Listening and British cultures: listeners' responses to music in Britain, c. 1700-2018

The study of music has typically focused on the work, the composer and the performer. More recently, interest has focused on the listener, but generally from the perspective of psychology or reception studies, which draw their evidence from experimentation, interview or musically informed critical opinion. The approach of this project is different: it places the listener at the heart of musical experience in Britain in the period c.1700-2018, emphasising the written testimony of the impact of music on 'ordinary' people. Typically the material is drawn from diaries, letters and memoirs. The evidence is all the more potent for being personal and often musically 'uninformed' or naïve. The team believes that such evidence facilitates a new way of studying how and what music communicates, and that it can, when gathered as a mass, inform novel approaches to musicology.

The project will address three research questions:
1. What can personal accounts of listening to music in Britain tell us about how listeners recognise and identify with a common culture through music?
2. What can these accounts add to our understanding of the place of music in broader aspects of personal, community and national life in Britain?
3. What more can listeners' accounts tell us about the place in British musical life of particular repertoires and their associated performing and listening practices?

The project aims to combine empirical research methods effectively with digital research methods. It does not aim merely at gathering 'big data', but sets out to use that data to support a traditional strength of humanities research - close reading of texts to underpin the writing of historical narratives. It builds on the AHRC-funded Listening Experience Database (LED) project (2013-15, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/LED), which established a methodology for collecting accounts of listening experiences in any period or culture, and a tool, in the form of a Linked Open Data database, for its storage and analysis.

The objectives are:
1. To capture a mass of primary source evidence, and to make it available for analysis through an open-access database.
2. To use this data to inform new understandings of the place of music in British cultural life.
3. To develop a clear methodological framework for using digital content in humanities research, and an effective methodology for the mining and analysis of social media as primary source material for responses to music.
4. To develop the ways in which the database supports entry and analysis of data, and to use the database as a case study for research into the application of Linked Open Data.
5. To disseminate the findings to academic and non-academic audiences through a range of means including publications, social media, knowledge exchange events, seminars and a conference.

New insights into the experience of listeners have the potential to inform not only historical musicology but also other research within and beyond the academic community - for example, in performance practice, social and cultural history, religious studies, Celtic studies, area studies, psychology and health studies, sociology and media studies. The project will benefit museums, libraries and archives - in particular, specific institutions with which the team will be working - by informing understanding of and increasing exposure to their collections. It will develop and document a clear methodology for using digital content in humanities research, including large-scale data sets such as social media archives that are currently difficult to use. It will establish data modelling practices transferable to other projects and create data assets of value to both academics and other users such as the media (for example, rich data about a wide range of music).

The project will have academic impact for a number of disciplines (detailed in 'Academic beneficiaries') beyond the three that specifically underpin it - historical musicology, digital humanities and knowledge media research. Beyond the academic community, it will be relevant to curators and archivists in the museum, library and archive sector, the media, educators and students, and independent researchers.

The database content will benefit museum and archive curators, informing research for displays and exhibitions and their accompanying explanatory literature. It will also give exposure to aspects of museum and archive collections that have so far been under-used or unknown. For example, the National Library of Wales is enthusiastic about the potential of the project to contribute to its mission to bring Welsh culture and history to a much wider national and international audience. Glasgow Life and the National History Museum (Wales) have expressed a strong interest in the project and its potential to both inform and give added exposure to their collections. All have expressed their willingness for the project to mine their collections and quote their material (subject to the rights status of individual items) in the database. The team will write case studies based on all the research topics, which will be made available on the project website. In particular, studies of musical experience will be designed for the particular institutions on whose collections they draw. The studies will be interesting in their own right, but will also illustrate the ways in which the database can be used.

Both the database and the studies drawn from it will also benefit independent researchers in - for example - music, local history and religious history, as well as researchers and writers for film and television. It will offer such researchers new insights into repertoires, musical practices and responses to music, and access to sources that they could not previously have mined effectively and at scale, and may well never have found.

The team also envisages its work on the analysis of social media being of significant interest to the museum, library and archive sector and the media, which make extensive use of social media to engage their users. Studies and templates will be written and made available on the project website to enable other users to adopt our methodology.

The evidence from the Listening Experience Database (LED) project suggests that of those who register for a contributor account, only about 10% actually contribute material to the database. Free learning material will be published on the Open University's OpenLearn site which will introduce people to the nature and purpose of the project, how to use the database as contributor and researcher, and some of the broader issues and skills involved in adopting digital humanities approaches to studying music history. OpenLearn materials can be used as self-study materials or adapted (for example, by teachers) under a creative commons licence to suit specific purposes. The existing music learning packages on OpenLearn have proved hugely popular, attracting c.175,000 users a year. The OU uses OpenLearn as its landing page from external sites such as the BBC, and as part of wider awareness marketing, and it has had over 37 million visitors since its launch in 2006.

Through the data.open.ac.uk platform, the project will make a range of rich data relating to music, biography and bibliography available as Linked Open Data. The impact will probably be primarily academic, but could also be commercial; it is impossible to define, as it will evolve during the project and with end users' feedback. Resources will be included on the website to illustrate how our Linked Open Data could be used.