Call for Chapters: Edited Volume – Sounds Without Borders: New Music, Hybrid Languages and the Futures of Listening Call for Submissions Publications

Editor: Paolo Tortiglione
Publisher: Pietà dei Turchini Edizioni

This edited volume examines new music through the lens of cultural hybridity and global sonic exchange, bringing together musicologists, ethnomusicologists, composers, performers, and cultural theorists. It explores how musical traditions dissolve, merge, and reinvent one another, illuminating how composers, performers, and listeners are reshaping musical language in an interconnected world.

As the boundaries between Western art music, non-Western traditions, electronic music, and popular forms grow increasingly porous, composers and performers move fluidly across notation systems, vocal techniques, rhythmic languages, and sonic technologies. Yet analytical frameworks have struggled to keep pace with this creative reality. The collection investigates cultural translation, sonic border-crossing, and the emergence of hybrid musical languages — from archaic vocal textures resurfacing in contemporary composition to electroacoustic reimaginings of ritual sound, from migrating percussion traditions to music born of urban diaspora.

We welcome historically grounded studies, theoretically informed analyses, and practice-based perspectives from musicology and related fields (cultural studies, sound studies, urban studies, postcolonial theory).

Possible topics include: graphic scores and oral transmission across cultures; AI-generated and open-form notation; world vocal fusion and archaic vocal techniques; electroacoustic music in ritual and spiritual traditions; field recording as ethnographic practice; polyrhythm and percussion traditions crossing cultural borders; urban soundscapes, migration, and diaspora as avant-garde practice; jazz and improvisation; reworked folk traditions; microtonality; silence and noise; the body in performance; spirituality in border music; and film/incidental music as sites of fusion.

Submission Guidelines
Please send a 400–600 word abstract, a 150–200 word bio, and institutional affiliation (if applicable) to paolo.tortiglione@sanpietroamajella.cloud.

Deadlines
Abstract: August 15
Notification of acceptance: August 30
Chapter draft: November 30
Final chapters: 5,000–7,000 words, MLA style (notes and bibliography)