An itsy bitsy audience: Live performance facilitates infants’ attention and heart rate synchronization.

Abstract

Among our most powerful experiences are those we share with others. Researchers have increasingly sought to investigate responses to socially potent stimuli, such as music, in contexts that are more naturalistic than a traditional psychology lab. Here, we investigated behavioral and physiological responses to either a live concert or a perceptually matched recorded playback on a naïve audience: infants. Two audiences of 6- to 14-month-old infants (N = ∼30 each, total N = 61) watched a musical performance live in a specialized research facility/concert hall (McMaster University LIVELab). Two additional 6- to 14-month-old infant audiences (N = ∼30 each, total N = 59) watched a recorded playback of the same performance in the same auditorium. A third group (same age range, N = 27) watched the recorded playback individually on their family’s device at home. Infants were more engaged in the live performance than the recorded playback, indicated by more overall attention and more sustained attention, and physiological synchrony. Infants at home visually attended at levels comparable to infants in the live performance but their attention was sustained for shorter bouts. Findings suggest that performer–audience interactions and social context play an important role in facilitating attention and coordinating emotional responses to musical performances early in life.

Audio-visual concert performances synchronize an audience’s heart rates

“…The current study explored engagement between audio-visual and audio-only music performances in a Western classical concert setting, using cardiorespiratory synchrony as a measure of engagement. Extending studies investigating neural synchrony 4,11 , this study contributes to a growing literature on measures of peripheral physiological synchrony 12,44,73 in music concert settings 3,10,13 . We show that seeing musicians perform can heighten audience engagement, though this might be context-dependent, and is best assessed by time-resolved (rather than time-averaged) inter-subject correlation of HR (i.e., synchrony of heartbeat speed).…”

“…Growing evidence has related synchrony of neural responses to a participant’s engagement with stimuli. In correlational measures, SRC and ISC were related to engagement with movies 11,18,19 , speech 20–22 , and music 3,4,14 . In phase coherence measures, higher neural synchrony occurred in engaging group discussions, indicating a potential marker for shared attention mechanisms 23 .…”

“…People enjoy engaging with music, especially in live concerts [1][2][3] . However, the dynamics of musical engagement -defined here as a listener's real-time absorption in music 4,5 -outside the lab are largely unknown, particularly in concert settings.…”

“…Although musical engagement can be measured with continuous behavioural responses, these ratings might distract from the music experience. A promising alternative to measure engagement in a non-distracting way is to assess neural and peripheral physiological synchrony (e.g., 3,[10][11][12][13] ). This approach is based on the assumption that increased engagement to music is more likely to evoke common time-locked responses across participants 4,14 .…”

“…Recent work shows coupling of cerebral activity occurs when experiencing similar emotional response to live music concerts 10 . However, most synchrony research focused exclusively on neural responses, such as those measured via electroencephalography (EEG); more suitable approaches for a live concert audience could be to explore synchrony in peripheral physiological responses 3,13,31 .…”