Category Archives: Performance Psychology

Do Better-Looking Musicians Make Better Sounding Music?

Posted on January 28, 2013 | 5 Comments

Note: This post is cross-published on my “Live…In Concert” blog on the Psychology Today website.

SingingBeautyIn a week or so, two media-heavy music events will be upon us. Touted as “Music’s Biggest Night,” the Grammy Awards will be televised just one week following the musical-visual spectacle that is the Super Bowl halftime show. If you consider the musicians who’ll be at these events—Taylor Swift, LL Cool J, and Rihanna headline the Grammys, and Beyoncé stars at the big game—as well as other successful performers in the music industry, you might conclude that today’s audiences believe that the best music is offered by the best-looking people. Or perhaps they just prefer to open their ears to those who are also “easy on the eyes.” Of course, this is not just a modern phenomenon, nor is it limited to popular styles of music. The classical world has long featured performers who take the stage adorned in elegant gowns or suits, their appearance further ornamented by makeup, jewelry, and other accessories. Beauty, it seems, is a staple in most all kinds of music performance.

Research has established that what we hear in music—or perhaps more accurately, what we think we hear—is affected by what we see. Musicians (and producers) realize this and choose visual aspects of performance accordingly. As we saw over the recent holiday season, Christmas music usually comes with wintry images for the secular songs and religious ones for the sacred. New Years Eve performances are put on amid eye-catching party scenes. As for the performers themselves, facial expressions, bodily movements, and other visible attributes can heavily influence audience perception of musical quality. This includes the performer’s physical attractiveness.

It’s no secret that physical beauty can make people think and behave differently than they normally would. TV news programs seem to routinely run hidden video social experiments on how beautiful women affect the behavior of men (here’s one I came across recently). Typically, two people act as motorists stranded on the side of the road; one is an attractive woman and the other is…well…not. The cameras capture just how quickly men stop to help the damsel in distress. Of course, visual bias hasn’t always worked in women’s favor, as veteran symphony musicians can tell you. Female musicians were largely excluded from orchestras until behind-the-screen auditions were commonly instituted (Goldin & Rouse, 2000). Sexism notwithstanding, beauty bias seems to extend beyond our highways and into our concert halls, and often serves to advantage musicians who have the right look.

There is research that suggests that listeners hear music as more appealing when it comes from a more attractive musician. Over the last 15 years, an assortment of studies has shown that people tend to rate musical quality higher for performers who are judged to be physically attractive, as compared to those not judged as such (North & Hargreaves, 1997; Ryan et al., 2004; 2006; Wapnick et al., 1997, 1998, 2000, 2009). And it’s not just stage presence that’s more highly appraised. The quality of their sounded music is rated higher. This effect has even been found among highly trained musical evaluators (graduate level music study).

Simple physical beauty may have an effect, but there are other factors that influence how visually attractive a live performance will be. As I alluded to in a previous post, audiences are affected by the visuals cues of a performer’s wardrobe, bodily gestures, and stage behavior. We perceive the sights and sounds of a music performance together. These two forms of sensory input interact with each other (Kopiez & Platz, 2012), and both are filtered by our preexisting tastes and beliefs (e.g., the prestige effect). These cause us to form expectations for performance, which surely vary according to our knowledge of the performance conventions of different styles of music. What is considered attractive in terms of wardrobe and bodily gesture can differ greatly from one musical subculture to the next.

With this in mind, I would suggest that physical attractiveness bias in performance is not merely a matter of a musician’s absolute beauty (if there exists such a thing). Rather, we form expectations of what a “good musician” looks like, and we use them to judge whether particular performers look the part. The journal Psychology of Music recently published a research study smartly entitled “Posh Music Should Equal Posh Dress: An Investigation into the Concert Dress and Physical Appearance of Female Soloists” (Griffiths, 2010). As the title suggests, people’s opinions about the appropriateness of various performance attire—in this case jeans, a short nightclubbing dress, and a longer concert gown—were related to whether the performer played classical, jazz, or folk music. Judgments of appropriate dress coincided with higher ratings of musicality and technical performance ability.

The author of the “Posh” study says her research reinforces the idea that judgments of musical ability are connected to physical appearance. She makes specific application of her findings to the performance practices of female classical musicians. “Women wishing to project a body-focused image,” she writes, “should note that this may have a detrimental effect on perceptions of their musical ability” (p. 175). This research underscores the fact that attractiveness is culturally defined, and certainly different musical subcultures define it differently. It brings to mind the controversies that can be stirred up when classical musicians stray from traditional concert dress. The concerts of pianist Yuja Wang often yield reviews that spend just as much attention on her dresses as on her music making. And when critics have taken issue with her fashion sense, others have taken issue with that.

