Embodied Experience and Communicative Intentions of the Singing Performer

Abstract

Theories of Embodied Cognition assert that simulation mechanisms underlie inter-subjective communication. On this basis we posit that by solely assessing only visual component of a performance, a naïve audience could make similar judgments to those ones elicited by audiovisual or aural perception. Five vocal performances by performers of different levels of expertise were assessed using various of perception (audiovisual, visual and aural perception) by 90 musically uneducated subjects randomly assigned to a specific modality. Subject’s task consisted of pronounce an aesthetical judgment of the performances using an 11-point scale. Results assessed by ANOVA test of repeated measures showed significant differences between the factors SINGERS (F 16,296 p< 0,000) and CONDITION (F 8,622 p< 0,001) meaning that singers were judged differently among them and that, judgments were quantitatively different through each perceptual modality. Instead, factors’ interaction (SINGERS x CONDITION) was non significant (F 1,090 p<0,372) indicating that each singer was similarly evaluated via the three perceptual modalities. Consequently, results support the idea of a cross-modal correspondence in the reception of vocal performance. Besides, the lack of knowledge of the lyrics and the style of the musical piece on the part of the audience, allows us to suppose that judgments were based on sensory-motor simulations.