The Listening Experience Database

The project is run by members of the Music and English Departments at The Open University (OU) in collaboration with researchers at the Royal College of Music (RCM). The distinctive feature of the evidence that this project seeks to capture and analyse is its unsolicited nature - this is evidence recorded not for the purposes of influencing an audience, such as a review, or some other published form of musical opinion, but a record of an essentially private experience, either of an individual, or of a group of which the individual recording the event was part. The evidence is contained in a variety of sources, including private diaries, correspondence and oral testimony, which is searchable in electronic collections such as EEBO, British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries, as well as in public archives such as those held in the British Library and in private sources. This is the first time that evidence of this sort has been systematically collected and documented. It will shed new light on a number of areas of investigation. For example, it will provide music and social historians and social scientists with the evidence to form a deeper understanding of the effect of music on professional and amateur musicians. It will also provide a greater understanding of the way in which music has been used domestically, or as part of religious ritual, and it will reveal the impact of new technologies on the listening habits of individuals. The project will be of benefit to students of performance history, who will gain further insight into the settings and the way in which music was performed. Educationalists will be provided with a range of material relevant to the way in which music is studied and learned and social historians will be able to gain further insight into the extent to which music is valued and understood in society.

In its first three-year phase the project is restricted to sources in the English language, but within that constraint the project team is interested in evidence from any historical period concerning music of any sort - 'classical', popular, the music of non-western cultures, etc. The evidence will be entered into a searchable database that will be 'live' to the public at the end of the first year of the project on the project's website. A particular feature of this research is that it builds on the OU's Reading Experience Database (RED) project (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/index.html) and actively encourages members of the public to participate. The main reason for inviting this form of public involvement is the belief that many of the most interesting accounts of listening will be found in small archives and in sources owned by private individuals. Members of the public are invited to submit examples of listening experiences (appropriately verified, for example, by scanned copies of the relevant material) to the project's website. The project team will then verify the evidence prior to including it in the database.

The findings of the project will not only be made available in academic publications, but will also be disseminated through symposia at the end of years 1 and 2, a conference at the end of year 3, public lectures, a proposed radio broadcast series, and regular updates posted on the project's website. The project will run for three years initially, but it is planned to develop it thereafter, having established a network of international participants - both scholars and members of the public. The eventual aim is to create a multi-lingual and multi-national database of listening experiences.

The project will have a wide range of potential beneficiaries:

1. Performers. The project will provide performers with insights into the way in which previous audiences have responded to music. While musical reception has previously been restricted to reviews and limited feedback to individuals and groups, performers will have access through this project to a variety of responses not previously collected at scale. The RCM's networks will provide a direct route to this audience.

2. Libraries and museums. The project will demonstrate the usefulness of archival sources held by these institutions and provide material for exhibitions/displays. Many of the sources that are relevant to this project will be held in small, local archives, and it is the intention of the project team, through extensive public engagement activities, to encourage users of these archives to contribute to the database. An RCM colleague has an established route into this network through chairmanship of a working group of the International Association of Music Libraries.

3. Creative industries. The project will provide an entirely new way of understanding the impact of music on individuals and the social and cultural groups to which they belong. It is a new type of data source, and we anticipate that it will have a real and material benefit to the creative and media industry. It could, for example, add a new level of sophistication to the way in which music is combined with other aesthetic and dramatic elements in film, theatre and broadcast media. Links between the creative industries and the RCM already exist and those links will be strengthened further by the involvement of members of the Project Advisory Board.

4. Education. The project will provide new routes to educating about music, its cultural and social value and the way it is understood. It has potential for impacting significantly on the way that music is taught by casting light on the way music affects people and inspiring new approaches to teaching. At present, practical music teaching starts from the basis that music is an art form and then applies this to a range of contexts. This project suggests the possibility of a much more accessible starting point rooted in the intimate listening experience of the individual. Members of the Project Team are well-placed to develop this theme through their involvement in international networks of music educators.

5. Informal learning. Through open-access media the public will have previously-unavailable opportunities to learn of the impact of music on others, provoking reflection on their own listening experiences and habits, and prompting personal experimentation with different modes of listening, for example, to live performance, 'static' listening to physically fixed recorded sound sources and listening involving mobile technologies. Through its extensive networks, the planned BBC series, other media accessed through journalism, and public lectures the Project team is well-placed to enter into dialogue of this sort.

6. Cultural policy makers. State funding, through the Arts Council in England, for example, is premised on the assumption that listening to music, whatever the genre concerned, is 'effective' in some sense. The project will throw new light on this assumption and enable policy makers to gain a clearer understanding of how and why music matters in the lives of listeners. It will therefore represent a significant advance in the empirical basis of music policy making.