Though some may disapprove of her wardrobe choices, I imagine that fewer people would dispute that Yuja Wang is an attractive young woman. As mentioned above, a musician’s physical attractiveness can contribute to favorable evaluations of her performing. But could it be that some people actually become better musicians because they are better-looking than others? There is some evidence to suggest this. The studies by Wapnick and colleagues indicated some bias toward attractiveness even when the performers were not seen. In these cases, the performances rated highest in audio-only conditions tended to be those of more attractive musicians (as judged separately). In explaining this, the researchers have theorized a deeper bias: as young musicians develop through training and other performance experiences, those who are more attractive garner more attention, opportunity, and encouragement. “It is conceivable,” they write, “that the effects of attractiveness on progress in music may begin early in life, may be long lasting, and may be profound” (Wapnick et al., 1998, p. 519).

Be it from a natural human mixing of sensory signals or the pervasiveness of beauty-driven media, there clearly exists an attractiveness bias in our modern society. It should not surprise us that it is so evident in music. Though music may primarily be an aural phenomenon, it is well established that visual elements are quite consequential in the appraisal of musical quality. In a meta-analysis of studies on audio-visual music perception, Kopiez and Platz (2012) conclude that the visual dimension is “not a marginal phenomenon…but an important factor in the communication of meaning” and it “exists for classical as well as pop and rock music” (p. 75). It seems that many of the top musicians of today understand this and stage their concerts accordingly. Perhaps with music, audiences shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but research suggests that it’s an awfully hard habit to break.

References

Goldin, C., & Rouse, C. (2000). Orchestrating impartiality: The impact of “blind” auditions on female musicians. The American Economic Review, 90(4), 715-741.

Griffiths, N. K. (2010). ‘Posh music should equal posh dress’: An investigation into the concert dress and physical appearance of female soloists. Psychology of Music, 38(2), 159-177.

Kopiez, R., & Platz, F. (2012). When the eye listens: A meta-analysis of how audio-visual presentation enhances the appreciation of music performance. Music Perception, 30(1), 71-83.

North, A. C., & Hargreaves, D. J. (1997). The effect of physical attractiveness on responses to pop music performers and their music. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 15(1), 75–89.

Ryan, C., & Costa-Giomi, E. (2004). Attractiveness bias in the evaluation of young pianists’ performance. Journal of Research in Music Education, 52(2), 141-54.

Ryan, C., Wapnick, J., Lacaille, N., & Darrow, A. (2006). The effects of various physical characteristics of high-level performers on adjudicators’ performance ratings. Psychology of Music, 34(4), 559-572.

Wapnick, J., Campbell, L., Siddell-Strebel, J., & Darrow, A. (2009). Effects of non-musical attributes and excerpt duration on ratings of high-level piano performances. Musicae Scientiae, 13(1), 35-54.

Wapnick, J., Darrow, A., Kovacs, J., & Dalrymple, L. (1997). Effects of physical attractiveness on evaluation of vocal performance. Journal of Research in Music Education, 45(3), 470-479.

Wapnick, J., Kovacs-Mazza, J., & Darrow, A. (1998). Effects of performer attractiveness, stage behavior, and dress on violin performance evaluation. Journal of Research in Music Education, 46(4), 510-521.

Wapnick, J., Kovacs-Mazza, J., & Darrow, A. (2000). Effects of performer attractiveness, stage behavior, and dress on children’s piano performances. Journal of Research in Music Education, 48(4), 323-336.

Copyright 2013 Robert H. Woody

Source of image: PianoNOLA on Flickr Creative Commons

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Posted in Music and Culture, Nature of Music, Performance Psychology

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Posted on September 24, 2012 | 2 Comments

Note: This post is cross-published on my “Live…In Concert” blog on the Psychology Today website.

In many ways, the label “self-taught musician” is a misnomer. Even those who learn from YouTube videos avail themselves of the musical models of others. Most people who become skilled musicians only do so with the involvement of other people such as teachers, mentors, and musical peers. One of the most important functions they serve is giving feedback. Whether in the formal contexts of school classes or private lessons, or in more informal settings like a friend’s garage or basement, budding performers learn a lot about their musicianship from other people’s evaluation and advice.

