Change in Listeners' Evaluation of Impression by the Difference in Performer's Intentional Expressions in Piano Performance

Abstract

We often experience the difference of impression when a performer plays a piece in different intentional expressions. In order to investigate the effect of such different expressions on listener's evaluation of impression, we asked a professional pianist to perform 2 pieces ("Etude Tableaux Op.39-1" and "Prelude Op.32-5": both composed by Rachmaninoff) in 3 different types of expression ("deadpan","artistic" and "exaggerated"). We recorded and used them as auditory stimuli. Participants listened to the 6 stimuli (2 (pieces) * 3 (expressional types)) and evaluated each impression by using 31 epithets of emotion. As a result, the listeners can discriminate the expressional types intended by the performer, and the degrees of the impression differed by them.