More to Music Performance than Meets the Eye?

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was the last major orchestra to accept women as permanent members. Today, potential members audition behind a screen so that they can be judged on the basis of their musical skill, and not be excluded for reasons of gender or race.

It turns out that blind auditions, besides preventing discrimination, may have other advantages. A recent series of experiments suggests that judgments of music performance have as much to do with sight as with sound.

When presented with short excerpts by finalists in a music competition, participants were more likely to identify the winners when presented with the visuals only and the sound muted. In fact, they performed significantly above chance. Participants who relied on sound excerpts only (no visuals) performed significantly below chance. And those who were shown excerpts with both video and sound were able to identify winners at a rate no better than guessing.

Now, you might be thinking that it is no surprise that ordinary folks might rely on sight rather than sound in judging music performance. Surely the experimenter would get a different result with professional musicians.

Actually, no. When the experiment was repeated with professional musicians the results were similar. Even professionals were more likely to identify competition winners by watching a video with the sound muted than by sound alone or sound and visuals combined.

It would seem that both amateurs and experts depend primarily on visual information when judging musical performance. These results provide yet another example of our automatic and non-conscious dependence on visual cues. Keep this in mind the next time you tune in to American Idol or another TV talent show.

Reference:

Chia-Jung Tsay, Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1221454110