The Sound of Sadness : The Effect of Performers' Emotions on Audience Ratings

Very few studies have investigated the effect of performers’ felt emotions on the audience perception of their performances. Does it matter what a performer feels or thinks about when performing? To investigate this, we asked four violinists to play the same musical phrase in response to three different instructions. The first in-struction was to focus on the technical aspects of their playing. The second instruction was to give an expres-sive performance. Following a sadness-inducing mood induction task, the third instruction was to play while focusing on their felt emotions. High quality audio and motion-capture recordings were made of all perfor-mances. Subsequently, motion-capture animations, audio recordings, and motion-capture animations com-bined with audio recordings of the performances were presented to an audience. Thirty audience members rated how much they liked each performance, how skilled they thought each performer was, and to what ex-tent each performance was expressive of sadness. Statistical analysis revealed that, overall, audience mem-bers preferred the Expressive performances to the Technical and Emotional ones. In addition, the Expressive performances were rated as played by the most skilled performers. The Emotional performances, however, were rated as being most expressive of sadness. Our results suggest that what performers feel or think about when performing does affect the perception of their performances by an audience