Science Imitates Eddie Izzard

Note that the choice was between the top three finalists, so the conclusion is not that how you look matters more than how you sound: it is that the visual is a better guide than the aural when discriminations are really fine. Note, too, that it is not *looks* in the sense of aesthetics that matters: participants were able to pick the winner from line drawing renderings. The visual cues may be to something like “stage presence”. Or they may be to something like confidence, which (presumably) correlates well with actual ability, or even fluidity, which (again presumably) correlates even better with performance.

An executive transvestite is of course keenly aware of the impact appearances can have upon perception.

A very smart and very funny show. Haven’t seen it since the first time I watched it – a friend showed it to me during a challenging time to make me laugh (it worked well). Worth seeing if you haven’t. Actually reminds me of another part of the show, but it belongs on the Syria thread.

So her research question was something like:
to what extent can people who only watch the videos of competitions, reproduce the rankings that were actually assigned by the original judges?

But the quick write-up that you link to is missing a crucial piece of info:

did the original judges assign their actual rankings under the influence of visual information, or not? Were they properly screened and blinded from visual distraction?

One surely hopes so, right? After all, I have been hearing for a good decade or so that there is a clear body of research showing that musical auditions produce different results when the judges can see the performer and when they cannot.

In particular, it has been a staple of the “implicit bias” research (about which I have read only as an interested amateur), that women fare much worse in auditions where the judges can see them, and fare much better in blind auditions (and indeed have their performances lauded with traditionally masculine accolades like “muscular,” “commanding,” etc. that are denied to them when the judges see that they are women.)

So surely, in the face of this body of research, and at this late date, competitions are not allowing their judges to actually *see* the performers, are they?

Because that would be too depressing for words.

So: if this current research compares the rankings assigned to silent video clips, with the rankings assigned by judges who had all audio and no visual distractions, then this is interesting research! Rather surprising result! Calls for more study!

But if this current research simply compares the rankings assigned to silent video clips with the rankings assigned by judges who were watching the performers and knew their gender, race, stature, mode of dress, etc. etc. then the result itself is not very surprising, but the fact that anyone is still allowing competitions to be judged this way is deeply depressing, not to say appalling. It just calls for all of the competition-organizers to be fired.

MEK–wouldn’t that sort of explanation predict that the differences between blinded judging and unblinded judging would be unaffected by the gender, race, attractiveness etc. of the performers? Whereas in fact it is not?

Or do you just extend the theory to say that white men gain the greatest benefit from visual input because they are the most skilled at “visual enunciation?” Whereas women etc., no matter what kind of sounds they may be producing, just are “visually inarticulate”?

Calls for more research!

Oh, and thanks for the McGurk effect, which I had been unaware of. Nifty!

Notice that the general lines of your response, i.e. insisting on the importance and non-irrelevance of visual info, is also what the researcher herself does in the linked article:

“Even if we implement more objective evaluations, a lot of music is consumed live, so you can’t take out the visual,” she said. “Unless we decide we only want to experience music through auditory means, there will always be a visual element to these performances.”

Translation: suck on it, non-standard looking people! Us attractive types are going to get all of the top billings and TV spots anyhow, so you uglies may as well get weeded out early on in the competition!

On visual expressiveness, see Chris Thile of Goat Rodeo.

Given the famously dramatic rise in hiring women for orchestras when auditions are blind, I would be very interested to know whether the women participating in these contests won in proportion to their numbers. If the men won disproportionally one could chalk it up to garden variety sexism. And I don’t think women ever even reach that level if they are not attractive to begin with.

Susan Boyle.

