ComMUSICity_Research Paper

ComMUSICity Yu Zhang Design & Technology, Parsons 6 E. 16th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10011 zhany420@newshcool.edu fully enjoy the music. People dance together, sing together, and communicate with each other mutually. It is amazing.

ABSTRACT

With technology’s increasing prevalence, social experience, emotional experience and even the human mind are changing tremendously. Traditionally, people used to gather in one certain location, interacting at the same time through talking and dancing- creating very specific ways of experiencing sound and image. Today, people can experience media, and communicate, at a global scale instantaneously: digital personal assistants, smartphones and tablets increasingly become the main platform for these experiences.

Dread Scott once said, “I think that all people are responsible for fighting for the direction of society. If you can see that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is you should act on this understanding. If you are an artist and have the freedom to wrangle with ideas and are communicating your worldview for a living, your work can enable people to grapple with and engage some of the big ideas before humanity” [1]. So I want to use my cognitive knowledge and do something to act as my understanding.

KEYWORDS

MY ROLE AS A DESIGNER/ARTIST

Social media; communication; participatory culture; society engagement; individual temperament; resonance; facial expressions; mobile communication; physical co-presence; sound influence; affect; background; interface; live performance; ambience; community; unity.

Traditionally, a designer’s job is passively being asked to satisfy the needs of clients by working the form of physical artworks. This form has been evolving over time to meet the needs of globalization and the widespread use of media.

It is interesting to explore how individuals interact with media, and how this kind of relationship influences both individuals and media. As a designer and artist in contemporary society, I learn from other individuals and try to discover their underlying relationships with media.

Through the complexity of the media transition, the ways of people interacting with each other are no longer mutually exchange symbols that are interpreted as being meaningful.

So my goal is to develop social engagement through live music. The expected result should bring its audiences who share the same resonance with a certain type of music into an interactive community, stimulate the imagination of users, and allow it’s openness to interpretation.

INTRODUCTION

The idea of focusing this topic actually started from 2011 while I was completing my bachelor degree in University of Oregon. During the lectures, it is not difficult to find that almost every students in the classroom were using laptops, of course, most of them were taking notes, but a few of them were playing Facebook. At that time, technology has gradually entered everyone’s lives. When my journalism instructor raised a question, whose relationship broke only because of social media, half of the class raised their hands.

Obviously, the virtual world provided by technology has already created a huge impact to people. This phenomenon also can be seen while people are waiting for the subway, whether in New York or Shanghai, almost everyone is using their cell phones, whether they are alone or have companies. At the restaurant, this phenomenon is even more obvious. Since when did people choose to use personal digital assistant to interact with each other instead of mutually communicating?

To reach that goal, my design process basically consists of four stages: Research, Analysis, Prototype and Test, and last three stages are the flexible loop (figure 1.1). Each section contains different theories and methods that prepare me to produce innovative responses to social issues.

Interestingly, human’s behaviors and minds are changing when the situation changes. In the music festival, concert or live performance, people here were more willing to put down their phones, or other personal digital assistants, and Figure 1.1: Design Process

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cognized based on objectified knowledge that is the outcome of social relations. However, the problem of that is, people are not mutually exchange symbols that are interpreted as being meaningful [2]. In other words, they did not communicate with each other directly, but observe the essence of things through a third platform (social media).

RESEARCH My research stage will focus on Social Media, Social Engagement and Sound Influence. I will start talking about social media, because the possibilities of social media and social engagement are inextricably linked. Such as how social media is dividing a group of people to individuals, then research why music is so appealing, which can gather people in one community again.

2. Participatory Culture

Participatory culture is an important section to constitute this society. The participatory culture model is often opposed to the mass media and broadcasting model typical, where there is one sender and many recipient [2]. In this case, the sender can be considered as newspapers, radio and television, and the recipient is audience. Essentially, mass media is the transmission of filtered information to large audiences at the same time. According to the agenda-setting theory (figure 1.2), first developed by Prof. Maxwell McCombs and Prof. Donald Shaw in their Chapel Hill study. Two basis assumptions underlie most research on agenda-setting: (1) the press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it; (2) media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads to the public to perceive those issues as more important than other issues [4].

Social Media

Before defining what is social media, let’s ask what is society? A society consists of a group of various individuals, who have different culture, background or even perspective, like a system with multiple components. Owing to this difference, people need a third platform to exchange messages to enrich individual’s cognitive field. Originally, human used language as the main platform to exchange idea or message. Through the fast growth of technology (computing system), people start to share information in a virtual society through various social media, like Facebook, Instagram or Youtube.

1. Virtual Communication

Communication is the basic tool for humans to have activity, and also the basic form to build this community.

Fuchs Christian mentioned in his book, Social Media: A Critical Introduction, “Communication is a reciprocal process between at least two humans, in which symbols are exchanged and all interaction partners give meaning to these symbols” [2]. Humans couldn’t live in a community without communication or share information. According to Hofkichner, “information (cognition), communication and co-operation are three nested and integrated modes of sociality. They are encapsulated into each other”. Social media nowadays are various, social networking sites (Facebook), video sharing sites (Youtube), blogs (Wordpress) etc. Those are tools for people to share information. All media are information technologies, which enters into the human realm of knowledge as social facts that shape thinking. They enable the recursive exchange of information between humans in social relations [2]. We increasingly use mobile phones to navigate through the day and to coordinate our activities. Teens are using the mobile phone to exchange jokes, to keep in contact with one another, and to plan their days. Pre-teens are using the device to maintain contact with their parents and as a vicarious umbilical cord. Young adults are using mobile communication in their pursuit of careers and in the establishment of more or less stable relationships. Parents are using it to decide who should pick up the children and who should go shopping for groceries [3]. Interestingly, when people are using the social media platforms, they

Figure 1.2: Agenda-setting Theory

Comparing to the traditional broadcasting model typical of one-way transmission, people in contemporary society are more willing to use the Internet, where they have more freedom to exchange symbols anytime and anywhere.

