GAMPSISS is an interdisciplinary research project. Smart, inclusive, and sustainable societies need public values such as openness and tolerance to be rooted in citizens’ minds and behaviour. These values give rise to democratic citizenship and civic participation. The importance of classical music live concerts is fading in contemporary society. Prompted by our public and private partners, we will explore how artistic performances that fuse classical music and gaming will (in addition to other benefits) contribute to transforming the existing listening culture into one required for smart, inclusive, and sustainable societies to emerge.

GAMPSISS
The abbreviation GAMPSISS stands for GAmeful Music Performances for Smart, Inclusive, and Sustainable Societies. It is an interdisciplinary research project, initiated by the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (RASL). We investigate the integration of games and gamification in classical music concerts, so that its audiences may engage themselves in meaningful modes of listening, eventually resulting in a listening culture from which citizens and society could benefit.

The institutions
Four research institutions are taking part: Codarts University for the Arts, Rotterdam; Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of History, Culture, and Communication, Department of Arts and Culture Studies; Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management, Department of Multi­Actor Systems, Section Policy Analysis; and the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. Next to these knowledge institutions, a range of public and private partners are participating in the project.

Listening Space

We are currently collecting data to evaluate the musical listening game Listening Space. Updates on the analysis will come soon!

GAMPSISS is an interdisciplinary research project. Smart, inclusive, and sustainable societies need public values such as openness and tolerance to be rooted in citizens’ minds and behaviour. These values give rise to democratic citizenship and civic participation. Although classical music has shown its potential for transferring societal values in the 19th century, the importance of classical music is fading in contemporary society. Prompted by our public and private partners, we will explore how artistic performances that fuse classical music and gaming will (in addition to other benefits) contribute to transforming the existing listening culture into one required for smart, inclusive, and sustainable societies to emerge.

Through artistic, analytical, and design oriented research we aim to 1) extract indicators of listening culture from music scores and performances; 2) identify the historic development of society and listening culture; 3) to determine how the current listening culture can be modified, and 4) to develop and evaluate playful, artistic performances that foster an active listening culture that promotes smart, inclusive, and sustainable societies.

As its main scientific methods this research project employs secondary survey data on trends in society and listening culture, audience research, (quasi) experiments and design science research. For the design science research, several tools and one or more ludic music performances will be designed, performed and evaluated with a mixed methods approach to answer our research questions.

News

Listening culture
Smart, inclusive, and sustainable societies need citizens that are able to listen to multiple voices attentively. Therefore, listening takes a central place in our theoretical considerations. While deep, active listening to music is not the same as social listening in a democratic society, these different forms of listening require a similar set of skills and attitudes. Public values such as openness and tolerance to be rooted in citizens’ minds and behaviour. These values give rise to democratic citizenship and civic participation. Although classical music has shown its potential for transferring societal values in the 19th century, mainly through the template of elevation, the importance of classical music concerts is threatened by the decline and rapid ageing of its audience. In addition, the increasing digitalization and streaming of music is changing the nature of the relation between music and its audience, making the boundaries between musical genres more blurry and less meaningful. These changes in listening practices and the smoothing out of genre differences and cultural hierarchies makes it less likely that audiences will have meaningful, transforming experiences when attending a classical music concert.

Healthy democratic societies need citizens that are willing and able to listen to others. Earlier research has indicated that an active listening culture gives rise to more empathic behaviour. In this project, we investigate if through games and gamification we can enhance the relevance of listening on an individual level, as well as how an active listening culture may be encouraged. Furthermore, attracting the attention of a new social segment that is significantly more diverse than the current concert audience, is our final ambition.

Gamification
In today’s world, games are important for activating people and sparking public debate. They are an increasing force in education, skill training and entertainment. Prompted by our public and private partners, we will explore how artistic performances that fuse classical music and gaming will contribute to transforming the existing listening culture into one required for smart, inclusive, and sustainable societies to emerge. This way, we aim to address the current relevance of classical music at the level of the product, the sector and society at large. The game that we envision and will develop in this research trajectory functions as an integrated form of access that respects the original cultural product yet simultaneously redefines it. It is pervasive, engaging with sets of values from real life and interweaving them in order to contribute to a citizenship that does not remain between the walls of the concert hall.

