Sight is More Important than Sound in Music
Winning a classical music
competition is not just down to the performer's musical prowess, a new study
suggests.
An artist's stage presence could be
even more important when it comes to evaluating a recital. The
research, published in the PNAS journal, found that people shown silent
videos of piano competitions could pick out the winners more often than those
who could also hear the music. It underlines the dominance of our sense of
vision, say scientists. Their study concludes that the best predictor of a
winner's musical performance was the visible passion they displayed, followed
closely by their uniqueness and creativity.
Chia-Jung Tsay,
from University College London, UK, is the study's author and herself a concert
pianist. She was interested in how music was judged and found that even
professional musicians were unaware of how much they were using visual
information over sound. "I realised that depending on whether audio or
video recordings had to be submitted, there could be very different outcomes.
This led me to wonder about how much visual information really impacts these
important decisions," she explained.
More than 1,000 participants in the
study were given samples of either audio, silent video or video with sound, and
asked to rate the top three finalists from 10 international classical music
competitions. The actual competition winners were only correctly identified by
those who were randomly assigned the silent videos. When the volunteers viewed
video with sound, the accuracy dropped back to chance levels that were found
with sound alone.
Dr Tsay
said the findings were quite surprising, especially because both trained
musicians and those without training had stated that sound was most important
for their evaluation. "Regardless of levels of expertise, we still seem to
be led primarily by visual information, even in this domain of music," she
said.
"Classical music training is
often focused on improving the quality of the sound, but this research is about
getting to the bottom of what is really being evaluated at the highest levels
of competitive performance. "We must be more
mindful of our inclination to depend on visual information at the expense of
the content that we actually value as more relevant to our decisions." She
added that the findings had implications for other areas in life that rely
heavily on visual cues, such as hiring employees or selecting political
leaders.
Alexandra Lamont of
She added: "Music performance
is far more than just sound, and the visual aspects often enhance the quality
of the experience, whether this be watching an energetic young virtuoso on
stage at the Menuhin Competition or being dazzled by a light display during a
DJ set at
By Melissa Hogenboom
20 August 2013