Dear colleagues and friends,
Dear members of SProSIG!

The pandemic has certainly kept you rather busy in the last few months, just like us here in Denmark. It definitely has messed up our academic calendar quite a bit - not only the teaching calendar, but also that of the conferences and events. My team and I should have hosted two conferences at the University of Southern Denmark in 2020, the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI) and the 13th Nordic Prosody (NP) Conference. We were really looking forward to welcoming you here, and the first papers had already been submitted - but as we all know, things turned out differently. The Nordic Prosody has now been postponed to summer 2022 in consultation with the NP community. However, and I am very happy to be able to say that the TAI WILL take place this year, more precisely from 6.-9. December 2021! Of course, a TAI conference during the Danish summer would have been nice. But, believe me, the winter in Scandinavia, and especially in the culturally rich German-Danish border area, has its charms too. Candlelight, hot drinks of all kinds, hot and sweet cakes as well as an ice rink, sweet Danish Christmas beer, an original German Christmas Market event and a night hike are waiting for you in December (if you can take part physically, see below).

This email is intended as a save-the-date announcement and to inform you that the TAI website is now available with new dates.
https://my.eventbuizz.com/event/1st-international-conference-on-tone-and-intonation--tai--2021/detail/programs

We are very pleased that all special sessions and keynotes from 2020 could be retained. Many thanks to the speakers and organizers! We will clarify all other (more technical) things in the next days and weeks and update the website accordingly.

The new deadline for submitting abstracts for TAI is July 4th, 2020. We kindly ask those of you, who already had submitted an abstract last year, to submit it again (if it is still relevant). The easychair portal will open up again in May. Encouraged by the positive feedback, we also stick to our concept of selecting contributions for TAI 'only' on the basis of abstracts. The full 5-page proceedings papers (formatted according to the ISCA template) are to be submitted AFTER the TAI conference (on February 27, 2022). In this way, everyone has the opportunity to incorporate the feedback that s/he received during the TAI into the preparation or revision of the final full papers. As is common practice also for Speech Prosody, the TAI proceedings will become part of the ISCA archive.

Finally, I would also like to point out with great pleasure that there will be an attractive satellite event of TAI, i.e. the 2nd International Conference on the Foundations of Speech (SEFOS II). It will take place right before TAI, i.e. from December 2-4, and at the same venue as the TAI. The theme of SEFOS II is 'Articulation and Prosody: Between Interface and Integration'. Keynote speakers will be Cécile Fougeron (CNRS-Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France) and Peter Birkholz (TU Dresden, Germany). Furthermore, we are pleased that we can offer you widely visible and widely indexed open-access proceedings for your SEFOS II papers. Papers will have about journal-paper length (10-15 pages, approx. 7000 words). We will publish them in cooperation with Sciendo / deGruyter. The full-paper submission deadline will be August 1st, 2021. A paper template will follow soon. All further information can be found on the SEFOS II website: https://my.eventbuizz.com/event/2--international-seminar-on-the-foundation-of-speech-8992/detail

*** In general, note that we are currently planning both TAI and SEFOS II as hybrid events. Physical participation is therefore not a prerequisite for submitting a paper to TAI and/or SEFOS II, and there will be reduced registration fees for the virtual participants! Nevertheless, of course we hope that many of you will come to visit us this winter in Sonderborg/DK! ***

We wish you all a good start into spring!
Oliver Niebuhr
(on behalf of the organizing teams of TAI and SEFOS)

Oliver Niebuhr
Associate Professor of Communication & Innovation
Founder of AllGoodSpeakers ApS
Head of the CIE Acoustics Lab
CIE - Centre for Industrial ElectronicsDear Speech Prosody SIG Members,