Development of the Social Experience of a Concert Scales (SECS): The Social Experience of a Live Western Art Music Concert Influences People's Overall Enjoyment of an Event but not Their Emotional Response to the Music

Abstract

Social experience is often considered to be a key motivating factor for engaging with leisure activities and attendance at music concerts is no exception. Despite this, until recently, there has been limited interest in measuring the collective or social experience of live concerts in a quantitative way. Therefore, we created and validated a new measure of the social experience of a concert. In a pilot study, 103 participants were recruited across two concert settings . An extensive list of 65 items was used to measure the social experience of a concert. Based on the results, the measurement scale was reduced to 22 items. In the main study, a further 113 participants were recruited at several concerts from a weekly series with a range of musical genres. Participants provided self-ratings of their social experience, emotional response (GEMIAC), enjoyment and demographic information in a paper survey. Based on the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis we were able to reduce the number of items in the Social Experience of a Concert Scales (SECS) to 17 validated statements representing a five-factor model: Depth of Processing, Attention, Solidarity, Satisfaction, and Self-Definition. Using MANOVA, we tested the influence of these factors on the emotional response of participants to the music and found that they are not significant predictors; however, the social experience of a concert was found to be a significant predictor of enjoyment. We have developed and validated the first quantitative measure of the social experience of a Western art music concert. Our results also suggest that the emotional response to music and the overall experience of a concert are separate and that only the latter can be influenced by the social experience of a concert.

Collectively Classical: Connectedness, Awe, Feeling Moved, and Motion at a Live and Livestreamed Concert

“…However, the finding that there was a relation between neighbors’ motion and connectedness to the audience is compelling evidence that this single item (“to what extent did you feel connected to the audience?”) may have actually captured the intended latent variable. Since the present concert experiment was conducted, a scale for measuring social connectedness at Western art music concerts has been developed and validated (O’Neill & Egermann, 2022). Future research should certainly employ this 17-item scale when possible, within time constraints; however, the scale was developed for post-concert use and not for repeated measurements during a concert.…”

“…Social connectedness is an important component of the experience of concerts because one of the defining features of concerts is their social nature. Recent work by O’Neill and Egermann (2022) aimed to understand the social experience of concerts better through the development of a scale that combines measures grounded in parasocial interaction and in-group bonding (Horton & Richard Wohl, 1956; Leach et al, 2008). They found that the social experience of concerts was related to concert enjoyment, but not the emotional experience (O’Neill & Egermann, 2022).…”

“…Recent work by O’Neill and Egermann (2022) aimed to understand the social experience of concerts better through the development of a scale that combines measures grounded in parasocial interaction and in-group bonding (Horton & Richard Wohl, 1956; Leach et al, 2008). They found that the social experience of concerts was related to concert enjoyment, but not the emotional experience (O’Neill & Egermann, 2022). The personal listening experience of classical concertgoers is shaped by the audience group because there is an established set of conventions upheld by regular attenders to promote attention on and engagement with the music that needs to be learned by newcomers, through education or copying regular attender behavior (Dearn, 2017, p.116).…”

Unifying concert research and science outreach

“…Besides studies of the effects of musical activities on health and well-being using real-life interventions (e.g., Habibi et al, 2022;Jensen & Bonde, 2018;Kreutz, 2015), live concerts and performances have become a source of major interest (McAdams, 2004;Reynolds, 2004;Wald-Fuhrmann et al, 2021). The empirical methods used in such settings range from self-reports, sometimes continuous (Broughton et al, 2019;Egermann et al, 2013;O'Neill & Egermann, 2022), peripheral-physiology data (Czepiel et al, 2021) and motion capture (Swarbrick et al, 2018), to mention but a few. This trend toward the use of naturalistic concert settings in experiments on music perception is part of a wider momentum in the field (e.g., Tervaniemi, 2023) illustrated by the installation of expensive performance or concert halls specialized for research such as the Livelab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada (https://livelab.mcmaster.ca) and the ArtLab at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany (https://www.ae.mpg.de/artlab/information.…”

Assessing real-world music listening in concerts

“…This question is motivated by prior results suggesting that physiological synchrony between participants reflects social aspects (Konvalinka et al, 2011), and is higher when participants are co-present (Golland et al, 2015). Indeed, concerts likely create a social experience (Dotov & Trainor, 2021;O'Neill & Egermann, 2022). Thus, the social presence of others might be reflected in similarity of self-reports and neural measures (Chabin et al, 2022;Golland et al, 2015).…”