Call for Participation
Proposal deadline: 5 May 2026
Theme: From Circuits to Culture: Synthesizers as Instruments, Interfaces, and Ideas
We invite submissions for SYNTHposium ’26, bringing together practitioners, researchers, engineers, musicians, and scholars – interested in synthesizers in all their forms – historical, technical, cultural, and creative. We welcome proposals for paper presentations, performance-demonstrations or other initiatives over a two-day event bringing together practitioners, researchers, engineers, musicians, and scholars.
Submission Guidelines
Please upload 300–500word abstracts to: SYNTHposium ’26 Abstracts – Fill in form
If proposing a performance, make this explicit to demarcate from paper presentations that might have integral demonstrations.
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Event details:
12-13 September 2026 | Townshend Studio | University of West London, UK
SYNTHposium 26 will be an in-person only event this year.
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Rationale and Context
Synthesizers have played a defining role in popular and experimental music since the late 1960s, shaping sound worlds, performance practices, and creative cultures. SyReN seeks to foster dialogue across diverse communities – including musicians, academic researchers, non-academic scholars, hardware and software engineers, musicians, instrument designers, technicians, and curators – who share an interest in the use, history, design, repair, and engineering of synthesizers.
Following the success of last year’s event in Leeds, SYNTHposium ’26 aims to create an interdisciplinary platform for exchanging knowledge about how synthesizers are conceived, constructed, understood, and played. By examining both historical and contemporary practices, the symposium seeks to illuminate how musicians engage with these instruments and how such insights might inform future design, scholarship, and creative practice.
Events will take place at the Townshend Studio, a unique creative environment established at the University of West London in 2024. Inspired by the artistic legacy of Ealing, the studio houses a significant collection of instruments used by Pete Townshend, including twelve principal synthesizers and numerous other devices central to his creative work.
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Publication
Following the event, presenters will be invited to submit full texts (4,000-6,000 words) to peer review, and these will then be published in a seminal book of proceedings, by Routledge.
NB: physical book capacity is limited, and depending on the number of submissions, it might be necessary to rank them for inclusion via peer review.
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Themes and Questions for Discussion
The overarching question for all SyReN activities is: How can the network enhance synthesizer research and facilitate new discoveries of value to musicians, academics, engineers, and non-academic experts?
Accordingly, we encourage submissions that address (but are not limited to) the following areas:
Instruments: Practices, Performers, and the Materiality of Sound
The synthesizer as musical instrument – the techniques, limitations, and environments that shape its use.
* Evolving performance and compositional practices across genres and communities
* Embodied interaction: gesture, virtuosity, learning, and tacit knowledge
* The materiality of synthesizers – components, circuits, ergonomics, and playability
* How musicians develop, extend, challenge, or subvert an instrument’s affordances
* Undocumented or under-explored aspects of synth practice and their implications
* Unique affordances and agencies of synthesizers in composition and music production
Interfaces: Design, Interaction, and Human-machine Creativity
The synthesizer as interface: points of contact between human creativity, machine logic, and design philosophies.
* Interface design and its influence on musical outcomes
* Knobs, sliders, menus, and (touch)screens: how control modes shape creative behaviour
* Modular thinking vs fixed architectures – patching as an interface/compositional paradigm
* Why particular parameters or functions are prioritized by users and designers
* Interaction-design gaps and emerging opportunities across hardware and software
Ideas: Histories, Aesthetics, Cultures, and Meanings
Synthesizers as ideas: cultural artefacts, symbols, imaginaries, and drivers of artistic and technological change.
* Historical trajectories and shifting cultural perceptions of synthesizers
* Synthesizers in relation to identity, access, and representation (e.g., gender, race, disability, class, sexuality)
* Aesthetic frameworks: futurism, nostalgia, retro‑tech, authenticity
* Synthesizers in communities of practice – professional, enthusiast, maker, archival
* Gaps, absences, and new directions in synthesizer musicology and cultural history
Systems: Technologies, Infrastructures, and Ecologies of Use
Positioning the synthesizer within broader technological, economic, and social systems.
