Online networks and the production of value in electronic music

在线网络和电子音乐价值的生产

• 批准号: AH/L014602/1
• 负责人: Daniel Allington
• 金额: $ 4.85万
• 依托单位: The Open University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2014 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FL014602%2F1
• 关键词: Online; networks; production; value; electronic

Cultural value is one of the areas in which (as the saying goes) perceptions are also realities. Thus, sociologists have argued that the production of cultural value is actually the production of a form of belief. Although popular accounts of how culture gets made tend to focus on brilliant individual creators, research has highlighted over and over again that their work typically emerges from a creative milieu, in which value (or belief in value) comes into existence. This arguably explains why cultural producers - musicians, artists, etc - are among the most committed audiences for cultural products, and why so many of them create work primarily for appreciation by other producers. This highlights the relationship between amateur, professional, and semi-professional cultural production, which is commonly assumed to have been transformed by Web 2.0 technologies that potentially making every internet user into a creator and publisher of digital content.This project will make an incisive contribution to our understanding of how culture and its value is produced in the digital age by focusing on a specific art form: music. We will gather evidence from the SoundCloud website, which many musicians use for commenting on one another's work. And we will focus on a specific genre that has a special relationship with that website, i.e. electronic music. We will identify as 'electronic music' all audio files that are identified by their creators with synonyms of or recognised genres of electronic music (to take just a few examples: dubstep, intelligent dance music, electronica, algorave, chiptune, electronic pop, live coding). Although many registered users of SoundCloud do not produce audio content, the website's original core users consisted of musicians - especially electronic musicians - who use it for commenting on one another's work. This project will study relationships between millions of users of that website, building a series of social network graphs to represent their evaluations of audio files uploaded by other users. Social network analysis provides mathematical ways of analysing peer esteem and reflecting the intuition that the opinion of a highly-regarded creator may have special impact: for example, in a social network diagram representing positive evaluations, more highly esteemed producers will occupy more central positions, with the most central positions being occupied by those who are esteemed by other highly esteemed producers. In order to enhance this analysis, we will not only study evaluations implied by 'likes' and 'follows' on the website, but also use computational linguistic analysis to study the kinds of language used in comments and identify whether a given comment is likely to be positive or negative. Moreover, we will observe and interview musicians in the real world in order to understand how they locate value in their relationships with one another, both online and off.Findings will be disseminated through a range of venues, including a public access event featuring lectures from academics who have carried out related studies and invited performances by musicians who have been studied. We will also write a public report explaining our findings to a general audience (including emerging musicians who may wish to understand the role that websites such as SoundCloud can play in building a career), and we will release the source code to all the applications we create, with full instructions that will enable other researchers (both inside and outside the university system) to adapt those applications to study data from other sources. Our website will include a blog providing progress updates, and knowledge will be further disseminated through professionally-produced audiovisual podcasts and press releases to specialist media.

正如俗话所说，文化价值是感知也是现实的领域之一。因此，社会学家认为，文化价值的产生实际上是一种信仰形式的产生。尽管关于文化如何形成的流行说法往往集中在杰出的个体创造者身上，但研究一再强调，他们的作品通常来自一个创造性的环境，在这个环境中，价值（或对价值的信念）产生了。这可以说解释了为什么文化生产者——音乐家、艺术家等——是文化产品最忠实的受众之一，以及为什么他们中的许多人创作的作品主要是为了让其他生产者欣赏。这突出了业余、专业和半专业文化生产之间的关系，人们通常认为，这种关系已经被Web 2.0技术所改变，它有可能使每个互联网用户都成为数字内容的创造者和发布者。这个项目将通过专注于一种特定的艺术形式：音乐，对我们理解文化及其价值是如何在数字时代产生的做出深刻的贡献。我们将从SoundCloud网站收集证据，许多音乐家使用这个网站来评论彼此的作品。我们将专注于与该网站有特殊关系的特定类型，即电子音乐。我们将识别为“电子音乐”的所有音频文件，由其创作者识别的同义词或公认的电子音乐流派（仅举几个例子：dubstep，智能舞曲，电子乐，算法，芯片调，电子流行，现场编码）。虽然SoundCloud的许多注册用户并不制作音频内容，但该网站最初的核心用户是音乐家——尤其是电子音乐家——他们用它来评论彼此的作品。该项目将研究该网站数百万用户之间的关系，构建一系列社交网络图表，以表示他们对其他用户上传的音频文件的评价。社会网络分析提供了分析同伴尊重的数学方法，并反映了高度尊重的创造者的意见可能具有特殊影响的直觉：例如，在代表积极评价的社会网络图中，更受尊敬的生产者将占据更多的中心位置，而最中心的位置被其他高度尊重的生产者所占据。为了加强这种分析，我们不仅会研究网站上“喜欢”和“关注”所暗示的评价，还会使用计算语言分析来研究评论中使用的语言种类，并确定给定的评论是积极的还是消极的。此外，我们将观察和采访现实世界中的音乐家，以了解他们如何在他们与他人的关系中定位价值，无论是在线上还是线下。研究结果将通过一系列场所传播，包括一个公众活动，由进行相关研究的学者进行讲座，并邀请接受研究的音乐家进行演出。我们还将写一份公开报告，向普通受众（包括可能希望了解SoundCloud等网站在建立职业生涯中所起作用的新兴音乐家）解释我们的发现，我们将发布我们创建的所有应用程序的源代码，并提供完整的说明，使其他研究人员（大学系统内外）能够调整这些应用程序来研究来自其他来源的数据。我们的网站将包括一个提供最新进展的博客，并将通过专业制作的视听播客和新闻稿向专业媒体进一步传播知识。

项目成果

Valuing Electronic Music: Methodology

评估电子音乐：方法论

• 作者: Allington, D. (Secondary Authors Field Currently Not Working. Secondary Authors: Jordanous, A., Dueck, B.)

Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place

电子音乐的价值网络：SoundCloud、伦敦以及地点的重要性

• DOI: 10.1080/09548963.2015.1066073
• 发表时间: 2015
• 期刊: Cultural Trends
• 影响因子: 3.1
• 作者: Allington D

Online Networks and the Production of Value in Electronic Music

在线网络和电子音乐价值的生产

• 作者: Allington, D. (Secondary Authors Field Currently Not Working. Secondary Authors: Jordanous, A., Dueck, B.)

Valuing Electronic Music Workshop

重视电子音乐工作坊

• 作者: Allington, D. (Secondary Authors Field Currently Not Working. Secondary Authors: Dueck, B., Jordanous, A.)

How is Electronic Music Valued?

电子音乐如何估值？

• 作者: Allington, D. (Secondary Authors Field Currently Not Working. Secondary Authors: Dueck, B., Jordanous, A.)