At some point in their development, young musicians become less dependent on the appraisals of others and engage more in self-evaluation. Accurately hearing one’s own performance, however, is not always a straightforward process. In fact, self-awareness may not be a strong suit for some performers. I was recently asked about this by someone in audio production and engineering whose experiences had led him to believe that many musicians are poor judges of their own work. He wondered if there’s a psychological phenomenon by which performers mentally replace what is actually sounded with a version from their “mind’s ear.”

I think he’s onto something. In my own research, I’ve had numerous experiences in which musicians I’m working with are unaware of aspects of their own performance. In some ways, this is hardly noteworthy. Many of the expressive features that musicians put in their performances are done fairly automatically, presumably the result of much musical enculturation and practice. In one experiment (Woody, 2003), I asked advanced pianists to play a “deadpan” version of a melody—one with no expressive variations in tempo or loudness—and found that they were consistently unable to do it. But what’s more interesting are times when performers believe they have added certain expressive features in their music, when in fact they have not. It would seem that their musical intentions interfere with their ability to accurately hear their performance.

To understand this phenomenon better, I offer up a model of cognitive skills used in music performance (I believe it also can be applied to other types of skilled performance such as sports, but I’ll stick to music here). When people make music, there are three kinds of cognition going on:

  • Goal imaging is the ability to generate a clear idea of what the music should sound like. Because music deals with sound, this “image” is primarily aural, but it may also include some visual or conceptual aspects (e.g., focusing on a “high point” in a phrase). While most everyone holds goal images of music in memory—it’s how people can decide whether a particular rendition of a familiar song sounds good or bad—skilled musicians create precise images to guide their own performance.
  • Motor production is the ability to carry out the physical movements and responses needed to sing or play a particular instrument. At first thought, this ability might not seem cognitive in nature, but remember that “muscle memory” resides not in the muscles but in the memory (i.e., the mind). Learning a physical skill involves remembering the “feel” of it. New motor skills start off requiring much conscious effort, but with adequate repetition, they can reach a level of automaticity.
  • Self-monitoring is the ability to accurately hear one’s own performance. This is not always easy to do, which is why musicians can be surprised when they hear recordings of themselves (“Did I really sound like that?”). The importance of self-monitoring is seen in the research showing that musicians’ motor learning is significantly impaired when they cannot hear their performance (e.g., Brown & Palmer, 2012).

It is the interaction between these three skills that accounts for improvement made in musicians’ practice sessions. With a clear idea in mind of what they’re trying to sound like (goal image), musicians can compare it to how they do sound (self-monitoring). Identifying discrepancies between the two should guide them in adjusting their technique (motor production).

Especially when performing unfamiliar music, carrying out these cognitive skills can demand all of a musician’s attention. It may, in fact, demand more. Performers can cognitively “max out” just from concentrating on what they’re trying to sound like and on executing the physical skills required. They may not have attentional resources available to accurately hear the results of their efforts (see also Keller, 2001). This is why younger musicians can be so dependent on the feedback of others to know whether they performed something well. They simply cannot encode into memory both the goal and the outcome of performance. More experienced musicians may become so focused on the expressive intentions of their performances that they forget—or simply do not want to be bothered—to listen objectively to the sounds they’re producing. Instead of comparing the products of goal imaging and self-monitoring to guide their performance, they linger over the goal.

This model can be useful to musicians as they attempt to diagnose their performance problems. It can also be useful to teachers—perhaps even music producers—when they are trying to get performers to change something about their playing or singing. The key comes in pinpointing where a breakdown is happening. Does the musician not have a good idea of what he or she is supposed to sound like? If so, goal imaging can be built through additional listening, both to recordings and expert models (certainly school band directors would have an easier time in rehearsals if their students actually listened to band music). Alternatively, some musicians’ practice sessions may be ineffective because they are unaware of what they truly sound like. Perhaps they are practicing music that so challenges them technically that all their cognitive resources are devoted to merely producing the desired sounds on an instrument. In this case, I’d recommend they audio record their practicing and listen carefully upon playback.

By proposing this model, I’m not suggesting that making music should be experienced as an analytical process. Although I do believe these cognitive skills underlie performance, I’d suggest that musicians only try to bring them to the surface while practicing. Successful performance is marked by more fluid or “natural” music making. I suspect that through initial consciousness and the careful repetition of practice, these cognitive skills become automatized in expert musicians. It’s likely they come to use extramusical ideas—emotions, mental imagery, expressive metaphors—to more efficiently encode into memory the sounds and “feel” of performance that they acquire through experience.

