ICMPC Conference

** UPDATE: ICMPC15/ESCOM10 was successfully held 23rd-28th July 2018. Thank you to all our attendees, speakers, and to the organizing committees around the world. **

Welcome to the Sydney Hub of the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. The International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) takes place every two years, and the 15th event in the series is planned for 23-28 July 2018. Continuing a traditional 6-year cycle, the conference will be combined with the 10th triennial conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). Please note that while ICMPC opens on the 23rd of July, the Sydney hub will not be operating until the 24th July due to time zone differences with the other global hubs.

ICMPC15-ESCOM10 will be distributed across hubs on different continents, communicating via an internet cloud. We will strike a new balance between face-to-face and virtual communication and between activities on different continents to create a truly global conference.

Every hub will present a regular local keynote and regular parallel sessions. In addition, there will be virtual parallel sessions from the other hubs, mostly in real time (as unlisted, password-protected YouTube streams) followed by international discussions (probably using Zoom). In this way, each hub will present most or all of the global program.

The daily program will be divided into a morning and an evening session to maximize real-time international communication. Symposium organizers will present their own research and then lead a discussion of 2-3 thematically related videos from other hubs.

For the first time,

every talk will be both live and virtual, that is, presented to a live local audience and viewed elsewhere in real time (and possibly at other places, with a time delay);
all discussions will include real-time virtual participants at one or more remote locations;
all presentations and all discussions will be documented as videos plus comment feeds;
a limited number of colleagues who are unable to travel due to disability, caring commitments, visa/travel problems or severe financial limitations will have the opportunity to present a prerecorded, reviewed video;
abstract reviews will be considered when selecting keynotes, of which there will be one at each hub, streamed to one or two other hubs in real time with no competition from other events.
Participants will be free to attend any hub, regardless of their location. We recommend travelling to the closest hub, which will reduce both travel costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Flying across the world to a conference is comparable with driving a car in a regular way for a year.

The hubs are:

Montréal, Québec: Department of Music, Concordia University
Sydney, Australia: School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales
La Plata, Argentina: Faculty of Fine Arts, National University of La Plata
Graz, Austria: Centre for Systematic Musicology, University of Graz

Graz will carry out the review procedure and write the program in collaboration with other hub organizers. Registration fees will be paid directly to hubs. The technology was tested in April 2017 in a small international pilot event (Global Arts and Psychology Seminar GAPS2017).

A call for papers was released in August 2017. The abstract submission (via ConfTool) deadline is 20 November 2017.

Feedback and questions about the new conference format are always welcome.

Thank You!

ICMPC15/ESCOM10 was a success! A huge THANK YOU to all of our speakers, attendees, and assistants, and also CONGRATULATIONS to the other hubs around the world (Graz, La Plata, and Montreal).
See you next time!

Sydney Hub Committee (Emery, Anthony, Riza, Kim, & Diana)

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Venue and Travel

The Sydney Hub of ICMPC will be held at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
The conference will take place at the John Niland Scientia Building, UNSW Sydney, at the Kensington (main) campus of the University of New South Wales, Sydney (campus map reference G19).
See here for a google map of the conference venue. Transport options in google maps are fairly reliable, however for more information, see here: https://www.gettingstarted.unsw.edu.au/maps-and-public-transport

Please note, too, that UNSW will be in week 1 of the teaching semester, meaning that public transport will be busy, frequent, and overall provide good, rapid service from the central business district. See here for more information.
In addition to this, Sydney is undergoing major infrastructure development, which primarily affects UNSW campus with the construction of light rail routes, which affects transport around High Street and Anzac Parade.

There are many accommodation options in and around the university district. As ICMPC occurs during the teaching semester, on-campus options will be extremely limited. Most delegates are using commercial accommodation booking sources to find accommodation during the conference, such as AirB&B, Booking.com, Trivago etc. Please note that if seeking accommodation nearby, the University straddles the Sydney suburbs of Kensington and Randwick. If you are staying further away from the conference venue, there is good, though busy, bus transport service between Central station in the downtown city centre (CBD - central business district) and the University campus. Sydney public transport uses Opal cards which can be purchased in shops, online and opal card dispensing machines.

Program

The Sydney hub local program is available here

It consists of all the oral and poster presentations in the Sydney hub to be presented live, and a selection of presentations from other hubs which will be streamed or played back. For more information see the global program page here

Please note, also, that over time small changes may be made to the local and global programs. To check which version you are reading, check the date at the bottom of page 2 (of the local program only) and compare it with the current local program at the link above

Sydney hub Committee