On September 23rd 2022, in collaboration with Alex Whorms and her band, we aimed to manipulate audience participation. Specifically, Alex encouraged the audience to sing and clap along during two songs at a live concert. These two songs were matched with two other songs in emotional and musical content.
The audience filled a survey to report their enjoyment, engagement, kama muta, and connectedness towards the audience and the performers after the songs with participation and their matched controls (every second song). We also measured changes in fanship by measuring fanship level and the audience’s music consumption behaviour before the concert, immediately after the concert, and 1 week after the concert. We measured devotion to the artist by asking participants how much they would be willing to pay for various products (i.e., albums and concert tickets) and we measured participants’ actual spending behaviour. The performers also filled surveys that measured their performance evaluation, perceived audience engagement, and feelings of connectedness to the other performers and the audience. Head motion was recorded from the performers and the audience using high quality optical motion capture.
Dana explained the ideas behind the study and performed her original music for the audience with Alex Whorms and her band after the concert experiment. You can watch this in the Science Snapshot video:
Preliminary Research Findings
The concert was a sold-out show with a total of 91 audience members. We collected motion and survey data from the n = 4 performers and n = 69 of the live audience. The performers successfully manipulated audience participation with singing and clapping along, which can be viewed in the YouTube livestream of the concert. Data analysis is ongoing, but preliminary analysis of the live and livestreaming audiences’ survey responses suggests that high participation produced more engagement than low participation regardless of the audience group (live and livestreaming). There were no differences between the live and livestreaming groups on connectedness to the performers, but the live group reported more connectedness to the other audience members than the livestreaming group. Performance ratings, enjoyment, engagement, connectedness, and feeling moved were all positively correlated (r-values ranging from .26 to .75) in both groups. Motion analyses are ongoing, but we hypothesize that participants who demonstrate more interpersonal coordination will report more feelings of connectedness.
Media coverage
- Watch an episode of the Art of Science that focuses on this concert experiment:
How will the results be shared?
A paper is in progress and will likely be completed by the end of 2024. The results were shared at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Tokyo, Japan in August 2023. You can watch the recording of this presentation here: