arch Talking Vaudeville in Graz, Austria

On 6 November 2018, I presented a talk on vaudeville songwriting at the Research Round Table, University of Music and the Performing Arts in Graz, Austria.

My paper explored some of the standard songwriting practices that emerged on the vaudeville stage in the United States in the period 1870-1929 and the theories that were developed by musicians to explain them.

The discussion afterwards focused on issues of copyright, recording, challenges for songwriters working now, and changes in the music industry over the last century.

arch Being Thelonious: Perspectives on Thelonious Monk at 100

The Birmingham Conservatoire and Birmingham School of Media are hosting a free half-day symposium entitled Being Thelonious: Perspectives on Thelonious Monk at 100on Thursday 15 June 2017.

The keynote address will be given by Professor Robin D. G. Kelley, Department of History, UCLA, whose Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original(Free Press 2009) is the first full-length, complete biography of the pianist.

Professor Kelley’s work explores the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music; visual culture; contemporary urban studies; historiography and historical theory; poverty studies and ethnography; colonialism/imperialism; organized labor; constructions of race; Surrealism, Marxism, nationalism, among other things, and his publications include Race Rebels(Free Press, 1996), Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America(Beacon, 1998), and Freedom Dreams (Beacon, 2003).

There will also be presentations from New York guitarist and Monk expert Steve Cardenas, Hans Koller, Pedro Cravinho, and Sid Peacock.

You can register here.

arch BCMCR Music Data Hack #1

This short blog report will provide an overview of the first in a new series of events organised by BCMCR, the ‘Music Data Hack #1’, which took place over the weekend of 10th-11th February 2017.

The aim of these events is to bring together BCMCR researchers, BCU students, and practitioners from the surrounding area, to work collaboratively on the development of online data visualisation tools, product prototypes, and experimental analytical methods related to music. The first of these events explored possible uses and applications for data collected about music festivals.

Using data collected from a small group of volunteers at the 2016 Cheltenham Jazz Festival through a pilot version of a mobile application currently being developed by BCMCR researchers working on the CHIME Project, the hack aimed to explore the ways in which the data could be visualised in ways that may be useful to researchers, festival organisers and/or music fans. Working in small teams, participants were asked to conceive, plan and build a working prototype within 24 hours.

Friday 10th – 2pm-7pm

As had been our hope and intention, the hack attracted attendees from a variety of backgrounds, including staff and students from different faculties, and also external practitioners from large and small organisations. In all 18 participants arrived for the Friday session, which began with informal networking and team building.

At 3pm the overall aims of the event were presented to the group. This included an overview of the CHIME project provided by Dr Loes Rusch, and an introduction from one of our project partners, Annemiek van der Meijden of ZomerFietsJazzTour. The processes of data collection used in the Cheltenham Jazz Festival pilot were then explained to the group, along with information about the next phases of the project and how this hack would help inform that development.

The data provided to the group comprised of c15,000 lines collected over the weekend of 29th April – 2nd May, 2016, and was made up of the following:

• Text/Images collected via the CHIME prototype mobile interface at 2016 Cheltenham Jazz Festival (n = 145)
• Tweets with the official Cheltenham Jazz Festival hashtag, #cheltfest (n = 1703)
• Tweets with the UNESCO #jazzday hashtag (n = 12953)

Alongside the ‘core’ data sets, the following, additional data sets were provided:

• Basic programme information from Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2016 (Stage times, artists, venues, capacities)
• Results of automated computational Textual Analysis on core data (Sentiment Analysis, Hashtag searches, Character/word counts, etc)

Armed with this data, the teams were then set the following brief:

Working in teams, create an interactive online visualisation/interface that displays the data provided in ways that may help explore issues of cultural heritage among festival audiences, organisers and performers. We are particularly interested in how participants experience festivals through space (both the physical locations of festivals and/or through online spaces) and in terms of time (their experience during a particular festival and/or their memories of festivals over time). Ideally visualisations would have potential applications for data collected at future festivals and should be useful and/or meaningful to one or more of the following groups:

• Fans of Music (general), Jazz (particular), or Music Festivals
• Festival Practitioners
• Academic Researchers looking at Music Festival, Social Media or Audience Data
• General Audience

From 4pm onwards teams began to plan their ideas, organise their teams according to specific roles, and devise work plans for the next 24 hours.

By 6.30pm and the end of the first session teams had started to form ideas for their prototype. It was pleasing that the ideas ranged in technical scope and ambition, and that teams had negotiated internally ways of working that enabled participants with less experience of code and coding to contribute through other important activities, such as design, additional research, and planning.