References

Brown, R. M., & Palmer, C. (2012). Auditory-motor learning influences auditory memory for music. Memory & Cognition, 40, 567-578.

Keller, P. E. (2001). Attentional resource allocation in musical ensemble performance. Psychology of Music, 29, 20-38.

Woody, R. H. (2003). Explaining expressive performance: Component cognitive skills in an aural modeling task. Journal of Research in Music Education, 51, 51-63.

Copyright 2012 Robert H. Woody

Source of image: christophheinrich on Flickr Creative Commons.

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Posted in Expressivity, Music Learning, Performance Psychology

When Practice, Practice, Practice Isn’t the Answer

Posted on August 20, 2012 | 1 Comment

Note: This post is cross-published on my “Live…In Concert” blog on the Psychology Today website.

For many musicians, it’s a common scenario: You stand backstage about to go on, and you can feel the adrenaline coursing through your body. You may feel your chest pound, your breathing grow shallow, or a swarm of butterflies attack your stomach. As you take the stage, you notice your hands shake. It’s bad enough that you have to experience these unpleasant feelings, but you also worry that they will ruin how your music sounds onstage.

For those who’ve struggled with it, performance anxiety can seem like a fact of life. They accept it as an inevitable part of performing. And accordingly, they may come to believe that they’ll never sound in concert as good as they did in rehearsal. Performance quality—how accurate or otherwise “good” the music sounds to an audience—is paramount. So dealing with anxiety means somehow compensating for the drop-off in quality that happens onstage. “If I play it 95% well in rehearsal, but only 80% in performance,” one might think, “then if I can get it to 110% in rehearsal, I can expect 95% on stage. Right?”

From this perspective, many have advised musicians that the key to a successful performance is over-preparation. Practice your music so much that even your worst rendition still sounds pretty good. Practice so you know it incredibly well, then practice it some more so that your body will deliver it onstage without thinking, without trying. Then, according to this view, you can have utmost confidence and no reason to worry going into a performance.

I’m certainly a believer in the necessity of practice for building musical skills. But I don’t believe it is always the key to overcoming performance anxiety. In fact, I would suggest that if you can play or sing your music well in rehearsal, but not in the concert, then additional practice is a poor strategy for managing stage fright. Instead of accepting and coping with a drop-off from practice to performance, I’d recommend seeking to remove the factors that diminish quality onstage.

Psychologist Glenn Wilson has divided the sources of musical performance anxiety into three categories: the task, the situation, and the person. Many musicians and researchers, including myself, have found this model useful for understanding performers’ anxiety issues and selecting effective treatments (Klickstein, 2009; Lehmann, Sloboda & Woody, 2007, ch. 8; Wilson & Roland, 2002; Valentine, 2002). When musicians experience anxiety because they believe they’re physically incapable of playing or singing their music, then the task is the source, and additional practice is a viable treatment. However, the situation is a more likely source when worry is brought on by the conditions of a public performance. Situational factors include the presence or absence of co-performers, the makeup of the audience, and any consequences of performance (e.g., an audition or competition). The person as a source of anxiety refers to the influential role that musicians’ own thinking plays. As I mentioned in a previous post, performers’ own thought processes can be empowering or debilitating.

As prevalent as performance anxiety is, the value of diagnosing it has not seemed to catch on. More common are recommended cure-alls, ranging from the silly (“imagine your audience in their underwear”) to the simplistic (“practice, practice, practice”). Also popular are reactive strategies for confronting anxiety. Breathing and muscle relaxation exercises have been found effective for many, and some turn to beta blocking drugs. I think this reflects the fatalist attitude mentioned above, in which musicians accept anxiety as fact and resign to battling symptoms without considering what’s causing them.

A preventative approach starts with identifying the source. While practicing the musical task is undeniably important when approaching a concert, much research suggests that also very influential are the performance situation and what goes on inside the heads of musicians themselves. Here I’ll share a couple recent studies that highlight the impact these can have and the value of addressing them specifically in treatment strategies.

In a 2011 study published in the journal Psychology of Music, three researchers in the UK compared perceived performance anxiety experiences of several different types of musicians, including classical, jazz, and popular (Papageorgi, Creech & Welch, 2011). Across all of their participants, solo performance elicited more anxiety than group performance. Additionally, classical musicians tended to report higher levels of anxiety. The researchers concluded that the traditionally formal context of classical performance may create additional pressure and increase anxiety levels.

