Abstract
Live concerts normally involve gathering at the same time and place. In livestreamed concerts, participants may gather in time but not in space, providing a natural comparison for studying live concert experiences. Previous research suggests that livestreamed concerts promote more social connectedness than pre-recorded concerts and that live concerts promote more movement than listening to recorded music in a group. However, to the best of our knowledge, a comparison between live and livestreamed concerts has not been conducted. The Danish String Quartet is a critically acclaimed music group who performed a live concert that was also livestreamed. The live and livestreaming audiences’ emotions were measured with surveys that collected data on connectedness, feeling moved, and awe after each piece. In addition, audience motion was measured with an application that recorded from the participants' own smartphones’ accelerometers. Survey responses were collected from 91 live and 32 livestreaming participants. Motion data was collected from 82 live and 25 livestreaming participants. While the live audience felt more connected to other audience members than the livestreaming audience, both live and livestreaming audiences felt similarly connected to the performers. Feeling moved and awe were influenced by the piece of music, but not by the audience condition (i.e., live or livestreaming audience). During the classical Beethoven and Schnittke pieces, the live audience moved less, while during the folk tunes, the live audience moved more. The differences between pieces were smaller in the livestreaming audience. The live audience reported more connectedness to the audience when their neighbors moved more during the folk and less during the Beethoven and Schnittke. Connectedness with other audience members was also related to the amount that an individual stilled in response to key musical moments in the pieces. Together, these findings show that the classical concert audience actively engages with the music and the associated socioemotional experience based on genre-specific norms and expectations.
Keywords
Introduction
Concerts are fundamentally social experiences in which an audience and musicians gather to create and participate in an aesthetic experience. Based on the music and social bonding hypothesis, music may be such a ubiquitous human activity precisely because of its social nature and because it has the power to connect us (e.g., Savage et al., 2020). Given that music serves bonding functions in much of its practice, concerts could serve as venues for fostering togetherness. Classical concerts are a special type of musical situation, or frame, in which audiences gather with a shared intention of listening to and being immersed in classical music along with like-minded peers (Wald-Fuhrmann et al., 2021). Generally, classical music audiences are more behaviorally restricted than audiences of other contemporary genres, sitting still and in silence to enable absorption into the aesthetic experience, and seeming to participate only rarely, for example through applause at genre-appropriate moments. While classical music audiences are more motorically restricted, there is some evidence that they may cough more during concerts than during normal daily life, which indicates that the restrained social setting may afford other kinds of behaviors (Wagener, 2012). Classical music audiences tend to be older, more reserved, and are described as more highbrow or conservative than other musical audiences, such as those in popular music genres (Dearn & Pitts, 2017). There are also fewer opportunities for interaction between audience members at classical music concerts than in other genres (Dearn, 2017, p. 125). However, concertgoers still report social motivations for concert attendance (Dearn & Price, 2016). Social interactions can occur in a variety of ways at a classical concert—before and after the music and during the intermission, through discussion with fellow attendees—however, there are relatively few opportunities for these interactions (Dearn, 2017, p. 125). During the music, audience members may engage in social perception by observing the audience members around them and the musicians; however, these activities are not necessarily interactive (Dearn, 2017, p. 85). Despite these limitations, music listening in the live classical concert is still viewed as participatory because attendees feel that they are a part of an audience community (Dearn, 2017, p.114). There has been much attention on the classical concert recently as various stakeholders try to understand how they can promote further classical music consumption despite aging and dwindling audiences (e.g., the Experimental Concert Research group 1 , the Maastrict Centre for Innovation in Classical Music 2 , and the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre 3 ). Given that classical concerts provide a frame in which engagement is communicated with less activity during music listening than other contemporary musical genres, classical concerts are unique events for examining musical social experiences.
Social connectedness is an important component of the experience of concerts because one of the defining features of concerts is their social nature. Recent work by O’Neill and Egermann (2022) aimed to understand the social experience of concerts better through the development of a scale that combines measures grounded in parasocial interaction and in-group bonding (Horton & Richard Wohl, 1956; Leach et al., 2008). They found that the social experience of concerts was related to concert enjoyment, but not the emotional experience (O’Neill & Egermann, 2022). The personal listening experience of classical concertgoers is shaped by the audience group because there is an established set of conventions upheld by regular attenders to promote attention on and engagement with the music that needs to be learned by newcomers, through education or copying regular attender behavior (Dearn, 2017, p.116). Furthermore, audience members may be attentive to and influenced by other audience members’ or the musicians’ emotional facial expressions (Dearn, 2017, pp.111–112). During a classical concert research experiment, an audience completed a survey that included questions on boredom, concentration, and absorption, and they reported that recorded music is less engaging than live music (Merrill et al., 2021). Research that examined several concert genres at the same time found that livestreamed concerts promote more feelings and behaviors of connectedness than pre-recorded concerts (Swarbrick et al., 2021). Livestreamed concert viewing styles can foster varying degrees of connectedness toward the audience and performers, such as with video conferencing, which enhances intra-audience connectedness, and virtual reality, which enhances audience–performer connectedness (Onderdijk et al., 2021).
