Effects of environmental experience on audience experience of street performance (busking).

Abstract

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.

Effect of Street Performance (Busking) on the Environmental Perception of Public Space

“…Preference is a common notion in studies related to public space ( Herzog, 1992 ; Herzog and Gale, 1996 ; Herzog and Leverich, 2003 ; Herzog and Bryce, 2007 ). As discussed earlier, past studies revealed that the presence of street performance was associated with an attractive surrounding environment ( Doubleday, 2018 ; Ho and Au, 2018 ; Ho et al, 2020 ). Hence, we hypothesize that:…”

“…Literature regarding street performance has concentrated on the history of street performance ( Campbell, 1981 ; Cohen and Greenwood, 1981 ; M. Smith, 1996 ), case studies of the street performances in specific locations ( Prato, 1984 ; Harrison-Pepper, 1990 ; Tanenbaum, 1995 ; Marina, 2018 ), and life stories of street performers ( Moore, 1974 ; Press and McNamara, 1975 ; Condos, 1976 ; Palmquist, 1984 ; Gomes, 2000 ; Rebeiro Gruhl, 2017 ). Others have studied street performance from the economic ( Kushner and Brooks, 2000 ), legal and legislative ( McNamara and Quilter, 2016 ; Juricich, 2017 ), urban design and policy ( Astor, 2019 ; Clua et al, 2020 ), and spectator experience ( Ho and Au, 2018 ; Ho et al, 2020 ) perspectives. Last but not least, there is the discourse that street performance can enhance people’s experience of public space ( Simpson, 2011 ; Doughty and Lagerqvist, 2016 ; Doubleday, 2018 ), and that is of interest to the current paper.…”

“…” and “ This performance made me feel I belonged to this place. ”; Ho and Au, 2018 ; Ho et al, 2020 ). In Santa Monica, shoppers of a shopping promenade thought that street performance was important to the attraction of the area ( Doubleday, 2018 ).…”

Scale Development for Environmental Perception of Public Space

“…We employ the affective-cognitive distinction to organize psychological constructs related to environmental perception of public spaces. Using keywords "urban," "public space/place," and "environmental perception/experience/ appraisal/preference/attributes," we identified from the literature 20 publications dated from 1980 onward that operationalized environmental perception with self-report items (Russell and Pratt, 1980;Nasar, 1983;Herzog, 1992;Strumse, 1994;Herzog and Gale, 1996;Hanyu, 1997;Herzog and Leverich, 2003;Herzog and Bryce, 2007;Yatmo, 2009;Yüksel, 2009;Nasar and Terzano, 2010;Nasar and Cubukcu, 2011;Ho et al, 2020;Chiang et al, 2014;Motoyama and Hanyu, 2014;Pals et al, 2014;Rašković and Decker, 2015;Nasar and Bokharaei, 2017a,b;van Rijswijk and Haans, 2018). A quarter of those publications explicitly state whether they examined the affective or the cognitive domain of environmental perception.…”

“…Those four duplicate items were reduced to one item. Similarly in the cognitive domain, there was a duplication of a set of five "perceived crowding" items between two studies (Yüksel, 2009;Ho et al, 2020). Those two duplicate sets were reduced to one set.…”