That higher anxiety is linked to solo performance (vs. group) and classical contexts (vs. more informal) has been reported in much previous research. These clearly represent situational factors. Greater mastery over one’s music (the task) through practice does not address the intense “on the spot” feeling of a public solo performance, or additional pressure that may be brought on by formal concert settings. Instead, musicians can deal with situational stress through mental rehearsals, in which they try to remain calm while vividly imagining aspects of public performance. When situational anxiety is particularly debilitating, performers may choose a program of systematic desensitization. In this treatment approach, musician carry out a series of performances, learning to control their physiological arousal while gradually progressing from least anxiety-inducing to most anxiety-inducing conditions.

In another recent study, British conservatoire students underwent a “mental skills” training program that addressed sources of anxiety within the categories of the person and the situation. Participants learned to manage anxiety through goal-setting, cognitive restructuring (changing thinking through self-talk), and vivid imagery in mental rehearsals. Compared to a control group, those who received the training experienced a significant increase in their self-efficacy (i.e., perceived competence) toward performing. The post-training comments of these musicians “revealed greater levels of self-awareness, confidence, facilitative views toward and heightened control over anxiety, and healthier perspectives toward music-making” (p. 342).

As the old joke goes, the way to get to Carnegie Hall may very well be practice, practice, practice. But it may not be the key to having performance success once onstage. What’s more, excessive practice may not lead to enjoyment of the experience. Not only can stage fright harm the musical product being presented to an audience, it can prevent musicians from enjoying performance for themselves. I would suggest that many would be better served to focus not on the quality of their music—which may just drive them to more practice—but on finding greater “in the moment” awareness and reward for themselves during performance. This may prompt them to think more carefully about the situational factors that affect their performance experience, and reexamine their thought processes during music making.

References

Clark, T., & Williamon, A. (2011). Evaluation of a mental skills training program for musicians. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 23(3), 342-359.

Klickstein, G. (2009). The Musician’s Way. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lehmann, A. C., Sloboda, J. A., & Woody, R. H. (2007). Psychology for musicians. New York: Oxford University Press.

Papageorgi, I., Creech, A., & Welch, G. (2011). Perceived performance anxiety in advanced musicians specializing in different musical genres. Psychology of Music. doi: 10.1177/0305735611408995

Valentine, E. (2002). The fear of performance. In J. Rink (Ed.), Musical performance: A guide to understanding (pp. 168-182). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, G. D., & Roland, D. (2002). Performance anxiety. In R. Parncutt & G. E. McPherson (Eds.), The science and psychology of music performance (pp. 47–61). New York: Oxford University Press.

Copyright 2012 Robert H. Woody

Source of image: luxorium on Flickr Creative Commons.

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Posted in Motivation, Performance Psychology, Practicing, Uncategorized

Music Made for Peak Perception

Posted on April 16, 2012 | 5 Comments

Note: This post is cross-published on my “Live…In Concert” blog on the Psychology Today website.

Music possesses the power to evoke human emotions, some extremely intense and meaningful in the contexts of our lives. For many, live performance can do this especially well. Even in the current age of omnipresent digital recordings, live music is still in great demand. For those of us who take the stage as performers, it can be difficult to think of a concert solely from the perspective of a spectator. We are used to focusing on how best to produce expression and transmit feeling through our music. We may not think as much about how audience members receive our expressive messages, and how they experience emotion during performances. But the emotional rewards felt by concertgoers can be just as powerful—if not more so—than those felt by the people on stage.

These magical moments that are so cherished by musicians and music lovers have also been the target of psychologists’ study for some time. The notion of peak experiences, first advanced and by Abraham Maslow in the 60s and 70s, refers to mental states in which people have strong feelings of wonder, enthrallment, and ecstasy. The 80s and 90s saw the popularization of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow, which describes how people can become so completely engaged in a challenging activity that time flies by and they experience the intrinsic rewards of the activity free of self-consciousness. One of the conditions of the flow state is a balance between the challenge of a task and one’s skill in carrying it out. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that music performance has been a frequent context for the study of flow, with Csikszentmihalyi himself often citing it.

Many musicians aspire to have peak performances in their activities. Ideally the presence of a public audience is not seen as a source of anxiety, but an opportunity to further enhance the strong emotional rewards of performance. As musicians seek these for themselves, I believe most would also like to provide peak experiences for their audiences. Although music listening and concert attendance aren’t typically thought of as challenging activities or tasks, they can still engender flow experiences. They are, however, clearly different from the act of performing music. Musicians can gain much with a better appreciation for all the factors that are present during a performance, specifically from the perspective of an audience.