Social connectedness may also be an important component of the emotion commonly labelled “feeling moved/touched.” This emotion has been operationalized through a construct named “
Particular pieces of music consistently evoke similar continuous ratings of feeling moved/touched across different listeners, which indicates that the emotion may be evoked as a result of the music itself even without a social context (Vuoskoski et al., 2022). While research has shown that feelings and behaviors of connectedness differ between livestreamed and pre-recorded concerts, reports of
Connectedness between concertgoers may also be established as a function of the individuals’ shared identities and group membership. The link between musical preferences and personal identity is well-established (Frith, 1996; Gosling et al., 2003; Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003, 2006). Musical preferences for both genres and artists are used to form personal and group identities (Bennett, 1999; Weiner, 1999), and musical preferences also correlate with personality and values (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003). Therefore, based on musical preferences alone, individuals can make judgements of personal characteristics, including belief systems (Edwards & Singletary, 1989; Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). In classical concert communities, where attendees repeatedly go to concerts at the same venue, a sense of shared identity can develop (Dearn, 2017, p. 136).
Musical genres can set up expectations for behavioral norms including how audience members should behave, dress, and speak. When compared to other contemporary genres, classical concerts may provide fewer opportunities for applause, movement, and interaction, though the experience is social nonetheless (Dearn, 2017). Newcomers to the classical concert frame may struggle to understand the conventions and culture given how much it contrasts with popular musical genre concert norms (Dearn & Pitts, 2017; Dobson & Pitts, 2011; Pitts, 2016). It can thus be easy to identify outgroup members—for example, if a newcomer applauds between movements, they are readily identified as an outsider. Classical concert norms typically include that audiences applaud at the end of pieces, not when the musicians pause between movements; audience members demonstrate their engagement with the music by being quiet and attentive; and they may show appreciation for the music by closing their eyes or expressing emotion on their faces (Dearn, 2017, pp.116–117).
Identifying as a fan of an artist can also be used to affiliate (Chadborn et al., 2017). Fanship, (i.e., identifying as a fan, in contrast to fandom: identifying with others who are fans), is known to influence social experience and behavior at concerts. For example, fans move more vigorously and more in time with the music than neutral listeners at a rock concert (Swarbrick et al., 2019), which could possibly signal their in-group status. Fanship has also been correlated with a number of social experience measures collected from virtual concerts, including social connectedness,
Being an admirer may also influence experienced connectedness toward the performers and
According to the embodied music cognition framework, the body and its motion is central not only to the production of music but also to its perception (Leman, 2008). Given that classical music audiences are so still while they are listening at concerts, some might be dismissive of using this framework for understanding classical concert audiences. On the contrary, this natural stillness makes the classical concert the perfect object of study for embodied music cognition because questions on the involvement of movement in social bonding can be investigated. There is much literature that suggests that when people move in the same way at the same time, engaging through a process of entrainment that may lead to synchrony, the actors may experience social bonding through enhanced social feelings, cognition, and behaviors (Rennung & Goritz, 2016; Vicaria & Dickens, 2016). However, the processes of affiliation involved in classical concerts may differ from that in other musical genres. Alternatively, the relative stillness may make any motion more detectable to concertgoers.
In the concert under study, the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) performed four pieces, namely Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 opus 135, Schnittke's String Quartet No. 3, Bach's Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus XIV, and a selection of six folk tunes, which will be referred to as the musical “pieces’’ of Beethoven, Schnittke, Bach, and Folk, respectively for the remainder of this manuscript. (Refer to Lartillot et al., this special collection for the for results pertaining to the Bach piece). The folk tunes were a selection of Irish and Nordic folk tunes arranged by the Danish String Quartet, namely (i) a set of three by Turlough O’Carolan: Mable Kelly, Planxty Kelly, and Carolan's Quarrel with the Landlady; (ii) Stædelil; (iii) Halling efter Haltegutten; (iv) Unst Boat Song; (v) Lovely Joan; and (vi) Halling by Fredrik Sjölin, the DSQ cellist. The folk genre is often associated with folk dances that co-develop as music–dance styles, and engagement through movement is often a characteristic feature of folk performances (e.g., with Norwegian
We aimed to measure the audiences’ social and emotional experience, individual and relational characteristics, and motion to understand how these variables relate to each other in a classical concert context. We hypothesized that the live concert audience would experience more social connectedness than the livestreaming audience. We expected that the different musical pieces would evoke different emotional responses from the audience, for example with the Schnittke evoking more awe. Based on the framework of
Methods
The Danish String Quartet performed in Musikhuset København on October 26, 2021, in Copenhagen, Denmark. The concert was promoted by both the Danish String Quartet and the researchers, as part of the annual Danish String Quartet Festival and the MusicLab Research Concert series. The live, in-person audience was seated in staggered rows facing the performers, who were seated in a semi-circle on a stage. The concert was livestreamed by a professional who mixed the video with multiple cameras and dynamic camera views and angles, ranging from long shots from the back of the room that included the in-person audience to close-ups of performers’ faces, to create a sophisticated livestreamed video. The full concert livestreamed video is available on YouTube. 5 The live audience is occasionally visible in the livestream. The concert host (researcher Simon Høffding) provided introductions in Danish and research participation instructions in both Danish and English. The Danish String Quartet spoke to their audience occasionally in English to accommodate the livestreaming audience, but mostly in Danish to introduce the research concert and some of the pieces. Program notes (see Supplemental Material) were distributed to the live audience along with the questionnaire booklet that collected the audience's subjective experience. The livestreaming audience watched in near real-time because the livestream with YouTube's normal latency setting leads to a 15–60 s delay. Further concert procedure details are presented in other articles in this special collection (e.g., Upham et al., this special collection, a).
