Live Music Performance Research Articles

Music is a Place: Oprys and the Rural Working-Class Constitution of Public Space

Abstract“Oprys” are public musicking events found in Appalachia and beyond. They facilitate regular embodied sociality between strangers and friends in a region often characterized by the social fallout of neoliberal economic trends. Drawing on ethnographic research in Tennessee and elsewhere, I show that oprys constitute rural working-class public space where participants negotiate a precarious cultural order through the affordances of live country music performance. But political discourse in these spaces is articulated primarily through embodied, performative, and aesthetic realms which are not captured in a delimited and classed notion of discourse as primarily text or talk. As such, oprys offer a corrective to our understanding of what counts as discursive contestation. I foreground two particular cultural imperatives that structure oprys: participation and accommodation. These imperatives produce a socio-cultural event that characteristically refuses the monetization of space and privileges dialogic sociality over the production of artistic sound. Approaching oprys through the frame of “counterpublic” reveals a different way of imagining public space, public music making and sociality, and the terrain of political discourse.

Designing Places for Making Memories: Immersive Audience Experiences for Live Music Performance

AbstractWith his long‐established interest in transient architecture, architect and academic Robert Kronenburg has been a longstanding friend of the STUFISH organisation. Here he probes the notion of ‘reminiscence bumps’, many of which are conditioned by music, concerts and shows and our experience of them. These bumps help make us into the individuals that we are and act as touchstones in our memories that traverse time.

Hatsune Miku, Virtual Idols, and Transforming the Popular Music Experience

This essay aims to discuss the various ways that virtual idols have transformed music production, consumption, and performance in our digital society. Vocal synthesisers like Vocaloid have given amateur musicians accessibility into the industry, pushing the limits of vocal capability and preservation, and resulting in a worldwide fandom which utilises Vocaloid characters in diverse ways. Virtual idols bear resemblance to real-life Japanese idols, yet they manage to circumvent the often-strict lifestyles idols face while also playing into tropes surrounding otaku culture. It concludes by discussing how the experience and liveness of music concerts changes with virtual performers, and how virtual concerts have continued live music performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A New Music Teaching Mode Based on Computer Automatic Matching Technology

The rapidly developing computer technology has been extensively applied in music teaching. The computer automatic matching technology supports the automatic generation of randomized teaching contents, providing a good tool to develop the musical thinking of students. This paper tentatively introduces this technology to music teaching, and derives a new music teaching mode. The results show that, computer technology can effectively assist in music teaching; the inclusion of computer technology in music teaching arouses students’ interest in music activities; the application of computer automatic matching technology has improved students’ professional skills, live music performance, as well as music ability. The research results greatly promote the reform of music teaching modes and methods.

Arts engagement supports social connectedness in adulthood: findings from the HEartS Survey

BackgroundLoneliness is a public health challenge, associated with premature mortality and poorer health outcomes. Social connections can mitigate against loneliness, and there is evidence that the arts can support social connectedness. However, existing research on the arts and social connectedness is limited by focus on particular age groups and arts activities, as well as a reliance on typically small-scale studies.MethodsThis study reports survey data from 5892 adults in the United Kingdom, closely matched to the national profile in terms of sociodemographic and economic characteristics. It investigates the extent to which arts engagement is perceived to be linked with feelings of social connectedness, which forms of arts engagement are reported as most connecting, and how. Data were collected via the HEartS Survey, a newly designed tool to capture arts engagement in the United Kingdom and its associations with social and mental health outcomes. Demographic and quantitative data, pertaining to the extent to which arts engagement is perceived to be linked with social connectedness, were analysed descriptively. Qualitative data pertaining to respondents’ perceptions of how arts engagement is linked with feelings of social connectedness were analysed using inductive thematic analysis.ResultsResults demonstrated that the majority of respondents (82%) perceive their arts engagement to be linked with feelings of social connectedness at least some of the time. The forms of arts engagement most linked with feelings of social connectedness were attending a live music performance, watching a live theatre performance, and watching a film or drama at the cinema or other venue. Four overarching themes characterise how arts engagement is perceived to facilitate feelings of social connectedness: social opportunities, sharing, commonality and belonging, and collective understanding.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that arts engagement can support social connectedness among adults in the UK through multiple pathways, providing large-scale evidence of the important role that the arts can play in supporting social public health.

