Examining the Perception of Liveness and Activity in Laptop Music: Listeners’ Inference about What the Performer is Doing from the Audio Alone

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Bown, Oliver; Bell, Renick and Parkinson, Adam. 2014. Examining the Perception of Liveness and Activity in Laptop Music: Listeners’ Inference about What the Performer is Doing from the Audio Alone. In: , ed. Proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference. , pp. 13-18 [Book Section]

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Official URL: http://www.nime.org/wp-publications/obown2014/

Abstract or Description

Audiences of live laptop music have been known to express dismay at the opacity of performer activity and question how “live” such performances actually are. Yet motionless laptop performers endure as a musical spectacle from clubs to concert halls, suggesting that for many this is a non-issue. Understanding these perceptions might help performers better achieve their intentions, inform interface design within the NIME field and help our understanding of what ‘liveness’ means in the context of new performance practices. To this end, a study of listeners’ perception of liveness and performer control in laptop performance was carried out, in which listeners were presented with several short audio-only excerpts of laptop performances and answered questions about their perception of the performance: what they thought was happening and its sense of liveness. The study suggests that listeners naturally associate liveness with perceived performer activity (such as improvisation and the audibility of gestures). Listeners were also shown to be able to recognise generative music processes,

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Book Section

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Full paper is used with special permission from the publisher.

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Computing > Embodied AudioVisual Interaction Group (EAVI)

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