Expressivity, affective nuance, and presentation modality in a performer-to-audience communication.

Abstract

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.

How Live Music Moves Us: Head Movement Differences in Audiences to Live Versus Recorded Music

“…This study adds to the fledgling literature examining music listening in concert settings (Egermann et al, 2011; Shoda and Adachi, 2012, 2015, 2016; Fancourt and Williamon, 2016; Shoda et al, 2016). It provides unique insight into how live music is experienced in ecologically valid conditions, and how that experience is expressed through body movement.…”

Gesture-sound causality from the audience’s perspective: Investigating the aesthetic experience of performances with digital musical instruments.

“…These results indicate that visual input contributes significantly to the perception and appreciation of a musical performance, from which it can be inferred that DMI performances that present conflicting or confusing audiovisual information might be less effective at communicating musical intentions to an audience. Vuoskoski, Gatti, Spence and Clarke (2016) and Shoda and Adachi (2016) have provided contrasting results on this matter, reporting stronger emotional responses to audio-only conditions. However, these two studies both used music from the Romantic era (Brahms and Rachmaninoff respectively) that employ a musical idiom familiar to most listeners.…”

Neurology Telemusic Program at the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Turning Hospital Time Into Aesthetic Time During Crisis

“…We also planned to assess whether such intervention in the form of telemedicine would be viable. Considering research indicated that the interactivity of live music was more strongly associated with positive outcomes (24)(25)(26), we chose live, over recorded music. Due to mandatory COVID-19 precautions in the hospital, musical activities were organized virtually.…”