I was approached by my friend Tom on the animation course in 3rd year to work on a project called 'Wake Me Up' which is a short documentary style animation which surrounds the topic of sleep paralysis.
He sent me an email with a reference to a documentary on sleep paralysis, which has some sounds in that he was looking for in his work:
Once he had sent that email, a few days later he sent an animatic for his review with his lecturers for me to do sound design on. This piece very abstract and I really liked that I could create my own sound effects for it, based on the documentary he sent me. Which is in fact a very interesting documentary in it's own right. He said he really liked what I did with the sound, and now I have to wait for more animation from him.
Following on from my other research, I wanted to look at the psychology of sound and how it affects you in mind and body. Firstly I found a TED talk about how sound affects you in 4 different ways:
Cognitively- You can't understand large amounts of sound at once.
Behaviourally- fast paced music makes you drive faster, we leave when we hear pleasant sounds.
I can expand on different ways in which sound affects you and it will probably fall into one of those four categories.
Sound in language helps us read emotions just as we would read facial expressions. A study revealed that when people were exposed to a fearful sounding recording and a photograph of someone with a fearful look on their face, there was much more increased brain activity than if they were neutral.
There is also such a thing as conditioning with sound, which is manipulating memory to condition our emotions in response to certain events. For example, when you hear a piece of music and it reminds you of a particular time in your life. A rather cruel study done on rats where they were played a sound before being electrocuted over time showed the rats become fearful of that sound as they associated it with pain.
When talking about how sound affects the brain we can again talk about binaural beats, and brain waves. When you play binaural beats at a particular frequency then you have an effect on the brain waves we produce. These then have an effect on how we feel. There are four categories of brain wave frequency:
Delta: associated with loss of awareness, deep sleep. Ranges from 0.1-3.9Hz.
Theta: Associated with deep relaxation, sleep. Ranges from 4-7.9Hz.
Alpha: Associated with relaxation while awake, dreaming, pre-sleep and pre-wake drowsiness. Ranges from 8-13.9Hz.
Beta: Associated with being active, busy, concentrated, survival, problem solving etc. Ranges from 14-30Hz.
These waves are often associated with spirituality, and meditation, but they do have their foundations in scientific research.
Sound doesn’t just affect your brain, it also affects your hormone releases. High pitched, panicked sounds like the sound of an alarm raises your heart rate and releases cortisol into your blood, which is the hormone that activates the feeling of fight or flight. In a similar vein, horror movies create tension using silence and very low frequency sounds to make you feel uncomfortable, and then breaking the tension with a release of cortisol using a jump scare.
I found a thread on a sound forum asking members what films made them feel the most uncomfortable which will aid me in my research on different sound design techniques and why they work so well:
After my tutorial with Kathleen last week, where she gave me some suggestions for research, I went away and did some broad research around the topic I wish to base my project on.
I firstly researched Maryanne Amacher who was an American composer and sound designer who sadly died a few years ago. Her work was very site specific and she liked to incorporate the acoustics of a particular place in her work. She also used psychoacoustics to create auditory illusions in her work, namely, otoacoustic emissions which is mostly used for testing hearing. It is a sound which is given off by the inner ear when the ears are stimulated by sound. When you hear these sounds they feel as if they are coming from inside your head.
"When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head ... (my audiences) discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room. Tones 'dance' in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes ... Do not be alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! ... these virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception ... I want to release this music which is produced by the listener ..." (Maryanne Amacher)
Here is an example of a piece of work that includes this called Synaptic Island:
This led me to research other psychoacoustic illusions in connection to this one. One of which I found to have a similar kind of effect to the one above, which is called a Phantom Voice. This occurs when two tones are played or sung together and a third tone is produced, seemingly from a different source. It feels as if it is coming from the centre if you play both tones in separate ears. Here is an example of it:
If you listen closely you can hear a third higher tone here which does not exist in reality.
Your brain also perceives beats in sound if two tones are played at slightly different frequencies, with a difference of less than 30hz. This is because of the way your brain deals with the frequency difference of each tone which then allows you to hear a beat that isn't there. Here is an example of this:
The last illusion I looked at in depth is something called a scale illusion. It was discovered by a psychologist in 1973 called Diana Deutsch. The illusion starts with a scale, with low and high notes played into both ears respectively. The illusion makes it appear as if the high notes are played in one ear and the low notes are played in the other. In reality the scale is played with some highs in one ear and some in the left, and vice versa for the right. However the way our brain processes the sound makes it appear the way it does. Here is an example of it:
Lastly I researched another artist called Karlheinz Stockhausen. He works in music, but unconventionally. A lot of his pieces focus on one or two aspects of sound, enhancing them and exploring them. I looked at a variety of his pieces but I found an article which spoke a bit about a particular one called Kontakte.
Karlheinz Stockhausen created a pivotal moment in the history of music with his work Kontakte (1958-1960). According to the composer, “In the preparatory work for my composition Kontakte, I found, for the first time, ways to bring all properties of sound [i.e. timbre, pitch, intensity and duration] under a single control.” The most famous moment, at 17:03 minutes, is a potent illustration of these connections. A high, bright tone descends in several waves, becoming louder as it gradually acquires a snarling timbre, and finally passes below the point where it can be heard any longer as a pitch. As it crosses this threshold, it becomes evident that the tone consists of pulses, which continue to slow until they become a steady beat.
This famous descending tone uncovers a fundamental understanding of our hearing. Once a tone passes below the threshold of 16 Hz we stop perceiving tone, and start to hear beats. The range of hearing was never explored in this way before this moment, because there was no instrument that could perform this frequency range. Up until that time, beats and tones were considered separate musical properties – and often they still are. Beats belong to the realm of rhythm and tempo, and tones to melody and harmony. With Kontakte, Stockhausen showed that beats and tones form a continuum, and the distinction between them is an illusion. It is exclusively due to the lower threshold in our hearing, whether we perceive sound as beats or tone.
Stockhausen worked with instruments and with electronic ways of creating sound, and it is understood that he paved the way for electronic music to come about. Here is Kontatke:
All of this research has given me some context into sound, and how it manipulates the body. Now I can think about how to draw up a plan for what I want to achieve with my own sound design.
