Background by Design: Listening in the Age of Streaming (original) (raw)
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Classical music futures: Practices of innovation , 2024
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced audiences to new ways of engaging with artistic performance in an online environment (Rendell, 2020, terms this ‘pandemic media’). Multiple performers and organisations transferred live performances into a recorded or livestreamed format. However, at present, there is little research to support decisions that organisations may make in terms of how they do this, and what they deem to be important in how they record and / or stream. There is evidence to support the value of ‘liveness’ in music performance (Tsangaris, 2020), but what is this, and can it be replicated in online environment? This chapter will outline existing research regarding concepts such as liveness in music performance. The study discussed in the chapter will also discuss research regarding the live music experience as a social one, and the vital role that sharing musical spaces plays in social bonding and group coherence. This study examines questions including what listeners perceive to be the main differences between live and livestreamed attendance at music performance, and what constitutes ‘liveness’ in such performances. Data analysis suggests that audiences may have different motivations to attend live versus livestreamed performances, with the former being associated with having fun and a good night out, and shared experience, and the latter often about using time in a meaningful way and the sound quality available in livestreamed attendance at an event. ‘Liveness’ involves not only such factors as the opportunity to share an experience and interact with other audience members and performers, but also the sense of atmosphere, immersion, sensory experiences, and being physically present. When asked about the advantages and disadvantages of attending a livestreamed performance, audience members cite factors common to both live and online experiences such as the logistics, and whether they are with other people or not. However, a thematic analysis also reveals differences in what people see as the advantages and disadvantages of attending online, such as the emotional response to a live performance, and considerations around accessibility and the impact on the environment for online experiences. There is an urgent need in the music industry to better understand what the essential elements of a live performance are, and whether these aspects need to be, and indeed can be replicated in a livestreamed event, for example in terms of level of sound quality and emotional response.
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This review engages with this year's edition of CTM's avantgarde clubbing and electronic music festival in Berlin. Using an essay form and toying with the concept of the portal, which titled the 2023 edition, the piece analyses the aim of the event and matches it with various participating acts, asking whether CTM is managing to attain a "reorganization in the field of knowledge" for club music.
Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century
This article examines how ideas about music and music listening are articulated and what listening practices are constructed when symphony orchestras provide concert performances through streaming services. This is achieved by paying attention to how listening situations connected to symphony orchestras’ digital performances are characterized, how the audience is positioned in relation to the performances and the involved musicians, and furthermore to how the music is represented in text, images and verbal statements. The empirical data comprises the streaming service platforms, and supporting materials, of two concert institutions, London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO), and was gathered during spring 2020, i.e. when concert halls were closed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The article demonstrates how online listening practices are characterized as disconnected from constraints of time and space, and free for anyone to use, anytime and for al...
Deep Listening: Selling and Defining the Experience of Live Music
The Berlin Journal, 2017
Lecture pre-talk slide presentation before a public conversation with Christoph Lieben-Seutter, the Artistic Director of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. The conversation took place at the U.S. Consulate General Hamburg in front of invited guests of the American Academy in Berlin and the Consulate General. The main topic of our conversation concerned the modern forces that shape our listening experiences of live music in the acoustically-enhanced concert hall of today. Some of the forces include acoustics/technology (a fetish of digital “pure” sound); economic (ticket price-seat location and the access to varied ‘unique’ sound experiences—you get what you pay); socio-political (total control over the listener—do not speak, silence all devices, do not clap, do not cough, private vs. public consumption); and spiritual/non-temporal (the materialization of sound that goes beyond the everyday listening experience so that it encircles the individual in order to hear something more in the music—as if the music has a message for all of us to decipher; the concert hall as a temple, the oracle of Delphi, an escape from the everyday). The article "Deep Listening: Selling and Defining the Experience of Live Music" presents my lingering thoughts that followed our conversation.
2021
This article examines how ideas about music and music listening are articulated and what listening practices are constructed when symphony orchestras provide concert performances through streaming services. This is achieved by paying attention to how listening situations connected to symphony orchestras’ digital performances are characterized, how the audience is positioned in relation to the performances and the involved musicians, and furthermore to how the music is represented in text, images and verbal statements. The empirical data comprises the streaming service platforms, and supporting materials, of two concert institutions, London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO), and was gathered during spring 2020, i.e. when concert halls were closed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The article demonstrates how online listening practices are characterized as disconnected from constraints of time and space, and free for anyone to use, anytime and for al...
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Advancements in audio-visual distribution and consumption technologies have transformed the performance culture of live classical music. By partially mediating the musical performance in real time, audio-visual Internet streaming hardware and software enable the addition of new spaces and practices of production and consumption to the live music performance, adding a new dimension of performance culture. While the implementation of these technologies has increased drastically in performance venues around the globe in the past decade, no academic account of this phenomenon has been produced to date. By exploring the case of the digitized concert hall with the Aspen Music Festival and School and Medici.TV, this paper explores the role technology has taken in transforming traditional classical music performance culture. It will do so by situating the new spaces, practices and culture associated with and enabled by the use of this technology, against a map of the traditional, thereby laying the groundwork for further research in the fields of new media, performance and musicological studies.
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Starting from the nineties, digital technologies such as the MP3 format, peer-to-peer networks and, more recently, streaming platforms, have provoked major changes in music practices and listeners' routines. This chapter aims at advancing the intersections between science and technology studies (STS) and music studies by exploring some of these changes and, more specifically, those triggered by listeners' adoption of smartphone-based music streaming platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music. The chapter will do this by adopting an infrastructural perspective, which brings to the foreground the role of technology in music practices by primarily looking at affordances and constraints posed by the increasingly infrastructural qualities of today's digital music ecosystem.
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This article explores a dataset collected by a Facebook live streaming of the "Falando de Música" program, the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra pre-concert lecture venue. Based on qualitative and quantitative interviews (online and face-to-face) as much as Facebook's own measures, this paper aims at analyzing the impact on online viewers. Reflecting on the concept of "liveness" and its historical developments, it describes some effects on the public by using the platform and the content accessibility. This research is a "work in progress" investigation to produce a video streaming methodology for online music lectures with a single person.