Listening Space:An Exploratory Case Study on a Persuasive Game Designed to Enrich the Experience of Classical Music Concerts

Classical music venues in the Netherlands and throughout the world are struggling to attract new audiences. Especially younger visitors are underrepresented. Previous research emphasizes the importance of providing new, potentially interested audiences with more means to consume the music. This paper presents an exploratory case study with the persuasive game Listening Space which we developed to help attract new audiences and thus preserve Western classical music heritage. In particular, we studied to what extent this game could promote more varied ways of listening to classical music and thus enrich the experience of visiting a classical music concert. We designed and executed a controlled randomized trial with surveys before and after the experiment as well as a series of in-depth interviews with participants after the experiment. Our treatment group consisted of 139 participants (both new and existing visitors). They played our digital game at their own convenience, followed by a visit to a concert in a renowned classical music concert hall. A control group of 165 participants only visited the concerts. We measured the effects of the game – changes in the ways participants listen to classical music – through self-report in questionnaires before and after the experiment. Results show that Listening Space seems most effective for new audiences: the game promoted more varied ways of listening in the treatment group and thus enriched their experience of visiting a classical music concert. The control group of new visitors did not show an effect and also no differences were found between the treatment and control groups of regular visitors of classical music concerts We employed regression analysis to identify predictors of the game's effect on listening styles: participants’ age and their level of appreciation of the classical music genre were negatively related to the effectiveness of the game. The way in which participants experienced the game also significantly influenced the effectiveness. This case study shows the potential of using games to promote classical music concerts: games seem to be valuable in attracting new, young audiences and, therefore, represent powerful instruments to help preserve Western classical music cultural heritage

Music - Media - History

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge)

Architecture for Community and Spectacle: The Roofed Arena in North America, 1853-1968

This dissertation provides the first treatment of the origins and development of the roofed arena in the United States and Canada. Supported by archival resources of graphics and text, and informed by direct contact with arena architects, design and operations staff, this study examines the arena as a place for spectacle within the larger environments of city and campus. The arena\u27s site, massing, and design revealed the expectations of its sponsorship. The arena\u27s internal configuration of roofed seating bowl, floor, portals, and passages was a purposeful arrangement intended to accommodate attendees and manage their movement through architectural space. The first chapter focuses on the transmission to the nineteenth century, via the architecture of theater, circus, and other spaces of public assembly, of the Greek and Roman hippodrome oval for accommodation of multiple kinds of revenue-generating activities situated within a circular, elliptical, or rectilinear seating bowl. The significance of the Royal Albert Hall, London, as the conceptual model for the presentation of modern indoor spectacle is recognized. But within the context of the growth or urban centers and the expansion of commercial leisure, Stanford White\u27s Madison Square Garden, New York, is documented as the principal formal model. White\u27s facility, a hippodrome within a rectangular industrial shed, whose impact was amplified by the communications media that disseminated its image and the reports of its spectacle, generated successors on a continental scale. The research method identified buildings, sought to find relevant information, and fixed the buildings along a time line. Populated with enough examples, the time sequence yields affinities and clarifies differences, making possible useful generalizations about site and design in context. Across the time period considered, enclosure evolved from arched and pitched forms, and thin-shell experiments, toward the anti-industrial dome and drum. The emergence of tensile solutions allowed roof support to act as a design element as well as engineering. But by the end of the 1960s, circular and ovoid buildings receded in favor of the operationally more efficient rectilinear footprint covered by a flat truss or space frame. Exteriors of brick and stone became complex fields of concrete, glass, and multiple forms of metal. Over the long term, internal treatment of attendee space emphasized presentation of finished surface. This dissertation identifies those formal architectural attributes that carried the arena\u27s programmatic objectives. It examines the emergence of the commercial, mercantile arena; higher education\u27s recognition of the capacity of the architectural fabric of arenas to support institutional growth; and municipalities\u27 use of the form to project government-defined civic values. The chronological narrative recognizes the intensity of concurrent strands of development between the World Wars and concludes by noting arena managements\u27 increasing interest in building commercial destinations for attendees outside the seating bowl. Finally, the work establishes the role of the arena in large-scale repurposing of urban land in the 1960s. The Appendix is an extensive census of the large roofed arenas built in North America between 1853 and 1968. It provides the name of the facility, dates of design and opening, architect, type of siting, and configuration of building envelope. The Appendix introduces distinctions useful for analysis. Component siting, in contrast to independent siting, indicates placement of the arena within a system of buildings of associated purpose. Centroidal positioning indicates a building\u27s occupation at the functional center of mass. Building envelope--with pitched or arched roof or other kind of enclosure--operates with siting as another indicator of sponsors\u27 Intent. By assembling and reading the evidence of site, design, and operation, this paper ventures an approach to understanding the place of the roofed arena in the North American urban landscape. It is hoped that this work will invite and assist investigation into related issues, e.g., the architectural profession\u27s approach to arena projects and, particularly, the commercial archaeology and human geography of the arena\u27s interior zones

