A live music concert is a pleasurable social event that is among the most visceral and memorable forms of musical engagement. But what inspires listeners to attend concerts, sometimes at great expense, when they could listen to recordings at home? An iconic aspect of popular concerts is engaging with other audience members through moving to the music. Head movements, in particular, reflect emotion and have social consequences when experienced with others. Previous studies have explored the affiliative social engagement experienced among people moving together to music. But live concerts have other features that might also be important, such as that during a live performance the music unfolds in a unique and not predetermined way, potentially increasing anticipation and feelings of involvement for the audience. Being in the same space as the musicians might also be exciting. Here we controlled for simply being in an audience to examine whether factors inherent to live performance contribute to the concert experience. We used motion capture to compare head movement responses at a live album release concert featuring Canadian rock star Ian Fletcher Thornley, and at a concert without the performers where the same songs were played from the recorded album. We also examined effects of a prior connection with the performers by comparing fans and neutral-listeners, while controlling for familiarity with the songs, as the album had not yet been released. Head movements were faster during the live concert than the album-playback concert. Self-reported fans moved faster and exhibited greater levels of rhythmic entrainment than neutral-listeners. These results indicate that live music engages listeners to a greater extent than pre-recorded music and that a pre-existing admiration for the performers also leads to higher engagement.

Musical life became disrupted in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many musicians and venues turned to online alternatives, such as livestreaming. In this study, three livestreamed concerts were organized to examine separate, yet interconnected concepts—agency, presence, and social context—to ascertain which components of livestreamed concerts facilitate social connectedness. Hierarchical Bayesian modeling was conducted on 83 complete responses to examine the effects of the manipulations on feelings of social connectedness with the artist and the audience. Results showed that in concert 1, where half of the participants were allowed to vote for the final song to be played, this option did not result in the experience of more agency. Instead, if their preferred song was played (regardless of voting ability) participants experienced greater connectedness to the artist. In concert 2, participants who attended the concert with virtual reality headsets experienced greater feelings of physical presence, as well as greater feelings of connectedness with the artist, than those that viewed a normal YouTube livestream. In concert 3, attendance through Zoom led to greater experience of social presence, but predicted less connectedness with the artist, compared to a normal YouTube livestream. Crucially, a greater negative impact of COVID-19 (e.g., loneliness) predicted feelings of connectedness with the artist, possibly because participants fulfilled their social needs with this parasocial interaction. Examining data from all concerts suggested that physical presence was a predictor of connectedness with both the artist and the audience, while social presence only predicted connectedness with the audience. Correlational analyses revealed that reductions in loneliness and isolation were associated with feelings of shared agency, physical and social presence, and connectedness to the audience. Overall, the findings suggest that in order to reduce feelings of loneliness and increase connectedness, concert organizers and musicians could tune elements of their livestreams to facilitate feelings of physical and social presence.

The popularity of virtual concerts increased as a result of the social distancing requirements of the coronavirus pandemic. We aimed to examine how the characteristics of virtual concerts and the characteristics of the participants influenced their experiences of social connection and kama muta (often labeled “being moved”). We hypothesized that concert liveness and the salience of the coronavirus would influence social connection and kama muta. We collected survey responses on a variety of concert and personal characteristics from 307 participants from 13 countries across 4 continents. We operationalized social connection as a combination of feelings and behaviors and kama muta was measured using the short kama muta scale (Zickfeld et al., 2019). We found that (1) social connection and kama muta were related and predicted by empathic concern, (2) live concerts produced more social connection, but not kama muta, than pre-recorded concerts, and (3) the salience of the coronavirus during concerts predicted kama muta and this effect was completely mediated by social connection. Exploratory analyses also examined the influence of social and physical presence, motivations for concert attendance, and predictors of donations. This research contributes to the understanding of how people can connect socially and emotionally in virtual environments.

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When a sweeping COVID-19 pandemic forced cultural venues, schools, and social hangouts into hibernation in early 2020, music life relocated to the digital world. On social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, sofas and balconies took center stage for musical performances presented as live-streamed concerts and recorded videos. Amateurs and professional musicians alike embraced digital formats and innovated novel genres of corona-themed music. We will refer to the products of this musical phenomenon collectively as "coronamusic." Adapting a well-known term from cultural musicology (Small, 1999), the diverse practices of listening, playing, dancing, composing, rehearsing, improvising, discussing, exploring, and innovating within this domain will be characterized as "corona-musicking." This study aims to establish the CORONAMUSIC DATABASE–a crowdsourced corpus of links to coronamusic videos and news media reports (https://osf.io/y7z28/). This constitutes the first readily accessible and searchable resource for researchers from all disciplines with an interest in documenting and investigating the musical dynamics underlying the pandemic.

Abbreviations: BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor; HIIT, high-intensity interval training; HR, heart rate; LIIT, lowintensity interval training; VO 2peak , peak oxygen uptake; W max , maximum power output.

Practice is required to improve one’s shooting technique in basketball or to play a musical instrument well. Learning these motor skills may be further enhanced by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). We aimed to investigate whether tDCS leads to faster attainment of a motor skill, and to confirm prior work showing it improves skill acquisition and retention performance. Fifty-two participants were tested; half received tDCS with the anode on primary motor cortex and cathode on the contralateral forehead while concurrently practicing a sequential visuomotor isometric pinch force task on Day 1, while the other half received sham tDCS during practice. On Day 2, retention of the skill was tested. Results from a Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that participants in the anodal group attained a pre-defined target level of skill faster than participants in the sham group (χ2 = 9.117, p = 0.003). Results from a nonparametric rank-based regression analysis showed that the rate of improvement was greater in the anodal versus sham group during skill acquisition (F(1,249) = 5.90, p = 0.016), but there was no main effect of group or time. There was no main effect of group or time, or group by time interaction when comparing performance at the end of acquisition to retention. These findings suggest anodal tDCS improves performance more quickly during skill acquisition but does not have additional benefits on motor learning after a period of rest.

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