Distributed Listening - socially engaged art

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The 8 month impact proposal builds on past AHRC funded research into network music performance. Those results are here applied in a participatory theatre context. The main impacts consist of enabling theatre practitioners and participating communities to engage in network music performance strategies/technologies, normally only available in HE institutions. This engagement will have transformative qualities for relationships between sound, everyday life and mobile transmission technologies. The PI, a musician and theorist, investigated how performers make music together when not in the same physical space, specifically how they listen to each other. This research used different types of musical notation (3D rendered graphics, improvisational strategies, graphic scores). The PI carried out ca. 20 different types of network performances including performing with musicians in a virtual world. The experience of playing different types of music (strictly notated jazz tunes, guided improvisation, graphically scored music and entirely free improvisations) led to questions of who leads, conducts or makes decisions in a situation where several cities are connected with musicians in each place. It was found that physical absence of another performer allows musicians to focus closely on the relation with their instrument, their breathing and gestures; and finally, it ask performers to listen in quite different ways, what the PI terms 'distributed or network[ed] listening'. In the network musicians listen to their own sounds, to the sounds of remote performers, but also to sounds circulated through the network, which can be 'jittery' due to often fragile technical infrastructure. The network reveals subtle differences between being 'here' and 'there', between the 'self' and the 'other', between 'listening' and 'being listened to' and between body and instrument. This impact proposal aims to extract such type of fragile listening, 'distributed listening', to an environment outside the well-equipped university context. Therefore, we will develop a custom-designed app for mobile devices (smart phones) that allows young community participants to explore such listening, while at the same time enabling them to play and create together in a distributed setting. We have teamed up with two theatre companies, the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and 42nd Street, Manchester. 42nd Street is a young people's mental health charity providing innovative services to young people with mental health problems. Both companies regularly work with community participants, practising 'socially engaged arts', a form of active citizenship, art that intends to effect social change, that is artist-led and participant focussed. Both theatre companies have identified 20 young adults each who, during 8 weeks workshops will learn to use the app in order to create a creative theatre piece based on the idea of 'distributed listening'. Each city will create a context specific work, using the custom-designed app. Each community group will showcase their work in 2016. A video artist will accompany both companies' working processes, creating video diaries for documentation on the project's website. The custom-designed app will also be used for a one day of hands-on workshops with school children in Northern Ireland, taking place at the Science Festival, which is supporting this project. The final part of the project includes an impact conference where all participants from Manchester and Belfast will meet, and, alongside invited industry speakers, will share the project's creative outcomes, including the video diaries, the documented showcases and the app design.The project was developed in close communication between the named theatre companies, the PI, Co-I, the Science Festival, Arts & Business NI and the Young Vic, London, to ensure greatest possible impact and visibility.