LIVE MUSIC IS SPECIAL, SAYS A SCIENTIFIC STUDY

Julie Mullins

When was the last time you attended a live music performance? Was it a qualitatively different experience than listening to similar music on your hi-fi system? A recent study2 supports a position taken by many (but not all) audiophiles: that there’s something special about live music. Evidently, it’s built into our evolutionary makeup.

In “Live music stimulates the affective brain and emotionally entrains listeners in real time,” a team of researchers led by Dr. Sascha Frühholz from the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience division of the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich found that live music moves us more emotionally than recorded music does. “Here, we show that live music can stimulate the affective brain of listeners more strongly and consistently than recorded music,” the study’s introduction states.

The researchers developed a method using fMRI to observe listeners’ brain activity in real time as they listened to live and recorded music, performed by the same musicians in this case. While a live pianist played music said to be akin to “jazz standards,” functional MRI machines imaged the listeners’ neurofeedback, especially in the amygdala, the brain’s center of emotion. The musicians—pianists in this case—were instructed “to dynamically induce variations in their musical performance that could potentially drive an increase in the mean left amygdala signal of the listeners.” Listeners were said to be “non-musicians” and were unaware that both prerecorded and live music, including deliberate modifications, would be heard.

Most concertgoers have experienced live musicians responding to audience reactions, creating a feedback loop in real time. The researchers did something similar, creating a “closed neurofeedback loop” in which the pianist(s) could also see and respond and adapt immediately to the listeners’ responses by changing the music as the researchers observed listeners’ brain activity. The pianists played music that was “pleasant” and “unpleasant”; when played live, both types “seemed to elicit significantly higher amygdala activity compared to the same musical pieces presented as recordings.” Live music not only engaged areas of the brain needed for processing emotions from music; it also connected more brain areas, forming a broader neural network, the study said.

“Many of the positive correlations for live music concerned rhythm and spectral features, highlighting the notion that both temporal and spectral features connect musicians and listeners in live performances.” This may also speak to sonic characteristics valued by audiophiles and music lovers: accuracy in the time domain and absence of dynamic compression, for example. The researchers found strong synchronization between the pianists and the listeners with live music. Obviously, musicians can only respond to audiences’ real-time reactions when playing live.

“Live music is acoustically different from recorded music, and only live settings lead to a close coupling between musical performances and emotional responses in listeners,” the study authors wrote. Hearing musicians play in person is also a social experience. “This can perhaps be traced back to the evolutionary roots of music,” Frühholz said.

The findings underscore audiophiles’ desires to achieve the “holy grail” of listening: a system that can play music back as if it were happening live.

2 See pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316306121.