Music lovers who regularly attend concerts and festivals often say live performances are far superior to recorded music. Now, researchers at the University of Zurich have investigated whether this is primarily a matter of personal perception – and the evidence suggests otherwise.

In a paper published in the journal PNAS, Sascha Frühholz and colleagues suggest that concertgoers tend to feel more moved by live music because it triggers increased activity in the part of the brain linked to emotional processing.

The researchers came to this conclusion after conducting an experiment involving nearly 30 volunteers with no musical training. They asked them to listen carefully to 12 short pieces of music that had been specially designed to elicit specific emotions, some positive and some negative.

The participants listened to each of these compositions twice: once through a loudspeaker while a musician played them live on the piano, and the other time through headphones in the form of a traditional audio recording. Throughout, the volunteers lay in an MRI scanner so the research team could monitor their brain activity.

The pianist who played the pieces received instructions from the scientists to adapt their playing in relation to the brain activity of the participants. Thus, if one of the participants reacted poorly to “positive” music, the pianist would have been instructed to play more vigorously, for example.

Imaging revealed increased brain activity in the volunteers’ left amygdala when they listened to live versions of the various pieces, whether “positive” or “negative”. Notably the left amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional regulation, attributes emotions to sensory stimuli such as sounds.

In contrast, the researchers found that sound recordings did not trigger a spike in activity in the left amygdala, suggesting that “live music can stimulate the affective brain of listeners more strongly and consistently than recorded music”.

Frühholz and colleagues believe that the evocative power of live music lies in the fact that it is more dynamic and fluid than recorded music. Musicians tend to adapt to their audience when performing live, in order to achieve the best possible emotional response.

The researchers say they would now like to conduct a similar experiment at a real concert, to verify the findings of their study among a larger audience.