International Workshops on Mobile Music Technology

Combining music and mobile technology, mobile music is a new field concerned with musical interaction in mobile settings. Devices such as mobile phones, Walkmans and iPods have already brought music to the ever-changing social and geographic locations of their users and reshaped their experience of the urban landscape. With new properties such as ad hoc networking, Internet connection, and context-awareness, mobile music technology offers countless new artistic, commercial and socio-cultural opportunities for music creation, listening, placing and sharing. How can we push forward the already successful combination of music and mobile technology? What new forms of interaction with music lie ahead, as locative media and music use merge into new forms of everyday experiences?

The annual International Workshops on Mobile Music Technology are the first events that focus on this new field. They have played a key role in the development of mobile music since the first workshop at the Viktoria Institute in 2004. The workshops gather a mix of researchers, designers, musicians, new media artists, social scientists, hackers and representatives of the industry, and have been held in Göteborg, Vancouver, Brighton and Amsterdam in collaboration with local committees and international partners.

The goal of the workshops is to raise awareness about existing projects as well as help actors of the field with backgrounds in multiple disciplines to identify common goals and issues, share resources, and introduce one another to relevant technologies, methods and concepts. Workshop programmes thus include various combinations of keynote presentations from invited speakers, peer-reviewed paper presentations, poster and demo sessions with state-of-the-art projects, in-depth discussions about the crucial issues of mobile music technology, break-out sessions, hands-on tutorials, work-in-progress feedback sessions, as well as live performances.

(Picture: "Hearing Sirens" by Cathy van Eck)