Overall this session provided important groundwork for the following day, when the building of prototypes would begin in earnest.

Saturday 11th 10am-4pm

Our first session on Saturday focussed on an open discussion between CHIME Researchers, hack participants, and festival practitioners, lead by Prof Nick Gebhardt. Annemeik van der Meijden from ZomerJazzFietsTour was joined by Ian Francis of the Birmingham-based Flatpack Festival, and William Soovik from GMLSTN Jazz in Sweden, who kindly joined us via Skype, to provide the perspective of festival organisers.

The discussion raised interesting points regarding the potential use cases for mobile apps at festivals that took in to consideration the activities of festivalgoers, the aims of the CHIME project, and the needs of festival organisers. The core map-based approach taken in versions 1 and 2 of the mobile app was generally seen as a positive feature, with ideas for possible applications ranging from the capture of information about and engagement with more ‘casual’ visitors to festivals (as opposed to more committed ‘regulars’ with whom festival organisers have already developed good channels of communication) that could prove useful, particularly at fringe/free events in public spaces. Navigation and familiarity with festival sites and artistic programmes were also considered as useful features, providing users with the feeling of ‘belonging’ to a wider festival experience, particularly where festivals are dispersed across a wide geographic areas, such as cities, and also extended timeframes. Hack participants posed useful questions and observations to both researchers and festival practitioners, and took on board responses in terms of the day ahead and the development of their prototypes.

The remaining sessions, either side of lunch, were a race against the clock for teams attempting to get their prototype visualisations and applications ready for the 3pm deadline, and included a ‘Paper Demo’ session as the final two hours approached. This provided teams with the opportunity to present their ideas in simple, graphic form. Feedback was intended to drive and focus the activities of teams in the remaining hours of the build.

At 3.15pm teams convened to hear 5 minute presentations of the completed hacks.

BCMCR Music Data Hack #1 – Completed Prototypes

The following ideas/prototypes were presented by the teams in the final session of the hack. Where possible, links are provided to the finished prototypes.

A Role/Sentiment Map of Cheltenham 2016

This visualisation was built using the Carto service and was based on the 145 data points collected via the mobile app at Cheltenham 2016, and subsequent ‘Sentiment Analysis’ of text. The map enables users to isolate data points in terms of sentiment scores and/or the roles of participants in the pilot. You can view this map here.

This particular idea was inspired by a test of the Carto software explored by another team during the Friday session, which displayed the same information using a Time and Location as the basis for its visualisation. Click here to see that visualisation, created by Paul Bradshaw.

Virtual Reality Data Exploration

Perhaps the most ambitions of the hack products, and taking also the Cheltenham data as it’s starting point, this idea sought to render the data collected from pilot participants into 3D virtual space. Users would be able to explore Cheltenham at street level across a condensed timeframe and encounter reflections (including text and images) at the very locations where they were originally posted. The team also described how further development could enable users to (re)experience an entire festival be visiting stages and hearing recording from artists.

Festival Management Back-End

Based on designs and ideas for new features in the mobile application, this idea focussed primarily on the needs identified by festival practitioners and sought to generate real-time analysis related to the experience and mood of festival visitors. The user interface would include several gamification elements that the team hoped would make using the app more widespread, with activity linked to prizes such as free tickets or drinks discounts. Data collected via the app, along with real-time analytics, would be displayed to festival staff via a back-end dashboard. The team felt this would enable more effective, proactive management of the festival space whilst at the same time extending a sense of community amongst festival visitors.

Exploring Festival Emotions

Based on components of automated text analysis this team built two visualisations using the Tableau and Carto services that displayed text according to colour-coded scales and separate emotional categories such as Anger, Joy, Sadness and Anticipation. You can see both via the following links: Tableau Visualisation and Carto Visualisation

Recommendations & Discussion

On the whole we feel that the event was a worthwhile exercise and certainly worth repeating at some stage. Participants informally canvassed at the end of the event indicated they would also consider returning for a further session. The main advantage of an event of this kind is the possibility of exploring different ideas and perspectives in a very short amount of time, with the technical aspect allowing some ideas to be developed beyond conceptual stage.

The next phase of this strand of the CHIME project will collect data at two further European Jazz Festivals, at GMLSTDN (Sweden) in April 2017 and during ZommerFeitsFest (Netherlands) later in the summer. This will produce two further datasets that can be analysed alongside the existing data from Cheltenham 2016, and could form the basis of a further hack event.

