Why do people go to concerts? U-M is helping the Berlin Philharmonic find out
By Jon Meerdink
A 144-year old orchestra is looking for the answer to a simple question: why do people go to concerts? A new study is helping the orchestral team find out.
The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research is working with the University Musical Society and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to discover and explore data that cuts to the heart of why audiences do what they do. Working closely with members of the orchestra, ISR researchers are developing ways to measure audience experience, while also determining the larger impact of a Berlin Philharmonic performance.
“You have the experience of a concert, but how much does it stick with you?” said ISR Director Kate Cagney. “Do you think about that music a week later, a month later, a year later? Do you send that music to a friend? Do you share the experience of the concert, and does that have spillover effects socially?”
Building on an existing relationship UMS has with the orchestra, ISR representatives traveled to Berlin in May 2025 to gain a better understanding of the Berlin Philharmonic’s relationship with its audience. But rather than merely relying on a simple survey and assessing audience reactions on a scale ranging from strong negative responses to strong positive ones, the partnership is pushing for new and better measures.
Working closely with musicians such as principal horn player Stefan Dohr, ISR researchers interviewed 11 members of the orchestra to build on previous methods of surveying the audience about their experience.
In addition to the innovative inquiry methods, researchers are also exploring additional data capture methods, including extended follow-up conversations with audience members about how they experienced a particular Berlin Philharmonic event. They are even geofencing data surrounding the orchestra venue to try to capture information about spillover effects after a performance comes to an end.
But the measurement doesn’t end there. Through in-depth interviews with members of the orchestra, researchers also hope to quantify key aspects of their relationship with the audience during and after a performance, including one somewhat counterintuitive measurement: the amount of silence. Silence, it turns out, is a key indicator of audience engagement.
“You have the experience of a concert, but how much does it stick with you? Do you think about that music a week later, a month later, a year later? Do you send that music to a friend? Do you share the experience of the concert, and does that have spillover effects socially?”
When an audience is truly engaged during a performance, the concert venue is practically silent during pauses and between movements. But when an audience is a bit tuned out, orchestra members reported being able to hear rustling, movement and other sounds that indicated distracted listening.
ISR researchers are now working to synthesize their data while continuing to develop new scientific approaches to quantifying audience engagement and potentially expanding their study to include other arts initiatives. If studying one performing arts group’s relationship with its audience yields results, Cagney believes other organizations could benefit as well.
“We want to think about comparison work with other orchestras, but also other forms of artistic expression and how some of these metrics could be generalized,” Cagney said.
Future innovation could include ever-more-nuanced measures of an artistic experience, including data as granular as monitoring an audience member’s heart rate during a performance or tracking broad emotional well-being over time and its relationship to artistic engagement.
That kind of measurement is already important to projects close to home for ISR: at the University of Michigan, the universitywide Arts Initiative supports a program called “Arts Rx,” which works with healthcare providers to connect people with community-based activities including art to boost mental and emotional health.
Audience capture has proven elusive even in broad artistic contexts, and identifying audience trends at a level as specific as a particular concert performance is a difficult target to hit. It’s novel and cutting edge research. But with promising partners like UMS and the Berlin Philharmonic, and a determination to seek out new approaches to finding important data, Cagney believes anything is possible.
“ISR has always been known for leading the way in how we characterize the social fabric of our lives. Why not in this realm?”