[Commlist] CfP - Listening to Possible Worlds: Sound and Music in Speculative Literature and Culture

Call for Papers:
*Listening to Possible Worlds: Sound and Music in Speculative Literature 
and Culture *
*22-23 October 2026, Leiden University, the Netherlands (in-person) *
*Confirmed keynote speakers are Anna Snaith (King’s College London) and 
Chris Tonelli (University of Groningen) *

In her 1999 essay “Quantum Listening,” musicologist Pauline Oliveros 
called for new and speculative modes of listening that are not only 
attentive to but also active in the creation of possible future worlds. 
For Oliveros, this practice entails “listening in as many ways as 
possible simultaneously – changing and being changed by the listening.” 
The conceptualisation of listening as a speculative practice of shaping 
possible cultures yet-to-come is especially relevant in the current era 
of rapidly emerging technologies of structural creation, embodiment, and 
mediatisation. Indeed, a quarter of a century later, her reference to 
“accelerated artificial evolution – hybrid humans – new beings born of 
technology” who bring with them “new challenges, consequences, dangers, 
freedoms and responsibilities” seems even more apt.
Despite an extensive presence in speculative fiction, both at the level 
of representation and as practice or methodology, the role of sound, 
music, and listening has received limited attention in scholarship on 
speculative literature and culture. Nevertheless, examples abound in the 
Anglophone world alone, from the use of music or recording technologies 
in literature, such as the phonograph in Bernard Capes’ story “The 
Devil's Fantasia” (1902), the stones in the for-TV horror play /The 
Stone Tape/ (1972), or the Orchestra in Kim Stanley Robinson's /The 
Memory of Whiteness/ (1985), to the use of music as a mode of 
speculative worldbuilding in the pseudo-anthropological soundtrack of 
Ursula K. Le Guin’s /Always Coming Home/ (1985), as a practice of 
decolonial cosmology in /Journey to Nabta Playa /by Angel Bat Dawid and 
Naima Nefertari (2025), and as a transmedial project of speculative 
research-creation in the approach of Black Quantum Futurism 
(2015-present). Sound and music are biopolitical; from underscoring 
technological modes of extraction and war in historical modernist 
fiction to shaping identities around gender in video games. Sound and 
music are at once ephemeral and otherworldly yet also intensely linked 
to technological modes of mediation, and this is especially apt in the 
recent emergence of GenAI technologies that offer new forms of sonic 
capture and subversion. At the same time, aural forms such as 
storytelling and song have the potential to circumvent the dominance of 
visual language and the written word and, with them, the normative 
ideas, worlds, and epistemologies they reinforce. *How does speculative 
literature respond to or incorporate the aural, sonic, or noisy? How are 
sonic technologies co-opted into practices of worldbuilding? How does 
the speculative mode of artistic and literary enquiry generate new 
possibilities of listening? *
This conference calls for presentations on sound and music in 
speculative literature and culture. We invite studies of sound across 
forms, media, genres, and contexts, taking a broad approach to both the 
“speculative” and to “fiction.” This includes literary texts but also 
games, broadcast media, digital culture, music, television, and film, 
and is not limited to the genres of science fiction or the fantastic but 
to works of art that ask, /what if? /
Topics of interest may include but are not limited to:

  *
    Sound, music, and futurity
  *
    Music and speculative technologies, including generative AI
  *
    Sonic technologies in fiction
  * Acousmatics and the hearing sciences in fiction
  *
    Listening as a speculative mode of ex/post/de-coloniality
  *
    The sounds and music of war
  *
    Music and the posthuman, more-than-human, and non/human
  *
    Utopian and dystopian soundworlds
  *
    Listening and/as ecology in SF
  *
    Disability and embodiment in SF
  *
    Experimental speculative fiction, sound art, and the avant-garde
  *
    The weird, the eerie, and the cosmic
  *
    Noise and/or silence in SF
  *
    Sonic worldbuilding across media
  *
    Gender, sexuality, and sound in SF
  *
    Genre and adaptation between sound and fiction
  *
    Science fiction, fantasy, YA, and popular fiction
  *
    Race, caste, class and music in SF
  *
    The relationship between sound/music and speculative isms or
    aesthetic modes such as Dadaism, Afrofuturism, Cyberpunk etc.
  *
    The relationship between sound/music, digital culture, and internet
    aesthetics
  *
    The politics of language, translation, and sound in SF

There are two tiers for registration fees: €50 for waged and/or funded 
participants and €25 for unwaged and/or unfunded participants. There are 
a limited number of bursaries available for people without access to 
regular funding, consisting of €100 towards expenses and a conference 
fee waiver. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please 
indicate this on the proposal.
We invite presenters to submit an abstract of 250 words and a bio of 100 
words for a 20-minute paper or alternative presentation format 
(performative, creative-critical, collaborative). Please send abstracts 
and bios in one document to Ruth Alison Clemens at 
(r.a.clemens /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl) 
<mailto:(r.a.clemens /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl)> with the subject heading ‘LTPW 
Proposal’. We will notify participants by the end of April 2026.
*Deadline for submissions: Monday 30 March 2026 *


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