The sessions featuring Research Staff (on Friday) and Festival Practitioners (on Saturday) were useful in terms of providing context around the project, the data collected, and the aims of the hack. Additional sessions at future hacks could include those from practitioners involved in App/Visualisation/Data projects, either in terms of academic research and/or commercial project, to help provide context and guidance around the more ‘nuts and bolts’ elements of building data-derived prototypes.

Additional notes

Thanks to all participants for giving their time, efforts and expertise over the weekend. Thanks also to BCMCR and CHIME for their support in making this event possible.

A Storify of Tweets from the weekend can be found here

If you are interested in taking part in future BCMCR Music Data Hack events, please contact me: craig.hamilton@bcu.ac.uk and I will add you to our mailing list and notify you when the next event comes up. If you would like to explore the data and create some visualisations of your own, please let us know.

arch A new book co-edited by Roger Fagge and Nic Pillai with contributions from colleagues across the UK.

New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice is an edited collection that captures the cutting edge of British jazz studies in the early twenty-first century, highlighting the developing methodologies and growing interdisciplinary nature of the field. In particular, the collection breaks down barriers previously maintained between jazz historians, theorists and practitioners with an emphasis on interrogating binaries of national/local and professional/amateur.

Each of these essays questions popular narratives of jazz, casting fresh light on the cultural processes and economic circumstances which create the music. Subjects covered include Duke Ellington’s relationship with the BBC, the impact of social media on jazz, a new view of the ban on visiting jazz musicians in interwar Britain, a study of Dave Brubeck as a transitional figure in the pages of Melody Maker and BBC2’s Jazz 625, the issue of ‘liveness’ in Columbia’s Ellington at Newport album, a musician and promoter’s views of the relationship with audiences, a reflection on Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Eric Hobsbawm as jazz critics, a musician’s perspective on the oral and generational tradition of jazz in a British context, and a meditation on Alan Lomax’s Mr. Jelly Roll, and what it tells us about cultural memory and historical narratives of jazz.

Find out more.

arch ‘Shut Up & Write’ relaunched at BCU

Are you struggling with writer’s block and procrastination?

As a student, do you sometimes feel you lack motivation?

Do you want to improve your writing skills, critical thinking and come up with new ideas?

Well look no further! BCMCR is launching in partnership with PGRStudio a new series of ‘Shut up & Write’ sessions to start on January 24, 2016. What makes this group different from other groups you might have signed up to before is this one is designed and managed by PhD students. Our main aim here is to create with you an intellectual environment where we can all come together to work and discuss common challenges that we all face as postgraduate students. So we have decided to keep the structure quite flexible to accommodate your needs.

We hope this reading and writing group will help you enhance your writing skills, while giving you, at the same time, the opportunity to critically engage with one another’s work. This group also aims at helping you discuss issues around your work, share concerns about the challenges that you are facing and set up short and long-term goals that you can achieve, while making you critically think out of the box as a researcher.

There are a number of benefits to being a part of this reading and writing group:

• You will develop the habit of writing for reasonably short periods of time, which can help you better understand your own “peak” hours of effectiveness
• You will learn how to become more accountable for your progress goals
• You will develop the skills needed for a supportive intellectual community, such as giving and taking feedback, and creating original work
• You will be able to benefit from and contribute to new resources, perspectives and ideas
• You will get the opportunity to prepare and practice for conference presentations, which can help iron out all of the kinks
• You will improve your time-management skills

Our first session will take place on Wednesday 27th January 2016, at 1pm in P233 (2nd floor, Parkside building). Our group will meet monthly and each session will last three hours. At these monthly gatherings, we’ll engage with a curated list of texts, including but not limited to excerpts from PhD student work, staff and researchers publications and major theoretical texts in the field. We’ll spend two hours writing as a way to respond to and critically engage with these texts. At the end of each session, we’ll share what we’ve written, evaluate each other’s work and reflect collectively on the main issues we all faced through the writing process.

Here’s an overview of our first two sessions in 2016. It’s important you read the book before the writing session, so please come prepared!

January 27th 2016 Room P233 Time: 1-4pm

Patrick Dunleavy’s ‘Authoring a PhD. How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation’ published by Palgrave in 2003.

The book is available at BCU Curzon library and in PDF online here.

February 24th 2016 Room P233 Time: 1-4pm

Ann Gray’s ‘Research practice for cultural studies: ethnographic methods and lived cultures’ published by SAGE in 2003.

The book is available at BCU Curzon library and in PDF online here.

Please sign up on Eventbrite here or email us on ShutupandWriteBCU@gmail.com to join. Also, look out for our live-tweets on #Shutup&WriteBCU about this series in the next few weeks.