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Concert Report: The Impact of Live Music on Society

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

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The social impact of concerts, the economic impact of concerts, the psychological impact of concerts.

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What’s behind the magic of live music?

Associate Professor of Music and Music Theory, Columbia University

Disclosure statement

Mariusz Kozak does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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For months, fans were relegated to watching their favorite singers and musicians over Zoom or via webcasts. Now, live shows – from festivals like Lollapalooza to Broadway musicals – are officially back.

The songs that beamed into living rooms during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic may have featured an artist’s hits. But there’s just something magical about seeing music surrounded by other people. Some fans reported being so moved by their first live shows in nearly two years that they wept with joy .

As a music theorist , I’ve spent my career trying to figure out just what that “magic” is. And part of understanding this requires thinking about music as more than simply sounds washing over a listener.

Music as more than communication

Music is often thought of as a twin sister to language . Whereas words tend to convey ideas and knowledge, music transmits emotions.

According to this view, performers broadcast their messages – the music – to their audience. Listeners decode the messages on the basis of their own listening habits, and that’s how they interpret the emotions the performers hope to communicate.

But if all music did was communicate emotions, watching an online concert should’ve been no different than going to a live show. After all, in both cases, listeners heard the same melodies, the same harmonies and the same rhythms.

So what couldn’t be experienced through a computer screen?

The short answer is that music does far more than communicate. When witnessed in person, with other people, it can create powerful physical and emotional bonds .

A ‘mutual tuning-in’

Without physical interactions, our well-being suffers. We fail to achieve what the philosopher Alfred Schütz called a “ mutual tuning-in ,” or what the pianist and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer more recently described as “ being together in time .”

In my book “ Enacting Musical Time ,” I note that time has a certain feel and texture that goes beyond the mere fact of its passage. It can move faster or slower, of course. But it can also thrum with emotion: There are times that are somber, joyous, melancholy, exuberant and so on.

When the passage of time is experienced in the presence of others, it can give rise to a form of intimacy in which people revel or grieve together. That may be why physical distancing and social isolation imposed by the pandemic were so difficult for so many people – and why many people whose lives and routines were upended reported an unsettling change in their sense of time .

When we’re in physical proximity, our mutual tuning-in toward one another actually generates bodily rhythms that make us feel good and gives us a greater sense of belonging . One study found that babies who are bounced to music in sync with an adult display increased altruism toward that person, while another found that people who are close friends tend to synchronize their movements when talking or walking together.

Music isn’t necessary for this synchronization to emerge, but rhythms and beats facilitate the synchronization by giving it a shape.

On the one hand, music encourages people to make specific movements and gestures while they dance or clap or just bob their heads to the beat. On the other, music gives audiences a temporal scaffold: where to place these movements and gestures so that they’re synchronized with others.

The great synchronizer

Because of the pleasurable effect of being synchronized with people around you, the emotional satisfaction you get from listening or watching online is fundamentally different from going to a live performance. At a concert, you can see and feel other bodies around you.

Even when explicit movement is restricted, like at a typical Western classical concert, you sense the presence of others, a mass of bodies that punctures your personal bubble.

The music shapes this mass of humanity, giving it structure, suggesting moments of tension and relaxation, of breath, of fluctuations in energy – moments that might translate into movement and gesture as soon as people become tuned into one another.

This structure is usually conveyed with sound, but different musical practices around the world suggest that the experience is not limited to hearing. In fact, it can include the synchronization of visuals and human touch.

For example, in the deaf musical community, sound is only one small part of the expression. In Christine Sun Kim’s “ face opera ii ” – a piece for prelingually deaf performers – participants “sing” without using their hands, and instead use facial gestures and movements to convey emotions. Like the line “fa-la-la-la-la” in the famous Christmas carol “ Deck the Halls ,” words can be deprived of their meaning until all that’s left is their emotional tone.

In some cultures, music is, conceptually, no different from dance, ritual or play. For example, the Blackfeet in North America use the same word to refer to a combination of music, dance and ceremony. And the Bayaka Pygmies of Central Africa have the same term for different forms of music, cooperation and play.

Many other groups around the world categorize communal pursuits under the same umbrella.

They all use markers of time like a regular beat – whether it’s the sound of a gourd rattle during a Suyá Kahran Ngere ceremony or groups of girls chanting “Mary Mack dressed in black” in a hand-clapping game – to allow participants to synchronize their movements.

Not all of these practices necessarily evoke the word “music.” But we can think of them as musical in their own way. They all teach people how to act in relation to one another by teasing, guiding and even urging them to move together.

In time. As one.

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• Relationships
• Communication
• Live performance
• Musical theatre
• Synchronization

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What is Dance’s Relationship with Live Music?

Live music adds an extra layer of liveness to a performance, one that encourages performers to tune in to one another and that invites audiences to experience heightened sensual awareness.

Introduction

Live dancing paired with live music creates rich, multi-sensory experiences for audiences and performers alike. This combination enables a give-and-take between dancers and musicians as they work together to co-create the performance pieces on stage. They tune into one another so that dancers hear and musicians see, which produces something that the audience can feel. Live music and dance are fixtures at the Pillow. This essay aims to explore dance through the lens of live music, which actually illuminates the thematic content of the performance works.

When the pairing of live music and dance is done well, dancers and musicians sync up so precisely it seems it would be impossible for one to perform without the other. For an audience, live music fills the ears as the live dancing fills the eyes. For dancers, performing with live music changes their sensitivity and attention to it. That said, it is not always the case that musicians and dancers are discrete groups of people on stage. Borrowed Light (2006, 2012), ETM: The Initial Approach (2014) and ETM: Double Down (2016), and Moses(es) (2014) testify to this fact. In these pieces, the line between musicians and dancers is blurry, as everyone on stage moves and makes music together.

Borrowed Light: Staging Community

Borrowed Light , a collaboration between the Tero Saarinen Company of Finland and the Boston Camerata, offers a compelling juxtaposition of off-centered movement with music that is even and measured. The Shaker tunes and the performance of them by the Boston Camerata are bouncy, articulate, and sung mostly in unison with occasional simple harmonies, while the movement of the dancers spirals around itself, swinging and falling. Dancers lurch forward only to spill backward. They throw their energy up, out, and all around them. These movements are amplified by the whirl of their costumes, and in some moments, the dancers unleash their own momentum as their fellow dancers control them by pulling on their thick leather belts.

One theme Saarinen refers to whenever he discusses Borrowed Light is community. The piece uses Shaker spirituals as its music and follows an architectural principle employed in Shaker residences to maximize daylight as the premise of its lighting design. Importantly to Saarinen, the piece does not represent Shakers explicitly, but rather, the piece explores the feeling and spirit of community embedded in the Shaker experience.

From its inception, Borrowed Light was also about another community—the one the performers would create by uniting the Boston Camerata with the Tero Saarinen Company. In response to a question about the ways the dancers and singers support one another in performance, Saarinen discusses his objective to “weave together these two communities” in this piece.

The voices of the singers paired with the body percussion and heavy stepping and stomping of the dancers; the three-dimensional circling and spiraling of the dancers paired with the constant presence and gaze of the singers—this piece would not be so powerful if one were seen or heard without the other. While there are distinct differences between the singers and dancers, the choreography often integrates the two groups. The singers traverse the stage throughout the piece, sometimes joining the dancers as they side-step their way around a large circle or as they slowly travel in a line, moving from upstage toward the audience.

The following excerpt brings the two groups together. As the singers’ voices repeat a verse again and again, the dancers dance themselves almost to exhaustion. Over time, the singers create a small clump at the center of the stage, a vortex around which the dancers circle and leap, stomp and slap. Together, the movement and sound build to a frenzied, delirious, almost crazed energy.

Borrowed Light feels complete for its integration of movement with voices, costumes, and lighting. As a theatrical enterprise, Borrowed Light invests time and energy into collaboration, into design, into integrating each of the elements that makes up a living piece of art. The singers and dancers of Borrowed Light create a cohesive community and an exquisite performance piece. The integration of a cappella voices, body rhythms, and full-bodied, space-eating movements, epitomizes the rich sensory experience created throughout the piece.

MOSES(ES): A Single Idea Unfolding Infinitely

Choreographer Reggie Wilson is no stranger to Jacob’s Pillow. His company, Reggie Wilson / Fist and Heel Performance Group first appeared in the Inside/Out series with Love in 1996 followed by a repertory program in 1998, and then in the Doris Duke Theatre with The Tale in 2007, Moses(es) in 2014, and POWER in 2019. As an artist, Wilson says he likes the idea of “taking something unmanageable and trying to make it manageable,” which is the challenge he presented himself with in his piece Moses(es). While the title of the piece refers to the biblical figure of Moses, and while the piece is in some ways about that figure, Moses is really just the beginning. When asked about how his relationship to Moses(es) changed in the process of making the piece, Wilson reveals the complex simplicity that this piece is all about.

Approaching Moses(es) from the perspective of the relationship between dancing and live music illuminates this central premise of the piece—a single idea, unfolding infinitely. On the integration of music and sound in the piece, Wilson purposefully created an interactive sound score, which enables his investigation of layers of ideas, piling high, shifting, unfolding, aligning, dissembling, multiplying.

The piece uses recorded music from Louis Armstrong, The Klezmatics, and the Blind Boys of Alabama, to name only a few. In performance, Wilson along with vocalists Lawrence Harding and Rhetta Aleong add live singing, chanting, and percussion to the sound score. The dancers also occasionally lend their voices to the performance, as when they chant a fractal equation alongside the vocalists’ live and recorded voices.

The concept of fractals is one point of entry for Wilson in exploring the infinite unfolding of an idea. Fractals are complex patterns that repeat themselves in ever-smaller scales. In Moses(es) , however, the notion of fractals produces an ever-expansive range of ideas, images, and movements. In a section of Moses(es) that specifically engages a fractal equation, Wilson uses fractals as a metaphor for the infinite potential of all of this layering. Though this section does not use music, it does layer a variety of sound qualities from multiple voices, which is a distinctive characteristic of this piece. The sound score for this section includes recordings of the vocalists speaking a fractal equation alongside their live voices, which also recite the equation. At the start of the section, even the dancers speak as they move. In the beginning it seems easy to identify the correlations between movements and words as dancers chant and move simultaneously and in unison. However, over time, as the movements expand, those markers disappear. It becomes impossible to identify patterns or relationships between movements among the dancers and between movements and words, as seen in this brief excerpt from the piece.

In moments of transition, live voices bump up against recordings. Lighting shifts. Singers chant and move. Dancers pace. As these moments layer visual and aural experience, they also blur distinctions between seeing, hearing, and feeling. In one of these transitions, the movement and tone of the piece shift abruptly. As vocalists chant-sing, “Eli, Eli! Somebody call Eli,” their arms gesture up, down, and out, while their feet perform a stepping pattern from a folk dance. Suddenly a recording of female throat singing by the Ngqoko Women’s Ensemble interrupts their voices and, at the same time, dancers begin running across the stage. The vocalists join in this spilling, connecting, and constantly shifting movement. In this exploration of community, no one performer ever emerges as a singular leader.

Near the end of the piece, we see the return of a community that had been established as performers touch one another to connect, then exploding out only to reassemble again. This time it happens in slow motion as Wilson calls out, “Moses, Moses, don’t get lost,” and dancers respond, “in that red sea.”

The integration of movement with live and recorded sound involving both dancers and singers displays the already interconnected community of Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group. Addressing the theme of Moses in this piece, audiences encounter the integration of leaders and followers as essential to a unified community.

ETM: Dance is Music is Dance

As in other tap dancing, in the ETM series from Dorrance Dance, dancing creates music. ETM , which stands for electronic tap music, is a play on EDM, electronic dance music. What sets ETM apart from other tap dance performance is the ways the wired dance boards upon which the performers dance also add tone and timbre and electronic dimensions of sound inaccessible by shoes alone.

Artistic director (and 2013 Jacob’s Pillow Award winner) Michelle Dorrance has cultivated a distinct aesthetic that encourages tap dancers to engage the entire body while dancing. The tap dance boards offer dancers a new challenge, which makes this full-bodied dancing even more exciting. Dancers stretch to reach a board. They end spins at just the right moment. They jump up and hang in the air until the moment they have to play their next note.

The use of technology certainly makes this piece stand out from the tap dance pack, but it does not get all of the credit. The choreography, improvisation, and staging of this piece epitomize the quality of innovation that is embedded in tap dance as a form. In the ETM series, Dorrance Dance transforms upon its own original innovation. With ETM: Double Down , Dorrance expanded upon what was already a rich investigation of the potential of bodies to make sound/music in an earlier iteration of the piece dubbed ETM: The Initial Approach . A side-by-side comparison of one scene from each iteration reveals the tremendous choreographic development from the Initial Approach to Double Down . In the Initial Approach three dancers shift in and out of simple choreographed steps and individual improvisations.

In Double Down , those original steps and rhythms remain, but by using the full company of dancers for the scene in Double Down , Dorrance more than doubles the dimensions of movement and sound on stage. Additionally, when the tap dancers face upstage keeping a steady beat with side-to-side crawling steps, b-girl Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie’s movements stand out downstage.

Dorrance Dance

ETM: Double Down

Michelle Dorrance and her collaborator Nicholas Van Young talk about the many ways they expanded their use of technology in Double Down . They also address ways this enhanced the possibilities of dancers making music in the moment of performance.

While electronic music is certainly foregrounded in the ETM series, the show does not completely abandon acoustic tap dance. The moments when the dancers put metal to wood without assistance from computer software are all the more pronounced in this show. That said, as with the rest of ETM , even in acoustic moments the sounds of tap dancing are augmented with other textures of sound. In the section aptly titled “Boards and Chains,” dancers tap atop acoustic wood platforms, which are fitted with a strip of corrugated metal along one side. Each dancer also manipulates a long metal chain, dropping it onto the board in time with the dancing.

ETM reminds audiences that tap dancers are also musicians. Their bodies constantly interact with technology, with the floor, and with the body itself to create music and dance simultaneously.

In a 2017 PillowTalk entitled “Tap Today,” Dorrance and Dormeshia, co-directors of several different tap programs in the School at Jacob’s Pillow, discuss the relationship between tap dance and music.

By integrating musicians and dancers in these pieces and blurring the lines between who dances and who makes music, Borrowed Light , ETM , and Moses(es) persistently remind viewers of the liveliness of performance.

To see even more instances of live music and dance at the Pillow, check out the Live Music playlist on Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive. These excerpts illustrate many different ways choreographers engage with live music. For example, note that in Dance Heginbotham’s Chalk and Soot and Jessica Lang Dance’s Within the Space I Hold musicians join the dancers on stage as in the pieces discussed above. However, in the choreography by Heginbotham and Lang, while musicians and dancers do not physically interact, the musicians are responsive to the action unfolding before them.

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2021

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Live Performance in Today’s Culture Essay

The music industry is especially dependent on the recording. Recordings allow singers to eliminate imperfections in their performance and enhance its quality (Caramanica). Both recordings and live concerts are popular in the American society. However, this topic is highly controversial because sometimes recordings can alter artists’ voice beyond recognition. During a live performance, one can see the clear difference between the recording and the actual voice of a singer. Sometimes it can be better, but quite often it is otherwise.

Indeed, attending musical concerts is a big part of our culture. Live music performances do not only bring aesthetic pleasure. According to the Australasian Performing Right Association report, “Active engagement with music has been shown to increase positive perceptions of self, which in turn leads to greater motivation, manifesting in turn in enhanced self-perceptions of ability, self-efficacy, and aspirations” (10). A substantial amount of research investigating the effects of live performances on people has found that attending concerts with live performance and seeing live art performances improved the well-being of a person, build social capital and increase appreciation of music.

On the other hand, some artists can disappoint the audience because their real voice greatly differed from the recording. They undeservingly become famous and rip off listeners on concerts. I believe that good live performances leave a good impression on a person. For example, once I bought an expensive ticket to the concert of a famous pop singer and was highly disappointed. Another time, the live music performed by that band was very sensitive and touched my heart and gave me the feeling of belongingness. In my opinion, live performances are needed to inspire people and enrich their spirituality.

Works Cited

Australasian Performing Right Association. The Economic and Cultural Value of Live Music in Australia 2014. 2014. Web.

Caramanica, Jon. “Pitched to Perfection: Pop Star’s Silent Partner.” NY Times , 2012, Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, May 24). Live Performance in Today’s Culture. https://ivypanda.com/essays/live-performance-in-todays-culture/

"Live Performance in Today’s Culture." IvyPanda , 24 May 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/live-performance-in-todays-culture/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Live Performance in Today’s Culture'. 24 May.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Live Performance in Today’s Culture." May 24, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/live-performance-in-todays-culture/.

1. IvyPanda . "Live Performance in Today’s Culture." May 24, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/live-performance-in-todays-culture/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Live Performance in Today’s Culture." May 24, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/live-performance-in-todays-culture/.

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Laura Pausini: Live Music Event Critique

In this paper, I will present my analysis and reaction to the live concert of Laura Pausini, which took place in Miami on July 26, 2018. The event started at 8:00 PM at James L. Knight Center and lasted for a couple of hours. It was dedicated to Laura’s new album “Hazte Sentir,” and it can be suggested that the concert was held to promote the album and offer Laura an opportunity to come in contact with her fans. As I happen to be one of them, I was excited to attend. I arrived rather early, but the event was worth it, and I was glad to talk to the people who were equally interested in Laura as I waited.

Laura made an exciting entrance, during which the stage and lighting were set in a way that would not draw too much attention to the other performers, but the setting changed very soon. In general, the scene was very dynamic; Laura used it to diversify her performance, and there were instances when other people were placed in the spotlight. Similarly, the lighting and the screen behind the scene were employed to complement the songs and make the performance more entertaining. Additionally, lighting helped Laura in transitions from one song to another. As for costumes, they were not very special; rather, they looked like comfortable and elegant clothing, in which none of the performers was set apart too noticeably. Even Laura’s costumes (she changed them several times) were not very colorful, although they were beautiful.

Laura was not working on her own; she had the support of other singers and musicians who played electric guitars, drums, and a piano. All the mentioned people appeared very skilled to me; the performance was definitely polished. Laura interacted with the performers, but she interacted with the audience even more often. She joked, came up with the comments that would help her introduce new songs, and thanked the audience for their support. She also invited us to sing along with her. It seemed that Laura took the opportunity to communicate with us very seriously.

It was also clear that Laura enjoyed being on the scene and liked her performance. Overall, it appeared to me that Laura and the other performers were working very hard but enjoyed the process. The songs were diverse, especially in their mood, and I loved all of them, but “Nadie Ha Dicho” was the one that was particularly memorable to me because it was the first one. Additionally, it was a very powerful song; it described a lost love and focused on the feelings that remained, which resonated with my personal experiences.

Furthermore, I enjoyed the performance that was designed for the song “Escucha Atento” very much. It involved red lights and images on the screen, which corresponded to the song’s message that was concerned with the concept of independence. I also think that the two songs demonstrated the diversity of Laura’s work: the first one was softer and bittersweet, and the second one was more assertive and energetic. The two songs did not involve instrumental solos, but they placed Laura in the spotlight, which was precisely what I wanted from the concert. Regarding the genre, Laura Pausini Official Website states that she is a pop singer, and it also notes that she has received some Latin music awards. I agree with this classification, and I think that Laura has a distinctive style that has been influenced by multiple genres. Pop-music and Latin music are probably the most prominent ones.

The audience at the concert was rather diverse; I saw men and women of different ages and ethnicities. Also, all the people that I have met seemed to be excited about the event; I think that they were either the fans of Laura or the people who were very interested in Latin pop-music and live concerts. I believe that the reason for this attitude was the fact that Laura’s music was the primary focus of the event; a person who would not enjoy it would have no reason to attend it.

Regarding my personal enjoyment of the event, it was immense. I think that I would have liked it in any case since I was excited about the opportunity from the very beginning. However, the efforts of Laura Pausini and other people who were involved in the process contributed to my experience. The concert was more than a person singing the songs that I was familiar with; rather, it was a performance, which involved much interaction with a singer I admired. While I did not talk to Laura in person, it still felt like it, and I think that it was her intent. As a result, the main thing that I recall about the experience was Laura: she engaged the audience, and she was engaged in the performance herself. That was exactly what I expected to see during a live concert, and it was delivered. As I returned home, I was filled with creative ideas and positive emotions.

Thus, I can conclude that several elements of the concert contributed to its success from my perspective. First, it was the audience: we came to the event because we wanted to be there and were interested in what Laura had to offer. Second, it was the professionalism of the performers: they were skilled and delivered high-quality music. Third, the special effects and settings were noteworthy: they were developed to improve the work and augment the presentation. Most importantly, however, it was Laura who helped me to enjoy the concert: she performed well, employed the special effects to her advantage, and interacted with the audience, giving us what we wanted. I am very grateful to her for this experience.

Laura Pausini Official Website. “Bio.” Laura Pausini Official Website .

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Bibliography

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

How live music moves us: head movement differences in audiences to live versus recorded music.

• 1 Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
• 2 McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
• 3 Digital Music Lab, School of the Arts, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
• 4 Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Hospital, Toronto, ON, Canada

A live music concert is a pleasurable social event that is among the most visceral and memorable forms of musical engagement. But what inspires listeners to attend concerts, sometimes at great expense, when they could listen to recordings at home? An iconic aspect of popular concerts is engaging with other audience members through moving to the music. Head movements, in particular, reflect emotion and have social consequences when experienced with others. Previous studies have explored the affiliative social engagement experienced among people moving together to music. But live concerts have other features that might also be important, such as that during a live performance the music unfolds in a unique and not predetermined way, potentially increasing anticipation and feelings of involvement for the audience. Being in the same space as the musicians might also be exciting. Here we controlled for simply being in an audience to examine whether factors inherent to live performance contribute to the concert experience. We used motion capture to compare head movement responses at a live album release concert featuring Canadian rock star Ian Fletcher Thornley, and at a concert without the performers where the same songs were played from the recorded album. We also examined effects of a prior connection with the performers by comparing fans and neutral-listeners, while controlling for familiarity with the songs, as the album had not yet been released. Head movements were faster during the live concert than the album-playback concert. Self-reported fans moved faster and exhibited greater levels of rhythmic entrainment than neutral-listeners. These results indicate that live music engages listeners to a greater extent than pre-recorded music and that a pre-existing admiration for the performers also leads to higher engagement.

Introduction

Music is a universal social phenomenon that has traditionally been experienced in a live context ( Nettl and Russell, 1998 ; Freeman, 2000 ). The advent of recording technology in the late 19th century heralded a cultural shift in the way that people experienced music, allowing for the convenience of private, in-home consumption ( Moreau, 2013 ). While technology has provided a low-cost, convenient method for music listening, many people continue to attend live concerts, sometimes at great expense in uncomfortable settings ( Baxter-Moore and Kitts, 2016 ; Brown and Knox, 2017 ). What is it about the experience that motivates listeners to attend live concerts? A survey found that listeners’ strongest musical experiences often took place at live events ( Lamont, 2011 ). Two factors that likely contribute critically to the enjoyment of live concerts are (1) people like the social connexion of experiencing music with other people ( Burland and Pitts, 2014 ; Brown and Knox, 2017 ) and (2) people like the feeling of being connected to the performers, by being in the same physical space together, with the potential for performers to directly engage the audience ( Silverberg et al., 2013 ; Leante, 2016 ), and by experiencing a unique live performance as it unfolds over time ( Brown and Knox, 2017 ). Every live performance is idiosyncratic such that events unfold organically and unpredictably, unlike when listening to a recording in which there is no possibility for an audience to directly affect what a performer has already created.

The social effects of experiencing music with other people have been studied to a greater extent than the effects of experiencing a live performance ( Freeman, 2000 ; Egermann et al., 2011 ; Rennung and Goritz, 2016 ; Stupacher et al., 2017 ). Here we examined the effects of live performance while controlling for the social setting. We compared people who listened to a live performance (specifically, a record release party by Canadian rock star Ian Fletcher Thornley’s 2015 solo album Secrets ) to people who listened in a group in the same venue without live performers to the album recordings of the same songs from Secrets . Recently, research on audiences of live performances has gained interest ( Egermann et al., 2011 ; Burland and Pitts, 2014 ; Danielsen and Helseth, 2016 ; Bradby, 2017 ; Brown and Knox, 2017 ), in part because audiences provide an ecologically valid setting for examining group dynamics. Audience experience has been examined with a variety of techniques including real-time subjective responses ( McAdams, 2004 ; Stevens et al., 2009 , 2014 ; Egermann et al., 2013 ), social networking ( Deller, 2011 ), video analysis ( Chan et al., 2013 ; Silverberg et al., 2013 ; Stevens et al., 2014 ; Leante, 2016 ; Theodorou et al., 2016 ) and physiological measurement ( Fancourt and Williamon, 2016 ; Bernardi et al., 2017 ). It is important to understand effects of the concert setting because attendance may increase health: attending a musical performance was found to reduce stress hormones in audience members ( Fancourt and Williamon, 2016 ) and a 10-year longitudinal study suggested that engagement in cultural events, including concerts, may protect against age-related cognitive decline ( Fancourt and Steptoe, 2018 ).

Enjoying music with other listeners may contribute powerfully to the concert experience. Observers of concert audiences judged synchronously moving listeners as experiencing greater rapport and similar psychological states compared to those moving asynchronously ( Lakens and Stel, 2011 ). After adults move in synchrony, even when unaware of their synchronised movements, they remember more about each other, express liking each other more, and show greater levels of trust and cooperation compared to after moving asynchronously ( Hove and Risen, 2009 ; Wiltermuth and Heath, 2009 ; Valdesolo et al., 2010 ; Valdesolo and DeSteno, 2011 ; Launay et al., 2013 ; Woolhouse et al., 2016 ). More broadly, periodic movements and physiological rhythms, such as breathing and heart rate, tend to synchronise unconsciously among people in a group ( Richardson et al., 2007 ; van Ulzen et al., 2008 ; Morris, 2010 ; Codrons et al., 2014 ; Miyata et al., 2018 ).

Entrainment is defined as the ability to synchronise movements with an external auditory stimulus, in this case the timing regularities of music ( Phillips-Silver and Keller, 2012 ). In humans, synchronisation is supported by connections between auditory and motor cortices ( Sakai et al., 1999 ; Janata and Grafton, 2003 ; Grahn and Brett, 2007 ; Zatorre et al., 2007 ; Fujioka et al., 2012 ) and manifests as oscillatory activity measured in EEG and MEG ( Schroeder and Lakatos, 2009 ; Arnal and Giraud, 2012 ; Fujioka et al., 2012 , 2015 ; Cravo et al., 2013 ; Calderone et al., 2014 ; Cirelli et al., 2014a ; Chang et al., 2018a ). Interestingly, few non-human species entrain movements to auditory regularities ( Merker et al., 2009 ; Patel et al., 2009 ; Schachner et al., 2009 ). The connection between movement synchronisation and social-emotional engagement may have deep evolutionary roots in humans. Infants are not yet able to coordinate their movements to entrain to a musical beat, although they do move faster to music with a faster compared to slower tempo ( Zentner and Eerola, 2010 ). Yet if an infant as young as 14 months is bounced to music synchronously with the movements of another adult, the infant is more likely to help that adult (e.g., to pick up “accidentally” dropped objects needed to complete a task) compared to if an infant is bounced asynchronously with the adult ( Cirelli et al., 2014c ). Later work revealed that this increased helpfulness extends to friends of the experimenter who bounced with them ( Cirelli et al., 2016 ). In another study, infants who were bounced to music with stuffed animals, choose animals that bounced synchronously with them over animals that bounced asynchronously. These studies indicate that synchronisation of movement with others during music listening is a cue that even infants use in the development of social-emotional bonds and altruistic behaviours ( Trainor and Cirelli, 2015 ; Cirelli et al., 2018 ).

We examined the effect of live music while controlling for the effects of being with others in an audience. Little research has examined differences between live and recorded performances by manipulating the presence and absence of the performer. Shoda et al. (2016) reported that the heartbeats of audience members at a live performance exhibited greater entrainment with the musical rhythm than those of listeners at a pre-recorded performance. Performer presence was also found to produce greater relaxation in audience members compared to those listening to a recording ( Shoda et al., 2016 ). Contemporary popular performers often play variations of recorded works at live performances ( Shoda and Adachi, 2015 ), suggesting a novelty factor for listeners. Brown and Knox (2017) found that audience members consider this musical novelty as an important motivator for concert attendance. Live concerts also enable audience members to experience an in-person relationship with the performer. Performers can also be influenced by the presence of an audience, and live performances can be acoustically and energetically different than those recorded in the studio ( Zajonc, 1965 ; Yoshie et al., 2016 ; Bradby, 2017 ).

We used head movement responses as our main measure of audience experience for several reasons. Moving to the beat during music listening is culturally ubiquitous, with collective movement a hallmark of the contemporary concert experience ( Zatorre et al., 2007 ; Madison et al., 2011 ; Janata et al., 2012 ; Davies et al., 2013 ; Madison and Sioros, 2014 ; Stupacher et al., 2017 ). Individuals use a range of movements when listening to music, from foot tapping to head nodding, to whole body movement ( Leman and Godøy, 2010 ). Head movements are particularly relevant as they are a reliable indicator of rhythmic entrainment ( Toiviainen et al., 2010 ; Burger et al., 2013 ), reveal communication patterns between performers ( Chang et al., 2017 ), reveal directional and emotional communication patterns (Chang et al., unpublished), and even predict who will “match” during speed dating ( Chang et al., 2018b ). Movement of the head alone—but not legs alone—affects how ambiguous auditorily-presented rhythms are interpreted ( Phillips-Silver and Trainor, 2008 ). This interaction between head movement and auditory perception likely involves the vestibular system located in the inner ear which processes proprioceptive information about head movements ( Trainor et al., 2009 ). Head movements also encode emotional information ( Livingstone and Palmer, 2016 ; Chang et al., unpublished), and may function as a form of non-verbal communication in a noisy environment ( Harrigan et al., 2008 ). Head movements provide information about the nature of an emotion being communicated ( Ekman and Friesen, 1967 ; Witkower and Tracy, 2018 ). Furthermore, movement smoothness (which increases with movement speed) is greater when communicating joy than a neutral emotion or sadness ( Kang and Gross, 2016 ). Horizontal head movements and forward velocity communicate happiness even without the context provided by facial expression or vocal content ( Livingstone and Palmer, 2016 ). Additionally, movement vigour (average speed) and movement distance have been shown to convey the intensity of emotions ( Atkinson et al., 2004 ). Leow et al. (2015) found that, even when asked to walk at the same tempo, participants walked more vigorously (faster) to more familiar music. One study found that during music listening, greater head speed was correlated with increased spectral flux in low frequencies (associated with greater presence of kick drum and bass guitar) and in high frequencies (associated with hi-hat and cymbals or liveliness of a rhythm), as well as with greater percussiveness, but head speed was not found to be related to tempo ( Burger et al., 2013 ).

In summary, there are many possible factors contributing to movement during music listening including biological imperatives, emotions, and the presence of others. These factors have been studied in highly controlled laboratory settings but have yet to be explored in real-world music listening contexts. In the present study, we were interested in how a live concert affected audience head movements as an index of engagement, specifically, by comparing the movements of concertgoers who experienced a live performance versus a recorded version of the same songs. We were particularly interested in the measure of vigour. Following previous researchers, we operationally defined movement vigour as the average speed of movement over a time interval, regardless of direction (specifically, head distance travelled within a song divided by the total length of the song, giving a value in millimetres per second) ( Atkinson et al., 2004 ; Mazzoni et al., 2007 ; Zentner and Eerola, 2010 ). We were also interested in how head movements might be influenced by audience members’ prior admiration for the performers (i.e., their Listener-preference). People are motivated to attend music concerts when they hold a strong preference for the musicians’ work. Musical preferences for genres and artists also play a role in defining social affiliations, particularly during adolescence, where they appear to function as a ‘badge of identity’ within a social group ( North and Hargreaves, 1999 ; Mulder et al., 2010 ). ‘Fans’ of a particular performer would be expected to enjoy musical performances by that performer, in part because the familiarity gained from repeated exposure to recordings of their music would be expected to increase enjoyment of the performer’s music in general ( Schellenberg et al., 2008 ; van den Bosch et al., 2013 ). To examine the effect of audience members’ prior preferences for the band, we recruited fans of the performer Ian Fletcher Thornley, along with naïve listeners who expressed no particular preference for the performer. Since the album had not yet been released prior to the concerts, the effects of song familiarity were controlled while examining differences between fans and neutral listeners as neither group had heard the songs prior to the concerts.

In sum, we examined the effects of live versus pre-recorded music and fan status on audience engagement with the music through head movements. Self-reported Fans and Neutral-preference listeners were separately recruited, and randomly assigned to attend one of two concerts. The concerts served as the record release event for Canadian rock star Ian Fletcher Thornley’s 2015 solo album Secrets , featuring new unreleased music. In the Live concert, audience members experienced a live performance by the musicians, while in the Album-playback concert, listeners heard an audio recording of the same songs from the Secrets album. Both concerts were held in the LIVELab, a 106-seat performance hall equipped with a 25-camera optical motion capture system. Head movements of participants were recorded simultaneously throughout each of the two concerts (Supplementary Figure S1 ). Two aspects of head movement were examined: (1) vigour and (2) entrainment to the beat of the music. We hypothesised that head movements would be faster and better entrained when audiences experienced a live concert compared to a pre-recorded version of the music. We further hypothesised that fans of the performer would exhibit faster movement, and entrain better to the rhythm, compared to neutral listeners.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

Fans of the performer were recruited through contests advertised in social media ( n = 39). Neutral-listeners who expressed no specific preference for Ian Fletcher Thornley ( n = 21) were recruited for course credit through McMaster University’s online research portal ( n = 3), social media and flyers circulated across campus and in music stores ( n = 18). Self-asserted Fan-status was verified via a follow-up questionnaire. Participants’ demographics and condition assignments are described in Table 1 . Prior to analysis, five participants were excluded due to: self-reported abnormal hearing ( n = 1 from Live/Neutral-listener condition), movement restrictions ( n = 1 from Album-playback/Fan condition), or having previously heard songs from the album ( n = 3; 1 from Album-playback/Fan, 2 from Live/Fan conditions). Six participants who did not respond to a follow-up survey confirming fan-status were further excluded: 1 from Album playback/Fan, 2 from Album-playback/Neutral-listener, 2 from Live/Fan, 1 from Live/Neutral-listener conditions. The final sample consisted of 32 Fans and 17 Neutral-listeners. The McMaster University Research Ethics Board approved all procedures.

Table 1. Participant demographics.

