Cambridge IELTS 11 Academic Listening Test 4 (Questions 27-30)

SUPERVISOR: You only had women performers in your study. Was that because male musicians are less worried about fashion?

JOANNA: I think a lot of the men are very much influenced by fashion, but in social terms the choices they have are more limited … they’d really upset audiences if they strayed away from quite narrow boundaries.

SUPERVISOR: Hmm. Now, popular music has quite different expectations. Did you read Mike Frost’s article about the dress of women performers in popular music?

JOANNA: No.

SUPERVISOR: He points out that a lot of female singers and musicians in popular music tend to dress down in performances, and wear less feminine clothes, like jeans instead of skirts, and he suggests this is because otherwise they’d just be discounted as trivial.

JOANNA: But you could argue they’re just wearing what’s practical … I mean, a pop-music concert is usually a pretty energetic affair.

SUPERVISOR: Yes, he doesn’t make that point, but I think you’re probably right. I was interested by the effect of the audience at a musical performance when it came to the choice of dress.

JOANNA: The subjects I interviewed felt this was really important. It’s all to do with what we understand by performance as a public event. They believed the audience had certain expectations and it was up to them as performers to fulfil these expectations to show a kind of esteem …

SUPERVISOR: … they weren’t afraid of looking as if they’d made an effort to look good.

JOANNA: Mmm. I think in the past the audience would have had those expectation of one another too, but that’s not really the case now, not in the UK anyway.

SUPERVISOR: No.

JOANNA: And I also got interested in what sports scientists are doing too, with regard to clothing.

SUPERVISOR: Musicians are quite vulnerable physically, aren’t they, because the movements they carry out are very intensive and repetitive, so I’d imagine some features of sports clothing could safeguard the players from the potentially dangerous effects of this sort of thing.

JOANNA: Yes, but musicians don’t really consider it. They avoid clothing that obviously restricts their movements, but that’s as far as they go.

SUPERVISOR: Anyway, coming back to your own research, do you have any idea where you’re going from here?

JOANNA: I was thinking of doing a study using an audience, including ..