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 …

Sonic Visualiser : Visualisation, Analysis, and Annotation of Music Audio Recordings [Review]

Music as embodied experience

Relationships Between Audio and Movement Features, and Perceived Emotions in Musical Performance

A core aspect of musical performance is communicating emotional and expressive intentions to the audience. Recognition of the musician's intentions is constructed from a combination of visual and auditory performance cues, as well as compositional features. The current study attempted to quantify these contributions by measuring relationships between ratings of perceived emotion, and motion and auditory performance features. A pianist and violinist with advanced degrees in music performance individually performed four short western tonal pieces. The musicians were tasked with performing the pieces while invoking different expressive intentions: sad, happy, angry, and as a control, deadpan. …

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

Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2023 Chang-Arana, Mavrolampados, Pokki and Thompson. 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 w…

On Happy Dance : Emotion Recognition in Dance Movements

Movements are capable of conveying emotions, as shown for instance in studies on both non-verbal gestures and music-specific movements performed by instrumentalists or professional dancers. Since dancing/moving to music is a common human activity, this study aims at investigating whether quasi-spontaneous music-induced movements of non-professional dancers can convey emotional qualities as well. From a movement data pool of 60 individuals dancing to 30 musical stimuli, the performances of four dancers that moved most notably, and four stimuli representing happiness, anger, sadness, and tenderness were chosen to create a set of stimuli containing the four audio excerpts, 16 video excerpts (w…