North Valley Voice Studios

08/06/2024

|:Repeat after me:|

||: Music | Every Child | Every School | Every Day :||

08/06/2024

This is one reason why I always encourage my students to “make your mistakes boldly”. 🤗

I remember my teacher repeatedly reminding me to not make faces when I made mistakes on stage.

I eventually stopped doing this. But I always wondered…how big a deal is this really?

A 2017 study (Waddell & Williamon) recruited 53 musicians and 52 non-musicians to serve as audience members, and asked each group to watch and evaluate video of the same performance - but with a few modifications to each video.

Two of the groups saw videos in which the pianist stops playing and fumbles around for a moment before resuming. It’s an obvious enough mistake that even non-musicians noticed that something went wrong.

In one version of the video, the pianist makes a face, shakes his head, and looks frustrated.

In another version of the video, he has no reaction to the mistake at all.

So…how would this affect the audience members’ impressions of the performance?

To find out, the researchers used a continuous rating system. Where listeners rated the performance from the beginning and made adjustments as their impression changed.

The mistake led to a drop in performance rating of ~7 points when the pianist made no face.

But it led to a ~19 point drop when he did make a face!

Also, when the pianist made no face, his final score was pretty much the same as his performance score before making the mistake.

As in, the audience seemed to forgive/forget the mistake, and didn’t penalize him.

However, when he did make a face, his final score was significantly lower than his score prior to the mistake.

It’s as if the mistake stuck in the listeners’ minds more deeply, and was reflected in a lower overall score.

So…if your teacher ever gave you the same advice that mine gave me, it’s because they are totally right!

An audience is often more forgiving than we might expect – so long as we can keep our face from ruining the moment for them!

Get all the nerdy details here: https://bulletproofmusician.com/why-every-performer-needs-a-good-poker-face/

08/02/2024

Join a choir in Children’s Choir of Chico to learn to read and write music, sing in varied languages, and learn songs from many genres, including great art music, Broadway tunes, spirituals, patriotic songs, traditional songs, and folk music from around the world.  Medieval to modern, Bach to Ger...

07/02/2024

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06/21/2024

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06/18/2024

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06/10/2024

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06/09/2024

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06/06/2023

"Music is the art of thinking with sounds."
~ Jules Combarieu

Image: The Project Gutenberg eBook of How to Sing, by Lilli Lehmann.