One of my favorite chapters in the 2011 Handbook of Music and Emotion is by music psychologist Alf Gabrielsson, who reviews the research on “Strong Experiences with Music.” He tackles a few of the more fantastic examples of music-induced peak experiences, such as transcendental and religious experiences, trance states, and synesthesia (visions of colors and lights). He also identifies some of the most important contributors to peak experiences during a live music performance. These influencing factors, in the broadest terms, are the music, the person, and the situation (see also Lamont, 2011). These three things interact to create the added dimensions that make live music so unique and powerful—the thrill of real-time vocal and instrumental production, the visuals on stage and around the venue, and the social aspects involving performers and audience members.

The sound properties of the music that make it expressive include timbre, rhythm, pitch, tempo, dynamics, and articulation. You might say that the art and craft of musicianship consist of choosing the right order, combinations, and variations of these things in order to communicate to a listening audience. There has been some interesting research that has provided insight into how certain musical devices can even elicit physiological responses from listeners. For example, John Sloboda’s (1991) study of classical music lovers was able to identify some pretty specific musical triggers among Westerners. Among them, tears were linked to melodic appoggiaturas, shivers occurred after sudden harmony changes, and a racing heart followed instances of rhythmic syncopation.

This would suggest that it is a worthwhile endeavor to develop mastery over one’s instrument in order to allow expressive musical devices to be carried out with control and precision. But just because performers can produce expressive features in their music, doesn’t mean that they always will do so. My own research has shown that even among advanced musicians, expressive intentions don’t always make it into the sound properties of performance (Woody, 2002, 2003). Some musicians trust that their own emotions will naturally infuse their music and elicit the same feelings from listeners. It doesn’t always work. As part of developing expressive performance skills, it can be fruitful to simply direct musicians’ attention to the acoustic sound properties that they’re producing—and how they’re perceived by listeners—instead of dwelling only on their inner intentions to be expressive (Juslin & Laukka, 2000). Take, for instance, a pianist who wishes to communicate sadness and longing in melody. Her strategy for making the melody expressive may be to muster up feelings of sadness and longing in herself while performing. This emotional process could divert her attention from accurately hearing whether her sounded music contains features that will be perceptible to listeners. In fact, her own felt emotion could wrongfully convince her of the expressiveness of her music. As far as the music is concerned, listeners have no other way to access the heart of the pianist but by the way she presses the keys on the instrument (and the sound it produces). This is why listening to recordings of themselves can be so helpful to musicians; it can afford them more objective appraisals of their performance quality.

The other two factors of strong experiences with live music are the person and the situation. Many things can affect an audience member’s disposition and extra-musical associations during a concert, some of which are clearly outside of the control of any performer. (Though this doesn’t mean they should be dismissed altogether, as we’ll see below.) Situational factors, however, are often chosen—or passively accepted—by performing musicians. Anything that affects how audience members receive the sounds and sights of the performance can be extremely influential. This is why much pre-concert time is spent on sound checks to ensure the best acoustics given the physical layout of a venue. But the visual aspects of a performance are also critically important. A recent NRP Music interview brought one case in point to my attention. Aside from her impressive technique, some of cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s notoriety can be attributed to how physically expressive she is in performance. She points to the moving and dancing that rock musicians commonly do onstage, saying “it always struck me as sort of surprising that people would find that strange in classical music.”

Concertgoers take many cues about emotionality from what they see in musicians’ facial expressions, bodily movements, and other physical attributes. Quite a few research studies have confirmed that what people hear—or think they hear—can be heavily influenced by what they see (among them Behne & Wöllner, 2011). Even among musically sophisticated audience members, judgments of musical quality are often biased by things like performer attractiveness, wardrobe, and stage behavior. There is also the prestige effect, which says that listeners’ perception can be skewed by whether they believe they’re hearing, say, the “naïve interpretation” of a student musician, versus a “bold rendition by innovative expert.” It also explains the famous (among classical music followers, anyway) Joshua Bell subway experiment, in which the world-class violinist went ignored while playing virtuosic repertoire in a busy Washington, DC Metro station.