Stimuli and Apparatus

Ian Fletcher Thornley’s record release party concert was the setting for this study. Participants listened to eight songs from Thornley’s new studio album Secrets on the day of its official release. This release reached a top position of 9 on the Canadian iTunes sales charts on October 30th, 2015. The first seven songs were novel to all included participants. The final song in the concert, “Blown Wide Open,” was a cover version of a previous song that was familiar to fans 1 . The eight songs were presented in the following order in both conditions: (1) “Just to Know I Can”; (2) “How Long”; (3) “Fool”; (4) “Elouise”; (5) “Frozen Pond”; (6) “Feel”; (7) “Secrets”; and (8) reinterpretation of “Blown Wide Open”. These stimuli are hereafter referred to as Songs 1 through 8, respectively.

Both the Live and Album-playback concerts took place in the LIVELab 2 . The LIVELab is a research facility with a 106-seat performance hall designed for the study of human interaction in a variety of ecologically valid contexts, including music, dance and pedagogy. In both Live and Album-playback concerts, motion-recorded Fans and Neutral-listeners were seated interspersed in the front and centre of the audience across four rows with an average of 8 people per row. Sound for both concerts was presented over a high-quality Meyer Sound 6 channel house PA system (Left/Right Main Speakers, Meyer UPJ, Left/Right Front Fill, Meyer UP4, Left/Right Subwoofer, Meyer 500-HP). Reverberation was added to each instrument in the Live Concert via a Digico SD9 sound mixer. A sound technician manipulated volume and reverberation throughout the live concert as it would be at a professional live show. For the Live Concert condition, Thornley (vocals and electric guitar) and his band (electric bass, drums, and cigar box guitar) performed renditions of the 8 songs in the same order as they were presented in the Album-playback concert condition. Given that it was a live performance, there were minor variations in tempo and arrangement between the stimuli at the Live compared to Album-playback Concerts, as would be expected in any live performance of a recorded work (see Supplementary Table S1 in the Supplementary Material for a comparison of the tempi of the pre-recorded and live songs). Coloured stage lights helped create the concert experience. Videos depicting a variety of neuroscience-themed phenomena played behind the performers on the stage video wall (3 × 3 array of Mitsubishi LM55S 55″ monitors) during the Live concert. In song 6, “Feel,” a video depiction of a previous recording of Thornley’s neural responses when listening to the recording of his own song “Feel” were imaged from fMRI and EEG data. Referred to as “Lightning Brain,” the 5-min video can be viewed online 3 .

In the Album-playback concert, a photo of the Secrets album artwork was displayed on the stage video wall and the stage was dimly lit with coloured lights. The stage setup was identical for the two conditions; all of the instruments were in place and ready for performance. During Song 6 the video depiction of Thornley’s neural responses was displayed as in the Live concert. See Supplementary Table S1 for the tempi of the recorded and live songs.

Design and Procedure

The experimental design was a 2 × 2 × 7 with between-subjects factors Concert-status (Live, Album-playback) and Listener-preference (Fan, Neutral-listener) and within-subject factor Song (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). The 8th song was analysed separately with only the between-subjects factors since it was familiar to Fans.

Fans and Neutral-listeners were randomly assigned to the Live or Album-playback conditions. In both cases participants were greeted at the entrance, filled out a consent form, and were fitted with a motion-capture cap. The caps did not restrict listener movement in any way. Participants were ushered into the theatre and to their seat. Once seated, additional audience members who did not participate in the study were then admitted to the theatre. Two researchers thanked the participants for their attendance and introduced the concert. Participants were instructed to do their best to forget that they were wearing caps and to enjoy the concert as they normally would. They were given no further instructions and were not encouraged to move in any particular way. Participants then completed a questionnaire on their familiarity with the performers, their current state of arousal and happiness, and their musical expertise (see Appendix S1 in Supplementary Material ). A follow-up questionnaire at the end of the concert asked the same questions regarding listener arousal and happiness.

Both concerts (Live, Album-playback) took place on the same day, with the Album-playback concert in the afternoon and the Live concert in the evening. During the Live concert, Thornley occasionally spoke to the audience between songs as performers would at a typical concert. Head movements between songs were not analysed. At the end of the Album-playback condition, Thornley and his band played a live song to avoid disappointing fans; head motion during this song was not analysed. A second questionnaire was sent to participants after the experiment to collect participant demographic information including age, sex, detailed music and dance experience and preferences.

Data Recording and Analysis

An audio recording of the live performance was recorded for later analysis. A passive optical motion capture system (24 Oqus 5+ cameras and an Oqus 210c video camera, Qualisys) recorded the head movements of participants at 90 Hz. Four retroreflective markers (10 mm) were placed on felt caps worn by the participants, forming a rigid body. One marker was placed on the front of the head, one on top of the head, and one on each temple.

Motion capture data were cleaned and labelled using the Qualisys Track Manager, then exported to MATLAB (The MathWorks Inc., 2015) for analysis with the motion capture toolbox ( Burger and Toiviainen, 2013 ). Motion data were gap-filled using linear interpolation, then low-pass filtered at 6 Hz to remove jitter. The positions of the four head markers were averaged to produce a single, stable representation of participant head centre (Supplementary Figure S1 ). Data were then normalised and segmented into songs. After preparation, two measures of participant head motion were generated.

Movement Vigour

The average movement speed of each participant in mm/s was calculated to provide a representation of movement vigour ( Mazzoni et al., 2007 ; Zentner and Eerola, 2010 ; Leow et al., 2014 ). The speed of participants’ movements was estimated by taking the first derivative of the motion signal (differences in position between adjacent frames). Speed trajectories were then smoothed using a second-order lowpass Butterworth filtre with a normalised low-pass frequency of 0.2π radians per sample. At a sampling frequency of 90 Hz, this equated to a 9 Hz low-pass filtre. Movement vigour is conceptually independent of synchronisation; a participant could remain in perfect synchrony to a given tempo and still move with more or less vigour (e.g., by increasing or decreasing the distance they moved their head), and a participant could also remain completely unsynchronised and still move with more or less vigour.

Degree of Entrainment

The degree of entrainment was defined as how frequently participants entrained their movements to the beat of each song. Movement periodicities were extracted with a windowed autocorrelation performed on listeners head-centre motion trajectories, with window size of 10 s, hop size of 5 s, and lags ranging from 0 to 2 s using mcwindow and mcperiod functions from the Mocap Toolbox ( Eerola et al., 2006 ; Burger and Toiviainen, 2013 ). The tempi of the songs from both the Live and Album-playback concerts were determined by two musically trained raters (first and third authors, n = 9 and n = 15 years of formal training, respectively) who tapped along to the beat of each song while listening to the recordings of the album and the Live concert using a metronome application (Metronome Beats, Stonekick©2015). The average inter-beat interval period was calculated from the song tempo, and this period was used to calculate the period at the quarter, half, and whole note levels of the musical metrical hierarchy for each song at which participants could have entrained. The participants’ head movement period at each window, obtained from the autocorrelation analysis, was compared to the three possible periods of each song. If the participant’s period of motion was within 5% of one of these beat periods, then that window was added to a count of the number of windows demonstrating entrainment. The measure of degree of entrainment was defined as the number of windows with entrainment divided by the total number of possible windows, to give the proportion of entrainment, which could range between 0.0 (no entrainment) and 1.0 (perfect entrainment). Actual measured proportions ranged from 0.0 to 0.58 depending on the participant and song. Our overall grand mean entrainment proportion of 0.081 was smaller, but of similar magnitude, to that found by Burger et al. (2014) who showed period-locking proportions less than 0.3 (summing tactus divisions and excluding inferior-superior movement, which our seated participants were not free to engage in). Smaller values would be expected in our case, given that for the Burger et al. (2014) experiment participants were standing and specifically asked to move to the music, whereas in the present study participants were seated and were not given any instructions regarding movement.

Analyses of the First Seven Unfamiliar Songs

Movement vigour and degree of entrainment were analysed with repeated measures ANOVAs, with between-subjects factors Concert-status (Live, Album-playback) and Listener-preference (Fan, Neutral-listener), and within-subjects factor Song (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). When Mauchly’s test indicated that sphericity was violated, Greenhouse-Geisser’s corrections were applied. Effect sizes are reported with partial eta-squared values, means are accompanied by a variance measure of one standard error of the mean ( SEM ). Pairwise comparisons were adjusted using Bonferroni correction. Statistical tests were conducted in SPSS 2013 v20.0.0. Experiment-wise corrections were not implemented on the reported values, but below we note the two cases in which such a correction would affect interpretation of an effect as significant.

Concert-Status

There was a main effect of Concert-status for vigour, but not for entrainment, F (1,45) = 15.783, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.260 and F (1,45) = 1.569, p = 0.217, η p 2 = 0.034, respectively. Participants moved more vigorously in the Live concert ( M = 15.559, SEM = 1.397) than the Album-playback concert ( M = 7.644, SEM = 1.421) condition. These results indicate that the Live concert increased vigour but not necessarily the degree of entrainment of head movements. The interaction between Concert-status and Listener-preference was not significant for either vigour or entrainment.

Listener-Preference

As predicted, there was a main effect of Listener-preference for both vigour and entrainment, F (1,45) = 12.871, p = 0.001, η p 2 = 0.222, and F (1,45) = 4.197, p = 0.046, η p 2 = 0.085, respectively. (Note that the effect of Listener-preference on entrainment is no longer significant if experiment-wise Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons is implemented). Fans ( M = 15.175, SEM = 1.174) moved faster than Neutral-listeners ( M = 8.027, SEM = 1.610) and Fans ( M = 0.074, SEM = 0.007) showed a higher degree of entrainment than Neutral-listeners ( M = 0.050, SEM = 0.01). These results indicate that Listener-preference affected both vigour and entrainment of head movements. The interaction between Concert-status and Listener-preference was not significant for either vigour or entrainment.

In addition to the main effects produced by the between-subjects variables, there was a main effect of Song for both vigour and entrainment, F (4.439,199.768) = 9.626, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.176 and F (3.254,146.414) = 19.022, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.297, respectively. This indicates substantial differences between songs in their ability to produce both fast and entrained movement, likely due to intrinsic properties of the songs, such as tempo (see Figures 1 , 2 ; song tempi are provided in Supplementary Table S1 in the Supplementary Material ). Interestingly, songs producing the fastest movement were not necessarily the same songs that produced maximal entrainment, indicating the possibility of some level of independence between these two measures. An acoustic analysis of the songs from both performances is underway as a separate paper in which we plan to relate head movements to characteristics such as Danceability, Energy, Instrumentalness, Liveness, and Valence of individual songs.

Figure 1. Vigour of head movements across songs. The distance travelled within a song was divided by the total length of the song, giving a value in millimetres per second. Fans moved with greater vigour than Neutral-listeners for every song and those in the Live Concert condition moved with greater vigour than those in the Album-playback Concert condition for every song. Vigour varied among songs, and was qualified depending on Concert-status (Live, Album-playback). The songs were: (1) “Just to Know I Can”; (2) “How Long”; (3) “Fool”; (4) “Elouise”; (5) “Frozen Pond”; (6) “Feel”; (7) “Secrets”; and (8) reinterpretation of “Blown Wide Open.” The violin plots show the same parameters as a standard box plot (range, interquartile range and median) as well as a kernel density plot that estimates the continuous distribution of the data.

Figure 2. Proportion of movement entrainment across songs. Fans generally showed a higher degree of entrainment to the tempo of the music than Neutral-listeners. However, there was variation among songs, which interacted with Concert-status. The songs were: (1) “Just to Know I Can”; (2) “How Long”; (3) “Fool”; (4) “Elouise”; (5) “Frozen Pond”; (6) “Feel”; (7) “Secrets”; and (8) reinterpretation of “Blown Wide Open.” The violin plots show the same parameters as a standard box plot (range, interquartile range and median) as well as a kernel density plot that estimates the continuous distribution of the data.

There was also an interaction between song and Listener-preference for both vigour and entrainment, F (4.439,199.768) = 2.428, p = 0.003, η p 2 = 0.082, and F (3.254,146.414) = 3.010, p = 0.029, η p 2 = 0.063, respectively. This interaction indicates that Fans and Neutral-listeners reacted differently to different songs (It should be noted that the interaction between song and Listener-preference on entrainment is no longer significant if experiment-wise Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons is implemented).

Analyses of the 8th Song

The final song (“Blown Wide Open,” released in 1997) was analysed separately because it was familiar to Thornley’s fans, having been one of the most famous songs from his previous band Big Wreck. This provides a preliminary exploration of how familiarity can promote movement.

There was a main effect of Concert-status on vigour, F (1,45) = 16.929, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.273. Movement was more vigorous in the Live concert ( M = 20.32 mm/s, SEM = 2.003) than Album-playback concert ( M = 8.56 mm/s, SEM = 2.037) condition. There was also a main effect on entrainment, F (1,45) = 11.917, p = 0.001, η p 2 = 0.209. The degree of entrainment was higher in the Live concert ( M = 0.235, SEM = 0.029) than Album-playback concert ( M = 0.091, SEM = 0.030) condition.

For Listener-preference, there was a main effect on vigour, F (1,45) = 14.494, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.244. Fans ( M = 19.88 mm/s, SEM = 1.683) moved faster than Neutral-listeners ( M = 9.00 mm/s, SEM = 2.308). There was also a main effect on entrainment, F (1,45) = 13.630, p = 0.001, η p 2 = 0.232. Fans ( M = 0.24, SEM = 0.025) entrained to a greater degree than Neutral-listeners ( M = 0.086, SEM = 0.034). The interaction between Concert-status and Listener-preference was not significant.

Musicians Versus Non-musicians

Using the self-reported measures of music experience, participants were categorised as musicians ( N = 25; mean years of training = 11.7; range = 1–38) or non-musicians with no musical training ( N = 24). Independent-samples t -tests were performed for vigour for the mean of Songs 1–7, t (47) = 0.6, p = 0.58, vigour for Song 8, t (47) = 0.4, p = 0.68, entrainment for the mean of Songs 1–7, t (47) = 0.5, p = 0.62, and entrainment for Song 8, t (47) = 0.8, p = 0.45. There were no significant differences on any of these measures.

The question of why people enjoy attending live concerts, when the same music can be experienced more easily and for less money at home, likely involves two aspects: the social sharing of the experience in a group of people; and “live” aspects, including connecting with the artists and experiencing the potential for spontaneity and unpredictability of live music as it unfolds over time, compared to a pre-recorded and unchanging version on a recording that a fan might become familiar with after repeated listening. In our study, we examined primarily the second aspect, comparing listening to a recording of a set of songs from Ian Fletcher Thornley’s 2015 album Secrets to listening to a live performance of those songs, while keeping the social aspect largely the same: both the Live and Album-playback concerts were experienced in the context of an audience in the same LIVELab venue. In the case of this study, audiences were not familiar with recorded songs, but nonetheless may have reacted to the knowledge that the music in the Live condition was unfolding in a unique way that would never be repeated exactly. Necessarily, the visual stimulation differed between the two conditions because of the presence of the live performers. We feel that this is not necessarily a confound—a live performance requires the presence of performers—but future studies might incorporate some visual stimulation that tries to better equate the two conditions, for example, by showing a video of the live performance. We also examined how being a fan of the musical group affected these experiences by comparing self-reported Fans and Neutral-listeners randomly assigned to the Live and Album-playback concert conditions. We focused on head movements, using motion capture to extract the vigour and degree of entrainment of head movements to the beat of music ( Toiviainen et al., 2010 ; Burger et al., 2013 ).

We found that for both Fans and Neutral-listeners, head movements were more vigorous in the Live than the Album-playback concert, but Concert-status did not affect degree of entrainment to the beat. On the other hand, across both concert conditions, Fans moved their heads more vigorously and with better entrainment to the beat compared to Neutral-listeners. The greater degree of entrainment to the beat in general in Fans likely reflects their greater familiarity with the artist’s musical style. The greater vigour of head movements across groups at the Live compared to Album-playback concert likely represents greater arousal, increased anticipation, and increased connection with the artists and their music during the live concert ( Mazzoni et al., 2007 ; Leow et al., 2014 ). Amount of musical training varied across audience members, but there were no differences between musicians and non-musicians in either movement vigour or synchronisation to the beat. Similarly, Bernardi et al. (2017) reported that musical training did not affect the degree of synchronisation of autonomic responses to the beat of music experienced in a group setting. Together, these results suggest that entrainment responses in audiences are independent of musical training.

We controlled for song familiarity across Fans and Neutral-listeners by using songs that had not yet been publicly released (the first 7 songs of the concerts). The eighth song, “Blown Wide Open,” on the other hand, was certainly familiar to Fans, and may have been familiar to some Neutral-listeners as its original rendition had achieved double platinum sales in Canada in the late 1990s. Interestingly, when the songs were not familiar, there was no difference in degree of entrainment to the music across the Live and Album-playback concerts. However, for the eighth song that was familiar at least to Fans, head movement entrainment was greater during the Live than Album-playback concert. This suggests that while the vigour of head movements is affected by whether the music is live or pre-recorded regardless of familiarity, familiarity with the music may foster greater entrainment to the beat during live compared to recorded contexts.

Vigour of head movements and degree of entrainment differed across songs. Further, there were interactions for both measures between Songs and Listener-preference, indicating that Fans and Neutral-listeners reacted differently to different songs. This suggests that some songs might excite existing fans differently than naïve listeners, which might inform record company promotion decisions. Concerts are becoming increasingly important for the music industry as the prevalence of piracy results in reduced revenue from album recordings ( Frith, 2007 ; Papies and van Heerde, 2017 ). Interestingly, the majority of audience members report that cost does not influence their decisions to attend concerts ( Brown and Knox, 2017 ). In general, research on audience development and retention could be important for sustaining the multi-billion dollar music industry ( O’Reilly et al., 2014 ; Papies and van Heerde, 2017 ).

