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Monkey on the Roof: Researching creative practice, music consumption, social change and the online environment

This research paper comes out of my work into music as a tool for social change. I had visited India before and worked with the music charity Music Basti in Delhi as part of my knowledge exchange activities with grassroots music industry organisation UnConvention. I arranged for a practice based research and knowledge transfer project to take place in which colleague Jez Collins and I took a professional record producer to Delhi to work with the children in the homes for street kids to make a recording of a collection of songs that they had co-written with their Music Basti music workshop coordinators. We spent a week in India making the album and using handheld digital video cameras to allow the staff and students of Music Basti to tell their stories. The record was released online on Bandcamp which allowed for us to allow purchasers to choose the price they would like to pay - with all proceeds going to the Music Basti charity. The Monkey on the Roof website was designed by colleague Simon Barber and it allowed for web visitors to view videos that were of interest to them based on a series of metatags, before going on to make the music purchase, which we hypothesised would contribute to their decision-making process about how generous they would be when purchasing the album. In addition, the web interface was in turn used as inspiration for the music discovery interface subsequently implemented by Bandcamp after I demoed the site to them in my role as advisory board member. This paper explored the idea of these kinds of integrated activities as practice based research in a special issue of the Creative Industries Journal.