No doubt some musicians lament that elaborate costuming, scenery, and stage “antics” may be used to compensate for poor command of one’s musical instrument (i.e., technique, including sounded expressiveness). Such visual elements are often referred to as extra-musical factors. I would suggest, however, that they are more para-musical, in that they are necessarily part of live performance. No music can be perceived and understood outside of some cultural and personal context. Music performance has always been about more than the pleasantness of the sounds produced. Audio-purists should take heart, though, to know that research affirms that the music does matter. But it’s also clear that performers can no more afford to ignore the para-musical factors that affect perception than they can what’s accomplished through technique.

One clear message musicians can take from this research is that audiences do not parse out various aspects of live performance. Many times an intense emotional response to music is less about the music, and more about the person taking it in. Music-induced peak experiences can often be cathartic in nature, characterized by the feeling of releasing something within. In another study, John Sloboda (1992) reported how many listeners described music as a trigger or an outlet or a way to deal with things that are “bottled up” inside. He concluded that in many instances, “music does not create or change emotion; rather it allows a person access to the experience of emotions that are somehow already ‘on the agenda’ for that person, but not fully apprehended or dealt with” (p. 35).

Perhaps the most successful performers try to know the types of people who are in attendance at their concerts. They not only practice the notes that they will produce on stage, but they consider the other factors that will affect the audience’s perception. Instead of merely accepting the conventions of their performance genre—for better or worse—they more actively select the physical and social factors that hold sway in live music. The may even have some insight into the kinds of emotions their audience members seek to have stirred up or released by the music they take in. Playing or singing for a crowd of engaged and emotionally responsive people will likely make the experience all the more rewarding for the performers themselves.

References

Behne, K. E., & Wöllner, C. (2011). Seeing or hearing the pianists? A synopsis of an early audiovisual perception experiment and a replication. Musicae Scientiae, 15, 324-342.

Gabrielsson, A. (2011). Strong experiences with music. In P. N. Juslin & J. Sloboda (Eds.), Handbook of music and emotion: Theory, research, applications (pp. 547-574). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Juslin, P. N., & Laukka, P. (2000). Improving emotional communication in music through cognitive feedback. Musicae Scientiae, 4, 151-183.

Lamont, A. (2011). University students’ strong experiences of music: Pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Musicae Scientiae, 15, 229-249.

Sloboda, J. A. (1991). Music structure and emotional response: Some empirical findings. Psychology of Music, 19, 110-120.

Sloboda, J. A. (1992a). Empirical studies of emotional response to music. In M. R. Jones & S. Holleran (Eds.), Cognitive bases of musical communication (pp. 33-46). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Woody, R. H. (2003). Explaining expressive performance: Component cognitive skills in an aural modeling task. Journal of Research in Music Education, 51, 51-63.

Woody, R. H. (2002). The relationship between musicians’ expectations and their perception of expressive features in an aural model. Research Studies in Music Education, 18, 53-61.

Copyright 2012 Robert H. Woody

Source of images: Flickr Creative Commons: 1, 2.

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Posted in Expressivity, Nature of Music, Performance Psychology

Taking Stock Before Taking the Stage

Posted on March 12, 2012 | 2 Comments

Note: This post is cross-published on my “Live…In Concert” blog on the Psychology Today website.

When great musicians are on stage, I am amazed by how naturally the music seems to flow from them. There’s great energy in what they’re doing, but it seems to happen without much obvious exertion. The performers communicate through their music, and it moves my thoughts and emotions as I watch and listen. It would seem that in the ideal performance situation, this process happens almost organically, naturally driven by the musicians’ inner passion, and free of contrivance and strain.

In an ideal world, all musicians would perform with the goal of heartfelt expression that deeply moves audiences. Unfortunately, this may not be the norm in most of our concert halls. Some musicians are so preoccupied with the work involved in giving a public performance that they lose sight of their expressive goals. They would love to take the stage with clear minds and more fully channel the emotion they wish to communicate. But this can be an elusive endeavor. To make matters worse, sometimes the only emotion a musician brings to a performance is fear, as stage fright takes hold.

Because of the ideas described above, some may come to believe that performance success depends on shutting off the intellect. It can be an appealing prospect: quit thinking and planning and analyzing, and just trust that your love for music will guide you to an expressive performance, right? Perhaps not. Research in the psychology of music suggests otherwise. Our thinking may be our most powerful resource toward fulfilling performances. It is our thinking—specifically our beliefs and attitudes—that guides our motivation patterns in our musical activities. It is mindful and deliberate practice that most efficiently builds performance skills. And there is great value in our mind’s capacity for reflection, that is, our ability to monitor our musical behaviors and even change the way we think.

