Same songs, different wrapping : the rise of the compilation album

The commercial success of compilation albums has increased in markets both in North America and in Europe. The albums can be considered as a manifestation of a significant change within the music industry—among both producers and consumers of popular music. Based on sales figures and a number of interviews with senior decision‐makers in multinational music companies, we discuss some of the major drivers behind the development, and thereby give an important contribution to the existing body of knowledge on music industry dynamics.

Lived experience and devised theatre practice : a study of Australian and Norwegian theatre students' devised theatrical practice

This study explores the incorporation of young people's lived experience upon the creative dynamics in the development of devised performance practice. By employing Vygotsky's creativity theory to devising processes the role of lived experience is analyzed through three case studies located in two theatre education colleges in Norway and Australia. The study demonstrates how young peoples' life experience is a primary resource that is developed and reasoned upon in the creative performance practice. A key finding of the study is the identification of two distinct type of performance outcome in devised theatre practice, described as "livsbasert/life-based" and "egenskapt/self-made" that will enable devised theatre to have a more nuanced understanding of both process and product in the Nordic context.

Twelve : the best Of IMP's 100 Songs Project 2011

12 Original recordings curated by leading national industry figures. It’s a 12 track album full of remixed, rerecorded and rejigged tracks from the project that were shortlisted by our friends at MGM Distribution, Music Sales, and EMI Music Australia. The TWELVE album is already receiving critical acclaim from Australia's music industry.

Eleven : best of 100 Songs Project 2012

Eleven original recordings curated by leading industry figures. This is a compilation album from QUT's 2012 100 Songs project. It's called Eleven: Best of 100 Songs Project 2012 and was released in May 2013. It’s an 11 track album with a bonus track, full of remixed, rerecorded and rejigged tracks from the project that were shortlisted by our friends at MGM Distribution, Mushroom Music, Island Records and Music Sales Australia. The Eleven album is already receiving critical acclaim from Australia's music industry.

100 Songs Project 2012

The Independent Music Project is centred around the development and creation of new music, and includes research into copyright, business models of the future, new technologies, and new audiences. The music industry is undergoing the most radical changes it has faced in almost a century. New digital technologies have made the production, distribution, and promotion of recorded music accessible to anyone with a personal computer. People can now make high-quality digital copies of music and distribute them globally within minutes. Even bastions of the established industries, such as EMI and Columbia, are struggling to make sense of the new industry terrain. The whole employment picture has changed just as radically for people who wish to make a living from music. In Australia, many of the avenues that provided employment for musicians have either disappeared or dramatically shrunk. The advertising industry no longer provides the level of employment it used to prior to the Federal deregulation of the industry in 1992. In many places, new legislative pressures on inner-city and suburban venues have diminished the number of performance spaces that musicians can work in. Just as quickly, new sectors have opened to professional musicians: computer games, ringtones, sound-enabled toys and web advertising all present new opportunities to the enterprising musician. The opportunity to distribute music internationally without being signed to a major label is very attractive to many aspiring and established professionals. No doubt the music industry will face many more challenges as technologies continue to change, as global communication gets easier and faster, and as the challenges to copyright proliferate and change. These challenges cannot be successfully met on a single front. They require research and expertise from all sectors being affected, and this is why the independent music project (IMP) exists.

100 Songs Project 2011

The Independent Music Project is centred around the development and creation of new music, and includes research into copyright, business models of the future, new technologies, and new audiences. The music industry is undergoing the most radical changes it has faced in almost a century. New digital technologies have made the production, distribution, and promotion of recorded music accessible to anyone with a personal computer. People can now make high-quality digital copies of music and distribute them globally within minutes. Even bastions of the established industries, such as EMI and Columbia, are struggling to make sense of the new industry terrain. The whole employment picture has changed just as radically for people who wish to make a living from music. In Australia, many of the avenues that provided employment for musicians have either disappeared or dramatically shrunk. The advertising industry no longer provides the level of employment it used to prior to the Federal deregulation of the industry in 1992. In many places, new legislative pressures on inner-city and suburban venues have diminished the number of performance spaces that musicians can work in. Just as quickly, new sectors have opened to professional musicians: computer games, ringtones, sound-enabled toys and web advertising all present new opportunities to the enterprising musician. The opportunity to distribute music internationally without being signed to a major label is very attractive to many aspiring and established professionals. No doubt the music industry will face many more challenges as technologies continue to change, as global communication gets easier and faster, and as the challenges to copyright proliferate and change. These challenges cannot be successfully met on a single front. They require research and expertise from all sectors being affected, and this is why the independent music project (IMP) exists.

