Four Fields of Music Making

"Kumbaya" is a perfect example of what a participatory song is.  Participatory songs are usually limited by the skill level and participation of the group.  The potentials for participatory songs are limitless.  You can have an infinite amount of people singing, and there is the potential for everyone to be in sync.  Participatory songs value only what you can bring to the song.  If you cannot sing, you clap. If you cannot clap, you dance, etc.  Everyone is essential to the groups performance, and there is an egalitarian feel to the production.  The expectations for participatory songs are for you to join in and contribute, regardless of ability.  As the quality of participatory songs is judged by the feeling of the group, there is an emphasis on social bonding.  The music is focused more on "the doing."  It would be insulting for you not to join in the group and contribute whatever talents you possess to the performance.

This live version of the Lynyrd Skynyrd song "Free Bird" is a good representation of Presentational Music.  As Lynyrd Skynyrd performs the song, the audience watches in awe.  This music is for "listening" and appreciating unlike participatory.  However, the musicians cannot slack off during a performance because they need to sustain interest from the audience or they will not be performing for long.  Also, performances are continually being rehearsed and made better.  This is because the audience is expecting to hear exactly what they heard on the recording, and will be disappointed by hearing anything less.  In presentation music, you can hear individual lines, there are closed forms and extensive variation.  

High Fidelity Performances are musical sounds heard on recordings that index live performance.  They represent what a performer would do live. The limitations of this type of music are that the musicians may never meet the song engineer, producer or mixer, thus giving the artist limited control over his music,  and the song must make up a lack of visual by musical variation or keeping the songs short.  There is an economical value system set up by a capitalistic market that turns music into a product that can be sold.  The expectations of the listener is to be entertained and in his mind not have wasted money. 

Studio-Audio Art is a type of recorded music with the limitation that live performances are impossible.  This is because most sounds are computer generated and do not exist in the real world.  Genres that are mostly Studio-Audio Art include techno, dubstep and any kind of music that falls into the electronica realm.  The potential for Studio-Audio Art is that anyone can now make music on their computer, making the need for instruments obsolete.  Furthermore, the artist can use eclectic types of instruments and use sounds that are unique.  The values of Studio-Audio music are bestowing absolute control of how the track sounds to the artist.  With this comes another limitation which is the fact that a limitless amount of music can be made with no human interaction.