Collective Music Listening and Emotional Contagion: Emotional Contagion and College Students at a Music Festival

Abstract

The ways people listen to music varies and has changed considerably throughout history and advances in technology. Live performances and concerts have remained constant as form of music listening, though events like the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have kept listeners away from large live listening experiences. The live music setting allows for a unique experience that listeners seek out, a large factor that contributes to this is being an audience member and a part of a bigger crowd. The current study investigated the effects of emotional within listening experiences, in this specific instance SUNY Purchase's Culture Shock music festival. This study explored the relationship between emotional contagion and several factors: musical enjoyment and appreciation, physical engagement with the music, social connectedness, and related facets of the concert-going experience. Said effects were examined through post-concert surveys completed by festival attendants where they answered questions relating to their concert experience. The participants answered the questions on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The data was exported from Qualtrics, coded and sorted in Microsoft Excel, and then analyzed using JASP. The factors observed were constructed by summing each participant's numerical responses to questions within each factor category. The various factor categories were analyzed using a series of stepwise regressions. Emotional response/connectedness was shown in the results to be the largest contributing factor to how participants experienced the concert, revealing that emotional contagion does have a significant effect on how concertgoers experience a live music event.