Welcome to our Music, Festivals, Heritage conference, Siena
This week the major international gathering of the CHIME project takes place, in Siena, Italy. We welcome everyone attending and contributing. Our conference, titled Music, Festivals, Heritage, seeks to explore a number of key themes, questions or problems for the field, including:
- Established and innovative uses of heritage sites and public spaces
- Festival sites and cultural memory
- Transformations of place: music festivals as utopian sites
- Questions of music genre (e.g. jazz, opera, folk, rock, classical) and the construction of heritage at festival
- Festival as dull culture: repetition, predictability, boredom
- The tension between the conservation and the use of heritage sites
- Festivals and cultural tourism
- New models of engagement between festivals and cultural heritage
- Festivals as sites that explore the relationship between tangible, intangible and digital heritage
- Critical perspectives from festival programmers, producers, organisers
- The mediation and representation of (heritage and) festival
- Festival as exclusive community; festival as marginal space
- From carnivalesque to festivalisation: theoretical approaches and questions of festival
- The cultural politics of festival sites.
Our location is the Siena Jazz Archive, which holds the most important specialised collection in Italy; it includes more than 25,000 sound and video items, over 2,000 books, and thousands of magazine issues including the only complete collection of the Musica Jazz magazine. Here is a feature in the Italian press about the conference.
On behalf of the CHIME project and the organising commitee, conference convenor Prof Walter van de Leur says:
We are hugely excited about the international conference here in historic and beautiful Siena this week, in collaboration with the Siena Jazz Archive. The conference is a major part of our EU Heritage Plus programme CHIME project. We are delighted to be hosting around 70 speakers coming from 23 countries across Europe, Canada and the US, South Africa, Colombia, and Australia. We look forward to stimulating, enjoyable and productive discussions around music, festival and heritage from the perspectives of academic research, the festival and music industries, and cultural policy.
Further information, including the daily schedule of papers and presentations, exhibition, lectures, plenary, reception, and screenings is available here, where you can also find travel information for international delegates coming via Florence and Pisa airports, for instance.
How is CHIME chiming? Visualising impact in 2015 and 2017
The impact of our research is important for us as researchers, for our industry and public partners, and for our funders—from the inception event at the EFG London Jazz Festival (a project partner) in November 2015 on we have been talking about impact as well as ‘doing’ it. In fact if you click the following link you can see and download the short presentation I gave about what ‘impact’ means and its scope in the British research landscape from that first event.
CHIME inception day Nov 20 2015
We wanted to capture and to easily visualise a sense of impact as a process through the development of the project. We thought a simple infographic-style map could do that, and gathered information from each researcher about their key collaborative relationships and anticipated work at the start of the project, and asked them to update that a year or so later. So we have produced two impact maps to date, one from November 2015 and second from March 2017. The aim is to capture how the work packages have developed as work is undertaken and activities completed. The maps capture the project’s scope (how CHIME is indeed chiming), but also in a way they visualise its development, its story. Here are our impact maps, side-by-side, 2015 and 2017.
Rachel Daniel, my AHRC Connected Communities administrator, who also happens to be a creative artist and researcher (see Rachel’s own work exploring drawing and medicine here), made the maps happen. We thought about using Coggle or some other infographic/mapping programme, but in the end it didn’t need to be done like that, and she used Adobe Illustrator actually. So relatively simple, I’m told—though I gather the second one was slightly (…) more fiddly. Thank you, Rachel.
Gathering the information from each researcher, and then selecting from what each submits, and double-checking with them that we’ve got it right, takes a bit of time. From one of the team we received an email headed ‘Can you read this?’ and a photo attached of a pen-on-paper sketch of her collaborations on the project. Yes, we could.
Revisiting Kvibergs kaserner – the home of GMLSTN JAZZ
Olle Stenbäck
In order to move focus further towards potential links between jazz music and heritage sites/grounds, we’re currently revisiting GMLSTN JAZZ’s initial outpost, the Gothenburg military heritage site Kvibergs kaserner, classified as a ‘notable building’ back in 1971. Our goal is to analyze the already collected material and pinpoint dialogues (modes of engaging) with the past and elevate notions on the potential relationship(s) between jazz music – as a world heritage – and physical remnants of the past.
