ECREA16-Abstract

231

Friday, November 11

1 8 : 0 0 – 1 9 : 3 0

DCC13

Music, Sound and Listening

PP 504

The Art of Practice of Mobile Music Listeners

L. Detry

Université catholique de Louvain, ILC, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

With the advent of MP3, listening takes place with a technical device that is more portable than ever. This technical specification has some effect on the use

of the device and the practice. It takes place in various situations where the individual can listen to a personalized music program. Digital interfaces also

afford new possibilities of navigation and organisation of a large music collection. Research on mobile music listening lacks empirical data to provide

a good understanding of the practice. My ethnography investigates how mobile listeners construct their practice by taking into account the affordances

and constraints of the situation and the technology. Results show that listeners’ actions on their environment and their device participate in their experi‑

ence of “good listening”. My interpretations, based on Antoine Hennion’s and Sophie Maisonneuve’s research consider mobile listening as a “performance”

of the listener, as it already was for the 1930’s gramophiles. Listening is a product of the ecology in which it takes place and of the listener’s actions to

configure it. Far from the idea of a passive listener of background music, I propose a typology of listening practices that underline the role of the listener in

the composition of his listening. The idea of a creative practice of listening is discussed.

PP 505

International Standardization of Audiovisual Heritage Metadata Systems and Their Local Effects on Cultural Memory and Innovation

Curation

I. Ibrus

, M. Ojamaa

Tallinn University, Baltic Film- Media- Arts and Communication School, Tallinn, Estonia

New initiatives are emerging throughout Europe to digitise audiovisual heritage collections. Related high costs are deemed worthwhile not only in terms

of preserving the heritage, but with regard to repurposing heritage to tell new stories that may also reshape the cultural memory. What affects such

re-utilisation is that metadata standards for AV-heritage are in the early era of standards fragmentation. This paper responds to this challenge by analysing

the related challenges in Estonia – a country that has finalized its 6-year plan to digitize most of its audiovisual cultural heritage and to grant public access to

it.This is paralleled by the development of an elaborate meta-description system by Estonian Film Database (EFD) for turning everything about the heritage

films, including what these films depict, findable. Findability is expected to promote heritage reuse. Different kinds of internationally oriented institutions

that design and operate digital audiovisual archives and develop related international standards for metadata have rather different understandings with

regard to what should be found, who should be searching and how metadata should guide the usage processes. For instance, while librarians have been

concerned about standardised access to descriptors, content producers are interested in efficient asset management (IPR, access controls), online service

providers (YouTube, Netflix) are developing proprietary recommendations systems motivating further consumption, and newly created dedicated public

databases (Europeana, EUScreen) are seeking public value in service interoperability. The ‘multileveled’dialogues and power struggles among these insti‑

tutions are influencing metadata standardisation. Since the national archives such as the EFD are forced into dialogues with the international platforms this

relationship is crucial also for the national cultural memory curation. Furthermore, people in different localities who search for content may have different

motivations, needs, contextual awareness or ideological understandings and some of these may be in conflict with the internationally standardised me‑

ta-description systems. These conflicts constitute the central topic of this paper. In terms of Juri Lotman the various methods of heritage meta-description

could be understood as forms of cultural auto-communication that have the ability to fix the heritage in a culture in specific ways. The new metadata

systems are useful for facilitating heritage recycling, but they unavoidably also attach concrete meanings to content that may have an effect of fixing that

heritage in a culture. The globally varying metadata systems present a question on the influence of some of these locally and therefore their ideological

effects to the structuration of also local cultures – i.e. in Estonia. Relatedly, the question raises, what are the strategies to turn these systems and description

processes more dialogic? Should the global standardization of audiovisual metadata standards be governed with regard to enabling dialogues between

different stakeholders? In Europe, could this be regulated in the context of the new Digital Single Market strategy? Our paper relies on our recently launched

large scale research project and discusses these questions by analyzing the existing metadata standards (using methods developed in software studies) and

the positions of different stakeholders in this process (using documentary research and interviews with their representatives).

PP 506

VKontakte – An Expression of a Post-Recorded Culture

P. Åker

Södertörn University, Media and Communication Studies, Huddinge, Sweden

VKontakte (VK) is a Russian social networking site (SNS) and a blueprint of Facebook, though one striking difference is the centrality of music on the site.

It is the biggest SNS in Russia and was not planned as a platform for music but has become such because of its users and the weak attention to copyright

questions in Russia.The widespread music piracy has also turned it into the enemy no 1 for the big global music companies.The fact thatVK is an SNS makes

music use intertwined with self-presentation and social networking. VK is an environment where music is just one of many different activities and one

among other resources for social interaction. Of interest in this study is how piracy, file-sharing and VK being an SNS influence the ways the user encounter

music on the site. In contrast to commercial streaming services music found on VK is user-generated. However, the site complicates a simple distinction

between user-generated file-sharing and a commercial streaming service. It is fully possible to useVK as a streaming service for music without contributing

or downloading any files. However, the absence of control by the music industry can be put in contrast to what Rothenbuhler (2006) has called “recorded

culture”. This culture, formed and controlled by the music industry, is based on fixity, repeatability, and a constant search for better sound quality (cf. Clarke

2007).This study aim at, with departure from how the recorded culture has been described, investigate a context –VK – which is seen as a threat to the mu‑