No matter what music event you go to there'll be people in the crowd having a conversation during the performance. If it's a quiet bit of ambient in a church, it's two girls discussing a facebook post on one of their's iPhone. If it's unbelievably loud industrial it's a couple of hipsters shouting at each other. Even when it's pumping Techno and most of the crowd is leaping around and waving their arms, there's the group of friends talking about where they're going next or something.
Just like the people standing in the dark reading Twitter, or the one's taking pictures of lasers through the fog machine haze, or the conga line of people pushing to the front or back to the bar, it's pointless getting upset about it. It's just part of the performance.
What I'm curious about is how the talent feels about it. If you've spent months creating an audio-visual masterpiece of 3 projector CGI mixed in with artfully a-rhythmic beats and samples, does it upset you that 1/3 of the audience are not Here and Now and paying attention?
When we were in the Dark Place in Galloway there was a lovely simple art installation. A projector on to a big screen and a camera recording the screen with a 15 second delay and some fuzz and pan before feeding it back into the projector. All this was across a main walk way so people left shadows which then became part of the repeat echo. Mixed in with this were some emotionally charged text like "Authentic" or "Anticipation". It's pretty simple programming with a Mac, webcam and projector but was remarkably effective. Most people walked through without realising they were part of the performance but some discovered they could manipulate the images.
So here's the thing. If people talking in the crowd are part of the performance, can we make that explicit rather than just accidental. Do the same kind of approach but with the audio domain rather than the spatial. I picture a directional mic or perhaps a sneaky roving collaborator with a mic recording the conversations and then feeding it back into the mix after a few seconds delay. Would that freak out the people who noticed or would they join in?
I do like things that break down the wall between performance and audience, so I'd sure show up at a concert that included something like that. I think there was a theatre (or maybe just a play) where people were encouraged to leave their cell phones on and do whatever. I don't remember how or if that was somehow integrated into the performance, but it sounded interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEtcHc8rJQQ John Cage 4'33'' Autotune
And yes, that's one of the approaches I had in mind. The trick would be to play it back to the audience in real time.
I can't remember what it was now but there was a famous acid-club-rave track from the mid 90s that had a lot of football crowd noise mixed in in waves. Great way to get the audience to clap and cheer by playing the sound of thousands of people clapping and cheering at them.