Thursday 11th October 2012 – The BE OPEN Sound Portal (part two)

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Jay

This post continues from last weeks blog on the BE OPEN Sound Portal, displayed in Trafalgar Square as part of the London Design Festival. The previous post introduced the event and talked about the first piece and what effect it had on me as a listener. This week, the second post will talk about the next two very interesting pieces. The third will talk about the remaining pieces as well as the talk on the BE OPEN Sound Portal I attended which was hosted by Ben Evans, the Director of the London Design Festival. The fourth and final post will be about the application to real-world design of the ideas and lessons gained from this wonderful experience.

The second piece I experienced at the BE OPEN Sound Portal was created by Nathaniel Robin Mann and consisted of a journey through various sounds that were meaningful to the artist. Among other things, a folk choir, steam train and an aviary all featured, moving the listener on a journey from one space to another. In effect, this seemed to be an exploration of space and how it makes you feel; the various spaces were all very different and their mixture created further atmospheres. As each space visited the BE OPEN Sound Portal, the listener was transported to a different place and to a different set of feelings. The noise of the steam train, carefully intertwined with open urban spaces created a sense of freedom and re-assurance by immersing the listener anonymously within human interaction. For me, the visit to the aviary brought back exciting and wondrous feelings of exploring pet-shops and being mesmerized by exotic animals as a child; the recorded acoustics working wonderfully with the birdcalls. However, to somebody else, the notion of caged animals may bring an entirely different feeling. The interaction between the different spaces rather than what they contained created the sense of immersion and movement from one place to the next, solely through hearing different acoustics. This gives the listener a magical sense of travel and exploration, wondering where you will travel to next. The effect that space has on emotion and action is also very important, but more on this next week.

With the next piece at the BE OPEN Sound Portal, Jo Thomas aimed to create a hot space with the use of symbols. In a piece of improvisation, symbols were hit in various ways to create a sizzling mix of frequencies and pulses. This was a very interesting piece with only cymbals as a reference point. This very narrow focus meant that meaning is somewhat taken away from the equation, allowing the listener to focus on the physical experience of the sounds. However, the fact that the piece used a musical instrument meant that the listener is also tempted to create some kind of meaning usually associated with music ie. sense of story. Sound, instead of music was being used to influence the mind and other senses. Composers try this manipulation of the mind all of the time (think Vivaldi and The Four Seasons) but music is a very elitist method of communication due to its very abstract nature. Is simplifying the delivery going to make it more primal/human and therefore more relevant to more people and their experiences? More about this in a couple of weeks.

Thursday 4th October 2012 – The BE OPEN Sound Portal (part one)

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Jay

As part of the London Design Festival 2012, the BE OPEN Sound Portal was commissioned for exhibition in Trafalgar Square to show the public ‘design that you can’t see’. The BE OPEN Sound Portal, a large black rubber box, contained a cutting-edge sound system which uses a system called Ambisonics: a system of recording, mixing and presenting sound that uses nine speakers placed all around the listener for total sound immersion. Over five days, five sound artists displayed their commission; one on each day.

Because this event was such a landmark for the use of sound in everyday design (my main interest!), I will talk about the BE OPEN Sound Portal over four weekly posts. This post will introduce the event and talk about the first piece and what effect it had on me as a listener. The second will talk about the next two pieces and the third will talk about the remaining pieces as well as the talk on the BE OPEN Sound Portal I attended hosted by Ben Evans, the Director of the London Design Festival. The fourth and final post will be about the application to real-world design of the ideas and lessons gained from this wonderful experience.