Music compels us to move, the likely result of connections between auditory and motor areas of the brain ( Sakai et al., 1999 ; Janata and Grafton, 2003 ; Grahn and Brett, 2007 ; Zatorre et al., 2007 ; Grahn and Rowe, 2009 ; Janata et al., 2012 ), whose communication during rhythm and beat prediction can be measured in neural oscillations ( Fujioka et al., 2012 ). Certain characteristics of music lead to increased entrainment to music and compulsion of movement, such as beat predictability and rhythmic complexity ( Fitch, 2016 ), the density of events between beats ( Madison et al., 2011 ), moderate levels of syncopation ( Witek et al., 2014 ; Fitch, 2016 ), and possibly micro-timing deviations (cf. Madison et al., 2011 ; Davies et al., 2013 ; Stupacher et al., 2013 ; Kilchenmann and Senn, 2015 ). The present study demonstrates that in addition to acoustic characteristics of music, environmental and personal factors influence movement to music as well. Specifically, familiarity with the performer and musical style (Listener-preference) led to increased movement and entrainment, while the live performance (Concert-status) led to a significant increase in movement vigour. Because synchronous movement can lead to prosociality ( Hove and Risen, 2009 ; Wiltermuth and Heath, 2009 ; Valdesolo et al., 2010 ; Valdesolo and DeSteno, 2011 ; Launay et al., 2013 ; Cirelli et al., 2014b ; Trainor and Cirelli, 2015 ; Rennung and Goritz, 2016 ; Woolhouse et al., 2016 ), and because entrainment to music was fostered more by Listener-preference than Concert-status, it is possible that personal factors are more important than environmental factors for generating synchronous movement and subsequent prosociality.

This study adds to the fledgling literature examining music listening in concert settings ( Egermann et al., 2011 ; Shoda and Adachi, 2012 , 2015 , 2016 ; Fancourt and Williamon, 2016 ; Shoda et al., 2016 ). It provides unique insight into how live music is experienced in ecologically valid conditions, and how that experience is expressed through body movement. Many questions that remain could be addressed in future research in the LIVELab, such as how individual differences in personality affect live concert experiences, how individuals in a concert setting are affected by the movements of those around them, the effects of different musical characteristics (e.g., tempo, instrumentation, presence of improvisation, genre), whether synchronous movements in a concert setting leads to increased prosociality and bonding, and how performers are affected by audiences.

Data Availability

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this manuscript will be made available on https://zenodo.org/ (search for ‘LIVELab) by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

Ethics Statement

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (T), with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the McMaster University Research Ethics Board.

Author Contributions

DS involved in data collection and analyses, and the preparation and review of the manuscript. DB involved in the research design, data collection and analyses, and the preparation and review of the manuscript. SL involved in motion data collection, statistical analyses, and review of the manuscript. JB involved in project and research design, recruitment, organisation, and data collection, and review of the manuscript. MW involved in the conception and organisation of the project including artist-Anthem coordination, research design, and review of the manuscript. SM-R involved in recruitment, data collection and review of the manuscript. LT involved in the conception and organisation of the project, research design, review of the statistical analyses, and preparation and review of the manuscript.

This research was funded by Anthem Records, a grant to LT from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2016-1442), and a grant to MW from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (30524).

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We thank Ian Fletcher Thornley and his band for their generosity in participating in this study. We thank Andy Curran of Anthem Records for collaborating with the Digital Music Lab and coordinating the launch of the Secrets album at the LIVELab. We thank Dave Thompson and Ranil Sonnadara for their assistance on sound and lighting, and for their assistance in executing the concert. We are grateful to Alex Zaranek, Research Assistant in the Digital Music Lab, for creating the video “Lightning Brain” shown within the live concert; Mike Noseworthy recorded the MRI data used to render the 3D brain in the video. We also thank the many volunteers for their help throughout the concerts. Finally, we thank the many participants for volunteering their time.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02682/full#supplementary-material

• ^ Blown Wide Open was first released in 1997. The containing album achieved double platinum sales status (CRIA) and itself achieved a peak position of #8 on the Canadian rock charts.
• ^ http://LIVELab.mcmaster.ca
• ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h-Js1KtQa4

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Keywords : live concert, recorded music, music, fan, entrainment, movement, motion capture

Citation: Swarbrick D, Bosnyak D, Livingstone SR, Bansal J, Marsh-Rollo S, Woolhouse MH and Trainor LJ (2019) How Live Music Moves Us: Head Movement Differences in Audiences to Live Versus Recorded Music. Front. Psychol. 9:2682. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02682

Received: 21 August 2018; Accepted: 13 December 2018; Published: 11 January 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Swarbrick, Bosnyak, Livingstone, Bansal, Marsh-Rollo, Woolhouse and Trainor. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Laurel J. Trainor, [email protected]

† Present address: Steven R. Livingstone, Department of Computer Science, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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The Importance Of Live Performances For Growing Your Music Career

Jun 5, 2023

For any aspiring musician, live performances are a crucial stepping stone on the path towards success . Through performing live, artists can cultivate and grow their careers in numerous ways. In fact, the benefits of performing live are so profound that it’s difficult to overstate their importance. 

Whether you’re playing to a packed stadium or at an intimate coffee shop, there’s no substitute for the energy and excitement that comes from a live performance. From generating buzz and attracting new fans to honing your skills and refining your craft, there are countless reasons why every musician should prioritize performing live as a critical component of their career growth strategy.

Here are seven reasons why live performances are so important for all musicians.

In This Article:

How to connect with fans, showcase your skills and talent, help build your brand as a musician, reach new audiences, generate income, improve as a performer.

Performing live can be a game-changer for artists looking to establish a deeper connection with their fans. Through interactions both on and off stage, live performances offer a unique opportunity for musicians to build strong and personal relationships with their audience.

Whether it’s meeting fans after the show or engaging with them while still on stage, these moments can help create a loyal and dedicated fanbase, turning casual listeners who happened to buy a ticket to die-hard followers.

Concerts can be a chance to connect with the audience in a way that is simply not possible through other means. Streaming platforms are great for accessing tunes, but they are no match for any kind of show when it comes to forming a bond.

If you’re looking to connect with fans, social media  is one of the best ways to do so – and if you don’t know how to start, we can help with your social media promotion .

Musicians are often looking for opportunities to exhibit their artistic skills and captivate their audience, and there’s no better time and place than at a concert. Whether playing an instrument, singing, or both, live performances give artists a chance to showcase their talent and create a lasting impression on the audience. With the freedom to improvise and add their unique flair to the music people already know, in-the-flesh performances offer a dynamic experience that cannot be replicated in a recording studio or via any streaming or download platform.

Playing live provides an opportunity to display the hard work, dedication, and passion that goes into creating music, and to connect with the audience on a deeper level through a shared appreciation for the art form.

Help Build Your Brand As A Musician

In the music industry, establishing a personal brand is essential for gaining recognition and standing out from the competition. While hiring a music publicist will help, giving live performances offer a valuable opportunity for musicians to create a unique brand identity based on what they do on stage. Through a combination of showmanship, presence, and musical ability, live performances enable artists to develop their own distinct brand and cultivate a loyal following of fans.

Live performances provide a platform for musicians to reach new listeners and turn those in the audience into fans, which is perhaps the most important thing any artist can do. Playing live allows acts to broaden their fan base, and the more people who fall in love with your art, the better.

Whether it’s a local music festival , a concert in a different city or country, or an opening act for a more established artist, exposure is invaluable for up-and-coming artists looking to establish a foothold in the music industry, as it allows them to showcase their talent to a wider audience and build a following outside of their existing fan base.

By performing in front of new crowds, musicians can also receive feedback and gain insight into what resonates with different audiences, helping them to improve their craft and perhaps gain even more ground the next time they take to the stage.

Looking to reach new audiences? It’s time to begin looking for music promotion !

These days, anywhere an artist can make money is a blessing, as earning a living in the music industry is tougher than ever. Concerts, festivals, and other live performance options have become a vital source of income for musicians throughout the past few decades, as they provide a direct financial return for their hard work and talent.

Whether playing a paid gig, selling merchandise , or offering exclusive experiences like meet-and-greets or VIP tickets, live performances offer numerous opportunities for artists to monetize their music in new and inventive ways. For up-and-coming musicians, concerts–and the money made at them–can truly be a lifeline.

In addition to providing direct financial returns, live performances also offer opportunities for exposure and networking, potentially leading to new collaborations, partnerships, and opportunities for additional future income.

Live performance offers musicians a unique opportunity to receive immediate feedback from audiences, providing valuable insights into what’s working and what isn’t on stage. By paying attention to audience reactions and constructive criticism, musicians can refine their skills and evolve. The experience of performing live can help musicians build confidence and develop their stage presence, allowing them to engage more effectively with audiences and create memorable performances that leave a lasting impression.

If you have a tour coming up, you have the chance to reach so many new people, and Planetary can help you by promoting your upcoming shows .

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The art of research in live music performance

ABSTRACT: Live performance is an under-researched area within contemporary music performance studies, and currently there is a very limited research context for studying the creation of a live performance of music involving a score. This paper presents preliminary artistic research on live music performance from the perspective of a classical professional pianist working within a chamber music context. It addresses two broad questions: 1) How do performers continue to learn on stage? and 2) What methods are appropriate for documenting and analyzing a live performance in terms of musical content, social significance, and as a research outcome for dissemination to the wider research community? It is argued that performers continue to learn on stage, and among other things a live performance is a site of knowledge production. The project takes the value of the live event for the performer as the starting point and thereby moves beyond the interests of merely gaining new knowledge and understanding into an area where artistic engagement with and commitment to the ‘object’ of research, i.e. the live performance, necessitates an interested and subjectively valorized positioning of the performer–researcher. The project also contributes to artistic research in music performance by motivating the emergence of a specifically performer-oriented discourse on live music-making.

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Mine Dogantan-Dack

Miguel Angel Marin

Adam Davies

This dissertation takes as its subject the performing style of the great composer, conductor and pianist, Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943). More specifically, it analyses characteristics of temporal fluctuation in his recordings. By focusing on Rachmaninov’s four recorded performances of his Polka de W.R., written in 1911—one on piano roll and three on record, spanning nine years from the earliest (1919) to the latest (1928)—we are able to determine firstly how characteristics of his style are manifested in these performances, and secondly, the extent to which they differ. Brief analysis of other pieces Rachmaninov recorded more than once throughout the 1920s is then carried out to determine whether chronological patterns of interpretative change may be observed, taking any differences between Rachmaninov’s Polka recordings as a starting point. The study begins with a section concerning approach and methodology when analysing temporal aspects of performance, and the analysis itself (in Sections 2 and 3) makes reference to graphic representation of the recordings through the use of the purpose-built computer software Sonic Visualiser (developed in conjunction with the research carried out in the first decade of this century by the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music). By viewing Rachmaninov’s temporal fluctuation in this way, in relation to a specific piece, we are able to see clearly how this aspect of performance practice operates in the recorded style of possibly one of the foremost respected and successful pianists of all time.

Cecilia Oinas

This study will examine the opening sonata-form movements of the piano trios by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) and Robert Schumann (1810–1856) concentrating on the interaction between analysis and performance. The aim is to consider and explore musical motion from various analytical perspectives – such as formal, structural, metrical, and a more general dramatic aspect – and see how they interact with each other. In addition, these analytical insights are related to the issues of musical ‘shaping’ in performance, and the study examines both how the analytical findings might be reflected in performers’ shaping and, vice versa, how the analytical interpretation might be influenced by the experience gained while rehearsing the works for performance. The practicing process of the piano trio ensemble (with myself at the piano) is documented in an informal rehearsal diary. By capturing the ways in which performers themselves discuss the pieces fresh and new ideas are brought to the analysis and performance studies that traditionally have been dominated by the analysis-to-performance discussion, not the other way round. As a conclusion, the study includes both a more analytical, scholarly viewpoint and an introspective, performance-related viewpoint making the study a mixed method research.

IMPAR Journal

Luca Chiantore

Disciplining Music, by Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman, was an iconic book along the road towards rethinking the relations between what were then three apparently separate fields: historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and musical practice itself. Since that distant 1992, the upsurge in theoretical perspectives and research experiences in these and other fields has intensified so much that this very interaction has spawned new opportunities for reflection and action. This article focuses on the potential of the interaction between artistic reflection and alternative historiographic perspectives, one that will be applied to the canonic repertoire of Western classical music to show how the existence of a precise tradition can turn performance into a laboratory for experimentation for both musicians and scholars. Taking as a reference point the relation between activism and performance in the writings of Richard Schechner and Dwight Conquergood, and the idea of "declassification" as shaped by Antonio García Gutiérrez, I propose the concept of historiographic activism as a specific framework for possible applications in Artistic Research to tap music's potential to bring about individual and collective changes.

Music&Practice Volume 5

Cecilia Oinas is a Finnish-Hungarian music scholar, music theory lecturer, and a classical pianist from the University of the Arts Helsinki (Sibelius Academy). In 2017, she completing her doctorate in the Sibelius Academy's DocMus department, in which she examined the Mendelssohn and Schumann piano trios with the special aim of combining aspects of analysis and performance in a symbiotic way: performance being influenced by analysis and analysis by performance. She was subsequently appointed to a post-doctoral research post at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (2018-2019). Cecilia's research interests lie in performance studies and interdisciplinary research, as well as in combining aspects of music analysis and performance in a chamber music context. She has published peer-reviewed articles and given presentations and lecture recitals in numerous seminars and conferences in Europe and the US. She is also an active pianist, specialising in chamber music and collaborating with classical singers. Abstract: From Four-handed Monster to All-embracing Vishnu: the Case of "Middle Hands" within a Piano Four hands Duo This article examines cases in the piano four-hands genre in which the so-called "middle hands"-primo's left and secondo's right-somehow interchange or criss-cross with one another. After considering brief examples from the 19th and early 20th centuries, its main focus is on two four-handed works by György Kurtág, "Flowers we are …" and "Beating-Quarrelling", both from Játékok VIII (2010). In these works, Kurtág's distribution of primo and secondo creates a private space for the pianists, mostly excluding the audience who almost have the role of a voyeur (see Daub 2014). The intention of this research is to create bridges between performers' tacit knowledge, music-analytical language, and a corporeal approach. The article is a part of a larger research project that focuses on the special nature of piano duet music, extending from late 18th century to the present day. During the project, various piano duet ensembles and their rehearsal process are being examined through semi-structured interview and by following their rehearsals. By flexibly navigating between performance research and music analysis the aim is to acquire a holistic view on the piano duet, a genre that until recently has not been much studied from a performative point of view.

MA dissertation

David Aijón Bruno

Although fingering indications are probably the most bodily grounded clues to performance practice that there are in keyboard music, historical fingerings after Beethoven are surprisingly still underrepresented in the scholarship on nineteenth-century piano performance. Much research is yet to be carried out with a view especially to understand specific practices of composer-pianists of the era. This study takes preliminary steps in that regard by exploring Chopin’s original fingering indications from the viewpoint of musical expression in three etudes, op. 10 nos. 2 and 9, and op. 25 no. 1, as well as hypothesize extrapolation from them. In addition, it discusses how these fingerings occasionally carry analytical weight, i.e allude to musical structure by clarifying meaning that would otherwise remain ambiguous through regular notation. This study is also undertaken from an historical performance perspective, and a companion video recording (consisting exclusively of complete, unedited takes) made using a restored 1837 Érard piano is appended. The practice-led aspects of it are probably paramount, as the qualitative difference stemming from use of Chopin’s original fingerings is something that can only be fully appreciated experientially. Such practice-led studies focused on fingering potentially complement recordings-inspired performance and research on historical recordings by helping bridge current musical practice and gestural dimensions that are rather challenging to discern from recorded sound alone.

Edited by Fabian, Timmers and Schubert. Oxford University Press 2014

Dorottya Fabian

What does it mean to be expressive in music performance in diverse historical and cultural domains? What are the means at the disposal of a performer in various time periods and musical practice conventions? And what are the conceptualisations of expression and the roles of performers that shape expressive performance? For the first time a wide variety of perspectives are assembled in one volume investigating expressiveness in performance in various styles and cultures, including in what ways the improvisations of Louis Armstrong, studio fashioned Electronic Dance music, and the songs of Bedzan Pygmies can be considered expressive. The volume is unique in combining historical, systematic, computational and phenomenological approaches to performance and in including empirical investigations of western and non-western classical music as well as western and non-western popular and folk music. The highlighted conceptualisations and materialisations of expressiveness in performance are as diverse as one would hope them to be. More awareness of and focus on oral traditions and player interaction is needed for performance research to break away from the dogma of notation. While this challenges existing methods, computational and empirical approaches are nevertheless not only crucial, but may become central to furthering our understanding of what makes music performance expressive. Keywords: expressivity, performance, traditions, computational methods, music history, contemporary culture, non-western cultures, empirical musicology, music psychology, philosophy.

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The spatial value of live music: Performing, (re)developing and narrating urban spaces

• • Provides a conceptualisation of the spatial value of live music.
• • Spatial value concerns performing, (re)developing and narrating urban spaces.
• • Examines the relationship between live music and the built environment.
• • Challenges to achieving spatial value include gentrification and densification.
• • Discusses how the spatial of value can be supported in urban policies.

