Audience gaze while appreciating a multipart musical performance

Abstract

Visual information has been observed to be crucial for audience members during musical performances. The present study used an eye tracker to investigate audience members' gazes while appreciating an audiovisual musical ensemble performance, based on evidence of the dominance of musical part in auditory attention when listening to multipart music that contains different melody lines and the joint-attention theory of gaze. We presented singing performances, by a female duo. The main findings were as follows: (1) the melody part (soprano) attracted more visual attention than the accompaniment part (alto) throughout the piece, (2) joint attention emerged when the singers shifted their gazes toward their co-performer, suggesting that inter-performer gazing interactions that play a spotlight role mediated performer-audience visual interaction, and (3) musical part (melody or accompaniment) strongly influenced the total duration of gazes among audiences, while the spotlight effect of gaze was limited to just after the singers' gaze shifts.

All Eyes on Me

“…This suggestion supports Tsay's (2013) notion of a natural, automatic, and unintentional dependence on visual cues during musical performances. More importantly, our results help contextualize previous studies reporting that observers' visual attention depends on the musical part (Kawase & Obata, 2016) and that melodic parts of a musical performance attract listeners' attention (Gregory, 1990), especially if the melody or the solo part is in a higher register than the accompaniment (Fujioka, Trainor, Ross, Kakigi, & Pantev, 2005;Trainor, Marie, Bruce, & Bidelman, 2014). In a musical performance with unexpected visuo-kinematic cues such as an accompanist behaving as a soloist, saliency of the auditory information (i.e., the musical solo part) does not always seem to be sufficient to attract visual attention.…”

“…In a typical musical performance where visual and auditory information are present, a musician behaving as soloist attracts most visual attention-an effect that is present even when audio is absent. These results further various research areas including bodily gestures in musical duo performances (Goebl & Palmer, 2009;Keller & Appel, 2010;King & Ginsborg, 2011) and audience gaze during concerts (Kawase & Obata, 2016). Nevertheless, it is important to consider several limitations in further pursuing these research topics.…”

“…What seems clear is that, in an audio-visual music performance, auditory information alone is not sufficient for conveying all the features associated with a soloist performance. Being a soloist, or rather, the defining characteristics of being a soloist, is determined by a confluence of auditory, visual, and visuo-kinematic cues, and as accumulating evidence shows, the latter two may be equally as powerful as the former (e.g., Griffiths, 2010;Kawase & Obata, 2016;Platz & Kopiez, 2012;Waddell & Williamon, 2017;Wapnick et al, 1998).…”

“…However, salient auditory cues such as the solo part in an ensemble performance may also attract visual attention. In an experiment on duo singing performance, the melody part (soprano) was shown to attract more visual attention than the accompaniment part (alto) throughout the piece (Kawase & Obata, 2016). Since singers were instructed to ''maintain a stationary position to avoid any significant movements that might attract visual attention'' (p. 18), it is unknown whether body movements would have diverted the visual attention from a soloist showing few expressive bodily gestures to an accompanist displaying more expressive bodily gestures.…”

Cross-Modal Perception of Noise-in-Music: Audiences Generate Spiky Shapes in Response to Auditory Roughness in a Novel Electroacoustic Concert Setting

“…Audience response interfaces like Rama have the potential to bring a new dimension into perception and cognition research. With the ability to consolidate participant responses outside of the laboratory and into an environment like a concert hall or an art gallery, researchers can develop testing methods suited to the sampling of situations with high ecological validity (e.g., Kawase and Obata, 2016 ). However, more care should be given to integrate audience participation with the research design.…”