Elena Baturina, Russian businesswoman, entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded BE OPEN, explained what the Sound Portal is all about: ‘Our project at the London Design Festival, the BE OPEN Sound Portal and associated events, involves working with people who represent the future of acoustic development. We will effectively be setting up an ambitious mobile laboratory for exploring the boundaries of what can be achieved with sound technology – an active demonstration of design’s transformational abilities – and holding talks and discussions to put these ideas forward. We engage with people across all platforms – the arts, science, education and the media – as we believe that the most innovative discoveries are made where these disciplines meet’

The first piece displayed at the BE OPEN Sound Portal was created by Russian Ivan Pavlov (also known as CoH). It was an electronic piece that brought together precise digitized noises as well as the processed chanting of the human voice. The effect was a somewhat otherworldly quasi-religious feeling brought about by the chanting and ethereal noises. The function of all religious noise-making is to totally envelope the noise-makers and/or listeners to bring them closer to a deity and the immersive nature of Ambisonic sound really contributed toward this. For me, the overriding lesson that I learned from this piece is the power of the human voice and how it can be applied to really effect atmosphere and mood. Even though the voices in this piece were heavily processed, inhuman and were making sounds that made no sense to me, their power was so very strong and totally changed the environment of the Sound Portal. Language is very important to the human experience and actually shapes the way our brain develops; I have even heard it suggested that language can account for cultural stereotypes. For example, the German language is very ordered and logical – is it therefore more likely to produce a brain that uses these aspects in everyday life? The Welsh, for whom singing is a famous part of their culture, speak a language that seems to sing poetically. English seems to break all the rules; could this produce an eccentric, creative way of thinking? These are all stereotypes of course and therefore have limited value, but I think it’s food for thought – more on this later… to be continued…

Thursday 24th November 2011 – Sound, Architecture and Environment

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Jay

The odd thing about recording is that your end product, the music, isn’t exactly real… it is a process that allows replication of something that has gone on before: The music etc is played live and a snapshot is taken. Also, you may know that the recording process cannot capture every single aspect of what the sound was like when you took that ‘snapshot’. Current technology is very good at trying to emulate the original sound and you could argue that it does it so well that the imperfections are not even noticed, especially to the non-musician.

However, there are aspects of live music that the face-value capture of sound encapsulates with great difficulty. Think about listening to a great busking band on the street. You have the excitement of stumbling upon the performance; the personalities of the performers as they interact with the crowd, verbally and with their instruments; the collective experience of being part of a crowd; your own state of mind, if you are on holiday for example; and all of the sounds and feelings associated with these aspects. Then there are the more physical aspects: the way the sound of the different instruments reverberate around the buildings (even depending on where each musician is sitting), the qualities of that reverberation (imagine the difference in sound of a cathedral to your living room); other sounds working with/against the music intentionally or otherwise; even the state of the air could influence the total experience. You then buy a copy of the band’s CD as the experience was so wonderful but, although the CD may sound good, it just isn’t the same.

The total experience (the actual music added to these aspects missing from the CD) is atmosphere (which I go on about all of the time!) and modern recording technologies can even go a long way to accounting for this; think about those realistic reverbs for example. To my mind, maybe a change in focus is what’s needed to get closer to this elusive ‘atmosphere’. When recording, maybe don’t think of it as recording music; or even as recording a performance. Maybe think about the process as recording an experience. This combined with keeping an open mind about what you can use to achieve this may produce even stronger results. Music in particular tries to reproduce the thoughts and feelings of the song-writer using abstract methods (communicating with a guitar is very different from talking!), so why not extrapolate this to the whole process rather than just the sound-making? You could even take this to the extreme by reproducing the atmosphere of a performance without actually including the instrument being used, although this would be a little silly if you are recording a virtuoso violinist because they are technically brilliant, for example! Obviously, the balance of sound reproduction and atmosphere would have more real-life applications…

So, that finally brings me to the more overt topic of this post. Architecture could be said to be one of the unsung heroes of the life experience. We take it for granted that buildings, trees, and the rest of our surroundings are ‘just there’ but as any architect will tell you, these surroundings mold our lives and our life experience/atmosphere. Therefore if we are thinking about the recording of music as above, it follows that we should take time to notice how sound interacts with the spaces it is immersed in. This could go further than just putting the sounds in a reverb that emulates the space, and many musicians work with furthering this idea (for example Gustav Holst tried to describe the planets of our solar system in his music ‘The Planets’ using an orchestra; The band The Gathering used samples of crowd noises and street noises in their album ‘If Then Else’ to manipulate the atmosphere).

