Music Research “in the Wild” – Introducing the MusicLab Copenhagen Special Collection
Simon Høffding, Niels Chr. Hansen, Alexander Refsum Jensenius · Music & Science · 2024
Some of the most intense human experiences unfold while performing and listening to music. For both performers and listeners, active musical experiences—sometimes called acts of musicking (Small, 1998)—regulate our emotions, guide our attention, and generate prosocial behavior. It is no surprise, then, that philosophy, musicology, sociology, biology, and psychology have been occupied with understanding how and why music mediates these intense experiences. Yet, it has been difficult to produce reliable scientific knowledge while, at the same time, preserving the liveness of music as it unfolds in concert venues. In response to this challenge, concert research is emerging as a research topic involving interdisciplinary investigations of music, interaction, consciousness, cognition, physiology, behavior, and technology within a concert venue (Tröndle, 2021; Wald-Fuhrmann et al., 2021). With recent rapid developments in wearable sensing devices, it is now possible to perform research “in the wild” with real audiences and musicians. In this way, we are gradually getting a better grasp of what it is about live music that makes it so enriching. By analyzing the experiences, behaviors, and interactions of both musicians and audiences, we can develop methods to understand the entire ecosystem of the concert experience, even if we do not arrive at exhaustive explanations. Several groups are now pursuing such investigations, for instance, McMaster's LIVElab in Canada, the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, the Experimental Concert Research team in Berlin, and RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion at the University of Oslo (UiO). This special collection of Music & Science contains 111 articles. They thoroughly describe a particular instantiation of a research concert, namely the innovative and complex event MusicLab Copenhagen. This took place over 14 hours on October 26, 2021, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Working with The Danish String Quartet (DSQ), one of the world's best chamber ensembles, a research team from RITMO, complemented with researchers from several other European institutions, ran experiments and studied how mind and body are engaged during a concert. This was a unique opportunity to capture concurrent qualitative, behavioral, and physiological measurements in a concert hall, delicately balancing the scientific ideals of reliability and ecological validity.