

The look of music - andrewljohnson
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/08/the-look-of-music/

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aufreak3
Extract from the abstract - "People consistently report that sound is the most
important source of information in evaluating performance in music. However,
the findings demonstrate that people actually depend primarily on visual
information when making judgments about music performance."

Not too surprising a result. It would've been interesting to propose a model
of cognition that might account for this effect. The "embodied music
cognition" school might, for example, propose something like this -- "the
brain needs to process the inputs and reconstruct the body movements required
to produce the sound so that the music can be experienced in the listener's
body. This is less work when given the visual signal alone than when given the
audio signal alone."

Also, I was curious about what instruments or vocal music the competitions
were about, but the paper doesn't talk about that (in my quick scan through).
I venture a prediction that for vocal music, the audio alone is likely to be a
better predictor than the visual alone, but for piano and violin the visual
may show this effect.

Another point that struck me was that the experiments featured the
performances of only the top-three finalists in competitions. These are
already performers who the judges in those competitions selected as good,
suggesting that perhaps these performers are not very distinguishable by their
sound alone anyway. It would've been better to also include non-top performers
to see how the audio-alone and visual-alone inputs fare when they are also
included. Then again, stating the result as (simplified) "among top
performers, the visuals are important" reduces the surprise factor :)

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lmg643
This reminds me of my occasional habit of watching movies with the sound off.
When you watch a movie with no sound, you can get a great sense for how well
the actor is "selling" the role based on their facial expressions and body
language. Without the distraction of the soundtrack and dialogue (often dubbed
in later) you are left with a raw performance and get a great sense for how
well the actor is doing.

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cbhl
A copy of the actual paper is available at:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/16/1221454110.abst...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/16/1221454110.abstract)

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qq66
Unless the judges were judging blind, then this could just mean that the
judges are as susceptible as laypeople to awarding the best-looking
performers.

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spenrose
Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is all about this. He would say that the
visual impressions are "System 1" and the fine musicological distinctions are
"System 2".

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tjr
Interesting. I don't go listen to live music very often, but when I do, I
often close my eyes to focus on listening.