The impact of the Queensland Government's Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence Policy on live music performances in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Australia.

The Queensland Government's Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence (TAFV) Policy was met with concern from live music venue owners who feared decreased patronage and associated revenue. This study investigates the impact of the TAFV Policy on live music venues and performances in Fortitude Valley, an inner-city suburb of Brisbane, Australia recognised as a hub of live music performances. Data relating to live music venues and performances in Fortitude Valley for the 2000-2018 financial years were obtained from the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA AMCOS), who maintains an online data portal allowing artists to enter performance details to collect royalty payments. These data were supplemented with six precinct mapping audits of live music venues operating in the Fortitude Valley Safe Night Precinct between July 2016 and September 2019. APRA AMCOS data show increases in the number of reported live music performances and venues in Fortitude Valley between 2000 and 2019. Precinct mapping audits show minimal changes in the operation of live music venues in Fortitude Valley between 2016 and 2019. As the first study to independently document the impact of licenced venue trading hour changes on live music, this study shows the number of live performances reported to APRA AMCOS and original live music venues trading in the Fortitude Valley Safe Night Precinct were unchanged by the introduction of the TAFV. The study highlights the value of using performance returns and venue audits to track live music in a contested policy space.

Queensland Alcohol-related violence and Night-time Economy Monitoring (QUANTEM): Rationale and overview.

This commentary introduces the special section on the outcomes of the Queensland Alcohol-related violence and Night-time Economy Monitoring project and outlines the political and policy context of the interventions put in place under the Queensland government's Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence strategy. The development of the strategy was informed by alcohol policy initiatives trialled in other major Australian cities over the past two decades. The articles in this special section examine the impact of the Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence policy stages on alcohol-related harms and local economies across selected entertainment precincts (Safe Night Precincts). A rich array of data were utilised, including administrative health and justice data, data reflective of nightlife trading (i.e. foot traffic data, ID scanner data and live music performances) and street surveys. Findings have implications for research, policy and practice and demonstrate the need for comprehensive evaluations that can accommodate the complexities of modern alcohol policy in Australia.

The Effect of Nostalgia Emotion to Brand Trust and Brand Attachment towards Repurchase Intention

A music concert or live music performance is an event that can give more experience to their audiences than just listening to music and this makes people go to their favorite musician’s concert several times. This study has an objective to analyze the effect of nostalgia emotion to brand trust and brand attachment towards repurchase intentions by adding the repurchase intention from the previous studies as a new variable and applying it to the music industry, especially in the live music performance sector. The data used for this study were collected from 120 respondents who have watched music concerts or live music performances in Jakarta through an online survey and analyzed it by using SmartPLS in structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). This study provides more understanding of the connection between each variable in the chosen industry and indicates that nostalgia emotion of a person can affect their brand trust and brand attachment towards their repurchase intention as the results.

Psappha, 3x3 Concerts 1 October and 12 November 2020

What constitutes a concert? While many have played with the form, the basics – performers and audience in a shared space – seemed self-evident. However, at a time when restrictions limit or prevent gatherings of performers and audience, this question has assumed new significance. Indeed, the area of live music performance has borne the brunt of many of the ongoing uncertainties, changes and debates of recent months. In the midst of disappointing and unsettling news about cancellations and postponements, it was a welcome relief to read that Psappha decided to go ahead with their 2020–21 concert series. As one of the UK's preeminent contemporary music ensembles, Psappha's influence extends far beyond its Manchester home, reaching a worldwide audience via its YouTube channel. Psappha's current programme is testament to the ensemble's vision, juxtaposing well-known monoliths from the twentieth-century repertoire against works by emerging composers and those whose music is heard less often in the UK.

