Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic severely limited collaboration among musicians in rehearsal and ensemble performance, and demanded radical shifts in collaborative practices. Understanding the nature of these changes in music creators' patterns of collaboration, as well as how musicians shifted prioritizations and adapted their use of the available technologies, can offer invaluable insights into the resilience and importance of different aspects of musical collaboration. In addition, assessing changes in the collaboration networks among music creators can improve the current understanding of genre and style formation and evolution. We used an internet survey distributed to music creators, including performers, composers, producers, and engineers, all active before and during the pandemic, to assess their perceptions of how their music, collaborative practice, and use of technology were impacted by shelter-in-place orders associated with Covid-19, as well as how they adapted over the course of the pandemic. This survey was followed by Zoom interviews with a subset of participants. Along with confirming previous results showing increased reliance on nostalgia for musical inspiration, we found that participants' collaborative behaviors were surprisingly resilient to pandemic-related changes. In addition, participant responses appeared to be driven by a relatively small number of underlying factors, representing approaches to musical collaboration such as musical extroversion or musical introversion, inspiration clusters such as activist musicking, and style or genre clusters.
Highlights
IntroductionCollaborative music-making, is a core aspect of human musicality (Small, 1998)
Making music with others, or collaborative music-making, is a core aspect of human musicality (Small, 1998)
We are interested in two questions: What aspects of musical collaboration do music-makers strive to preserve and maintain? What social, cultural, and technological affordances do they rely on to do so? The Covid-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to search for patterns in the usage of these new technological capacities, especially in the community of professional and semi-professional music-makers such as performers, songwriters, composers, arrangers, producers, and engineers; this is the community of music-makers we refer to with the phrase “working musicians.”
Summary
Collaborative music-making, is a core aspect of human musicality (Small, 1998). Collaborative music making has predominantly been face-to-face, synchronous and interactive, with reliance on recording and production technologies for dissemination and archiving. The emergence of electroacoustic synthesis and processing, along with interactive digital systems, has brought new technologies to the forefront of music practices, and new genres such as electronic music and live coding have changed the shape of musicking and collaborative music creation. This study investigates how musicians proactively adapted internet-based technologies to perform and produce music, and to maintain (or retain) inspiration to create during the COVID19 pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to search for patterns in the usage of these new technological capacities, especially in the community of professional and semi-professional music-makers such as performers, songwriters, composers, arrangers, producers, and engineers; this is the community of music-makers we refer to with the phrase “working musicians.” We are interested in two questions: What aspects of musical collaboration do music-makers strive to preserve and maintain? What social, cultural, and technological affordances do they rely on to do so? The Covid-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to search for patterns in the usage of these new technological capacities, especially in the community of professional and semi-professional music-makers such as performers, songwriters, composers, arrangers, producers, and engineers; this is the community of music-makers we refer to with the phrase “working musicians.”
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