Food & Paper: The Audience Reconstructed (Finn Upham)

This week's Food & Paper will be given by Finn Upham from RITMO on fan Twitter interactions during online BTS concerts.

RITMO emblem alongside photograph of Finn Upham

Abstract:

Audiences have embraced online concert performances, but current platforms only support some components of the experiences we expect from in-person events, and audience-audience interactions have not been a priority. By looking at Twitter activity during streamed BTS concerts, we can identify how fans turn to social media to supplement the broadcast content. Shifting rates of hashtag use, the timing of retweets, and the complexity of posts demonstrate distinct engagement objectives contributing to fans’ recreation of the communal aspects of in-person concerts.

Bio:

Finn Upham uses measurements of audience behaviour, physiological changes in listener bodies, and musical signal characteristics to investigate how we experience music unfolding in time. Their dissertation research identified the rare but informative phenomenon of listener respiratory phase alignment to music, while recent work with the SSIMSA project at McGill University addressed the auditory streaming complexity of Renaissance counterpoint and the corresponding implications for contemporary parishioners attending Mass. Now a postdoc at RITMO, they are working on the empirical evaluation of temporal relationships between rhythms in musical signals and the oscillatory systems of the human body.

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Published Nov. 5, 2021 5:05 PM - Last modified Dec. 14, 2021 11:09 PM