Conclusions for street performances

One of the recurring themes and main goals both for this class and for this blog project is to gain an understanding of the ways in which applied ethnomusicology can help the various issues in social justice we each explore. With my own projects I have striven to look at the ways in which music can help issues in social justice. Admittedly, I have gone into most of my conversations with the bias that music will be helpful and positive. What I have found most striking is that this is not always the case. Music, as everything else, has a time and a place. There are many ways in which music can be helpful. As we have seen, music can facilitate conversation. It can bring people together and give them something mutual and potentially unbiased to bond or connect over. Music can be a bridge between different worlds and communities. However, music can also create more problems than it solves. Music can be distracting and take away from the ultimate goals people have. It can be just as destructive as it is helpful, especially when you take into account what type of music, who has created it, and what functions the music serves, either by the original artist or those who are using it to serve their own purposes.

One thing this course and this project has taught me is how important it is to stay away from such biases. Further research into street performance and comparison between how street performers view themselves versus how passersby view them would give a better understanding of how music can be both positive and negative. More research could show how music can have an effect on people, from something as simple as Somewhere Over the Rainbow brightening someone's day to an instrumental cover of Blurred Lines deeply offending someone walking by. More observances of music in relation to charities would also serve to show both the positive and negative aspects towards music. Experiments in which music is used to influence people to sign up to help a charity on the street could help to show how music could either help the situation, or as some believe, be too distracting.