Atmosphere In Music Festival:Environment,Tourists' Ego And The Interaction Between Them

Event tourism has a promoting effect on the local politics,economic,cultural and social life respectively.Governments and tourism attractions are keen to hold diverse events and festivals to shape and spread the image of tourist destinations,push economic growth and to drive infrastructure construction,which encourages the increasing number and ever-expanding scale of events in tourism industry.As a leisure lifestyle pursued by young people,music festival industry has become an essential element of modern event tourism.A large amount of capital investment has brought the vigorous expandsion of cultural industry,as well as the explosive growth of domestic music festivals.To be more specific,music festivals have the capacity to gather a large number of tourists in a short period and immediately drive local economic growth due to higher flexibility and acceibility compared with ordinary tourist attractions.Therefore,music festival industry serving as a new engine boosts the development of the tourism industry and economy as a whole.The irreversible trend of event tourism development has also implicated practical problems.For starter,serious homogeneous competition resulting from repetitive design of event products has appeared and gradually turned out to be a vicious circle.In spite of wide array of events varieties,the content of events in same types tends to be similar.In addition,low level of participation of tourists will largely lead to lack of in-depth experience.Related studies have fully verified the close relationship between atmosphere and behavioral factors such as tourist satisfaction,word-of-mouth effect and repeated participation.However,there is still a certain degree of ambiguity in the definition of atmosphere.It places too much emphasis on the importance of objective environmental elements and ignores the subjective initiative of "people”.Additionally,existing researches rarely pay attention to the atmosphere in music festivals.This study believes that simply equating the atmosphere with objective environmental elements cannot explain the differences in the perception of atmosphere caused by individual differences.The interaction between the environment and tourists has also been ignored.Therefore,this research raises four research questions:(1)what is the essence of the atmosphere in music festival;(2)what components constitute the atmosphere in music festival;(3)what are the distinctive features of the atmosphere in music festival;(4)what are t he relationships between the components of the atmosphere in music festival.Aiming at the above research problems,this study takes the Midi Music Festival as research case and uses a mixed research method to construct a conceptual framework of event atmo sphere on the base of theory of psychophysical field.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)the nature of atmosphere music festival is a dynamic field contains the tourists' ego and environment,as well as the interaction between them.Objective things existed in the geography environment act as stimulus on perceptive channels.The atmosphere contains ego and environment as two poles.(2)The environment and the tourists ' ego are two independent subsystems in the field,with their own complete structures.The environment in the field includes the objective environmental stimulus,that is,the geographical environment;it also includes the subject's perception of the geographical environment,that is,the behavioral environment.The formation of the behavioral environment depends on the physical stimulums and the organizational process of the stimulums received by the sensory channels.According to the difference of the stimulus itself,the behavior environment can be further divided into eventscape and social eventscape.Eventscape is the overall perception of the "things" in the geographical environment,and the social eventscape is the "human" factors.Tourists' ego is the only part in the field separating from the environment,and has its own independent dynamic.Motivation is the core power source within the ego-system.The imbalance of the need system will generate tensions facing both the inside and the outside of the ego-system,and drives the individual to adopt adaptive behaviors to alleviate and release this tension,thereby achieving the temporary balance of the system.Emotion is a sub-system with representation of forces within the ego-system.(3)The instinctive features of the atmosphere in music festival include holism,subjectivity and dynamics.Holism is the foundation to understand the event atmosphere.When tourists enter the situations of events,the event atmosphere emerges as a kind of holistic perception.Both the ego of tourists and environment cannot represent the holism of event atmosphere.Moreover,subjectivity is an important feature of event atmosphere.The presence of touris is the requirement of the formation of event atmosphere.Dynamics derives from the interaction between tourists' ego system and environment.(4)The interaction between environment and tourists' ego is the most important dynamic relationship in the atmosphere field.Quantitative analysis results such as structural equation modeling and analysis of variance have fully verified the interactio n.On the one hand,eventscape and social eventscape affect tourists' emotions.On the other hand,emotion affects eventscape and social eventscape by affecting the allocation of attention resources.Therefore,emotion is not only mediators of external forces pointing to interior,but also mediators of internal forces pointing to external environment.In short,the atmosphere in music festival is not a simple collection of environmental stimulus.It is a field composed of the tourists' ego and the environment with the process of interaction.Based on the above research conclusions,the contribution of this research contains the theoretical perspectives and the definition of atmosphere in music festival.This study has systematically analyzed the nature,structure and features of atmosphere in music festival from the perspective of holism.The conception framework the field of event atmosphere contributes to the comprehensive understanding of event atmosphere.It complements and deepens the existing conceptions based on positivism,and adds a new theoretical perspective to the study of tourism experience,especially the festival experience.In addition,this study provides inspiration for the practice of event management.Managers should be aware of the importance of tourists themselves in the process of atmosphere perception.In addition,Event managers must have a holistic view during the management of objective environmental factors.In the early stage of environmental design,these specific elements such as the infrastructure,layout and personnel management should be considered from a holistic perspective,so that they are in line with the theme of the event.Moreover,professional employees and volunteers should be trained to serve tourists.They can induce tourists' stronger positive emotions to promote atmosphere perception.Finally,they should provide tourists more opportunities to interact with objective environment and other social individuals through more interactive facilities,equipment and activities.