No abstract

Street performance (busking) has gained a higher social status in the 21st century. Recently, scholars have argued for its merit in contributing to the quality of urban life. Past studies of street performance have focused on performers and performances; there is a research gap in the literature calling attention to studying street performance from an audience perspective. A Street Audience Experience (SAE) scale was developed based on a Hong Kong sample through an exploratory and a confirmatory stage over 3 parts of study. In the exploratory stage, interviews and a quantitative survey were conducted and followed by an exploratory factor analysis to inform a hypothetical factor model. In the confirmatory stage, another survey was conducted and followed by a confirmatory factor analysis to validate the model. Six factors of street audience experience were confirmed: emotion, intellect, interaction, novelty, place, and technique. Based on the SAE scale, the relations between the audience's experience of street performance and their behavioral intentions are also discussed.

Street performance (busking) is a historically and culturally important topic. This article focuses on street audience experience (SAE) and highlights the environmental factor of street environment, which has not been fully acknowledged in SAE research. The current study examines how street audience’s experience and satisfaction of busking performances can be influenced by street-environment suitability, which refers to the street audience’s evaluation of the street environment as a preferable “venue” for street performances. Furthermore, the current study examines the antecedent of street-environment suitability, street-environment experience, which is captured by the street audience’s evaluation of the street environment in terms of visual aesthetics, acoustic comfort, and perceived crowding. We staged a musical busking performance as a field experiment across four locations in Hong Kong and surveyed a total of 201 respondents. Structural equation modeling analyses established two lines of findings. First, a street environment that is considered as more suitable for street performance is associated with higher SAE and overall satisfaction with the performance. Second, a street environment that is perceived as more positive in terms of visual aesthetics, acoustic comfort, and perceived crowding is considered as more suitable for street performance. Our results validate the importance of street environment in understanding the experience of street performances.

We developed a psychometric scale for measuring the subjective environmental perception of public spaces. In the scale development process, we started with an initial pool of 85 items identified from the literature that were related to environmental perception. A total of 1,650 participants rated these items on animated images of 12 public spaces through an online survey. Using principal component analyses and confirmatory factor analyses, we identified two affective factors (comfort and activity) with 8 items and six cognitive factors (legibility, enclosure, complexity, crime potential, wildlife, and lighting) with 22 items. These eight factors represent the core attributes underlying environmental perception of public spaces. Practicality of the scale and limitations of the study are also discussed.

We tested the relationship between art classification and liking of the graffiti murals among naive viewers (N = 60 college students). Graffiti murals were classified as art to a lesser extent than both abstract and representational paintings. Surprisingly, graffiti murals were only liked less than representational but not abstract paintings. Thus, art classification might not necessarily predict liking.