From Lab to Concert Hall: Live Performance Effects on Acoustic-EEG Phase Locking

Poster Session E - Monday, April 15, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Arun Asthagiri¹ (arun.asthagiri@gmail.com), Psyche Loui²; ¹New England Conservatory/Northeastern, ²Northeastern

Experiencing a live musical performance is an immersive activity that can be enhanced in many ways relative to listening to recorded music, but little is known about how the experience of liveness itself affects neural entrainment. This project provides unique insight into EEG-audio stimulus tracking in a live performance setting. We tested whether the liveness of a performance, as measured by the difference between live and recorded performance conditions, affects acoustic-EEG phase-locking. 21 participants from the New England Conservatory (NEC) community listened to recorded and live performances of four solo violin excerpts performed by renowned violinist Joshua Brown at NEC’s Pierce Hall, including 2 live and 2 recorded performance trials presented in counterbalanced order. After each trial, participants gave ratings of engagement, spontaneity, pleasure, and distraction. Significantly higher ratings of engagement, spontaneity, and pleasure were observed for the live vs. recorded trials. Acoustic-EEG phase locking was significantly higher during live than recorded conditions at low-frequency, delta-band frequency ranges: 0.6-2 Hz and 2.6-4 Hz. Since the lower frequency-range corresponds to the beat rate whereas the higher range corresponds to the note rate, results suggest stronger neural entrainment to beat and note-event levels during live performance. Ongoing analyses will link phase-locking values to trial-by-trial ratings, thus relating specific frequencies of EEG-audio stimulus tracking to fluctuations in pleasure, engagement, and the perception of spontaneity in live performances. Results point to a neural entrainment-based account of what makes the experience of live music rewarding.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition