Manipulated Music

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Apropos of my comment at the end of yesterday’s entry that one should look at statistics with a critical eye, the same obviously goes for any news report. What I specifically have in mind in this case is the Washington Post story about how Josh Bell was ignored by rush hour pedestrians at a Washington D.C. train station.

I have seen links to this article from Artsjournal.com and Arts and Letters Daily. There was a response to the article on Salon.com and discussions on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s forums.

And I guess I am contributing to the hysteria by mentioning it here. But the whole experiment really perturbed me.

The title of the article, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” an allusion to pearls before swine, really says it all. The effort seemed to be biased toward proving that the philistines of D.C. wouldn’t recognize talent. It almost seems like they set Bell up to fail. It was more of a stunt to write a provocative article about than a constructive attempt to observe and measure response. I guess I shouldn’t expect so disciplined approach from the the author, Gene Weingarten, since he is a columnist rather than a reporter.

They put him in a train station leading up to the 9:00 am hour, a time when people have work commitments they are rushing to satisfy, expecting people to engage in a leisure time activity.

Busking is prohibited in the Metro stations. In a post article discussion, the author admits he had to cajole the transit authority into violating their rules and give him permission. While people might stop because Bell’s presence was out of the ordinary, they also might ignore him assuming he was operating illegally and the police would be along to stop him soon.

Weingarten cites Kant’s belief that beauty can only be appreciated under optimal conditions. Instead of trying this out in less than optimal conditions, he sets it up in abysmal conditions. Probably the only situation that would have been worse would be stationing Bell in a stadium vomitorium at a Washington Redskins game during half time.

It would have been better to try this experiment in a place where people were in a more leisurely state of mind even if they were in the process of pursuing a goal. Perhaps a shopping mall–or the National Mall.

I mention this more for the benefit of the reader than in any hope of influencing future experiments by newspaper columnists. Studies like the Magic of Music mentioned yesterday have noted people are listening to classical music fairly frequently these days. They just don’t do it in a concert hall. The performers, to paraphrase Willie Sutton, may have to go where the people are if they aren’t coming to them.

Sure there have been performances in malls and outdoor areas before, but has anyone thought to study before what it is that gets people to stop? It is easy enough to perform with no specific expectation of how many will stop and another to measure the who, what, when, why and how of getting people to sincerely do so. The answers may comprise the basis for the next method of presenting performances.

One last thing in closing that has been long debated in many forms and I won’t try to tackle tonight.

I didn’t read all the responses people made on the various websites on which the story appeared, but one interesting observation did catch my eye. There was much ado made about the fact that Bell only made $34 and attracted the attention of a handful of people vs. National Symphony music director Leonard Slatkin’s projection that a hypothetical World Class musician would make $150 and cause 75-100 to take a meaningful pause. On the Chronicle of Higher Ed forums, a poster named Grupt (comment #17) observed: “But there’s an assumption there that there should be a tight relationship between talent and take, and I doubt that relationship exists.”

Modeling Consumer Behavior

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Over at Adaptistration, its Take A Friend to the Orchestra Month (TAFTO). I am not writing this year, but I am participating in a sense. The orchestra will be performing in the theatre I run.

Drew prefaced today’s entry with a promise that it would wow readers with the concepts it was presenting. I have to say it certainly did for me. Bill Harris of Facilitated Systems creates a computer model to test if Drew’s TAFTO program is beneficial for orchestras in comparison with paid advertising.

Now since he is dealing with statistics and computer programs, it isn’t the easiest of reads. On my first read through I absorbed enough to realize it was providing enough valuable insights to read through again a couple hours later. If I understand correctly, one can copy the program he has written and use it in the simulator he suggests to produce results specific to ones organization.

I was intrigued by all this so I followed a link back to Bill’s blog and came across an entry on the Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music Final Report. Not two weeks ago I had cited a portion of the finding of this report to a group and now I see Mr. Harris telling people to be careful about the conclusions they drew from it.

He quote from page 32 of the report-

In trying to profile the factors that might predict a ticket buyer, one statistic stood out: 74 percent of them had played an instrument or sung in a chorus at some time in their lives.

What he says this appears to be saying is,”the probability of someone having played an instrument or sung in a group, given that they were a ticket purchaser, was 0.74.”

But what he says you really want to know is the probability that someone will buy a ticket “given that they played an instrument or sang in a group.” That may be what you assumed the report was saying because you hope that people who play instruments and sing (or perform in a play, paint, etc) will patronize your organization.

My assumption about the findings in the Knight report was that people who had music in their background might be inclined to attend later in life, but I didn’t see a cause and effect relationship. It merely seemed that people with a musical background shared were an affinity group within symphony attendees.

However, under the suspicion that inclination to attend wasn’t any different than cause and effect assumption, I posted a comment to Harris’ latest blog entry asking if I was making an erroneous assumption.

We shall see what he says. In the meantime, the lesson here is to read those statistics with a careful, critical eye.

Will I Still Love Me Tomorrow?

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One of the exercises Peter Drucker suggests in the “Managing Oneself” article I cited yesterday is feedback analysis suggesting that:

“Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.”

If you are thinking of making this a practice, you might check out FutureMe.org. It is a website that allows you to send email messages to your future self anywhere between 3 days and 50 years. You could use the service to aid in feedback analysis, self-reflection or just entertain your future self.

There was a piece on NPR this weekend about the FutureMe website where the founder read off some of the public letters submitted to the site. (You can flag your letters as private or public when you submit them.) Some of them were funny and others, the the story of a man who uses the service to cope with his progressing Alzheimer’s, were quite touching.

Leader, Manage Thy Self

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Are you a listener or a reader? If you don’t have any idea what I am talking about, you may want to take a look at Peter Drucker’s “Managing Oneself,” an article that has been reprinted in the Harvard Business Review a number of times. I first got my hands on it at the Arts Presenters Emerging Leadership Institute in January and have read it about three or four times since then. (It is only 11 pages long.)

As one might imagine from the title, the main thrust of the article deals with self-examination as a way of self-improvement. What he suggests isn’t a “12 Easy Steps to a Better You” program. If anything, he believes trying to adopt another’s practices is likely to make you miserable. He also observes that people often think they know what their strengths and weaknesses are but are usually wrong. (So if you are miserable in your current position, read it!)

In addition to knowing ones strengths and weakness, he feels it is important for people to know how they perform. That is where the whole reader or listener question comes in along with learning how one learns, what environments one thrives most in and what ones values are. Then, given your knowledge about how you best operate in relation to these factors, what is it you can contribute? Drucker gives a number of interesting examples of how men like Patton, JFK, Eisenhower and Churchill were hampered by situations which emphasized their weaker areas.

Once you have obtained this self-knowledge, Drucker urges you to recognize that everyone around you is an individual operating in varying degrees to the same criteria, have different ways of achieving success and therefore need different things from you to realize that success.

“Whenever someone goes to his or her associates and says, “This is what I am good at. This is how I work. These are my values. This is the contribution I plan to concentrate on and the results I should be expected to deliver,” the response is always, “This is most helpful. But why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

And one gets the same reaction – without exception, in my experience-if one continues by asking, “And what do I need to know about your strengths, how you perform, your values, and your proposed contribution?” In fact, knowledge workers should request this of everyone with whom they work, whether as subordinate, superior, colleague, or team member. And again, whenever this is done, the reaction is always, “Thanks for asking me. But why didn’t you ask me earlier?” Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another.”

Yes, I know there is a certain irony in expecting people who don’t learn best by reading to gain maximum benefit of Drucker’s message through reading.