Research design
As our research is right on the intersection of the artistic and the academic knowledge production, our research design combines analytical, design oriented and artistic research. The nature of the research is interdisciplinary, since all researchers feedback to – and intervene in each other’s disciplines. The importance of this approach lies in the fact that the research needs 1] an artist who deeply understands classical music from a maker’s point of view; 2] academics on existing listening cultures of audiences and their social values to translate her findings and hold them against state of the art knowledge in the social sciences; and 3] someone who can converge all forces into a high end product in terms of game design, interaction design and practical usage. As its scientific methods the project employs audience research, experiments, secondary survey data on trends in society and listening culture,  and design science research. Several ludic music performances will be designed, performed and evaluated with a mixed methods approach to answer our research questions.

Annebeth Erdbrink works as PhD researcher (Delft University of Technology) on the GAMPSISS project. Her mixed method research focuses on the design and evaluation of two playful classical music performances, with the aim to contribute to an active listening culture that promotes smart, inclusive and sustainable societies.
As a social psychologist specialized in game design, she is fascinated by the potential impact of applied games (on a personal and societal level). If a game’s design is based on solid research and used in a relevant context, she believes, it can be innovative and sustainable instruments to achieve attitude or behavioural change.

The GAMPSISS project enables her to investigate the application of games within an artistic context. Something she is excited about, because after working as a cultural programmer for more than eight years she experienced that arts and culture can contribute to society on many different levels.

Koen van Eijck (1967) is professor at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies at Erasmus University. His research and publications focus on social inequality and trends in cultural participation and taste patterns, arts education and talent development, the perception and appreciation of visual art and (classical) music and cognitive sociology. This background makes him eager to contribute to the GAMPSISS project in order to learn how classical music can be optimally enjoyed and understood. He teaches courses on general sociology, philosophy of science, (cultural) consumption, and arts perception in the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Research Master’s programmes of the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication.

Koen graduated as a developmental psychologist in 1991. In 1996 he finished his PhD in the Sociology of Stratification based on a sibling study into the impact of family background on education, occupation and consumption. After post-doc positions at Tilburg University and Radboud University Nijmegen where he continued his studies of cultural lifestyles, he was assistant professor of Leisure Studies at Tilburg University between 1999 and 2006. After one year of associate professorship at Leuven University, he became associate professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2007, where he was head of the department between 2010 and 2014. Since 2016, he is full professor of cultural Lifestyles.

More information: https://www.eshcc.eur.nl/vaneijck/

Micha Hamel is as a composer, poet, performer and researcher one of the most versatile artists in the Netherlands. He composed music for the concert hall, dance and theatre and conducted many concerts with ensembles and orchestras, mainly performing contemporary music. Since the composing of his ‘tragic operetta’ Snow White (2008) he mainly composes interdisciplinary and polystilistic works. Works that require an unconventional line-up, spacing and movement, acting and singing musicians, crossing over with poetry, fine arts or architecture. As a conductor and artistic leader, Micha programmed and performed many cross-over concerts and events that are meant to push the borders of the concert-framework. In 2015, he founded a production unit for small scale music theatre, ‘Ensemble Michamix’, for which he composes, writes and directs his own productions. He holds a professorship at Codarts University for the Arts Rotterdam in which he researched the current state and the future of classical and contemporary music, which resulted in the book Speelruimte voor klassieke muziek in de 21ste eeuw. He also published five collections of poetry that were praised for their vitality and originality. Future projects include composing an opera and creating ‘poetic experiences’ for Virtual Reality. Since january 2015, he has been a member of the Royal Academy of the Arts. From 2016–2017, he was a visiting teacher at Utrecht University. Micha Hamel is the project leader and the primary artistic researcher of GAMPSISS.

More information: www.michahamel.com

Janna Michael works as postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is investigating listening cultures, classical music audiences and explores if and how music listening culture can be altered through gamification. She draws on interviews, survey data and experiments to examine values realized in the aesthetic experience of music listening.

Her PhD research addressed cultural consumption and boundary drawing in the areas of visual arts, music and fashion during her PhD research. Now she is enthusiastic to investigate inclusive outcomes of cultural participation within the GAMPSISS project by investigating the relation between aesthetic experience and the value of listening.

