For the next few months, musicologist and curator Brandon Farnsworth is working with us at Art Music Denmark. We will be working together on the project “Tourbus – Understanding Art Music Mobility”, focusing on understanding musicians’ mobility in the Øresund Region.

About the project, Farnsworth tells:

“Tourbus solve an old problem: While many professional musicians have impressive local and international networks of collaborators and contacts, we don’t have any overview of how these different musical communities are interconnected. Using the possibilities of new AI tools, Tourbus maps artists’ performance patterns, including where and with whom they perform, while also analyzing their presence across digital platforms like Spotify and Bandcamp.

This data-driven approach will provide unprecedented insights into the region’s musical ecosystem, enabling more informed decisions about artist support and development. Assembling this enormous puzzle will give us unprecedented insight into how musical life actually functions in our region, helping us make better decisions about supporting artists based on an up-to-date and evidence-driven overview.

For this pilot period, we’re focussing on the Øresund Region. While we all share a notion of musical exchange between the two regions, and occasionally meet colleagues who work in one country and live in the other, a sense of two separate worlds often prevails, despite their interconnection. By comprehensively mapping who performs where and with whom, we will identify different professional communities of artists. How often do Swedish musicians perform in Copenhagen and vice-versa? Do experimental musicians collaborate more than classical musicians or sound artists? And how separate are these worlds anyway?”

The findings will be shared during a final event in late February/early March.

If you have any questions regarding the project, feel free to contact: info@tourbus.ai.

This project is made possible by Culture Moves Europe, Augustinus Foundation, and LU Innovation.