Audience on the Internet can be both seen as either a sender or a recipient. Then the Web has become a site of consumer participation. Ferdinand Tonnies believed that “the very existence of community rests in the consciousness of belonging together and the affirmation of the condition of mutual dependence [2]. There is no doubt that almost every users are motivated by social and communicative needs and desires to use social media. This kind of virtual or digital network community can afford a sense of belonging or security, then turn people into one part of it. However, when people are using the third platform to exchange messages, they are not communicate with each other face2

to-face, which leads to a fake reality. Due to the increasing users on the Internet, and it is the main platform for people to receive messages, which causes a question of who can control or influence this digital network community? For Manuel Castells, social media communication is mass selfcommunication. He argues that the emergence of this type of communication has resulted in profound shifts in the power structures of society. People do not simply live in a society, but that they live in capitalist societies and that capitalism needs to be considered as the context of the Internets [2].

the joint attention that people accepted is also somehow various. How are people able to share attention and experience with others? Why do they share attention and experiences with others? The second question leads to reflection on the motivational factors and processes that contribute to the human tendency to share experience with others. For example, consider the following vignette. You are going to be part of the audience at an event that you are sure you will thoroughly enjoy (a play, a concert, a sporting event, etc.). You have a choice: You can go alone or take a friend along. Many, if not most, people will choose the company of a friend. Moreover, during the event, there is a strong likelihood that you and your friend will exchange eye contact and experience a sense of relatedness at some point in response to your shared experience of an especially interesting or emotionally stimulating incident that occurs during the event. In that moment the two of you are socially engaged in joint attention [6]. In other words, this kind of joint attention can also be considered as social resonance.

You and your friend have the common thoughts or feelings in this event.

Society Engagement

The term social engagement is different from the concept of a social network, as social network focuses on a group, rather than the activity (Prohaska, Anderson & Binstock, 2012). Key elements of social engagement include: (a) activity (doing something), (b) interaction (at least two people need to be involved in this activity), (c) social exchange (the activity involves giving or receiving something from others), and (d) lack of compulsion (there is no outside force forcing an individual to engage in the activity) [5]. What are the key components of social engagement? In answering this question, it is helpful to divide up the list of components into those that are inherent in the individual versus those that are dyadic. For example, the ability to perceive faces and perhaps to discriminate between facial expressions of emotion is inherent in the individual, as is the ability to express a range of emotions [6]. Thus, through cognitive capacities associated with the development of social engagement, my research will specifically focus on individual temperament and facial expressions.

Social engagement is the notion of shared affective experience. There is a great deal of discussion regarding this aspect of social interaction. Some researchers believe it is an uniquely human characteristic to understand that someone else has an affective experience similar to one’s own and that both individuals may share in that experience (Tomasello & Haberl, 2003; Tomasello & Rakoczy, 2003).

The construct of joint attention has received a great deal of interest as an initial indicator of shared affective experience [6].

In that way, why do we, as infants, children, and adults, engage in this behavior even when viewing the event by ourselves would be pleasurable? Does the sharing of experience with others hold some positive reward value that motivates people to engage in acts of joint attention throughout the life span? Does this motivation system assist in bootstrapping the development of joint attention and its critical early self-organizing functions in human social development? Some would respond with an unequivocal yes to these questions and go on to suggest that human beings have an intrinsic motivation for sharing of experience or inter-subjectivity that is important for the early organization of social and cognitive development (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001; Hobson, 2002). One of the factors that may organize early development is an intrinsic preference to orient to social stimuli and faces (Bard, Platzman, Lester, & Suomi, 1992; Valenza, Simion, Cassia, & Umilta, 1996) and related motivation processes that promote face-to-face interaction involving the facial and vocal expression of positive affect (Trevarthen, 1979; Stern, 1985). In particular, Trevarthen and Aitken (2001) suggest that there is an intrinsic motivation function to share affective experience with others. In its first phase of development, this involves face-to-face sharing of nonverbal emotional information, or what has been referred to as primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979) [6].

One example of a biological approach to individual differences in social and emotional development is the study of temperament. Temperament has been conceptualized as “characteristic individual differences in the way basic emotions are experienced and expressed” (Goldsmith, 1994). Emotions are generally seen as interpersonal phenomena, and “characteristic” implies cross- situational stability and temporal stability [6]. Owing to the difference of individual’s temperament or personality,

In terms of neural development, this motivation system is theoretically mediated by orbitofrontal and temporal brain systems involved in the perception of social stimuli (e.g., facial affect) and the association of these stimuli with positive reward value (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001).

According to this model, sensitivity to the reward value of these stimuli is inherent to human beings and possibly mediated by a neuropeptide-based endogenous social reward system (Panksepp, 1979) [6]. When you send a

1. Individual Temperament in Joint Attention

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signal or a topic to others, those who share a joint attention or emotional experience with you subjectively generate a positive response or reaction, in that moment, the two of you are all resonated to this signal or topic together.

