Objective: Investigations of aesthetic experience have continually searched for field-research methodologies that measure physiological and self-report responses reliably and with little invasiveness. On this background, the interdisciplinary research project “ECR–Experimental Concert Research” set out to study aesthetic experience in live public concerts. Methods: A team of scientists from musicology, psychology, cultural studies, and software engineering were brought together to cooperate in this project. Here we describe the methodology, design, and infrastructure to enable this endeavor, realized in 3 pilot concerts and 11 final concerts, with approximately 900 participants. The technical setup involved the physiological measurements of electrodermal, cardiac, and respiratory activity; facial expressions; and motion capture. Before and after concerts, participants provided sociological information and experiential assessments of the musical performance, including an automated stimulated-recall rating of selected musical segments. Results: The implementation of the methodological framework in the field generated an integrated dataset of high quality and ecological validity. We present the merits and challenges of this framework.
Tröndle et al. (Sun,) studied this question.