Musicians take a note!

Music performers need to focus more on their appearance than concentrate on polishing their voice, according to a new study conducted by researchers at the University College London. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study found that visual parameters are major considerations while judging a performance.

According to Daily Mail, researchers arrived at the conclusion after asking participants to watch and/or listen to video-only, audio-only or video-plus-sound versions of clips of the top three finalists of ten classical music competitions. They surveyed 1,100 participants which included music experts and novices (those who were new to the field of music).

The success rate of novices identifying the winners was around 52.5 percent when watching a video-only clip. However the rate dropped to 25.5 percent when listening to audio-only clips.

On the other hand, only 25.7 percent of the expert musicians picked the actual winners with silent video-only recordings and their success rate was 47 per cent with sound-only recordings.

With 59.6 percent, passion was the most important visual indicator while assessing the quality of a performance.

 'People consistently report sound is the most important source of information in evaluating performance in music. However the findings demonstrate people actually depend primarily on visual information when making judgments about music performance," said Dr Chia-Jung Tsay, who led the study at the University College London.

'The results highlight our natural, automatic and non-conscious dependence on visual cues.

Although all the performances were instrumental, Tsay feels that the findings might also hold true for singers.

'As a musician myself I was quite surprised there was not any real difference between the novices and professionals in their reliance on visuals despite the consensus sound is the most important criteria,' said Tsay.