Different groups of people who accepted different joint attentions are because they need a social resonance to achieve a sense of belonging, or they desire to have social engagement.

3. Enter of Mobile Communication

Traditionally, people used to gather in one place, share same ambience, and receive messages together through the mass media, like a whole family watch television together.

Through the increasingly number of personal digital devices, especially mobile communication, enter human’s life, then this kind of interactive technology has became the dominant force in social engagement.

Mobile communication has altered the way that social situations develop and the way that they are carried off.

Before the development of telecommunications, we could converse with only those who were near at hand. It was possible to correspond, of course, with letters, but these were widely asynchronous. With the development of the telegraph, message transmission was nearly simultaneous, at least between telegraph offices. The final delivery of a message relied on the transport of a piece of paper. The telephone extended this kind of simultaneity into the home and to specific geographic locations (offices, phone booths, etc.). Mobile communication, however, has meant that we can talk to others regardless of where they are [3]. However, the problem lies with the evolution of technology, the way people receive information through mobile nowadays is no longer as profound as through facial expressions.

2. Facial Expressions of Emotions

What Are Facial Expressions? The ability to pick out a face from other objects and patterns in the visual environment is an important skill, but equally important is the ability to read the various types of information the face itself contains, such as facial expressions of emotion. Facial expressions of emotion can be defined as characteristic movements of the face that adults readily identify as representing discrete emotions (Ekman, 1972). Although there remains a debate regarding the degree to which recognition of facial expressions is universal across cultures and the degree to which recognition is influenced by socialization within a culture (for a history and discussion of this debate, see Ekman, 1998), a number of emotional expressions are recognized relatively consistently across different cultures and are described as the “basic� emotions [6]. This kind of basic emotions is innate to human, regardless of infants, children or adults, and they all have different interpretations on the facial expressions of the emotions of others based on experiences. People usually analyze the inherent emotional meaning through observing the facial expressions of others.

Ritual interaction takes place when the participants in a situation share a common mood and recognize their mutual entrainment. These interactions develop into a broader sense of solidarity where the individuals share the same perspective, talk about the same issues, and submit to the same ideals. Ito and Okabe (2005) write:

The process of recognizing facial expressions of emotion is typically described as involving at least two steps: perception and recognition of meaning. Perception of a facial expression involves the basic ability to perceive the features that define one expression and allow it to be discriminated from another expression. Recognition of the meaning of an expression refers to the ability to link this percept to some other source of information regarding its meaning. In adults, a variety of sources of information are potentially available to contribute to recognition of the meaning of an expression (Adolphs, 2002): (a) knowledge of the verbal label for the expression, (b) conceptual knowledge about the emotion the expression conveys, (c) perception of an emotional response in the self that viewing the expression triggers, and (d) knowledge about the motor representations required to produce the expression. For example, human infants may be born with specialized perceptual abilities to process faces (Morton & Johnson, 1991). They learn that certain faces and people provide reinforcement, reward, or security more than others, and that people often share affective information via facial expression, gesture, and voice (Walker-Andrews, 1997) [6].

If even an infant need to process faces through observing, evidently, the facial expressions play a significant role to develop social engagement.

. . . mobile phones do undermine prior definitions of social situations, but they also define new technosocial situations and new boundaries of identity and place. To say that mobile phones cross boundaries, heighten accessibility, and fragment social life is to see only one side of the dynamic social reconfigurations heralded by mobile communications. Mobile phones create new kinds of bounded places that merge infrastructures of geography and technology, as well as technosocial practices that merge technical standards and social norms.

As can be seen from many phenomena currently, face-toface rituals can be set into the background when the flux of a mobile phone conversation might demand that able to have an engrossing conversation with a friend or a colleague [3]. Just like I mentioned in previous Social Media section, the way of people interacting with each other through mobile communication are no longer mutually exchange symbols that are interpreted as being meaningful. Besides, some people nowadays would love to use ideograms (emoji) to express personal emotions, which can easily lead to misunderstand, and people try so hard to figure out the meaning of ideograms. After all such ideograms can be understood in different ways from different people. When the information is no longer specific, people will gradually become more emotionally numb or

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lazy. Comparing to this virtual situation, the face-to-face interaction is based on same location, same ambience, and also take advantage of both audio and visual1.

In 1947, the architect Aldo van Eyck built his first playground in Amsterdam, on the Bertelmanplein (figure 1.3). Many hundreds more followed, in a spatial experiment that has (positively) marked the childhood of an entire generation. Though largely disappeared, defunct and forgotten today, these playgrounds represent one of the most emblematic of architectural interventions in a pivotal time: the shift from the top down organization of space by modernist functionalist architects, towards a bottom up architecture that literally aimed to give space to the imagination. Immediately after the Second World War, Dutch cities were in a state of dereliction, whereas almost no space for children was available. Van Eyck’s playgrounds, initially build on temporarily unused plots of land, can be seen as an emergency measure, but they had a significance far beyond that of a creative solution in a time of need. Van claimed, “‘functionalism has killed creativity’.

A building is more than the sum of its functions; architecture has to facilitate human activity and promote social interaction.” For him the playgrounds were an opportunity to test out his ideas on architecture, relativity and imagination.

