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Musical and Bodily Predictors of Mental Effort in String Quartet Music: An Ecological Pupillometry Study of Performers and Listeners.

ABSTRACT: Music performance can be cognitively and physically demanding. These demands vary across the course of a performance as the content of the music changes. More demanding passages require performers to focus their attention more intensity, or expend greater "mental effort." To date, it remains unclear what effect different cognitive-motor demands have on performers' mental effort. It is likewise unclear how fluctuations in mental effort compare between performers and perceivers of the same music. We used pupillometry to examine the effects of different cognitive-motor demands on the mental effort used by performers and perceivers of classical string quartet music. We collected pupillometry, motion capture, and audio-video recordings of a string quartet as they performed a rehearsal and concert (for live audience) in our lab. We then collected pupillometry data from a remote sample of musically-trained listeners, who heard the audio recordings (without video) that we captured during the concert. We used a modelling approach to assess the effects of performers' bodily effort (head and arm motion; sound level; performers' ratings of technical difficulty), musical complexity (performers' ratings of harmonic complexity; a score-based measure of harmonic tension), and expressive difficulty (performers' ratings of expressive difficulty) on performers' and listeners' pupil diameters. Our results show stimulating effects of bodily effort and expressive difficulty on performers' pupil diameters, and stimulating effects of expressive difficulty on listeners' pupil diameters. We also observed negative effects of musical complexity on both performers and listeners, and negative effects of performers' bodily effort on listeners, which we suggest may reflect the complex relationships that these features share with other aspects of musical structure. Looking across the concert, we found that both of the quartet violinists (who exchanged places halfway through the concert) showed more dilated pupils during their turns as 1st violinist than when playing as 2nd violinist, suggesting that they experienced greater arousal when "leading" the quartet in the 1st violin role. This study shows how eye tracking and motion capture technologies can be used in combination in an ecological setting to investigate cognitive processing in music performance.

SUBMITTER: Bishop L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8274478 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Current evidence demonstrates that even though some non-native listeners can achieve native-like performance for speech perception tasks in quiet, the presence of a background noise is much more detrimental to speech intelligibility for non-native compared to native listeners. Even when performance is equated across groups, it is likely that greater listening effort is required for non-native listeners. Importantly, the added listening effort might result in increased fatigue and a reduced ability to successfully perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Task-evoked pupil responses have been demonstrated to be a reliable measure of cognitive effort and can be useful in clarifying those aspects. In this study we compared the pupil response for 23 native English speakers and 27 Italian speakers of English as a second language. Speech intelligibility was tested for sentences presented in quiet and in background noise at two performance levels that were matched across groups. Signal-to-noise levels corresponding to these sentence intelligibility levels were pre-determined using an adaptive intelligibility task. Pupil response was significantly greater in non-native compared to native participants across both intelligibility levels. Therefore, for a given intelligibility level, a greater listening effort is required when listening in a second language in order to understand speech in noise. Results also confirmed that pupil response is sensitive to speech intelligibility during language comprehension, in line with previous research. However, contrary to our predictions, pupil response was not differentially modulated by intelligibility levels for native and non-native listeners. The present study corroborates that pupillometry can be deemed as a valid measure to be used in speech perception investigation, because it is sensitive to differences both across participants, such as listener type, and across conditions, such as variations in the level of speech intelligibility. Importantly, pupillometry offers us the possibility to uncover differences in listening effort even when those do not emerge in the performance level of individuals.

Dataset Information

Musical and Bodily Predictors of Mental Effort in String Quartet Music: An Ecological Pupillometry Study of Performers and Listeners.

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