Organised Sound
Aims and Scope
Organised Sound is a fully peer-reviewed scholarly journal focusing on the rapidly developing methods and issues arising from the use of contemporary technology in fields such as multimedia, performance art, sound sculpture and electroacoustic composition. It is a forum for music scholars, composers, performers, computer specialists, mathematicians and engineers to share the results of their research as they affect musical issues. Young researchers will be particularly encouraged. Contributors of accepted articles are encouraged to submit accompanying sound examples and other multimedia material for inclusion in the DVD that will accompany the journal annually.
Submission
Submission of a paper to Organised Sound is held to imply that it represents an original contribution not previously published and that it is not being considered elsewhere. Papers are reviewed by at least two referees.
Papers should not normally exceed 7,000 words and should be preceded by an abstract of approximately 200 words.
Please contact the editor if you have sound or movie examples. See further information concerning sound and movie examples below, including maximum durations and format instructions.
For information about submitting a paper, please see Submitting your materials.
For information about seeking permission to use copyrighted material, please see here.
Manuscript requirements
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through Organised Sound's ScholarOne site (please see our Submitting your materials page). The journal initials OS and 6 characters of the author surname should be used as the file name, plus .doc, e.g OSjones.doc would be a typical file name.
Where Mac files are submitted these should be .docx files and similarly OSjones.docx should be the file name.
Only final material should be submitted; no draft material is accepted. The author affiliation, full postal address and email address to which proofs should be sent should start the file. The contributor should keep a back-up file.
Illustrations should be submitted as individual eps or tif files in separate files from the text and labelled similarly JonesF3.eps, etc. No author graphics programs can be handled. Colour files should not be submitted; the journal uses only black and white reproductions and all colour images should be converted to black and white before submission to check that all features are present when colour is not used. Very large files can be zipped. The normal reproduction of halftones for printing is at 300dpi and line artwork at 1200dpi. Low resolution illustrations may be rejected by the editor.
Please note that it is each author’s sole responsibility to gain copyright permission for images, sound and movie examples.
Sound Examples should be submitted using the .m4a file format. There is no prescribed maxima for the total duration of sound examples.
Movie Examples should be submitted using the .m4v file format. There is no prescribed maxima for the total duration of movie examples.
Footnotes should be kept to a minimum and presented using Word footnote not endnote facility. Note indicators in the text should follow punctuation.
Bibliographical references should be given in parentheses in standard author-date form in the body of the text: (Lee and Devore 1968: 236). Works written by 3+ authors, use first name and et al. for every mention.
A complete list of references cited, arranged alphabetically by author's surname, should be typed double-spaced at the end of the article. The reference list should contain all the items mentioned in the text, and only those items. Contributors are asked to standardise on basic conventions:
• make all journal numbers arabic
• do not use pp. before page numbers if the volume number is also given
• make the titles of published works italic (not bold)
• do not use inverted commas around chapter titles in edited books, journal articles, and the titles of unpublished dissertations
• elide page numbers to the shortest pronounceable form: 56–7, 281–3, but 215–16.
• include an 'accessed on' date when a specific article has been cited, but not for general websites (e.g. www.cambridge.org)
• include doi details for journals if available
Examples of references:
Book
Weidenaar, R. H. 1995. Magic Music from the Telharmonium. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
Chapter in edited book
Hugill, A. and Amelides, P. 2018. Audio-only Computer Games: Papa Sangre. In S. Emmerson and L. Landy (eds.) Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 355–75.
Article
Noble, J., Bonin, T. and McAdams, S. 2020. Experiences of Time and Timelessness in Electroacoustic Music. Organised Sound 25(2): 232–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/S135577182000014X.
Online article
Martin, B. 2014. The Thing about Listening is...Compositional Approaches and Inspiration Using Spoken Word, Field Recordings and Electroacoustic Techniques. eContact! 16(2).
http://econtact.ca/16_2/martin_listening.html (accessed 29 August 2016).
Unattibuted website
BBC. 2019. Colombia Protests: Three Dead as More than 200,00 Demonstrate. 22 November. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-50515216 (accessed 6 August 2021).
Attributed website
Kunst, J. 1986. Social Cognitions and Musical Emotions. www.joskunst.net/social_cognitions.html (accessed 10 July 2023).
Proceedings article
Young, J. 2002. The Interaction of Sound Identities in Electroacoustic Music. Proceedings of the 2002 International Computer Music Conference. Göteborg/San Francisco: ICMA, 342–8.
Score
Sciarrino. S. 1992. Perseo e Andromeda. Milan: Ricordi, score 135358.
Example of a discography entry:
Smalley, D. 1992. Wind Chimes (1987). On Impacts intérieurs. Montreal: Empreintes Digitales, IMED9209-CD.
Punctuation should follow standard British practice. Single quotation marks should be used with double reserved for quotations within quotations. Punctuation that is not part of the quoted material should be outside closing quotation marks, as should footnote indicators. Longer quotation should be indented left without quotation marks and double-spaced. Prose citations should be in English unless the original is of particular importance, unpublished or inaccessible, in which case the original should be follow by a translation in square brackets.
Contractions and acronyms should have no full points (Dr, DAT), but abbreviations and their plurals should retain them (vol., vols., ed., eds.). At first appearance, acronyms should be presented in full and followed by the acronym within parentheses.
Tables should be clearly laid out on separate pages, numbered consecutively, and designed to fit the printed page. Vertical lines should not be used and horizontal lines should be used only at the top and bottom of the table and below column headings.
Captions should be on a separate page, double spaced. Indicate in square brackets in the typescript, or in the margin, approximately where in the text tables and illustrations should fall.
Subheadings should be typed with prefatory numbers indicating the level of importance, 1, 1.1, 1.1.1. No more than three levels of subheading should normally be used.
Quotations. Single inverted commas should be used except for quotations within quotations, which should have double inverted commas. Longer quotations of more than 60 words, or quotations which are of particular importance or the focus of your discussion, should be set off from the text with an extra line of space above and below, and typed without inverted commas. The page numbers for a quotation should be included in its citation if available in original source.
Spelling. The journal employs British English spelling conventions.
Idiomatic English.
We welcome and encourage submissions from non-native speakers of English.
However, every effort should be made by non-native speakers of English to
have their final draft checked by a colleague who is a native speaker of
English. Manuscripts may be sent back to the author(s) if serious language
deficiencies remain in the text.
Copyright
The policy of Organised Sound is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant Cambridge University Press a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here.
For open access articles, the form also sets out the
Creative Commons license
under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental
principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible
but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a
Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that
the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can
also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for
any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is
given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different
kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting
non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.
Publishing ethics
Authors should check Organised Sound's Publishing ethics policies while preparing their materials.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.