Wanna Be a Rock Star? Science Says You’d Better Have the Look
You already had your suspicions, didn’t you?
It is more important for a musician to look cool than sound good, a study suggests.
More than 1,100 volunteers were recruited to watch and/or listen to video-only, audio-only or video-plus-sound versions of clips of the top three finalists of ten classical music competitions.
Novices had a success rate of 52.5 per cent at picking the winners with silent video-only recordings, significantly above chance (33 per cent).
With sound-only recordings they had a success rate of 25.5 per cent.
Only 25.7 per cent of expert musicians were able to identify the actual winners when provided with sound only, but this rate rose to 47 per cent when provided with video-only stimuli.
Passion (59.6 per cent) was the most important visual indicator of the quality of a performance.