Randall Collins (2004) is explicit in saying that to engender cohesion a ritual cannot be mediated. Indeed, he says, physical co-presence is a requisite aspect of ritual interaction. It is clear that face-to-face or body-to-body (Fortunati, 2005) interaction is the most efficient way of generating Collins’s focused emotions and mutual recognition. According to Durkheim, in order to be merged into a single cohesive whole individuals must shout the same cry, say the same words, and perform the same action before they “arrive at and experience agreement” (1995).

That is, they must experience a collective co-present ecstatic event that is highly focused and that has, in the words of Collins, a high degree of entrainment. In short, Durkheim provides us with the sense of how ritual interaction can serve as a kind of social glue. In the case of mobile communication, rather than examining a ritual peopled by a large number of celebrants, we are faced with examining two people talking on their mobile phones.

Rather than uttering the same cry and performing the same action in co-present unison, we are faced with people who are not even within shouting distance. By and large, Goffman is a “face-to-face” man. He says that the full notion of a situation includes “the sense that they (the interactants) are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experiencing of others, and close enough to be perceived in their sensing of being perceived” (Durkheim, 1963; Goffman, 1967) [3].

Different elements of the playgrounds represented a break with the past. First and foremost, the playgrounds proposed a different conception of space. Van Eyck consciously designed the equipment in a very minimalist way, to stimulate the imagination of the users (the children), the idea being that they could appropriate the space by it’s openness to interpretation. The second aspect is the modular character of the playgrounds. The basic elements – sandpits, tumbling bars, stepping stones, chutes and hemispheric jungle gyms – could endlessly be recombined in differing polycentric compositions depending on the requirements of the local environment. The third aspect is the relationship with the urban environment, the “inbetween” or “interstitial” nature of the playgrounds. The design of the playgrounds was aimed at interaction with the surrounding urban tissue.

Case Study: The City as Playground

The focus on how space could be appropriated, stood in clear opposition to the prevailing modernist conception of space in architecture, most famously formulated by Giedion in his classic Space, Time and Architecture where he defined the essence of modernist architecture as the merger of space and time, creating the experience of movement.

Van Eyck’s concerns were of a completely different nature: “Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion.” The transitory playground was “place” and “occasion” combined [7].

Figure 1.3: Aldo van Eyck and the City as Playground

Sound Influence 1

Although there are some visual communication softwares (Skype, Facetime) available nowadays, physical co-presence interaction still seems more real in most situations.

Music surrounds us. It is inescapable, and we have no desire to escape it [8]. Benjamin Zander mentioned in his TED talk, “you cannot be tone-deaf. Nobody is tone-deaf. If you were tone-deaf, you couldn't change the gears on your 5

car, in a stick shift car. You couldn't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome.

And the telephone, if your mother calls on the miserable telephone, she calls and says, ‘Hello’, you not only know who it is, you know what mood she's in. You have a fantastic ear. Everybody has a fantastic ear. So nobody is tone-deaf” [9]. At the same time, we will also use the personal digital assistant to listen to the latest songs, or go to a concert to enjoy a live performance. These sounds or music are deeply attracted us.

intensity of neural firing: “any stimulus with a relatively sudden onset and a steep increase in the rate of neural firing will innately activate a startle response [...] if the rate of neural firing is increased less rapidly then fear will be innately activated” (Tomkins, 1995). When conjoined with thought, these “neuro-physiological events” become feelings, and may be “elaborated into the more complex blends of affect which comprise emotion” (Gibbs, 2001).

So when conjoined with thought, these “neurophysiological events” become feelings, and may be “elaborated into the more complex blends of affect which comprise emotion” (Gibbs, 2001). Thus, while affects play a role in the formulation of feeling and emotions, they nevertheless remain distinct: affects are discrete and innate, while emotions can be thought of as more complex and personal. Like, Affects may also shape the trajectory of the drives: for example, shame or anxiety may work to diminish a sexual drive [10].

1. Sound as Affect

We can’t define a certain type of sound or music is touching, because everyone has different definition to "touching". Maybe some people think Rock&Roll can be irritating or exciting, but some might not. So can we define the relationship between sound and human senses? Here we should talk about “affect”. We could say that music is the catalyst for affect.

So why people eager to listen to music? Or they eager to listen to a certain type of music? Affect is commonly thought in terms of feeling or emotion, an event bound to “labor in the bodily mode”, of which the products are “intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion” (Hardt & Negri, 2001). We often use music affectively to encourage or emphasize a particular mood or create a general ambience: we have our pre-party soundtrack, our romantic-night-in mix tapes, or our chill-out compilations. We have our personal MP3 playlists for the gym that encourage us to run faster and for longer, and our “mood-managing” smartphone apps such as Moodagent. There are those “Utopian” moments on the dancefloor, where the sound and rhythm becomes an affective glue, bringing together dancing bodies. The DJ and the crowd exist in a feedback loop, whereby the DJ’s track selections shape the mood of the crowd, while the mood of the crowd shapes the DJ’s track selections. In some sense, we have always known about the intimate relationship between sound and affectivity, even if we haven’t expressed it in quite the same language [10].

What do we mean by affect here? The question, though, is never really what affect means but what it does. Broadly speaking, the emergence of what Patricia Ticineto Clough (2008) refers to as “the affective turn” marks a (return to) interest in the relationship between bodies (in the broadest sense – including animal bodies, part-bodies and inorganicbodies) and the fluctuations of feeling that shape the experiential in ways that may impact upon but nevertheless evade conscious knowing. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation, as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities (2010). For Brian Massumi, affect exists as “the excluded middle” 2 , the third state between activity and passivity, occupying the gap between content and effect [10].