This paper examines the spatial value of live popular music by adopting an inter-disciplinary approach grounded in urban and music studies. What is understood of the relationship between live music and the built environment is improved, with a focus on how this cultural form contributes to performing, (re)developing and narrating urban spaces. The post-industrial city has become a stage for events that serve a wide range of social, cultural, economic and spatial objectives. However, the densification of the built environment has led to a debate about the extent to which live music’s positive outcomes outweigh the nuisance experienced by residents in terms of noise and the unavailability of public spaces. Furthermore, small venues in many cities are struggling with issues of gentrification, implying that the spatial value of music is part of wider concerns about who owns the city and which forms of culture can be produced and consumed in urban centres. Against this background, the paper asks the following questions concerning the spatial value of live music: how can it be defined? What are the challenges to achieving it? How can it be supported in urban planning? The study is grounded in a qualitative content analysis of 24 live music reports and strategies, as well as 10 in-depth interviews with policymakers, festival organisers and venue owners. Also discussed is how the spatial value of live music can be supported in urban policies by building interdisciplinary networks, establishing strategies, and creating and sustaining places for live music events.

1. Introduction

This article examines the spatial value of live popular music, with a focus on how this cultural form contributes to performing, (re)developing and narrating urban spaces. Music events occur in diverse places, which vary in terms of their size, organisation and level of professionalism, and include bars and community centres, as well as big festivals and arenas. As we will argue in this paper, live music concerts should not be dismissed as just temporary forms of entertainment: they can have a long-term impact on the built environment and the way in which people experience the urban landscape ( Wynn, 2015 , Nunes, 2019 , Richards, 2017 ).

In recent years, the role of the cultural form of live music has been more prominent in both the music industries and urban policy. Indeed, as the revenues from recorded music declined, that performed live became central to the former’s business models ( Mazierska et al., 2020 ). Roberts (2015, p. 7) . This reminds us that recorded and live music have different geographies, with the latter literally requiring more space in cities: “[It] is in urban areas that the live music industry has carved out its augmented geography over the past decade.” New venues, like flagship music arenas, are testament to live music’s value in urban development ( Kronenburg, 2019 ). Indeed, the post-industrial city has become a stage for a growing number of events that serve a wide range of goals, including urban branding and increasing cultural vibrancy ( Jakob, 2013 , Van der Hoeven and Hitters, 2019 , Wynn, 2015 ).

Nevertheless, live music’s embeddedness in cities poses multiple spatial challenges: the densification of the built environment has led to a debate about the extent to which live music’s positive outcomes outweigh the nuisance caused to residents in terms of noise and, for instance, the accessibility, or even unavailability, of public parks; the privatisation of urban spaces, which constrains the opportunities for live music events to be held in some cities ( Cohen, 2007 , Kronenburg, 2020 ); and many musicians and small music venues are struggling to cope with increasing rents ( Shaw, 2013 ). This all suggests that the spatial value of music is part of a wider concern about who owns the city and which forms of culture can be produced and consumed in urban centres ( Roberts, 2015 , Sassen, 2017 ). Against this background, this paper answers the following questions in relation to the spatial value of live music: How can it be defined? What are the challenges to achieving it? How can it be supported in urban planning?

The project contributes to the development of the concept of live music’s spatial value and examines how this can be achieved. It also adds to the field of urban studies by exploring the relationship between live music and the urban space. In doing so, we build on previous research on live music’s materiality, geography and architecture (e.g., Wood et al., 2007 , Kronenburg, 2019 ). This enables readers to understand how the connections between musical performances and urban space develop and can be supported. While earlier studies have paid attention to the social, cultural and economic value of live music to cites ( Behr et al., 2016a , Van der Hoeven and Hitters, 2019 ), this project takes a different approach by examining the impact on the built environment in its own right. Our scope is limited to popular styles of live music in cities in order to improve the focus of the study. We do, however, acknowledge that other forms of music have a spatial impact and their performance is not exclusive to cities.

Our article demonstrates that the concept of spatial value is contested and complex, being shaped by a wide range of different actors with conflicting interests. Moreover, the spatial value of live music needs to be understood in relation to wider political and economic forces that affect how and where it is performed and with what effects. These findings are grounded in 10 interviews with event organisers, directors of music venues and real estate experts in the Netherlands. We have also analysed 24 live music reports and strategies from eight different countries.

The next section discusses the existing literature on the relationship between music and urban space, enabling us to conceptualise spatial value. There is then a description of the research project and its methodology, followed by a discussion of the challenges to achieving spatial value. This distinguishes between the impact of and on the urban environment in which live music is embedded. Finally, we address how spatial value can be supported in urban planning and policymaking. Here, we discuss three vital steps for strengthening urban live music ecologies: 1) building inter-disciplinary networks; 2) establishing urban strategies; and 3) creating and sustaining places for live music.

2. Conceptualising spatial value

This section provides a conceptualisation of spatial value that is grounded in the existing literature on the relationship between music and the built environment. The concept of ‘value’ is used to achieve an understanding of the various benefits of urban live music ecologies, which can be understood as the networks of venues, festivals and social actors that support live music performances ( Behr et al., 2016a , Behr et al., 2016b ). The importance of the intrinsic value of live music as an end in itself should be understood before turning to the values of live music ecologies. This intrinsic value is a necessary condition for realising any of music’s more instrumental effects ( Behr et al., 2016b ). In other words, our discussion of the uses of live music in cities is not intended to deny the rich personal, communal and aesthetic experiences involved in the enjoyment of this cultural form.

The spatial value of live music is understood as an addition to three other values that have been defined in earlier research ( Van der Hoeven & Hitters, 2019 ): 1) social value refers to live music’s contribution to social relationships (i.e., social capital), the public engagement of live music organisations (e.g., charity, volunteering and activities for the neighbourhood) and a sense of identity; 2) cultural value is connected to musical creativity, talent development and cultural vibrancy in cities; and 3) economic value concerns financial benefits and the relevance of live music for cities in monetary terms (e.g., increased tourism and job growth).

Conceptualising spatial value is necessary if there is to be a more comprehensive understanding of how live music shapes, and is shaped by, urban spaces. As we will argue in this literature review, live music’s spatial value concerns the relationship between live music and the built environment, as constituted by the dimensions of performing, (re)developing and narrating the urban space (see Table 1 ).

Three dimensions of live music’s spatial value.

2.1. Performing urban space

According to Adhitya (2017) , the city is a stage for urban performances. The architecture and urban design shape the rhythms of our movements, just like music. Urban planners, Adhitya explains, compose how we go about our everyday lives in urban spaces. The literature in this section of our article supports the argument that music has an impact on how cities are used and performed ( Connell & Gibson, 2003 ). Indeed, the musical activities taking place in dedicated venues or the urban environment, with street music ( Bennett and Rogers, 2014 , Bywater, 2007 ) and festivals being examples ( Kronenburg, 2020 ), shape how we experience urban space.

Arguably, one of the most significant places in people’s experiences of music are the stages where performers and audiences meet. Here, we can make a distinction between festivals as temporary stages and permanent bricks and mortar venues. 1 In relation to the former, Wynn (2015) observes a trend of festivalisation, in which an increasing number of temporary events are organised to achieve different spatial, socio-cultural, symbolic (e.g., urban branding) and economic objectives. Festivals often provide a spatio-temporal platform for alternative lifestyles ( Friesen et al., 2014 , Kearns, 2014 ), addressing issues of inclusivity (e.g., all-age festivals and openness to cultural diversity) and sustainability (e.g., waste reduction). Wynn identifies three different spatial patterns for festivals, with varying levels of spatial control and consolidation. These include the citadel pattern in a bounded space with a single event, the more open core pattern , in which activities take place in and around a particular area, and the confetti pattern , where events are spread about a city in diverse locations. Fenced-off festivals in particular, which each have their own stage lay-outs and facilities, can be experienced as a different world ( Kearns, 2014 ). In contrast, those without fences have a stronger connection to their urban surroundings. In terms of venues, Kronenburg, 2011 , Kronenburg, 2019 makes a useful distinction between adopted, adapted and dedicated buildings for musical performances. Adopted venues are places that are not intended to be used for music events, but can be if only a few changes are made to an existing building. In the case of adapted venues, the original building is modified significantly, while dedicated venues are, in contrast, specifically designed and built as places for musical performances.

It is clear that the physical locations where music is performed greatly affect the relationship between live music and the built environment. In a study of the connections between performance and the geography of music, Wood et al. (2007: 869) argue that musical activities have a strong material dimension: “Music making is a material practice: it is embodied and technologised; it is staged; it takes place.” Different event and building types each have their drawbacks and benefits; for example, the main problem with using existing buildings for live music is that they are not normally designed to optimise acoustics and service the needs of audiences. An advantage, however, is that they do not have to take the usually larger economic risks associated with dedicated music venues, which require significant investment ( Kronenburg, 2019 ). Furthermore, adapted buildings like factories actually often add to the atmosphere of a concert through their character and historical associations ( Bottà, 2012 , Kronenburg, 2019 ). Indeed, the venue’s materiality in terms of smell, size, temperature and building materials shapes the live music experience ( Behr et al., 2016a , Behr et al., 2016b ).

Notwithstanding the specificities of individual venues, it is the diversity of music stages that ultimately matters for a city’s live music ecology ( Webster & Behr, 2013 ). As Mercado-Celis (2017) reminds us, the different stages form a spatially-dispersed network of both public and private actors. Rather than focusing on individual stages, his focus is on the mobilities between them. Indeed, the career of a musician can be understood as a spatial trajectory through the city, progressively moving from small and informal types of musical activity to more formal organisations ( Cohen, 2012 ).

Finnegan’s (2007) concept of musical pathways enables an understanding of how music becomes part of the urban landscape. In her work, Finnegan focuses on amateur musicians, whose pathways consist of musical landmarks like places where they have rehearsed and performed (e.g., studios and music venues). These pathways are often invisible to others, but nevertheless have great meaning to specific groups or people:

“Such pathways form one important - if often unstated - framework for people’s participation in urban life, something overlapping with, but more permanent and structured than, the personal networks in which individuals also participate. They form broad routes set out, as it were, across and through the city.” ( Finnegan, 2007: 323 )

Although Finnegan developed the concept of musical pathways by studying amateur musicians, it is also relevant for understanding how other groups make sense of their urban experience through music ( Espinosa, 2016 ). As an example, music is vital for migrants negotiating a collective identity in a new urban environment, which they do through performances and the creation of social spaces ( Sánchez-Fuarros, 2013 ). A study of the Pasifika Festival in Auckland demonstrates its role in the identity-building of migrants from the Pacific islands, promoting wellbeing and celebrating the contributions of Pacific peoples to the socio-cultural life of the city in which they now reside ( Friesen et al., 2014 ).

Musical pathways are not static ( Cohen, 2012 ): they evolve through changes in music scenes, artistic developments and new sounds brought about by migration. In that sense, places are relational, since they develop through connections to other localities ( Andrews et al., 2014 ). Similarly, festivals bring a wide range of global influences and styles together in a bounded space ( Kearns, 2014 ). In raising awareness of the evolving musical histories of cities, Cohen (2007:10) argues that urban spaces are marked by the physical and affective traces of the musical past, which turn the material environment into a “palimpsest space that offers chronological layers of musical significance, one superimposed upon another, with new layers coexisting with, rather than effacing, the earlier ones.” Cities are thus a rich setting for personal and collective memories associated with music-making and consumption. Urban trajectories become meaningful through, for example, songs about specific streets, knowledge of the location of album cover photos, and memorable concerts ( Bottà, 2008 , Brunow, 2019 , Espinosa, 2016 ).

Similarly, the diverse urban spaces used for music performances are rich in meanings for audiences and participants in music scenes. Over the years, they are imbued with particular ideologies and memories, offering a sense of place to specific communities ( Wood et al., 2007 , Andrews et al., 2014 ). Alternative do-it-yourself scenes have always been drawn to undesirable and disbanded places like vacant factories, squats or the tunnels used for raves ( Connell and Gibson, 2003 , Kronenburg, 2020 ). Underground music scenes, which set themselves apart from society’s ‘mainstream’, often find their way to a city’s hidden spaces, where they can avoid the control and surveillance taking place in the public realm ( Brunner, 2013 ). As Bottà (2012, p. 123) argues about the use of urban space by the punk sub-culture:

“Punk scenes in industrial cities were able to rearticulate the private vacant industrial spaces, into public ones, both materially (by gathering in them) and at the imaginary level (by using them in pictures, lyrics and sounds). However, they also occupied public spaces and made them ‘private’, winning them as sub-cultural territories.”

While many venues have their roots in sub-cultural movements and youth culture, the relatively recent phenomenon of new dedicated buildings for live popular music marks a shift in its ideological underpinnings ( Kronenburg, 2019 ). Large arenas not only provide an improved experience for both audiences and artists; they also serve wider goals associated with their flagship status, such as attracting tourists and city branding ( Holt & Wergin, 2013 ). In this case, music venues have developed from counter-cultural spaces to highly professional organisations that are used as valuable instruments by urban planning authorities to promote their city. This role of music in urban development is discussed further in the next section.

2.2. Developing urban space

The effects of live music performances reverberate beyond the venues and festivals where they take place, leaving an impact on their urban surroundings. Places where music is performed attract social and cultural activity in their vicinity, thus becoming social hubs for groups of people or central nodes in particular creative networks ( Cohen, 2007 , Florida and Jackson, 2010 ).

Music events are often used in placemaking efforts to improve the quality of a location ( Richards, 2017 , Wynn, 2015 ). According to Kronenburg (2020: 139) , live popular music concerts can be a catalyst for change by transforming the familiar:

“The location takes on a different character – it becomes, temporarily, a different sort of space, a place that is activated by the shared experience of an audience engaging together with a performer. Rather than a place of transition (to move through from one place to another), it becomes a place to linger (to wait and watch).”

In post-industrial cities grappling with urban decay and a loss of social cohesion, cultural experiences, festivals and mega-events therefore became one of the tools used by urban planners to regenerate a location ( Hitters, 2007 , Jakob, 2013 ).

Many post-industrial cities redefined themselves as centres of experience, consumption, creativity and cultural activity in order to attract a population of middle-class professionals with sufficient spending power ( Brown et al., 2000 , Cohen, 2013 , Holt and Wergin, 2013 , Jakob, 2013 ). In this context of competition between cities, the staging of experiences has resulted in an ‘eventification’ of place. It has also had the effect that experience-based planning schemes not only include as vital assets investments in hard infrastructure, but also a full and diverse events calendar ( Jakob, 2013 , Marlet, 2010 ). Indeed, popular music events can enhance the (inter)national reputation of a city ( Kearns, 2014 ) and provide economic advantages, particularly when one of its concert locations is included in the world tours of high-profile artists ( Baker, 2017 , Short et al., 1996 ). Urban regeneration has thus provided an important rationale for investing in a thriving live music ecology, as it supports urban branding, tourism and gentrification ( Bottà, 2008 ). Venues in landmark buildings designed by ‘starchitects’ further bolster these economic goals ( Van Schaik, 2018 ). Along with this physical music infrastructure, festivals are increasingly used as temporary events to stimulate sociocultural, economic and spatial objectives ( Nunes, 2019 , Van der Hoeven and Hitters, 2019 ). Venues and festivals are therefore often located strategically in derelict neighbourhoods, with the aim being to make them more attractive to future investors and developers. In doing so, live music puts places on the mental maps of potential residents, tourists and property investors.

Although this implies that live music is now a solid aspect of urban policies, various researchers have actually raised awareness of the negative consequences of using music in places under development. Wynn and Yetis-Bayraktar (2016: 204) state that the “the marriage of music culture and urban placemaking” results in a commercialization of urban life, for example in the case of the corporate branding of music festivals. Consequently, places allegedly become so polished and sterile that this is hard to reconcile with popular notions of creativity and authenticity ( Cohen, 2007 ). Furthermore, due to rising rents in gentrifying areas - ironically often the places popularised by creatives - musicians and small-scale venues are struggling to make ends meet ( Gibson and Homan, 2004 , Grodach, 2012 ). As Roberts (2015: 2) argues, music is often used in a process of normalisation that benefits commercial and state actors in a city:

“An exploration of the process of normalisation involves a critical examination of music’s relationship with forms of urban hegemony and the processes though which hegemonic actors both shape and benefit from the production of uneven urban geographies. […] I theorise urban normalisation as a set of spatial processes which reproduce the dominant position of both commercial and state actors within the city.”

In his research, Roberts documents how particular music styles (e.g., indie music) have been normalised in the city of Birmingham, while the cultural expressions of disadvantaged youth (e.g., grime) are marginalised. Writing about a festival in Lisbon, Nunes (2019) finds that cultural expressions associated with the margins of the city, like graffiti and slams between rappers, can actually also be brought to upper-class neighbourhoods during official events. In this case, the culture of minorities (e.g., migrants and LGBTQ people) is institutionalised. Nunes (2019: 160) describes this as practices of ‘social control’, whereby the cultural expressions of marginalised groups are brought centre-stage “to keep the center far away from the margin.” This illustrates how music’s role in urban development is connected to the representation of different groups and their socio-spatial identities.

