Make a mistake performing? Don't bother making a frowny face.

I think my face is a mistake and my playing acknowledges this…:unsure: One of my biggest heroes is Rod Morgenstein who constantly gurns whilst playing perfectly executed beat displacements; very misleading for those who like to spot a mistake. The king has to be Mick Fleetwood; now that’s a mistake face if ever I saw one! :unsure: 😂
You made me look up “gurns”. Google caught it, but autocorrect didn’t. I didn’t appreciate that.
 
A study observing the psychological effect on the listener that observes a performer making a mistake...


Why Every Performer Needs a Good Poker Face​



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Noa Kageyama, Ph.D. <[email protected]> Unsubscribe​





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Why Every Performer Needs a Good Poker Face​

by Noa Kageyama
My daughter loves card games. And what I enjoy most about playing with her, is how completely transparent she is. Anytime she gets dealt a good hand, or picks up a special card, it’s written all over her face. Her eyes light up, and I know something bad is about to happen to me.
In time, maybe she’ll develop a better poker a better poker face, but for now it’s pretty cute.
And maybe not all bad, because when it comes to performing, research suggests that this sort of emotional expressivity is an important part of communicating from the stage. But…there’s a flip side. Where we frown and scowl, or express frustration when the performance isn’t going well.
We’ve all had teachers tell us to avoid making such faces when we’ve made a mistake, but really, as long as we sound great, how big a deal is it really?

The visual impact of what we do on stage​

A number of studies in the last few decades have shed more light on questions like this (like this one that caused quite a stir), suggesting that what we see affects our evaluation of a performance more than we might like to think. And researchers George Waddell and Aaron Williamon at the Royal College of Music’s Centre for Performance Science recently conducted a study to look at two specific visual aspects of a performance – first impressions, and facial expressions in response to mistakes.

Same performance, but with a few tweaks​

53 musicians and 52 non-musicians were recruited, and randomly assigned to one of several groups. Each group was to watch and evaluate video of the same performance of Chopin’s Aeolian HarpEtude, but with a few slight modifications made to each video.
Participants in Group #1 and Group #2 watched an error-free performance. However, while Group #1 saw the pianist walk on stage confidently, Group #2 saw the pianist walk on stage with poor stage presence (hands in pockets, barely looking at the audience, not smiling, etc.).
Groups #3 and #4’s videos both used the “good” stage entrance, but in their videos, the pianist makes a pretty major mistake. Midway through the piece, he flat-out stops and fumbles around for a moment before resuming the performance – noticeable even to the non-musicians. In Group #3’s video however, the pianist makes a face, shakes his head, and looks frustrated in response to the mistake, while in Group #4’s video, he has no discernible reaction to the mistake at all.

Rating the performance​

The participants were asked to rate the quality of the performance, as if they were judging a competition.
But to get a sense of how quickly we form first impressions, and how our impressions change over the course of a performance, the researchers used an interesting “continuous” rating system. Where instead of waiting until the very end to ask participants for a score, participants were allowed to rate the performance from the very beginning, making adjustments to their score from moment to moment, as their opinion of his playing changed.
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From Waddell, G., & Williamon, A. (2017). Eye of the Beholder: Stage Entrance Behavior and Facial Expression Affect Continuous Quality Ratings in Music Performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 8.
So how much does a performer’s stage entrance, and facial reactions matter?

The impact of a poor stage entrance​

Walking out on stage with poor stage presence did have an immediate impact.
For one, both musicians and non-musicians were much quicker to judge the performance, giving it a score 8 seconds into the performance. Those who saw the “good” stage entrance didn’t give the performance an initial rating until 18.52 seconds in.
Two, the pianist’s poor stage entrance totally affected his score – at least amongst the musicians, who gave his playing an initial rating of 34.91 (out of 70). Curiously, the non-musicians didn’t seem to mind his poor stage entrance. They gave him an initial score of 47.30, which was on par with what he got from non-musicians in the other groups who saw his good stage entrance.

But wait – that’s not the end of it!​

But even the musicians didn’t seem to hold his poor stage entrance against him for long. By the 25-second mark of his performance, his performance rating had already recovered and was on par with the score he got from musicians who watched the video with his good stage entrance.
So while first impressions may have some impact and shouldn’t be ignored, perhaps the way we walk out on stage isn’t quite as influential as we may have thought. Or at least, it’s something we can overcome as long as our playing is at a high level and we exhibit good stage presence while playing.
So what about mistakes, and making faces in response? Is it possible that this too is not as big a deal as people say it is?

Making faces​

As you can imagine, making a very audible mistake led to an immediate drop in performance ratings. But the magnitude of the drop depended on whether it was accompanied by a face or not.
Participants who heard the mistake, but saw video of the pianist looking blissfully unaware of the memory slip, dropped his rating by 7.43 points (relative to the error-free performance).
Those who not only heard the mistake, but saw the pianist shaking his head and looking frustrated dropped his rating by 19.20 points (relative to the error-free performance).
So obviously, making a mistake is not great, but expressing frustration apparently makes the mistake seem waaay worse.
Which is interesting, but there was actually something even more intriguing to come out of the data.

Audiences may be surprisingly forgiving​

The musicians who watched the video where the pianist displayed no facial reaction to the mistake gave his performance a final score of 48.55 – which is identical to their initial rating of 48.55. The non-musicians’ scores were similar – a final score of 46.00 and an initial score of 45.00.
So in other words, the mistake did not affect the final score that musicians and non-musicians gave his performance. It appears that they either forgot or “forgave” the mistake by the time he reached the end of the piece!
But this was not the case for those who saw him make a face in response to the mistake. These musicians’ initial rating (44.00) dropped in response to the mistake and stayed down, ending at 35.50. Same for the non-musicians (45.50 initial rating; 36.50 final rating).

