The Universal Sense, by Seth Horowitz, is a book about “how hearing shapes the mind” from a musical and neurological perspective. I read Chapter 5, which explained how sound affects time, attention and emotion. I found this extremely enlightening because it explained sound from a neurological, and therefore psychological, perspective. This is applicable to our project because we want to use sound to manipulate and control the audience’s emotions, interpretation and experience to communicate our message. So, understanding, even on a basic level, how sound affects our attention and emotion will enable us to better meet our intentions.
Some of the main points that I got out of this chapter was:
Familiar sounds elicit a faster response and jump out of background noise.
Sound is one of the fastest triggers for emotional response.
Loud and low pitched sounds are generally interpreted as coming from something large, thus eliciting fear.
Because our brain subconsciously monitors background noise, the absence of sound leads to arousal and attention: something is missing, and therefore wrong.
Understanding how sound directly affects more complex emotions is not yet understood because they are not often directly linked to our instinctive survival response.
Negative emotional responses generally perceive the sound as louder, even if it is played at the same amplitude as other sounds.
Sounds from living things, especially form humans, create a stronger emotional response than mechanical sounds.
I found this last point extremely interesting because of how we could apply this knowledge to our project. For us, we want to avoid using any dialogue or distinguishable conversations in the soundscape. Thus, in a way we might rely more on mechanical sounds to communicate our narrative. However, I know that we want to be able to still create a strong emotional response in the listener. So, how do we do that within the limitations that we have given our self?
After much thought, I realised that there are other human generated sounds that isn’t speech. E.g.sighs, coughs, crying, laughter etc… So that is one way we can use human sounds to elicit stronger emotional response from the audience.
Horowitz further goes on to say that it’s is not what we say, but how we say things, that is the most important. E.g. pitch, pace, tone, volume etc.. Building on from this, I think it’d be very interesting to see if we can use voice techniques as a platform of inspiration from which we devise our soundscape. I think this might help us achieve distinct moods in our soundscape by mimicking the voice techniques used to show certain emotions. E.g. in cold anger your pitch lowers, you pace slows down with equal emphasis, and your volume and tone remains even. So, if we wanted to create this emotion in our soundscape we could take inspiration from those voice techniques e.g. have a low monotone drone, long and even beats etc…
This makes me super excited because it is something that I was interested in exploring in my soundscape for the Sound Project, and because it links nicely to my interest in drama.
From this, I want to try applying what I learnt from this chapter, as well as the ideas I discussed above, to my practice as I devise and create my section of the soundscape.
Horowitz, S. S. (2012), The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, Bloomsbury: New York, Chapter 5: What Lies Below, pages 94 – 131. Retrieved on the 24/5/17
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