Participants
All participants provided informed consent. The consenting process was conducted visually with information provided to audience members at ticket purchasing and again with signs at the concert hall. Participants who completed questionnaires or had their motion measured additionally filled consent in the MusicLab App or filled paper consent forms. Gender, age, and other demographics are presented in Table 1. The audience was similar in age to other classical concert audiences in Scandinavia (40–60-year-olds being the largest audience group; Tovslid & Salvesen, 2023).
Audience demographics separated by live and livestreaming audiences listed as counts unless otherwise stated as mean ± SD.
Variables with significant differences between groups are marked with asterisks (*
Participants were excluded if they only filled survey 1 and had no usable motion data (
There were significantly more Danish-speaking participants in the live audience than in the livestreaming audience and vice versa for English-speaking participants, chi-square test: χ
Survey
The survey was developed in collaboration with the other researchers involved in the MusicLab Copenhagen project (see Swarbrick, Martin et al., this special collection; Lartillot et al., this special collection). We were primarily interested in examining the phenomena of social connectedness,
The survey consisted of a pre-concert survey, post-piece surveys that were identical for the Beethoven, Schnittke, and Folk pieces, and a post-concert survey. For the entire survey, see the OSF repository 6 (other data from other publications including video recordings, performer pupillometry and ECG data is also available in the OSF repository). After the Bach, the questions pertained mostly to the visualization of the fugue (see Lartillot et al., this special collection, for more details). The pre-concert survey collected information on participants’ age, gender, musical sophistication category (Zhang & Schubert, 2019), level of fanship (Swarbrick et al., 2019), and trait empathic concern (one of the four subscales of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index; Davis, 1980). The survey also collected relational information, including their relationships to those seated around them (e.g., stranger, friend, family, and relation of parent, child, partner) and whether they had a personal relationship with the Danish String Quartet.
The post-piece surveys contained questions on social connectedness and scales of
Social Connectedness
Social connectedness was measured with single Likert scale items relating specifically to the connectedness participants felt toward the audience and the performers (Onderdijk, Swarbrick et al., 2021). The livestreaming audience was asked to report the connectedness that they felt to both the livestreaming and physically attending audiences separately. Responses were recorded on a Likert scale with response poles of 0 =
Kama Muta
The post-piece questionnaire for the Beethoven, Schnittke, and Folk collected information on participants’ experiences of
Awe
Awe was measured with the two highest loading items from three subscales (perceived vastness, physical sensations, and need for accommodation) of the Awe Experience Scale (Bannister & Eerola, 2021; Yaden et al., 2019) that were unique to the scale and not already in the survey. Specifically, items from the Awe Experience Scale subscales of time perception, self-diminishment, and connectedness were not included because these items may be related to the other phenomena of interest (i.e., absorption and social connection). The translation of “awe” in Danish (
The post-concert survey contained questions asking participants to rank the pieces on their engagement, how visually stimulating they were, how absorptive they were, and how touching they were. It measured trait-based absorption with the Absorption in Music Scale (Sandstrom & Russo, 2013). Participants were also provided with a comment box where they were encouraged to write their impressions of the concert research experience.
Motion
Motion was recorded from both audiences using the MusicLab App, which leverages the inertial measurement unit sensors in participants’ own smartphones (Swarbrick et al., 2022). In-person audience participants were fitted with a phone holder that positioned their smartphones on their upper chests. Livestreaming participants were instructed to secure their smartphones to their upper chests in a similar fashion (see instructions for livestreaming participants in the Supplemental Material). If participants came to the live concert and either did not have a smartphone or did not want to use their own to download the MusicLab App, they were provided with an accelerometer sensor (AX3, Axivity). Motion sensor data were analyzed to quantify the mean quantity of motion (mQoM) of each participant for each piece. This measure is representative of the relative amount of time spent moving rather than a sustained displacement because participants generally moved very little (Upham et al., this special collection, a). Upham conducted a musicological analysis to identify moments where the audience might still as a result of the music (Upham et al., this special collection, b). Stilling was defined as the proportion of these moments in which each participant actually reduced their motion past a defined threshold. See Upham et al. (a, b), this special collection, for a more in-depth overview of motion analyses.