Creating new folk opera forms of applied theatre for HIV and AIDS education in Papua New Guinea

This research investigated the potential of folk opera as a tool for HIV and AIDS education in Papua New Guinea. It began with an investigation on the indigenous performativities and theatricalities of Papua New Guineans, conducting an audit of eight selected performance traditions in Papua New Guinea. These traditions were analysed, and five cultural forms and twenty performance elements were drawn out for further exploration. These elements were fused and combined with theatre techniques from western theatre traditions, through a script development process involving Australians, Papua New Guineans and international collaborators. The resulting folk opera, entitled Kumul, demonstrates what Murphy (2010) has termed story force, picture force, and feeling force, in the service of a story designed to educate Papua New Guinean audiences about HIV and the need to adopt safer sexual practices. Kumul is the story of a young man faced with decisions on whether or not to engage in risky sexual behaviours. Kumul's narrative is carefully framed within selected Papua New Guinean beliefs drawn from the audit to deliver HIV and AIDS messages using symbolic and metaphoric communication techniques without offending people. The folk opera Kumul was trialled in two communities in Papua New Guinea: a village community and an urban settlement area. Kumul is recognisable to Papua New Guinean audiences because it reflects their lifestyle and a worldview, which connects them to their beliefs and spirituality, and the larger cosmological order. Feedback from audience members indicated that the performance facilitated HIV and AIDS communication, increased people's awareness of HIV and AIDS, and encouraged behaviour change. Tellingly, in one performance venue, forty people queued for Voluntary Testing and Counseling immediately after the performance. Twenty of these people were tested on that night and the other twenty were tested the following day. Many of the volunteers were young men – a demographic historically difficult to engage in HIV testing. This encouraging result indicates that the Kumul folk opera form of applied theatre could be useful for facilitating communication and education regarding sexual health and safer sexual behaviours in Papua New Guinea. Feedback from participants, audience members and other research stakeholders suggests that the form might also be adapted to address other social and development issues, particularly in the areas of health and social justice.

Folk conceptions of humanness: Beliefs about distinctive and core human characteristics in Australia, Italy, and China

The present research explores cultural understandings of what it means to be human. We used open-ended responses to examine whether the most culturally salient aspects of humanness are captured by two theoretical dimensions: human uniqueness (HU) and human nature (HN). Australians, Italians, and Chinese (N = 315) showed differences in the characteristics considered human and in the emphasis placed on HU and HN. These findings contribute to developing cross-cultural folk psychological models of humanness.

Folk theory of social change

People have a folk theory of social change (FTSC). A typical Western FTSC stipulates that as a society becomes more industrialized, it undergoes a natural course of social change, in which a communal society marked by communal relationships becomes a qualitatively different, agentic society where market-based exchange relationships prevail. People use this folk theory to predict a society’s future and estimate its past, to understand contemporary cross-cultural differences, and to make decisions about social policies. Nonetheless, the FTSC is not particularly consistent with the existing cross-cultural research on industrialization and cultural differences, and needs to be examined carefully.

Mrs Curly and the Norwegian Smoking Pipe

Research background: Mrs Curly and the Norwegian Smoking Pipe is a full-length album and book release, produced in collaboration with renowned multi-instrumentalist Linsey Pollak. The project involved the recording and production of Pollak’s original compositions and arrangements of traditional works, drawing on hybrid digital-analog production techniques. The recording of the album was informed by prior scholarly work by Taylor, Feld, Wong and others. These existing studies have discussed the complexities of intercultural collaboration, and the types of cultural politics that are involved in the recording and distribution of what has been known by the term ‘World Music.’ Aspects of applied ethnomusicology have informed the creative work, as a means of interpreting the implicit and explicit complexities that arise through the recording and dissemination of intercultural creative practice. The project asked the research question, in what ways is intercultural music making effected by collaborative practices in the recording studio? Research contribution: This project has identified that the recording and production of intercultural music making involves a complex amalgam of aspects of live or ‘authentic’ performance practices, alongside highly mediated production practices that are influenced by new forms of digital recording technology. Research significance: The compact disc and book was released and promoted on the Marata Music label. The song ‘Plačam za’ was nominated in the World category of the 2015 Queensland Music Awards. The research context of the work is detailed in Gavin Carfoot, 2015 (in press), ‘Musical discovery, colonialism and the possibilities of intercultural communication through music’ in Popular Communication.

