Synchrony in the periphery: inter-subject correlation of physiological responses during live music concerts

Abstract

While there is an increasing shift in cognitive science to study perception of naturalistic stimuli, this study extends this goal to naturalistic contexts by assessing physiological synchrony across audience members in a concert setting. Cardiorespiratory, skin conductance, and facial muscle responses were measured from participants attending live string quintet performances of full-length works from Viennese Classical, Contemporary, and Romantic styles. The concert was repeated on three consecutive days with different audiences. Using inter-subject correlation (ISC) to identify reliable responses to music, we found that highly correlated responses depicted typical signatures of physiological arousal. By relating physiological ISC to quantitative values of music features, logistic regressions revealed that high physiological synchrony was consistently predicted by faster tempi (which had higher ratings of arousing emotions and engagement), but only in Classical and Romantic styles (rated as familiar) and not the Contemporary style (rated as unfamiliar). Additionally, highly synchronised responses across all three concert audiences occurred during important structural moments in the music—identified using music theoretical analysis—namely at transitional passages, boundaries, and phrase repetitions. Overall, our results show that specific music features induce similar physiological responses across audience members in a concert context, which are linked to arousal, engagement, and familiarity.

Aesthetic and physiological effects of naturalistic multimodal music listening

“…Physiological changes occur in response to cognitive music processes such as recognising unexpected harmonic chords (Koelsch et al, 2008; Steinbeis et al, 2006) and deviant stimuli (in an MMN-like paradigm, (Chuen et al, 2016, though see Lyytinen et al, 1992), which might be enhanced by attention (Frith & Allen, 1983). In more naturalistic music listening, many studies showed that arousing music (faster tempos and unpredictable harmony) increase SC, HR, and RR (Bernardi et al, 2006; Coutinho & Cangelosi, 2011; Czepiel et al, 2021; Dillman Carpentier & Potter, 2007; Egermann et al, 2015; Khalfa et al, 2002; Krumhansl, 1997; though we note this is not also consistent across studies, for reviews see (Bartlett, 1996; Hodges, 2009; Koelsch & Jäncke, 2015). In terms of valence, researchers have shown that zygomaticus activity increases during happy music (Lundqvist et al, 2008).…”

“…Researchers are increasingly foregoing ultimate control for a more ecologically valid approach that enables participants to have more powerful aesthetic experiences. This study follows others that have moved more into the ‘wild’ to explore such naturalistic experiences (Chabin et al, 2022; Czepiel et al, 2021; Dotov & Trainor, 2021; Merrill et al, 2021; Swarbrick et al, 2019; Tervaniemi et al, 2021). The current findings show that self-reported aesthetic experience significantly increases in audiovisual (compared to audio only) piano performances in the naturalistic setting of a concert hall.…”

“…Peripheral measures include the somatic (voluntary muscle) and autonomic nervous systems (ANS), of which the latter comprises the sympathetic (‘fight-or-flight’) and parasympathetic (‘rest-and-digest’) nervous systems (SNS, PNS). In naturalistic settings, previous work revealed (synchronised) physiological arousal responses in audiences occur in relation to surprising, emotional, and structural moments in music, such as transitional passages, boundaries, and phrase repetitions (Czepiel et al, 2021; Egermann et al, 2013; Merrill et al, 2021). Such peripheral measures are likewise mentioned in the AE chronometry approach (Brattico et al, 2013) as reflecting tension and chill responses (Grewe et al, 2009; Salimpoor et al, 2009).…”

“…However, this enhanced AE effect has been mostly assessed in laboratory settings. Recent studies are increasingly exploring such experiences in live concerts (Chabin et al, 2022; Czepiel et al, 2021; Merrill et al, 2021; Scherer et al, 2019; Swarbrick et al, 2019; Tervaniemi et al, 2021), where participants report to experience stronger emotions (Gabrielsson & Wik, 2003; Lamont, 2011); though note that Belfi et al (2021) found that felt pleasure did not differ between live and an audiovisual recording of the same performance. Focusing more specifically on the role of modality, to date only a few studies compare responses to AV vs. AO conditions in naturalistic settings.…”

Structural complexity of the long-term collective rhythm of naturalistic conversations.

“…Individuals normally find themselves in social settings in their daily life, involving dyadic and small group interactions (1). During social exchanges, people coordinate with each other in different modalities (2,3) and timescales (4), and the extent of this coordination depends on a variety of factors related to the social context (5,6) and task constraints (7,8). It is by virtue of these interdependencies that both the interacting individual's behavior and the interaction as a whole are organized in time (9).…”