Contrasting the emotional impact of music played by a solo violinist vs string quartet

What is it about?

We know that there many variables that come into play when studying what listeners feel while listening to music, such as the structure of the music, the way it is performed, the personality and expertise of the listener, and even the context in which the music is being listened to (e.g. at home, commuting, in a concert). But the effect of playing the same music as a solo instrument or as a group ("ensemble") has been rather neglected. To this end, we recorded five segments from the same musical piece (Schubert's “Death and the Maiden”) played just by the first violin or the whole string quartet. We found that the emotional impact of the music was not a simple question of intensity (where playing as a group systematically led to stronger emotions for example) but that this depended both on the segment being played and the emotion under study. Overall we also found that listening to music played as a quartet led to more feelings of wanting to move and of one's internal rhythms changing. These in turn predicted the intensity of listener's emotions.

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