Abstract

Every musician has the quality of their performance evaluated. However, the cognitive processes leading to those judgements, and how features of the repertoire, performer, environment, and evaluator interact and influence them, are not well understood. The Time to Decide project comprised four quantitative studies investigating the process of forming musical judgements. Studies 1 and 2 experimentally manipulated repertoire length and familiarity, error location, stage entrances, and facial expressions to investigate their effects on continuous quality judgments. Studies 3 and 4 employed large-scale surveys at professional concerts to investigate the pre- and during-concert factors that predict evaluative and aesthetic judgments in live settings. Implications for musicians, teachers, and researchers will be discussed, including first steps in developing a method to train evaluative skills through immersive simulation.