Listeners’ Perceptions of Choral Performances With Static and Expressive Movement

Abstract

We examined how movement impacted listeners’ perceptions of choral performances. Participants ( N = 115; n = 60 nonmusic majors, n = 55 music majors) viewed excerpts of Moses Hogan’s “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel” under four conditions: good tone/expressive movement (GT/EM), good tone/static movement (GT/SM), poor tone/expressive movement (PT/EM), and poor tone/static movement (PT/SM). They rated tone quality and overall expressivity for each excerpt. We found a significant multivariate main effect for the examples. For both tone quality and expressivity, participants rated the examples in the following order from highest to lowest: GT/EM, GT/SM, PT/SM, and PT/EM. There was a significant interaction between the examples and participants’ major. Music majors rated the GT/EM example higher than the nonmusic majors but rated the other three examples lower than the nonmajors. Expressive movement seemed to enhance ratings of expressivity when performed with good tone but detracted when the tone was poor. In written responses, majors distinguished between expressive movement and tone consistently, while nonmajors could not consistently separate what they were seeing from what they were hearing.