An orchestral audience: Classical music and continued patterns of distinction

This paper considers the key findings of a year-long collaborative research project focusing on the audience of the London Symphony Orchestra and their introduction of a new mobile telephone (‘app’) ticketing system. A mixed-method approach was employed, utilizing focus groups and questionnaires with over 80 participants, to research a sample group of university students. This research develops our understanding of classical music audiences, and highlights the continued individualistic, middle-class, and exclusionary culture of classical music attendance and patterns of behaviours. The research also suggests that a mobile phone app does prove a useful mechanism for selling discounted tickets, but shows little indication of being a useful means of expanding this audience beyond its traditional demographic.

Auto-tune, and why we shouldn't be surprised that Britney can't sing

Put Britney Spears into a YouTube search and the third auto-fill on the list is “Britney Spears without Autotune”. Auto-Tune has become the music industry equivalent of doping in the Tour de France circa 2005; we know everyone’s doing it, but we still have a sense of surprise and outrage when it becomes public. In the last week or so a video has surfaced of the pop singer Britney Spears – with examples of her vocal before and after processing. Whether or not the “before” version is actually the raw material for the “after” version is difficult to say. What’s not difficult to say is that the “before” vocal is distinctly lacking in a demonstrable ability to sing in tune.

The urgent need for career preview: Student expectations and graduate realities in music and dance

Unlike the work available in many creative disciplines, musicians and dancers have the possibility of full-time, company-based employment; however, participants far outweigh the number of available positions. As a result, many graduates become ‘enforced entrepreneurs’ as they shape their work to meet personal and professional needs. This paper first explores the career projections of 58 music and dance students who were surveyed in their first week of post-secondary study. It then contrasts these findings with the reality of graduate careers as reported by five of that cohort four years later. In contrast with the students’ overwhelming focus on performance roles, the graduate cohort reported a prevalence of portfolio careers incorporating both creative and non-creative roles. The paper characterises the notion of a performing arts ‘career’ as a messy concept fraught with misunderstanding. Implications include the need to heighten students’ career awareness and position intrinsic satisfaction as a valued career concept.

'Doing-things-with-music'-the newest arm of the industry

Even though revenues from recorded music have fallen dramatically over the past fifteen years, people across the world are not listening to less music. Actually, they listen to more recorded music than ever before. Recorded music permeates throughout almost every aspect of our daily lives...

North West Music Festival in Port Hedland, Western Australia

A travel article about a music festival in Port Hedland, Western Australia. At first, the crowd gathers in small groups, as though we’ve arrived at a picnic day. Girls in long skirts wearing bands in their hair call out across the wide lawn of the Turf Club, and run over to meet friends. They sit cross-legged in the sun, half swaying to the music, chatting. On stage, Thelma Plum, a girl with a voice from the 1960s, circles her lyrics with her hands. You wonder if she’s casting a spell, an appeal to the decade of revolutions...

Music for the Pria Dewasa : changes and continuities in class and pop music genres

This paper presents Rolling Stone Indonesia (RSI) and places it in an historical context to tease out some changes and continuities in Indonesian middle-class politics since the beginning of the New Order. Some political scientists have claimed that class interests were at the core of the transition from Guided Democracy to the New Order, and popular music scholars generally assert that class underlies pop genre distinctions. But few have paid attention to how class and genre were written into Indonesian pop in the New Order period; Indonesian pop has a fascinating political history that has so far been overlooked. Placing RSI in historical perspective can reveal much about the print media’s classing of pop under New Order era political constraints, and about the ways these modes of classing may or may not have endured in the post-authoritarian, globalised and liberalised media environment.

Vocal repertoire of the New Zealand kea parrot Nestor notabilis

The unique alpine-living kea parrot Nestor notabilis has been the focus of numerous cognitive studies, but its communication system has so far been largely neglected. We examined 2,884 calls recorded in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. Based on audio and visual spectrographic differences, these calls were categorised into seven distinct call types: the non-oscillating ‘screech’ contact call and ‘mew’; and the oscillating ‘trill’, ‘chatter’, ‘warble’ and ‘whistle’; and a hybrid ‘screech-trill’. Most of these calls contained aspects that were individually unique, in addition to potentially encoding for an individual’s sex and age. Additionally, for each recording, the sender’s previous and next calls were noted, as well as any response given by conspecifics. We found that the previous and next calls made by the sender were most often of the same type, and that the next most likely preceding and/or following call type was the screech call, a contact call which sounds like the ‘kee-ah’ from which the bird’s name derives. As a social bird capable of covering large distances over visually obstructive terrain, long distance contact calls may be of considerable importance for social cohesion. Contact calls allow kea to locate conspecifics and congregate in temporary groups for social activities. The most likely response to any given call was a screech, usually followed by the same type of call as the initial call made by the sender, although responses differed depending on the age of the caller. The exception was the warble, the kea’s play call, to which the most likely response was another warble. Being the most common call type, as well as the default response to another call, it appears that the ‘contagious’ screech contact call plays a central role in kea vocal communication and social cohesion

Interactive music formats : will audiences interact?

