Some insight into the somatic response to live vs. recorded music.

Well, the basis for the difference with live music is that the performer is paying attention to the audience and altering their performance in response. So I guess you'd have to have a feedback mechanism in your audio setup that would change playback in response. AI to the rescue (people are working on this stuff).

Well sure!
With recorded music, you push a few buttons, sit down and listen to the music.
With live music, you drive to the venue (often at a specified time), interact with people that you may not know, then the music starts on their schedule.

The article states they told the player to play the music mased on what was seen on the MRI. My thought are the listeners responding to the music because it's live or because the piece is tailored to the person's mood or personality.

Myself I listen to a wide variety of music, really wide. What I pick to listen to usually depends on my mood. I typically will play a few things before deciding what direction I want to listen. Perhaps the MRI gave them this insight.

I believe I can personally enjoy my system just as much. Typically at live shows there's quite a bit of other distractions going on. There's interactions and variations of familiar songs that make live music special. It's just two different experiences. That may also depend on whether you are at a Rock concert versus a more intimate show. I suppose both would have it's distractions though.

I can see if AI becomes involved there will be an issue with AI altered music, tempo, emphasis, etc. vs the song as the artiest originally wanted to play it.

Interesting rabbit hole.

My thinking is along the lines of the feedback loop that exists between performance and listener as NekoAudio cites. Interestingly, Peter Gabriel’s most recent album, I/O (his first album in 21 years), contains 2 different mixes of each song. And a third mix exists (the In-side mix) in object based Dolby Atmos. For the 2 channel version the listener in this case has the binary choice of which performance they find more engaging, assuming one has a preference.

With more research (including the potential application of AI) I can see how parasympathetic cues from the listener could be detected in real time that could be applied to “customizing” the performance for the individual listener. Is this where a device like the Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3 could be applied? Those companies certainly have the resources to explore enhanced reality options such as this.

Speedskater said:

Well sure!
With recorded music, you push a few buttons, sit down and listen to the music.
With live music, you drive to the venue (often at a specified time), interact with people that you may not know, then the music starts on their schedule.

Click to expand...

This experiment was conducted in a controlled manner. The live music was played back in much the same way as the recorded music: through speakers to a single subject listener who was being observed. If I read it correctly, the test ensured the subject did not know if it was live or recorded music being played back.

So this wasn't an effect of being in a large venue with a bunch of people at an exciting concert. But rather the result of the qualitative characteristics of the music being heard through the speakers and their impact on the listeners' brain activity. Those characteristics being different when the musician was playing in front of the "audience" versus when they played for the purpose of making a recording.