@pedant – the problem with blinding judges, which is done routinely for orchestra auditions but pretty much never for solo competitions – is that it’s widely accepted among musicians that visuals are part of the performance.
This is most pronounced among singers – see how much Joyce DiDonato works on theatrics&expression during her masterclasses, for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3QAvSAoA_8
But it’s certainly also the case for instrumentalists. When I saw the Takács quartet give a masterclass, I thought it was striking how much they worked on things like facial expressions etc., especially with their advanced students.
And I’m not sure why that should be a bad thing by itself. If it matters for the judges, it certainly matters for the audience. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t any problems with that – the fact that you can pretty much no longer become a touring solo violinist unless you’re also hot is certainly troubling. But detaching the competition from the experience of the concert goer doesn’t strike me as a solution. I mean – theater critics and judges also have their biases, are we going to insist they only listen to shows?
(That said, the winners of the major competitions like Tchaikovsky or Queen Elisabeth strike me as more male then what you end up seeing on the circuit, for whatever reasons).

“…the winners of the major competitions like Tchaikovsky or Queen Elisabeth strike me as more male…”
“And I’m not sure why that should be a bad thing by itself.”

Oh, totally agree! Where would I be without male privilege? If I had had to compete on a level playing field with equally talented women, I would have been unemployed for decades now.

Right pedant. That’s why you wear dark glasses to every performance you go to, right? Because if not, you might be influenced by your biases in how you perceive it. If you don’t, I hope you think of yourself as a sexist & racist pig?!

You shouldn’t wear dark glasses when reading comments, though. Else you wouldn’t have missed that I readily concede that there are problems (as in “I’m not saying there aren’t any problems with that”) but that the solution must be more complex than just removing a key part of the performances. My reference to the music competitions is also a lot more nuanced than you make it out to be: My claim is that among commercially successful solo artists you see more women than among the winners of major competitions. Unless you believe that the classical music market & concert circuit is a perfect judge of quality that doesn’t necessarily mean that the competition judges are sexist. It _could_, but it could also be that some of faces of the dudes who are winning don’t conform to what the record companies want to put on their labels. I honestly don’t know. If I had to guess, it’s some of both.
(Oh – and the gender, race, and ethnicity of performers in my preferred art form has zero impact on my privilege as a white male academic).

As for Naxos – I think that’s exactly right if you look at chamber works – e.g. the Kodaly Haydn Quartets on Naxos are outstanding (as is the fact that their recording a ton of music that no one else does, which is part of the reason for their good reputation among enthusiasts).
But it’s not actually true for the orchestra recordings. There is an audible difference between fine orchestras like Seattle and Milwaukee (both recording on Naxos) and great orchestras like Chicago, New York, or Berlin. It’s so audible that people immediately notice when an orchestra like Minnesota, which wasn’t considered top-tier, puts out an amazing recording like their Beethoven symphonies.

“Why else would people go and spend tons of money on it?”

Well, you might want to hear it live because the sound is better in the hall than on your MP3. But the difference in that case is still an audio difference.

That’s why I offered the next two scenarios: in the hall, but lacking visual input, either temporarily or permanently.

You do know that Lang Lang irritates the shit out of some musicians, who think that his theatrics positively detract from the musical experience?

Look: of course someone could create a new hybrid art-form, which combined musical performance with some other stuff that could only be appreciated visually. We could require the oboists to send out semaphore-signals of the notes they play. You’ll need to be able to see them to judge how well they do! We could ask the horn section to play their parts while also doing synchronized swimming routines in a pool. My god, you have to see that to appreciate it! We could require our pianists to do a perfect mime rendition of Dean Stockwell’s lip-synching to Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet. What a visual feast!

How can we tell the first-prize winning piano-Stockwell-performers from the second-prize winners, without seeing them? We can’t! It’s a hybrid performance, part musical, part visual!

This is what you are telling me about Lang Lang–he plays the piano, and he also does a little interpretive dance. Nice! Cool hybrid medium. Let’s hope it doesn’t get confused with a pure musical performance, or judged as though it were one.

