"Musical research in the past has focused on the composers, the performers and the musical works. The listeners have been absent," says Professor David Rowland.
"We are drawing on private sources such as diaries, letters and memoirs, to try and get at how ordinary people – soldiers in the trenches, the working classes in the nineteenth century – have really listened to music, and what impact it has had on them."
The research, funded with a grant of nearly £800,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is the second stage of an ambitious programme which applies the latest digital techniques to arts and humanities research.
In the first stage Professor Rowland, who is leading the Listening and British Cultures research programme, and his team spent three years developing the Listening Experience Database (LED) to collect records of people's experiences of listening to music, in any historical period.
The LED stores the information as Linked Open Data, which means it is connected up with other relevant information on the web, putting database users in touch with a much richer network of knowledge.
Building on this work, researchers are now using these sources to investigate the listening practices of a range of representative segments of the British population in more detail.
"It is easy for us to forget how limited people's opportunities to listen to music could be before the invention of recording,"
Particular areas of interest they are looking at include: music and Welsh identities; bands and singers in Ireland and the Irish diaspora in Britain; listening to traditional and art music in Scotland; how metropolitan music culture spread to the British provinces; and what social media can reveal about listening practices.
Using advanced digital research methods, developed in conjunction with The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, enables the researchers to draw on a wider range of resources than conventional databases, such as social media archives.
The project has been designed to serve as a model for other digital humanities research across a range of disciplines.
And by focusing on 'ordinary' people, rather than just the highly educated and musically literate, it will help build up a much richer picture of the place of music in British culture.
"It is easy for us to forget how limited people's opportunities to listen to music could be before the invention of recording," says Professor Rowland.
"In the eighteenth century, when London musicians began touring the provinces, people outside London often had their first chance to hear really excellent musical performances. How did they react?
"What was the effect when cheaper concerts were launched in Manchester in the 1850s, and thousands and thousands of people heard a symphony for the first time?
"These are the kinds of questions we are hoping to answer by focusing on the people who actually listened to music, from a wide range of social and educational backgrounds."
Listening and British cultures: listeners' responses to music in Britain, c. 1700-2018 is led by The Open University, in collaboration with Glasgow University, the Royal College of Music, the British Library, Glasgow Life and the National Library of Wales.
The Listening Experience Database
Launched in 2013, the Listening Experience Database is free to use and open to all and welcomes contributions from everyone.