Effect of perceptual mode on the identification of expressiveness in piano performance

Chet, Yeng Loong

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the overall perception of the musical expressiveness of a piano performance is affected by the mode of presentation - audio, visual, or audio/visual combination - and whether or not mistakes made by the performer affect expressiveness scores. Subjects (N=90), were undergraduate music majors, randomly selected from two large state universities. A professional pianist performed an excerpt of a piece in three perceptual modes: audio only, visual only, and audio/visual combination, with and without mistakes. Subjects only saw, heard or heard and saw performances with and without mistakes and then rated each presentation for its musical expressiveness using a seven-point Likert scale. Two One- Way ANOVAs with repeated measures were used to analyze the data of audio only and audio/visual combination performances. A t-test with dependent variables was used to analyze the visual only mode. There were significant differences between the expressive and non-expressive performances regardless of the condition. Greater differences were found in the perception of expressive and non-expressive performances in audio/ visual modes as opposed to the visual only and audio only modes. Lastly, the subjects_ perception of the musical expressiveness of a piano performance was affected by the inclusion of intentional mistakes when the performance was not played expressively. Keywords Piano performance, expressiveness, perceptual modes, audio, visual, mistakes

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