Cultural Value Project 2014 Research Development Award Project

Cultural Value 2014 Project Summaries Research Development Awards Grant Holder: Dr Daniel Allington Project Title: Online networks and the production of value in electronic music Summary: Cultural value is one of the areas in which (as the saying goes) perceptions are also realities. Thus, sociologists have argued that the production of cultural value is actually the production of a form of belief. Although popular accounts of how culture gets made tend to focus on brilliant individual creators, research has highlighted over and over again that their work typically emerges from a creative milieu, in which value (or belief in value) comes into existence. This arguably explains why cultural producers - musicians, artists, etc - are among the most committed audiences for cultural products, and why so many of them create work primarily for appreciation by other producers. This highlights the relationship between amateur, professional, and semi-professional cultural production, which is commonly assumed to have been transformed by Web 2.0 technologies that potentially making every internet user into a creator and publisher of digital content. This project will make an incisive contribution to our understanding of how culture and its value is produced in the digital age by focusing on a specific art form: music. We will gather evidence from the SoundCloud website, which many musicians use for commenting on one another's work. And we will focus on a specific genre that has a special relationship with that website, i.e. electronic music. We will identify as 'electronic music' all audio files that are identified by their creators with synonyms of or recognised genres of electronic music (to take just a few examples: dubstep, intelligent dance music, electronica, algorave, chiptune, electronic pop, live coding). Although many registered users of SoundCloud do not produce audio content, the website's original core users consisted of musicians - especially electronic musicians - who use it for commenting on one another's work. This project will study relationships between millions of users of that website, building a series of social network graphs to represent their evaluations of audio files uploaded by other users. Social network analysis provides mathematical ways of analysing peer esteem and reflecting the intuition that the opinion of a highly-regarded creator may have special impact: for example, in a social network diagram representing positive evaluations, more highly esteemed producers will occupy more central positions, with the most central positions being occupied by those who are esteemed by other highly esteemed producers. In order to enhance this analysis, we will not only study evaluations implied by 'likes' and 'follows' on the website, but also use computational linguistic analysis to study the kinds of language used in comments and identify whether a given comment is likely to be positive or negative. Moreover, we will observe and interview musicians in the real world in order to understand how they locate value in their relationships with one another, both online and off. Findings will be disseminated through a range of venues, including a public access event featuring lectures from academics who have carried out related studies and invited performances by musicians who have been studied. We will also write a public report explaining our findings to a general audience (including emerging musicians who may wish to understand the role that websites such as SoundCloud can play in building a career), and we will release the source code to all the applications we create, with full instructions that will enable other researchers (both inside and outside the university system) to adapt those applications to study data from other sources. Our website will include a blog providing progress updates, and knowledge will be further disseminated through professionally-produced audiovisual podcasts and press releases to specialist media. Grant Holder: Dr Matthew Thomas Brennan Project Title: From pub to stadium: The ecology of public and commercial investment in British live music venues Summary: Live music is a prime illustration of wider issues in the UK's cultural sector. Pressure on the public purse, nationally and locally, is felt from larger institutions - orchestras, opera companies, etc.- to the grassroots as direct funding dries up due to cuts. Meanwhile, live music has overtaken recorded sector revenues since 2008. Major events sell-out in hours and, as lobbying group UK Music's recent report on music tourism shows, the live sector is a significant source of income for the nation. Yet the benefits are felt unevenly, and not simply as a matter of suffering state subsidised arts and a healthy commercial sector. Growing concern for the fate of venues at the lower level of the economic activity is reflected in media and industry reports of struggles and closure. Neither is this just recession based. The key piece of music related legislation in recent times - the Live Music Act 2012 - deregulated the provision of live music of all kinds in licensed premises. But it was the result of a long campaign by industry, grassroots and legislators that arose from the negative impact of earlier licensing legislation in 2003 on venues and practitioners. Calls for more deregulation also involve both industry (UK Music) and musicians' (the Musicians' Union) representatives. Neither are music venues alone in their predicament. Questions of how to support culture hinge on assessments of how to value it - for economic benefit or innate social worth - and intersect with those about the role of the state and private vs public investment. Opposing speeches by UK Culture Secretary Maria Miller and Scottish Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop have starkly illustrated the lines between economic and intrinsic values as cases for investment. Implicit in wider debates and those around live music is a sense that different points on the scale of activity are interdependent. Today's stadium acts started in the pubs and local hotspots that are now struggling - in other words, an ecological model. Again, private and public sector inputs are not discrete but interdependent. Transport infrastructure, sensitive or draconian local licensing regimes, zoning and health and safety policies all affect local live music ecologies just as do direct investment from state, municipality or commerce. We will shed light on such interactions - the funding ecology - by examining them in context and practice in three case-study localities across the UK - the London Borough of Camden, Leeds and Glasgow. We will work with three key sector groups: PRS for Music, who license venues' use of copyright compositions, will provide data allowing us to map the size and types of venue in each area. With UK Music and the Musicians' Union (MU), we will then select case studies of venue capacities in six categories: Small (Under 200 capacity); Small-Medium (200- 500); Medium (500-2,000); Medium-Large (2,000-5,000); Large (5,000-20,000); Very Large (20,000+). Interviews with local and national policy makers, council officers, regional MU representatives, and venue operators will, along with the mapping exercise, show how the interplay of regulation, finance, ownership and management structures produce and reflect conceptions of cultural value in theory and in practice across the live music venue ecology. The ecological model of music venues in the context of investment and stakeholder activity will both broaden and sharpen our understanding of the sector. It will account for the narratives of public and private actors in shaping the environment in which musical careers proceed as an interdependent system of different levels of economic activity. The effects of local and national regulation, alongside various forms of direct subsidy and indirect support (or hindrance), are felt in ways both obvious and hidden. We will illuminate this system to provide insights into live music, and cultural activity at large, for policy makers, industry and practitioners alike. Grant Holder: Professor Eric Clarke Project Title: Music, empathy and cultural understanding Summary: In the age of the internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and influence on people's lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most individual (personal stereos) and massively communal (large-scale live events, and global simulcasts) kind; and it increasingly brings together or exploits an exceptional range of cultures and histories, through developments in 'world music', sampling, mash-up, re-release, archival recording, and hybridisation. The aim of this Research Development project is to pursue the idea that music affords powerful insights into other consciousness’s and cultural identities, and that in doing so it has powerful potential for cultural understanding. The objectives of the project are: 1) to bring together the considerable body of research and scholarship, across disciplines ranging from the neuroscience and psychology of music to the sociology and anthropology of music, and cultural musicology, that has proposed or presented evidence for music's power to promote empathy and social/cultural understanding through powerful affective, cognitive and social factors, and to propose a unifying and synthesising conceptual framework in which to connect and make sense of this disparate evidence, and to use that framework to highlight interdisciplinary points of convergence and divergence; 2) to undertake a novel piece of empirical research to further develop and test one important aspect of those claims; 3) to publish and disseminate the findings of the project, and in doing so to contribute to a developing case for the value of arts and culture to individuals and to society. Grant Holder: Dr Joshua Edelman Project Title: The Value of Amateur, Subsidised and Commercial Theatre for Tyneside's Audiences Summary: This project aims draw a complete and systematic picture of the theatrical life of the city of Newcastle and the surrounding Tyneside region from the perspectives of the audience members who experience it.

Load more