Enhancing Multimodal Interaction Between Performers and Audience Members During Live Music Performances

Live performance provides a good example of enthusiastic interaction between people gathered together in a large group and one or more performers. In this research, we focused on elucidating the mechanism of such enthusiastic group interaction (collective effervescence) and how technology can contribute to its enhancement. We propose a support system for co-experience and physical co-actions among participants to enhance enthusiastic interaction between performers and audiences during live performances. This system focuses on a physical synchronization between the performer and the audience as the key that generates enthusiastic interaction during a live performance. Also, it supports enhanced bidirectional communication of the performer's actions and the audience's cheering behaviors. An experiment in an actual live performance environment in which collective effervescence was already occurring demonstrated that the bidirectional communication and visualization of physical movements in the proposed system contributed to the further unification of the group.