Abstract
Virtuosi impress audiences with their musical expressivity and with their theatrical flair. How do listeners use this auditory and visual information to judge performance quality? Both musicians and laypeople report a belief that sound should trump sight in the judgment of music performance, but surprisingly, their actual judgments reflect the opposite pattern. In a recent study, when presented with 6-second videos of music competition performers, listeners accurately guessed the winners only when the videos were muted. Here, we successfully replicate this finding in a highly-powered sample but then demonstrate that the sight-over-sound effect holds only under limited conditions. When using different videos from comparable performances, in a forced-choice task, listeners' judgments were at or below chance. And when differences in performance quality were made clearer, listeners' judgments were most accurate when they could hear the music—without audio, performance was at chance. Sight therefore does not necessarily trump sound in the judgment of music performance.
Highlights
No effects were found in any condition, demonstrating that auditory skills were unrelated to higher performance in identifying the competition winners
This provides a conceptual replication of previously reported effects [1], where separately recruited professional musicians performed comparably to non-musicians
While performance was slightly higher in the visual than the audio and audio-visual conditions, it was not above chance in the visual condition. These findings show that simple methodological changes rendered participants unable to accurately identify competition winners from visual information alone
Summary
That musicians entertain their listeners both with their musical expressivity and their theatrical flair provides a simple explanation for the widespread popularity of live concerts, even when the internet makes audio recordings of performances more accessible than ever. This multimodality presents issues, for evaluating the quality of music performances, because visual information—including the performer’s sex, attractiveness, movement, and so on— could confound listeners’ ability to make judgments of the quality of the music being performed.
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