When Wontae Kim wakes up this morning, he doesn't know what awaits him in the evening.

He is a musician, solo violist in the Brandenburg Concert Orchestra in Eberswalde.

On Instagram he discovers a post by Amihai Grosz.

Together with Alban Gerhardt, Baiba Skride, Gergana Gergova and Michail Afkham, Grosz plays a quintet program on eleven consecutive days.

The usual "sandwich program": classical, new music, romantic.

In this case: Beethoven, Dean, Brahms.

The concert takes place in a former pumping station, the Berliner Radialsystem.

Kim has never been there.

At the place, numerous people cavort around the reception desk and in the hallway.

It teems with questions and curiosity.

Here Kim learns that he can listen to the concert not only as a visitor, but also as a participant in Experimental Concert Research (ECR).

For that he had to be wired.

Kim agrees.

He becomes subject number 54. .

With dozens of other test participants, he is led into a room with huge arched windows.

The light of the evening sun falls on the hundred seats in the room.

Tablets with questionnaires and declarations of consent are laid out on plywood tables, so that breathing, heart rate, skin conductance, facial expressions and movement are recorded during the concert.

Kim signs and begins the questionnaire.

In terms of his previous musical knowledge, he states that he is a musician himself.

After a few more replies, he looks up and says, "Apparently it's about my future."

immersion and synchronicity

He will have to wait another two to five years for answers.

By then, musicologists, psychologists, sociologists and musicians will have read the ECR data set.

Research leader is the cultural sociologist Martin Tröndle.

Together with an international team of researchers, he is investigating whether and under what conditions people synchronize with music.

The working hypothesis is: "The immersion in music leads to increased synchronicity." In astronomy, immersion describes the moment when one celestial body steps into the shadow of another.

Our body can also come under the influence of aesthetic stimuli such as music.

This is decisive for the question of who will attend concerts in the future and what they might look like.

The starting point is the grievances that became apparent during the corona pandemic.

State funding for culture, for example, could be significantly reduced or non-existent due to a lack of scope.

According to a survey by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, cultural institutions only reach 4.5 percent of their potential users with their current offerings.

That sounds alarming, but it cannot be proven, writes Tröndle in his book about "non-visitors".

His research shows that proximity is the decisive factor for visiting a cultural institution, both in the literal and in the figurative sense: be it proximity to one's own reality,

the proximity to the stage with the immediacy of live experience or the proximity to familiar people.

Hardly anyone wants to go to a concert or a museum alone.

The result: "Cultural institutions are currently unable to get close to 75 percent of the test subjects." Now Tröndle asks: Who would go to the concert if ... ?