Full citation: Wald-Fuhrmann M, O'Neill K, Weining C et al. (2023) The influence of formats and preferences on the aesthetic experience of classical music concert streams. Psychol Aesthet Creat 19(4):576–586
Link:https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2023-63242-001.html
Open access article: yes
Open access data: No (but data may be made available on resonable request)
Genre: Classical concerts
Manipulation/contrast: Concert design factors including concert hall, movement order, prestige of performers, audio amplification, additional visalisations, dynamic concert lighting, interview with performers, and opportunity for personal involvement.
Audience measurements: post-stimulus self report ratings of experience (aesthetic experience, togetherness, annoyance) facial expression via IR recording (categorical, partial coverage), average heart rate, respiration rate, and skin conductance levels. Another study also uses interview data from participants of the concert series.
Principle results: Evaluate significance of specific concert condition factors (manipulations) on audience measurements via comprehensive large general linear model. Stand out associations for my own interests include:
The inclusions of an interview with musicians increasing the sense of audience-musician interaction and clarifying/intensifying the emotions of the music as felt (decrease happy (all), increase melancholy (all), decreased annoyed (Contemporary)) and expressed (increasing the quantity of negative facial expression) by the audience.
The addition of visual media (related to the music being performed) reducing the attention to other audience members, reducing felt happiness (classical) and annoyance (contemporary) WITHOUT the expressive component prompted by the musicians interviews, and increasing arousal (higher Skin conductance and higher heart rate)
The increase in heart rate alone with enchancing/immersive amplification of the acoustic performance.
The "audience participation" condition, which I would interpret as personal involvement rather than what is normally meant by audience participation (actions concurrent with performance that are also observable to other audience members and the live musicians). Given that the task encourage extremely personal associations with the music, it is understandable that along with a higher arousal reaction to the music, their attention and identification with the other audience members would be lower.
Concerns challenges: Despite the confusing formatting of table 4 (which I assumed was imposed by the publisher), the analysis presented is an extremely efficient report of 11 live concerts captured in many modalities. The model construction is considered and reasonable, the variable preparation well explained, and the results present tidy data points confirming the relevance of specific concert design choices for classical music performances.
However, that very efficiency is also my main point of frustration. By virtue of its construction, the parameter estimates of this model make it very difficult to translate specific claims into effects on specific variables. When the Immersive sound condition co-occures with higher audience heart rate, its nice to know of the existence of a potential relationship but without translation into measurable quantities, there is no way to replicate components of these results in any other arrangement. As a reader, I don't know what percentage of heart rate increase might be attributable acoustic amplification at a similar performance.
I don't blame the authors for this level of results reporting. Demonstrating the existence of significant relationships between concert design decisions and aspects of audience experience was the main purpose of this aggregate report. That is enough for the paper, and that is practical given the quantity of information stuffed into 15 pages. But I hope there may be other reports that express some of these effects in terms that can be brought back to specifics of what has being measured. Or even better, that the lab shares their measurements with whomever might be interested in replicating these effects.
More generally, I wonder if the use of GLMs (and HLMs) is hampering research into complex phenomena like concerts. For years, we've been publishing papers that demonstrate the existence of relationships between variables without being able to discuss how they interact, mechanically, because the specifics of audience experience and behaviour are so abstracted in these representations. I hope the field continues to look for richer representations of concert data to help us move closer to understanding how these events unfold.