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Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds

August 1, 2007 - By Mitzi Baker

STANFORD, Calif. - Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine has gained valuable insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it.

The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements - when seemingly nothing was happening.

Beyond understanding the process of listening to music, their work has far-reaching implications for how human brains sort out events in general. Their findings are published in the Aug. 2 issue of Neuron .

This 20-second clip of a subject's fMRI illustrates how cognitive activity increases in anticipation of the transition points between movements.

The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.

"In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested," said the paper's senior author Vinod Menon , PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.

"I'm not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner," Menon said.

The team used music to help study the brain's attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.

"These transitions between musical movements offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process," said Devarajan Sridharan, a neurosciences graduate student trained in Indian percussion and first author of the article.

No previous study, to the researchers' knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. To explore this area, the team chose pieces of music that contained several movements, which are self-contained sections that break a single work into segments. They chose eight symphonies by the English late-baroque period composer William Boyce (1711-79), because his music has a familiar style but is not widely recognized, and it contains several well-defined transitions between relatively short movements.

The study focused on movement transitions - when the music slows down, is punctuated by a brief silence and begins the next movement. These transitions span a few seconds and are obvious to even a non-musician - an aspect critical to their study, which was limited to participants with no formal music training.

The researchers attempted to mimic the everyday activity of listening to music, while their subjects were lying prone inside the large, noisy chamber of an MRI machine. Ten men and eight women entered the MRI scanner with noise-reducing headphones, with instructions to simply listen passively to the music.

In the analysis of the participants' brain scans, the researchers focused on a 10-second window before and after the transition between movements. They identified two distinct neural networks involved in processing the movement transition, located in two separate areas of the brain. They found what they called a "striking" difference between activity levels in the right and left sides of the brain during the entire transition, with the right side significantly more active.

In this foundational study, the researchers conclude that dynamic changes seen in the fMRI scans reflect the brain's evolving responses to different phases of a symphony. An event change - the movement transition signaled by the termination of one movement, a brief pause, followed by the initiation of a new movement - activates the first network, called the ventral fronto-temporal network. Then a second network, the dorsal fronto-parietal network, turns the spotlight of attention to the change and, upon the next event beginning, updates working memory.

"The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music," said Jonathan Berger , PhD, associate professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.

According to the researchers, their findings expand on previous functional brain imaging studies of anticipation, which is at the heart of the musical experience. Even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece, and forming predictions about what will come next. Typically in music, when something will come next is known, because of the music's underlying pulse or rhythm, but what will occur next is less known, they said.

Having a mismatch between what listeners expect to hear vs. what they actually hear - for example, if an unrelated chord follows an ongoing harmony - triggers similar ventral regions of the brain. Once activated, that region partitions the deviant chord as a different segment with distinct boundaries.

The results of the study "may put us closer to solving the cocktail party problem - how it is that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room of many conversations," said one of the co-authors, Daniel Levitin , PhD, a music psychologist from McGill University who has written a popular book called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession .

Chris Chafe , PhD, the Duca Family Professor of Music at Stanford, also contributed to this work. This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada , the National Science Foundation , the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Fund, the National Institutes of Health and a Stanford graduate fellowship. The fMRI analysis was performed at the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory .

• Mitzi Baker

About Stanford Medicine

Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu .

Hope amid crisis

Psychiatry’s new frontiers

Classical Music Synchronizes Brain Waves, Improving Depression

Summary: Western classical music can significantly affect brain activity, particularly in people with treatment-resistant depression. By measuring brainwaves and neural imaging, scientists discovered that music synchronizes neural oscillations between brain regions associated with sensory and emotional processing, enhancing mood.

This study suggests that personalized music therapy could be a powerful tool for treating depression, especially when integrated with other sensory stimuli.

Key facts :

• Classical music was found to synchronize neural oscillations, improving mood in depression patients.
• The study focused on brain regions responsible for processing sensory and emotional information.
• Personalized music therapy plans may enhance treatment outcomes for those with treatment-resistant depression.

Source: Cell Press

Whether Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart, it’s widely recognized that classical music can affect a person’s mood.

In a study published August 9 in the Cell Press journal  Cell Reports , scientists in China use brainwave measurements and neural imaging techniques to show how Western classical music elicits its positive effects on the brain.

Their goal is to find more effective ways to use music to activate the brain in those who otherwise don’t respond, such as people with treatment-resistant depression.

“Our research integrates the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurosurgery, providing a foundation for any research targeting the interaction between music and emotion,” says senior author Bomin Sun, director and professor of the Center for Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

“Ultimately, we hope to translate our research findings into clinical practice, developing convenient and effective music therapy tools and applications.”

The study focused on 13 patients with treatment-resistant depression who already had electrodes implanted in their brains for the purpose of deep-brain stimulation.

These implants are placed in a circuit connecting two areas in the forebrain—the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Using these implants, the researchers found that music generates its antidepressant effects by synchronizing the neural oscillations between the auditory cortex, which is responsible for processing of sensory information, and the rewards circuit, which is responsible for processing emotional information.

“The BNST-NAc circuit, sometimes referred to as part of the ‘extended amygdala,’ underscores the close relationship between this circuit and the amygdala, a central structure in emotional information processing,” Sun says.

“This study reveals that music induces triple-time locking of neural oscillations in the cortical-BNST-NAc circuit through auditory synchronization.”

The patients in the study were assigned to two groups: low music appreciation or high music appreciation. Those in the high music appreciation group demonstrated more significant neural synchronization and better antidepressant effects, while those in the low music appreciation group showed poorer results.

By grouping the patients, the investigators were able to study the antidepressant mechanisms of music more precisely and propose personalized music therapy plans that would improve treatment outcomes.

For example, when inserting theta frequency noise into music to enhance BNST-NAc oscillatory coupling, those in the low music appreciation group of patients reported higher music enjoyment.

Several pieces of Western classical music were used in the study. This type of music was chosen because most participants did not have familiarity with it, and the researchers wanted to avoid any interference that could arise from subjective familiarity.

“We concluded that the music choices during the formal listening process were individualized and unrelated to the music’s emotional background,” Sun says.

The team’s future research will focus on several areas. For one, they aim to study how the interaction between music and the deep structures of the brain play a role in depressive disorders.

They will also introduce other forms of sensory stimuli, including visual images, to investigate potential combined therapeutic effects of multi-sensory stimulation on depression.

“By collaborating with clinicians, music therapists, computer scientists, and engineers, we plan to develop a series of digital health products based on music therapy, such as smartphone applications and wearable devices,” Sun says.

“These products will integrate personalized music recommendations, real-time emotional monitoring and feedback, and virtual-reality multi-sensory experiences to provide convenient and effective self-help tools for managing emotions and improving symptoms in daily life.”

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the scientific and technological innovation action plan of Shanghai, and the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project.

About this music, depression, and neuroscience research news

Author: Kristopher Benke Source: Cell Press Contact: Kristopher Benke – Cell Press Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: The findings will be presented in Cell Reports

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Study shows how Western classical music elicits positive effects on the brain

• Download PDF Copy

Whether Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart, it's widely recognized that classical music can affect a person's mood. In a study published August 9 in the Cell Press journal  Cell Reports , scientists in China use brainwave measurements and neural imaging techniques to show how Western classical music elicits its positive effects on the brain. Their goal is to find more effective ways to use music to activate the brain in those who otherwise don't respond, such as people with treatment-resistant depression.

Our research integrates the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry , and neurosurgery, providing a foundation for any research targeting the interaction between music and emotion. Ultimately, we hope to translate our research findings into clinical practice, developing convenient and effective music therapy tools and applications." Bomin Sun, senior author, director and professor of the Center for Functional Neurosurgery, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

The study focused on 13 patients with treatment-resistant depression who already had electrodes implanted in their brains for the purpose of deep-brain stimulation. These implants are placed in a circuit connecting two areas in the forebrain-;the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Using these implants, the researchers found that music generates its antidepressant effects by synchronizing the neural oscillations between the auditory cortex, which is responsible for processing of sensory information, and the rewards circuit, which is responsible for processing emotional information.

"The BNST-NAc circuit, sometimes referred to as part of the 'extended amygdala,' underscores the close relationship between this circuit and the amygdala, a central structure in emotional information processing," Sun says. "This study reveals that music induces triple-time locking of neural oscillations in the cortical-BNST-NAc circuit through auditory synchronization."

The patients in the study were assigned to two groups: low music appreciation or high music appreciation. Those in the high music appreciation group demonstrated more significant neural synchronization and better antidepressant effects, while those in the low music appreciation group showed poorer results. By grouping the patients, the investigators were able to study the antidepressant mechanisms of music more precisely and propose personalized music therapy plans that would improve treatment outcomes. For example, when inserting theta frequency noise into music to enhance BNST-NAc oscillatory coupling, those in the low music appreciation group of patients reported higher music enjoyment.

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Several pieces of Western classical music were used in the study. This type of music was chosen because most participants did not have familiarity with it, and the researchers wanted to avoid any interference that could arise from subjective familiarity. "We concluded that the music choices during the formal listening process were individualized and unrelated to the music's emotional background," Sun says.

The team's future research will focus on several areas. For one, they aim to study how the interaction between music and the deep structures of the brain play a role in depressive disorders. They will also introduce other forms of sensory stimuli, including visual images, to investigate potential combined therapeutic effects of multi-sensory stimulation on depression.

"By collaborating with clinicians, music therapists, computer scientists, and engineers, we plan to develop a series of digital health products based on music therapy, such as smartphone applications and wearable devices," Sun says. "These products will integrate personalized music recommendations, real-time emotional monitoring and feedback, and virtual-reality multi-sensory experiences to provide convenient and effective self-help tools for managing emotions and improving symptoms in daily life."

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the scientific and technological innovation action plan of Shanghai, and the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project.

Lv, X.,  et al.  (2024) Auditory entrainment coordinates cortical-BNST-NAc triple time locking to alleviate the depressive disorder . Cell Reports . doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2024.114474 .

Posted in: Medical Science News | Medical Research News

Tags: Amygdala , Antidepressant , Auditory Cortex , Brain , Brain Stimulation , Cell , Cortex , Depression , Frequency , Imaging , Imaging Techniques , Implants , Music Therapy , Neural Imaging , Neuroscience , Neurosurgery , Psychiatry , Research , Technology

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Articles on Classical music

Displaying 1 - 20 of 132 articles.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at 200: Revolutionary work of art has spawned two centuries of joy, goodwill and propaganda

Ted Olson , East Tennessee State University

Rhapsody in Blue: celebrating 100 years of Gershwin’s groundbreaking classical-jazz masterpiece

Robert Taub , University of Plymouth

Four rising Welsh music acts to set your playlist ablaze

Paul Carr , University of South Wales and Robert Smith , University of South Wales

‘It doesn’t matter where you come from’: regional youth orchestras help fight music education inequality

Mandy Hughes , Southern Cross University

The Missa Solemnis at 200: Beethoven was close to deaf when he wrote his self-proclaimed best work

Peter Tregear , The University of Melbourne

From concert halls to movie soundtracks, Arnold Schoenberg’s legacy as a classical composer still resounds

Aidan McGartland , McGill University

From ‘Jaws’ to ‘Schindler’s List,’ John Williams has infused movie scores with adventure and emotion

Arthur Gottschalk , Rice University

‘Maestro’ shows the enduring power of Gustav Mahler through Leonard Bernstein’s passion

George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is a story of jazz, race and the fraught notion of America’s melting pot

Ryan Raul Bañagale , Colorado College

Five inspiring female composers from history you should listen to

Judith Valerie Engel , University of Oxford

A long-dead soprano has taken to the stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Are holograms the future?

Shelley Brunt , RMIT University

Who was Leonard Bernstein, the man at the centre of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro?

Joseph Toltz , University of Sydney

Gustav Mahler’s symphonies in cinema – and why Maestro’s Symphony No.2 and Tár’s Symphony No.5 sound so different

Martin Knust , Linnaeus University

Music painted on the wall of a Venetian orphanage will be heard again nearly 250 years later

Marica S. Tacconi , Penn State

What does an orchestra conductor really do?

Cristina Simón , IE University

Arts organisations say they want to be ‘cultural leaders’ – but are they living up to their goals?

