Eye of the Beholder: Stage Entrance Behavior and Facial Expression Affect Continuous Quality Ratings in Music Performance

Abstract

Judgments of music performance quality are commonly employed in music practice, education, and research. However, previous studies have demonstrated the limited reliability of such judgments, and there is now evidence that extraneous visual, social, and other “non-musical” features can unduly influence them. The present study employed continuous measurement techniques to examine how the process of forming a music quality judgment is affected by the manipulation of temporally specific visual cues. Video footage comprising an appropriate stage entrance and error-free performance served as the standard condition (Video 1). This footage was manipulated to provide four additional conditions, each identical save for a single variation: an inappropriate stage entrance (Video 2); the presence of an aural performance error midway through the piece (Video 3); the same error accompanied by a negative facial reaction by the performer (Video 4); the facial reaction with no corresponding aural error (Video 5). The participants were 53 musicians and 52 non-musicians (N = 105) who individually assessed the performance quality of one of the five randomly assigned videos via a digital continuous measurement interface and headphones. The results showed that participants viewing the “inappropriate” stage entrance made judgments significantly more quickly than those viewing the “appropriate” entrance, and while the poor entrance caused significantly lower initial scores among those with musical training, the effect did not persist long into the performance. The aural error caused an immediate drop in quality judgments that persisted to a lower final score only when accompanied by the frustrated facial expression from the pianist; the performance error alone caused a temporary drop only in the musicians' ratings, and the negative facial reaction alone caused no reaction regardless of participants' musical experience. These findings demonstrate the importance of visual information in forming evaluative and aesthetic judgments in musical contexts and highlight how visual cues dynamically influence those judgments over time.

Making an Impression

“…Continuous measures methodologies, where participants provide real-time feedback to a stimulus where temporal location of feedback is valuable, have been used in a wide variety of musical contexts (see Geringer, Madsen, & Gregory, 2004, for a review). The majority of these studies have examined elements of musical expressiveness, arousal, and attention, although several have explicitly examined performance quality ratings (Himonides, 2011;Thompson et al, 2007;Waddell & Williamon, 2017b). For the present study, the continuous measures data were collected using software developed at the Royal College of Music and used by Thompson and colleagues (2007).…”

“…Data were treated to several operations, primarily following Thompson et al (2007) and Waddell and Williamon (2017b), in which three discrete variables were extracted from the full continuous data, along with the quality rating provided in the written comments:…”

“…Previous studies have demonstrated that participants form their initial quality judgements within an average of 15 s when rating audio (Thompson et al, 2007) or audiovisual (Waddell & Williamon, 2017b) recordings of standard repertoire, with no correlation found between time to first decision and overall quality rating. Thus, hypothesized increases or decreases in decision time resulting from differences in features of the works themselves were posited based on the existing literature:…”

“…The role of evaluators has also been scrutinized in terms of their reliability (Wapnick et al, 2005;Wesolowski, Wind, & Engelhard, 2015), their knowledge of the performer (Duerksen, 1972;Kroger & Margulis, 2017), and the validity of the rubrics used (Thompson & Williamon, 2003;Wesolowski, 2017). Recent research is beginning to examine the temporal processes by which these assessments are formed (Himonides, 2011;Thompson, Williamon, & Valentine, 2007;Waddell & Williamon, 2017b) and the points in time when decisions are made, changed, and concretized. The present study examined this process by experimentally manipulating four representative factors hypothesized to interact with the temporal process of quality judgement: the general length, familiarity, and likeability of presented works, and the location of performance errors.…”

“…Only one study has, to date, examined the effects of errors on temporal quality judgements (Waddell & Williamon, 2017b). In that project we manipulated a videorecorded performance of a Chopin Etude to include a significant performance error and/or a negative facial reaction to that error.…”