Exploring the impact of live music performances on the wellbeing of community dwelling people living with dementia and their care partners

• Music based initiatives can enhance the wellbeing of people living with dementia. • Music based initiatives can enhance the wellbeing of people dementia care partners. • Self-report perspectives provide a holistic picture of what works and why. • Supportive live music cafés can enhance participation of people living with dementia. Music-based initiatives cover a wide range of activity, including music therapy in either an individual or group capacity, choirs, orchestral performances, and apps on digital technology enabling people to engage with individual playlists. The impact of live music performances on the wellbeing of people living with dementia in the community is less well understood. To explore if attending a live music café impacts the wellbeing of community dwelling people living with dementia and their care partners. Twelve live music performances were hosted at a purpose refit facility at the authors’ institution, once a month between April 2018 and March 2019. Participants consenting to be part of the research included 7 people living with dementia, 7 care partners and 3 former care partners. Baseline semi-structured interviews explored the meaning of music and expectations of the upcoming music cafés. Dementia Care Mapping captured ‘in the moment’ experiences of each music café. Follow-up semi-structured focus groups explored the impact of music on wellbeing and if participant expectations had been met. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically. The findings demonstrate that attending the music café benefitted the self-reported and observable wellbeing of participants in three particular ways: first, by offering opportunities for peer support and a reduction in feelings of isolation through a shared love of music; second, creating opportunities to increase wellbeing through music ‘in the moment’ that can have lasting effects long after the event; third, group interaction with music meets an unmet need for meaningful musical experiences in supportive enabling environments. Live music is a powerful medium to promote wellbeing for community dwelling people living with dementia and care partners. A ‘music café’ format promotes wellbeing through opportunities to interact with others in non-judgemental and supportive environments to experience a shared joy of music.

Are YouTube and Facebook Canceling Classical Musicians? The Harmful Effects of Automated Copyright Enforcement on Social Media Platforms

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, classical musicians had to find virtual alternatives for reaching their audiences after canceling recitals and concert seasons. Social media platforms seemingly provided the perfect solution by providing the ability to broadcast live music and upload prerecorded performances for audiences to view, leading to income and a sustained social media presence; however, the use of hash matching and classification machine learning to monitor uploaded content for copyright infringement complicates the issue when these methods are unable to distinguish between copyrighted performances and original recordings of works in the public domain. This article explains the mechanics and applications of hashing and classification methods in YouTube and Facebook's automated copyright enforcement systems and suggests incorporating crowdsourcing, voice recognition technology, metadata analysis, and human moderator intervention as improvements which may mitigate the negative impacts these programs may have on classical musicians.

“You Know You’re Missing Out on Something”: Collective Nostalgia and Community in Tim’s Twitter Listening Party during COVID-19

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of our social lives. Stay-at-home and social distancing orders have resulted in the absence of live musical performances. In this context, our paper examinesTim’s Twitter Listening Party, which constitutes a new form of musicking where musicians do not exist as active performers; rather, musicians and audience members participate together to create a musical experience. The elements of the listening party can be linked to previous research on (1) participation, (2) collective nostalgia, and (3) community-making. Finally, collective nostalgia offers comfort to individuals during a time of uncertainty.

LIVENESS, MULTIFOCALITY, EAVESDROPPING IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL FIELDWORK RESEARCH AT GHANAIAN FESTIVALS AND ROYAL FUNERALS

Ethnomusicological research that involves live, sprawling, multifocal and integrated ceremonies often present liveness-induced challenges that may undermine the authenticity of the research outcomes. )is article describes multifocal and integrated music making performances such as festivals and royal funerals in Ghana and how the vagaries of liveness are largely responsible for nuanced peculiarities which every live musical performance assumes. )e article argues in favour of a central role for eavesdropping among informed participating audience members in data gathering efforts as an important strategy for dealing with liveness-induced contingencies in multifocal and integrated performance events.