With Tomkins, affects give name to neuro-physiological processes and mechanisms that function as a basic and more or less universal “primary motivator” 3 . Tomkins considers there to be nine affects: enjoyment–joy, interest– excitement, surprise–startle, anger–rage, distress–anguish, and fear–terror, shame–humiliation, disgust and “dis-smell”.

These are qualitatively differentiated by the gradient and

In Benjamin’s TED talk, the Transformative Power of Classical Music, he told a story about how classical music can be so touching: I was in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. And I played Nocturne by Chopin with them. This is a risky thing to do, because they were street kids. And one of them came to me the next morning and he said, "You know, I've never listened to classical music in my life, but when you played that piece of music." He said, "My brother was shot last year and I didn't cry for him. But last night, when you played that piece, he was the one I was thinking about. And I felt the tears streaming down my face. And you know, it felt really good to cry for my brother."

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With the term the “excluded middle”, Massumi is making reference to Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle, the third of the three classic laws of thought (the first being the law of identity and the second being the law of non-contradiction) and states that either that proposition is true, or its negation is true – the truth of the famous statement “Socrates is mortal”, for example, is an either/or selection, it is either true or false – he is either mortal or he is not. In other words, there is no middle ground. In existing in the space between contradiction, the middle of the excluded middle, Massumi’s notion of affect thus troubles such principles, running against the grain of much twentieth-century thought that takes Aristolian principles as its ontological basis. For more on this, see Andrew Murphie’s informative “Affect – a basic summary of approaches”(2010).

At that moment, Benjamin made up his mind that classical music is for everybody. Everybody [9].

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This is not to say that all cultures have the same affective responses to the same things.

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transformations to the extent that it is logical without being fixed in connotation, expressive without being literal in its symbolism. Her formulation in Philosophy in a New Key is that “music articulates forms which language cannot set forth”. In other words, music is a powerful medium for making meaning. Perhaps this is because music is so abstract. No effort to label music, to turn it into a species of “program” music, has ever worked. We write about music, but we are aware when we do that writing is not music making, and that something is always lost in translation between different mediums [8].

2. Sound as Background

At last section, I talked about that people often use music affectively to encourage or emphasize a particular mood.

Here I need to mention that music can create the ambience, more specifically, music appear as a background ambience.

We need to combine the context when we define the term “touching”. It is common to see that when people are alone, such as waiting for the subway, stay at home alone or walking in noisy environment alone, people will listen to music to ease the loneliness.

The appearance of radio seems can reach this kind of effect.

Susan Douglas writes of listeners having a particularly intimate relationship to the radio. In this intimate relationship, the radio is not just a facilitator of connections within imagined communities but is an agent, a proxy for those communities; the radio itself is figured as “company” as shorthand for its role as the tool. Solitary listening does not, then, imply solitude as such, as the notion of other listeners is very importantly part of that listening:

The various technological developments that have changed some of the interfaces for music listening. Of these, two are of particular interest: Spotify, which actively encourages the sharing of music using Web 2.0 technology; and Moodagent, which profiles individual tracks according to their “mood”, and enables users to organize playlists (on smartphones, personal computers, or through Spotify) according to mood-based parameters. However, these technologies, which have overtly come together in recent software developments, enhance the possibilities for the distribution of subjectivities. In this conglomeration of interfaces between Spotify and Moodagent, the user – emphatically a user, with its implications of agency, rather than a listener – is at the center of the musical network, both creating and consuming the musical space in which subjectivities are distributed. For Julian Johnson, there seems to be an implicit threat from popular culture – a force that can easily be identified as running through Classic FM, for instance – as he writes, “Classical music is shaped by different functional expectations than popular music, a fact all but lost today because of the dominance of the functional expectations of popular culture” (2002). He goes on to explain that this has to do precisely with how the function of music operates: “The paradox of music in a commercial context is that, for all appearance of difference, musics that derive from quite different functions lost their distinctiveness because they are assumed to serve the same function as all the others” [10].

Most of us know that feeling, driving alone at night on a road or highway, surrounded by darkness, listening to the radio. [...]

There we were alone, yet through this device we were tied by the most gossamer connections to an imagined community of people we sensed loved the same music we did, and to a DJ who often spoke to us in the most intimate, confidential, and inclusive tones (Douglas, 1999) [10].

At this context, people seem not lonely anymore, because they have a company, and this company is music. In this case, the appearance of music is a form of that people no longer feel alone, or that gives a feeling of relaxing.

However, radio is the traditional broadcasting model typical of one-way transmission, which somehow against social engagement. Because audiences are receiving messages through radio not sending, which means there is no at least two people interaction in this activity.4 Today we inhabit a media world of sound that is truly interdisciplinary, in which the old boundaries no longer apply. The emerging practitioners of today and tomorrow face a multimedia environment in which their skills and understanding must be equal to the test of emerging platforms, technologies and genres. Be it radio, film, theatre, games, the Internet – or, indeed, increasingly the world of the gallery and museum – the common denominator will always be sound [11]. As can be seen from the contemporary music industry, the mode of music plays have been transferred from physical to software, or from three to two dimensions. If the outside world is constantly transformed from sense-perception into something “intelligible” or “rationalizable”, it is done through symbols.

