Subway Experiment

There was a great story in the Washington Post yesterday about subway music. The Post disguised the internationally acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell as a street musician and placed him in the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington, DC during rush hour. The experiment: see if context and setting affect listeners’ perception of the music. What do you think? Would a virtuoso performance by one of the world’s pre-eminent musician’s stop you in your tracks if you heard it on the way to work?

Link to Article

BTW I also really like the way the Washington Post integrates media into the body of this article. Bell’s performance was filmed by a hidden camera so the online version of this article is supported by video samples.