It is true that I feel somewhat confused about the matter. I don’t know anything about classical competitions other than watching my children’s (more-or-less-beginners) violin and piano recitals, where children would play the same piece and they sounded like they were playing entirely different pieces, of different lengths and with different notes. Incidentally, when we went to buy a new bow or instrument, we would always listen blind before deciding on one — and usually, it was quite obvious which sounded better and to the teacher too, if she we brought them to her for consultation.

In any case, if the facial movements and gestures were something purely extraneous that can be taught, then why don’t the students of Callas and Didonato do it as well Callas and Didonato? Obviously, it can be taught up to a point.

I saw Mick Jagger at the grammy awards a few years ago and he was the only performer whose dancing didn’t appear highly choreographed — he also covered much much more of the stage than any of the others. I heard a Laban-trained movement analyst once discussing him, who noted how his movements, especially of the knees and thighs, were remarkably similar to those of a morris dancer.

Still, one would like to know what the judges in this particular experiment were listening and watching for.

As far as whether a recording can be as good as a live performance, it is true you can close your eyes at the concert hall, which I suppose is why it used to be called “absolute” or abstract music, but as for as a recording being the same — no way, even if the brain does supply the missing harmonics. Glenn Gould seems to have thought a recording could be equally good in its own, and very different way, though.

It is very complex as adam.smith has said. Some musicians — like Szegeti or Oistrach — put the music across with hardly any physical emoting, at least not perceptible to me, and you feel they are transparent vehicles and you are hearing what the composer really intended — maybe that is an illusion, too, but it is to me the most pleasing one.

That’s why I offered the next two scenarios: in the hall, but lacking visual input, either temporarily or permanently.

Right. So according to you, seats with limited visibility shouldn’t get any price discount. And there should never be such a thing as a video screen that broadcasts performances from symphony hall. But visually impaired seats are always discounted and video screens are common – the NY Phil has them for big events like the season opener, the Chicago Symphony has them at Ravinia, concerts are shown on TV (and used to be a lot more frequently when classical music had a bigger place in public culture) etc.
Look, you can try to decree some art form, but it’s not how classical music works or is supposed to work. It’s also not how most professional classical musicians think about performance. And that’s not some newfangled thing – Liszt, Paganini certainly knew about it. Who are you that you think you get to define that visual aspects don’t play a role in classical music?

And sure, some people are annoyed by Lang Lang (as they were by DuPre), but that’s hardly the point, right? The fact that some people find their theatrics negatively impacts their performances just goes to underline that they’re part of it. So they prefer musicians that portray the music with a stern serenity. So look at a Janos Starker performance. He was perhaps the prime example of a performer eschewing theatrics (while performing at least ;). But boy would you miss out by not watching him. His deep dedication to his instrument and the music is palpable. Why do you want to take that away?

Don’t you guys naturally close your eyes to listen better when the music is good? I do. Even though it means missing Mick and Keith and Charlie.

Gosh, Neil, how can we ever make it up to you?

But seriously, maybe we can we pull this apart a little.

– Musicians give each other visual cues, which can make e.g. chamber music, small-ensemble jazz, or Indian classical performances more interesting – you get some sense of the music from the inside, as it’s being made. Obviously conducting is all about cues and audiences can follow those.

– It seems reasonable to suppose that part of some musicianship is deliberately giving the audience cues as well, about what to expect, how to listen. Clearly there’s a lot of variation here, vocalists tending to be especially expressive. OTOH my Dad, who had a career as a professional oboist, had contempt for conductors who were too concerned about their “rear view.”

Anyway, you could make a respectable argument that the visual is not irrelevant for some performance and some consumption of performance, and that might get at the point of why the film matters in the above study.

But that said, I’m with Frank @18 and Tony @31. Music is an aural medium, and if it were up to me I’d keep judging blind. Recordings often have *better* sound than live venues. I’m struck above that when commenters above try to describe the advantages of the visual, it’s oddly naive: “heart and soul,” “deep dedication.” This is not any communication about the particular music that’s going on, but instead some kind of communion they want to feel with a performer, an emotion. (A lot of people seem to want to experience art in these quasi-religious terms.) That there’s a demand for that kind of experience is obvious! But “adam smith” doesn’t seem to realize how tautological his argument about “how classical music works” is.