Why did this happen?​

So why are both musicians and non-musicians more likely to forgive a mistake when it isn’t accompanied by a look of frustration?
The authors note that when we interpret facial expressions, we don’t just intuit the person’s current mood, but also make generalizations about more stable characteristics and traits. So when we see a musician expressing frustration at making a mistake, instead of interpreting this as a random mistake, the expression of frustration may lead us to conclude that such mistakes are habitual, and that this is a musician who routinely struggles with consistency.

Take action​

As usual, it seems that our teachers were totally right. Making a mistake is not the end of the world, and an audience is often much more forgiving than we give them credit for being – so long as we can keep our face from giving us away and ruining the experience for them.
Would an audition committee or competition jury be as forgiving? That’s hard to say, but it’s probably a safe bet that maintaining your poker face is a better way to go, no matter how many mistakes you find yourself making on stage (or alternately, I guess you could make sure everything is a “hole-in-one,” ala Happy Gilmore).

Dig a little deeper​

If you’d like to geek out about this some more, the full paper and all five videos are online here:
Eye of the Beholder: Stage Entrance Behavior and Facial Expression Affect Continuous Quality Ratings in Music Performance (paper)
Supplementary Material (videos, etc.)
Or, if you only have time for the highlights, the researchers have distilled the videos down to 88 seconds here:
Does stage behaviour matter?

Found this article helpful? Here are two more things you might like:
  • Practice challenges: If practice has been feeling a little stale, change things up a bit with these 7-day practice plans, and make this your most productive week of practice yet.
  • Online mental skills course: Learn how to overcome nerves and become a more confident and effective performer in the Bulletproof Musician home-study course, where you'll develop six skills that athletes use to perform their best when it matters most.

I do one of two things:

1. Look at the bass player like they messed up

2. Make one of those heavy jazz face/groans like I'm just pushing myself to the limit and trying to modulate time or something super heady and people are like "yeahhhhh"


Half of the time - it works all the time.
 
I'm convinced that WHATEVER happens around the drum kit, the audience won't notice. It's liberating 😇 I dropped a stick at our last concert and missed a full bar I believe, even the band members didn't notice. During an earlier concert half the band played the verse while the other half was in the chorus, nobody took note.
There is a famous experiment in psychology where a guy in a gorilla suit enters a basketball game and nobody notices because they are paying attention to something else.
It must be the singer 👿
 
One...time...i messed up a wee tiny bit of the ending of Make me smile by Chicago. Why? I don't know..not paying attention? Being on autopilot?. Well..im talking with the bass player the next day and during conversation mentioned that the keyboard player was livid. I said what?..you can't be serious. During the next rehearsal it's all I could do to remain calm. I made it but it was an eternal rehearsal.
 
One...time...i messed up a wee tiny bit of the ending of Make me smile by Chicago. Why? I don't know..not paying attention? Being on autopilot?. Well..im talking with the bass player the next day and during conversation mentioned that the keyboard player was livid. I said what?..you can't be serious. During the next rehearsal it's all I could do to remain calm. I made it but it was an eternal rehearsal.
As I always say, we're not curing cancer, we're playing cover tunes in a bar.
 
If I drop a clanger I do my best to not let my face show it, however it can be an unconscious automatic reaction so perhaps not as easy to avoid as I'd like.
A pet peeve of mine though is when someone announces the next song along the lines of "we just played this song for the first time in rehearsal this week so if we make a mistake go easy on us". I swear I've seen audience members visibly lose the interest the band has fought hard to build after comments like that.
 
I laugh when I make a mistake but snarl when someone else does

Gotta keep the band on their toes
 
Been trying to utilize a gravity blast at gigs. It doesn't always take the 1st try, so I just restart until it does. It's a so-what moment. Every player screws up sometimes.
My solo also still sucks, but I keep trying anyway. I own the shame.
 
Been trying to utilize a gravity blast at gigs. It doesn't always take the 1st try, so I just restart until it does. It's a so-what moment. Every player screws up sometimes.
My solo also still sucks, but I keep trying anyway. I own the shame.
Hahaha.. Brother. I feel you owning your shame.. 🤘
 
Yeah that's terrible. If it really isn't ready, don't play it 🤷🏼‍♂️ Or else, never apologise in advance. Not even afterwards 😁
Was playing dance tunes in a gig where all the audience was having a ball dancing like crazy. Our neurotic bandleader kept apologizing for mistakes between songs. Some audience members told me afterwards how that was the only mistake they noticed and that each time it temporarily upset the mood.
 
I played a gig a few weeks ago where I launched a stick in the middle of a song and dropped the beat slightly before I was able to recover. Normally we just make goofy faces and laugh about it and keep going. It helps that our stage presence and crowd interaction between songs is basically a comedy act so nothing is taken seriously at all in our shows. I don't think the audience even reacted to the drop from what I can tell.

Going in while telling yourself "no one cares and are probably all drunk anyway" helps when you goof up on the kit.
 
"People hear with their eyes and think with their asses."~Lefty Phillips,©1988

The guy at the clinic, that came off as part of the act, and that's how I always approach situations like broken strings and such. Just go with it, have fun, make sure the audience knows you're having fun, they've having fun, and all is well with the world until last call. :)
 
I don't have total poker face but I embrace mistakes as little poops of self-expression and I don't get frowny. I might briefly look at the wall with a smirk on my face.

Life is too short to beat yourself up over poops.
 
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