Anne Danielsen

Live Islands in the Seas of Recordings: The Music Experience of Visitors at the Øya Festival

Live music remains popular in the digital age, as reflected in the growth in music festivals in the 2000s. The increased availability of music online highlights the issue of what sets live music apart but also raises the question of whether the use of new music media changes the experience of live music. This article explores perceptual, psychological, and social aspects of the music experience of visitors at the Øya festival in Norway. It finds that new music media can in fact enhance the live music experience but also uncovers fresh dilemmas regarding the fundamental pleasures of attending performances.

Investigating repetition and change in musical rhythm by functional MRI

Groove-based rhythm is a basic and much appreciated feature of Western popular music. It is commonly associated with dance, movement and pleasure and is characterized by the repetition of a basic rhythmic pattern. At various points in the musical course, drum breaks occur, representing a change compared to the repeated pattern of the groove. In the present experiment, we investigated the brain response to such drum breaks in a repetitive groove. Participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to a previously unheard naturalistic groove with drum breaks at uneven intervals. The rhythmic pattern and the timing of its different parts as performed were the only aspects that changed from the repetitive sections to the breaks. Differences in blood oxygen level-dependent activation were analyzed. In contrast to the repetitive parts, the drum breaks activated the left cerebellum, the right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG), and the superior temporal gyri (STG) bilaterally. A tapping test using the same stimulus showed an increase in the standard deviation of inter-tap-intervals in the breaks versus the repetitive parts, indicating extra challenges for auditory-motor integration in the drum breaks. Both the RIFG and STG have been associated with structural irregularity and increase in musical-syntactical complexity in several earlier studies, whereas the left cerebellum is known to play a part in timing. Together these areas may be recruited in the breaks due to a prediction error process whereby the internal model is being updated. This concurs with previous research suggesting a network for predictive feed-forward control that comprises the cerebellum and the cortical areas that were activated in the breaks.

Mediating Music: materiality and silence in Madonna's 'Don't Tell Me'

This article investigates how the concrete sound of and recording process behind a pop tune relate to the possibilities and constraints of its electronic media. After a brief presentation of some theoretical issues related to the question of mediation and materiality, we address the claim that digitisation erases the material aspects of mediation through an investigation of contemporary popular music. Through a close analysis of the sound (and the silence) in Madonna’s song ‘Don’t Tell Me’, from the album Music (2000), as well as in a handful of related examples, we argue that one can indeed identify specific aural qualities associated with digital sound, and that these qualities may be used to achieve different aesthetic effects as well as to shed light on mediation and medium specificity as such.

The mediated festival: Live music as trigger of streaming and social media engagement

Live music events are increasingly saturated with and mediated via the online and mobile devices of the audience. This article explores patterns in this media use surrounding the Øya festival in Norway and focuses, in particular, on music streaming and social media activity. It presents statistical analysis of listening sessions via the streaming service Wimp and social interactions via the micro-blogging platform Twitter. The juxtaposition of these unique access points allows the analysis to explore the impact of physical live concerts on the digital music experience. It also enables a nuanced examination of how the festival audience responds to different artist segments, from international headliners to local acts. One key finding is that local artists that are positively evaluated via Twitter have the greatest boost in subsequent music streaming. The article argues that in-depth studies of the intersection of live and mediated music are essential to understanding the encounter between artists and audiences that is facilitated by contemporary live music events.

Mediated Immediacy: The Relationship between Auditory and Visual Dimensions of Live Performance in Contemporary Technology-Based Popular Music

Today, a live concert no longer necessarily presents a temporal or physical correspondence between the sound and its production, though it continues to promise an experience characterized by immediacy. In this article, we approach this paradox through analysis, participant observation, and interviews with audience members from a concert with Norwegian artist Susanne Sundfør. We conclude that an audience can accept huge discrepancies between auditory and visual information, as long as the music’s core auditory elements are convincingly communicated and represented visually on stage. This “mediated immediacy” is an important aspect of the live concert experience in contemporary technology-reliant genres.

Live Mediation. Performing Concerts Using Studio Technology

The use of computers is continuously changing the sound of records but also increasingly challenging established forms of live concert aesthetics. So what becomes of creativity and expressivity in the live performance? In this study, we present an artist-oriented approach to this question through interviews with artists invested in performing studio works on stage, as well as improvising musicians using studio technology in their concerts. We find that challenges to creative authorship and expressive agency are constantly negotiated through evolving practices of up- and down-scaling particular aspects of studio works on stage, as well as designing technological setups tailored to individual forms of improvisation. While these practices challenge deep-rooted notions of the ‘right’ or appropriate bond between musician and music, the appropriation of studio technology in live performance has clearly become an integral part of many artists’ continual exploration of their musical agency.

Moving to the Beat: Studying Entrainment to Micro-Rhythmic Changes in Pulse by Motion Capture

Pulse is a fundamental reference for the production and perception of rhythm. In this paper, we study entrainment to changes in the micro-rhythmic design of the basic pulse of the groove in ‘Left & Right’ by D’Angelo. In part 1 of the groove the beats have one specific position; in part 2, on the other hand, the different rhythmic layers specify two simultaneous but alternative beat positions that are approximately 50-80 ms apart. We first anticipate listeners’ perceptual response using the theories of entrainment and dynamic attending as points of departure. We then report on a motion capture experiment aimed at engaging listeners’ motion patterns in response to the two parts of the tune. The results show that when multiple onsets are introduced in part 2, the half note becomes a significant additional level of entrainment and the temporal locations of the perceived beats are drawn towards the added onsets.