ACMC 2026

The Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC) is the annual gathering of the Australasian Computer Music Association, a place to show and discuss research and artistic progress in computer and electronic music. It’s a festival of performances, installations, workshops, and tutorials that inspire, challenge, and showcase our community.

Important dates:

All dates are Anywhere-on-Earth (AoE) time.

About the Conference

ACMA 2026: Resistance Music

Music is often positioned as subordinate to visual media, being used to underscore visual storytelling and gameplay in the screen industries. Streaming increasingly extends the reach of Muzak through mood-based playlisting, turning music into a generic accompaniment to daily life. Social media’s algorithm-driven platform economies can obscure direct listening pathways between musicians and audiences. This year’s ACMC theme, Resistance Music, invites exploration of how musicians and listeners reassert the importance of music as a primary mode of experience and meaning-making, in resistance to mainstream visual-media communication and platform dynamics. What strategies are used to experiment, stretch genre boundaries, or manipulate technologies, platforms, and algorithms to find new musical expressions and listening experiences? How are artists crafting works in which visual media serves sound and music?

ACMA is an inclusive community, and we encourage work that explores the breadth of Australia’s computer/electronic music culture—especially work by artists and scholars who are gender diverse; young or emerging; from regional or remote areas; living with disability; First Nations; on low or no income; engaged in community music-making; or working outside academia and mainstream institutions.

ACMC 2026 will take place at the University of Queensland on 7–8 December and will take advantage of CREATE Lab, a state-of-the-art facility enabling surround audio (7.2 channel), surround video (four-channel or seamless wrap-around projection), and an extensive collection of virtual reality headsets. The UQ School of Music is also facilitating connections between composers and student performers to realise solo and small chamber works.

Call for submissions

We are calling for submissions under two categories: papers/artist talks, or music with program notes.

We consider both categories to be equally valuable formats for artistic research contributions in computer music. Both will be subject to peer-review and the split is simply to allow the most appropriate materials to be uploaded and to assist in forming the program. Potential submissions may not fit exactly into these categories and can be submitted according to whether the presentation format would be more appropriate as a talk or performance.

Submission Guidelines

Peer Review

All submissions meeting submission requirements will receive 2 peer reviews and a meta-review by a program committee member. Reviewing is single-blind (reviewers unknown to authors). Abstracts and program notes will be published in the conference proceedings.

Paper Templates

Full text papers should be submitted using the ACMC template (Latex or Word), please submit a PDF file.

Submissions by abstract-only or program note can upload text into the submission form. An uploaded PDF is not necessary.

How to submit

Authors will need a CMT Account before they can submit their contributions.

Committee

Acknowledgemenets

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

  1. The camera-ready deadline is the final deadline by which authors must submit their completed, fully formatted paper, incorporating all revisions, that is ready for publication without any further edits or changes. Full papers that do not have a camera-ready submission by this date will be appear in the program as abstract-only papers. ↩

  2. The registration deadline is the final deadline that accepted authors must register for the conference to be included in the program. Submissions where no author has an appropriate registration will be removed from the program after this date. ↩