Name:Rory Kirk

School/Affiliation:University of Sheffield

Co-Authors:Cameron Anderson, Martin Miguel, Emily Wood, Hany Tawfik, Dan Bosnyak, & Laurel J. Trainor

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Abstract:

Previous concert studies have observed neurophysiological synchronisation between audience members (e.g., Chabin et al., 2022; Czepiel et al., 2021), but what are the factors that contribute to this? Is there a relationship between the emotional expressivity of the performers and audience synchronisation patterns? We predict that peak moments of expressivity will correspond to greater agreement in participant ratings and audience neurophysiological synchronisation. To test this, we are investigating data collected at a live performance held at the McMaster University LIVELab featuring a professional pianist from the Canadian Chopin Society. We recorded EEG, HR, and GSR from 20 audience members as they attended the performance and listened to works from Scarlatti, Schuman, Prokofiev, and Chopin. The performer was also asked to indicate moments in each piece that they believed were particularly emotionally expressive. An online follow up study asked a new group of participants to listen to audio recordings of the concert and provide continuous valence and arousal ratings. We first compared EEG coherence (Chabin et al., 2022) and between-participant standard deviations in the ratings and GSR. Preliminary results show significantly greater standard deviations in arousal ratings and GSR activity during the expressive moments. This suggests that periods of high expressivity correspond to less interindividual synchronisation, contradicting our hypothesis. Ongoing analyses are investigating continuous interpretations of expressivity and audio features for further relationships between musical features, subjective perceptions and neurophysiological activity (e.g., Gingras et al., 2016).