Multichannel speaker interference reduction using frequency domain adaptive filtering

Microphone leakage or crosstalk is a common problem in multichannel close-talk audio recordings (e.g., meetings or live music performances), which occurs when a target signal does not only couple into its dedicated microphone, but also in all other microphone channels. For further signal processing such as automatic transcription of a meeting, a multichannel speaker interference reduction is required in order to eliminate the interfering speech signals in the microphone channels. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, we consider multichannel close-talk recordings of a three-person meeting scenario with various different crosstalk levels. In order to eliminate the crosstalk in the target microphone channel, we extend a multichannel Wiener filter approach, which considers all individual microphone channels. Therefore, we integrate an adaptive filter method, which was originally proposed for acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), in order to obtain a well-performing interferer (noise) component estimation. This results in an improved speech-to-interferer ratio by up to 2.7 dB at constant or even better speech component quality. Second, since an AEC method requires typically clean reference channels, we investigate and report findings why the AEC algorithm is able to successfully estimate the interfering signals and the room impulse responses between the microphones of the interferer and the target speakers even though the reference signals are themselves disturbed by crosstalk in the considered meeting scenario.

Kesha’s Comeback and the Stakes of Live Performance: Connecting through Trauma at the 2018 Grammy Awards

ABSTRACT The use of live popular music performance as a platform to address gendered and sexual violence and trauma within the popular music industry can be demonstrated through the analysis of Kesha’s performance of “Praying” at the 2018 Grammy Awards. Analyzing the artist’s vocal and artistic delivery, in addition to her public persona following her allegations of sexual abuse against producer Lukasz Gottwald (Dr. Luke), illustrates how live performance—building on and contrasting with social media campaigns, such as #FreeKesha and #MeToo, and studio recordings—is a uniquely effective mode of processing individual and collective trauma.

Using a Church as a Temporary Auditorium. Acoustical Design of S. Domenico of Imola

In Europe, many of the ancient buildings, especially sacred architecture, are subject to renovation projects by converting their initial occupation type for temporary exposition. In particular, the demand for assisting to live musical performance is increased considerably in Italy because of the missing of places dedicated to the performing arts. As such, one of the churches of Imola (i.e. San Domenico), located approximately 30 Km far from Bologna, has been requested by citizens to be adapted into an auditorium when necessary. Based on needs expressed by the local population, this paper recommends one of the possibilities of how the acoustical design can be applied to the church in order to adjust the main volume to the realization of transient musical venues, cancelling any undesirable reflections that can lower the quality perception of sound. The actual acoustics has been adapted in order to reach both speech and musical intelligibility, especially focused on sacred music style. Both measured and simulated results have been compared determining the choice of the proposed acoustical solutions in terms of type of finishes and surface area to be covered by the added materials. The suitable treatments in consideration include absorbing wooden panels, curtains and fabric wrap.

Now I'm Digital, Where Is My Ritual?: Exploring Postdigital Performance Objects as Totems for Agency and Ritual

The author argues that significant aspects of electronic music performance have been diminished in the rush to incorporate the latest, often discreet (as in intentionally unobtrusive) technologies. He identifies these aspects as agency, ritual and, to a lesser extent, serendipity and mess. Using references to his own work, he suggests that applying an understanding of how actors create totems to present agency and affordance is essential to regain, and possibly acclimate, these tools and practices so they are relevant to live electronic music performance practice in a contemporary technology environment.

The impact of festivalization on the Dutch live music action field: a thematic analysis

In the global pop music industries, revenue models have shifted from physical record sales to streaming services and live performances. At the same time, the supply of live music performances has changed as a result of festivalization. This study aims to understand the effects of festivalization on the strategic action field (SAF) of the Dutch live music ecology. This paper is grounded in a qualitative thematic analysis based on in-depth interviews with directors of pop music venues and festivals. Contributing to the scholarly literature on festivalization we approach this concept from inside the strategic action field (SAF) of live music and place it within the context of the rapidly changing music industries. Among other results we emphasize the significant multiple value creation produced by festivals, the strategic advantages of festivals in relation to traditional music venues and the potential co-evolution within the live music action field.