Samuel Cairnduff , Deakin University

How video games like ‘Starfield’ are creating a new generation of classical music fans

J. Aaron Hardwick , Wake Forest University

Fusing traditional culture and the violin: how Aboriginal musicians enhanced and maintained community in 20th century Australia

Laura Case , University of Sydney

US music education has a history of anti-Blackness that is finally being confronted

Philip Ewell , Hunter College

Intimate and immense: remembering Kaija Saariaho, one of the greatest composers of our time

Liza Lim , University of Sydney

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Deputy Head of School, Senior Lecturer in Piano and Musicology, School of Music, Australian National University

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• Review Article
• Published: 29 March 2022

Music in the brain

• Peter Vuust   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4908-735X 1 ,
• Ole A. Heggli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7461-0309 1 ,
• Karl J. Friston   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7984-8909 2 &
• Morten L. Kringelbach   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3908-6898 1 , 3 , 4  

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume  23 ,  pages 287–305 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Music is ubiquitous across human cultures — as a source of affective and pleasurable experience, moving us both physically and emotionally — and learning to play music shapes both brain structure and brain function. Music processing in the brain — namely, the perception of melody, harmony and rhythm — has traditionally been studied as an auditory phenomenon using passive listening paradigms. However, when listening to music, we actively generate predictions about what is likely to happen next. This enactive aspect has led to a more comprehensive understanding of music processing involving brain structures implicated in action, emotion and learning. Here we review the cognitive neuroscience literature of music perception. We show that music perception, action, emotion and learning all rest on the human brain’s fundamental capacity for prediction — as formulated by the predictive coding of music model. This Review elucidates how this formulation of music perception and expertise in individuals can be extended to account for the dynamics and underlying brain mechanisms of collective music making. This in turn has important implications for human creativity as evinced by music improvisation. These recent advances shed new light on what makes music meaningful from a neuroscientific perspective.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by The Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF117). The authors thank E. Altenmüller and D. Huron for comments on early versions of the manuscript.

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Peter Vuust, Ole A. Heggli & Morten L. Kringelbach

Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, London, UK

Karl J. Friston

Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

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Patterns of pitched sounds unfolding over time, in accordance with cultural conventions and constraints.

The combination of multiple, simultaneously pitched sounds to form a chord, and subsequent chord progressions, a fundamental building block of Western music. The rules of harmony are the hierarchically organized expectations for chord progressions.

The structured arrangement of successive sound events over time, a primary parameter of musical structure. Rhythm perception is based on the perception of duration and grouping of these events and can be achieved even if sounds are not discrete, such as amplitude-modulated sounds.

Mathematically, the expected values or means of random variables.

The ability to extract statistical regularities from the world to learn about the environment.

In Western music, the organization of melody and harmony in a hierarchy of relations, often pointing towards a referential pitch (the tonal centre or the tonic).

A predictive framework governing the interpretation of regularly recurring patterns and accents in rhythm.

The output of a model generating outcomes from their causes. In predictive coding, the prediction is generated from expected states of the world and compared with observed outcomes to form a prediction error.

The subjective experience accompanying a strong expectation that a particular event will occur.

An enactive generalization of predictive coding that casts both action and perception as minimizing surprise or prediction error (active inference is considered a corollary of the free-energy principle).

A quantity used in predictive coding to denote the difference between an observation or point estimate and its predicted value. Predictive coding uses precision-weighted prediction errors to update expectations that generate predictions.

Expectations of musical events based on prior knowledge of regularities and patterns in musical sequences, such as melodies and chords.

Expectations of specific events or patterns in a familiar musical sequence.

Short-lived expectations that dynamically shift owing to the ongoing musical context, such as when a repeated musical phrase causes the listener to expect similar phrases as the work continues.

The inverse variance or negative entropy of a random variable. It corresponds to a second-order statistic (for example, a second-order moment) of the variable’s probability distribution or density. This can be contrasted with the mean or expectation, which constitutes a first-order statistic (for example, a first-order moment).

(MMN). A component of the auditory event-related potential recorded with electroencephalography or magnetoencephalography related to a change in different sound features such as pitch, timbre, location of the sound source, intensity and rhythm. It peaks approximately 110–250 ms after change onset and is typically recorded while participants’ attention is distracted from the stimulus, usually by watching a silent film or reading a book. The amplitude and latency of the MMN depends on the deviation magnitude, such that larger deviations in the same context yield larger and faster MMN responses.

(fMRI). A neuroimaging technique that images rapid changes in blood oxygenation levels in the brain.

In the realm of contemporary music, a persistently repeated pattern played by the rhythm section (usually drums, percussion, bass, guitar and/or piano). In music psychology, the pleasurable sensation of wanting to move.

The perceptual correlate of periodicity in sounds that allows their ordering on a frequency-related musical scale.

Also known as tone colour or tone quality, the perceived sound quality of a sound, including its spectral composition and its additional noise characteristics.

The pitch class containing all pitches separated by an integer number of octaves. Humans perceive a similarity between notes having the same chroma.

The contextual unexpectedness or surprise associated with an event.

In the Shannon sense, the expected surprise or information content (self-information). In other words, it is the uncertainty or unpredictability of a random variable (for example, an event in the future).

(MEG). A neuroimaging technique that measures the magnetic fields produced by naturally occurring electrical activity in the brain.

A very small electrical voltage generated in the brain structures in response to specific events or stimuli.

Psychologically, consonance is when two or more notes sound together with an absence of perceived roughness. Dissonance is the antonym of consonance. Western listeners consider intervals produced by frequency ratios such as 1:2 (octave), 3:2 (fifth) or 4:3 (fourth) as consonant. Dissonances are intervals produced by frequency ratios formed from numbers greater than 4.

Stereotypical patterns consisting of two or more chords that conclude a phrase, section or piece of music. They are often used to establish a sense of tonality.

(EEG). An electrophysiological method that measures electrical activity of the brain.

A method of analysing steady-state evoked potentials arising from stimulation or aspects of stimulation repeated at a fixed rate. An example of frequency tagging analysis is shown in Fig.  1c .

A shift of rhythmic emphasis from metrically strong accents to weak accents, a characteristic of multiple musical genres, such as funk, jazz and hip hop.

In Aristotelian ethics, refers to a life well lived or human flourishing, and in affective neuroscience, it is often used to describe meaningful pleasure.

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Vuust, P., Heggli, O.A., Friston, K.J. et al. Music in the brain. Nat Rev Neurosci 23 , 287–305 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00578-5

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1 Locating Classical Music in Culture

• Published: July 2019
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This chapter reframes existing research on classical music by putting it into dialogue with sociological understandings of class and gender to outline what a social analysis of classical music should look like. This also lays the foundations for theorizing more widely how music might be analysed in relation to class, an urgent theoretical intervention at a time of increasing economic inequality within many nation-states. It asks, how are musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and in what ways might music enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them? The chapter argues for understanding music and inequality through a multi-scalar approach that examines how sociocultural discourses and practices can be traced within musical practices, and how such practices can then be heard in the aesthetic that they create.

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This is your brain on Beethoven: how music treats depression

Ellen Phiddian

Cosmos science journalist

Classical music can improve the mood of people with treatment-resistant depression because of the way it synchronises 2 parts of the brain , according to new research.

The study, done by Chinese researchers, is published in Cell Reports.

“Our research integrates the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurosurgery, providing a foundation for any research targeting the interaction between music and emotion,” says senior author Professor Bomin Sun, director and of the Center for Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.

“Ultimately, we hope to translate our research findings into clinical practice, developing convenient and effective music therapy tools and applications.”

The researchers recruited 23 patients with treatment-resistant depression, all of whom had received deep-brain stimulation treatment and so had electrodes implanted in their brains. These implants are placed in the “BNST-NAc circuit” of the brain – a part of the forebrain that connects the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc).

The researchers used these electrodes, alongside electroencephalograms (EEGs), to monitor patients’ brain signals while they listened to Western classical music.

The team chose Western classical music because their participants were mostly unfamiliar with it, which they said would lower the chance that subjective familiarity had an effect. Pieces included compositions by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi.

They found that while listening to the music, neural oscillations between the auditory cortex, which processes sound and other sensory information, and the rewards circuit, which processes emotions, were synchronised.

Musicians networked brains

“The BNST-NAc circuit, sometimes referred to as part of the ‘extended amygdala,’ underscores the close relationship between this circuit and the amygdala, a central structure in emotional information processing,” says Sun.

“This study reveals that music induces triple-time locking of neural oscillations in the cortical-BNST-NAc circuit through auditory synchronisation.”

This synchronisation activated an antidepressant response in the patients. Patients who enjoyed the music more had more improvement of depressive systems.

Interestingly, the mood of the music – a sadder or happier piece – did not influence patients’ symptoms.

“We concluded that the music choices during the formal listening process were individualized and unrelated to the music’s emotional background,” says Sun.

The researchers are planning to study music and brain structure further, as well as investigate other sensory experiences to combine with music.

“By collaborating with clinicians, music therapists, computer scientists, and engineers, we plan to develop a series of digital health products based on music therapy, such as smartphone applications and wearable devices,” says Sun.

“These products will integrate personalised music recommendations, real-time emotional monitoring and feedback, and virtual-reality multi-sensory experiences to provide convenient and effective self-help tools for managing emotions and improving symptoms in daily life.”

If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact: Lifeline 13 11 14 Beyond Blue 1300 22 46 36 Kids Helpline 1800 551 800 Headspace 1800 650 890 (in Australia).

Originally published by Cosmos as This is your brain on Beethoven: how music treats depression

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Home › Brain News

Classical music as medicine: Mood-boosting tunes synchronize the brain

By StudyFinds Staff

Reviewed by Chris Melore

Research led by Bomin Sun, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Aug 09, 2024

(Credit: Shutterstock AI Generator/Shutterstock)

SHANGHAI, China — Depression affects millions worldwide, and for some, traditional treatments don’t provide relief. But what if the key to feeling better was as simple as pressing play on your favorite song? A new study suggests that classical music could be a powerful tool in treating depression, especially for those who haven’t responded well to other therapies.

Researchers at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine have uncovered fascinating insights into how our brains process music and why certain tunes might lift our mood. The study published in Cell Reports focused on patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD), a condition where multiple standard treatments have failed to provide relief .

The team discovered that it’s not just any music that does the trick – the key factor is how much a person enjoys what they’re listening to. Patients who reported higher levels of enjoyment while listening to classical music showed significant improvements in their depressive symptoms. This finding challenges the common belief that only “happy” or upbeat music can improve mood.

“Our research integrates the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurosurgery, providing a foundation for any research targeting the interaction between music and emotion,” says senior author Bomin Sun, director and professor of the Center for Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in a media release. “Ultimately, we hope to translate our research findings into clinical practice, developing convenient and effective music therapy tools and applications.”

What’s happening in the brain when we listen to music we love?

The researchers found that enjoyable music activates a complex network involving the auditory cortex (the brain’s sound processing center) and two deeper brain regions: the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc). These areas are part of the brain’s reward circuit, which plays a crucial role in mood regulation and pleasure .

When patients listened to music they enjoyed, these brain regions showed increased activity and improved communication with each other. This enhanced brain connectivity was associated with better mood outcomes. It’s as if the music creates a harmonious symphony within the brain itself, helping to restore balance in areas disrupted by depression.

“The BNST-NAc circuit, sometimes referred to as part of the ‘extended amygdala,’ underscores the close relationship between this circuit and the amygdala, a central structure in emotional information processing,” Sun explains. “This study reveals that music induces triple-time locking of neural oscillations in the cortical-BNST-NAc circuit through auditory synchronization .”

Interestingly, the study found that even patients who were initially unresponsive to music could benefit from a technique called auditory entrainment. By incorporating specific sound frequencies into the music, researchers were able to “tune” the patients’ brains to be more receptive to the mood-boosting effects of music.

“By collaborating with clinicians, music therapists, computer scientists, and engineers, we plan to develop a series of digital health products based on music therapy, such as smartphone applications and wearable devices,” Sun concludes. “These products will integrate personalized music recommendations, real-time emotional monitoring and feedback, and virtual-reality multi-sensory experiences to provide convenient and effective self-help tools for managing emotions and improving symptoms in daily life.”

While more research is necessary before music therapy becomes a standard treatment for depression, this study provides compelling evidence that the power of music goes far beyond entertainment. It suggests that the right melody, enjoyed in the right way, could be a powerful ally in the fight against one of the world’s most common mental health conditions.

Paper Summary

Methodology.

The study involved 23 patients with treatment-resistant depression who had electrodes implanted in specific brain regions for a potential future treatment. These electrodes allowed researchers to record brain activity directly from the BNST and NAc while patients listened to music.

Researchers also recorded brain activity from the scalp, focusing on the temporal area near the ears. Patients listened to different types of music and rated their enjoyment and mood changes. Some patients listened to unfamiliar classical music, while others listened to familiar tunes they either liked or disliked. The researchers then analyzed how brain activity changed based on music enjoyment and its effects on depressive symptoms.

Key Results

The study found that patients who enjoyed the music they listened to showed greater improvements in their depressive symptoms. This enjoyment was linked to increased activity and better communication between the auditory cortex, BNST, and NAc.