Let me start with an example of how beliefs and attitudes can affect the way musicians approach performance. Some psychologists who study motivation have suggested that there are two broad orientations that people can have when pursuing something like music: ego-involved and task-involved. If I have an ego-involved goal orientation, I’m primarily concerned about how I am judged through my musicianship. Performances are opportunities to garner favorable recognition…or to lose it. If I have a task-involved goal orientation, I’m thinking about the musical activity itself. Thought processes center on producing a performance that measures up to a self-set standard.

In a 2005 study of the goal orientations of collegiate instrumental musicians, beliefs about musical talent emerged as an important underlying factor (Smith, 2005). Those who thought of musical talent as an inborn stable trait (“either you got it or you don’t”) were more likely to take an ego-involved approach to performance. They thought about how they would compare to other musicians and expressed concern about looking bad. This came in contrast to those who believed musical ability is acquired through effort and practice; these musicians were more likely to embrace new challenges and to do so out of personal interest. Further, task oriented musicians tended to take more varied and in-depth strategies in their practicing.

I think there’s much to be gained by examining our motivations as performers, perhaps even using the ego- and task-involved goal designations. Past research suggests that musicians driven by ego goals—without much task involvement—are more likely to experience negative feelings in their music making. Their orientation may actually hinder the effectiveness of their practicing and make them more susceptible to stage fright. I know I’ve gone into performances primarily concerned about how my musicianship would be judged by others. Instead of focusing on my expressive aims, I’m worried about wrong notes. Performance is no longer an opportunity to enjoy, but an ordeal to endure.

Just being aware of our thought processes heading into a performance can be beneficial. In another study with college music majors, two researchers asked their participants to complete “diary” before 15 performances during a school year (Sadler & Miller, 2010). For each entry, always done within an hour before performing, they described their thoughts and feelings heading into their performance. Over the course of the 15 performances, there was a significant decrease in performance anxiety reported by the music students. And note, these musicians were not directed to use any particular strategy to combat stage fright; they simply took note of what they were thinking and feeling. It would seem that even some basic self-awareness can have a therapeutic effect.

So it’s not the avoidance of thinking that facilitates a gratifying performance experience. More likely, the key is being able to direct your thoughts to the right things. For years, psychologists have treated anxieties of many kinds through cognitive restructuring. In this approach, people struggling with anxiety learn to change their thinking, primarily through self-talk. But it does not entail reciting undue praise to yourself in a shallow “power of positive thinking” way. Rather, self-talk is used to monitor and reshape thought patterns, in order to replace irrational negative thoughts with more realistic and task-centered ones. The approach has been effective with musicians, including very recently in a study by two performance psychologists (Hoffman & Hanrahan, 2012). They provided three workshops in which musicians were guided in examining their thought processes related to performance anxiety. They identified the negative thinking that they commonly engage in, and learned how to replace dysfunctional “all or nothing” thought patterns with more constructive ones. Even with this relatively modest intervention—just three hour-long sessions offered over a three week period—the musicians experienced a significant drop in perceived anxiety while performing, as well as a significant increase in the quality of their performances, as determined by independent musical judges.

Ultimately your musical performances will be judged by how expressive or feelingful they are. And you can’t “play it with feeling” if all you feel is dread! We cannot simply shut off our minds just prior to taking the stage. I suppose for some of the greatest musicians, their skills are so practiced, so polished, and so deeply rooted that they can deliver a stirring performance with their thoughts wandering to others things. But most of us are not there yet. We have to think about something as we prepare to present our music to an audience. There can be some serious drawbacks of stepping on stage while thinking about the performance—what’s riding on it, what could go wrong, and other potentially threatening aspects. A better alternative would be to focus your thoughts on your music making, and that in its plainest context. I would suggest that fundamentally, music is about the sharing of expression with others, done because it’s a meaningful, enriching, and even essential part of being human.

References
Hoffman, S. L., & Hanrahan, S. J. (2012). Mental skills for musicians: Managing music performance anxiety and enhancing performance. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 1(1), 17-28.

Sadler, M. E., & Miller, C. J. (2010). Performance anxiety: A longitudinal study of the roles of personality and experience in musicians. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1(3), 280-287.

Smith, B. P. (2005). Goal orientation, implicit theory of ability, and collegiate instrumental music practice. Psychology of Music, 33(1), 36-57.

Image source: Photos taken by Liz Love of LizLovePhotography.com

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Posted in Expressivity, Performance Psychology