Audience reconstructed: social media interaction by BTS fans during live stream concerts.

COVID-19-motivated social distancing made online concerts common practice in 2020 and 2021, with millions logging into streaming sites to see their favorite artists perform in realtime. For some fans, watching alone at home may have been enough, but concert-concurrent surges of social media activity suggest many virtual performance attendees are doing more. To understand why fans would turn their attention from these precious performance streams to social media, we explored Twitter engagement during four live streamed concerts performed by the Kpop group BTS in 2021.

Interpreting expressive performance through listener judgments of musical tension.

This study examines listener judgments of musical tension for a recording of a Schubert song and its harmonic reduction. Continuous tension ratings collected in an experiment and quantitative descriptions of the piece's musical features, include dynamics, pitch height, harmony, onset frequency, and tempo, were analyzed from two different angles. In the first part of the analysis, the different processing timescales for disparate features contributing to tension were explored through the optimization of a predictive tension model.