Reminder: Send your presentation proposal for the ICMS Congress by 31 January 2026
The 16th International Congress on Musical Signification will be held at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2–6 June, 2026.
Twenty-five years after ICMS 7 and forty years after the first edition in Imatra, the ICMS returns to Finland. Since 1986, the ICMS congress has been organised every 2–4 years to gather together scholars of musical signification, signs in music, and musical meaning – recent developments and future trends in musical semiotics and related fields of research.
The congress is one of the platforms of the Musical Signification Project, launched in Paris in 1984, and directed now for more than 40 years by prof. Eero Tarasti of the University of Helsinki. The International Musical Signification Project has also served as a pedagogical tool educating doctoral researchers in the field.
The congress themes include:
- analytical and historical approaches to evolving and persisting meaning(s) in music
- topics, narratives and gestures as meaningful phenomena in music
- embodiment of and in musical meanings
- mechanisms and processes of music, mind, and meaning
- semiotic and philosophical approaches to the ontology of music and its meaning(s)
- synthesis of cognitive and cultural approaches to the study of meaning(s) in and of music
- locality and globality of music as a meaningful art
- relationship of musical meaning with learning and growth
- relationship of musical meaning with therapy and wellbeing
- music as a meaningful art in the era of technological explosion
- sustainability and music as a meaningful art
- relationship of societal phenomena, structures and policies with music as a meaningful art
Call for proposals
We invite proposals for presentations on topics relating to the conference themes above along with those addressing broader notions of musical signification, meaning in music, and semiotics of music. In addition, we welcome proposals that approach these topics from interdisciplinary relations between semiotics and other disciplines. The duration of paper presentations will be 20 + 10 minutes.
We also invite proposals for roundtables, workshops, and lecture recitals. In your proposal abstract, please indicate the suggested duration and format of your proposal as well as key participants.
Please send the abstract of your proposal and a short biographical note by email to icms16helsinki@uniarts.fi on 31 January 2026, at the latest.
Read the guidelines and more info
More information from juha.ojala@uniarts.fi