One of the reasons I prefer live symphony performances is that my ear isn’t that good. I find that I sometimes confuse oboe with clarinet, and brass instruments with each other, particularly with works I first heard at a young age. Tchaikovsky was fond of creating novel sounds with unison woodwinds. Beethoven sometimes weaves so many different threads together that it’s easier to keep track with your eyes than your ears (and this is even true with chamber music).

Then there’s the giant hammer in Mahler’s 6th, whose effect is almost entirely visual, as are some of the virtuosic extravagances of Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy.

Sometimes, especially with opera, subtracting the visual spectacle can be revealing. I’ve at least had the delusion, while listening to the radio, that parts of Don Giovanni and Rigoletto were more like symphonic suites than plays with incidental music.

I am not arguing that visually expressive music makes better music for the ears. I am arguing that live, acoustic music is better music for the ears. I also agree with Neil Levy that the visual aspects of a performance can reveal a lot of information about technical proficiency; for those who know what to look for. Nevertheless, competitions, virtuosity, and theatrics shouldn’t be the main thing music is about, obviously.

This is a fascinating topic. One aspect I enjoyed in the playing of a timpanist of an orchestra I used to watch live a good deal was his grace and economy of movement. I enjoyed watching him and listening to him at the same time. Seeing him made me hear the timpani better, because I could tell when the notes were being played visually in a very precise way. Seeing him also made his drums sound better, because I was affected by the aesthetics of his movement. I think it is plausible that an expert judge could tell the difference between a good and a less good timpanist almost as easily by watching with the sound off as by listening with the visuals off. One’s everyday enjoyment of such things is alway tinged by those impure elements. Some of us enjoy that sort of contamination and some don’t. For auditions and competitions there is another logic at play, though, since the purity of perception acquires an ethical dimension.

But it seems implausible that the visual element is so aesthetically important that it ought to be easier to identify the winners from vison alone than from sound alone.

I’ve now read the study a bit more carefully, and I don’t think that’s the correct interpretation of what’s going on. Some key points:
1. The excerpts used were 6secs long – we should not be surprised that even for experts it’s impossible to judge the quality of almost equally matched musical performances from such mini clips
2. People who had the same conditions as the judges – i.e. aural and visual – did no better than those just having aural. Which is rather odd – if the claim is that judges decide by visuals even though they listen to the music, why wouldn’t the participants with the same experience _also_ judge mainly by the visuals?

Here’s my suggested model of what’s going on: There is broad agreement about which visual cues/behaviors are considered a better performance. There is, given sufficiently close quality of playing, very little agreement on which aural elements consider a better performance – certainly not in 6secs clips, but as the author points out, not even among the judges who have listened to more.
Now, if both judges and participants weigh the aural aspect (say) 90% and the visual aspect 10% – but everyone agrees on the latter and no one agrees on the former – you’d get exactly the experimental results she got.
If, on the other hand, people weighed visual cues more heavily than aural clues generally, participants who both watched and listened should have been indistinguishable from those who just watched.

So if I’m right, what she has shown is that people are more likely to _agree_ on visuals and to be able to make these judgments more quickly. Not that visuals dominate musical decisions.

“All music is acoustic” Adam Gopnik, but he does tackle that question here at some length: http://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/11288313/music-to-your-ears-princeton-university

There is agreement that reproduced music can never quite capture the quality of dynamic variation, much less the infinite resonances experienced in the concert hall, but Gopnik concludes that it doesn’t matter because the brain supplies what is missing. Agree or not, it is an interesting article.

Colin, we posted at the same moment, responding differently to Neil. I am struck by the number of “con” compounds I used! I share your distrust of kitsch. Kitsch v. con — an interesting tension. How to distinguish?