‘Old Adam was the first man formed’: (In)forming and investigating listeners’ experiences of new music as audience enrichment, public engagement and research

Talk-based audience research has been shown to shape the engagement of research participants (Reason, 2010; O’Neill, Edelman & Sloboda, 2016; Pitts & Gross, forthcoming). Asking participants to articulate their arts experiences and providing them with the space to think out loud can prompt them to view the arts in new ways, simultaneously investigating and informing their engagement. However, it is unclear how this process fits within the academic paradigm of public engagement. If audience research functions as audience development or audience enrichment, could it also be considered as a form of public engagement?

This paper reports the opportunities and complications faced when employing public engagement and audience enrichment in a longitudinal study with eight folk music listeners, tracing their engagement with a new album and associated performances. The study offered a unique opportunity to investigate these concepts because public engagement was incorporated into the research design; alongside attending conventional performances, participants were also taken to a specifically-programmed ‘public engagement’ event, a roundtable discussion on the value of the arts that formed part of the AHRC’s ‘Being Human’ festival 2015. The study therefore functions as a form of public engagement in two ways: firstly, by providing a space to reflect on arts experiences through careful questioning to prompt new ways of thinking about their listening; and secondly, by sharing the findings of earlier research projects through a scheduled public engagement event.

The study uncovered deeply nuanced findings around the primary question of engagement, but it also raised questions for the ethical and methodological implications of developing audience’s experiences whilst simultaneously trying to record them. Despite this ouroboric paradox, incorporating public engagement activities may be beneficial to audience research, offering a way to access the musical experiences of self-conscious or increasingly ‘sociologised’ audience members (Hennion, 2001). By exploring the impact of taking part in the research on the participants, we question the distinction between ideas of audience enrichment and public engagement, and in addition, explore public engagement as research method.