We also quantified participants’ neighbors’ motion by averaging the mean quantity of motion of their neighbors to their left and right, and the two participants directly in front. The seating arrangement in the hall was prepared in a windowed style such that each row was slightly shifted to allow the row behind to see between the heads of the audience members in the row in front.
Analysis
The analysis of the survey data was conducted in R (version 4.2.2; R Core Team, 2020) with help from the “tidyverse” package collection (Wickham et al., 2019) and the “easystats” package collection (Lüdecke et al., 2022). Other packages that were used are listed in the results section. In the spirit of open and reproducible science, the analysis script is available in a public repository. 7 Imputation of missing values is described in the Supplemental Material.
Results
Scale Reliability
We assessed the internal consistency of the scales with McDonald's Omega from the “psych” package, which is a well-regarded measure of reliability (McDonald, 1999; Revelle, 2022; Zinbarg et al., 2006). The
Effect of Concert and Individual Characteristics on Emotions
We aimed to examine the contribution of concert, relational, and individual characteristics on the outcome measures of social connectedness,
Predictors
We included predictors of concert variables, relational information, and individual characteristics in every model. Concert predictors included concert group (live, livestreaming) and piece of music (Beethoven, Schnittke, and Folk) (Recall that analyses from the Bach piece are presented in another paper in this special collection, Lartillot et al., under revision). Relational predictors included their fanship level, group size, and if they had a relationship with the Danish String Quartet musicians as a friend or family member. Individual characteristic predictors included trait empathy, trait absorption in music, and musical sophistication level. Given that trait absorption is known to correlate with trait empathy (e.g., Garrido & Schubert, 2011; Sandstrom & Russo, 2013), we included only trait empathic concern in the models for social connectedness and
Model Fitting
We fitted models with all predictors and reported effect estimates for all predictors, including non-significant results. For the linear mixed modeling, models were fitted with restricted maximum likelihood (REML), and significance (
Bayesian model fitting was conducted with the “brms” package (Bürkner, 2017). Examining posterior effects and “significance” was conducted with, and following recommendations from, the “bayestestR” package (Kruschke & Liddell, 2018; Makowski et al., 2019a, 2019b).
Social Connectedness
Social connectedness was measured from each participant with questions of “To what extent did you feel connected to the musicians?” and “To what extent did you feel connected to the other audience members?” with Likert scale responses of 0 (
The outcome measure of connectedness included both the connectedness to the musicians and the audience, and the differences between these measures were modeled by including a factor of target of connectedness (musicians, audience) in the model. We expected that this target of connectedness predictor could interact with the effects of group and the relational predictors, so we included interactions between target and group, and target and the relational predictors of fanship, relationship with the musicians, and group size. There were no outliers detected in the connectedness measure by the z-score robust (3.09) method. The data included 89 participants from the live audience (Beethoven = 89, Schnittke = 83, Folk = 88) and 32 participants from the livestreaming audience (Beethoven = 32, Schnittke = 26, Folk = 23). Recall that not all participants filled all surveys or recorded motion for all pieces, which is why the sample sizes vary by piece in the analyses. Data were standardized with z-scores prior to model fitting. We conducted Bayesian multilevel ordinal regression by fitting a cumulative model with a probit link. The probit link assumes that the latent variable is normally distributed. The model was fitted with 6 chains, each with 2,000 iterations and 1,000 warmups per iteration, leaving a total of 6,000 post-warmup draws. The “brms” model formula was specified as Connectedness ∼ Piece + Target + Group + Target:Group + Fanship + Target:Fanship + Relationship_Musicians + Target:Relationship_Musicians + Group_Size + Target:Group_Size + Trait_Empathy + Musical_Sophistication + (1|Participant). Generic weakly informative priors were specified for all fixed effect estimates as normal distributions with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 (Gelman, 2020). The model was fitted with initial values of all parameters set to 0. The model demonstrated satisfactory effective sample sizes and Rhat values (Bürkner, 2017; Vehtari et al., 2019). Description of the meanings of variables presented in Table 2 is located in the Bayesian model section of the Supplemental Material.
Parameter estimates from fixed effects with probability of direction estimates greater than 97.5% from the Bayesian model with connectedness as the dependent variable.
Mdn: Median, 95% CI: 95% Credible Interval computed with high density intervals, pd: probability of direction, % out of ROPE: percentage of posterior outside the region of practical equivalence. Rhat: values near 1 but not greater than 1.01 indicate that Markov chains were consistent. ESS: effective sample sizes; values greater than 1,000 indicate stable estimates. % out ROPE values higher than 99% have further been italicized to highlight effects that are practically significant.
The Folk pieces evoked substantially more connectedness than the Beethoven piece, while the Schnittke evoked less connectedness than the Beethoven. There was an effect of target such that both the live and livestreaming audiences reported more connectedness to the musicians than to the audience (Figures 1–3). Being in the livestreaming audience had a negative effect on connectedness. The effect of relationship with the musicians on connectedness was positive and significant. There was an effect of trait empathy, with higher empathy leading to greater connectedness. The interaction between target and group indicates that the livestreaming participants reported feeling more connected with the musicians than the audience (see Figure 3A). The live audience did not have as great a difference between their reports of connectedness to the musicians versus the audience. When the other effects are considered, the livestreamed audience actually reported more connectedness to the musicians compared to the live audience (see Figure S3). There was a positive and significant effect of the interaction between fanship and connectedness to the musicians, indicating that participants who reported being greater admirers reported more connectedness to the musicians, and this influence was not so great for connectedness to the audience (see Figure 3B).