Even patients who initially didn’t respond well to music could benefit when researchers added specific sound frequencies to enhance brain responsiveness. The study also revealed a unique “triple time-locking” pattern of brain activity associated with music enjoyment and mood improvement.

Study Limitations

The study had a relatively small sample size of 23 patients, all of whom had electrodes implanted in their brains – a situation that doesn’t apply to most people with depression. The research focused on a specific type of depression (treatment-resistant) and may not apply to all forms of the condition. Additionally, the long-term effects of this music-based approach weren’t explored in this study.

Discussion & Takeaways

This research suggests that personalized music therapy could be a promising avenue for treating depression, especially in cases where other treatments have failed. The study highlights the importance of subjective enjoyment in music’s therapeutic effects, rather than specific genres or emotional content of songs. The discovery of the “triple time-locking” brain activity pattern provides a potential biological marker for effective music therapy. The success of auditory entrainment in improving responsiveness to music therapy opens up possibilities for enhancing the treatment’s effectiveness.

Funding & Disclosures

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the scientific and technological innovation action plan of Shanghai, and the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project.

About StudyFinds Staff

StudyFinds sets out to find new research that speaks to mass audiences — without all the scientific jargon. The stories we publish are digestible, summarized versions of research that are intended to inform the reader as well as stir civil, educated debate. StudyFinds Staff articles are AI assisted, but always thoroughly reviewed and edited by a Study Finds staff member. Read our AI Policy for more information.

Our Editorial Process

StudyFinds publishes digestible, agenda-free, transparent research summaries that are intended to inform the reader as well as stir civil, educated debate. We do not agree nor disagree with any of the studies we post, rather, we encourage our readers to debate the veracity of the findings themselves. All articles published on StudyFinds are vetted by our editors prior to publication and include links back to the source or corresponding journal article, if possible.

Our Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief

Chris Melore

Sophia Naughton

Associate Editor

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Research shows huge surge in Millennials and Gen Zers streaming classical music

19 August 2020, 10:28

By Maddy Shaw Roberts

With the rise of streaming services, young people are listening to more Mozart and Bach than they did 10 years ago. And during lockdown, classical music has experienced a second boom.

Classical music is becoming more popular among young people, according to new joint research by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra , streaming service Deezer, and British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

Of those streaming classical music in the last year, a third (34 percent) were 18 to 25 years old. Over the same period, classical streams by listeners under 35 rose by 17 percent.

A decade ago, data published by BPI showed just a tenth of classical listeners were under 30, while the vast majority (70 percent) were over the age of 50.

Classical had a second ‘spike’ when lockdown hit in March, as both modern classical artists and more traditional composers were suddenly a hit among younger listeners. The report, which looks at official streaming data on Deezer, a competitor of Spotify, shows that over three months, global plays of classical music among 18 to 25-year-olds grew by 11 per cent.

Mozart and Bach are the platform’s most popular classical composers, while streams of female pianists including Khatia Buniatishvili and Martha Argerich soared during that three-month period.

Read more: Classical music boosts mental wellbeing in isolation, study finds >

According to an earlier report from the RPO , more than a third (35 percent) of respondents under 35s felt listening to orchestral music during lockdown had helped them relax and maintain a sense of calmness and wellbeing.

The joint research also reveals how classical music habits are changing among young people. Young classical talent and crossover playlists, like ‘Classical Goes Pop’, are proving popular.

Playlists linked to mood, like ‘feel good’, ‘calm’ and ‘sleep’, have also been well-liked during the pandemic, as young people turned to classical music as a means of finding solace, reassurance and relaxation in an uncertain time.

Calming piano music is a favourite among young listeners. ‘Calm Piano’ continued to be classical music’s most popular playlist in March. And those under 35 listening to the ‘Classical For Sleep’ playlist shot up by 10 per cent. Streams of this playlist also spiked by a huge 284 per cent across all age groups during this time.

Among the top performing artists and composers of 2020 worldwide, were Italian artists Einaudi and Andrea Bocelli , and Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi .

Albums are seeing a resurge too, as classical listeners streamed more in full than fans of other genres, despite previous research showing that fewer people than ever are listening to whole albums.

Classical artists have been voicing their support for the positive findings, including Max Richter , Ray Chen, Jess Gillam and Alexandre Desplat .

Oscar-winning film composer, Desplat, said: “It’s heartening that the appeal of classical music is clearly expanding and connecting with a broader and younger audience.

“The ease of discovery and connectivity through streaming must be playing its part, but so too is the global reach and power of film soundtracks, which draw such inspiration from classical composition.”

Read more: Vote for your favourite film soundtrack, and you could win £500 >

Renowned composer Max Richter added: “It is wonderful that new audiences are coming to classical music during this time of anxiety. Streaming offers listeners the chance simply to follow their enthusiasms through the musical universe without any boundaries, and I’m really happy to hear that many people are turning to classical music for the first time.

“As well as being a historical art form, classical music is also part of what is happening now and it is great to see more people embracing it.”

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Classical music lifts our mood by synchronizing our 'extended amygdala'

by Cell Press

Whether Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart, it's widely recognized that classical music can affect a person's mood. In a study published in Cell Reports , scientists in China have used brainwave measurements and neural imaging techniques to show how Western classical music elicits its positive effects on the brain. Their goal is to find more effective ways to use music to activate the brain in those who otherwise don't respond, such as people with treatment-resistant depression.

"Our research integrates the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurosurgery, providing a foundation for any research targeting the interaction between music and emotion," says senior author Bomin Sun, director and professor of the Center for Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. "Ultimately, we hope to translate our research findings into clinical practice, developing convenient and effective music therapy tools and applications."

The study focused on 13 patients with treatment-resistant depression who already had electrodes implanted in their brains for the purpose of deep-brain stimulation. These implants are placed in a circuit connecting two areas in the forebrain—the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Using these implants, the researchers found that music generates its antidepressant effects by synchronizing the neural oscillations between the auditory cortex , which is responsible for processing of sensory information, and the rewards circuit, which is responsible for processing emotional information.

"The BNST-NAc circuit, sometimes referred to as part of the 'extended amygdala,' underscores the close relationship between this circuit and the amygdala, a central structure in emotional information processing," Sun says. "This study reveals that music induces triple-time locking of neural oscillations in the cortical-BNST-NAc circuit through auditory synchronization."

The patients in the study were assigned to two groups: low music appreciation or high music appreciation. Those in the high music appreciation group demonstrated more significant neural synchronization and better antidepressant effects, while those in the low music appreciation group showed poorer results. By grouping the patients, the investigators were able to study the antidepressant mechanisms of music more precisely and propose personalized music therapy plans that would improve treatment outcomes. For example, when inserting theta frequency noise into music to enhance BNST-NAc oscillatory coupling, those in the low music appreciation group of patients reported higher music enjoyment.

Several pieces of Western classical music were used in the study. This type of music was chosen because most participants did not have familiarity with it, and the researchers wanted to avoid any interference that could arise from subjective familiarity.

"We concluded that the music choices during the formal listening process were individualized and unrelated to the music's emotional background," Sun says.

The team's future research will focus on several areas. For one, they aim to study how the interaction between music and the deep structures of the brain play a role in depressive disorders. They will also introduce other forms of sensory stimuli, including visual images , to investigate potential combined therapeutic effects of multi-sensory stimulation on depression.

"By collaborating with clinicians, music therapists, computer scientists, and engineers, we plan to develop a series of digital health products based on music therapy, such as smartphone applications and wearable devices," Sun says. "These products will integrate personalized music recommendations, real-time emotional monitoring and feedback, and virtual-reality multi-sensory experiences to provide convenient and effective self-help tools for managing emotions and improving symptoms in daily life."

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Think Twice

Does listening to classical music improve academic performance.

Image from theconversation.com

In the 18th century, Amadeus Mozart gripped the musical world with his elegantly crafted symphonies and intricate, melodic orchestral pieces. But can his music help students with studying? 

“The Mozart Effect” was first suggested in 1993 in a study conducted by psychologist Francis Rauscher at the University of California in Irvine. Students assigned to listen to a piano sonata composed by Mozart scored higher on a spatial reasoning test compared to those who did not.  

According to a study published in Learning and Individual Differences , students who listened to classical music during a lecture received superior marks on exams compared to their peers who did not. However, this may relate to classical music in general rather than Mozart in particular. An additional study on “The impact of music on the bioelectrical oscillations of the brain” used EEG data to measure brain activity, which suggested that music had a positive impact on brain function. The theory is that music reduces stress while stimulating happiness and arousal, which in turn helps students better concentrate on the task at hand. In the experiment, as long as the music was not too dynamic and did not become distracting, it was associated with better student performance on cognitive based exams.  

So the next time you are stressing about an exam, consider popping in some earbuds and listening to classical music. It might offer heightened stimulation to help you focus on the task at hand and get the most out of your studying time. 

https://news.usc.edu/71969/studying-for-finals-let-classical-music-help/

https://www.incadence.org/post/the-mozart-effect-explaining-a-musical-theory#:~:text=The%20Mozart%20Effect%20refers%20to,and%20their%20reactions%20when%20listening .

https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/please-explain/february-2022/please-explain-does-music-help-you-study

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02044/full

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6130927/#:~:text=According%20to%20scientists%2C%20music%20that,right%20frontal%20and%20temporal%20regions

One thought on “Does listening to classical music improve academic performance?”

I noticed that every year more and more people are interested in the subject of classical music. But unfortunately very often only online. Therefore, any such information helps to revive interest in real concerts.

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• v.14(7); 2022 Jul

The Effect of Classical Music on Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, and Mood

Cyrus darki.

1 Science, The Avery Coonley School, Downers Grove, USA

Jennifer Riley

2 Literacy, The Avery Coonley School, Downers Grove, USA

Dina P Dadabhoy

3 Rheumatology, Northwest Rheumatology Specialists, Elk Grove, USA

4 Interventional Cardiology, Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, USA

Jennifer Garetto

Anxiety and depression have deleterious effects on health. Numerous studies have demonstrated the negative impact of emotions such as stress and anxiety on heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP), and heart disease. These mood states have been linked to stroke, heart failure, diabetes, heart disease, respiratory problems, and drug abuse. Negative emotions can affect the HR and BP through the link between the nervous system and the cardiovascular system. Our study demonstrates the positive effect of classical music on HR, BP parameters, and mood states.

Introduction

Anxiety and depression have deleterious effects on health. Several studies have demonstrated the negative impact of emotions such as stress and anxiety on heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP), and heart disease [ 1 ]. These mood states have been linked to stroke, heart failure, diabetes, heart disease, respiratory problems, and drug abuse [ 1 ]. Negative emotions can affect the HR and BP through the link between the nervous system and the cardiovascular system [ 2 ].

Increasing evidence has linked the beneficial effect of music and managing anxiety and depression. Cherry concluded that the psychological effects of music can be powerful and wide-ranging including improving cognitive performance, reducing stress, improving athletic performance, and enhancing sleep [ 3 ]. Gold et al. illustrated that those subjects who had musical exposure were able to more effectively complete tasks as compared to those not exposed [ 4 ].

Even though there is evidence to support the positive effect of music on HR, BP, and mood there are many inconsistencies in prior studies driven by heterogeneity and small sample sizes. Additional limitations include a lack of a broad range of ages and not including a mood survey.

We aimed to expand on prior studies looking at the effect of music on HR, BP, and mood states utilizing two classical pieces, “Symphony of Fate” by Beethoven and “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven.

Materials and methods

For the study, we utilized wireless headphones, Kardia electrocardiography system, autonomic blood pressure cuff, fast song: Beethoven’s Symphony of Fate, slow song: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, mood survey, and tablet.

A five-questionnaire mood survey was designed by the study authors specifically for this study.

After participants were briefed about the study and consent was obtained, subjects sat for one minute and then asked for his/her age, gender, if he/she enjoys classical music, takes any medications, and is a musician. Then the resting heart rate and blood pressure of the subject were taken using an EKG system and a blood pressure monitor. The subject then listened to a fast classical piece (first movement of Symphony of Fate). The heart rate was recorded on the EKG system 40 seconds into the song. The blood pressure of the same subject was recorded after the performance. The study subject then completed a mood survey followed by a minute break to allow the heart rate and blood pressure to normalize.

Next, the subject listened to a slow classical piece (Moonlight Sonata 1). The heart rate was checked on the EKG system 90 seconds into the song. The blood pressure of the same subject was recorded after the performance. The study subject then completed a mood survey.

Data analysis

The mean heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure were calculated using a two-tailed t-test. Statistical significance was defined by a p-value <0.05. Excel (Microsoft® Corp., Redmond, WA) and SPSS 28.0 software (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY) were utilized for statistical analysis.

