About ESCOM

ESCOM is an international non-profit society to promote theoretical, experimental and applied research in the cognitive sciences of music.

The ESCOM triennial conference takes place every three years across Europe. ESCOM 12 will be hosted by The University of York (UK), with satellite locations at Universidad Nacional de la Plata (Argentina), and The University of Melbourne (Australia).

Become a member of ESCOM now! https://www.escomsociety.org/

The aim of the conference is to provide an interdisciplinary and intercultural platform for the dissemination of the most recent developments in music cognition research. The goal is to offer a green and inclusive format that combines high scientific standards with lower emissions associated with flying.

Participation is encouraged in person in one of these hubs, or entirely remotely (e.g., from their home computer). We invite all participants to go to the nearest hub, trying to avoid flying for environmental reasons. The conference will be live-streamed across the hubs (and remotely) and all talks will be recorded and made available to all attendees for the weeks following the event.

We are not the first to run our conference in this way. There have been other examples from which we are learning. Richard Parncutt et al. (2021) found that a multi-hub academic conference affords “global, inclusive, culturally diverse, creative, [and] sustainable” participation.

The way it works is that each site preserves the experience of an in-person event, but the sites are spaced geographically to facilitate overland transportation and require much less flying.

Professor Parncutt and colleagues in the field of music and psychology demonstrated the feasibility of this format at the 15th biennial International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (“ICMPC15/ESCOM10”), which had simultaneous sites in Montreal (Canada), La Plata (Argentina), Graz (Austria), and Sydney (Australia).