The purpose of this research was to conduct a pilot study of a prototype interactive music release format which sought to investigate the readiness of audiences to interact with an interactive alternative to a fixed recorded work. A prototype music interface was created for testing. The prototype was then tested on a sample of users to understand what factors might be critical to audience engagement. The research further investigated the potential implications of the interactive release format on musicians' creative process.

The impact of relaxing music on insomnia-related thoughts and behaviours

Insomnia is a pervasive problem involving poor sleep quality and quantity. Previous research has suggested that music listening can help alleviate insomnia, but exactly how music helps sleep problems has not been determined. A greater understanding of these processes could help practitioners to design more effective music-based insomnia treatments. This randomised controlled trial was designed to assess the influences of nightly music listening on the sleep-related thoughts and behaviours described in Harvey’s (2002) cognitive model of insomnia maintenance. University students, including a range of good and poor sleepers, were randomly assigned to a music listening group or a control group and were assessed before and after a two-week music listening intervention. Measures included a range of self-report scales, each assessing an element of Harvey’s cognitive model. During the intervention, the music listening group was asked to listen to provided music for at least 20 minutes each night. The control group was asked to maintain their regular nightly routines. Results indicated that the music listening group significantly improved on most of the factors theorised to influence sleep quality, although their actual sleep quality did not significantly improve. The control group did not change significantly on any measures. The results of this study suggest that music listening can have positive impacts on a range of factors theorised to influence sleep quality. However, as the music was not shown to actually improve sleep quality, Harvey’s cognitive model explanation of music’s effect on sleep quality may require further investigation.

Associations between early shared music activities in the home and later child outcomes : findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children

The benefits of early shared book reading between parents and children have long been established,yet the same cannot be said for early shared music activities in the home. This study investigated the parent–child home music activities in a sample of 3031 Australian children participating in Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) study. Frequency of shared home music activities was reported by parents when children were 2–3 years and a range of social, emotional,and cognitive outcomes were measured by parent and teacher report and direct testing two years later when children were 4–5 years old. A series of regression analyses (controlling for a set of important socio-demographic variables) found frequency of shared home music activities to have a small significant partial association with measures of children’s vocabulary, numeracy, attentional and emotional regulation, and prosocial skills. We then included both book reading and shared home music activities in the same models and found that frequency of shared home music activities maintained small partial associations with measures of prosocial skills, attentional regulation, and numeracy. Our findings suggest there may be a role for parent-child home music activities in supporting children’s development.

From music student to industry professional: An entrepreneurial learning design

This design-based research project addresses the gap between formal music education curricula and the knowledge and skills necessary to enter the professional music industry. It analyses the work of a teacher/researcher who invited her high school students to start their own business venture, Youth Music Industries (YMI). YMI also functioned as a learning environment informed by the theoretical concepts of communities of practice and social capital. The students staged cycles of events of various scales over a three-year period, as platforms for young artists to engage and develop new, young audiences across Queensland, Australia. The study found that students developed an entrepreneurial mindset through acquisition of specific skills and knowledge. Their learning was captured and distilled into a set of design principles, a pedagogical approach transferrable across the creative industries more broadly.

Book Review: "Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World". Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

It is rare to find an anthology that realizes the possibilities of the form. We tend to regard our edited collections as lesser siblings, and forget their special value. But at times, a subject seems to require an edited collection much more than it does a classic monograph. So it is with the subject showcased here, which concerns the global circulation, performance and consumption of heavy metal. This is a relatively new and emerging body of work, hitherto scattered disparately in the broader popular music studies, but quickly gaining status as a “studies” with the establishment of a global conference, a journal, and publication of this anthology, all in recent years. Metal Rules the Globe took the editors’ a decade to compile. That they have thought deeply about how they want the collection to speak shows through in the book’s thoughtful arrangement and design, and in the way in which they draw on the contributions herein to develop for the field a research agenda that will take it forward...

Self-regulation support through music

A critical dimension of early learning competence in the year prior to school is self-regulation. Self-regulation enables children to manage their emotions and direct their attention, thinking, and actions to meet adaptive goals. These skills enhance young children's readiness to learn.