The red couch came from a dumpster. Well, to be fair, it came from the free store of sorts that is the Ditch That Dumpster campaign. So, yes, it’s recycled. In fact, with that story in mind, one could very well think that the scribbles in black Sharpie which cover the armrests come from its past owners. Except they’re not scribbles: they’re autographs from the performers on The Red Couch Project, a new student initiative begun last year in Kimball Hall which aims to promote musical performance on campus. So don’t be afraid to sit on it — in fact, be excited.

The setting is Kimball, third floor, in a corner single facing Campus Drive. Roughly once each week, a Stanford student performer sits on the red couch, surrounded by recording equipment, and plays an intimate 15-minute gig which is subsequently lightly edited and uploaded onto the student group’s YouTube page. The masterminds behind the project are Emma Sedivy ’12, artistic director, Stephen Henderson ’11, technical director, and Jeffrey Gerson ’12, publicity manager. The project has featured notable campus acts such as Nimbleweed and Jamaica Osorio.

Inspired by the concept of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, informal gigs behind All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen’s desk, Red Couch was originally christened Kimball Tiny Couch Concerts. It has since moved away from the image of a single-dorm event and toward a more encompassing image, not just across campus, but across the global networks attached to social media.

“The idea is to get the artists themselves involved with the marketing of the event,” Jeff explained. “The strength of the event lies in the personal ties the performer has.”

Take Ohioan Rebecca Richardson ’12, for example. Richardson had had no previous recording experience before she appeared on Red Couch. Once her 15-minute video was uploaded onto YouTube and a Facebook marketing campaign begun, viewership of Red Couch’s YouTube channel increased exponentially thanks to heavy viewership in her home state. The same effect was apparent when the project formed a partnership with the Stanford Soundtrack, with an opportunity for one of the performances to be featured as a special track on the compilation. Viewers were asked to vote for their favorite performance by “liking” it on Facebook. With the incentive of having their recording on a formal release, performers probably contributed to the spike in Red Couch’s number of Facebook friends, which increased to 485 during the voting stage.

But the real magic of Red Couch does not come from its popularity on the Internet (although it has cultivated a fan base which spans as wide as the BOSP campuses). Although the organization is definitely invested in bringing the experience of live performances to the virtual world, the strength of the organization lies in the ease and comfort the artist finds in the setting. The project strives for a feeling of veracity in the recordings — according to Henderson, the background noise from the natural environment of a dorm isn’t removed during the editing, because it would take away from the real experience. The intention is to create a deliberately unpolished sound which showcases the performers as they really are. In its intimacy, TRCP represents the more laid-back, refreshing energy of a live set than what you’d be able to get at on-campus venues like the CoHo. The focus is on creating an accessible environment in which the invisible boundary between audience and performer embodied by the elevated stage dissolves. Red Couch instead creates a community of musical appreciation that lasts not only for the duration of the performance, but is preserved in the digital media which define our generation. Red Couch manages not only to present artists at their best, but also to attract its audience members in their natural habitat: the Internet.

One of the goals of the project is to capture the musical scene of Stanford as experienced by the students, and it really has. Not only has it created a much-needed personal space for performance, but it has created a middle ground for busy Stanford students to experience the wealth of musical ability around them. “Good music should be listened to,” Henderson said. And so it shall be — even if it’s on YouTube.