Subgroup analysis

Subgroup analysis was performed by age stratification (<25, 25 to 55, >55 years old), gender, and if a participant is a musician. All data was stored confidentially. Patient names were de-identified and listed as numerical values.

The study was approved by The Avery Coonley School institutional ethics committee, Downers Grove, Illinois.

A total of 100 participants were enrolled in the study. There were 53 males and 47 females. The mean age for participants was 39.8 years old +/- 17.8. Forty percent of the participants were musicians. Thirty-five percent of the subjects were on medications. Sixty-two percent of participants enjoyed classical music.

Subjects had a mean resting HR of 75.7 +/- 17.8 beats per minute, mean resting systolic blood pressure of 116.0 +/- 10.9 millimeters of mercury, mean resting diastolic blood pressure of 73.15 +/- 10.0 millimeters of mercury, and a mean arterial pressure of 87.5 +/- 9.4 millimeters of mercury. With fast music, the mean heart rate was 83.0 +/- 11.9 beats per minute, mean systolic blood pressure of 122.1 +/- 13.9 millimeters of mercury, and a mean diastolic blood pressure of 79.7 +/- 11.2 millimeters of mercury. For slow music, the mean systolic blood pressure was 110.5 +/- 9.7 millimeters of mercury, and a mean diastolic blood pressure of 70.7 +/- 9.8 millimeters of mercury. The mean difference in resting, fast music, and slow music heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure was statistically significant (p= <.05, Table ​ Table1 1 ).

All 100 subjects completed a mood survey using a scale of 1-5 (1 being lowest, 5 being highest). The mean score for mood survey Q1 “how uplifting the song was” was 4.2 +/- 1.0 for fast music and 2.9 +/- 1.0 for slow music (Figure ​ (Figure1). 1 ). The mean score for mood survey Q2 “how calming the song was” was 2.8 +/- 0.8 for fast music and 4.5 +/- 0.8 for slow music (Figure ​ (Figure1). 1 ). A total of 83% of subjects reported that fast music created positive emotions while 56% of subjects reported that slow music created positive emotions. Three percent of subjects said that fast music created negative feelings and 9% of subjects said that slow music created negative emotions. A total of 98% of participants said that fast music helps manage stress and 99% of participants said that slow music helps manage stress (Figure ​ (Figure1 1 ).

(A) Does fast and slow music evoke positive emotions? (B) Does fast and slow music help manage stress? (C) How calming is fast and slow music? (D) How uplifting is fast and slow music?

To further analyze the data, subjects were categorized into the following age groups: <25, 25 to 55, and >55 years old. There were 16 subjects in the group <25 years old, 66 subjects in the group 25 to 55 years old, and 18 subjects in the group >55 years old. The data was also stratified by gender and whether the participants were musicians.

The mean resting heart rate for <25, 25 to 55, and >55 years old groups were 78.5 +/- 29.0 beats per minute, 75.1 +/- 17.0 beats per minute, and 75.7 +/- 13.2 beats per minute. After listening to fast music, the heart rate for <25, 25 to 55, and >55 years old was 80.6 +/- 12.0 beats per minute, 80.3 +/- 11.7 beats per minute, and 83.7 +/- 13.0 beats per minute, respectively. After listening to slow music, the heart rate for <25, 25 to 55, and >55 years old was 81.6 +/- 12.4 beats per minute, 70.8 +/- 10.8 beats per minute, and 71.1 +/- 8.7 beats per minute. There was no statistical difference between the resting and fast heart rate groups. Slow music heart rate, however, was statistically significantly lower for ages 25 to 55 and >55 as compared to <25 years old (p = .002).

The resting systolic blood pressure for <25, 25 to 55, and >55 years old was 107.0 +/- 10.7 millimeters of mercury, 117.8 +/- 10.5 millimeters of mercury, and 117.7 +/- 13.2 millimeters of mercury. After listening to fast music, the systolic blood pressure for <25, 25 to 55, and >55 years old increased to 106.6 +/- 12 millimeters of mercury, 125.6 +/- 11.7 millimeters of mercury, and 124.3 +/- 10.8 millimeters of mercury, respectively. After listening to slow music, the systolic blood pressure for <25, 25 to 55, and >55 years old decreased to 106.2 +/- 8.7 millimeters of mercury, 111.6 +/- 9.5 millimeters of mercury, and 110.4 +/- 10.8 millimeters of mercury. With regards to systolic blood pressure, those subjects <25 years old had a statistically lower systolic blood pressure as compared to the other two groups (Figure ​ (Figure2, 2 , p = .001). This difference was maintained with fast music (Figure ​ (Figure2, 2 , p = .001). With slow music, there was no statistical difference in the three groups (Figure ​ (Figure2 2 ).

(A) The mean resting, fast, and slow music systolic blood pressure stratified by age. (B) The mean resting, fast, and slow music heart rate stratified by gender.

The resting heart rate for males and females was 76.2 +/- 11 beats per minute and 75.1 +/- 17.0 beats per minute. After listening to fast music, the heart rate for male and female was 80.6 +/- 12.0 beats per minute and 80.3 +/- 11.7 beats per minute, respectively. After listening to slow music, the heart rate for male and female was 81.6 +/- 12.4 beats per minute and 70.8 +/- 10.8 beats per minute, respectively. There were no statistically significant gender differences in resting heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure. The resting systolic blood pressure for males and females was 115.2 +/- 10.7 millimeters of mercury and 117.1 +/- 11.2 millimeters of mercury. After listening to fast music, the systolic blood pressure for male and female was 121.5 +/- 13.9 millimeters of mercury and 122.4 +/- 14.0 millimeters of mercury, respectively. After listening to slow music, the systolic blood pressure for male and female was 111.0 +/- 8.8 millimeters of mercury and 110.2 +/- 10.8 millimeters of mercury, respectively. There were no statistically significant gender differences in resting heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure (Figure ​ (Figure2 2 ).

The resting heart rate for musicians and non-musicians was 75.8 +/- 11.9 beats per minute and 75.7 +/- 11.4, respectively. After listening to fast music, the heart rate for musicians and non-musicians was 82.2 +/- 12.7 beats per minute and 84.1 +/- 10.7 beats per minute, respectively. After listening to slow music, the heart rate for musician and non-musician was 73.1 +/- 11.3 beats per minute and 71.9 +/- 11.4 beats per minute, respectively. The resting systolic blood pressure for musicians and non-musicians was 118.2 +/- 10.4 millimeters of mercury and 112.8 +/- 10.9 millimeters of mercury, respectively. After listening to fast music, the systolic blood pressure for musicians and non-musicians was 122.9 +/- 13.5 millimeters of mercury and 120.9 +/- 14.5 millimeters of mercury, respectively. After listening to slow music, the systolic blood pressure for musicians and non-musician was 112.0 +/- 10.4 millimeters of mercury and 108.3 +/- 8.2 millimeters of mercury, respectively. Musicians had a statistically significant lower resting systolic blood pressure and lower heart rate after slow music as compared to non-musicians (p-value = .001).

The major findings of this study include: one, listening to fast music increased heart rate, systolic, and diastolic blood pressure; two, listening to slow music decreased heart rate, systolic, and diastolic blood pressure; three, mood survey scores were favorable for both fast and slow music. Fast music was viewed as uplifting with a mean score of 4.2 +/- 1.0 (out of 5). Listening to slow music was viewed as calming with a mean score of 4.5 +/- 0.8 (out of 5). For fast and slow songs, 98% and 99% of subjects reported that the music could help manage stress respectively. The mean difference in resting, slow, and fast heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure were all statistically significant.

To further analyze the study data, the following subgroup analysis was completed: age stratification (<25, 25-55, >55 years old), gender differences, and whether subjects were musicians. Subjects <25 years old had a statistically lower resting systolic blood pressure as compared to the other two groups (p = .001). Listening to slow music reduced all systolic blood pressures highlighting the calming effect of slow music and the therapeutic potential for slow, classical music.

The study did not identify gender differences in resting heart rate, systolic, and diastolic blood pressure, emphasizing the uniform benefit of music in both males and females. Musicians did have a statistically significantly lower systolic blood pressure after listening to music (p = .001) possibly related to pleasant memories from prior musical experiences.

The physiologic changes in heart rate and blood pressure while listening to fast and slow music are complex. Music affects the cardiovascular system through multiple potential mechanisms. One pathway includes brain signals responding to music rhythms through signal activations to organs of the body, including the heart, which then respond to the tempo of the song -- i.e., when the tempo is fast, the heart rate and blood pressure speed up, and when the tempo is slow the heart rate and blood pressure slow down [ 5 ]. Similar to the findings in this study, Suguna and Deepika reported that fast music increases heart rate and blood pressure, and slow music decreases both parameters [ 6 ]. Furthermore, Bernardi et al. observed that fast-beat music has an arousal effect proportional to the speed of music [ 7 ].

Another pathway explaining the effect of music on the cardiovascular system is the role of the autonomic system. Ellis and Thayer described how heart rate is under the control of the parasympathetic nervous system through the vagus nerve [ 8 , 9 ]. The vagus nerve, cranial nerve X, is located near the eardrum and responds to musical vibrations by triggering the body to relax. This pathway may explain the study observations which found lower systolic blood pressure after listening to slow, classical music [ 10 ].

Music also affects other parts of the brain, which in turn affects the mood through the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. Ellis and Thayer described the release of dopamine from the nucleus accumbens after listening to pleasurable, classical music [ 8 ]. Salimpoor et al., using magnetic resonance imaging, demonstrated dopamine release at the peak of emotional arousal during music listening [ 11 ]. Dopamine release may contribute to the study findings which found that 83% of subjects found fast music uplifting. In the subjects that did not find the classical music pieces uplifting, Koelsch and Jäncke described that different tastes and preferences of music may affect people’s response to a certain piece [ 1 ].

Finally, nearly all subjects in the study found that music can help manage stress. This has been previously reported. Agrawal et al. demonstrated that people use music as a tool to improve their emotions or their athletic performance [ 5 ]. Additionally, McCraty et al. found that classical music, in general, has many benefits including the reduction in anxiety and depression [ 2 , 12 - 13 ].

The study has several important limitations. First, there were fluctuations in the testing environment and in the subjects’ baseline stress levels. For example, some subjects were not comfortable being tested inside due to the COVID-19 pandemic which resulted in varying conditions that could potentially affect outcomes. Also, subjects who entered the study with higher levels of stress may have experienced a higher heart rate and blood pressure than those who were more relaxed. Second, while the study enrolled 100 subjects, the standard deviations of approximately +/- 10 in each cohort can be improved by a larger sample size. Additionally, only 16% of subjects were under the age of 25 years old and 18% >55 years old. There were no significant outliers in the study.

Conclusions

In conclusion, our study suggests classical music has a positive impact on the cardiovascular system and potential emotional benefits. Music affects the cardiovascular system through multiple potential mechanisms including the autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve which responds to musical vibrations by triggering the body to relax. Music also affects other parts of the brain, which in turn affects the mood through the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. Dopamine release may contribute to the study findings which found that 83% of subjects found fast music uplifting. Finally, nearly all subjects believe music can help manage stress. Listening to music may be a potential therapeutic method for reducing anxiety and depression. Given the large sample size, the study adds greatly to the current literature by validating the results of other smaller studies.

The content published in Cureus is the result of clinical experience and/or research by independent individuals or organizations. Cureus is not responsible for the scientific accuracy or reliability of data or conclusions published herein. All content published within Cureus is intended only for educational, research and reference purposes. Additionally, articles published within Cureus should not be deemed a suitable substitute for the advice of a qualified health care professional. Do not disregard or avoid professional medical advice due to content published within Cureus.

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Human Ethics

Consent was obtained or waived by all participants in this study. N/a issued approval n/a. The study received an IRB waiver/exemption from the Illinois Junior Academy of Science (IJAS) given that human subjects were at no risk to undue stress, injury, or death. No cultures or blood samples were taken. Additionally, the IJAS mandated completion of the Humans as Test Subjects Form which was approved by the IJAS scientific review committee and sponsor.

Animal Ethics

Animal subjects: All authors have confirmed that this study did not involve animal subjects or tissue.

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By Anya Wassenberg on August 9, 2024

A recently published research paper looks at the role classical music can play in stroke recovery therapy. The French and Swiss researchers found that listening to classical music can help in recovering language skills, along with brain interconnectivity.

Published in the Annals of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, the paper titled Listening to classical music influences brain connectivity in post-stroke aphasia: A pilot study .

Post-Stroke Recovery

Aphasia affects not only speech, but can also affect the ability to write or read. The proof-of-concept study tested the anecdotal evidence of music therapy, which has shown the potential for using music to enhance cognitive functions, even those damaged after a stroke.

