An eight-week Chan (Zen) meditation program did not significantly improve musical performance quality among conservatory students. However, the meditation group showed a positive relationship between performance anxiety and performance quality, while the control group showed the opposite: as performance anxiety increased, performance quality decreased. This suggests that mindfulness and concentration cultivated by Chan practice may help performers channel anxiety to enhance performance.
Music performance anxiety (MPA) prevents many musicians from performing at their best, and meditation is one coping tool. This qualitative study explored experts' experiences with meditative techniques for MPA through 16 semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis identified three main themes: how experts describe MPA, factors influencing meditation's effectiveness, and which techniques reduce MPA. Body-centered meditations, breathing techniques, visualizations, and Vipassana meditation were prominent. Affect-centered meditations showed promise for counteracting perfectionism and self-criticism. Findings may help educational institutions and musicians seeking emotional awareness and self-regulation strategies to improve performance.
Fifty-seven undergraduate non-musicians listened to four types of auditory stimuli during mindfulness meditation: a script alone, a steady beat, beat with harmony, and beat with harmony and melody. When controlling for absorption in music, there was no significant difference in mindfulness scores across the four conditions. Without that control, significant differences emerged, suggesting that a person's tendency to become absorbed in music moderates how different sounds affect mindfulness. Participants ranked the melody and harmony conditions as most useful and preferred for meditation.
Religious music can trigger religious experiences, but this effect is at least partly dependent on cultural background. In a cross-cultural experiment with 84 Turkish and 63 German participants, religious music elicited religious experiences more strongly in some cultural contexts, while certain types of religious music failed to trigger such experiences regardless of culture, suggesting a possible neuropsychological component. Positive emotions felt during music strongly predicted religious experience. The findings indicate that both cultural and neuropsychological factors play a role.