Music & Fun
Even though there is a sub-discipline of musicology that defines itself as "ludo-musicology", it essentially deals with video game music or with the way in which music participates in the ludic experience provided by video games. The Music & Fun project, on the other hand, aims at something much more general, the idea being to be interested in works and practices whose aim is to arouse amusement (and which should be clearly distinguished from entertainment as well as from joy). This is one of the fundamental dimensions of musical making: we make music (whether we are listening or performing) also to have fun. But if the sciences of music have long been concerned with other dimensions of musical practices, the ludic condition of music remains surprisingly largely unquestioned.
This project is organized in a number of areas: interviews with performers about the sounds they consider amusing; an ethnographic survey of the productions of the Dur&Doux label; an analysis of forms of musical humor within web culture; and psychological experiments aimed at systematically exploring the mechanisms underlying the production and perception of musical humor.
IRCAM's Team : Analysis of Musical Practices
