Lighting as a Visual Instrument in Instrumental Electro-Folk Night Performances

Nightclub lighting is often treated as a feature of the sensory environment, yet it can function as a time-structured expressive system that shapes how instrumental music is felt and socially coordinated. This article examined how lighting influenced emotion, immersion, and embodied engagement in Nicynix, an instrumental electro-folk project presented across seven curator-led European night performances. Phase A combined multisite field capture of lighting-control logs, audio features, and audience responses. Lighting-augmented models fitted the data better than audio-only models, as indicated by lower values of the Akaike information criterion (AIC). Lighting transition structure and intensity variability were associated with reconstructed arousal and absorption, whereas palette–valence associations depended on timbral context. Phase B held audio constant and found that congruent lighting increased peak arousal, immersion, and movement periodicity, whereas incongruent timing reduced coherence and increased arousal volatility. Phase C interviews linked these patterns to phrase legibility and timbre-sensitive palette decisions. The study framed lighting as a visual instrument that can scaffold time-varying engagement in hybrid acoustic-electronic performance contexts.