A Crowd-Sourced Database of Coronamusic: Documenting Online Making and Sharing of Music During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Niels Chr. Hansen, John Melvin Treider, Dana Swarbrick, Joshua Silberstein Bamford, Johanna Wilson, Jonna K. Vuoskoski
Abstract
When a sweeping COVID-19 pandemic forced cultural venues, schools, and social hangouts into hibernation in early 2020, music life relocated to the digital world. On social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, sofas and balconies took center stage for musical performances presented as live-streamed concerts and recorded videos. Amateurs and professional musicians alike embraced digital formats and innovated novel genres of corona-themed music. Adapting the well-known “musicking” term from cultural musicology (Small, 1999), we will characterize the diverse practices of listening to, playing, dancing to, composing, rehearsing, improvising, discussing, exploring, and innovating musical products during lockdown with explicit or implicit reference to the novel coronavirus and/or pandemic life circumstances as “corona-musicking.” By extension, audiovisual products of such corona-musicking behavior will be defined collectively as “coronamusic.” To best facilitate future work, these definitions are intentionally broad and minimally exclusive (cf. Small, 1999). This study aims to establish the CORONAMUSIC DATABASE–a crowdsourced corpus of links to coronamusic videos and news media reports (https://osf.io/y7z28/). This constitutes the first readily accessible and searchable resource for researchers from all disciplines with an interest in documenting and investigating the musical dynamics underlying the pandemic.