My Fair Lady på skandinaviska : En studie i funktionell sångöversättning

The dissertation presents a functional model for analysis of song translation. The model is developed on the basis of an examination of theatrical songs and a comparison of three translations: the songs of the Broadway musical My Fair Lady (Lerner and Loewe, 1956), made for the premiere productions (1959–1960) in Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. The analysis explores the three challenges of a song translator: the fitting of a text to existing music, the consideration of a prospective sung performance, and the verbal approximation of the content of the source lyric. The theoretical foundation is based on a functional approach to translation studies (Christiane Nord) and a structuralist/semiotic analysis of a theatrical message (Ivo Osolsobě, building on Roman Jakobson). Thus, three functional levels in the fitting of a text to music are explored: first, a prosodic/phonetic format; secondly, a poetic/rhetoric format; and thirdly, semantic/reflexive values (verbalizing musical expression). Similarly, three functional levels in the textual connections to a prospective performance are explored: first, a presentational goal; secondly, the theatrical potential; and thirdly, dramaturgic values (for example dramatic information and linguistic register). The functionality of Broadway musical theatre songs is analyzed, and the song score of My Fair Lady, source and target lyrics, is studied, with an in-depth analysis of seven of the songs. The three translations were all considered very well-made and are used in productions of the musical to this day. The study finds that the song translators appear to have worked from an understanding of the presentational goal, designed their target texts on the prosodic and poetic shape of the music, and pursued the theatrical functionality of the song, not by copying, but by recreating connections to relevant contexts, partly independently of the source lyrics, using the resources of the target languages. Besides metaphrases (closest possible transfer), paraphrases and additions seem normally to be expected in song translation, but song translators may also follow highly individual strategies – for example, the Norwegian translator is consistently more verbally faithful than the Danish and Swedish translators. As a conclusion, it is suggested that although linguistic and cultural difference play a significant role, a translator’s solution must nevertheless be arrived at, and assessed, in relation to the song as a multimedial piece of material. As far as a song can be considered a theatrical message – singers representing the voice, person, and situation of the song – the descriptive model presented in the study is also applicable to the translation of other types of song.

Ystävä sä lapsien : Lasten virret ja hengelliset laulut suomenkielisissä kokoelmissa 1824-1938 ja niiden vaikutus vuoden 1938 virsikirjaan