But as Langer reminds us, music is a model for all symbolic

Clearly, before the appearance of all kind of music software, people use vinyl or CD to listen the whole album, and now they can store one single MP3 file into smart phone or iPod. Listening on the digital devices allow people to play the soundtrack where they also intends to do other things, like writing an essay on laptop [10]. However, in this situation, the problem lies that not engrossed in listening to music, but using music as a tool, background or context, to help complete the other things.

Another scenario is that we can hear ubiquitous background music in the mall. The term “ubiquitous music” describes the phenomenon that incorporates all kinds of music that is not chosen by the listener, which helps construct the space in which it is heard, and that is additional and often secondary to some other activity. This includes, for instance, music in audiovisual media such as films and games, as

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Of course, you can make a phone call to DJ while you’re listening, then have the interaction. However, this action is passive, because the hotline only opens at a certain moment.

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well as Muzak in shopping malls or elevators, or the music played in Starbucks to construct a “feel good” atmosphere and a global space (that is, a space where the “welcoming” “global family” is used to mitigate against any accusations of westernizing colonization founded on Starbucks’ global presence as a brand). In this space of ubiquitous music, Kassabian further argues that affect plays an important role; the converse is also argued, that for the flow and circulation of affects, ubiquitous music is an important fuel. This has to do also with how listening happens in relation to ubiquitous music, for its “background” nature tends to detract from the level of conscious attention afforded to it; listening in the supermarket, the coffee shop, or the cinema is very different from listening in the concert hall [10].

interested in “the contemporary” this area of live performance seems like a bit of a backwater?

From a 1958 book entitled, strikingly, A Primer for Playgoers, in which the author stresses: the tremendous personal comfort of relaxing at home in an easy chair and seeing some of the top names in the theatre world perform in a variety of three or four programs in a single evening. This involves a greater degree of physical comfort than to come home weary from the day’s work, wash, dress, hurry, drive through heavy traffic, find a place to park, walk to the theatre, pay an ever-increasing admission, sit on the same seat for two hours, then fight traffic and arrive home very late (Wright, 1958).

Tichi also notes that this understanding of television was frequently reiterated in advertisements for television sets:

Whether the music is played in our digital devices, or in the public space as a background, the appearance of music as a tool that is not the main factor, but as the secondary for people to listen. But when the music is additional or even secondary to some other activity, the fact that this is rarely focused listening, does not mean that it is entirely inattentive, or that it has no effect on the listener. There is much evidence to suggest that listening without conscious attention still allows for considerable perception on the part of the listener. We can turn to everyday moments to illustrate this easily, and ask how it is that we can be paying no conscious attention to another conversation, but suddenly be aware of it the very moment our name is spoken, or think about those occasions in a pub when our ears prick up to a favorite song, as if we were listening to the music despite paying more attention to a conversation [10].

Numerous advertisements...showed couples in evening attire gathered in their living rooms as if in a private box at the theatre, and gazing in rapt attention at on-screen ballet, opera, or drama from the legitimate stage (Tichi, 1991)[12].

In the live performance, almost everyone gives the whole attention and mind to this event. In previous section, I mentioned that sound as background, which means listening without conscious attention, but the status of concert or theatre is completely different. People in live performance will put down everything, not busy on driving, texting, making phone calls, or even in front of a laptop, but threw themselves into the music world, and nothing could disturb this scene. Then music will become protagonist, not background anymore. One of the main conventional explanations advanced for the continued appeal of live performance is that it offers a fuller sensory experience than mediatized music player.

Whereas mediatized representations appeal primarily to the auditory senses, live performances engage all the senses, including the olfactory, tactile, somatic, and kinesthetic [12]. Event, in this sense, is datable and locatable, but also continuous, calling into being new processes of filiation and fidelity (Badiou, 2005).

Badiou recognizes something similar when he writes that theatre:

Work in psychology demonstrates that a complex mode of listening is occurring in such situations, as in tests for selective attention in listening. Anne Treisman, for instance, played subjects two speech tracks simultaneously – one in each ear – and asked them to ‘shadow’ one track, to filter their listening to focus on one track only. In the results, Treisman notes that subjects were able to derive a meaningful message that alternated between ears, and suggests that the “rejected” message may be being analysed and perceived on some level, through occasional sampling or monitoring. At the same time, the subjects in this test were almost all completely unaware that the speech they were following in fact switched ears midway through, an indicator of the fact that audio inputs from separate ears are ultimately made sense of as a single unit within the brain; this fact we can also already determine from the preconscious “monitoring” [10]. Thus, it is quite different that listening without conscious attention and listening with conscious attention.

is the assemblage of extremely disparate components, both material and ideal, whose only existence lies in the performance, in the act of theatrical representation. These components (a text, a place, some bodies, voices, costumes, lights, a public ...) are gathered together in an event, the performance, whose repetition, night after night, does not in any sense hinder the fact that, each and every time, the performance is evental, that is, singular (Badiou, 2004).

“Performance” in music is not only the label given to what happens on stage; music is performative too: it does things.

A musical performance is a creative act/ion that not only conforms to the fitting of itself to a template, but also brings about something new [10]. A number of theatres have displayed signs similar to the banner that flew outside the Alliance Theater in Atlanta declaring that its offerings are “Not Available on Video,” demonstrating that the only way

3. Live Performance

What is the status of live performance in a culture dominated by mass media? Is it true that for artists

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of imputing specificity to the experience of live performance in the current cultural climate is by reference to the dominant experience of mediatization [12].

one certain place. There is a limitation when people listen to music alone. Because people used to buy or even download songs online. However, Music Festival consists of many various bands, which provides novelty and visual enjoyment to audiences. In this situation, people are more willing to try new genre. It also provides a buzz for people to interact with each other, like sharing thoughts or even dancing. Interestingly, the number of people who joining this Music Festival is larger than the number of albums some of these bands have been sold. This means people need this ambience, which contains powerful live music and a group of music lovers. Meanwhile, Music Festival also benefits bands, which gives them a new way to propagate their music. Many underground bands finally can have a chance to show their creative composition to people in the public space. This is the amazing part of live music (figure 1.4).

