We investigated how the audience member’s physiological reactions differ as a function of listening context (i.e., live versus recorded music contexts). Thirty-seven audience members were assigned to one of seven pianists’ performances and listened to his/her live performances of six pieces (fast and slow pieces by Bach, Schumann, and Debussy). Approximately 10 weeks after the live performance, each of the audience members returned to the same room and listened to the recorded performances of the same pianists’ via speakers. We recorded the audience members’ electrocardiograms in listening to the performances in both conditions, and analyzed their heart rates and the spectral features of the heart-rate variability (i.e., HF/TF, LF/HF). Results showed that the audience’s heart rate was higher for the faster than the slower piece only in the live condition. As compared with the recorded condition, the audience’s sympathovagal balance (LF/HF) was less while their vagal nervous system (HF/TF) was activated more in the live condition, which appears to suggest that sharing the ongoing musical moments with the pianist reduces the audience’s physiological stress. The results are discussed in terms of the audience’s superior attention and temporal entrainment to live performance.

we explored how a pianist manipulates his upper body according to his interpretation of music. We asked a professional pianist to perform artistic, deadpan, and exaggerated renditions of two structurally contrasting pieces. The pianist’s affective interpretations clearly differentiated among the three renditions. The artistic rendition, representing the true nature of the piece, was compared to the contrived deadpan and exaggerated renditions. The pianist’s range of body movement in the artistic rendition differed from the other two for a fast, energetic piece, whereas it only differed from the deadpan for a slow, romantic piece. The pianist highlighted the structural contrasts within the artistic rendition by manipulating his range of body movement and by coordinating the variations between body movement and temporal/dynamical projection of tones.

It is a given that a live concert is fundamentally different from a recorded live performance, but we wanted to investigate in a controlled setting how different renditions of the same piece of music affected an audience. In our previous case study using Rachmaninoff's pieces, a pianist expressed richer affective nuances when he performed his artistic rendition of the piece than his contrived deadpan (i.e., mechanical) and exaggerated renditions (Shoda & Adachi, 2012). The primary goal of the present study was to show the role of presentation modality (i.e., sound-only, video-only, both) in the audience's perception of the multifaceted affective nuances projected in his artistic rendition as compared with those in the deadpan and the exaggerated renditions. Each of 106 participants experienced each rendition of the performances in sound-only, video-only, and sound and video modalities, and rated the perceived degree of its expressivity and affective nuances. We identified a 2-dimensional map for performer-to-audience communication of the complex affective nuances of music with multiple adjectives by means of exploratory positioning analysis, a multidimensional statistical technique for Likert-type ratings in within-participant design. As expected, visual clues indeed assisted an audience to decode a pianist's intended level of expressivity, but with a surprising twist: The affective nuances portrayed by the pianist in artistic rendition were communicated more successfully via auditory information alone. These results suggest that auditory and visual cues serve different roles in pianist-to-audience communications.

We explore the concept that artists perform best in front of an audience. The negative effects of performance anxiety are much better known than their related cousin on the other shoulder: the positive effects of “social facilitation.” The present study, however, reveals a listener's preference for performances recorded in front of an audience. In Study 1, we prepared two types of recordings of Träumerei performed by 13 pianists: recordings in front of an audience and those with no audience. According to the evaluation by 153 listeners, the recordings performed in front of an audience sounded better, suggesting that the presence of an audience enhanced or facilitated the performance. In Study 2, we analyzed pianists' durational and dynamic expressions. According to the functional principal components analyses, we found that the expression of “Träumerei” consisted of three components: the overall quantity, the cross-sectional contrast between the final and the remaining sections, and the control of the expressive variability. Pianists' expressions were targeted more to the “average” of the cross-sectional variation in the audience-present than in the audience-absent recordings. In Study 3, we explored a model that explained listeners' responses induced by pianists' acoustical expressions, using path analyses. The final model indicated that the cross-sectional variation of the duration and that of the dynamics determined listeners' evaluations of the quality and the emotionally moving experience, respectively. In line with human's preferences for commonality, the more “average” the durational expressions were in live recording, the better the listeners' evaluations were regardless of their musical experiences. Only the well-experienced listeners (at least 16 years of musical training) were moved more by the “deviated” dynamic expressions in live recording, suggesting a link between the experienced listener's emotional experience and the unique dynamics in music.