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.

We report an experiment investigating whether dancing to the same music enhances recall of person-related memory targets. The experiment used 40 dancers (all of whom were unaware of the experiment’s aim), two-channel silent-disco radio headphones, a marked-up dance floor, two types of music, and memory targets (sash colors and symbols). In each trial, 10 dancers wore radio headphones and one of four different colored sashes, half of which carried cat symbols. Using silent-disco technology, one type of music was surreptitiously transmitted to half the dancers, while music at a different tempo was transmitted to the remaining dancers. Pre-experiment, the dancers’ faces were photographed. Post-experiment, each dancer was presented with the photographs of the other dancers and asked to recall their memory targets. Results showed that same-music dancing significantly enhanced memory for sash color and sash symbol. Our findings are discussed in light of recent eye-movement research that showed significantly increased gaze durations for people observing music-dance synchrony versus music-dance asynchrony, and in relation to current literature on interpersonal entrainment, group cohesion, and social bonding.

A context-independent model of tonal attraction is presented based on the formal musical property of interval cycles. An interval cycle is the minimum number of additive iterations of an interval that are required for the original pitch classes to be re-stated. Interval cycles are conjectured to give rise to an abstract grouping property, interval cycle proximity, which in turn is responsible for tonal attraction. The model was tested using a probe tone experiment requiring subjects to rate the probe for strength of attraction/resolution with respect to a preceding context chord. The results, displayed as 'attraction profiles', agreed with the predictions of the model, and showed that even diatonic chords, such as dominant sevenths, can be heard chromatically. The results are discussed in relation to examples of real music and previous research within the field.

In previous studies investigating entrainment and person perception, synchronized movements were found to enhance memory for incidental person attributes. Although this effect is robust, including in dance, the process by which it is actuated are less well understood. In this study, two hypotheses are investigated: that enhanced memory for person attributes is the result of (1) increased gaze time between in-tempo dancers; and/or (2) greater attentional focus between in-tempo dancers. To explore these possible mechanisms in the context of observing dance, an eye-tracking study was conducted in which subjects watched videos of pairs of laterally positioned dancers; only one of the dancers was synchronized with the music, the other being asynchronous. The results were consistent with the first hypothesis—music-dance synchrony gives rise to increased visual inspection times. In addition, there was a preference for upper-body fixations over lower-body fixations across both synchronous and asynchronous conditions. A subsequent, single-dancer eye-tracking study investigated fixations across different body regions, including head, torso, legs and feet. Significantly greater dwell times were recorded for head than torso and legs; feet attracted significantly less dwell time than any other body region. Lastly, the study sought to identify dance gestures responsible for torso- and head-directed fixations. Specifically we asked whether there are features in dance that are specially designed to direct an observer’s gaze towards the face—the main “communicative portal” with respect to the transmission of intent, affect and empathy.

The issue of structural nonadjacency in music and language was explored from a musical perspective in an experiment employing a stimulus-matching paradigm. The experiment measured the perceptual effect of a temporally nonadjacent key on the closure of a musical phrase; participants rated a stimulus-ending two-chord probe cadence for its closural properties. The temporal rate of decay of the nonadjacent key in memory was observed by varying the length of the intervening key area; that is, the key temporally adjacent to the probe cadence. Evidence emerged that listeners were able to hold the nonadjacent key in memory for over 10 seconds, indicating "global" nonadjacent harmonic perceptions. The study provides qualified evidence to support the notion that there are syntactic parallelisms between language and music, particularly in respect of nonadjacent key relationships.