Concert formats measurably change audience experience, classical music study finds

Orchestras and festival organizers continually develop and experiment with new concert formats for classical music. But do these formats actually have an impact on audiences? A research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main and the University of Cologne, Germany, has now demonstrated for the first time that different concert formats measurably influence audiences' subjective experiences, behavior, and physiological responses. These effects were particularly pronounced in formats that differed markedly from the conventional concert format. The study's results were published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.