2nd International Conference on Music and Consciousness

Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, UK, 14th-17th April 2015.

Organised jointly by the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, and the University of Newcastle's International Centre for Music Studies.

There have been rapid multidisciplinary advances in scholarly understanding of musical experience over the last fifteen years or so. It is increasingly accepted that musical experiences are multi-faceted, fluctuating, and dynamic; complex composites of cognitive, perceptual, embodied and affective components. One response to the acknowledged phenomenological complexity of musical engagement has been a growing interest in the relationship between music and consciousness. 

Following on from the success of the first International Conference on Music and Consciousness (Sheffield, 2006), and the edited volume Music and Consciousness to which this led, this second conference is again intended as a forum for the exchange of perspectives from a broad range of disciplines, including but not restricted to:  neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, musicology, performance studies, ethnomusicology, music therapy, evolutionary psychology, cognitive archaeology, and cultural history.
  
The conference will consist entirely of plenary sessions, enabling wide-ranging participation, with significant time set aside for discussion. It will include keynote presentations, papers, short communications, and musical performances. 

The conference committee welcomes submissions addressing a broad range of themes, including but not limited to the following:

•	Music and Unconsciousness
•	Neural substrates of musical consciousness
•	Consciousness and musical performance
•	Music and trance, flow, absorption, dissociation, and altered states of consciousness (ASC).
•	Theorising musical consciousness - across disciplines, across cultures, across history
•	Consciousness and musical creativity
•	Modes of musical consciousness, modes of musical subjectivity
•	Music and collective consciousness

Proposals will be accepted on the basis of their relevance to the conference themes, significance, originality and rigour.

A formal call for papers will be issued in January 2014, with a deadline for proposals of July 2014.

David Clarke (Newcastle)
Eric Clarke (Oxford)
Ruth Herbert (Oxford)
MusCon 2 Conference Committee