So what does live performance mean, and why is it demanded, within particular groups defined by shared cultural identity and tastes? In terms of live performance, I will conjoin with social engagement.

The appeal of live performance proposes that live performance brings performers and spectators together in a community. In the social engagement, I’ve emphasized that physical co-presence is an important role in social engagement. This is also one part of live performance, which is quite different comparing to listen music through headphones. This community is real, audiences and audiences, audiences and performers, face-to-face, body-tobody. Bogosian’s perception of the value of live performance clearly derives from its existence only in the moment (“every time it happens”), and its putative ability to create community (if not communion) among its participants, including performers and spectators. Blau addresses these issues of performance and communality in his discussion of the theatre audience: Desire has always been...for the audience as community, similarly enlightened, unified in belief, all the disparities in some way healed by the experience of theater. The very nature of theater reminds us somehow of the original unity even as it implicates us in the common experience of fracture, which produces both what is time-serving and divisive in theater and what is self-serving and subversive in desire...as there is no theater without separation, there is no appeasing of desire (Blau, 1990).

Figure 1.4: Modern Sky Music Festival in Central Park (2014)

Gracyk’s own handling of the question of live performance is not altogether consistent. Initially, he describes the pleasures of live performance as deriving from interaction with others: the individual listener has the opportunity to commune with fellow fans and to experience an illusory bond with the performer (Gracyk, 1996). Simon Frith’s description of his own listening experience can probably stand as typical for that of a sophisticated rock fan: “I listen to records in the full knowledge that what I hear is something that never existed, that never could exist, as a ‘performance,’ something happening in a single time and space; nevertheless, it is now happening, in a single time and space: it is thus a performance and I hear it as one” (Frith, 1996). [12]

ANALYSIS

In terms of the people who go to live performance, I did a survey and analyze its results. My target group is generation Y, because they witnessed emerging digital technologies like instant communication via email and text messaging.

Generation Y, sometimes referred to as “Millennials”, “Echo Boomers”, or jokingly as “Generation Why?”, refers to the cohort of individuals born, roughly, between 1982 and 1994. They born into a world marked by increasing inter-regional and inter-community conflicts. Generation Y grew up with many world-changing events including the rise of mass communication and the Internet. The Y Generation is known as a Culture War “battleground” with growing disagreements between conservative and progressive perspectives [13].

Case Study: Modern Sky Music Festival

Modern Sky held the Music Festival in New York City on October 4th and 5th. Almost every music lovers gather around in this location, Central Park. You can’t feel this powerful atmosphere, which provides sensual environmental qualities (lights, sound, temperature), when you are at home. Music Festival is a great opportunity, which brings all audiences together to enjoy live music in

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Figure 1.6: Ideation Figure 1.5: Survey

In my ideation (figure 1.6), I just simply use four numbers to represent any possibility of soundtracks. In order to make my melody not too complicated, I only use four soundtracks to finish. Each letter represents one person, the number behind means first/second/third/fourth person, and of course, there is no order. When only one person interacts with my object, this first person can only hear the radio noise. So only when the second person joins, then it will trigger the first soundtrack, after as well. Finally all four people joined, the sound will be played completely.

As can be seen from the results of the survey (figure 1.5), when people are alone, most people will listen to music through digital devices, like Spotify or iPod, and people are more willing to go to concert with friends. At the same time, in terms of listening music alone, almost everyone think go to live performance can make people become closer. Of course, most people who go to live performance is for music itself, and they think live performance is a new experience that can’t feel through digital devices. One person mentioned that he/she went to concert only because he/she wants to watch performer playing. In terms of the number of audiences, the majority of people hold the attitude of “don’t care”, and one said the site should be fully filled but not crowded is the best. By analyzing the genres of music, most people will go to Rock&Roll and Electronic Music performance, but also a lot of people will go for Classical Music. In the end, comparing to a listener who just sit on the back, almost every one wants to participate the musical interaction.

PROTOTYPE

Cubitt once argued, “the more you approach a performer, the more you inhibit the very performance you are there to see. No matter how much a performer gives, no matter how intensively you attend to her, the gap remains between” (Cubitt, 1994) [12].

So my interactive installation is called, “comMUSICity”, which removed the role of performers, and the gap between performers and audiences. Participants interact with my objects and create sound, so they can be considered as either performers or audiences. Meanwhile, in order to emphasize the interaction between participants, if they want to trigger one melody, it must require at least two people, which means they have to communicate with each other, no matter talking or eye contact.

Figure 1.7: First Test

To finish this installation, the software and hardware that I used is Arduino and MAXMsp (figure 1.7).