* The lifecycle of instruments: design, manufacture, sustainability
* Technological infrastructures and connectivity: opportunities and limitations
* Synthesizers in: studios, live performance, education, community spaces, geographical regions
* The political economy of synthesizers: access, cost, commercial priorities
* Interoperability and tensions between legacy and contemporary systems
* Maintenance and conservation issues – knowledge, survival and authenticity
Futures: Innovation, Imagination, and the Next Generations of Instruments
Casting forward to future possibilities for synthesizer design, practice, and scholarship.
* Emerging technologies: AI/ML, hybrid instruments, adaptive interfaces
* Reimagining synthesizer design philosophies
* Speculative and experimental approaches to synthesis and interaction
* How insights from musicians, engineers, and scholars can inform future instruments
* The future role of analogue instruments in a digital age
* Emulation, circuit behaviour modelling, and firmware innovations
* Novel architectures – where is left to go?
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Submission Guidelines
Please upload 300–500word abstracts to: SYNTHposium ’26 Abstracts – Fill in form
If proposing a performance, make this explicit to demarcate from paper presentations that might have integral demonstrations.
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Registration
Conference registration will be via https://paymentportal.uwl.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/london-college-of-music/conferences/synthposium-26
Details for registration, along with a list of Ealing hotels will be sent out once final numbers are established.
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Conference fees
Conference attendance fees are now confirmed.
Register no later than 26 June to get the early-bird rate of £210 per delegate.
After 26 June fees will rise to £260.
Fees include coffee/tea and snacks throughout the conference, lunch Saturday and Sunday, conference buffet dinner Saturday, and pizza at the studio event on Friday evening.
A near-20% discount on the full registration fee is available for currently registered research students, and so it is £170, but there is no additional discount during the early-bird period. To obtain this discount, research-degree candidates should send an institutional letter that verifies their student status to the email@synthresearch.org email address.
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Dates and Deadlines
26 March 2026 – Abstracts submission portal opens
5 May 2026 – Abstracts submission deadline
18 May 2026 – Authors notified of acceptance
26 June 2026 – Earlybird registration discount ends
1 September – Registration closes
11 September 2026 – 5 pm – Distributed-creativity studio session
12 September 2026 – Conference opens
13 September 2026 – 5 pm – Conference closes
02 November 2026 – Deadline for submitting full chapters
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Format
Presentation length is 15 minutes + 5 minutes for questions.
The symposium will run over Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September with a combination of paper presentations, practical demonstrations, performances and plenaries, but delegates will be invited to attend for the evening of Friday the 11th as well. They will be given the opportunity to play with the rare, exotic (and expensive) instruments of the Townshend collection in order to create a patch, motif or sequence as an audio excerpt – for an exercise in distributed creativity. As the symposium progresses over the weekend – behind the scenes – everybody’s contributions will be woven into a unifying composition to celebrate SYNTHposium, and this will be played at a plenary closure with an explanatory presentation. Stems will be provided later, and participant-remixes might be invited to be published on the SyReN website subject to peer review, with the opportunity to provide contextualisation to qualify them as practice-research.
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Organization
Chairs:
Dr Ewan Stefani, University of Leeds,
Prof. Justin Paterson, University of West London
Synthesizer curator: Greg Smith, University of West London
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Contact
For specific enquiries, please contact Justin Paterson <justin.paterson@uwl.ac.uk> including “SYREN 2026” in the subject line.
General SyReN enquiries: email@synthresearch.org
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Venue
University of West London, St Mary’s Rd, Ealing, London, W5 5RF
Studio: https://www.uwl.ac.uk/study/study-facilities/the-townshend-studio
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Equality and Diversity
All involved in the organization of SYNTHposium ’26 are committed to encouraging fairness, equality and diversity throughout our event, in terms of the organizational structure, the invited participants and in the encouragement of presenters and paper authors. We welcome anyone interested in the conference themes to engage with us and join us in building a sustainable conference that can represent the full range of synthesizer-related industries.
Synthesizer Research Network 