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CLASSICAL CHARTS THE BIG IDEA Music Consumption Worldwide Up Almost 10 Percent Over 2021A newly released report detailing how we find, consume and enjoy music in all its available forms has offered some surprising results. The report was compiled by IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), an organization that represents more than 8,000 record companies across the world. Founded in 1933, IFPI advocates for record producer rights and works to expand the reach of recorded music globally. The data was collected through June and July 2022 from over 44,000 respondents (aged between 16-64) in 22 countries. Results and revelationsTaken together, the report’s details only underscore the significant role that music plays in our everyday lives. Just how important is music? A solid 69% say that it’s crucial to their mental health. How do we listen to music?Across 22 of the world’s leading music markets, the numbers show that people’s engagement with music is up. Simply put, we listen to more music on a weekly basis, up to 20.1 hours from 18.4 in 2021, an increase of nearly 10%. The way we listen to music involves a mix of media — on average, individuals access music via six or more different ways. That mix breaks down like so:
The big news for the industry is that nearly half of us (46%) are using paid subscription services. For classical music organizations on the fence vis a vis streaming, the report shows that 32% of respondents had watched a livestream concert over the past month. GenresWhen it comes to genres, fans are branching out in all different directions. On average, we listen to about eight different genres of music. This section of the report synthesizes the respondents of 34,000 people in 18 different countries. Incredibly, when it came to the kind they listened to the most, the respondents named more than 500 music subgenres. Revelations
The Top TenThe top ten genres worldwide put classical music and opera in a solid position.
MediaWhile it’s now a minority of listeners, 12% of music fans have bought a CD in the last month, with another 8% buying vinyl. Fans who bought vinyl tended to say they liked having a physical copy of their music, as well as the perks of liner notes and listening to a whole album at once.
Unfortunately for artists, about 30% of respondents (and 43% of those aged 16 to 24), said they’d used unlicensed/illegal music. Overall, 27% used stream ripping (i.e. taking an unauthorized download from an online source), and the number swells to 40% among 16 to 24-year-olds. The report provides a focus on a few specific countries. Interestingly, classical music is #7 among popular genres in China, where about 95% of listeners used streaming and short-form video (TikTok) as their primary sources of music. In Indonesia, classical is #8. Both countries, along with Nigeria and India, reported higher-than-average listening hours per week. One correlation emerged: the people reporting the highest average number of favourite genres (nine) also listened to music the most every week, and paid for their music streaming subscriptions. Frances Moore, IFPI Chief Executive, commented in a media release. “This year’s Engaging with Music report paints a fascinating picture of how fans around the globe listen and engage with music today. It shows the results of record companies’ partnership with artists and their work to harness new technologies to connect fans with their favourite tracks in even more ways. “We continue our work to ensure that those seeking to profit from unlicensed and unauthorized music can’t threaten the vibrancy of a music ecosystem that is essential to artists and fans. Engaging with Music 2022 serves as a healthy and celebratory reminder of the true global importance and value of music and the need to protect and support it.” THE LATEST Media Moves: Deutsche Grammophon launches new online subscription service Stage+. Industry: Curtis Institute launches own label. Obituary: RIP Ned Rorem. Awards: Hilary Hahn, Renée Fleming, And More Lead 2023 Classical Grammy Nominations. Opinion: New Yorker writer slams Cate Blanchett’s Tár as a “pseudo-documentary that turns into a lesbophobe horror movie”. Handel's: London home to be fully restored. Ticketmaster: Backed out of last week's public Taylor Swift ticket release due to issues with inventory and unheard-of demand. Violin: Private collection of leading expert Norman Rosenberg, including a 1685 Stradivari, to go up for auction. News: Germany introduces a 200-euro culture pass for 18-year-olds to spend on concerts. Youtube: gets a new jingle. Listen here. Editorial: icareifyoulisten wonders if classical music’s racial reckoning was all just a mirage. Environment: The climate cost of live music. REPORT What is ASMR and why are so many musicians exploring it?ASMR is gaining in popularity by leaps and bounds and entering into music-making at all levels. ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is the term that has been coined for the way some people respond physically to audiovisual stimuli. It’s become a growing phenomenon on the internet, spawning stars like Gibi ASMR, who has 4.47M subscribers to her YouTube channel. Gibi offers her viewers what she calls sensory calming therapy via her videos. ASMR is intended be used to help people relax and sleep, and to help relieve anxiety in general. The premise is this: some people, estimated at about 25% of the population, experience pleasant physical sensations, also called frisson, as well as a relaxing mood, when subjected to certain kinds of soft noises and also visual stimuli. Soft noises can include whispering, soft sounds from nature, or of nails clicking on a hard surface. The evidence shows, however, that even the other 75% benefits from the same pleasurable mood-altering effects. In an interview with the BBC, pop singer Alaina Castillo describes it as, “weirdly mundane sounds that grounds you a bit”. Social media picked up on ASMR during the pandemic in a big way, and music artists began to use the principles in their work. Pop stars were quick to connect with the growing trend. Billie Eilish’s team contacted Gibi, asking her to work on an ASMR version of her latest release. Singers like Zara Larsson use a soft spoke, whispery style of vocals, delivering their message directly to the viewer of their videos. That intimate style is part of ASMR. Along with the sounds, the videos incorporate a personal touch. The ASMR artist speaks directly to the viewer, and offers intimate attention, slow and repetitive movements, and other gentle stimuli. But…is it for real?A 2021 study by Japanese researchers, titled Induction of Relaxation by Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, looked into that very question. They tested the responses of 30 subjects, comparing ASMR with classical music. Each of the subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they listened to one and then the other. After the experiment, the test subjects also answered a questionnaire about their mood and somatosensation, or the bodily sensations they felt while either played. Somatosensation can include tingling feelings, vibrations, ticks, spine, and legs, as well as a tingling of the scalp.
The big takeaway: even without the physical sensation of frisson, it seems that ASMR produces a response in the brain. Physiological reactions
The researchers conclude, “Both classical music and the ASMR auditory stimulus produced a pleasant and relaxed state, and ASMR involved more complex brain functions than classical music, especially the activation of the medial prefrontal cortex.” They note that the comforting state of relaxation that ASMR engenders is easy to use, and widely accessible. The researchers from Japan’s Niigata University of Health and Welfare aren’t the only academics exploring ASMR. Giulia Poerio, psychology professor at the University of Essex, is among several others studying the effects of ASMR on the mind and body. ASMR and musicAlong with (literally) hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos, artists like Melinda Lauw have incorporated ASMR into theatre. Lauw is the co-creator of Whisperlodge, which offers audiences live ASMR/theatre experiences for small groups, with one-on-one attention. The 90-minute event has been staged for more than 1,000 participants in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Singapore. As Lauw describes it in a podcast interview, “So ASMR is very broadly defined as a series of soothing sensations that can be triggered by a whole range of tactile audio and visual stimuli. And it is so broad because actually, the feeling of ASMR is very subjective.” Combining music and ASMR in live performance is a natural fit for electronic artists and new tech. New media artist and composer Erin Gee has been working with ASMR for a couple of years. Developed in a collaboration between the Music department at l’Université de Montréal and the National Theatre School of Canada in 2020-2021, Gee’s We as Waves (the studio performance version) debuted in 2020 featuring the Hamilton Children’s Choir, with music and voice by Erin Gee, text by Jena McLean, and videography by Michel de Silva. The 2022 Vancouver New Music festival presents Erin Gee’s ASMR-infused Affect Flow in concert, with musica intima vocal ensemble and pianist Andrea Wong. The concert presents three of Gee’s works, including We as Waves, Intimacy Alphabet, an ASMR-based piece workshopped with community members, and Song of Seven as performed for choir, electronics, and piano. ASMR offers both audiences and performers a different kind of experience. For Song of Seven, the singers will be outfitted with biosensors that track functions like blood flow and skin conductivity, and they’ll be improvising anecdotes from their own childhood in song. The combination of intimate memories and performance will be measured as physiological responses, and converted into specific pitches. The other singers and pianist Andrea Wong will respond to the results. “I use personal memories as a way of unlocking emotion and empathy in the choir, because there’s different ways of