Why Showing More Passion Means Greater Audience Response

Okay all you American Idol and The Voice wannabes, here's the key to winning the judges hearts. A study published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Science has found that musicians who show passion when performing place higher when being judged.

Researchers recruited a group of 106 musicians with experience in judging music competitions, and then randomly assigned to one of three groups that did the judging. One group judged on sound only, one on video only and the third on both sound and video. They were then shown 6 second clips of the top 3 finalists in classical music competitions from around the world and asked to identify the winner in each of the 10 contests.

As you would expect, most of the judges said that they were primarily concerned with the audio performance, but it turned out that the judging group that picked on sound only guessed the winner only 26% of the time while the ones given the audio and video got it right 33% of the time, or about what the odds of chance predicted.

But what's mind-blowing is that the judges that were shown the video only guessed correctly 47% of the time, which meant that another round of research was required.

This time a study group was show black and white videos of just the outlines of musicians' bodies and asked a range of questions about the performers creativity, involvement, motivation, passion and uniqueness. It turns out that passion was the number one factor, and when the judges were asked to go back and judge the competition performances again, they scored nearly 60% right.

Musicians inherently know that the audience really digs it when it looks like you're really into it. Now there's real research that proves it.