(5. C. Results)
II) MUSICIANS SESSIONS
Regarding the music-knowledgeable sessions, I carried out three rounds: two in the KC with friends (21-25 years old) and another one in my home city, Málaga, with a big group of teen students (most of them between 16 and 20 years old, also a few adults) of the local conservatory, thanks to the invitation of an old teacher that showed interest in my Research. At this point, I already thought that the fact that the experiments with non-musicians were held with a much more heterogeneous sample (in terms of age) could distort the results, but I did not have the possibility of attracting an older connoisseur public. If I take an optimistic view, this combination of a non-musicians audience, interested in musical activities, and a group of still young and not fully trained musicians shows a closer distance in terms of musical reception.
For the first session with musicians, I prepared a written explanation of the experiment, together with an overview of the three philosophical approaches (see 5.A) Experiments done). The aim of not doing it this time verbally was to achieve a higher level of focus previous to the activity. Despite achieving it in my opinion, part of the feedback I received was negative: the comprehension was difficult, especially of the theories (which is a complex topic), and there was discomfort in asking doubts due to the silence in the room. Because of that, I changed my mind for the second and third groups and gave oral and simpler descriptions.
(1) PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES
ENGAGEMENT OF THE THEORIES. The results of the questions attaching the philosophical approaches with a music-knowledgeable audience show a different picture because Kivy's beauty of music becomes the least engaging perspective: 7.2 of engagement doing the average of all the times it was used during the session, 7 in the first piece using exclusively this theory (the same beginning of Bach's Chaconne (2) like in the non-musicians sessions) and 7.1 if we take into account the two pieces in which Kivy's was the only approach allowed (Bach's (2) and (8), this last one being another fragment of the Chaconne in D Major). Davies' contagion keeps his middle position, but this time closer to the leadership: the global average is 7.5, the average of its two 'exclusive' pieces (Tchaikovsky's concerto beginning (3), like with non-musicians, and Bartok's Rhapsody (9)) is 7.7, whereas the first reception of only the Tchaikovsky (3) was clearly better: 8.2. However, the gold medal goes to Levinson's imagination thanks to its 7.8 global average. The sum of the first Sibelius' concerto beginning (1) performance and a second version of Bach's Chaconne beginning (6), both heard only with Levinson's mindset, has an average of 7.7, while only in Sibelius' beginning (1) the average is a little lower, 7.6.
STANDARD DEVIATION. Since the global sample size with musicians is much larger, I decided to calculate the standard deviation, a number that indicates how much the sample values are distanced from the average. The lower it is, the smaller the disparity of results is, and vice versa. Levinson's imagination proposal also has the lowest standard deviation: 1.9, versus a 2.2 for Davies' contagion and a 2.4 for Kivy's music itself. That means that there is a higher consensus about a (slightly) better engagement of Levinson's mindset, whereas there were more radical opinions about how engaging Davies' and Kivy's approaches were: for some listeners, they were pretty effective, and for others certainly not. See Figure 21.
EASE or DIFFICULTY. Regarding the ease or difficulty of being engaged by making use of each approach, what we can see is that Levinson's imagination is again the simplest mindset, with a general average of 3.5 (out of 10, being 1 really easy and 10 extremely difficult)1 and a little higher 3.8 in its first contact with Sibelius' performance (1). Davies' contagion and Kivy's beauty of music are once more quite close to each other, but changing their positions, being now Davies' qualified as the most demanding one with a global 4.25 versus a 4 of Kivy's (same results looking at the first contact with each theory in Tchaikovsky (3) and Bach (2)). See Figure 21.
FREE THINKING
For the last two pieces, I allowed the audience to create their own path and have total freedom about their thoughts while listening to the music. I asked them to try to explain their mindset after each performance. Many of them acknowledged that they made use of narratives, Levinson's style: in Sibelius (12) some answers included mysteries, deaths, enemies, a regretted protagonist... In Prokofiev (13) these fictions frequented intrigue and war ideas. Other listeners indicated that the way they think is similar to Davies, letting music activate memories, meanwhile others pointed out that they focus more on an analytical view, or on the execution itself. Other remarkable paths were the ones related to landscapes, like a Nordic and cold one for Sibelius (12); or synesthesia, combining moments of music with colors; or losing control, trying to genuinely achieve a blank mind.
The results of the engagement level question were totally disparate: the highest note of the whole experiment for Sibelius (12), 9.15, and the lowest, a 6, for Prokofiev (13). I must point out that, due to time constraints, I had to skip one of both pieces for the second and third sessions: the second group did not hear Prokofiev, and the third, Sibelius. This could explain such huge differences, but the results of the first group still show big contrasts. Sibelius' listening was accompanied by a non-standard setting, whereas Prokofiev was not. Nevertheless, the factor that seems to be the most determinant is the type of piece. In Chapter [6] I will give a couple of hypotheses, since the fact of knowing or not the piece could be transcendental. A quick deduction for now could be that it is better to ‘lose control’ or to ‘have freedom’ with something familiar than with something weirder.