Call for Papers:

Amplification & Everyday Life Conference
June 4-5, 2026
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK
https://makeitlouder.co.uk/2025/10/23/call-for-papers-amplification-and-everyday-life/

Deadline for submissions: December 15, 2025

We are delighted to invite proposals for a two-day conference dedicated to Amplification and Everyday Life, taking place June 4-5, 2026, at the University of Huddersfield, UK.

The Amplification Project, a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project housed within the Music and Music Technology division of the University of Huddersfield, invites proposals on the theme of “Amplification and Everyday Life.” As the first large-scale research project dedicated to the study of amplification, we hope this conference will help to identify and define key issues and debates that are of core importance to the topic and will advance our mission to make amplification into a key subject in the cultural study of music and sound.

Sound amplification is one of the fundamental technologies of modernity. More than a way to make things louder, amplification has contributed to the increased ubiquity of recorded sound in everyday life and has afforded new mechanisms for controlling sound or using sound as a medium for social control. The sounds resulting from a range of amplified or amplifying devices – radios, phonographs, hi-fidelity stereo units, instrument amplifiers, public address systems, mobile phones – have been integrated into both private domestic settings and public events, contributing to the construction of diverse forms of individual and collective experience.

Where and how do we experience amplification?

• Amplified instruments can be played in isolation or in concert with others, creating the basis for distinct types of musical sociality.
• Live musical events use public address systems to build sonic environments designed to allow audiences to feel removed from everyday experience, but the work of assembling these systems is often routinized and relies upon specialized knowledge acquired through years of applied effort.
• Political rallies and protests use sound reinforcement to amplify the voices of both the political elite and the oppressed or marginalized, while police and military authorities have often resorted to amplification in efforts to drown out or silence those same voices.
• Portable listening devices afford new listening practices and ways of negotiating space, whether through cultivating privatised soundtracks through headphones or using mobile speaker technology to stake claims to public space on buses, subways, and neighbourhood streets.

In all these settings and more, amplification insinuates itself into everyday living patterns and is one of the principal frames through which sound circulates as a primary aspect of social interaction.

We welcome contributions from a wide range of scholarly fields, disciplines, and methodological approaches, including work that emerges from creative practice, and strongly encourage proposals about amplification in the everyday life of people of the Global South and marginalized—racial, gendered, sexual, socioeconomic—identity groups.

We invite papers that explore the following themes, or others related to amplification:

• Amplification as a listening technology and a means of cultivating audile technique
• Amplification as a performance technology and its alignment with musical practice
• Amplification as a technology of the self
• Timbre and amplified sound in everyday performance settings
• Live music production as everyday labour
• Amplifying political cultures
• Amplification technologies as tools of political repression
• Modifying and experimenting with amplification devices
• Home audio systems and audiophile culture
• Amplification in outdoor or natural sonic environments
• Amplification as a mediator of gender, race, class, sexuality, and/or disability
• Historical or geographical differences and continuities in amplification
• Amplifier manufacturing and production
• The home as listening environment
• Home studios and domestic production
• Amateur musicking and amplification
• Restoration, preservation and archiving of amplification technologies
• Reflections on the relationship between the material and metaphorical aspects of amplification
• Everyday amplification and the extreme or the extraordinary
• Amplified sound art as a medium for representing or distilling the everyday
• Acoustic monitoring devices and everyday surveillance

Individual papers/presentations should plan to be 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for discussion. Panel presentations should include 3 or 4 individual presenters. Panels can also take alternate formats such as a more open panel discussion but should specify the need for a 90-minute or 120-minute time slot.

For individual proposals, please submit a maximum 300-word abstract including title, a 100-word bio, and contact information for the presenter.

For panel proposals, please submit a maximum 300-word abstract for the full panel, in addition to 300-word abstracts for the individual papers, a 100-word bio for each presenter, and contact information for all participants.

Presentations will be evaluated through a peer review process based on the following criteria: (a) relevance to the call for papers and potential significance; (b) evidence of original research; (c) clarity of the main idea and research claims being made; and (d) theoretical and methodological rigour.

We can offer a limited number of small travel stipends of £200 for conference participants who require assistance. If you would like to request a stipend, please include a one-paragraph rationale for your request with your conference submission. Your rationale should address the basis of the financial need and the importance of the conference to your research plans. Stipends will only be provided for those who have had their proposals accepted.

Submissions for the conference will be due by 15 December 2025. The conference organizers hope to respond to all proposals by 1 February 2026.

The submission form is here.

Questions about the conference can be directed to Amplification Project Senior Research Fellows Gabrielle Kielich, G.E.Kielich2@hud.ac.uk, or Rebekah E. Moore, R.Moore2@hud.ac.uk.