The concept revolves around using the healthy right hemisphere of the brain when a stroke has induced aphasia, or language difficulties. The language centre is located in the left half of your brain.

The idea overall is that music has an impact on brain connectivity, which means that it uses both hemispheres; it brings the two halves together, put simply. Can it then help to facilitate stroke recovery in concrete ways?

Historically, experts believed that the lingering cognitive disabilities of stroke survivors resulted from dysfunction of the cerebral cortex. Nowadays, researchers in the field have found that the evidence leans more towards a disruption of the neural (nerve) networks.

Previous studies on the role of the right, non-damaged hemisphere after a left hemisphere stroke were inconclusive.

The small study used four right-handed subjects who had experienced symptoms of aphasia three months after a left hemisphere stroke, (which are more common on average than right hemisphere). Their average age was just under 58, and none had prior musical training.

Instrumental music was chosen in favour of vocal compositions since vocal music tends to engage the left hemisphere of the brain, unlike listening to instrumental works.

As the paper’s authors explained ,

“Classical music from the Vienna school was selected because it strikes a good balance between expected and unexpected elements, and the length of the typical musical phrases is well-suited to engage working memory, which could help cognitive recovery.”

For two weeks, the patients were randomly assigned:

• Daily 2-hour listening sessions of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven — instrumental pieces only — along with standard rehabilitation treatment;
• Along with the music, a narrator’s voice added the historic context of the work;
• The rest received two weeks of standard care.

After the initial two-week period, the groups switched. In other words, those who’d heard music the first time now received just standard care, and vice versa.

The results were evaluated using cognitive and neuroimaging tests (EEG & MRI) both before and after the study’s end, with a preliminary evaluation after one week. The data showed improvements both in the language tests, and measures of brain connectivity.

• Two patients with relatively mild language dysfunction showed increases in EEG metrics of brain connectivity in the damaged left hemisphere;
• One patient showed changes in white matter microstructures, which also suggest increased connectivity;
• Another patient showed cognitive improvement and increased EEG markers in the right (undamaged) hemisphere;
• Two patients showed improved language test scores.

The study was admittedly small, and the subjects all fell into the same demographic. However, encouraging results mean that larger studies are now warranted.

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REVIEW article

Music listening in classical concerts: theory, literature review, and research program.

• 1 Department of Music, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
• 2 York Music Psychology Group, University of York, York, United Kingdom
• 3 WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany
• 4 Experimental Psychology Division, University Hospital for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
• 5 Radialsystem V, Berlin, Germany
• 6 Department of Applied Musicology, Gustav Mahler Private University for Music, Klagenfurt, Austria

Performing and listening to music occurs in specific situations, requiring specific media. Empirical research on music listening and appreciation, however, tends to overlook the effects these situations and media may have on the listening experience. This article uses the sociological concept of the frame to develop a theory of an aesthetic experience with music as the result of encountering sound/music in the context of a specific situation. By presenting a transdisciplinary sub-field of empirical (concert) studies, we unfold this theory for one such frame: the classical concert. After sketching out the underlying theoretical framework, a selective literature review is conducted to look for evidence on the general plausibility of the single elements of this emerging theory and to identify desiderata. We refer to common criticisms of the standard classical concert, and how new concert formats try to overcome alleged shortcomings and detrimental effects. Finally, an empirical research program is proposed, in which frames and frame components are experimentally manipulated and compared to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience. Such a research program will provide empirical evidence to tackle a question that is still open to debate, i.e., whether the diversified world of modern-day music listening formats also holds a place for the classical concert – and if so, for what kind of classical concert.

Introduction

Humans love music. We see it as a fitting accompaniment to virtually every situation – using it for a plethora of purposes – and an activity that we engage in daily ( Merriam, 1964 ; DeNora, 2000 ; Schäfer et al., 2013 ). We have further developed our passion for music since the invention of music recording, broadcasting, and playback techniques; and even more so since music has become portable and digital and thus all-available ( O’Hara and Brown, 2006 ; Gopinath and Stanyek, 2014 ). At present, in what the economist and social theorist Jacques Attali (1977 , 1985) called “the period of musical repetition,” people in those countries that account for the vast majority of the global recorded music market listen to recorded music about 18 hours a week ( IFPI, 2019 ). Before this, namely throughout the longest part of its history, music could only be listened to when played live. In other words, musicians and listeners had to be co-present, with production and reception occuring simultaneously in situations such as church services or opera theaters, during public festivities, banquets or dance entertainments, and, starting in the late 17th century, in concerts devoted exclusively to attentive music listening ( Schwab, 1971 ; Salmen, 1988 ; Johnson, 1995 ; Weber, 1997 ; Müller, 2014 ).

Nowadays, live music performance is only one of many ways of listening to and utilizing music and it has to compete with mediatized formats, very similar to other genres of live performances ( Heister, 1983 ; Bontinck, 1999 ; Auslander, 2008 ). One could even wonder if homo economicus still needs the concert at all, given the numerous practical and financial advantages of recorded and streamed music. Economically, however, the live music market has not yet fallen behind. In 2019, it was neck and neck with the market for recorded music, either industry creating a global revenue of around 28 billion $ ( IFPI, 2020 ; Statista, 2021 ). Yet, mostly thanks to music streaming, the market for recorded music could boast an annual growth rate of around 8% per year since 2015, while the live music business has been growing by only about 3% (the COVID-19 pandemic not yet factored in).

While one could leave this for the consumer to decide, publicly funded and subsidized forms of live music, as well as the institutions that have been developed to ensure the public provision with high-quality music performances, face the pressure to substantiate their viability, in addition to their aesthetic and societal relevance. In particular, Western classical music concerts have been challenged. Critics point to shrinking audience numbers, their rapid aging ( Heinen, 2013 ; Gembris and Menze, 2020 ) as well as the narrow social strata that attend those concerts at all ( Reuband, 2007 , 2013 , 2018 ). Music managers, orchestras and music festivals are busy with attempts to respond to these calls, giving the classical concert a makeover and restoring its appeal to contemporary and more diverse audiences ( Schröder, 2014 ; Tröndle, 2020 ). At the same time, the unique character of liveness has found passionate advocates who write about it from an artistic or theoretical standpoint ( Gracyk, 1997 ; Tröndle, 2011 , 2018 ). People are still queuing to listen to famous orchestras, conductors or musicians. New representative concert halls are being built and meeting with enormous public interest, and music festivals are mushrooming in many parts of the world.

The question of whether the diversified world of contemporary music listening formats also holds a place for (different kinds of) classical concerts is still open to debate. At its core stands, we argue, the question whether the concert offers particular and meaningful experiences to its audiences that are qualitatively distinct from those afforded by other musical media ( Burland and Pitts, 2014 ). This is ultimately an empirical question that researchers of liveness in general as well as researchers of the concert and its audiences in particular have only recently started to pursue systematically.

With this article, we want to bring the question of what a classical concert has to offer contemporary audiences to the fore. We present a transdisciplinary sub-field of empirical concert studies with which we expand on earlier ideas of “concert studies” ( Tröndle, 2018 , 2020 ) and take up Eric Clarke’s claim for an “ecological approach” to understanding music listening ( Clarke, 2005 ). We start by sketching out the underlying theoretical framework (part 2). From this, we conduct a selective literature review evaluating evidence on the general plausibility of the single elements of this emerging theory and point to desiderata. Along the way, we refer to common criticisms of the standard classical concert and report how new concert formats try to overcome alleged shortcomings and detrimental effects (part 3). Finally, we suggest an empirical research program, in which frames and frame components are experimentally manipulated and compared to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience (part 4).

Theoretical Core Concepts: Frame, Aesthetic Experience, Classical Concert

Our approach towards the study of music listening in classical concerts is grounded on a theoretical framework that understands a musical experience as the result of a person’s interaction with a musical stimulus in a specific situation (see Figure 1 ). A situation encompasses material, social, spatio-temporal, and cultural characteristics. Adopting a term from the sociologist Goffman(1974 ; see also Willems, 1997 ), aspects of situations that have a bearing on music listening can be conceptualized as frames, that is, features perceived as essentially belonging to the situation and used by participants to understand and interpret it as well as to align their behavior accordingly. As such, the concept of frame is much more specific whilst simultaneously broader than that of context; a term which is typically used if researchers want to address factors that neither belong to the aesthetic object nor the individual ( North and Hargreaves, 2010 ; Brattico et al., 2013 ; Leder and Nadal, 2014 ) 1 . Frames for music listening can be places (e.g., living rooms, cars, concert halls, and public areas), situations (e.g., commuting to work, a romantic dinner, a church service, being alone, or with others), media (e.g., live, recording, digital stream), and discursive contexts (such as a culture’s overarching art and music concepts, or the aesthetics of specific musical styles and genres), all of which are socio-culturally determined.

Figure 1. Schematic depiction of a general framework understanding the aesthetic experience of music as the result of the encounter of a person with a sound sequence in a specific frame. Overlaps of Frame and Sound and Frame and Person indicate mediating effects, overlaps of all three components indicate moderating effects of the Frame.

The frame concept can be related to the theory of embedded cognition. By coining the term “affordance,” Gibson(1966 ; see also Lewin, 1936 ) developed a theory of how an object or an environment (implicitly) affects and structures human behavior by virtue of its material and formal properties. Recently, affordances have also been proposed to shape and organize mental processes ( Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014 ). In the context of music, frames can thus be understood as environmental properties that affect music-related behavior, as well as the mental processes underlying musical experience. In particular, frames in which music is embedded suggest specific listening modes (e.g., attentive, non-attentive, analytical, and emotional), listening behaviors (e.g., sitting still vs. gesturing or dancing), or functions attributed to the music (e.g., for its own sake or aesthetic pleasure vs. mood management, atmosphere creation, or social bonding).

Frames provide a horizon for evaluation and understanding; they can even define if a sound sequence is heard as music at all (e.g., in the case of noise music, it is more likely that it will be heard as music if presented in a typical music frame like a CD or a concert, rather than when heard on the street). The affordances activated by frames are tied to the material properties of the situation (such as space, technologies), as well as the sociocultural meaning attached to them (e.g., concert halls and opera houses as “temples” of high-quality art music performances). Therefore, it can be expected that such frames affect the music experience in bottom-up and top-down ways and act as moderator and mediator variables.

Aesthetic Experience

The aesthetic experience is a central concept of philosophical aesthetics ( Dewey, 1934 ; Beardsley, 1958 ; Bubner, 1980 ; Shusterman, 1997 ; Küpper and Menke, 2003 ; Reicher, 2005 ; Caroll, 2012 ; Deines et al., 2013 ). It has also been much studied in psychological aesthetics, where it is discussed also under a variety of other terms such as aesthetic appreciation, appraisal, enjoyment, engagement, perception and evaluation, responses, or, simply, reading, watching, and listening ( Abeles and Chung, 1996 ; Leder et al., 2004 ; North and Hargreaves, 2005 ; Marković, 2012 ; Brattico et al., 2013 ; Leder and Nadal, 2014 ; Pelowski et al., 2016 ). Philosophical concepts and psychological operationalizations, however, do not yet fit together very well. Philosophical concepts emphasize the perceivers’ contemplative, even disinterested attitude ( Stolnitz, 1960 ; Bullough, 1995 ), their attempt at understanding a piece of art formally and conceptually, as well as the piece’s potential to provide them with a transformative experience. In contrast, psychological theory would conceptualize aesthetic experience as an output variable in the context of a stimulus-response model, with outputs such as liking, aesthetic judgment and elicited emotion, and their physiological and neurological correlates. Recently, more specific qualities of aesthetic experiences were proposed, i.e., aesthetic emotion ( Marković, 2012 ; Juslin, 2013 ; Schindler et al., 2017 ; Menninghaus et al., 2019 ), fascination ( Marković, 2012 ), awe ( Konečni, 2005 ), or being moved ( Konečni, 2005 ; Menninghaus et al., 2015 ). In general, however, psychological research still emphasizes a primarily passive, physical, and emotional understanding of aesthetic experience, whereas philosophical theorizing tends to apply an overly cognitivist concept.

In psychology and philosophy of mind, a lived experience is generally defined as a first-person, qualitative phenomenon ( Chalmers, 1995 ). Experiences are distinguished from objective response phenomena, such as physiological and behavioral processes. Experiences have qualitative properties (“qualia”), and they are elements of cognitive and emotional processes. In the terminology of phenomenology, qualia comprise “what it feels like” to have exactly this experience in the here-and-now ( Nagel, 1974 ). Cognition refers to the processing of information through mental representations, thought, evaluation, the activation of memory traces and schemata. Cognition can, but need not, be conscious and experienced, sometimes even in a linguistic form as inner speech. Lastly, emotions are generally experienced. Emotions lend a specific flavor to experiences, thus the experience of joy, sadness, fear, or any number of further emotions or mixtures of emotions.

