From structural listening to daydreaming: Listening modes influence the individual experience in live concerts

Listening modes are often ignored in music perception research, especially when it comes to the supposedly attentive listening situation of a classical concert. The audience members’ various ways of listening, understood as the directedness of activity toward different dimensions of sound, is hypothesized to play a key role in the experience of live music. We assessed listening activity of participants ( N = 786) attending a series of experimental live concerts. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) revealed the following five listening modes: emotional-immersive, structural, sound-causal, diffuse, and single-focused. Furthermore, listening modes significantly predicted affective states (positive activation, negative activation, and valence) after the concert. Results show that, despite music educational paradigms, structural listening increases negative activation, whereas emotional-immersive and sound-causal listening increase valence and lead to relaxation in a classical music performance. The results are in line with former empirical and theoretical taxonomies of listening modes and provide a new contribution to the understanding of the role of listening modes for the perception and aesthetic experience of music in live concerts and beyond.