[In] classical music competitions, … nearly all participants — including highly trained musicians — were better able to identify the winners of competitions by watching silent video clips than by listening to audio recordings. … The effect held up even in high-level international competitions, which often feature not only top performers, but also highly trained musicians as judges. (more; HT Hugh Parsonage)
I give lots of quotes from the original study below the fold. Ordinary people and classical piano experts were rewarded for picking the winner from the top three candidates in ten prestigious international classical music competitions. People said and bet that they would guess better using sound only, but they in fact guessed better using video only, even when the video was reduced to line drawings like:
They guessed worse when they had both audio and video. When they rated videos on various keywords, the word that best predicted winners was “passion.”
This strongly suggests that people are reluctant to admit to themselves how much the passion and energy of motion of pianists influences their evaluation of such pianists. I recently puzzled over why people pay so much more attention to lead singers relative to backup singers when by most accounts the musical skill difference, if any, is very small. (Here’s a recent movie on this.) This new result suggests those usual musical skills are only a minor part of what people want from a singer — lead singers get most of the attention because they give most of what folks want – a vivid passionate attractive character to relate to.
I suspect we’d find similar results hold for novelists and academics – people think they rate them mostly on content, but even experts usually put more weight on style, i.e., on energy and control relative to plot, setting, characters, problem choice, analysis, etc.
Overall this fits into the homo hypocritus framework, as it seems less licit or admirable to like musicians, novelists, or academics mainly because we like to affiliate with people with lots of energy and control. We prefer instead to think that what we like is nice music or words, and that artists are just instruments to get us those things.
Those promised quotes: Continue reading "Silent Line-Videos Pick Music Winners" »
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