Familiarity, accessibility, and taste shape emotional and embodied responses to live music in a socially diverse audience

Music is increasingly studied for its well-being potential, yet much research focuses on recorded music, clinical settings, and socially homogeneous or genre-specific audiences. This limits understanding of how diverse listeners respond to live music. In this quasi-experimental field study, we examined live classical and popular concerts among a socially diverse audience ( N = 506) in a professional venue. Pieces differed in genre, accessibility, and levels of participant-reported prior familiarity. Participants completed post-piece surveys assessing appreciation, prior familiarity, and kama muta (KM; “being moved”), and wore Polar H10 chest straps to monitor heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV). Multilevel models showed that accessible pieces and pieces participants had heard before were associated with stronger appreciation and KM, but these associations varied across listeners. Responses depended partly on the alignment between musical genre and listeners’ genre-specific taste. Stronger KM was associated with increased mean and minimum HR and reduced parasympathetic HRV indices, suggesting heightened arousal. These findings show that live music responses are shaped by piece-level attributes, prior familiarity, and culturally patterned listening orientations, and that being moved is physiologically reflected. The study highlights the importance of accessibility, familiarity, and taste for understanding live music’s emotional and embodied relevance.