Performing Performance Spaces: Expressing Context in Live Music

Abstract

From basements and living rooms, to bars and clubs, to stadiums and arenas, the spaces that become venues for music performances bring with them unique features that can present sound reinforcement challenges. This is especially the case with smaller, lower-budget community-run or pop-up performance spaces, which may display more non-ideal characteristics like a higher electrical noise floor or unique acoustics. Qualities like these, coupled with the people occupying the space, distinguish one performance context from another—to a band on a long tour or to an audience member attending many shows in the same city.

This thesis is structured around a series of live concerts using a digital audio processing system that captures, exaggerates, and reproduces unique acoustic qualities of the spaces where the concerts are taking place. This allows performers to exaggerate these qualities expressively by modulating their prominence with a MIDI controller.

The concerts feature performances by the author as well as local Boston-area musicians. They aim to encourage their participants, both musicians and audiences, to share a musical experience that fosters awareness of context, the here and now, and shows the significance (in music and beyond) of the places we occupy and the people we share them with.