Effect of Perceptual Mode on the Identification of Expressiveness in Piano Performance

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.