The Stilling Response: From Musical Silence to Audience Stillness

Abstract

This article introduces a hitherto undescribed pattern of audience motion during a classical music performance, wherein audience members collectively decrease their quantity of motion in coordination with shifts toward stillness in the music. This “stilling response” was observed in the audience body sway measurements from the MusicLab Copenhagen concert experiment, a research concert event in which the Danish String Quartet and over a dozen researchers collaborated to measure, analyze, and understand the experiences, physiology, and behavior of the coupled musician–music–audience system. Analysis of the performance identified over 250 “stilling points” in the music, such as rests, rubatos, and decrescendos. Most of these points were matched with measurable local decreases in movement across the majority of participating audience members. From this exploratory study, we posit that encultured classical music audiences exhibit a stilling response to suitable concert music, wherein they use their musical understanding to anticipate moments of stillness in a performance and cooperatively suppress their own movements to match. As audience stillness is recognized and valued by performers, this behavior may constitute a joint and tacit act of communication where the audience confirm their approval of and attention to the performance.