Exploring the Interpersonal Level of Music Performance Anxiety: Online Listener's Accuracy in Detecting Performer Anxiety.

Music performance anxiety (MPA) affects musicians at various stages of a performance, from its preparation until the aftermath of its delivery. Given the commonality and potentially grave consequences of MPA, it is understandable that much attention has been paid to the musician experiencing it. Consequently, we have learned a great deal about the intrapersonal level of MPA: how to measure it, treatments, experimental manipulations, and subjective experiences. However, MPA may also manifest at an interpersonal level by influencing how the performance is perceived. Yet, this has not yet been measured. This exploratory online study focuses on the listener's perception of anxiety and compares it to the musician's actual experienced anxiety. Forty-eight participants rated the amount of perceived anxiety of a pianist performing two pieces of contrasting difficulty in online-recital and practice conditions. Participants were presented with two stimulus modality conditions of the performance: audiovisual and audio-only. The listener's perception of anxiety and its similarity to the musician's experienced anxiety varies depending on variables such as the piece performed, the stimulus modality, as well as interactions between these variables and the listener's musical background. We discuss the implications for performance and future research on the interpersonal level of MPA.

When nerves hit: The effect of trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery on the perception and interpersonal accuracy of musical expressiveness.

Music performance anxiety (MPA) is a prevalent phenomenon with potentially serious consequences to a musician's wellbeing and professional career. Yet, MPA does not always affect performance quality. It is hypothesized that trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery can exacerbate the effects of MPA and affect performance quality. Furthermore, it is unclear whether these effects are noticeable to both listeners and performing musicians. We measure performance quality as the expressiveness scores assigned by musicians and listeners to a set of pre-recorded performances. We selected three pianists with low, mid, and high MPA. Each pianist performed two pieces of their choice, familiar and unfamiliar, which were performed in rehearsal and recital conditions. The performances were videoed and edited into shorter clips for being presented to the performing pianists and to a set of online raters. Listeners and pianists will be asked to rate the expressiveness of all clips. We will determine the difference between the listeners' perceived expressiveness and the pianists' own expressiveness scores to estimate how well did listeners understand the pianists' expressive intentions. We investigate (1) what is the effect of trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery on the listener's perception of expressiveness and (2) what is the effect of these same variables on the listeners' understanding of expressiveness.

Where is the beat in that note? Effects of attack, duration, and frequency on the perceived timing of musical and quasi-musical sounds.

The perceptual center (P-center) of a sound is typically understood as the specific moment at which it is perceived to occur. Using matched sets of real and artificial musical sounds as stimuli, we probed the influence of attack (rise time), duration, and frequency (center frequency) on perceived P-center location and P-center variability. Two different methods to determine the P-centers were used: Clicks aligned in-phase with the target sounds via the method of adjustment, and tapping in synchrony with the target sounds. Attack and duration were the primary cues for P-center location and P-center variability; P-center variability was found to be a useful measure of P-center shape. Consistent interactions between attack and duration were also found. Probability density distributions for each stimulus display a systematic pattern of P-center shapes ranging from narrow peaks close to the onset of sounds with fast attack and short duration, to wider and flatter shapes indicating a range synchronization points for sounds with slow attack and long duration. The results support the conception of P-centers as not simple time points, but "beat bins" with characteristic shapes, and the shapes and locations of these beat bins are dependent upon both the stimulus and the synchronization task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Synchronization to metrical levels in music depends on low-frequency spectral components and tempo.

Previous studies have found relationships between music-induced movement and musical characteristics on more general levels, such as tempo or pulse clarity. This study focused on synchronization abilities to music of finely-varying tempi and varying degrees of low-frequency spectral change/flux. Excerpts from six classic Motown/R&B songs at three different tempos (105, 115, and 130 BPM) were used as stimuli in this experiment. Each was then time-stretched by a factor of 5% with regard to the original tempo, yielding a total of 12 stimuli that were presented to 30 participants. Participants were asked to move along with the stimuli while being recorded with an optical motion capture system. Synchronization analysis was performed relative to the beat and the bar level of the music and four body parts. Results suggest that participants synchronized different body parts to specific metrical levels; in particular, vertical movements of hip and feet were synchronized to the beat level when the music contained large amounts of low-frequency spectral flux and had a slower tempo, while synchronization of head and hands was more tightly coupled to the weak flux stimuli at the bar level. Synchronization was generally more tightly coupled to the slower versions of the same stimuli, while synchronization showed an inverted u-shape effect at the bar level as tempo increased. These results indicate complex relationships between musical characteristics, in particular regarding metrical and temporal structure, and our ability to synchronize and entrain to such musical stimuli.