Reports of social connectedness towards the musicians and the audience from the (A) live and (B) livestreaming audiences. The two-way interaction can be observed by noticing how the connectedness to the musicians is similar between the live (A) and livestreaming (B) audiences, but the live audience reported higher connectedness to the audience than the livestreaming audience. Note that the livestreaming audience members reported connectedness to both the audience that was attending the concert and the livestreaming audience.

Fixed effect medians and credible intervals representing 95% of the posterior probability distribution. There is a 95% chance that the real effect of the variable lies in that range. Intervals not crossing 0 are 95% likely to have a positive or negative direction, and their variable names are marked with an asterisk (*).

Raw data showing the interactions between (A) Target and Group, which shows that the livestreaming participants reported feeling more connected with the musicians than the audience, while the difference was not as great for the live audience, and (B) Target and fanship, which shows that participants who reported being bigger admirers reported more connectedness to the musicians and this influence was not so great for connectedness to the audience. Fanship was collected with the item “Are you a fan or admirer of the Danish String Quartet's music?” with a response scale of 1 (

The effect of piece on (A)

Responses from both audiences to the questions probing their valence and tension reactions to the pieces. Error bars represent standard error of the mean. The Schnittke piece evoked fewer positive and relaxed feelings and more negative and tense feelings than the Beethoven and the Folk pieces. The Folk pieces evoked fewer negative and tense feelings than the Beethoven.

Raw data (see Figure S4 for conditional effects). (A) The interaction of piece and group on motion indicates that the live group demonstrated differences in their quantity of motion between pieces, with motion being greatest for the Folk, then the Schnittke, then the Beethoven. The livestreaming group did not demonstrate any significant differences. Error bars represent standard error of the mean. (B) The interaction of piece and motion indicates that more awe led to less motion only in the Schnittke and Folk pieces. Error shading represents the smoothed conditional means of the linear relationship between awe and motion. *

Standardized fixed effect parameter estimates and their confidence intervals for linear mixed effects models of (C) log mean quantity of motion and (D) stilling. Con.Aud.: Connected Audience, Con.Mus.: Connected Musicians, KM:

Raw data (see Figure S5 for conditional effects). (A) The effect of feeling connected to the audience on the proportion of stilling was positive, which indicates that the more a person exhibited stilling, the more connected to the audience they felt. (B) The interaction between piece and connectedness to the musicians on stilling was significant when contrasting the Schnittke and the Beethoven, which indicates that during the Schnittke, as connectedness to the musicians increased, the participant stilled more at key musical moments, but this was only significant when contrasting with the Beethoven. *

(A) Standardized fixed effect parameter estimates and their confidence intervals for the linear mixed effects model on neighbors’ motion, and (B) the interaction between piece and connectedness to the audience on motion seen. The relation is negative during the Beethoven and positive during the Folk. *

Significant repeated measures correlations between the concert experience variables of
Kama Muta
There were no influential observations; therefore, the data included 91 participants from the live audience and at most 32 participants from the livestreaming audience (Beethoven: 32, Schnittke: 26, Folk: 23). The lme4 model formula was specified as Kama Muta ∼ Group + Piece + Fanship + Group_Size + Relationship_Musicians + Trait_Empathy + Musical_Sophistication + (1|Participant). There were statistically significant effects of piece, relationship with the musicians, fanship, and trait empathy (see Figure 4A, Figure 4C and Table 3). See Table S2 in the Supplemental Material for all model parameter estimates. Marginal contrasts for the main effect of piece indicated that the Folk pieces evoked more
Statistically significant standardized fixed effect parameter estimates for mixed effects models of
Significance values were calculated by Satterthwaite approximation. See Table S2 in the Supplementary Material for all model parameter estimates.
Awe
The sample size for this analysis was 91 live audience participants in the Beethoven and the Folk and 84 for the Schnittke (7 live audience participants failed to complete the page with the awe and connectedness items for the Schnittke piece) and at most 32 in the livestreaming audience (Beethoven = 32, Schnittke = 26, Folk = 23). The lme4 model formula was specified as Awe ∼ Group + Piece + Fanship + Group_Size + Relationship_Musicians + Trait_Absorption +Musical_Sophistication + (1|Participant). There were statistically significant effects of piece and trait absorption (see Figure 4B, 4D and Table 3). See Table S2 in the Supplemental Material for all model parameter estimates. Marginal contrasts for the main effect of piece indicated that the Schnittke evoked more awe than the Beethoven, estimated marginal difference = .20, 95%
Language Influence on Feeling Moved (Bevæget) and Touched (Rørt)
In Danish, the
Valence and Tension of the Pieces
Participants reported the extent to which they had positive or negative feelings and how relaxed or tense they felt to provide a measure of valence and tension (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011; Schimmack & Grob, 2000). We used an aligned rank transformation ANOVA to examine the effects of, and interactions between, the pieces, groups, and emotions. A random effect of participant was included. There was a main effect of emotion,
Motion and Emotion
We examined the effects of group (live, livestreaming), piece, and the emotions of connectedness,
Mean Quantity of Motion
Predictors of group (live, livestreaming), piece (Beethoven, Schnittke, Folk), the emotions of connectedness to the musicians, connectedness to the audience,
Statistically significant standardized fixed effect parameter estimates for mixed effects models of mean quantity of motion (top), stilling (middle), and seen motion (bottom).
