Abstract

Our experience of live performances is strongly influenced by the responses of people around us - other people's laughter, applause, fidgeting, rustling, sighing, scratching all influence our response to a live event. This talk will describe ethnographic and experimental work carried out in the Cognitive Science Group at Queen Mary that has explored these patterns of mutual influence.

Professor Healey will give an overview of work on audiences in street performance, stand-up comedy and contemporary dance. He will discuss some ways of sensing and measuring people’s responses in these different situations and some of the main hypotheses about what these measurements tell us about the character of audience responses. He will then introduce the claim that a, if not the, fundamental signal of audience engagement is concerted silence. Counter-examples are easy to find - chanting, singing, jumping etc. The speaker will argue that these behaviours reflect the operation of a separate social process - the need to display the character of responses to others i.e. ‘audience design’ and the prevailing norms about how this is done in different cultural contexts.

Biography

Pat Healey is Professor of Human Interaction and Head of the Cognitive Science Research Group in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. He is also currently working as a Turing Fellow. Healey’s research focuses on the basic mechanisms of human interaction, especially the processes by which people detect and recover from miscommunication. He is interested in how technology has the potential to extend and enrich human communication, particularly in the context of health.

http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/profiles/healeypat.html