Next to her postdoctoral research, she works as lecturer in the Ba and Ma program Arts, Culture and Society at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has taught diverse courses such as ‘Arts, Culture and Engagement’, ‘Methods of Qualitative Research’, and tutorials in ‘Contemporary Approaches to Cultural Sociology’ as well as ‘Economic Geography of Creativity and Urban development’.

Prof.dr.ir. A. (Alexander) Verbraeck (MSc in applied mathematics 1987 (cum laude); PhD in logistics 1991), is a full professor at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Multi Actor Systems Department. His research focuses on modeling and simulation, especially in heavily distributed environments and using real-time data. Examples of research on these types of simulations are real-time decision making, interactive gaming using simulations, and the use of 3D virtual and augmented reality environments in simulations.  The major application domain for research is logistics and transportation. In addition Alexander has a position as adjunct professor at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, USA. Here, he applies the modeling and simulation research for studying real-time supply chains. . His applied research in simulation, gaming, and training has been funded by organizations such as Maersk, Shell, KLM, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Port of Rotterdam, the National Forensics Institute, and Dutch Railroads. He presented over 100 refereed papers at conferences, wrote close to 20 book chapters, and published his work in a dozen journals.

Arlon Luijten (1978) is regisseur, game-designer, researcher en docent.
Zijn grootste inspiratiebron is de stad en de uitdagingen van de nabije toekomst en de nijpende vraag: wat is de rol van de kunsten in die toekomst? Hij ontwikkelt theatrale speelvelden die de wereld binnen en buiten het theater overbruggen, en die elementen combineren uit opera, theater, amusement, mythologie, serious gaming, technologie, onderzoek en onderwijs.
Hij daagt publiek, burgers, kunstenaars, ondernemers, wetenschappers en overheid uit om hierin samen te werken.

Tussen 2012-2016 ontwikkelde Arlon voor de Operadagen Rotterdam de stadsopera ‘PARSIFAL, playingfields’ met als onderdeel daarvan een game-performance. Sindsdien onderzoekt hij interactiviteit en gamification als dramaturgisch middel om het publiek niet alleen te laten deelnemen, maar ook mede-plichtig te maken aan het kunstwerk.
Tussen 2017-2020 werkt hij aan een nieuwe stads-opera-cyclus: ‘Ring of Resilience’ ;
een 4-jarig project dat scenario’s voor de toekomst van de stad verkent i.s.m Operadagen Rotterdam en Resilient City..
Daarnaast ontwikkelt hij interactieve kunstwerken en game-performances ism bedrijven, psychologen, steden en kunstenaars.
Sinds 2016 is hij Nederlands lid van het Europees Cultureel Parlement. Hierin werkt werkt hij aan nieuwe internationale samenwerkingen.
In GAMPSISS zal hij de regie van de ludic performances voor zijn rekening nemen.
Ook in het game-design zal hij, met de dramaturgische voorwaarden van de performances in het achterhoofd, deelnemen.

Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens (1973) is associate professor at Erasmus University College. She has a background in economics and philosophy and published books like “De overspelige bankier” en “Op naar de volgende crisis”. Her PhD “Contested Communication” was an interdisciplinary research on the communication of Central Bank Presidents in times of crisis.

Since she works for Erasmus University College (2012), she focuses on innovation in Education, both in research and education. The leading questions herein are “Why are we doing what we are doing? and Should we keep on doing, what we’re doing?”. To develop more societal relevant transdisciplinary education and research she co-initiated the Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab (RASL). This is a cooperation between Erasmus University, Willem de Kooning Academic and Codarts. Currently she is Academic Board member of RASL.

Since January 2016 Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens is member of the Council for Health and Society.

Liesbeth is married and has four children.

Within the Gampsiss research, Liesbeth joined the subgroup of Micha Hamel and Henrice Vonck. She will focus on the possibilities to do transdisciplinary research.

Previous Calls for Participation

Nederlands

Ben jij klaar voor ons luister-experiment?

We zijn op zoek naar mensen die via het invullen van een luisterdagboek willen deelnemen aan onze studie naar muziekbeleving door diep in een muziekstuk te duiken.

