework, we aim to investigate how composers and artists navigate the fusion of sonic and visual elements to create new practice-based research paradigms.

Integrating electroacoustic music with visual media from an intermedial perspective necessitates redefining compositional strategies, critically reassessing media balance, and meaning making. By embedding musique concrète thinking into sonic and visual domains—abstracting materials from reality while retaining traces of their origins—artists navigate tensions between mimesis and abstraction, narrative and non-narrative, reimagining how media interact within the Intermedial Space—a perceptual and conceptual domain where sound and image coexist as equals, mutually shaping meaning. Recent contributions, such as the concept of Intermedial Interference (the constructive and/or destructive interaction of different media features), emphasise the need for critical frameworks to raise questions about interpretation and the ethics of remediated source materials in works that resist hierarchical media relationships.

This issue invites audiovisual composers, interdisciplinary practitioners, and musicologists to explore how intermedial audiovisual composition reconfigures electroacoustic practice. How do electroacoustic traditions inform or conflict with intermedial creativity? What role do non-narrative structures or speculative approaches play in subverting cinematic or acousmatic conventions and challenging traditional hierarchies of sound and image? Contributions may address historical precedents, theoretical frameworks, or emerging technologies as long as they critically engage with the interplay of media in audiovisual works.

Potential topics:

Submissions may engage with, but are not limited to:

• Intermediality in Practice: Strategies for integrating sound, image, and technology as equal media
• Electroacoustic legacies: How musique concrète, acousmatic, and live-electronics traditions intersect with intermedial arts
• Musique concrète expanded: Concrète approaches to sound/image manipulation and source surrogacy
• Non-narrative frameworks: Meta-narratives, ambiguity, and open works in audiovisual composition
• Balance and perception: Managing sensory hierarchies and perceptual overload in multisensory environments
• The phenomenology of perception: Embodied experiences in audiovisual perception
• Technological mediation: Tools for mapping, generative processes, and immersive environments for manipulating intermedial relationships
• Ethics and authorship: Human and non-human agency in intermedial creation (e.g., AI and algorithmic systems)
• Ethical considerations: Representation, cultural memory, and the politics of intermedial expression
• Autoethnography: Reflexive methodologies for documenting intermedial compositional processes
• Historical/cultural lineages: From visual music to audiovisual intermediality
• Pedagogy: Teaching intermedial thinking in electroacoustic and sound art curricula and practice.

Furthermore, as always, submissions unrelated to the theme but relevant to the journal’s focus areas are always welcome.

Please note that Organised Sound seeks issue-driven submissions relevant to the journal’s readership. It does not seek artists’ statements or work/project descriptions without an underlying central question and broad contextualisation.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 January 2026

SUBMISSION FORMAT: Notes for Contributors including how to submit on Scholar One and further details can be obtained from the inside back cover of published issues of Organised Sound or at the following url: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/organised-sound/information/author-instructions/preparing-your-materials.

General queries should be sent to: os@dmu.ac.uk, not to the guest editor.

Accepted articles will be published online via FirstView after copy editing prior to the full issue’s publication.

Editor: Leigh Landy; Associate Editor: James Andean

Founding Editors: Ross Kirk, Tony Myatt and Richard Orton†

Regional Editors: Liu Yen-Ling (Annie), Dugal McKinnon, Raúl Minsburg, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Schedel, Barry Truax

International Editorial Board: Miriam Akkermann, Marc Battier, Manuella Blackburn, Brian Bridges, Alessandro Cipriani, Ricardo Dal Farra, Simon Emmerson, Kenneth Fields, Rajmil Fischman, Kerry Hagan, Eduardo Miranda, Garth Paine, Mary Simoni, Martin Supper, Daniel Teruggi, Ian Whalley, David Worrall, Lonce Wyse