Firstly I found a TED talk about how sound affects you in 4 different ways:
- Physiological- Breathing, heart rate, brainwaves, hormones
- Psychological- Emotional State
- 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:
Now I have done this research I feel more comfortable with piecing together what I want to do with my project.
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