The GMLSTN JAZZ festival has resided at Kvibergs kaserner since the very beginning, although its importance – as a result of transforming the festival into a (even more) dispersed event – have somewhat declined. Still, Kvibergs kaserner represents the beginning of the festival: it’s where the GMLSTN JAZZ narrative starts, and harbors several important symbolic aspects connoting the heritage discourse.
In the process of engaging with the past certain merits are claimed. In the case of jazz festivals, engaging with the past to claim authenticity and legitimacy is not a far-fetched guess. In relation to the process of marketization, residing at such a site might also add value not only to the specific festival but to jazz music in general and, consequently, emphasize its significance even on non-specific jazz venues downtown.
Even though the 2017 edition of the festival will no longer reside at Kvibergs kaserner, the site outlines the prequel of the GMLSTN JAZZ narrative. What significants does Kviberg carry?
More to follow.
In preparation of the festival exhibition
Some serious preparation by photographer Foppe Schut, in search of the perfect picture of the SummerJazzBikeTour brooche.The brooche is part of the travelling exhibition "Dutch jazz festivals in 30 objects" for the researchproject CHIME and will be on view in Siena, Groningen and Amsterdam (for more info, see http://chimeproject.org).For the exhibition we are collaborating with the Dutch Jazz Archive (http://www.jazzarchief.nl) and indeed the impeccable Foppe! Great to be part of this.
Posted by Loes Rusch on Wednesday, 1 March 2017
Some serious preparation by photographer Foppe Schut, in search of the perfect picture of the SummerJazzBikeTour brooche.
For the exhibition we are collaborating with the Dutch Jazz Archive (http://www.jazzarchief.nl) and indeed the impeccable Foppe! Great to be part of this.
CHIME-Birmingham Centre For Media and Culture Research Hack Day
This is an overview of the ‘Music Data Hack #1’, which took place over the weekend of 10th-11th February 2017, and was organised by Craig Hamilton from the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research in association with CHIME.
The aim of these events is to bring together BCMCR and CHIME researchers, BCU students, practitioners from the surrounding area, and festival directors 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 for CHIME, 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 BCU 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 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 could 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 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 by ‘visiting’ stages and hearing recordings from artists pulled in via the APIs of music streaming services.
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 during the morning session 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 attractive, 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, which the team demonstrated based on analysis and visualisations created in the R Package. The team felt this would enable more effective, proactive management of the festival space whilst at the same time forging 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, derived from Sentiment Analysis. 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 one 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 was 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 projects. This would 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 more information about the event please contact Craig Hamilton (craig.hamilton@bcu.ac.uk).
A history of Dutch jazz festivals in 30 objects
The last couple of months the Dutch CHIME team together with the Dutch Jazz Archive has been working on a travelling exhibition on Dutch jazz festivals.
As a starting point we have used a concept that is modeled after “A history of the World in 100 objects,” a 100 part series by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, exploring world history from two million years ago to the present. This model allows us to engage with questions of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, such as ‘How to translate intangible cultural history into tangible objects?’ Also, the great variety of objects (t-shirts, flags, jury reports, scrap-books, etc.) opens up ways of exploring the festival from different perspectives, including audiences, musicians, organizers, and journalists.
The past week Dutch Jazz Archive curator Ditmer Weertman and Walter van de Leur have made a final selection at the Dutch Jazz Archive, which includes the cassettes of the October Jazz Meeting, a 1948 jazz competition award and the scrap-book from the wife of North Sea Jazz Festival initiator Paul Ackett.
We are also very proud to introduce photographer Foppe Schut, who will make an artist impression of the objects.
The exhibition will be on view at the CHIME conference in Siena (25-28 May), in Groningen (ZomerJazzFietsTour, 26 Aug) and in Amsterdam (Rhythm Changes Conference, 31 Aug-3 Sep).
