Classical concert or scientific field experiment? With the event series "The Golden Ear Challenge", the research group "Music Perception and Processing" at the University of Oldenburg is blurring this boundary.
The concerts taking place from 10 November in Bremen, Hanover, Oldenburg and Hamburg will be different to what concertgoers are used to. Smartphones, for example, are expressly encouraged: they make it possible to take part in the "Golden Ear Challenge" during the concert evening. The string quartet of the "Orchester im Treppenhaus" from Hanover has deliberately included small mistakes in the classical works by Ludwig van Beethoven, Maurice Ravel and Robert Schumann, among others. The concert guests' task is to hear these and then record them on their smartphones. At the end of the evening, whoever has demonstrated the finest hearing will receive an award and take home the "Golden Ear Award".
"We use the anonymised data that we collect on this evening for our research," says Prof. Dr Kai Siedenburg, who continues to head the "Music Perception and Processing" working group at the University of Oldenburg, which is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, even after his appointment to the Graz University of Technology (Austria) last year. He is also a member of the Oldenburg Collaborative Research Centre for Hearing Acoustics, which is funded by the German Research Foundation. "We want to find out what role factors such as age or personal musical experience have on hearing ability," he explains. This is why the participants also answer questions about these aspects on their smartphones. It is important to the researchers to determine the auditory impressions outside the laboratory in a real concert situation. Therefore, concertgoers can look forward to first-class musical entertainment despite some deliberately wrong notes. Music educator and presenter Anne Kussmaul will lead the 90-minute programme.