2.3. Narrating urban space

As well as using and developing urban space, live music also plays a role in how cities are represented and imagined through narratives. Music performances, venues and festivals are part of the stories that are told about cities by media, local governments and citizens. Narratives give meaning to places by connecting their past, present and future ( Jensen, 2007 , Van der Hoeven, 2018 ). Urban branding and heritage activities are discussed in this article as two narrative practices in which live music often figures prominently. In both cases, it is important to acknowledge the multiplicity of narratives and the range of ‘storytellers’ involved, including official actors (e.g., urban marketing departments) and grassroots initiatives (e.g., city guides) ( Brunow, 2019 ). Furthermore, narratives can also use a range of media (e.g., social media, documentaries and radio shows) to mark spaces as connected to localised meanings and identities ( Maalsen and McLean, 2016 , Wood et al., 2007 ).

Urban regeneration is not just about physical interventions in cities; it also has important intangible dimensions such as the ways in which urban spaces are narrated and perceived. So, in order to develop derelict neighbourhoods, for example, it is vital that they are considered to be potentially attractive places in which to live, visit, or invest. Urban branding uses positive representations of a city to shape such perceptions, foregrounding the possibilities of a particular place. Bottà (2008) , for instance, explains how Helsinki was portrayed in its urban branding as a ‘rock city’ with a lively underground scene. This way of narrating the city aimed to also put ‘non-tourist districts’ on the map as interesting places to visit, thus diversifying how it is understood. According to Bottà (2008: 310) , this helps to overcome a division between a “culturally loaded city centre” and its “not culturally loaded” surroundings: “The city’s cultural territory is extended well beyond the usual borders, both in a symbolic and geographic dimension.” Similarly, cultural events such as festivals can be used to increase the awareness and appeal of particular urban areas for future development: for example, the European Union’s European Capital of Culture programme uses cultural events in its urban branding of cities ( Cohen, 2013 ).

Such urban branding practices often tie in with the popular music heritage of cities ( Oakes & Warnaby, 2011 ), which relates to the tangible and intangible elements of the music cultures with which people identify and seek to preserve and pass on to future generations ( Bennett, 2009 ). Examples are venues with a strong legacy and particular festivals that have become annual traditions. The popular music heritage of cities can be narrated through mediums like tourist brochures, exhibitions and documentaries. This heritage fosters a sense of belonging and place attachment ( Van der Hoeven & Brandellero, 2015 ). Indeed, the heritage value of a venue can be an argument for its preservation when it is threatened by encroaching development or gentrification ( Ross, 2017 ).

It is vital to recognise the plurality of narratives associated with a place in relation to both music’s role in urban branding and music heritage ( Brunow, 2019 , Jensen, 2007 ). Otherwise, the dominant narratives of a city overshadow other representations and understandings of value. In Liverpool, for example, the histories associated with three popular music venues (the Cavern Club, Eric’s Club and Cream) dominate accounts of its popular music heritage:

“These venues provide landmarks that have come to represent significant moments in Liverpool’s musical heritage, linked closely to the city’s social, cultural and economic landscapes during the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s.” ( Lashua et al., 2009 ).

The authors argue that this perspective neglects other narratives, such as those associated with minorities or emerging scenes. Similarly, Mercado-Celis (2017) contends that memories are often attached to iconic venues, meaning that the rich musical activities taking place outside the central neighbourhoods are overlooked.

Acknowledging the plurality of narratives is essential, because these representations feed back into how cities are performed and developed. The urban branding and popular music heritage of cities become part of people’s musical pathways and the promotion of neighbourhoods. The stories told about cities thus ultimately shape how they are redeveloped and for whom, suggesting that the three dimensions of live music’s spatial value are interrelated and dynamic.

3. Background to the study

This study is part of a bigger project on live music, and builds on our earlier research on its social and cultural values in an urban context ( Van der Hoeven & Hitters, 2019 ). 2 That research involved an analysis of 20 live music strategies and policy documents from different countries. The documents revealed how diverse actors (e.g., local governments, consultancy firms and music industry organisations) understand the value of live music and the ways in which it can be supported. Our analysis identified the emergence of a separate value representing the impact of live music on our experiences of urban spaces, and this has therefore been conceptualised further in the current study.

We have added four reports to our previous sample (Appendix A). We have also conducted 10 in-depth interviews with event organisers, directors of venues hosting popular music and real estate experts (Appendix B). A purposive sampling strategy was adopted to select respondents with relevant expertise on the issues arising from our research questions. In particular, we aimed to have a diverse sample to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the notion of spatial value itself. These interviews allowed us to achieve a more in-depth understanding of the connections between live music and the built environment. In accordance with our university’s ethical guidelines, we agreed to not disclose the respondents’ names.

The reports and interviews were subjected to a thematic analysis using the qualitative data analysis software, Atlas.ti. Our analysis was informed by the ecological approach to live music adopted in our project. This is a holistic perspective on urban live music ecologies, with the focus on the relationships between different actors, both in and outside the live music sector ( Behr et al., 2016a , Behr et al., 2016b ). In particular, we concentrated on the different factors that enable and constrain spatial value. These were coded using an open-coding strategy in which we labelled relevant segments from the text ( Boeije, 2010 ). In the next step of the axial coding, we grouped related codes and created categories, before going on to integrate the results. This produced several main themes, which we discuss in this paper (see Table 2 ). Our analysis is used to examine challenges to spatial value (i.e., the impact of and on the environment) and measures to support it (i.e., building networks, establishing strategies and creating and sustaining places for live music performances).

Main research findings.

4. Challenges to achieving spatial value

The spatial value of live music emerges in the interplay between live music stages and its urban environment, which is both enabling and constraining. Live music always takes place somewhere and so is affected by its environment. As a result, this section discusses the challenges to achieving spatial value, distinguishing between the impact of and on the urban environment in which live music is embedded.

4.1. Impact of the environment

The changing uses of urban space around live music stages has a significant effect on the opportunities to perform. In the process of gentrification, affluent people and businesses find their way to popular neighbourhoods. This leads to rising rents, which is particularly challenging to grassroots venues working with small budgets ( Webster et al., 2018 ). The following quote from Rotterdam’s popular music policy illustrates how the growing popularity of this city puts pressure on cultural uses of urban space:

“This city used to have sufficient affordable spaces for artists and other creatives. However, the development of Rotterdam and its growing popularity has an impact on the real estate market.” ( City Government of Rotterdam, 2019: 17 ) 3

The Mastering of a Music City report, published by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Music Canada to support musical activities in cities, argues that this development might result in fewer opportunities to perform:

“In many areas, redevelopment has led to the closure of iconic venues – even some world famous ones – that draw tourists. This has a two-fold negative impact. First, it threatens to eliminate key differentiators that help a city stand out. Second, it reduces the spaces available for performance, impacting the overall level of live music activity.” ( Terrill et al., 2015: 84 )

Even though culture has a positive social and cultural impact on cities, it is difficult to sustain cultural venues in an environment focused on commercial gain. Residences have a higher return on investment than cultural uses, with the consequence that the number of affordable buildings available for cultural functions falls. According to Shaw (2013: 351) : “The driving neoliberal imperative for highest and best use of land is anathema to creative subcultures.” As a real estate expert explains in the following quotation, the profits from buildings are more important to private developers than their wider cultural impact:

“That’s a vital difference between commercial developers and what we do in the projects commissioned by municipalities. For a commercial developer, the value of the spin-off is in fact value for someone else, unless they can develop a lot around the plot as well.” (Interviewee 9, real estate consultant)

In other words, unless there is a recognition that culture may actually increase the appeal of a place, there is no great commercial incentive to invest in less profitable cultural uses.

These challenges of gentrification are most likely to arise in popular areas in central districts. In contrast, venues in less popular neighbourhoods may have the opposite problem of a lack of activity around their buildings. Mixed uses in areas are thus essential for generating enough vibrancy and street level activity ( Brown et al., 2000 ). Less accessible public transport may also be an issue in the urban periphery, where there are also fewer bars and restaurants. Indeed, it has been found that the (lack of) availability of parking spaces and public transport options at night affects decisions about whether to go to concerts ( Whiting & Carter, 2016 ).

4.2. Impact on the environment

The popularity of inner-city living increases densification, causing tensions between residents and live music activities ( Shaw, 2013 ). As argued in the Mastering of a Music City report ( Terrill, Hogarth, Clement & Francis, 2015: 41 ): “Beyond the challenge of gentrification, […] the music businesses that initially made an area attractive are often perceived as unwanted neighbours.” Indeed, the issue of noise is a recurring theme in both the reports and interviews analysed for our study. Open-air concerts or performances in venues with poor sound insulation often cause a nuisance to residents. Even the loading and unloading of equipment can cause problems, as this venue owner explains:

“In every new venue, trucks can park inside to load and unload. Well, we don’t have that and you know for a fact that people, even if they haven’t been drinking, they have performed, they will have a beer or just sit with a soft drink. As soon as they pack their stuff it’s already past midnight. Well, then they’re standing outside, actually shouting because they’ve been in a noisy environment the whole night.” (Interviewee 4, director of a music venue)

Beyond noise, concerts can also cause parking problems in neighbourhoods or lead to anti-social behaviour by attendees. Indeed, regardless of whether these issues are actually relevant, venues often have a negative reputation, making residents hesitant about live music activities.

Open-air concerts in public parks and on greenfields cause a specific set of problems. In Rotterdam, for example, there are discussions about the unavailability of public parks because of the growing number of festivals, with commercial events in particular meaning that these locations are no longer accessible to residents for the duration of a festival ( Venema, 2019 ). Furthermore, some have concerns about the negative impact of live music on flora and fauna; for example, festival sites can experience damage to plants and wildlife may be disturbed ( Webster & McKay, 2016 ).

5. Supporting the spatial value of live music

The previous section demonstrates that spatial value cannot be taken for granted and is not self-evident. Indeed, if live music’s spatial embedding is to be enhanced, its values need to be recognised by, among others, residents and urban developers. The following sections therefore discuss how the spatial value of live music can be supported in urban planning and policymaking by building inter-disciplinary networks, establishing strategies, and sustaining places for live music.

5.1. Building networks

Providing support for spatial value requires a multifaceted approach, because the dimensions of performing, developing and narrating the urban space rely on a wide range of different actors. As well as physical facilities, cultural industries need a ‘soft infrastructure’ that connects people and organisations ( Brown et al., 2000: 447 ). Urban live music ecologies have a networked structure, in which different actors participate to value live music ( Van der Hoeven et al., 2020 ). This involves negotiation with people inside the music sector (e.g., bookers and managers), as well actors in other domains (e.g., regulators and policymakers) ( Behr et al., 2016a , Behr et al., 2016b ). Spatial value can be linked to different departments, even within local governments. According to Rotterdam’s music strategy (2019: 8):

“Popular music (pop culture) connects not only different parties or cultural makers, but also different policy domains: culture, spatial planning, economy, city marketing, tourism, wellbeing, youth, education and integration.”

These different departments can have conflicting interests, such as supporting talent development (culture), increasing the housing stock (spatial planning) and tourism (economy and city marketing), or improving citizens’ social capital (wellbeing, youth, education and integration).

Our analysis found that supporting live music’s spatial value requires people and organisations to find common ground between the interests of actors within diverse networks, including those like policymakers, business and the cultural industries ( Grodach, 2012 ). Although the actors in these urban networks may have different goals, they often share an attachment to a city. Various respondents stressed that a shared sense of pride in local accomplishments is a good starting point for conversations about the value of culture.

“Not everyone’s interested in [the value of culture] of course. That has to do with education as well. I mean, I’m not going into that issue, but I do try to show how it can benefit them. For me, the most important thing is what it can mean for the city. That’s the common denominator, the way of getting different parties together. Why are we doing this? Not for ourselves, but for the city.” (Interviewee 5, creative producer) “Interviewer: In the policy plan it said you told companies about the contribution of culture to urban development. I guess that’s not an easy story to tell?” Respondent: Well, we focused on the gut feeling, the sense of pride in the city that many companies also have. We were trying to address this gut feeling: ‘we’re located here in this legendary neighbourhood, which has reached its nadir, a no-go zone at the moment. We’re going to do pioneering work and you’re going to help. We’re going to make it better again by means of a theatre.’ That’s what we really focused on. Of course, it helped [that] they knew me and, I guess, trusted me.” (Interviewee 6, director of a theatre)

Of course, connecting the interests of different actors through a shared attachment to a place is only possible if the people involved identify with it. For this reason, some interviewees stressed the risks posed by foreign investors, who may buy buildings without feeling responsible for the direct surroundings. Similarly, event organisers based in a city away from where, for example, a festival is taking place might be less inclined to care about the concerns of local actors. It is, however, important to invest in the relationship with a neighbourhood if complaints are to be avoided and the social impact of events enhanced. Indeed, there is a need to also include residents in any multidisciplinary networks. Our respondents stressed the importance of communication about activities and, if possible, involving residents in any planning. This is a long-term process, because there is a risk of losing support without pro-active communication in the early phases of projects. One real estate expert discussed how residents may use social media to protest about new venues:

“All of a sudden there might be a neighbourhood coalition against your plans. If that’s the time you start your communication, it’s already 0–3 to them, let’s say.” (Interviewee 3, senior project manager real estate sector)

A common strategy for representing the interests of the music sector in these networks is to establish music advisory boards and/or appoint night mayors or night czars. Such boards are advocacy organisations comprised of a range of actors from within the music sector, while night mayors or night czars are individuals who liaise between different stakeholders in the night-time economy (e.g., venues, residents and local government). The Mastering of a Music City report argues that music advisory boards have three core functions: creating a consensus within the music sector, providing advice on regulation and acting as a contact point for stakeholders:

“[I]f there is no consensus and collaboration in the music community, it is inevitably harder for governments to understand the unique challenges faced by the sector, and governments will be far less motivated to make positive changes.” ( Terrill et al., 2015: 66 )

In other words, music boards can be central actors in linking the various stakeholders involved in negotiating the spatial value of live music.

5.2. Establishing strategies

In the view of our respondents, the challenges discussed in this paper require long-term strategies: without dedicated policies on the connections between music and the urban space, the availability of stages for events is often at risk, as discussed above. City strategies on popular music help to ensure that new talent has the space to experiment and be inspired by other musicians. Of course, the music advisory boards discussed in the previous section can also play a vital role in establishing such strategies.

An important starting point is to map the places that currently exist for performances ( Terrill, Hogarth, Clement & Francis, 2015 ). This allows stock to be taken of the diversity of stages in terms of venue size, genres and location. This data can be substantiated by interviews with relevant stakeholders in order to understand the challenges present in specific live music ecologies. This provides insight into how, for example, various regulations, including those related to parking permits, opening hours and alcohol licences, can have an impact on music businesses.

A strategy can propose specific policies and financial measures based on a needs assessment. A common policy instrument is to use subsidies, tax-breaks or micro-loans to sustain specific segments of music ecologies. These are particularly useful for supporting the grassroots level of the music sector. Showcase festivals, award shows, small venues and talent development organisations are important for emerging musicians wanting to develop their skills and build-up a following. However, organisations focusing on young musicians tend to operate on small budgets, as is also the case for music organisations with a social mission that involves community work.

It is helpful to have a dedicated department or music office within a municipality when it comes to implementing any music strategy. A single point of contact makes it easier for the music community to navigate regulatory issues ( Terrill, Hogarth, Clement & Francis, 2015 ), while such a department can also oversee a city’s music policy and liaise with the relevant board. Some cities even have a specific department focusing on events. In Rotterdam, for example, Rotterdam Festivals supports cultural organisations by conducting research on audiences, managing the festival calendar, providing subsidies and sharing relevant information. They have also created location profiles that contain conditions and instructions on how specific spaces in the city can be used for events.

Notwithstanding the importance of a music strategy, our analysis has demonstrated that there is a sense of contingency in how this is actually played out in cities. Of course, not everything can be approached from the top down. Indeed, in reality, a music strategy needs to support the bottom-up creativity of cultural entrepreneurs and organisations. Ultimately, it is the music community that is best placed to connect to audiences and their tastes, not a municipality. Furthermore, the contingency of achieving spatial value follows on from the reliance on wider political and economic conditions. Of course, investments in culture require political support from city councils. In this context, culture is in competition with other policy domains like healthcare and housing, making it more difficult to allocate money to culture at times of economic austerity. Nevertheless, to some extent, the 2007–2010 financial crisis also proved to be helpful for realising spatial value. The following quote exemplifies how there were more empty spaces available for temporary use, such as pop-up programmes on cultural events:

“The financial crisis meant that commercial property developers and investors couldn’t carry on with the transformation of buildings, because they weren’t able to acquire the necessary loan capital. This meant that all those buildings owned by investors, developers and social housing corporations were put on hold. Well, so if you had a good network [as an organisation supporting creative incubators], you could make deals with commercial developers.” (Interviewee 3, senior project manager, real estate sector)

Similarly, a director of a venue in an adapted building commissioned by the local municipality explains how construction companies worked for much lower prices during the financial crisis:

“The local government was able to get this venue at a good time. They invited the tenders almost 11 years ago. This was exactly the moment the financial crisis began, so all the construction companies were looking for work. This meant they were willing to work for lower amounts. The local government got a very nice building for relatively little money.” (Interviewee 10, director of a music venue)

During subsequent periods of economic growth, the number of vacant spaces declined again, making it more difficult to find cheap areas for the performance of culture. At the same time, the many new developments in a booming property market compound the existing pressure on the urban space. The final section of this article will therefore focus on how places for performing live music can be created and sustained.