Extracting Audio Signals from 4-Track Analogue Tape and Digital Standalone Multitrack Machine Material as a Part of Preservation

In facing ever-growing technology of audio peripherals, there is a concern of balancing in delivering technical knowledge to students dealing with audio recordings in the Music Department at Putra University, Malaysia (UPM). It seems to be difficult for them to do current multitrack recordings and at the same time maintaining the aesthetic aspect of past technology. In other words, if one preserves the recorded item, they have also to care about the specific features coming with these recordings. It is not the primary recorded subject alone they may have to consider. There is an urgency to migrate the recorded material such as cassette tapes that come in varying forms ranging from Ferric-Oxide, to Cro2, and Metal. These carriers are warranted to be extracted and migrate onto a more stable medium, not only in general as everywhere in the world, but also since it has become the university policy that equipment’s exceeding certain years will be disposed of. The selection focuses on the recording materials that includes live musical performances, multitrack musical compositions, and final recording projects. In this context the ‘recording’ may just mean the audio information. It is important for any archive to establish a general policy with regard to the limits of its collection as was pointed out repeatedly (Schuursma, 2010). Viewing from the perspective of preservation (Musib, 2015) of content, a lack of awareness in handling these carriers may lead to complications when extracting the signal from still available machines. The paper is intended to discuss the challenges and requirements in the process of signal extractions using exemplarily the two formats, namely the 4-track recorder and the digital standalone multitrack machine.

P478Cardiac response to live music performance: effect of large-scale musical structure on action potential duration

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements This work has received funding from the ERC under the EU’s Horizon 2020 R&I programme (Grant agreement No. 788960) Background Strong emotions can trigger cardiac arrhythmias, but the heart-brain mechanism by which they do so is not well understood. Music induces strong emotions, precipitated by musical changes and intensified during live performance; it thus serves as a powerful tool through which to investigate heart-brain interaction. However, existing studies use short, artificial or pre-recorded music excerpts, out of context and classified into singular, simple emotion classes over which aggregate response are reported, ignoring the range of responses possible for the same music stimulus. None has considered electrical response to music as measured from the heart muscles. Purpose To evaluate the impact on action potential duration due to musical changes at large-scale structural boundaries in live music performance. Methods Patients implanted with biventricular pacemakers/ICDs are invited to a live classical piano concert. Prior to the concert, the patients’ pacemakers are programmed from CRT to dual chamber pacing at 80 bpm or ten above their intrinsic heart rate. Following a ten-minute adjustment period, they listen to three pieces lasting 15 minutes; this was subsequently expanded to five lasting 30 minutes. Continuous recordings of the intracardiac electrogram (EGM) signals are downloaded from the ICD lead connected to the left ventricle whilst the patients listen to the music. The pacemakers are returned to their original settings after the concert. The patients further provide annotations for perceived change boundaries and tension, as well as information on their music training/experience. We approximate the action potential duration (APD) using the action recovery interval (ARI) extracted from the EGM signal, and compare the ARIs before and after each structural boundary indicated in the music score. Results We analyze the ARI data surrounding 24 music structural boundaries. The first results are for the three patients (two male; one female) from the initial study day. We perform a two-sample t-test to assess the population means in ARI values before and after each of the 24 structural boundaries. The figure attached shows the statistically significant changes across structural boundaries for α = 0.05; the bar plots show the sample means and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the 80 ARIs before and after a boundary, and report the p-values of the t-tests. Patients 1 and 3 each reacted significantly to three out of the 24 boundaries (12.5%), sometimes in opposite directions, and Patient 2 to 15 out of the 24 boundaries (62.5%). The CIs for the significant differences spanned the range (–4.4896,4.8745). Conclusions We show that structural boundaries, where music features change or transition, can produce significant changes in APD. A range of significant responses are observed, including contradictory ones, that span a nearly 10ms range, which could play a contributory role to clinical understanding of arrhythmias and emotion responses. Abstract Figure.