Proceedings of the First Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Sound, Movement, and the Sciences (SoMoS)

The First Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Sound, Movement, and the Sciences (SoMoS) was
originally planned to take place from 28 to 30 September 2020 in Sweden, hosted by the KTH (Royal
Institute of Technology) in Stockholm. Due to the global pandemic, the program committee, local hosts
and executive board of the study group decided jointly to turn the event into an online symposium. Our
host Andre Holzapfel thankfully became the primary online host, and to keep some Swedish “flavour”
he organized a wonderful opening event with Swedish folk music played by Sven Ahlbäck, Petter
Berndalen, and Olof Misgeld. Andre was joined by several voluntary co-hosts (members of the program
committee as well as SoMoS executive board) who helped to chair sessions, manage the meetings, and
provide back-up online space.
All presentations were pre-recorded, but the presenters attended in person online for their
respective sessions and answered questions after their presentations. Altogether more than 40 participants
took part, from all over the globe and across multiple time zones. To accommodate for time differences,
all video presentations were made available online for the duration of the event.
The main aim of the ICTM SoMoS study group is to bring together and support scholars whose
work combines methods and approaches from ethnomusicology and/or ethnochoreology with those from
the sciences to explore sound and movement in musical and dance contexts. For our first official
symposium, we welcomed proposals on any topic that aligns with the aims and themes of the Study
Group. In particular, we invited contributions that either combine ethnographic and science-based
approaches, explore the issues involved in such endeavours, or present reflective discussions on relevant
theories and methodologies. As hoped, the accepted presentations brought together scholars of diverse
backgrounds and approaches and resulted in exchanges of perspectives that proved fruitful for many
involved.
At the meeting, two open discussion sessions provided opportunities to communicate on a
professional and organisational level. After all, a symposium is as much about more general scholarly
exchange as it is about presenting and learning about each others’ research. Even in this online format,
the symposium served to strengthen our community and encourage and encourage discourse across the
areas addressed by our study group.
These proceedings are a record of the symposium in the form of short and extended abstracts.
All authors were given the option to decide in which of these two categories they wished to submit their
contributions. Short abstracts were up to 300 words in length, while extended abstracts had a limit in the
main text of 1,500 words. The extended abstract format, which is commonly used in the proceedings of
disciplines such as music psychology, was chosen instead of full articles to take into account the
preferences of the majority of presenters, as many needed to publish their full articles in discipline-
specific journals. All abstracts received were peer-reviewed and copyedited by the team of editors to
ensure a high-quality publication by the SoMoS study group.
Finally, we would like to thank all authors who contributed to the proceedings, and all reviewers
who volunteered and invested considerable time and energy to make this a peer-reviewed publication: a
valuable and tangible outcome of the first SoMoS symposium.

Graz, July 2021.
The SoMoS Executive Committee.