Significance values were calculated by Satterthwaite approximation.
Stilling
To examine the effect of piece and emotions on stilling, we fitted a linear mixed model with the emotions (connectedness to the musicians and the audience,
Neighbors’ Motion
To examine the association between others’ motion and felt emotions, and how the relations differed by piece, we fitted a linear mixed model with motion seen as the dependent variable, and emotions (connectedness to the musicians and the audience,
Relations between Concert Emotions
To examine the relations between the concert experience variables, we conducted repeated measures correlations with the package “rmcorr” (Bakdash & Marusich, 2017; 2022) on measures of connectedness,
Others Moved
We aimed to examine whether participants at the live concert could detect to what degree the audience members around them were moved (for a longer description see the Supplemental Material). Participants were asked “To what extent do you believe audience members around you were moved?”. Participants’ neighbors were defined as those in a clear line of sight: the audience members directly to the left and right and the two participants directly in front of the participant. Neighbors’ responses were averaged to provide each participant with a score for how moved their neighbors actually were. The same procedure was conducted for the
Statistically significant standardized fixed effect parameter estimates for mixed effects models of neighbors’ feeling moved (top) and neighbors’
Significance values were calculated by Satterthwaite approximation.
Discussion
On October 26, 2021, the Danish String Quartet performed four pieces of music for a live and livestreaming audience. Both audiences had their motion measured with accelerometers and they completed surveys to report their personal characteristics and their socioemotional experiences after each piece. We examined the effects of concert variables (live versus livestreamed, and musical piece), relational characteristics (fanship level, group size, and relationship with the musicians as family or friends), and individual characteristics (trait empathic concern, trait absorption in the music, and musical sophistication) on the emotions of connectedness with performers and the audience,
We found that the live audience reported more connectedness toward other audience members than the livestreaming audience, but both groups reported similar levels of connectedness to the musicians. Across both the live and livestreaming audiences, participants reported more connectedness to the musicians than to the other audience members. This is contrary to our hypothesis, which was that the live audience would have a superior social experience compared to the livestreaming audience and would rate connectedness to both the audience and musicians higher; however, only the connectedness to the audience was higher for the live audience. In fact, when the effects of fanship level, relationship with the musicians, and trait empathic concern were taken into account, the livestreamed audience actually reported more connectedness to the musicians compared to the live audience. Research in live classical concerts also indicates that being able to see the musicians closely leads to greater engagement and enjoyment (Dearn, 2017, pp.110–112); however, not all audience members could see the performers closely, as seating ranged from the front of the hall to the back. The livestream was professionally conducted and featured dynamic camera views and angles that allowed an intimate view of the performers that was often closer and clearer than many of the live audience members’ own views. This closeness, though mediated through video and a screen, may have afforded feelings of connectedness. Indeed, research on films suggests that closer shots may lead to more emotional engagement, possibly because they provide greater visibility of facial expressions (Benini et al., 2022). Previous research on livestreamed concerts found that a more immersive field of view with virtual reality glasses promoted greater feelings of physical presence and connectedness to the performers as compared to a regular YouTube livestream (Onderdijk, Swarbrick et al., 2021). Therefore, livestreamed concerts may be just as good or better at facilitating connectedness between audience members and performers as live concerts, thanks to their ability to provide intimate views of the performers.
There were no differences in reports of awe and
The pieces of music also influenced the socioemotional experiences, with feelings of connectedness and
The Schnittke piece is also deserving of further description to explain the results and why it contrasted so greatly with the Beethoven piece and the Folk tunes. Schnittke's String Quartet No. 3 is frequently highly dissonant, with the tonal scheme being related to the tritone (the “devil's interval”) (Herndon, 2018). The piece seems to communicate sadness, despair, and fear and may thus induce vigilance chills that are distinct from chills related to feeling moved (Bannister & Eerola, 2021). While we did not ask the participants to report the emotional origins of their chills, the audience did report a distinctly different emotional profile in response to the Schnittke piece, with greater negative feelings and tension, and fewer positive feelings and relaxation, than the other pieces. Interestingly, the emotional profile of this concert matches that of related concert research in which a contemporary piece performed in the middle evoked more negative feelings from their audience (Merrill et al., 2021). We invite readers to appreciate this piece themselves in the performance recording.
