ICMS 16: Mu­sic as a Mean­ing­ful Art

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.

Call for presentation is open until Sunday, 15 February, 2026. Read more on the conference website: https://www.uniarts.fi/tapahtumat/icms-16-music-as-a-meaningful-art/

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