Music - Media - History: Re-Thinking Musicology in an Age of Digital Media

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge)

Casco Bay Weekly : 7 September 1989

https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/cbw_1989/1036/thumbnail.jp

Music - Media - History

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge)

Reimagining the Flute Masterclass: Case Studies Exploring Artistry, Authority, and Embodiment

This work explores the flute masterclass as an aesthetic, ritualized, and historically reimagined cultural practice. Based on fieldwork that took place between 2017 and 2019 in the United States, in Italy, and on the social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, I argue that the masterclass—an extension of the master/apprentice system that dominates learning in the classical music tradition—is characterized by embodied qualities of artistry and authority. These qualities are not inherent, but are perceived through subjective, social, familied, and affective bodies. Chapter One outlines the main themes and the research design. Chapter Two is a case study that analyzes the concept of charismatic authority in relation to an established flutist, his former teacher, and the influence of the French School of flute playing. Chapter Three discusses the role of sociality in professionalization and the search for artistry in a ten-day masterclass. Chapter Four, a case study of masterclasses at the National Flute Association Annual Convention, explores how flutists perform identity within the “imagined flute community” through gestural excess and modes of conduct. Chapter Five investigates flute masterclasses on the social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube and the impact of online media on artistry, authority, and embodiment. Keeping in mind Latour’s actor-network theory, the “post-internet,” and the centralized web, I consider the reshaping and disruptive effects of social media on the traditional flute masterclass. I conclude that in order to continue as a relevant site for aesthetic experience and meaning-making, the flute masterclass must fashion a disciplined authority that respects the identity and selfhood of the student performer

Everyone Is Musical: a contemporary ethnography of ‘third-wave’ ukulele musicking, online and offline

This thesis aims to deepen understanding of ukulele players’ activity during the instrument’s ‘third wave’ of popularity, beginning around the new millennium. This activity is especially rich at the grassroots level, but limitations exist in its prior scholarship, which is largely restricted to North America, and to groups with relatively stable memberships, which do not target particular demographics, and which meet predominantly in offline, synchronous, spatial contexts. This thesis’s primary focus is English ukulele social worlds, which are highly active and comparatively underexamined. Equally important, however, is the third wave’s intimate relationship with the internet, inevitably complicating its geographical focus. Influenced by earlier scholars at the intersection of ethnomusicology and popular music studies, such as Finnegan, Shank, and Cohen, the thesis’s methodology combines multi-sited participant-observation with semi-structured interviews and an open-ended questionnaire. Its analysis, adopting Stebbins’s ‘social worlds’ and Finnegan’s more dynamic ‘pathways’ as structuring principles, takes particular interest in self-identity, both in terms of players’ broader social identities, and their self-identification as musicians. Where Shank applies a psychoanalytically-informed framework to participant identity, this thesis is informed by humanistic psychological models, suggesting participation in the ukulele’s social worlds is enabled through practices cultivating non-judgment, non-directivity, and what Carl Rogers calls ‘unconditional positive regard’, which may replace conventional metrics of musical valuation. This thesis proposes that the ukulele’s third-wave social worlds and pathways are marked by flexibility, allowing participants to pursue individual musical ‘desire lines’ (extending Finnegan’s ‘pathways’ metaphor), in contexts which are neither uncomplicatedly collective nor solitary, mirroring the convergence between online and offline which characterises contemporary life. This, in turn, enables participants to bring their real and ideal musical selves into closer congruence, and may appeal particularly to players previously excluded from musical practice and performance

Full Issue: Spring 2016

In this issue of DePaul Magazine we look at collaborative projects launched by the Office of Academic Affairs’ Innovation through Collaboration Initiative. Plus, find out how DePaul faculty educating students about the electoral process, learn about a new refugee and forced migration studies program, and meet a School of Music student who recounts her journey to DePaul from war-torn Syria