5.3. Creating and sustaining places for performing live music

As discussed in the literature review, the spatial value dimension of performing in the urban space relies on the availability of music stages. As a result, the most important way of supporting spatial value is creating and sustaining such spaces. Of course, this vision should be part of the music strategy discussed above. This will be discussed separately in this final section, given its key role in supporting spatial value. Creating and sustaining places for live music goes beyond music and cultural policy, influenced as this is by urban planning decisions. This section will consequently focus on opportunities to secure spaces, address noise issues, limit gentrification and introduce special designations for live music spaces.

The strategies discussed in the previous section begin with the mapping of the places that already exist for the performance of live music. The results of such an inventory may highlight the need to identify new spaces where venues can be created or festivals hosted. One way of doing this is to use government-managed buildings for creative purposes ( Hollands, 2019 ). Amsterdam, for example, facilitates cultural breeding spaces as a way to retain cultural activities in the gentrifying city ( Shaw, 2013 ). Another approach is the mapping of underused spaces, with areas marked for future development lent to live music organisations on a temporary basis, but for enough time to ensure that investments can be recouped by cultural entrepreneurs. Music can also form part of new urban developments right from the start, but it is essential that cultural spaces are included in initial plans and negotiations, otherwise the incentive is for commercial developers to focus on more profitable residential spaces. As the literature review on developing the urban space demonstrates, live music can increase the appeal of new developments. This is underscored by the following respondent, who talks about a neighbourhood which, in her view, lacks cultural facilities:

“Nothing happens there, only living and working. Not even working, almost only residential buildings in fact. It’s a really sleepy neighbourhood, which should really be avoided. Mixed neighbourhoods are important.” (Interviewee 5, creative producer)

Similarly, live music can also be taken into consideration in the construction of public spaces ( Auckland UNESCO City of Music, 2018 , Live Music Taskforce, 2017 ), for example by installing a base level of infrastructure for outdoor concerts.

Noise issues are the most common problem when it comes to existing spaces for live music, as discussed in the section concerning the challenges that must be faced before achieving spatial value. It is increasingly recognised that encroaching residential developments pose a threat to the cultural life of cities. This requires measures to ensure that music spaces and residents can co-exist relatively peacefully in urban environments. Tensions can sometimes be resolved by mediation between venues and neighbours, or by ensuring that prospective purchasers of homes are told in advance about how these spaces are used. Burke and Schmidt (2013) , for example, discuss an approach that real estate agents can adopt to enable potential buyers to listen to the soundscapes in an entertainment precinct. 4 A more structural solution is the Agent of Change principle ( Ross, 2017 , Shaw, 2013 ), which has been adopted in Australia and the United Kingdom. This urban planning measure puts the responsibility for addressing sound issues on the newcomer to an area (i.e., the agent of change), rather than on those in charge of existing cultural spaces, which should prevent the closure of long-standing venues after complaints from neighbours in new residential buildings.

Another important way of supporting existing live music spaces is to mitigate the negative consequences of gentrification. As discussed in the literature review, live music can play a vital role in place-making and increasing the appeal of an area. However, the risk is that these cultural organisations are forced out after rents rise. Using case studies in Melbourne, Shaw (2013: 349) argues that city councils must make a choice between maximising land value or supporting socio-cultural goals:

“They can pursue the usual urban renewal/economic development strategy, which creates a safer environment for capital investment and increases opportunities for residential development, in which case the indie creative subcultures that both councils celebrate will be displaced far more rapidly and effectively than they anticipate. Or they can grapple with the possibility that maximising the value of land in their municipality not be their primary objective.”

Even if local governments are selling buildings to private parties, they can include conditions on the ways in which they will be used. As an example, contracts, zoning plans or ground lease conditions could incorporate requirements that spaces need to fulfil cultural functions. Alternatively, successful cultural organisations in an area can be encouraged to remain by enabling them to buy their building, perhaps as a co-op where different organisations work together ( Hollands, 2019 ).

Finally, live music spaces can be protected by changing the ways in which they are classified. This can be done by recognising the unique contributions made by a building or area to the social and cultural life of cities. As discussed in the literature review, the dimension of narrating the urban space underscores how urban branding and heritage activities give meaning to the built environment. Venues with a strong public impact and history could be given a similar building classification as theatres, or even a heritage designation status. However, while the latter solution protects the building itself, the continuation of music activities will still rely on the occupants or the owner of the building ( Terrill et al., 2015 ). Furthermore, some governments have a protected status for buildings of community value, such as the Asset of Community Value process in the UK ( Davyd et al., 2015 ). It is also possible to define entire areas as entertainment districts using zoning plans. These can have a higher sound tolerance, longer opening hours for venues and special parking permits for musicians ( Terrill et al., 2015 ). An advantage is that many of the nuisance issues are then concentrated in a particular area, making them easier to control. Moreover, the different organisations can engage in shared promotional activities, making the area attractive to potential visitors. However, an important drawback of concentrated entertainment districts is that many parts of a city can be left with no provision for live music ( Burke & Schmidt, 2013 ). Certainly, social and spatial links between different areas are essential to cater for diverse urban communities in a thriving urban live music ecology ( Brown et al., 2000 , Mercado-Celis, 2017 ).

6. Conclusions and discussion

The aim of this study has been to conceptualise the spatial value of live music and explore how it can be supported through cultural policies and urban planning. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the paper contributes to the field of urban studies by drawing on literature from music and cultural research. Spatial value is defined as the relationship between live music and the built environment, which manifests itself through the dimensions of performing, (re)developing and narrating spaces. Performing the urban space concerns the ways in which a city is physically used to stage concerts and create musical pathways; redeveloping refers to the role of live music in the making and regeneration of space; and narrating focuses on live music as part of the stories told about cities. Defining the spatial value of live music is becoming an increasingly important task given the threats posed to it in cities.

Table 2 provides an overview of the main research findings. The focus is on the challenges likely to be faced when seeking to achieve spatial value and the ways in which this process can be supported. The paper has demonstrated that the spatial value of live music cannot be taken for granted, affected as it is by wider political and economic forces. Important challenges concern the impact of the environment in which live music is embedded (e.g., gentrification), as well as the nuisance music might cause (e.g., noise and anti-social behaviour). In addressing these issues, it is important to make a place for music. Doing so not only means having a physical space, but also recognising this space in urban policy and planning. In order to support live music in all its diversity (e.g., different genres, experimental sounds and artists at various stages of their career), its value needs to be acknowledged by the diverse stakeholders involved. Establishing strategies and creating and sustaining places for live music requires strong networks within the live music industries and connections to networks outside the music business. Such strategies can include financial instruments (e.g., subsidies), measures to mitigate the effects of gentrification (e.g., supporting socio-cultural values instead of maximising profits), solutions for noise issues (e.g., the agent of change principle), and using special designations for live music spaces.

Although these strategies allow for a systematic approach to achieving spatial value, we do not intend to suggest that live music can just be planned in a top-down manner. Indeed, it is essential that strategies make room for bottom-up initiatives, creativity and entrepreneurship. In the conceptualisation of spatial value, we emphasise its multiplicity, as a wide range of grassroots and official actors participate in the valuing of urban spaces. Furthermore, it should be noted that the spatial value of live music develops over time, often in unexpected ways due to social, technological and economic developments. This value builds on the musical heritage of a city; it also requires diverse spaces for experimentation by artists in order to guarantee a lively music culture for the future. Graves-Brown (2009) reminds us that music is both an event and an action. It is also dynamic and complex, like the cities in which it is performed ( Cohen, 2012 , Cohen, 2013 ). Indeed, music stages are often temporary, such as festivals or pop-up venues. These temporary stages are valuable in terms of experimentation and diversifying the music provision. Understanding urban live music ecologies as dynamic provides a counterweight to narratives about the fall in the number of live music venues. Arguably, the coming and going of stages is part and parcel of urban life. Nevertheless, it is essential that successful projects can contribute to the social and cultural life of cities in a sustained manner.

Future research may shed light on what is a good balance between temporary and fixed venues. Urban planning strategies to mitigate the negative effects of gentrification also require more attention. Of course, spatial value is contextual, relying as it always does on local geographical, political and economic conditions. As a result, case studies can further enhance our understanding of supporting spatial value in specific local settings. As we have limited the scope of this study to popular music in cities, future research could be extended to cover different styles of music and non-urban and rural spaces.

Finally, further research is required to understand the spatial value of live music in a post-Covid world. Shortly after the data collection element of this paper ended, the live music sector stalled due to the Coronavirus. Of course, the cancellation of so many events will have economic repercussions for numerous actors in the live music ecology, putting even more pressure on small music venues. The spatial consequences are hard to predict, but an early study of the impact of Covid-19 on the public space suggests that it could lead to an aversion to being in large crowds, requests for improved ventilation, more outdoor spaces in venues and the inclusion of health criteria in the design process ( Honey-Rosés et al., 2020 ). Inevitably, some spaces can satisfy such demands more easily than others. Meanwhile, new spaces could emerge as locations for concerts, changing how the urban landscape is performed, developed and narrated. As an example, the Sofar Sounds initiative books intimate concerts in people’s homes 5 , while illegal raves took place in urban outdoor spaces during lockdown ( Marshall et al. 2020 ). Perhaps the crisis will lead to the repurposing of vacant buildings for music activities. Finally, the experiments with online live music that occurred during the lockdown could lead to new virtual spaces for music-making, which will require studies to adopt innovative methodologies like netnography ( Maalsen & McLean, 2016 ). Post-Covid concerts could include hybrid forms of online and physical activities, as festivals and venues may increasingly support the streaming of concerts, the building of virtual worlds and online social interactions. Of course, these predictions are highly speculative, but nevertheless suggest that Covid-19 could change how the spatial value of live music is achieved in the future.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Arno van der Hoeven: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Investigation, Writing - original draft. Erik Hitters: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Writing - original draft.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported as part of the project Staging Popular Music: Researching Sustainable Live Music Ecologies for Artists, Music Venues and Cities (POPLIVE) by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Taskforce for Applied Research (NRPO-SIA) [grant number 314-99-202, research programme Smart Culture - Arts and Culture]. Partners in this project are Mojo Concerts and the Association of Dutch Pop Music Venues and Festivals (VNPF). The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable feedback. Thanks also go to Paul Long, Lyle Bignon, Sarah Raine and Jez Collins for organising a round-table discussion on live music and urban development at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, where early ideas for this paper took shape.

1 However, it should be noted that festivals can, of course, also take place inside venues.

2 See the project website www.poplive.nl for further information about the project.

3 All Dutch quotations have been translated by the authors.

4 See https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/planning-and-building/planning-guidelines-and-tools/other-plans-and-projects/valley-special-entertainment-precinct/valley-sound-machine (accessed 27 February 2020).

5 www.sofarsounds.com (accessed 20 August 2020).

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• BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
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• ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The History and Future of Live Music

“Music is about human beings communicating with other human beings ,” said Andrew Dubber, professor of music industry innovation at  Birmingham City Universit y and director at  Music Tech Fest .

Live music has existed for as long as humans have been communicating—that is, since the dawn of man. Here’s a quick history.

100,000 years ago: First prehistoric performances.  Humans “ perform ” by mimicking sounds in nature, meteorological phenomena, or animal calls.

40,000 years ago: The first musical instrument is made of animal bones.  The   earliest-known  flutes  are thought to have been used for “recreation or religious purposes,” experts  say .

8th century B.C.–6th century A.D.: Ancient musical performances.  In ancient Greek  and  Roman  societies music performance becomes ubiquitous at marriages, funerals, other religious ceremonies, and within theatre.  Persian and  Indian classical music  is used in comparable fashion.

Middle Ages: Churches become the main music venues in the Western world.  Pipe organs  are installed in big cathedrals with natural acoustics, adding a spiritual and imposing character to the music.

Baroque Era: Multiple-sized music venues.  Composers such as  Bach  do a lot of their playing in churches smaller than a Gothic cathedral. In the late 1700s,  Mozart  performs his compositions at events in grand, but not gigantic, rooms.  People now dance  to the music, too.

1700s: Opera emerges as a new form of entertainment.  Big  music  halls, such as the still very popular  La Scala  (1778) in Milan, are constructed. Musical ensembles — by then called orchestras —  grow gradually  throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

1870s: The microphone debuts.  David Edward Hughes invents the  carbon microphone (also developed by  Berliner and Edison ), a transducer that converts sound to an electrical audio signal for the first time.

Early 1900s: Jazz develops alongside orchestral music.  Originally played and danced to in smoky bars and public houses, jazz paves the way for the modern concert as we now understand it.

1910s — The PA is born.  Magnavox ’s Edwin Jensen and Peter Pridham begin experimenting with sound reproduction using a carbon microphone; soon afterward they file the first patent for a moving-coil loudspeaker. With their “Sound Magnifying Phonograph,” the modern  public address system (PA)  is born — a device we still use today at nearly every live concert.

Early 1930s: The first electric amplifiers for single instruments appear.  The introduction of  electrolytic capacitors  and rectifier tubes make it possible to produce economic, built-in power supplies that can plug into a wall socket.

1931: The “Frying Pan” guitar goes electric . Built by George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker of  Electro String  (later  Rickenbacker ), the amplified lap steel  Hawaiian guitar  becomes the first electric-stringed instrument. Legendary models by  Leo Fender  and Gibson’s  Les Paul  follow suit.

1941: Rickenbacker sells the first line of guitar combo amplifiers.  Although  rather tame  by today’s standards, the amplifiers are capable of making big, unprecedented noise, and became hugely popular and  influential .

1950s: Rock ’n’ Roll is born.  Several groups in the United States experiment with new musical forms by fusing country, blues, and swing to produce the earliest examples of what becomes known as “ rock and roll .” The rock concert grows into an entertainment standard around the world.

1960s: The modern concert format emerges.  American promoter  Bill Graham  develops the format for pop music concerts. He introduces advance ticketing (and later  online tickets ), modern security measures, and hygiene standards.

1960s–1970s: Live music exerts a major influence on popular culture.  Large-scale amplification facilitates the expansion of massive music festivals — the prime example being 1969’s  Woodstock Festival , attended by over 400,000 people.

1970s: Pink Floyd pioneers concert visuals and special effects.  The British rockers  incorporate  huge screens, strobe lights, pyrotechnics (exploding flash pots and fireworks), and special effects (from helium balloons to a massive  artificial wall ). The band also uses  quadrophonic speaker systems  and  synthesizers .

The Gig of the Future

Since the 1970s, the basic format and technology behind the rock concert have remained unchanged. Sure, sound systems have  gotten louder , and light shows now incorporate  3D projections  and massive holograms — with DJ Eric Prydz’s hologram at his 2014 Madison Square Garden  concert  the largest to date — but no matter the genre, the setup is the same.

So, will the concert of the future look any different at all? At the rate technology’s changing—yes. Since the 1980s, the  MIDI protocol  has allowed for triggering computer sounds via  MIDI controllers  that resemble traditional keyboards, guitars, mixers, etc.

Today, musicians can perform in  completely new ways , further unbound by the constraints of conventional instruments. Professor Dubber points us to the direction of British sound designer  Ross Flight  who uses Microsoft’s  Kinect motion sensing device to perform live by moving in space. Choreographer  Laura Kriefman  creates music by dancing; producer  Tim Exile  invented his own electronic instruments so as to perform “exactly how he wanted”; and beatboxer  Beardyman  built a real-time music production machine that “doesn’t have any onboard sounds” to allow him to create loops and layers from just the sounds he makes with his voice.

Interactivity

Interaction between fans and performers is becoming more intricate — as is interaction between members of the audience themselves.

Social media is an obvious facilitator here. Snapchat’s “ Our Story ” feature for live events creates a compilation of shared “snaps” within certain physical spaces, uniting people while broadcasting their collective experiences to the rest of the world.

U.S. event technologies company   Cantora  is developing an as-yet-unnamed software that “ takes the ebbs and flows ” of an audience to alter the physical venue, while London technology company XOX has  developed a wristband that claims to track audience emotions by “evaluating the electrical characteristics of a wearer’s skin in real time and processes this to identify changes.”

Beyond social and software, innovation is happening at the artist level as well. British songwriter and composer  Imogen Heap  has relied on technology extensively to interact and collaborate with her fans. In 2009, she used  Vokle , an online auditorium to  hold open cello auditions  for her North American tour. Later, she opened the virtual auditions to singers and choirs, inviting them to submit videos on YouTube. The winners ended up with her on stage.

Wearable technology

Heap is also a pioneer in the use of wearable technology in live music performance. She has been working for years toward a more flexible live setup that would enable her mobility while performing multiple musical production tasks on the fly.

In 2011, she unveiled  a pair of high-tech gloves  that allow her to amplify, record, and loop acoustic instruments and her voice; play virtual instruments; and manipulate these sounds live.

The  MiMu gloves  combine ground-breaking technology with sensors and microphones. Heap used them to record and later perform live “Me the Machine,” the first song she created solely with the gloves.

“The thing that has irritated me over the years is the lack of flexibility in music remote controllers,” Heap told me in an interview. “Technologically, I’ve been trying to free up the performer and enable them to control every kind of nuance and detail (e.g., bending a note or moving through different octaves very quickly with your hand), like playing through stars or playing a baseline like a basketball instead of having to be very rigid.”

Pianos and guitars are amazing instruments but their use is predetermined. “Often when you’re producing, especially electronic music, you’re using sounds which don’t have a body or a physical presence. It’s about bringing those digital sounds to life on the move, wirelessly, on the stage,” she said.