8
The wonders of live performances may originate in that the events therein unfold in a non-predetermined way. This performance was no exception, and in the
The relational variables that had the greatest impact on emotional reports were having a relationship with the musicians as a friend or family member and being an admirer from before the concert (i.e., fanship level). Having a relationship with the musicians had a positive effect on connectedness and
The individual characteristics with the greatest impact on emotional reports were trait empathy and trait absorption. Trait empathy facilitated greater connectedness and
The livestreaming audience moved physically more than the live audience. This could relate to how the live audience was restricted to their seats while the livestreaming audience was free to move about their viewing environments without disturbing others’ experiences. Personal communication between some of the audience members and the first author indicated that some participants were multi-tasking, such as making food or eating while viewing the livestream. The differences both in the social context as well as the physical space could explain the differences in motion between the audiences.
The live audience moved most during the folk, then the Beethoven, then the Schnittke, while the livestreaming audience did not demonstrate differences in quantity of motion between pieces (also see Upham et al., this special collection, a). The genre of the piece of music itself, and not simply the classical concert frame, was important for establishing the behavioral norms that permitted the audience to be “rowdy” during several folk tunes but restrained during the classical pieces (cf. Wald-Fuhrmann et al., 2021). Motion measures were most related to the emotions of awe and social connectedness. Experiencing more awe was related to less motion during the Schnittke and Folk pieces but not during the Beethoven (which was performed first). Participants were most still during the Beethoven (Upham et al., this special collection, a), therefore it is possible that there were floor effects during this piece such that the relation between motion and awe was unobservable. Reduced motion as a result of an awe experience corresponds with concepts of being awestruck and speechless, implying being shocked into inaction. This finding is in line with previous literature showing that awe is related to bodily immobility in the context of perceiving architectural vastness (Joye & Dewitte, 2016). Awe might inspire restrained motion in a similar way to freezing in response to fear (Huron, 2008, p. 32). Awe is characterized by distortions in perceptions of space and time, judging oneself as smaller than normal, and judging time to move more slowly (Rudd et al., 2012; van Elk et al., 2016; Yaden et al., 2019). Future research could use an embodied cognition perspective to examine the body's role in the experience of awe by assessing if the body's immobility causes the perceptual changes of time and space.
A higher frequency of stilling was related to more feelings of connectedness. Stilling was quantified as the frequency with which the live audience participants demonstrated reductions in motion in response to musically quieting moments (Upham et al., this special collection, b). The more frequently participants stilled in response to these key musical moments, the more social connectedness they reported toward the audience. However, the causal directionality of this relation cannot be determined based on the findings of the present study. It could be that the feeling of connectedness led to the behavior such that those participants who felt more connected to the audience conformed more to the cultural norms of the classical concert frame and demonstrated more restrained behavior during moments of quieting. It could also be that the act of stilling together with others was perceived as a coordinated, entrained “in”-action and led to a stronger feeling of being part of a group. Indeed, Upham et al. found that participants coordinated with those that they knew (friends and family) during non-musical concert activities (e.g., speeches); however, during music, social barriers lifted and people moved together based on proximity more than on personal relationship (Upham et al., this special collection, a). These findings align well with other research showing that entrained actions in musical contexts lead to more social bonding (Stupacher et al., 2017a, 2017b; Tarr et al., 2016). Could it be that entrained restrained action can also lead to more connectedness? It is conceivable that shared moments of stillness at musically meaningful points were experienced as shared attentiveness, for example. Finally, it could be that there is a third variable explaining the relation of stilling and connectedness, such that individuals who are most in tune with their external environments may report more connectedness to people around them and may still more as a result of the musical structure, simply because of their heightened responsiveness. Indeed, music perception and social perception go hand in hand, as music is most often experienced as a product of social interactions between the music-makers, and they even share neurobiological circuits (Maes et al., 2014; van’t Hooft et al., 2021; Wallmark et al., 2018).
Neighbors’ motion was related to more connectedness to the audience during the folk pieces, but there was a negative relation during the Beethoven and the Schnittke. It is probable that neighbors’ motion caused the changes in connectedness, since two out of the four neighbors included in the variable were seated in front of the participant, and thus are unlikely to have been influenced by the participant's behavior. The folk music created an expectation where the audience was invited to participate motorically with the music, with some people stomping their feet along to the music (Upham et al., this special collection, a). On the contrary, the Beethoven and Schnittke pieces were from the classical repertoire, a genre where motor restraint is the cultural norm so as not to disturb the experience for others (Wald-Fuhrmann et al., 2021). This relation shows that when neighbors behaved as expected within the cultural norms of the musical genre, or when neighbors misbehaved by not conforming to those norms, then audience members noticed and reported their connectedness accordingly. This finding also helps to demonstrate that even a single item measuring connectedness can show a robust relation with behavior.
