Seeing or hearing the pianists? A synopsis of an early audiovisual perception experiment and a replication

The visual impact of musicians' body movements has increasingly attracted research interest over the past twenty years. This article gives an overview of the main findings of this research and introduces and replicates one of the first experiments on visual information in music performance evaluations. In Behne's study (originally published in German in 1990), a pianist was video-recorded performing compositions by Brahms and Chopin. Using an audiovisual manipulation paradigm, further pianists acted as doubles and pretended to perform the music to the soundtrack of the first pianist. Different groups of ninety-three musicians and non-musicians rated audiovisual presentations of the videos. Only one participant in the whole series of experiments supposed that the musical soundtrack was similar across different performers. Even musically trained participants strongly believed that they perceived differences between performances. Further findings suggest gender effects, such that male interpretations were perceived to be more precise and female interpretations to be more dramatic. The replication generally confirmed the results for a present-day audience. Potential consequences for music evaluations and theories of audiovisual music perception are discussed.