Risk and Reward in Classical Music Concert Attendance: Investigating the Engagement of ‘Art’ and ‘Entertainment’ Audiences with a Regional Symphony Orchestra in the UK

Classical music organisations across the UK are under increasing pressure to grow and diversify their audiences. ‘Populist’ concerts are designed to attract new audience members by being more accessible and informal than core classical concerts, with programmes structured around well-known short pieces within a broadly-defined classical repertoire. Populist programming has been criticised in mainstream press for ‘dumbing down’ classical music in favour of attracting larger audiences. This thesis investigates how the distinction between populist and core programming is perceived and negotiated by audiences for a regional symphony orchestra, in order to explore cultural hierarchies operating in classical music today. This thesis is the product of a three-year Collaborative Doctoral Award with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO). It was intended to supplement the orchestra’s existing knowledge of their audiences, whilst reflecting on the value and challenges of conducting academic research within the arts industry. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 42 CBSO attenders from core and populist classical concerts, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to investigate how participants evaluate and assimilate their experiences of live classical music. The interviews explored participants’ musical engagement over a lifetime, considering: routes into concert-going, the decision to attend, the value of concert-going to the individual, the live concert experience, and their views on the classical music industry. This qualitative study was complemented by quantitative analysis of the orchestra’s customer records and ticket sales data. This thesis questions the relevance of the inherited model of ‘barriers’ to concert-going in understanding non-attendance. Instead, the analysis reveals that the decision to attend can be understood through an effort-risk-reward framework; audience members assess the amount of effort needed to attend a concert against their confidence that it will be enjoyable. For all participants, enjoyment of a concert was comprised of a mixture of ‘aesthetic’ and ‘extrinsic’ forms of value, thus complicating traditional models of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ audiences. In highlighting the idiosyncratic nature of attendance, this analysis challenges the extent to which conclusions can be drawn about attenders’ motivations for concert-going from their ticket booking history alone. This study reveals that audience members believe there to be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of listening, and suggests that making concerts more informal and less elitist, and providing attenders with support to engage with the music, may be beneficial to attracting new audiences

Kinematics of the Palomar 5 stellar stream from RR Lyrae stars

Thin stellar streams, formed from the tidal disruption of globular clusters, are important gravitational tools, sensitive to both global and small-scale properties of dark matter. The Palomar 5 stellar stream (Pal 5) is an exemplar stream within the Milky Way: Its $\sim 20^\circ$ tidal tails connect back to the progenitor cluster, and the stream has been used to study the shape, total mass, and substructure fraction of the dark matter distribution of the Galaxy. However, most details of the phase-space distribution of the stream are not fully explained, and dynamical models that use the stream for other inferences are therefore incomplete. Here we aim to measure distance and kinematic properties along the Pal 5 stream in order to motivate improved models of the system. We use a large catalog of RR Lyrae-type stars (RRLs) with astrometric data from the Gaia mission to probabilistically identify RRLs in the Pal 5 stream. RRLs are useful because they are intrinsically-luminous standard candles and their distances can be inferred with small relative precision ($\sim3\%$). By building a probabilistic model of the Pal 5 cluster and stream in proper motion and distance, we find 27 RRLs consistent with being members of the cluster (10) and stream (17). Using these RRLs, we detect gradients in distance and proper motion along the stream, and provide an updated measurement of the distance to the Pal 5 cluster using the RRLs, $d = 20.6 \pm 0.2~\textrm{kpc}$. We provide a catalog of Pal 5 RRLs with inferred membership probabilities for future modeling work.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. Published in A

Analysis of auditory functions in grades one, two, and three.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Separatrix Divergence of Stellar Streams in Galactic Potentials

Flattened axisymmetric galactic potentials are known to host minor orbit families surrounding orbits with commensurable frequencies. The behavior of orbits that belong to these orbit families is fundamentally different than that of typical orbits with non-commensurable frequencies. We investigate the evolution of stellar streams on orbits near the boundaries between orbit families (separatrices) in a flattened axisymmetric potential. We demonstrate that the separatrix divides these streams into two groups of stars that belong to two different orbit families, and that as a result, these streams diffuse more rapidly than streams that evolve elsewhere in the potential. We utilize Hamiltonian perturbation theory to estimate both the timescale of this effect and the likelihood of a stream evolving close enough to a separatrix to be affected by it. We analyze two prior reports of stream-fanning in simulations with triaxial potentials, and conclude that at least one of them is caused by separatrix divergence. These results lay the foundation for a method of mapping the orbit families of galactic potentials using the morphology of stellar streams. Comparing these predictions with the currently known distribution of streams in the Milky Way presents a new way of constraining the shape of our Galaxy's potential and distribution of dark matter.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Chimpanzees demonstrate individual differences in social information use

Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how behaviour patterns may diffuse through animal populations, yet within-species inter-individual variation in social information use has received little attention and remains poorly understood. We have addressed this question by examining individual performances across multiple experiments with the same population of primates. We compiled a dataset spanning 16 social learning studies (26 experimental conditions) carried out at the same study site over a 12-year period, incorporating a total of 167 chimpanzees. We applied a binary scoring system to code each participant’s performance in each study according to whether they demonstrated evidence of using social information from conspecifics to solve the experimental task or not (Social Information Score—‘SIS’). Bayesian binomial mixed effects models were then used to estimate the extent to which individual differences influenced SIS, together with any effects of sex, rearing history, age, prior involvement in research and task type on SIS. An estimate of repeatability found that approximately half of the variance in SIS was accounted for by individual identity, indicating that individual differences play a critical role in the social learning behaviour of chimpanzees. According to the model that best fit the data, females were, depending on their rearing history, 15–24% more likely to use social information to solve experimental tasks than males. However, there was no strong evidence of an effect of age or research experience, and pedigree records indicated that SIS was not a strongly heritable trait. Our study offers a novel, transferable method for the study of individual differences in social learning

The relationship between particulate pollution levels in Australian cities, meteorology, and landscape fire activity detected from MODIS hotspots

Generally, sigmoid curves are used to describe the growth of animals over their lifetime. However, because growth rates often differ over an animal\u27s lifetime a single curve may not accurately capture the growth. Broken-stick models constrained to pass through a common point have been proposed to describe the different growth phases, but these are often unsatisfactory because essentially there are still two functions that describe the lifetime growth. To provide a single, converged model to age animals with disparate growth phases we developed a smoothly joining two-phase nonlinear function (SJ2P), tailored to provide a more accurate description of lifetime growth of the macropod, the Tasmanian pademelon Thylogale billardierii. The model consists of the Verhulst logistic function, which describes pouch-phase growth - joining smoothly to the Brody function, which describes post-pouch growth. Results from the model demonstrate that male pademelons grew faster and bigger than females. Our approach provides a practical means of ageing wild pademelons for life history studies but given the high variability of the data used to parametrise the second growth phase of the model, the accuracy of ageing of post-weaned animals is low: accuracy might be improved with collection of longitudinal growth data. This study provides a unique, first robust method that can be used to characterise growth over the lifespan of pademelons. The development of this method is relevant to collecting age-specific vital rates from commonly used wildlife management practices to provide crucial insights into the demographic behaviour of animal populations