While working on this project, it has been important for me to envisage the audience as being part of the performance. The relationship with the audience has actually been part of my artistic idea, because this idea came from my experience of different situations with people rather than from a genuine musical experience. Therefore it was important to examine the audience’s experience in the developing process of the performance. I realised very early on that in order to gain access to a kind of “unbiased” knowledge in this respect I would need help in examining this experience in a more systematic and distanced way than I could on my own. (Being the performer, it is sometimes hard to obtain comments from the audience which are not filtered by politeness or personal relations). In this project I have therefore, as already mentioned, been cooperating with NTNU researcher Andreas Bergsland (see Sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.2). This took place in a specific research project called Voice Meetings, which started in 2010 and which will continue after the end of my artistic research project.[1] This project represents a rather unique model for cooperation: it is designed to feed artistic development and at the same time collect information about the audience’s experience of a vocal performance using live electronics. For me, my cooperation with Bergsland represents an extension of my possibilities as an “artistic researcher”. An article on this research can be found in Appendix no. 4
[1] Performativity is a new interdisciplinary focus area at the Faculty of Humanities, NTNU, and the first part of our project also became one of the various projects that was supported financially by, and brought in for discussion and reflection by, a working group dedicated to this focus area. This has been very valuable. Further, it has become a part of Bergsland’s ongoing postdoctoral project entitled Live electronics from a performativity perspective. As described earlier, Andreas Bergsland has, in his PhD thesis entitled Experiencing Voices in Electroacoustic Music (Bergsland 2010), examined the use of voice in electroacoustic music from a listeners’ perspective.