Background by Design:Listening in the Age of Streaming

By first revisiting the design of Amsterdam's famed 'Concertgebouw', this article reflects on the implications of streaming services on current and future cultures of listening, and on the agency and autonomy of practicing musicians

Challenging knowledge extraction to support the curation of documentary evidence in the humanities

The identification and cataloguing of documentary evidence from textual corpora is an important part of empirical research in the humanities. In this position paper, we ponder the applicability of knowledge extraction techniques to support the data acquisition process. Initially, we characterise the task by analysing the end-to-end process occurring in the data curation activity. After that, we examine general knowledge extraction tasks and discuss their relation to the problem at hand. Considering the case of the Listening Experience Database (LED), we perform an empirical analysis focusing on two roles: the 'listener' and the 'place'. The results show, among other things, how the entities are often mentioned many paragraphs away from the evidence text or are not in the source at all. We discuss the challenges emerged from the point of view of scientific knowledge acquisition

Violins, venues and vortexes : interrogating pre-reflective relationality in orchestral work : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Manawatū Campus, Palmerston North, New Zealand

This thesis explores the social structures of organising through an analysis of pre-reflective relationality in orchestral performance across three exemplary settings. These are: the opening stanza of a performance by the orchestra in which I play; a highly regarded performance by a well-known orchestra and conductor; and a concert performed under the shadow of COVID-19. Within these contexts, the player’s relationship with instrument and score, the role of the conductor, relations between conductor and player, and the player’s relations with audience, artifact and colleague are discussed. The study draws on autoethnography and the descriptive phenomenological method of Giorgi (2012). This framework allows work practices that are specialized, tacit, and entrenched to be interrogated through the theoretical lens of Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) late ontology as represented by the constructs of reversibility, écart, and Flesh. The research contributes to organisational knowledge on three dimensions. The contribution to theory is made through the interrogation of the pre-reflective relational bonds in symphony orchestras, first between individuals and artifacts, and then between individuals and colleagues, which shape the inter-collegial ‘between space’ (Ladkin, 2013) where the organizing of performance – the music-making itself – happens. The contribution to method is made in the exploration of specialized personal experience for research purposes through Giorgi’s framework and Merleau-Ponty’s constructs, while the contribution to practice builds on this foundation by using Merleau-Ponty’s ideas to acknowledge the inanimate alongside the human and so offer a fresh starting point for the understanding of organizational relationality. This approach also allows orchestral performance to emerge as a primordially interwoven, inherently reversible meshwork of relational connectivity harnessed in pursuit of a collective purpose. As organizations look beyond COVID-19 to a world where the virtual and hybrid must be accommodated alongside the longstanding and traditional, holistic approaches such as the one offered here will resonate with researchers and managers alike as they come to terms with relational structures and organizational contexts transformed by the combined effects of pandemic-related disruption and technological change