Conscientiousness and Extraversion relate to responsiveness to tempo in dance.

Previous research has shown broad relationships between personality and dance, but the relationship between personality and specific structural features of music has not been explored. The current study explores the influence of personality and trait empathy on dancers' responsiveness to small tempo differences between otherwise musically identical stimuli, measured by difference in the amount in acceleration of key joints. Thirty participants were recorded using motion capture while dancing to excerpts from six popular songs that were time-stretched to be slightly faster or slower than their original tempi. Analysis revealed that higher conscientiousness and lower extraversion both correlated with greater responsiveness to tempo change. Partial correlation analysis revealed that conscientiousness remained significantly correlated with responsiveness when extraversion was controlled, but not vice versa. No effect of empathy was found. Implications are discussed.

Hunting for the beat in the body: on period and phase locking in music-induced movement.

Music has the capacity to induce movement in humans. Such responses during music listening are usually spontaneous and range from tapping to full-body dancing. However, it is still unclear how humans embody musical structures to facilitate entrainment. This paper describes two experiments, one dealing with period locking to different metrical levels in full-body movement and its relationships to beat- and rhythm-related musical characteristics, and the other dealing with phase locking in the more constrained condition of sideways swaying motions. Expected in Experiment 1 was that music with clear and strong beat structures would facilitate more period-locked movement. Experiment 2 was assumed to yield a common phase relationship between participants' swaying movements and the musical beat. In both experiments optical motion capture was used to record participants' movements. In Experiment 1 a window-based period-locking probability index related to four metrical levels was established, based on acceleration data in three dimensions. Subsequent correlations between this index and musical characteristics of the stimuli revealed pulse clarity to be related to periodic movement at the tactus level, and low frequency flux to mediolateral and anteroposterior movement at both tactus and bar levels. At faster tempi higher metrical levels became more apparent in participants' movement. Experiment 2 showed that about half of the participants showed a stable phase relationship between movement and beat, with superior-inferior movement most often being synchronized to the tactus level, whereas mediolateral movement was rather synchronized to the bar level. However, the relationship between movement phase and beat locations was not consistent between participants, as the beat locations occurred at different phase angles of their movements. The results imply that entrainment to music is a complex phenomenon, involving the whole body and occurring at different metrical levels.

Crossmodal interactions in the perception of expressivity in musical performance.

In musical performance, bodily gestures play an important role in communicating expressive intentions to audiences. Although previous studies have demonstrated that visual information can have an effect on the perceived expressivity of musical performances, the investigation of audiovisual interactions has been held back by the technical difficulties associated with the generation of controlled, mismatching stimuli.With the present study, we aimed to address this issue by utilizing a novel method in order to generate controlled, balanced stimuli that comprised both matching and mismatching bimodal combinations of different expressive intentions. The aim of Experiment 1 was to investigate the relative contributions of auditory and visual kinematic cues in the perceived expressivity of piano performances, and in Experiment 2 we explored possible crossmodal interactions in the perception of auditory and visual expressivity. The results revealed that although both auditory and visual kinematic cues contribute significantly to the perception of overall expressivity, the effect of visual kinematic cues appears to be somewhat stronger. These results also provide preliminary evidence of crossmodal interactions in the perception of auditory and visual expressivity. In certain performance conditions, visual cues had an effect on the ratings of auditory expressivity, and auditory cues had a small effect on the ratings of visual expressivity.

Influences of rhythm- and timbre-related musical features on characteristics of music-induced movement.

Music makes us move. Several factors can affect the characteristics of such movements, including individual factors or musical features. For this study, we investigated the effect of rhythm- and timbre-related musical features as well as tempo on movement characteristics. Sixty participants were presented with 30 musical stimuli representing different styles of popular music, and instructed to move along with the music. Optical motion capture was used to record participants' movements. Subsequently, eight movement features and four rhythm- and timbre-related musical features were computationally extracted from the data, while the tempo was assessed in a perceptual experiment. A subsequent correlational analysis revealed that, for instance, clear pulses seemed to be embodied with the whole body, i.e., by using various movement types of different body parts, whereas spectral flux and percussiveness were found to be more distinctly related to certain body parts, such as head and hand movement. A series of ANOVAs with the stimuli being divided into three groups of five stimuli each based on the tempo revealed no significant differences between the groups, suggesting that the tempo of our stimuli set failed to have an effect on the movement features. In general, the results can be linked to the framework of embodied music cognition, as they show that body movements are used to reflect, imitate, and predict musical characteristics.