Voor een grootschalig onderzoeksproject naar de beleving van klassieke muziekconcerten en de rol die gamificatie daarin zou kunnen spelen, bestuderen we de luisterervaringen van verschillende mensen. Het onderzoek wordt uitgevoerd door een team van onderzoekers van de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Codarts Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Rotterdam en Technische Universiteit Delft. Momenteel werken we aan een deelproject waarin we onderzoeken hoe mensen muziekstukken ‘ontdekken’ en hoe hun waarnemen en waardering van die stukken veranderen als ze er herhaaldelijk naar luisteren. We doen dat met behulp van de innovatieve methode van het luisterdagboek. Als je deelneemt aan dit onderzoek, zullen we eerst een interview met je afnemen over je muzikale voorkeuren en luistergewoonten. Vervolgens kies je een muziekstuk dat je vanuit jezelf beter wilt leren kennen en ontvang je daarnaast een muziekstuk van ons om een aantal keer te beluisteren. Dit kan op verschillende dagen en in verschillende stemmingen gebeuren, wanneer het jou uitkomt. We vragen je om van dat luisteren een dagboekje bij te houden en naderhand wordt je nogmaals geïnterviewd. Je hoeft zeker geen muziekexpert of zelfs maar liefhebber te zijn om deel te nemen; we zijn juist op zoek naar de ervaringen en voorkeuren van heel verschillende soorten luisteraars.

Desgewenst kunnen deelnemers € 25,00 ontvangen voor hun medewerking.

Alle informatie die het onderzoek oplevert wordt anoniem verwerkt en we zullen nooit persoonlijke informatie doorspelen naar derde partijen.

Zin om mee te doen? Stuur dan een berichtje naar Michael@eshcc.eur.nl

Verspreid deze oproep gerust onder vrienden en bekenden.

Alvast hartelijke dank!

Koen van Eijck en Janna Michael
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam

Afdeling Kunst- en Cultuurwetenschappen

English

Are you ready for our listening experiment?

We are looking for people who want to participate in filling in a listening journal for our study on music experience, that of diving deep into a piece of music.

For our large-scale research project into the perception of classical music concerts and the role that gamification could play in this, we study listening experiences of different people. The research is carried out by a team of Erasmus researchers University of Rotterdam, Codarts University of the Arts Rotterdam and Technical University Delft. We are currently working on a subproject in which we examine how people “discover” music pieces and how their perception and appreciation of those pieces change as they listen to it repeatedly.

We do this with the innovative method of a listening book. If you participate in this research, we will firstly conduct an interview with you about your musical preferences and listening habits. Then you choose a piece of music that you know, one that you want to get to know better, and you will also receive a piece of music from us. All are to be listened to a number of times. This can happen on different days and in different moods.

We ask you to keep a diary of that listening and afterwards you will be interviewed again. You certainly do not have to be a music expert or even a fan to participate take; we are looking for the experiences and preferences of very different listeners.

If desired, participants can receive € 25.00 for their cooperation.

All information provided by the research is processed anonymously and we will never forward personal information to third parties.

Want to join? Send a message to Michael@eshcc.eur.nl

Spread this call with friends and acquaintances.

Thank you very much!

Koen van Eijck and Janna Michael
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Department of Art and Culture Studies

Knowledge Partners:

• Codarts University for the Arts
• Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management, Department of Multi Actor Systems, Section Policy Analysis
• Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of History, Culture, and Communication, Department of Arts and Culture Studies
• Willem de Kooning Academy / Research Center Creating 010, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences
• Radboud University, Department of History

• Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab (RASL)

Composer Alliance:

• Nieuw Geneco

Orchestras and Ensembles

• Het Balletorkest
• Het Gelders Orkest
• Stichting Omroep Muziek
• Philharmonie Zuidnederland
• Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest
• Noord Nederlands Orkest
• Amsterdam Sinfonietta
• Nederlands Blazers Ensemble
• Calefax Wind Ensemble
• Asko/Schoenberg Ensemble
• Nederlands Kamerkoor
• Holland Baroque
• Orkest van de 18e eeuw
• Nederlandse Bachvereniging
• Doelen Ensemble
• Ricciotti Ensemble
• Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest

Music Publisher

• Donemus Publishing

Concert Halls

• De Doelen
• Tivoli/Vredenburg
• Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ
• Theaters Tilburg
• Schouwburg & Philharmonie Haarlem

Get in touch

mhamel@codarts.nl