For the remainder of this paper, we will continue with a provisional comprehensive concept of an aesthetic experience of music that combines facets of existing philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological concepts. We conceive of it as a person’s phenomenal state while attending to and internally interacting with a sequence of sounds primarily for the sake of its perceptual and formal properties and their possible meaning, but not so much its real-life information value. In the case of a temporally unfolding stimulus as music, such a state is necessarily dynamic and may combine feelings, perceptions, emotions, associations, expectations, and insights, as well as the evaluation of the musical piece itself and the state(s) into which it puts the listener – all of them mutually influencing each other. It is related to a listener’s present attitude and degree of attention, and comes with physiological, motivational, and behavioral responses.

The Classical Concert as a Frame for Music Listening

This paper claims that a classical concert is one particular frame for music listening, which shapes the aesthetic experience of the music featured within it in specific ways, and that we need empirical studies to test this claim and understand the underlying mechanisms. But which of its characteristics are most likely to guide and influence the experience of a piece of music? Existing descriptions and theories, as well as results that have emerged from qualitative empirical studies ( Heister, 1983 ; Gracyk, 1997 ; Small, 1998 ; Auslander, 2008 ; Gross, 2013 ; Burland and Pitts, 2014 ; Tröndle, 2020 ), point to two defining factors of the classical concert frame: its work-centered aesthetics and its liveness.

As a result of the co-evolution of its forms, its discourses, and its repertoires, the concert has developed into the embodiment (and driving factor) of a specific and presupposition-rich musical aesthetics ( Johnson, 1995 ; Weber, 1997 ; Müller, 2014 ; Tröndle, 2020 ). Heister, who has provided the most exhaustive theoretical concept of the classical concert so far, defines it as the “place where musical autonomy is realized” ( Heister, 1983 , p. 42). A concert, at least in the form it has taken on in the late 19th and early 20th century, publicly celebrates the idea of the musical artwork, which is literally placed centerstage ( Goehr, 1994 ). The musicians have to devote all their skill and artistic refinement into the work’s realization. Meanwhile the audience, which first had to learn “the art of listening” ( Gay, 1984 ), has to receive it with concentration, even contemplation, and reverence, in an act of “purely aesthetic and musical savoring” ( Heister, 1983 , p. 522ss).

Almost all other characteristics of the concert are direct consequences of this aesthetics, as Heister meticulously spelled out. On the one hand, concert hall acoustics, program selections, the training of professional musicians, and the behavioral regimes of sitting still and quietly seek to provide optimal conditions for the production and reception of the greatest musical works ( Gross, 2013 ). On the other hand, the building and design of concert halls, a certain cult of great names and charismatic artists – be they composers or performers – formal dress codes, and rituals serve as constant reminders of the ideology of autonomous music ( Cressman, 2012 ).

The other main factor of a concert is its nature as a live performance featuring the distinct, but interrelated roles, of performers and listeners. This spatio-temporal co-presence entails a number of other aspects, most importantly the possibility to watch the performers creating the music and the genuinely social and interactive character of the event ( Gracyk, 1997 ). Although the concert has typically been seen as the pure embodiment of presentational performance ( Besseler, 1926 , 1959 ; Turino, 2008 ), recently, social-interactive and participatory aspects have been identified as well. As a live performance, a concert affords (verbal) communication between audience members (at least before the concert and in the pause of classical music concerts), inviting participants to form a short-lived community ( Cochrane, 2009 ; Burland and Pitts, 2014 ). It can also lead to manifold interaction processes: audience members can show support, interest, attention and appreciation, or displeasure, thus providing feedback to the performers which they are then likely to respond to, closing the autopoietic feedback loop ( Fischer-Lichte, 2004 ).

Apart from its social character, liveness is also typically associated with ideas of immediacy, indeterminacy, uniqueness, and non-repeatability of the event ( Auslander, 2008 ). Neither the audience members nor the musicians know exactly how the performance will turn out, which might be seen as another mechanism of directing and fixing the audience’s attention. This, in turn, lends presence and an event-like character to a performance, which comes with the promise of a not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively unique experience – a feature of present-day leisure culture that is very much sought-after by audiences ( Schulze, 1992 ; Gumbrecht, 2004a ; Seel, 2008 ; Tröndle, 2011 ; Rebstock, 2020 ).

In sum, the concert is a frame for music listening that is supposed to provide optimal conditions for the purely aesthetic contemplation of (excellent performances of) great musical works together with like-minded people. This historically evolved frame might afford a specific concert experience which consists of a certain type of listening (being pleasurably immersed into the music), a multi-modal character of the stimulus, its social embeddedness (feeling as part of a community), and the appreciation of its singular character. Such experiences have been described in qualitative studies and claimed by theoreticians and advocates of the genre ( Heister, 1983 ; Radbourne et al., 2014 ; Rebstock, 2020 ), but not yet quantitatively corroborated. In addition, while the standard form incorporates implicit assumptions about the relationship between its features and the hoped-for experience resulting from them, new and experimental concert formats that have been developed over the past decades can be understood as a form of aesthetic and social critique of the standard format ( Brüstle, 2013 ; Schröder, 2014 ; Roselt, 2020 ). Typically, these new forms modify the venue, the forms of listening, but also the relationships between performers and audience members and their respective rituals. By singling out and modifying such elements, they point to their potentially detrimental effect on the aesthetic experience and at the same time exemplify how this could be overcome to allow for fresh, heightened and new musical and social experiences that can also have the potential to attract younger audiences or audiences from other social and cultural backgrounds. Thus, they also tend to shift the focus of a concert away from the musical work toward the event-like aspects of a live performance.

This apparent conflict between existing concert formats points to the gap between implicit assumptions of concert practitioners and the lack of empirical knowledge about how exactly the elements of a concert – individually, as well as jointly – contribute to listeners’ actual experiences. Further, each element can, in principle, be realized in a multitude of ways, which might in turn substantially affect the degree and direction of its effect. This as well has not been examined empirically.

What We Already Know About Music Listening in Classical Concerts, and What We Still Need to Know: A Literature Review

To date, concert research consists of several branches. Of these, the history of the concert, its repertoires, halls, and listening forms ( Schwab, 1971 ; Heister, 1983 ; Forsyth, 1985 ; Salmen, 1988 ; Johnson, 1995 ; Weber, 1997 ; Cressman, 2012 ; Thorau and Ziemer, 2019 ), as well as the demography, sociology and consumer behavior of audiences ( Dollase, 1998 ; Reuband, 2007 , 2013 ; Glogner-Pilz and Föhl, 2011 ; Gembris and Menze, 2020 ; Tröndle, 2020 ) have been examined most comprehensively. More recently, a number of qualitative studies has addressed also the motivations and experiences of various audiences ( Pitts, 2005 ; Roose, 2008 ; Dobson, 2010 ; Gross, 2013 ; Brown and Knox, 2017 ; Toelle and Sloboda, 2019 ). There are studies which adopted a quantitative approach in measuring listeners’ experiences in concerts, by collecting continuous or retrospective self-report data or physiological recordings ( McAdams et al., 2004 ; Thompson, 2006 ; Egermann et al., 2013 ; Stevens et al., 2014 ).

Although the specificity of the concert as a medium or format for music listening has theoretically been identified sufficiently well, musical audience research has not yet addressed this issue systematically. Typically, audience experiences are neither analyzed with regard to which of their components are concert-specific, nor are frame effects explicitly addressed. This is related to the fact that music psychological research in general tends to overlook situational and frame effects ( Clarke, 2005 ). Even if studies had been conducted during live concerts, this context was so far neither explicitly addressed nor experimentally manipulated. Likewise, if concerts were compared with other musical media, the focus was not on actual experiences but listening times ( Roose and Vander Stichele, 2010 ).

This is very different from the situation in museum studies, which were the first to experimentally address the effects a museum, and the way it displays and communicates artworks, has on the experience of visitors ( Falk and Dierking, 1992 ; Stuffmann, 2005 ; Brieber et al., 2014 ).

In the following sections of this chapter, we come back to the most distinctive features of a concert identified above and point out what they might contribute to the afforded musical experience. We summarize related results from the fields of concert and audience research. We also identify desiderata and refer to other research contexts and approaches that might prove fruitful for the endeavor of understanding how concerts frame and affect music experiences.

Effects of Venue

Concert halls, the majority of which have been built since the 19th century, are both a prerequisite for a performance-centered staging of classical music and a potent sign of the concert’s underlying aesthetics. By their mere existence as buildings specifically dedicated to hosting musical performances, they signal an assumed importance, seriousness, and high-art quality of the music and the entire event of going to a concert. The architectural style and design of the hall is an aesthetic stimulus in itself that creates a specific atmosphere. Further, their acoustics co-constitute the auditory musical stimulus.

A concert hall is also perhaps the most influential component in the concert regime, as it materially affords what people can perceive and do within such as situation: the tiers require everyone to sit during the performance. Their spatial arrangement directs the audience’s attention to the stage by orienting them physically toward it. Although usually, parts of the audience can also be seen, the lighting control makes it clear that this is only accidental and that the audience should focus on the performers onstage. Taken together, the effect of a concert hall on the musical experience can be studied with regard to (1) the atmosphere created, (2) its function as a framing and/or priming intervention, (3) its contribution to the actual acoustic stimulus, and (4) the behavior it affords.

(1) The concept of atmospheres stems from phenomenology and has engendered broad and mostly theoretical research in the past years with strong affinities to aesthetic contexts and questions ( Böhme, 1995 , 2006 ; Griffero, 2014 ; Schmitz, 2014 ). It refers to the perception and experience a certain (often architecturally defined) space affords, but also to the social interaction that takes place in that space and theorizes upon the effects a certain atmosphere has on the experience and behavior of an individual. Psychological studies on the perception of atmospheres still are a desideratum ( Schönhammer, 2014 ; but see Tröndle and Tschacher, 2012 for a first example), although practitioners in the fields of concert hall architecture and concert locations are aware of this issue ( Göbel, 2020 ; Kirchberg, 2020 ). Today, concert series or festivals in particular, as well as individual concerts, are often staged in unusual locations. Such locations comprise, among others, of castles, museums, churches, factories, farms, outdoor stages, or dance clubs. In the case of the Yellow Lounge concert series in Berlin, its organizers from Deutsche Grammophon advertise it with particular reference to an altered atmosphere: “classical music can thrill even outside of the concert hall, good-humored and fully relaxed in the Club. (…) Good drinks, communicative atmosphere 2 .” Qualitative research has provided first evidence that festival audiences take note of and appreciate specific atmospheres and see them as a factor that positively influences their experiences ( Karlsen, 2014 ). However, no research so far has examined how exactly the experience of one and the same piece of music differs when listened to in a barn as compared to a hall in a palace, or in a concert hall with modern architecture as compared to one in the styles of the 19th century.

(2) A large body of market, media, and social psychology research shows that people’s judgments, interpretations, and experiences of any given phenomenon can be modified by priming or framing. While priming is conceptualized as additional information that influences the appreciation of a subsequent stimulus, framing means to select and highlight specific aspects inherent to a stimulus in order to modify its appreciation ( Entman, 1993 ). Emotionally charged framing information ( Entman, 1993 ), as well as those implying a positive or negative evaluation ( Levin et al., 1998 ) have been found to be particularly powerful. The latter is also related to the so-called prestige effect.

That these effects also work in the contexts of the arts in general ( Tröndle et al., 2014 ; Tröndle and Tschacher, 2016 ), and in music has been shown by a number of studies (for a recent overview, see Fischinger et al., 2020 ). Effects of program notes and other additional information in the form of texts or images have been found for emotions induced by music ( Vuoskoski and Eerola, 2015 ), enjoyment of music ( Margulis, 2010 ), children’s attention and comprehension ( Margulis et al., 2015 ), evaluation ( Anglada-Tort and Müllensiefen, 2017 ; Fischinger et al., 2020 ), and even perception of basic musical characteristics ( Chapman, 1981 ; North and Hargreaves, 2010 ; Fischinger et al., 2020 ).

That listeners might wish for additional information helping them understand and appreciate a piece of music is plausible. Most people lack advanced musical training to be confident in their judgment about any work and performance. In addition, the meaning of musical elements is typically far from being clear but contains a large degree of ambiguity. Even more, in the context of the arts, there simply are no such things as objective value and meaning, according to Umberto Eco’s theory of the open work ( Eco, 1989 ).

