Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre
(SPARC): summary of recent research (2010-2015)
Lead researchers: Professor Stephanie Pitts and Dr Jonathan Gross
Department of Music, University of Sheffield
http://sparc.dept.shef.ac.uk/
Background
SPARC was founded in 2010 by Professor Stephanie Pitts as part of the strong profile of music
psychology research at the University of Sheffield. The founding members were recent PhD
graduates of the Department of Music, and their co-supervisor from the Department of
Psychology, who together completed a research project with the City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra (Pitts, Dobson, Gee & Spencer, 2013). From the outset, therefore, SPARC has been
committed to investigating interdisciplinary perspectives on audience engagement, and to
collaborating with external arts organisations.
Subsequent projects have been funded by the University of Sheffield, through grants for
knowledge exchange and collaborative projects (c. £30,000), and by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC), through their Cultural Value research programme (£37,500) and their
funding of two PhD students on the Collaborative Doctoral Awards scheme (£110,000) – one
student working with City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the other with Music in the
Round, Sheffield.
Dr Jonathan Gross joined the SPARC team in October 2014, to lead our collaboration with
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG). Like Prof Pitts, Dr Gross has recently
completed an AHRC-funded Cultural Value project (Gross et al., 2014), and so both researchers
bring to our current collaborations a shared interest in the social and cultural impacts of live arts
engagement, and expertise in qualitative research methods that aim to understand audience
experience both in the moment of encounter and through later reflections.
Headline themes and findings
The social experience of listening has been an underlying theme throughout our collaborations
with organisations ranging from jazz clubs and festivals to chamber music providers and
symphony orchestras (Pitts & Burland, 2013; Burland & Pitts, 2012). We have considered how
the audience community establishes a shared identity through regular attendance, as listeners
become familiar with the conventions of communal listening and seek greater affiliation with the
organisation or art form that they engage with.
The conventions of shared listening through which established listeners derive the social pleasure
of concert attendance can be intimidating or off-putting for new audiences, who have been the
focus of collaborations with Music in the Round, Sheffield and with London events including The
Night Shift (Dobson & Pitts, 2011). New listeners have been shown to make assumptions about
the level of knowledge possessed by established audience members, and so to feel that classical
music listening requires preparation and education beyond the pure enjoyment of art forms such
as film and theatre.
We have focused in our various projects in developing innovative and appropriate research
methods that capture the audience’s experience without disrupting it – these have included
interviews, participant observation, surveys, ethnographic description and focus groups in a range
of settings, as well as contributions to reviews of methods across wider disciplines and art forms
(Burland & Pitts, 2014). We have also made effective use of an audience exchange (Pitts, 2014)
or culture club, in which audience members are encouraged to extend their arts experiences to
new forms or venues, and then to reflect on their first impressions and future intentions in the
new setting.
Impact and dissemination
Our work has been presented at national and international academic conferences, and published
in peer-reviewed journals across a range of disciplines: Participations, Arts Management, Social
Semiotics, Journal of New Music Research, Research Studies in Music Education, and International
Journal of Community Music, amongst others. With her established collaborator, Dr Karen Burland
(University of Leeds), Prof Pitts has recently edited Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience
Experience (Ashgate, 2014), a book which offers the most comprehensive account to date of
methods and debates in audience research across art forms.
Our work has had practical impact too, most notably through our long collaboration with Music in
the Round, Sheffield, who have introduced ticket offers for under-35s, informed by our analysis of
their existing audiences and their demographic gaps (Pitts & Spencer, 2008), and have
incorporated methods of post-concert discussion with new audiences after our research
demonstrated these to be a valuable way to increase engagement (Dobson & Pitts, 2011).
Relevant publications
Burland, K. & Pitts, S. E. (Eds) (2014) Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Burland, K. & Pitts, S. E. (2012) Rules and expectations of jazz gigs. Social Semiotics, 22 (5): 523543.
Dobson, M. C. & Pitts, S. E. (2011) Classical cult or learning community? Exploring new audience
members' social and musical responses to first-time concert attendance. Ethnomusicology
Forum, 20 (3): 353-383.
Gross, J. (In preparation) Absorption, distraction and being bored: a concert hall pleasure and its
failures.
Gross, J. (In preparation) Listening careers: concert going and everyday life.
Gross, J., Blakemore. L., Graham, H., Murray, S. & Walmsley, B. (2014) Approaching cultural value
as a complex system: experiencing the arts and articulating the city in Leeds. Arts and
Humanities Research Council report.
Pitts, S. E. (2014) Dropping in and dropping out: understanding cultural value from the
perspectives of lapsed or partial arts participants. Draft report, University of Sheffield.
Available online at http://www.sparc.dept.shef.ac.uk/research/
Pitts, S. E. &Burland, K. (2013) Listening to live jazz: an individual or social act? Arts Marketing, 3
(1): 7-20.
Pitts, S. E., Dobson, M. C., Gee, K. A., & Spencer, C. P. (2013) Views of an audience: Understanding
the orchestral concert experience from player and listener perspectives. Participations: Journal
of Audience & Reception Studies, 10, 65-95.
Pitts, S. E., & Spencer, C. P. (2008). Loyalty and longevity in audience listening: Investigating
experiences of attendance at a chamber music festival. Music and Letters, 89(2): 227-238.