A new study conducted by pianist Dr Chia-Jung Tsay of University College London suggests that classical music competitions are judged as much  - if not more – on visuals and stage presence as they are on sound quality.

The research, published in the PNAS journal, found that people shown silent videos of 10 international piano competitions could more easily pick out the winners than those who were given an audio track of the performance.

Even more interestingly, those of the 1000 music professionals and novices who were given both video and audio of the performances demonstrated around the same chance levels of accuracy as those who judged only the audio.

‘Regardless of levels of expertise, we still seem to be led primarily by visual information, even in this domain of music,’ said Dr Tsay. ‘Classical music training is often focused on improving the quality of the sound, but this research is about getting to the bottom of what is really being evaluated at the highest levels of competitive performance. We must be more mindful of our inclination to depend on visual information at the expense of the content that we actually value as more relevant to our decisions.’

The results certainly throw up some interesting questions about the way that competitions are judged – especially in an age of increasing video access on a myriad of media. And unlike Gramophone reviews, which more often than not are judged by our critics on an audio recording (unless dealing with a DVD performance), most competitions take place on a concert stage combining both a visual and aural element.

So what do you think? Are the results yet another mark against the high pressure and – some might say – unnatural environment of competitions? Or do you think that the visual element of musical performance is important in its own right?