Nowadays there are multiple ways to perceive music, from attending concerts (live) to listening to recorded music through headphones (medial). In between there are many mixed modes, such as playback ...performances. In empirical music research, this plurality of performance forms has so far found little recognition. Until now no measuring instrument has existed that could adequately capture the differences in perception and aesthetic judgment. The purpose of our empirical investigation was to capture all dimensions relevant to such an assessment. Using 3D-simulations and dynamic binaural synthesis, various live and medial situations were simulated. A qualitative survey was conducted at the Department of Audio Communication of the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). With the help of the repertory grid technique, a data pool of approximately 400 attribute pairs was created and individual rating data were collected. Our first study served to create a semantic differential. In a second study, this semantic differential was evaluated. The development of the semantic differential was carried out by first using a mixed-method approach to qualitative analysis according to grounded theory. Thereafter, a principal component analysis reduced the attribute pairs to 67 items in four components. The semantic differential consists of items concerning acoustic, visual and audio-visual interaction as well as items with an overarching assessment of the stimuli. The evaluation study, comprising 45 participants (23 male and 22 female,
= 42.56 years,
= 17.16) who rated 12 stimuli each, reduced the items to 61 and resulted in 18 subscales and nine single items. Because the survey used simulations, the social component may be underrepresented. Nevertheless, the questionnaire we created enables the evaluation of music performances (especially for classical concerts) in a new scope, thus opening many opportunities for further research. For example, in a live concert context, we observed not only that seating position influences the judgment of sound quality but also that visual elements influence immersion and felt affect. In the future, the differential could be reviewed for a larger stimulus pool, extended or used modularly for different research questions.
Previous studies have explored the impact of music on emotional visual material and examined the impact of the placement of music on neutral film scenes, but there has not been any link between these ...two topics so far. In our study, a horror film scene extracted from the Spanish film REC with several shock moments was presented to participants (N = 39) who are divided into three groups. The scene was underscored with specially composed horror film music that had either congruent shock moments (synchronous condition) or preponed shock moments (asynchronous condition). For the third group, there was no musical background (control group), but the same sound design and same dialogues. As physiological data we use skin conductance and heart rate, but only the skin conductance reached significant values for differences between the groups. The results show that there was an additional effect of the music even though there is already a strong emotional statement of the visual material. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the placement of music prior to the shock moment can lead to the stress level increasing earlier than in the other conditions.
PDF