Ystävä sä lapsien. Collections of Finnish language children s hymns and spiritual songs from 1824─1938 and their influence on the Hymnal 1938. The Hymnal has been the common song book of Lutheran parishes since the 1500s. In the beginning, the congregations sang the hymns from memory led by the choir or the church musician. The fundamentals of Christian faith are taught through the hymns, both in church and in family devotions. The Hymnal was the only song book of the church in Finland until the end of the 1800s. This study attempts to clarify when and by who were spiritual songs and hymns for children written in Finland. Research materials used were all the books I could find (approximately 200), whose headings were for pupils and young children in the home and school circles. The method of study is historical and analytical. In the first chapter, it is explained that children s literature in Finland differentiated from other literature at the end of the 1700s. Eric Juvelius published a small prayer book in 1781 with the prayer Gud, som hafver barnen kär / Jumala joka Lapsia rakasta. From that, after many Finnish translations, the first verse of the hymn Ystävä sä lapsien took shape. The second chapter considers singing instruction in the folk school from the beginning of the 1860s. Textbooks, including songbooks, were produced for the pupils. Some of the first pioneers in producing these materials were the teachers P.J. Hannikainen, Sofie Lithenius, Mikael Nyberg, Anton Rikström and Aksel Törnudd, as well as Hilja Haahti, Immi Hellén and Alli Nissinen, who were all teachers gifted in writing poetry. Several new spiritual songs appeared in the folk school songbooks. Hymns were sung often, especially in connection with church year celebrations. Children s songs in Christian education are discussed in the third chapter. The Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland recognized children already in its early song collections. The illustrative teaching methods in the folk school influenced the Sunday school activities and especially the Sunday school hymns. Hymns introduced as exclusively for children and pupils which appear in the Hymnal from 1886 and the supplement to the 1923 Hymnal are explored in the fourth and fifth chapters. The study shows that the renewal of church life at the beginning of the 1900s also resulted in an increase of the number of spiritual songs for children. This is also seen in the diverse choice of songs in the supplementary materials from 1923. The final chapter deals with the School and Childhood section of the 1938 Hymnal. The Hymnal committee did not think that the already well known folk school and Sunday school songs received enough attention in the Hymnal. Those songs were, among others, Kautta tyynen, vienon yön, Oi, katsopa lintua oksalla puun, Olen Luojani pikku varpunen, Rakas Isä taivahan ja Tuolla keinuu pieni pursi. Heikki Klemetti, Ilmari Krohn, Armas Maasalo and Aarni Voipio influenced the opinion that the spiritual songs still were not suitable to be sung in church. Hymns for children and pupils were brought into the same line as the entire Hymnal. The same hymn tunes, which were mainly old ones, were used as common settings for numerous hymn texts. No special type of melody emerged for the children s hymns. It was still notable that hymns for children and pupils were collected at all. In addition, the Hymnal committee marked those verses suggested for singing in both the folk school and Sunday school with an asterisk (*) throughout the entire Hymnal.

‘Enough is enough’: Songs and messages about alcohol in remote Central Australia

This article examines some of the ways in which Australia’s First Peoples have responded to serious community health concerns about alcohol through the medium of popular music. The writing, performing and recording of popular songs about alcohol provide an important example of community-led responses to health issues, and the effectiveness of music in communicating stories and messages about alcohol has been recognised through various government-funded recording projects. This article describes some of these issues in remote Australian Aboriginal communities, exploring a number of complexities that arise through arts-based ‘instrumentalist’ approaches to social and health issues. It draws on the author’s own experience and collaborative work with Aboriginal musicians in Tennant Creek, a remote town in Australia’s Northern Territory.

Bättre folk, bättre smak? : Suomenruotsalaisten maku ja kulttuuripääoma

The aim of my thesis, which consists of five original articles and a summarizing chapter, is to study the identity, lifestyle and cultural taste of the Finnish Swedes, i.e. the Swedish-speaking language minority in Finland, from a qualitative point of view. The Finnish Swedes are a somewhat special minority, first of all because of their wide-ranging language rights guaranteed by the constitution, and secondly because of the common image that Finnish Swedes represent a more legitimate or better lifestyle and taste than the Finnish-Speaking Finns. This conception is corroborated by the fact that, in comparison to the language majority, the Swedish-speakers have better health, employment, income and so on according to a number of quantitative studies. My research data is composed of twenty-six focus group interviews conducted among a geographically and socio-economically wide range of Swedish-speaking Finns. Group sizes ranged from 3 to 11 people. In the interviews, culture was approached through a framework of seven topics: music, cinema, television, arts, reading, eating and clothing. In each focus group interview, two subfields of culture were discussed along with a short section about cultural events and participation and definitions on good and bad taste. After discussing culture and taste, there was a final discussion on the Finnish Swede identity. The main theoretical framework of my thesis comes from Pierre Bourdieu (1979) and his followers: I am asking whether the status of being a Swedish-speaker can be used as a means of distinction. The main research questions are the following: (1) How does the Swedish-speaking minority look studied in the light of extensive qualitative data and in a framework of lifestyle and taste? (2) What kind of differences in lifestyle, taste and linguistic identity are there between different Finnish Swedes and how do those connect with socio-economical position, place of residence or age? I also ask how belonging to the language minority might work as a tool for cultural distinction and how different Swedish-speaking groups take use of it. My main research question is (3) whether mother tongue is a remarkable factor of lifestyle or cultural taste in contemporary Finland.