Today was the most fun and enjoyable forum I have been involved in to date. A lot of this had to do with the direct interaction between presenters and listeners and the relaxed nature of class discussion, although some may just call this clowning around. Instead of listing my opinions on each presenters choices I will now elaborate on my own choices and waffle on a bit more.
The third year students will probably recall my presentation last year on so called formulas in music and generating particular emotional responses with sound. Since psychoacoustics is already an area of interest to me I found this forum very enjoyable.
It is my understanding that the Indian emotions are to trigger a direct emotional response in the audience and not simply to project an aural cliché* of this emotion, therefore I made a conscious decision to not simply play musical sounds or manipulated sound effects. I wanted my audio choice to be a single subject with many possible interpretations based on timbre, pitch, frequency and generally on how it made me physically respond. I wanted the sound to be organic so as to relate to humans more. I considered various animal noises, and then realised what the creature was that spurs the most emotional response from other human beings on the planet. Babies.
Instead of repeating what I said at forum, I will move on at this point. It would appear that to get a ‘true’ emotional response from a sound and not a mere cliched memory of a sound, one would need to be in a Theta state. In other words, you would not need to think about it. It would just happen. You have suddenly gotten goosebumps while hearing something for example. Quite often during todays presentation we needed to do a lot of thinking or simply guess as to what emotion the sound was representing. This is sending us up into Beta states. So does that mean a piece of the puzzle of emotional response in sound lies somewhere around 5 to 8Hz? So emotion in sound is based on sub frequencies? Possibly, but I am only speculating. If there is a way to identify what makes us respond a particular way to certain sounds, could it be extracted and included in non cliched 'off the wall' music to create the same intended emotional response as the cliched music? One thing I forsee in a future such as this is that music would lose all melody and harmony. Would this be a good thing for music? Perhaps deep down we all like the cliches and familiarities in music and would not want it any other way.
The third year students will probably recall my presentation last year on so called formulas in music and generating particular emotional responses with sound. Since psychoacoustics is already an area of interest to me I found this forum very enjoyable.
It is my understanding that the Indian emotions are to trigger a direct emotional response in the audience and not simply to project an aural cliché* of this emotion, therefore I made a conscious decision to not simply play musical sounds or manipulated sound effects. I wanted my audio choice to be a single subject with many possible interpretations based on timbre, pitch, frequency and generally on how it made me physically respond. I wanted the sound to be organic so as to relate to humans more. I considered various animal noises, and then realised what the creature was that spurs the most emotional response from other human beings on the planet. Babies.
Instead of repeating what I said at forum, I will move on at this point. It would appear that to get a ‘true’ emotional response from a sound and not a mere cliched memory of a sound, one would need to be in a Theta state. In other words, you would not need to think about it. It would just happen. You have suddenly gotten goosebumps while hearing something for example. Quite often during todays presentation we needed to do a lot of thinking or simply guess as to what emotion the sound was representing. This is sending us up into Beta states. So does that mean a piece of the puzzle of emotional response in sound lies somewhere around 5 to 8Hz? So emotion in sound is based on sub frequencies? Possibly, but I am only speculating. If there is a way to identify what makes us respond a particular way to certain sounds, could it be extracted and included in non cliched 'off the wall' music to create the same intended emotional response as the cliched music? One thing I forsee in a future such as this is that music would lose all melody and harmony. Would this be a good thing for music? Perhaps deep down we all like the cliches and familiarities in music and would not want it any other way.
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For anyone interested in the video files I used today, here they are in the order I played them in flash format.
bhayanaka (fear/terror)
bhayanaka (fear/terror)
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Whittington, Steven. 2008. “Forum.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 4th September.
* Edward Kelly had stated that we [the public] had grown used to Hollywood’s cliched use of the same chord progressions and sounds to express a particular emotion.
Whittington, Steven. 2008. “Forum.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 4th September.
* Edward Kelly had stated that we [the public] had grown used to Hollywood’s cliched use of the same chord progressions and sounds to express a particular emotion.
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