Many of the emotions and aspects of the concert experience were related to each other. Social connectedness,
In support of Fiske's arguments for using the term
Limitations
Concert research has inherent limitations because with increased ecological validity comes a loss in experimental control. The livestreaming audience could have been distracted, moving about their homes, which could explain the increased motion from this group. Measuring online concert participants often involves significant levels of noise in the data and more participant attrition through technological challenges or short attention spans, and it can be challenging to recruit these samples (e.g., Swarbrick et al., 2022). The livestreaming group had a small sample size, which limits the statistical power to detect group differences and means that reported group differences should be interpreted with caution. Future research should aim to replicate this research with a larger livestreaming audience. Concert research also tends to be observational, making the interpretation of effect directions challenging.
Survey-based methods during concerts have limitations because there needs to be a balance between duration of response collection and the number of items necessary to measure phenomena robustly. Single items are fragile to noise but are convenient for measurement and likely reflect their underlying constructs; however, all results based on single items (i.e., the results including connectedness, enjoyment, familiarity, moved, and touched) should be interpreted with caution (Allen et al., 2022; Carifio & Perla, 2007). However, the finding that there was a relation between neighbors’ motion and connectedness to the audience is compelling evidence that this single item (“to what extent did you feel connected to the audience?”) may have actually captured the intended latent variable. Since the present concert experiment was conducted, a scale for measuring social connectedness at Western art music concerts has been developed and validated (O’Neill & Egermann, 2022). Future research should certainly employ this 17-item scale when possible, within time constraints; however, the scale was developed for post-concert use and not for repeated measurements during a concert. Furthermore, measuring connectedness explicitly with questions could be subject to demand characteristics. Given the observed relation between stilling and connectedness, stilling could be harnessed as an implicit measure of social connectedness in classical concerts. However, the measure of stilling relied on experimenter-informed musicological analysis (Upham et al., this special collection, b). Future research should aim to determine musical moments of stilling prior to data collection.
Single Likert-scale items do not meet the assumptions of parametric statistics. We used Bayesian ordinal regression modeling and aligned ranks transformation ANOVAs to analyze the single Likert items. Bayesian analyses are gaining greater popularity for their ease of interpretation and low reliance on arbitrary
Several live audience members mentioned that completing the survey detracted from their concert experience. For example, one participant reported that “It was unfortunately very disturbing to the concert experience to contribute to this survey. I didn't globally have the same effect as if I wasn’t supposed to answer questions.” However, others reported that the questions they were asked helped them to reflect positively: I think this evening was of course about music and science and their theories, but most of all I felt it was about playing, being connected, and having precious and joyful moments. This has shown me what I strongly believe: music has the power to kick down all barriers (cultural, religious, and so on) and create something that cannot be other than beauty itself. Thank you very much for this incredible experience!
It is certainly a limitation that participants are pulled out of their experience of the concert to respond to questions; however, their survey responses have given us rich insights. Future work could try to fine-tune the balance between probing audience experience and permitting their engagement with the music.
Conclusion
The findings on motion and emotions reveal that the classical concert audience does not consist of passive listeners but active participants (e.g., Bishop & Goebl, 2018) who communicate their feelings through their behavior. Their motion and stilling reflects their attunement to the musical genre, their experiences of awe, and connectedness with the audience. They actively perceive their surroundings and are affected emotionally not only by the music but also by other audience members’ behavior. Their prior relationships with the musicians, as fans, friends, or family, enhance their emotional experience. In her book, So the well-behaved audience member—who does not snap her fingers or nod her head in time to the music—is not really at rest; she is performing a kind of work—the silent, internal work of muscular inhibition.
Perhaps most remarkably, we found that livestreaming audiences can feel just as much connectedness with the performers as live audiences, which has great implications for performers who can aim to connect with their fans through technological mediation. The livestreamed concert is not just a symptom of the coronavirus pandemic but a tool that musicians should continue to employ to engage their audiences around the world.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-mns-10.1177_20592043231207595 - Supplemental material for Collectively Classical: Connectedness, Awe, Feeling Moved, and Motion at a Live and Livestreamed Concert
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-mns-10.1177_20592043231207595 for Collectively Classical: Connectedness, Awe, Feeling Moved, and Motion at a Live and Livestreamed Concert by Dana Swarbrick and Jonna Katariina Vuoskoski in Music & Science
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Nanette Nielsen translated the survey from English into Danish. Maria Lokna transcribed the paper surveys into a digitized format. Finn Upham conducted the motion analyses. Beate Seibt provided valuable feedback on the manuscript. The entire MusicLab team was helpful at the concert and with participant preparation. Simon Høffding coordinated the project and liaised with the musicians. We are grateful to the Danish String Quartet and the audience for letting us measure their incredible interaction.
Action Editor
Simon Høffding, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics.
Peer Review
Sarah Price, University of Liverpool, Department of Music. One anonymous reviewer.
Author Contributions
DS and JKV contributed to survey design. DS conducted data collection and analysis. DS wrote the first draft of the manuscript. JKV and DS reviewed it critically for content and approved the final version to be published.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical Approval
This experiment was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD), reference number 915228.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence scheme, project number 262762. DS is supported in part by funding from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
References
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