Global Arts and Psychology Seminar (GAPS)
Friday-Saturday 28-29 April 2017; Boston, Graz, La Plata, Sheffield, Sydney

Call for Papers

Content: GAPS is about the arts and the people who create and appreciate them, from a psychological perspective. “The arts” include auditory arts (music, sound design), visual arts (painting, architecture), literature, drama, opera, digital arts, and so on. We will focus on music. There will be about 8 research presentations at each hub. There will also be 3 keynotes, which will be viewed by all hubs.

Format: To our knowledge, GAPS will be the world’s first semi-virtual academic conference. GAPS 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 talk will be both live and virtual - presented to a live local audience and viewed elsewhere, either in real time or with a time delay. Live and virtual presentations will run in parallel at every hub. In July 2018, the new format will be scaled up for the international music psychology conference ICMPC15/ESCOM10.

Timing: GAPS will present current research by students at hubs in Boston (UTC/GMT-4 hours), La Plata (-3), Sheffield (+1), Graz (+2), and Sydney (+10). The program at each hub will be divided into two half-days (morning and evening), during which participants will communicate in real time with 1-2 other hubs, depending on time differences.

Technology: All talks will be live-streamed and recorded in YouTube. Both live streams and videos will be unlisted - available to registered participants only, in a password-protected teaching platform (Moodle). All discussions will be documented as comment feeds. During global discussions, session chairs will select questions from the real-time comment feed and pose them to presenters. Remote questioners will witness the question and answer on the live stream.

Organizers: Each hub has a senior organizer as follows:

• Isabel Martinez, Laboratorio para el Estudio de la Experiencia Musical, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina
• Richard Parncutt, Centre for Systematic Musicology, University of Graz, Austria
• Emery Schubert, School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
• Renee Timmers, Department of Music, Sheffield University, UK
• Parkes Wilde, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, Boston USA

Beyond some initial guidelines, the conference will be organized by graduate students. The main student organizers are:

• Boston: To be announced
• La Plata: Alejandro Pereira Ghiena (pereiraghiena@fba.unlp.edu.ar) and Joaquín Pérez (joaquinperez@fba.unlp.edu.ar)
• Graz: Maximilian Burkard (maximilian.burkard@googlemail.com)
• Sheffield: Shen Li (SLi37@sheffield.ac.uk)
• Sydney: Riza Veloso (r.veloso@unsw.edu.au)

How to submit an abstract. Doctoral and advanced Master’s students who would like to present their research at GAPS are asked to:

• create a personal account in EasyChair, making sure you enter your city and country (so we know which hub you will attend);
• find the submission link at the call for papers page at https://easychair.org/cfp/GAPS2017;
• enter a title of 50-150 characters (including spaces) and a structured abstract of 400-500 words; the headings for empirical abstracts are Background, Aims, Method, Results, and Conclusions, and the headings for theoretical abstracts are Background, Aims, Detail, Conclusions, and Implications (no references);
• enter SIX keywords and THREE topics.

To enter an empirical abstract, write it in the following form in a separate document, and copy-paste into EasyChair.