Alongside performance tools, wearable technology has infiltrated the audience experience, too. Here’s a few examples:

• Smart earbuds , like  those developed  by San Francisco’s  Doppler Labs , let users customize live music via a smartphone app that enables them to adjust the volume, EQ, and apply effects to the sounds of the environment around them.
• Nada , a wearable smart ticket combining a cashless payment method and paperless tickets, captures real-world attendee behavior at large scale.
• The Basslet ,   a wristband developed in Germany, lets listeners take the live gig experience anywhere by connecting their music players and making them “feel the bass and depth of music through their body.”

Paperless tickets are slowly replacing traditional ones.   Una , a British startup, is on a mission to eradicate scalping by providing users with  a plastic membership card  with embedded chips to be scanned at venues. The card works in conjunction with an online account and can also be used for cashless payments.

The first cash-free festivals held in the United States (Mysteryland), Canada (Digital Dreams), and the Czech Republic (Majales) took place in 2014 with the help of smart-ticketing pioneer  Intellitix .

Meanwhile, a subscription-based service has been making waves in the ticketing world.  Jukely  is essentially  a Spotify for live gigs  — you can pay $25 per month and attend as many concerts as you like from the roster the company offers.

Live streaming

A now-broken boundary, it was once a requirement that you be physically present at a concert to experience it. Live streaming has since enabled people from all over the world to gather into a single online “room.”

Artists like U2 have used applications like  Meerkat  and  Periscope  to broadcast their concerts to fans at home, and the activity has only grown in popularity since Coachella Festival  streamed on YouTube  in 2011.

Now apps like  Stageit , through which audience members  can contribute additional cash amounts  to the artist performing, and  Huzza , which allows for  tipping or buying merchandise , offer performers expanded solutions for monetizing live streaming.

Virtual reality

The idea of a concert in virtual reality isn’t new. Several South Korean record labels  introduced  V-concerts as early as 1998 — with varying rates of success.

Then, rather unexpectedly, English singer-songwriter Richard Hawley  played a gig on Second Life  in 2007.

More recently, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said that the company  plans to roll out a virtual reality concert system  that will enable fans to enjoy live concerts from the comfort of their living rooms. Ek hinted at virtual merchandise booths linked to the users’ Apple Pay accounts and joked that a virtual bouncer may also be included.

Artist payments and Mycelia

With profit margins for newer artists and concert promoters notoriously low, and many festivals shuttering their doors over the past few years, the live concert market is an unpredictable one.

The challenge of creating a sustainable and equitable artist remuneration system for the gig of the future is crucial.

Here, Imogen Heap might have the answer again. In October, she released her single “Tiny Human” on Mycelia.  Mycelia  is a revolutionary transaction system using  the Blockchain  — the architecture that underpins the popular electronic currency Bitcoin — that has the potential to transform how live musicians are paid.

Mycelia brings together artists, developers, and coders in a formal movement to shape the direction of the music industry in favor of the artist.

“With live for instance, if somebody covered one of my songs during a big show, sometimes it happens that that song doesn’t get registered properly and as a result [I] wouldn’t receive any royalties from the song’s performance,” said Heap.

“But there are devices —  little gizmos  sitting in a corner of the club — that find algorithmically who the songwriter of any performed song is and help calculate the amount of payment due — according to venue and audience size,” she explained.

“At the moment, any transaction would go through different collecting societies. In the future, it would just come directly to me as a songwriter. It’s becoming possible to break down the barriers of where institutions have previously got in the way of the flow of information and the flow of creativity. I’m excited about this, more than ever,” she said.

About the Author

This article was written by Vas Panagiotopoulos, he is a freelance journalist based in Athens & London. Bylines in Politico, Quartz, Vice, CityMetric, openDemocracy, European Journalism Observatory, WIRED, Wallpaper*.  See more .

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Example Of Essay On Music Performance

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Music , Entertainment , Teaching , Classical Music , Performance , Sound , Flute , Music Performance

Published: 12/05/2019

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Music performance by Mozart and Schubert

On 10/22/2011, I attended a music performance. This is therefore a paper outlining my classical reaction about the performance. Three symphony parts made up the performance. These parts are “Symphony No. 5 in B Flat, D. 485,” “Concerto for Clarinet,” and “Le Tombaue de Couperin.” My reactions are therefore, going to be on each of the symphony. Eventually, I will list the pros and cons of each.

Starting with the symphony of “Le Tombaue de Couperin” I realized that its performance was exactly like the description it had been given to it in the program notes. The performance was about a teacher who passed away during war times. The symphony was performed in an exciting way. I therefore, like it. According to me, the symphony could be performed well preferably at a show. In the process of the performance, the symphony could have a sudden stop, making everything to be as quite as is a thief was passing by. The symphony was not fit to be listened to at a concert. At a concert, the symphony will make me feel sleepy. I will prefer listening at the symphony in future.

“Concerto for Clarinet” was the name of the second symphony. Anthony Mcgill is the person who was performing this symphony at some parts. Mcgill played in three instances in the course of the symphony. Among these instances, the first one was preferable to me. On the other hand, the flute sound used in this performance did not sound so good to me. The reason for this is that the flute produced a low sound. Consequently, the other instruments, which were being used in the performance, suppress the sound of the flute. However, I would propose that in case it was possible to let the flute to play automatically, the sound would be beautiful.

“Symphony No. 5 in B Flat, D. 485” was the name of the third symphony. According to my point of view, there is no doubt that this was the best symphony for the lovers. Listening to the performance proved to be very nice. Apart from being nice Symphony No. 5 in B Flat, D. 485 was a classic symphony. The writer of the beautiful notes for this symphony, Schubert deserves many praises for doing an excellent job.

In conclusion, the music performance consisting of the three different symphonies was very nice. In fact, it was better than the rest of the music performances that I have watched previously. This was due to the fact this performance was more of feelings and music. I realized that by bringing out our feelings through music, our souls could really be touched. The only fault that I found out during this performance was that as the performance was on, some members of the music crew displayed some disorganizations especially those who were at the back. In addition to this, there was poor utilization of the spaces. Consequently, this made the crew to appear messy. Anyway, I enjoyed the performance. In fact, one of the striking features to me in this performance was the appearance of my professor. Professor was not there as part of the audience, but was seen playing with the rest of the performers. This was amazing to me since it made me to appreciate the fact that music is meant for everyone, even the most learned professors in the society.

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Live music streaming: Developing a new performance paradigm

By David Davies 2023-03-02T10:37:00+00:00

• No comments

A lifeline for so many musicians during the pandemic, live concert streaming looks set to remain an important aspect of the industry – thanks in no small part to increasingly efficient, tech-driven production, writes David Davies.

For a host of reasons, comedy and dramatic theatre are now littered with impressive examples of virtual events, but it’s arguably in live music where the greatest challenges have had to be addressed in terms of technology and overall production. With Veeps, Vimeo and many other platforms continuing to do good business, it also appears that live concert streaming – whether as a dedicated event or as part of a hybrid production that also includes conventional in-person attendance – will remain a significant and evolving part of the industry.

NY2C: an independent streaming network with live production technology provided by Cinegy

It’s also a trend that is expected to encompass more venues and genres as the technology underpinning it becomes more affordable. As Cinegy Head of Business Development, Andrew Ward remarked: “Recent years have seen marked changes in the way that consumers enjoy media, with the curtailment of public performances [during Covid-19] moving both audiences and providers towards alternative platforms. Small venues and organisations were previously priced out of broadcast platforms, but computer-based production systems that play out to the internet can be assembled for a fraction of what a ‘TV studio with transmitter’ used to cost. We believe that for this reason the market will continue to develop, even though public performance is once again possible.”

‘A whole new virtual concert ecosystem’

A brief look at some data from 2020 confirms the rapid expansion of the online concert market – not to mention the resulting opportunities for technology providers and production companies. According to the Virtual Concerts: A New Video Format report by entertainment intelligence company MIDiA Research, the share of live-streamed concert listings on Bandsintown grew from 1.9% to 40.7% during the period from June to November 2020, whilst the total ticketed revenue in December was up 292% from June.

Andrew Ward, Cinegy

The sustained uplift in paid events was integral to the flourishing of the sector given that artists were contending with both the long-term loss of income from recorded music (as highlighted by the Broken Record initiative) and the more abrupt decline in live performance revenue. According to MIDiA’s Mark Mulligan: “Traditional live is a scarce, premium product that generates many artists the bulk of their income. Yet the start of the live streaming boom was all about free – an uncanny rerun of when music first went on the internet.” Hence it was essential that live streaming be able to “pick up some of the slack as a meaningful revenue driver for artists”.

One might also add that it was pretty important for virtual event income to become more consistent in order to support the emerging video production community. Like virtual meetings in the day-to-day working world, there was always going to be a risk of digital fatigue – especially as the months wore on and the desire to engage with in-person events increased. Hence as the format has matured, so has the use of broadcast and AV technology to enhance and individualise live concert productions.

Read more  Dolby Atmos: Producing with object-based audio

One trend resulting from this recognition has been the provision of more compact and/or combined live production systems that allow live events to be streamed and recorded in a relatively straightforward and cost-effective way. Cinegy can attest to this, having recently provided live production technology to customers including NY2C, a New York-based independent streaming network that regularly hosts a wide range of live music from its production facilities at the Sour Mouse Club on the city’s Lower East Side.

In order to support live productions, Cinegy distributor and system architect Tab Butler of T&P Productions Inc. proposed a solution based on Silverdraft Supercomputing hardware and three channels of Cinegy Capture PRO, recording live switched programme feeds and iso cameras of the show. On the same computer, and integrated with Cinegy Capture PRO, is a VMix client for live streaming and Adobe Premiere Pro video editing for packaging highlights and show cut-downs geared towards social media. The new set-up can also be operated remotely for optimum flexibility.

Andrew Ward explained: “With NY2C we were helped immensely by the fact that the organisation really knew what they wanted. They asked for a way to pick up the best of local live entertainment from New York City and deliver it to their audience with great production and quality, and with the minimum effort. This was made possible by Cinegy’s ability to deliver simplified IP workflows and production tools in hybrid on-premise and cloud environments, eliminating the complexity while allowing the creative team to focus on the product.”

‘Age-old engineering principles’

If circumventing complexity remains an overriding objective of live streaming technology, then the same can also be said of minimising latency. With the rise of 5G networks leading to an increased expectation of being able to watch high-quality video without buffering – whether at home or on the move – there has to be a focus on delivering content efficiently and without delay, across multiple platforms.

Noted Ward: “In order to meet the needs of a demanding market, one of Cinegy’s prime technology drivers is the age-old engineering principle of removing latency from a process. In the last few years that driver has been helped tremendously by the development of the SRT [Secure Reliable Transport] protocol, which gives providers the control to ensure that ‘live’ really does mean ‘live’ and not ‘slightly delayed by old technology’.”

The Switch is a live video production and distribution specialist and has worked on a wide variety of streaming productions. Alex Joyce, the company’s Senior Sales Engineer, pointed to remote operation as being an ongoing priority for many customers: “One of the big impacts of the pandemic was that a lot of organisations came to us looking for ways to [operate] remotely or in a more decentralised way. Our ability to provide solutions in the fiber optic realm has been really popular for some of our high-end clients in [locations such as] New York and LA.”

Alex Joyce, The Switch

Remote mixing of live events has been a specific beneficiary. “There is a requirement for that sort of flexibility. For instance you might have an event taking place at a venue in New York, but the producers are in LA and want to remotely mix the production there,” said Joyce, who points to the rise of low latency, high quality transport protocols such as RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport) and the aforementioned SRT as being significant in this regard.

Like many others, Joyce noted that as the pandemic has become “more under control, the demand for live in-person content has increased again considerably. At the same time, there is a still a significant number of people who are enjoying the at-home experience, and therefore it is often a hybrid model that we get asked for.” Ultimately, it’s all about the expectation of a satisfying experience wherever the concertgoer is situated: “It comes back to the requirement for inclusion of all attendees; whether in person or virtually, they must have a good user experience.”

With growing signs of interest in the market around the potential of live streaming concerts using technologies such as 4K and immersive audio, it’s probable that we are only in the relatively early stages of developing a new artistic medium. Given the many practical and financial challenges now confronting creative people, it’s one that will also provide a welcome further revenue stream in a profoundly uncertain era.

Watch more  The John Logie Baird lecture: The state of audio technology and the next 5 years

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What’s Your Favorite Thing About Live Music?

Portlanders tell us about the magic of live performance..

In honor of our 20th edition of Best New Bands , we took to Portland streets to ask what our city dwellers love most about Portland live music. Here’s what they shared.

Dustin Sampson

“Being able to actually see the performance and the artists in their own music and the way they get into it with the crowd. When you see how they put it forth, and their charisma depending on who you go and see, [you get] that excitement and you see how they like playing their own music.”

Mickey McKeever and Oz McKeever

“It brings people back out. We’re in a time where being in is a lot safer and a lot more comfortable. Live music brings people back outside, whether it’s outside, it makes you take that adventure to that place to see that music. That’s what I mean to say, live music brings you to the adventure, or it creates the adventure, either way it’s essential.” Mickey McKeever (left).

“The energy of being with a community and seeing different art styles, that’s probably my favorite thing.” Oz McKeever (right).

Phil Carver

" I think the making of memories. When I think back to the venues that I’ve seen and I hear the music later, I think about the people I was with and the atmosphere and how it felt. That’s really valuable.”

Sadie Lovino

“I would probably say it’s the vibration and the energy that seeps into your soul when you’re listing to the music. “It can make you really move, yeah.”

Jessica Gomez and Colin Misich

“Favorite thing about live music? The Vibes! I don’t know, just seeing musicians do what they do on stage and getting a chance to hear it as it was meant to be heard.” Colin Misich (left)

“And getting to experience it with other people as well.” Jessica Gomez (right)

“The energy from the crowds and the performers. Everyone’s there for the same reasons. It’s like, everyone’s just happy to be there. It’s great.”

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today.

Cher and Jennifer Hudson perform fiery duet of 'Believe' at the 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards

Cher received the iHeartRadio Icon Award at the event.

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Cher, 77, was presented with the Icon Award at the event for her legendary contributions to music and entertainment.

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After the fiery duet, which was preceded by Hudson's performance of Cher's hit "If I Could Turn Back Time," Hudson turned to Cher and said, "We love you, Cher."

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Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson Perform Stripped-Down Version of 'Save Me' at 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards

The country stars performed "Save Me" at the show, where both artists took home trophies

Amy Sussman/Getty

Jelly Roll  and Lainey Wilson gave the 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards a duet to remember.

On Monday night, the "Son of a Sinner" singer, 39, and the "Heart Like a Truck" artist, 31, performed a stripped-down rendition of their collaboration "Save Me" after Jelly Roll won best new artist awards in both the pop and country categories.

Surrounded by candles on the stage, Jelly Roll began the performance solo onstage until midway when he introduced Wilson who alternated verses with him.

After the performance, the country star took to the stage to give an impassioned speech in honor of the accolades he received. He began the speech, "To be one of the voices coming through your radio and to be the best new country artist and represent country music and the best new pop artist, you want to know what it means to a kid like me?"

Kevin Winter/Getty

"I was thinking about it, 'What does it mean when a guy like me gets the opportunity to be the new pop artist of the year?' It means that God will always use the least likely messenger with the biggest message every single time," Jelly Roll told the crowd.

He concluded: "You can take that to the bank, baby. I love you Jesus, and I love you Bunnie, my wife. Thank you for everything. My daughter, Bailee Ann, I hope you’re watching. I’m coming home, baby. We did it."

Jelly Roll earned eight nominations including artist of the year, best new artist (pop), country artist of the year, best new artist (country), best new artist (alternative and rock), rock song of the year, rock artist of the year and favorite on screen. Wilson was nominated for two awards at this year's event — country song of the year and country artist of the year.

While Taylor Swift  led the pack as the most-nominated artist, ranking in a total of nine nods, SZA and  21 Savage landed eight nominations along with Jelly Roll, while Olivia Rodrigo  earned seven nods. 

Artists like  Beyoncé ,  Billie Eilish ,  Ice Spice ,  Jonas Brothers  and many others also received recognition across the various categories. 

The "Texas Hold 'Em" singer, 42, is set to receive the Innovator Award at this year’s show to celebrate her influence on pop culture and her creative endeavors, while Cher will be honored with the Icon Award with a special musical tribute for “her unparalleled contributions to music and pop culture for over seven decades," per a press release.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

Tasos Katopodis/Getty

In addition to the tribute performance,  Justin Timberlake ,  Green Day ,  TLC ,  Lainey Wilson  and  Tate McRae   are all set to take the stage. 

There are a handful of exciting new categories. There are five new awards, each with a genre focus: pop artist of the year, pop song of the year, K-pop artist of the year, K-pop song of the year and best new artist (K-pop).

Hosted by Ludacris , the 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards is airing live on April 1 from the Dolby Theatre at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. 

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Country star Colt Ford suffers heart attack after Arizona show, reports say

by JESSICA A. BOTELHO | The National Desk

GILBERT, Ariz. (TND) — Country music star Colt Ford suffered a heart attack following a recent performance in Arizona, according to reports.

TMZ on Friday noted Ford's team said he was in the intensive care unit at the Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, Arizona after his show at Dierks Bentley's Whiskey Row in Gilbert the previous night.

His representative told TMZ he is currently stable.

Fans expressed their support and well wishes on Ford's latest Instagram post, which he shared on Easter Sunday.

"Prayers for you brother you prolly won’t see this man but just know we all praying for you," one person wrote.

"I'm praying for a quick recovery!" another noted.

Ford, 54, is best known for fusing country and rap music, as well as co-writing Jason Aldean's big hit "Dirt Road Anthem."