composing emotion, right?” Gee says in an interview with Create A Stir magazine. “You can use psychological hacks and meditation or tricks, or you can just have people tell stories. Musica intima is going to be improvising stories of their childhood in order to unlock different musical tones in the biosensors. So you can really hear the empathetic relationship between people in the choir in real-time.” Science and art are merging in new ways that explore humanity’s deep connections to music and music making, with much more yet to be explored. CLASSICAL 101 What Does It Mean To Be In Tune?It sounds pretty simple when someone says that a singer, an orchestra or a piano is in or out of tune. But the search for the right tone lowers the drawbridge on a world of physics and fashion that has, for centuries, been the preserve of the most diehard musical geeks inhabiting a hothouse of jealousies, intrigues, and infighting. I’m prompted to write about this because of articles trumpeting the computer advances designed to make the human piano tuner obsolete. If only the world of tuning were that simple. First, everyone needs to agree on a common note to use as a reference point. Pitch: Concert AWhen concertmaster Jonathan Crow stands up in front of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at Roy Thomson Hall, he will ask principal oboe Sarah Jeffrey to play an A on which the whole orchestra will tune. Simple enough — except that, at nearly the same moment, Charlotte Nediger will play a different A for the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra at Trinity-St. Paul’s. That’s because the actual pitch of that A has varied over the centuries. Official modern concert pitch is an A that produces sound waves measuring 440 Hz. But many musicians are tempted to cheat, because a fractionally higher pitch makes for a brighter sound (some orchestras, like the New York Philharmonic, tune at 442 or 443 Hz). Baroque pitch is lower — and all over the map. Scientists couldn’t measure the amplitude and duration of sound waves until 150 or so years ago, so people relied on the craftsmen who made tuning forks and pitch pipes. At the extreme, these tuning standards could be two or even three full tones apart. Each period-performance ensemble sits down — sometimes before each new concert program — to decide what frequency they will use as their tuning standard (for example, if they are building a concert around a historical organ, which is difficult to tune, they will tune themselves to that instrument). The official modern concert pitch standard of A=440 Hz was only confirmed in 1939, by the ISO. TemperamentIf you listen to the organ at the University of Toronto’s Knox College, then walk down the drive to listen to the same piece of music on the organ at Convocation Hall, it will sound different. That’s not only because the instruments are tuned to a different pitch, but also to a different temperament, which sets up the intervals, or gaps, between notes from one end of the keyboard to the other. The Laws of Physics, inconveniently, don’t allow for equal increases in frequency when going up the Western halftone scale. If anyone were to try that, the instrument would, ironically, end up sounding completely out of tune. This means that all instruments have to cheat some intervals as they go up and down the scale. The codified, modern system of cheating is called equal temperament — made famous by J.S. Bach in his two books of Preludes and Fugues for all 12 possible major keys and their minor-key relatives. Until the 18th century, keyboards were tuned using a number of alternate tuning systems that focused on solving problems with thirds or fifths, usually in particular keys. (Still today, wind-instrument players find it very difficult to play in certain keys for tuning reasons, so sympathetic composers try to avoid writing in those keys.) The Knox College organ is tuned using a mean-tone temperament, which goes back to Pythagoras, the Greek geek who, besides figuring out musical intervals, gave us the key to measuring the length of the sides of a right triangle. What Does this all mean?What we hear as in-tune is really a combination of traditions and habits that our ears interpret as being correct. Leonardo da Vinci, should his time machine send him to Roy Thomson Hall, would find the sound strange, if not alien. Think this is all about splitting hairs? Here are Frédéric Chopin’s 24 Préludes played by Michele d’Ambrosio on a piano tuned in an unspecified variation of unequal temperament: AROUND THE WEB 📅 On this day: Baroque composer Henry Purcell dies November 21, 1695, in Westminster, United Kingdom. 📺 Must Watch: Sheku Kanneh-Mason transforms a Bob Marley classic, explores brand new preludes, and a favourite Welsh ballad. ✍️ Interesting: This 15-minute stick figure exercise can help you find your purpose. 🎶 History: This 1919 cartoon accurately predicted mobile phones at concerts over 100 years ago. 🛋️ Neat: See here for a searchable database of Ikea catalogues dating back to 1951. CARTOON OF THE WEEK How did you like today's email? |