So far, priming and framing information about music have been studied in the form of texts or images. These media also play a role in the context of a concert, be it in the form of programs, advertisements, paintings or sculptures of famous composers, program notes, or introductory talks. However, the atmosphere of a concert hall has not yet been researched with regards to its potential nature as prime and frame.

(3) A concert hall provides a specific acoustic setting ideally optimized for performances of classical music ( Lindau, 2010 ). Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2010) were among the first to test the effect of room size and sound direction on emotional responses to natural and artificial sounds. They observed that sound sources in front of listeners were perceived as less arousing than those behind listeners, while the sound of a large concert hall was experienced as more arousing and negatively valenced than the sound of a small room. This finding was explained by the additional observation that the larger room in the experiment was also perceived as “less safe” than the small room. Furthermore, Pätynen and Lokki (2016) showed that concert halls with a traditional rectangular shape evoke stronger physiological (skin conductance) and subjective responses to music presented in them (in this case excerpts from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony). In sum, however, empirical research that compares perception of – and responses to – acoustical variations of the same musical pieces is scarce.

(4) The behavioral restrictions created by the design of the auditorium together with learned norms are meant to provide, on the one hand, the condition for an undisturbed, attentive, even immersive listening experience in a specific time-frame. On the other hand, such restrictions also favor disembodied listening and the suppression of any overt spontaneous response. Originally a necessity to make music audible to a large group of people, this aspect of a concert has been met with the sharpest criticism in a time in which undisturbed listening is always possible via radio and recordings. In particular, the discouragement of overt and spontaneous interaction between participants might be experienced as antagonizing the inherently social nature of a concert ( Small, 1998 ). The implicit, but nonetheless perceivable, behavioral norms can produce stress in first-time and only occasional attenders thus preventing them from attending at all ( Radbourne et al., 2009 ; Dobson, 2010 ; Dobson and Pitts, 2011 ; Tröndle, 2019 ). The focus on contemplative and disembodied listening might counteract bodily entrainment afforded by some pieces. Some concert organizers have started to address this criticism by experimenting with concert formats that allow the audience to behave differently, e.g., lying down or walking around instead of sitting still, or by providing opportunities for real interaction and spontaneity.

A significant strand of research supports the concept of embodiment among various disciplines (e.g., developmental, social, and clinical psychology). Especially in the field of music psychology, researchers demonstrated the impact of bodily responses on listeners’ music experiences and vice versa. Particularly strong is the urge to move elicited by rhythmically accentuated music with a salient beat, which has been discussed as sensorimotor coupling ( Janata et al., 2012 ; Stupacher et al., 2016 ).

Although a considerable amount of research has already been conducted and published around embodied music experience, literature that examines effects of listening contexts, media, and frames is scarce. As a first step, it has been shown that participants’ non-verbal responses to live music differ from those to recorded music. For example, Swarbrick et al. (2019) found that head movements were faster during a live performance of a Rock musician than during the recorded version as well as finding that movements of self-identified fans being faster and having higher degrees of rhythmic entrainment (movement to beat) compared neutral listeners.

Further, research on non-verbal behavioral synchrony – which refers to the temporal coupling of movement or physiology between at least two individuals – is closely linked to the concept of embodiment and is viable in social listening situations. Although non-verbal synchrony research in the classical concert is still in an early phase, studies in realistic concert settings have so far revealed significant non-verbal synchrony effects within the audience. For example, Seibert et al. (2019) examined the spontaneous coordination of bodily movements – dyadic temporal coupling – within audience members and between audience members and musicians in a classical (chamber music) concert. They found strong movement synchrony between musicians, and also small to medium movement synchrony within the audience, despite the behavioral norms of sitting still. Aspects of music experience, namely absorption and the feeling of being connected to the musicians, were significantly negatively associated with non-verbal synchrony.

In addition to movement synchrony, some studies have explored physiological synchrony across audience members as an index of an embodied experience. Sato et al. (2017) investigated respiratory activity and emotional states within fifteen audience members of a live concert, where they found that respiratory synchronization effects emerged from time to time. Importantly, participants’ excitement seemed to correspond with the respiration activity indicated by synchronized respiratory phases. In another concert study, Bernardi et al. (2017) found that cardiorespiratory synchrony among audience members were higher during live music listening, compared to a resting baseline. In corroborating findings of Sato et al. (2017) , Bernardi and colleagues also found that synchrony and ratings of pleasantness were positively correlated; though it should be noted that synchrony was more strongly correlated (i.e., more variance explained) with low-level acoustic features such as loudness variability (compared to pleasantness ratings). Thus, it could be argued that the quality of performance in terms of excitement and pleasantness can be estimated – at least to a certain extent – by synchronous phase respiration.

Accordingly, the presented results on non-verbal synchrony and its association with perceived quality of performance and music experience underlined the embodiment perspective and stresses the relevance of embodied musical experience despite behavioral regimes that try to suppress it.

Effects of Multi-Modal Perception

As a consequence of the co-presence of performers and audience, music in a concert becomes a richer, multi-modal stimulus. In particular, visual aspects might add layers of meaning and aesthetic affordance to the musical sound. Studies and deliberations of a more general kind have argued that aesthetic pleasure is most commonly evoked by combining multi-modal perception into one single experience, including sight, sound, environment, and company ( Cohen, 2009 ; Huron, 2012 ). So far, potential multimodality effects in music listening and concerts have been primarily studied with regard to visual aspects, i.e., (1) visual aspects of the concert hall and performer, and (2) performers’ gestures. But it can be assumed that aspects of vibrotactile perception of sounds, room temperature and climate, lighting, or seating comfort might also affect the experience within a concert.

(1) The style and design of a concert venue provides a very strong visual stimulus, which may affect audience members’ emotions and level of engagement and to which they will respond with a judgment of taste ( Cook, 2012 ). By investigating the concert setting, a study by Coutinho and Scherer (2017) compared emotions during a live performance in a real-world musical context in a church (as part of a Lieder recital) to the audio-video recording in a laboratory situation (university lecture hall). Self-reports of emotion engagement, feelings of wonder and tenderness were much higher in the church setting, while boredom, tension and sadness were higher in the lecture hall setting, showing that environment could indeed be a crucial component in evoking more intense aesthetic emotions. Equally, fashion is a field where visual properties carry meaning and where human tastes vary a lot ( Solomon, 1985 ). In a concert, it is present via performers’ attire. For example, formal dress can create a “sense of occasion” ( Griffiths, 2011 ) and increase the perception of a performer’s technical and musical proficiency ( Griffiths, 2010 ).

(2) How auditory information interacts with performer gesture has been widely examined in psychology, specifically in the field of multi-modal perception. Such gestures can provide additional information about the music’s expressive and structural properties, thus enabling the audience to enter into a more engaging internal dialog with the musical pieces. For example, it has been shown that musical expertise can be perceived through performer movement, even in the absence of any auditory information pointing to a substantial effect of performers’ movements and gestures ( Tsay, 2013 ; Griffiths and Reay, 2018 ). Additionally, performative and expressive movements of instrumentalists ( Davidson, 1993 , 2012 ; Broughton and Stevens, 2009 ; Vines et al., 2011 ; Silveira, 2014 ; Vuoskoski et al., 2014 ), singers ( Davidson, 2001 ; Lange et al. in review), and conductors ( Luck et al., 2010 ; Morrison and Selvey, 2014 ), show that gestures can increase perceived expressivity of the music. Movements of a performer can further enhance communication of tension ( Vines et al., 2004 ) and emotion of the music ( Dahl and Friberg, 2004 ), as well as the emotion of the performer ( Van Zijl and Luck, 2013 ), to an audience.

Using psychophysiology as a measure of felt affect, Chapados and Levitin (2008) demonstrated that electrodermal activity (representing felt arousal) was significantly higher in audiovisual performances of Stravinsky’s Second Piece for solo clarinet, compared to audio-only and visual-only performances. Together with evidence showing that performer movement increases perception of expressivity, emotionality, and skill, this suggests that the visual component of a live concert performance can enhance our experience of the music. Indeed, first-time concertgoers commented on how they felt the visual cues enhanced enjoyment of the music ( Dobson, 2010 ; Dobson and Pitts, 2011 ).

However, there is also some research showing that visuals do not seem to enhance the emotional experience in listeners. Finnäs (1992) found no significant difference of subjectively rated felt emotional response (of either musicians or non-musicians) between audio-only and audiovisual versions of Mahler’s Second Symphony. Vuoskoski et al. (2016) found that audio-only performances of Brahms’ piano Intermezzo in B minor – compared to audiovisual performances – elicited more emotional arousal (as indexed by skin conductance), contrary to findings of Chapados and Levitin (2008) . The authors discuss how musical styles (Romantic vs. Modern) and the degrees of freedom of the performer (a clarinetist who is standing up compared to a pianist who is sitting down) may influence the extent to which visuals play a role in musical experience. Thus, the specific role of visuals as an enhancer in live music experience still requires further empirical study to consider possible variables (styles, instrument, and musical expertise of perceiver), as well as considering these factors in more applied and multi-modal contexts, such as a concert setting.

Effects of the Social Character of Music Listening

The presence and visibility of musicians, as well as the group nature of the audience, lend a social, and participatory component to the aesthetic experience. This social component is moderated, however, by behavioral protocols, arrangement of tiers vs. stage, and existing power relationships.

Qualitative research shows how much listeners appreciate the social nature of a concert and whether it is able to induce feelings of a shared experience with peers, a sense of belonging, direct interaction with the performers, and participation in something meaningful ( Radbourne et al., 2014 ). The possibility to watch performers is often mentioned as a positively experienced element of concerts alongside a real interest in personal connections with performers ( Burland and Pitts, 2014 ).

Quantitative and experimental studies have further corroborated these qualitative findings, in particular regarding the social character of the audience. For example, it was experimentally demonstrated that social feedback about other music listeners’ enjoyment changes how listeners respond to music subjectively, where knowledge of previous ratings of a musical performance influences an individual, motivated by a desire to conform ( Egermann et al., 2013 ). This finding was interpreted as a form of normative social influence on social appraisals ( Manstead and Fischer, 2001 ) assuming that a similar mechanism could be activated in classical music concerts through social feedback via ( inter alia ) applause ( Mann et al., 2013 ).

Previous research has demonstrated the effect the presence of other people has on a listener’s response to music. The emotion experienced when listening to music, specifically strong experiences with music, has been shown to be influenced by the social context in which the listening occurred ( Gabrielsson and Wik, 2003 ), with intense experiences occurring more frequently in live concerts when other people were present ( Lamont, 2011 ). In a more controlled study that utilized recorded stimuli – where participants listened to self-chosen or randomly sampled music samples – more intense emotions were reported when participants were listening with a close friend or partner compared to when listening alone ( Liljeström et al., 2013 ). However, another study found that listening in a group does not lead to more intense emotional responses perhaps due to less concentration on the music ( Egermann et al., 2011 ). In a later study by Linnemann et al. (2016) , music was found to reduce stress more if it was listened to in the presence of others, regardless of the original motivation for listening to the music, where influence of others has been found to be stronger if they are known to the listener.

Research on the effects of an interaction between listeners and performers, however, is much more sparse. Here, qualitative studies also provide evidence for the general importance and appreciation audiences and performers attribute to it ( Moelants et al., 2012 ; Toelle and Sloboda, 2019 ). In the behaviorally restricted setting of a classical concert, however, real and spontaneous interaction is only possible to a small degree. The only legitimate form of mutual feedback is applause ( Toelle, 2018 ), which not only informs the musicians how the audience is responding to their performances, but also provides feedback to an audience member on the reception of the music by other audience members.

If compared with other concert types, such as jazz and popular music concerts, classical concerts seem to leave the potential of creating a social experience of music largely unused, which is one factor behind the different experiences these concert types can afford ( Pitts, 2005 ; Kulczynski et al., 2016 ). This has not only been criticized from a theoretical point of view ( Small, 1998 ), but also been addressed by performers and concert curators who have started to experiment with forms that invite true interaction and even participation ( Schröder, 2014 ; Toelle and Sloboda, 2019 ). So far, the underlying assumptions as to how exactly such changes impact the collective experience have not yet been explored in a systematic way. The need to test these assumptions in a multi-disciplinary and ecologically valid way is central to further the understanding of the social experience of a concert and how the group experience can be enhanced.

Effects of Presence, Uniqueness, Immediacy

The live character of a concert is also closely tied to its nature as a single, unique, and un-repeatable event that might be valued for its presence and immediacy ( Auslander, 2008 ). According to Walter Benjamin, this special quality of a live concert could be described as the “aura,” i.e., the authenticity, realness and presence of the aesthetic object that technical reproduction would not be able to recreate ( Benjamin, 1963 ). Gumbrecht (2004b) even puts “presence” in the focus of the aesthetic experience as the sensorial and lived experience of an appearance. Further developing this concept of presence in the context of classical music concerts, Rebstock (2020) claims that the production of presence might be the key component of a concert and, therefore, new concert formats should aim for a higher intensity of presence ( Rebstock, 2020 ).