As can be seen from contemporary music industry, the way of presenting music is shifting from three to two dimensions, dematerialization seems a new world for designers to explore. But the physical can never be completely dismissed: “Every symphony has its compact disc; every audio experience its loud-speaker; every visual image its camera and video disc. Behind every outward image or symbol lies mechanical support, and if the

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immateriality of these images and symbols gives rise to a new approach to the relationship between human being and object, the analysis will be one of the individual’s connection with the material support underlying the new culture of immateriality” [14]. In terms of my comMUSICity installation, the physical parts are made by acrylic plastic, and this modular-style can stimulate people’s imagination, and allow people to predict the sound may appear. At same time, this installation can be placed in anywhere. Of course, the ideal place will be a closed and quiet place, so people can fully engage in my installation without disturbing. In terms of the shape, the top I used the semicircular arc shape, just like the size of human hand, in order to increase the sense of touching, or the invisible musical imagination. The cube below is like a stage, supporting each soundtrack.

In terms of music itself, as can be seen from the survey I did before, people are more willing to attend the Rock&Roll, Electronic Music, and Classical Music live performance with friends. So I will use these three genres to gather three different groups. Then, these three genres can gather individuals who share the same tastes into one community, for example, Monday is Rock&Roll genre, Tuesday is Electronic genre, Wednesday is Classical genre, etc. Of course, my installation is open to anyone who has curiosity, and any of them can feel free to join. I subjectively use following songs, and these songs should be familiar with these music lovers: Rock&Roll: Nirivana <Smile Like Teens Spirit> Electronic Music: In order to add some novelty, I used Ableton Live to complete.

Classical Music: Johann Pachelbel <Canon> TEST/CONCLUSION

Figure 1.8: Installation Floor Plan Figure 1.9: Final Test

When I focus on the physical object, I want to emphasize the experience as well. There is a certain distance between these four objects (figure 1.8), and this distance is one person can’t reach two of them at the same time, but not too far that people can’t communicate with each other. I want people to think why at least two people can trigger the sound, and why the more people join, the more abundant and complete the song will be.

I found an empty place, placed my objects on the table, and allowed its openness to interpretation by people themselves (figure 1.9). After the first person interacted with one object through a certain movement, which generates the radio noise, and the first person will tell his/her behavior to the second person. When these two people both interact with my objects together and trigger one melody, it is obvious to see that they are having eye contact. Then the third, the fourth join, they begin to look for an order, and want to figure out which soundtrack they’re controlling. When they did that, they communicate with each other continuously.

The installation starts with a special white noise, which can bring the curiosity to audiences, and let them want to join.

Then when only one person interacts with one of these objects, a radio noise will be generated. It might be helpful to the first person to think why only one person can’t trigger the melody. Suddenly, another person joined the first person, and they have to communicate, whether talking or eye contact, with each other to trigger the melody. In order to make my installation more fun, or represent the modular features, these two participants interact with either two objects within these four objects will produce different melody.

After all, many people who have experienced my installation asked me such a question: Q: Why did not use any visual effects?

A: In order to reach the social engagement, which is physical co-presence situation, instead of exchanging messages through social medias, I would like to use face-toface, eye contact, communication or share a joint attention as a visual effect to represent instead of generating a virtual image through software. It is not hard to find that almost all 11

audiences in the live performance are facing the same direction, and this direction is stage or screen. So I want to use human figure itself as a visual effect to present.

[10] Marie, Thompson and Ian, Buddle. Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. Bloomsbury Academic, March 2013.

ACKNOWLEDGE

[11] Tim, Crook. Media Practice: Sound Handbook.

Routledge. March 2012.

[12] Auslander, Philip. Liveness : Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London, GBR: Routledge, 1999.

There are many people who have provided invaluable advice, encouragement and help with this project. I would like to thank Sabine Seymour, who guides and helps me to finish this project. Also, thanks to professor, Ed Keller for giving critical comments and suggestions on my concept, and taught me to be more objective. Thanks to my friends who gave me comments and ideas after experienced my installation. Thanks to my friends and parents in China, who always support me. I also want to express enormous gratitude and respect for all of the artists, writers and musicians quoted and referred to in the text for the purposed of academic analysis.

[13] Malcolm, Anderson. Generational Change: Gen X, Gen Y and Baby Boomers. 2009. Retrieved from http://www.changedrivers.com.au/Articles/generationalchange.htm [14] Dunne, Anthony. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, MIT Press, 2005.

REFERENCES

[1] Vartanian Hrag. “Dread Scott Is Bringing the Wars Home.” Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art & its Descontents.

2007. Retrieved from http://hyperallergic.com/32470/dreadscott-is-bringing-the-wars-home/ [2] Christian, Fuchs. Social Media: A Critical Introduction.

London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2014.

[3] Rich, Ling. New Ties How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion. London: MIT Press. 2008 [4] Theorieënoverzicht TCW. AGENDA SETTING THEORY. University of Twente. September 10, 2014.

Retrieved from http://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20cl usters/Mass%20Media/Agenda-Setting_Theory/ [5] Thomas, R. Prohaska; Lynda A. Anderson; Robert H. Binstock. Public Health for an Aging Society. JHU Press.

2012 [6] Peter, J. Marshall; Nathan, A. Fox. The Developmentof Social Engagement: Neurobiological Perspectives. Oxford University Press. 2006 [7] Demerjin. Aldo van Eyck and the City as Playground.

2013. Retrieved from http://merijnoudenampsen.org/2013/03/27/aldo-van-eyckand-the-city-as-playground/ [8] Fuente, Eduardo de la. Social and Critical Theory, Volume 8 : Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music.

Boston, MA, USA: BRILL, 2010.

[9] Bejamin Zander, The transformative power of classical music. 2008. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and _passion?language=en

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