Although the concept of presence in the context of aesthetic experiences is repeatedly discussed in theory ( Seel, 2003 ; Fischer-Lichte, 2004 ; Gumbrecht, 2004b ; Rebstock, 2020 ; Roselt, 2020 ), no specific empirical research on it seems to exist, supposedly because of its intangible nature. However, some of the studies mentioned in the above sections include certain components, as the experience of presence can be understood as a sensorial and intense physical experience and is per se part of the aesthetic experience ( Gumbrecht, 2003 ).

While on the one hand the “incursion of reproduction into the live event” ( Auslander, 2008 ) can be seen as a threatening development for the live experience, on the other hand it can be argued that technical reproduction might increase the demand of experiences of unmediated presence or is already even a fixed component of auratic moments ( Schulze, 2011 ). Either way, there is no denying the fact that the link between uniqueness and presence dissolves due to technical developments, which empirical research might take up in a fruitful way.

Toward a Research Program

Our literature review has shown that the (classical) concert and concert listening experiences have been already acknowledged as worthwhile research topics by a multitude of disciplines. At the same time, more thorough, systematic, and transdisciplinary research is still needed since (so far) a theoretical framework able to generate interrelated research questions and overarching hypotheses has not been postulated. In the final passages of our paper, we develop what we have outlined in the preceding sections into a sketch of a research program that, albeit functioning within a psychological scheme, is genuinely interdisciplinary. In a nutshell, this research program stipulates the comparison and experimental manipulation of frames as well as frame components to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience. Here, the aesthetic experience of music is the dependent variable of interest. Although it is brought about by listening to a specific performance of music, i.e., the stimulus, and how a listener interacts with it, this is not what will be of primary interest. Rather, the focus will lie on the mediating and moderating effects of the concert frame, as well as its interactions with person- and stimulus-related factors.

Frame Components as Stimuli

At the heart of empirical concert research, as we propose in this current article, stands the idea of using frames and their individual components as stimuli and manipulating them experimentally, in order to establish the nature, form, and strength of their influence on the musical stimulus and the affordances they unfold for performers and listeners (see the expanded model in Figure 2 ). By nature, we mean whether an effect enhances or disturbs the experience, and on which component(s) of the aesthetic experience it exerts its influence. By form, we mean whether an effect is rather a mediating or moderating one. While some aspects of frames can be studied in the lab (which should be acknowledged as a particular frame of its own), frames that largely rely on particular venues and social situations cannot. This is especially true for the concert. While virtual reality technologies might provide a more lab-like solution for this in the near future, at the moment, researchers have to go to or create such frames and situations themselves.

Figure 2. Expanded frame-music-listener model to show potential concrete mediating and moderating effects of concert components on the performance and the listener and thus, the aesthetic experience of music.

In essence, series of experiments need to be designed in which individual concert components are manipulated. Inspirations for the components and types of such experimental manipulations should be derived from contemporary (and possibly even historical) concert practices, most importantly from practitioners who critically reflect on the concert ( Rebstock, 2020 ; Roselt, 2020 ). In such a case, the pieces to be performed as well as the musicians performing them need to remain the same to control for (the largest part of) the acoustic stimulus. Components to be manipulated would be those that have been shown to define the concert as a concert, namely: the venue and the atmosphere it creates, the multi-modality, the listening mode, the behavior, and the social component. This will, at least partially, result in concerts that have a very different character and atmosphere, concerts whose frame function will thus become increasingly more “visible” up to a degree where it might no longer be working as a frame, but as an artistic stimulus in its own right, completely merged with the music.

In terms of the venue, a considerable number of effects on the musical stimulus and the listeners can be studied, that likely work either in the form of mediators or moderators. A manipulation in the form of performing the same program in halls with different acoustics, architectural styles, layout of tiers and stage, and social connotations suggests itself. While the acoustics have an effect on the sound of the performed piece, the atmosphere and architecture may likewise influence the state of the listeners. Potential priming effects of style and decoration of a venue, however, might primarily work as moderators on how a listener experiences the music.

The multimodal character of music in a concert, that follows from the co-presence of performers and listeners, is also a way in which the concert exerts an influence on the musical stimulus or even contributes to it. It can be examined by varying the visual appearance of performers, their behavior toward the audience, the degree and form of their overt interaction with each other, their display of their own emotions and engagement. An extreme form would be to hide performers from sight, as was repeatedly proposed and realized by historical theoreticians and practitioners of the concert since the 17th century ( Schwab, 1991 ; Schröder, 2014 ). Besides, existing ideas to increase the value of the visual aspect even more by an artistic design of lighting, stage decorations, or the integration of video projections could be taken up and experimentally explored if they have an effect on attention, immersion, understanding, and appreciation.

Although, as a consequence of its underlying aesthetics, the attentive and disembodied listening mode is the historically preferred one in a concert, neither do all concerts afford these to a satisfying degree, nor should other potentially pleasurable and meaningful listening modes be excluded due to ideological reasons. Manipulations of a concert in the attempt to afford a specific listening mode is therefore another potential area of experimental variation of the classical standard concert. Such listening modes could include the exploration of the embodiment of the music, listening emotionally, associatively, or auto-biographically.

Related to this is the aspect of behavioral regimes exerted by a standard concert that can be assumed to moderate listening experiences. Here, moreover, variations can be designed that explore which other (less strict and ritualized) behaviors are possible and how they change the experience of the music.

Further, the social component needs careful consideration. Obvious variations could target the relationship between performers and audience in the attempt to make it less hierarchical, more spontaneous, personal, interactive, and – on the side of the audience – more participatory. Also, moderating effects of the size, density, and spatial arrangement of audiences can be examined.

Finally, variations could address the aspect of a perceived event-character and uniqueness of a concert. Here, elements that enhance the degree of surprise and indeterminacy would be related to the programming, the staging of pieces, or the integration of improvisation, among others, and thus moderate their experience.

All such variations would have to fulfill the double need of making sense artistically as a concert and of singling out individual components. To achieve this, concert curators need to form an essential part of a research team. Any hypothesis underlying a concrete experimental manipulation should primarily regard direct and mediated effects on attention, relating to the music, making sense of it, perceived presence and event-character, and the social components of the concert experience. This is because the distinctive features of a concert can all be seen as meant to afford intense, immersed, unique, and personally meaningful musical experiences that are characterized by two dimensions of relationships: between the individual listener and the music, and between the listeners and performers.

Perspectives

Such a research program that thoroughly and empirically investigates, as well as manipulates, the concert frame and its components can only be performed in interdisciplinary teams that gather musicologists, sociologists, concert practitioners, and under the guidance of psychologists ( Tröndle et al., 2020 ). It will come with a lot of challenges, above all methodological and conceptual ones in order to balance control with realism. However, it also provides important perspectives and promises to greatly advance (music) psychology, (cultural) sociology, and (empirical) aesthetics. In particular, it places a defining aspect of the art of music centerstage, namely that music requires to be mediated by performers, technologies, and even the air circulating through particular rooms. At the same time, our concept of frame highlights an aspect that is not only relevant, but crucial for all art forms. How (art) objects are perceived and experienced is only in part a direct result of their sensory and formal properties, but depends to a large degree on the aesthetic, social, and cultural discourses creating and surrounding them, as well as the situations in which they are perceived ( Clarke, 2005 ). Artifacts, cultural objects, and art works in particular do not have a meaning of their own, but gain their meaning from cultural practices and discourses in which they are embedded. The concert provides a particularly convenient example to embark on a systematic exploration of effects of frames – their situational, social, multi-modal, and discursive constituents – on one set of aesthetic experience, the experience of music. Thus, we can expect to gather insights that will help us answer the initial questions, whether and in what respects music listening in classical concerts is different from other listening frames, and also, which types of concerts may continue to be of aesthetic interest to contemporary societies.

Author Contributions

MW-F created a first and second draft of the article, prepared figures, wrote most of the sections, and led the process. KO’N, HE, AC, CW, DM, WT, JT, and MT wrote individual sections of the article. All authors discussed and revised earlier versions of the manuscript and read and approved the final manuscript.

This article is related to the research project Experimental Concert Research (ECR), which receives substantial funds from the Volkswagen Foundation and the Aventis Foundation.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Felix Bernoully from the graphics department at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics for designing the figures.

• ^ A frame conceptualized as a set of concepts that organize experiences guiding the actions of individuals and groups, can be closely connected to Michael Focault’s idea of the dispositif. Goffman is referring to the experience, Focault to power, both theories stem from the 1970s and try to conceptualize human behavior.
• ^ http://www.communicating-music.eu/en/345/yellow-lounge-berlin-de.html , 19 June 2020.

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Keywords : concert, music listening, classical music, performance, aesthetic experience

Citation: Wald-Fuhrmann M, Egermann H, Czepiel A, O’Neill K, Weining C, Meier D, Tschacher W, Uhde F, Toelle J and Tröndle M (2021) Music Listening in Classical Concerts: Theory, Literature Review, and Research Program. Front. Psychol. 12:638783. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638783

Received: 07 December 2020; Accepted: 25 March 2021; Published: 27 April 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Wald-Fuhrmann, Egermann, Czepiel, O’Neill, Weining, Meier, Tschacher, Uhde, Toelle and Tröndle. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, [email protected]

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Text: A A A Print Panda

New pandas make san diego debut, boost bilateral conservation research.

Accompanied by strains of Chinese classical music and cheers from a crowd of onlookers, the San Diego Zoo's Panda Ridge officially opened on Thursday, a tribute to the remarkable achievements of China and the United States in giant panda and wildlife conservation.

Officials from both nations gathered at the ceremony, celebrating the moment by highlighting the symbolism of the exhibit as a bridge between the two countries.

When Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng mentioned that fans in California of the two young pandas had written letters proposing that the U.S. give China grizzly bears in exchange for the pandas, the guests at the ceremony laughed warmly.

Xie noted that in November, President Xi Jinping announced in San Francisco that China is ready to continue cooperation with the U.S. on panda conservation and "do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians so as to deepen the friendly ties between our two peoples".

"Your dream has come true even without giving us grizzly bears," Xie told the audience members, who held traditional Chinese paper fans symbolizing good luck.

Yun Chuan and Xin Bao arrived at the end of June. The first character in the name of Yun Chuan is a nod to his grandma Bai Yun, the previous superstar at the zoo, who gave birth to six cubs during her 23 years in San Diego. The first character in the name of Xin Bao means a treasure of prosperity and abundance.

Xie said the arrival of Yun Chuan and Xin Bao during the celebration of the 45th anniversary of U.S.-China diplomatic ties has sent a clear and important message.

"China-U.S. cooperation on panda conservation will not cease, our people-to-people exchanges and subnational cooperation will not stop, and once opened, the door of China-U.S. friendship will not be shut again," Xie said, adding that with the new round of cooperation, China and the U.S. will work to improve the status of pandas and other rare wild animals, moving them from endangered to vulnerable, and ultimately to safe.

"China has sent the first pair of pandas to the U.S. with the ice-breaking trip by (then) president Nixon, inspiring in many Americans a strong interest in China. A panda a day keeps the sorrow away," he added.

California Governor Gavin Newsom echoed Xie's sentiments, saying, "There's nothing I enjoy more than watching the press report on pandas."

Newsom recalled a moment when an 8-year-old girl was interviewed on TV. When the reporter asked if she knew that pandas were coming back, "she lit up and got teary-eyed".

"This is a moment about exchange and understanding," said Newsom, who earlier declared Aug 8 to be "California Panda Day".

"It's about something much deeper and richer than just the two beautiful pandas we celebrate."

Newsom reflected on the challenges of recent years, noting how people have been living in a world filled with stress, anxiety and division, often focusing on differences rather than unity.

"For me, the spirit and pride associated with today's opening of Panda Ridge represent a deeper meaning — that we not only share brief moments in life, but we've also triumphed together," he said.

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said Panda Ridge represents the latest chapter in the U.S.-China story.

"Thirty years ago, the zoo — in partnership with our zookeeper friends in China — became a global leader in giant panda conservation," Gloria said. "I believe this is just the beginning of continued investments in the relationship between our countries. I extend my appreciation to President Xi for his commitment to continuing this incredible conservation effort between our two countries."

California and San Diego share a special bond with giant pandas. The San Diego Zoo was the first U.S. institution to collaborate with China on panda conservation efforts.

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