Thinking about how sounds interacts with architecture or the environment may not lead to placing sounds in a space as such, but it may also deepen an understanding of sound by looking into it’s real-life behaviour, which could loosen-up a musician’s perspective and therefore increase creativity. For example, watch this you-tube video of a fantastic sound-art installation and see what you learn…

http://youtu.be/Ve6PTrlLGOU

Also, think about the application of sound within the architectural field. Have a read here for some actual buildings/projects that have been designed to work within an environment that takes sound into account. A couple use fountains to put up a mask of ‘white noise’ (which contains sound from all frequencies- i.e. the ‘snow’ on blank analogue TV channels) to cover traffic noise; a classroom was also designed to reduce spill of outside noise whilst emphasising the frequencies that the human voice occupies; raised portions and physical barriers evade noise and different materials sound differently when walked on. Related to this, there are companies out there that design sound for business, taking every sound made within the company’s remit a part of their brand i.e. you wouldn’t use a noisy, clangy metallic floor in a shop that specialises in massage or meditation.

Of course, this is a two-way street as well. Musicians and sound recorders can learn from sound in the real world and architects can learn from musical idealism i.e. calming soundscapes may be used in a massage parlour so maybe the building can be constructed in a way to emphasises these sounds.

So, if you are a music fan see if these ideas change the way you listen to music; musicians out there, maybe try thinking about sound differently and see if it enhances your output; and if you are involved in any aspect of creation think about how sound is as much a part of experience as your chosen field is and how careful thought around it can enhance the end product.

Thursday 14th July 2011 – Audio/Visual Experiment

Posted on July 14, 2011 by transientmusic

This week’s post is a little explanation of some work of mine that Lesley Flower has posted on her website and is something I’ve mentioned a few times. The project will appear on my brand new website when it’s completed but for now you can have a look through the link below:

Audio/Visual Experiment

The idea behind the project is to immerse the viewer/listener in a world of our choosing, each aspect (audio and visual) strengthening the other. The internet is not an ideal medium for this as we have no control over the monitor or headphoens you are using and we also have to use MP3s which are poorer quality than a CD. Also, we cannot eradicate all of the different distractions present when you choose to take a look (playing children, busy roads outside, TV in the next room, etc etc). So, if we are to get as close to the ideal conditions as possible, lock yourself in a quiet room, use some decent headphones and try to avoid any other stimuli. Don’t worry if this isn’t possible but if we ever get the chance to exhibit please to come down and check it out in the form we intended!

….One thing before you read on though….. Another external stimuli it would be best to avoid would be any information on the project that I may give you…. For that reason, click on the link above or here and experience what’s on offer before you read on…. You wouldn’t want to know the ending to a film you want to see at the cinema would you..?

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As mentioned, the final product needs to be immersive and I felt that if I overtly referred to the themes of the pictures, the sound would not be so closely tied to the photo. This may sound counter-intuitive but because the themes require an amount of semantic processing by our brains after viewing, an inevitable delay in reaction (however small) will probably occur. I feel that if I tap into the more primitive parts of the brain by referring to basic visual stimuli instead of the more complex stuff, the audio should require less processing and have a clearer path to action, rather like how instinct works. Instinct can provide a stronger reaction in terms of your body’s current atmosphere/context so I thought this might be the best way to create something more all-encompassing. However, at the end of the day I may as well be a layman in theoretical psychology as it has been years since I studied it so don’t take these theories to be contemporary fact. But if our project does have the intended profound effect on you please do think about how it may have achieved this and let us know your thoughts on how it may have done this. This is an exploratory project after all and maybe any follow-ups could look more deeply into current perceptual theory, depending on this project’s success.

So, with the picture containing the flowers I chose to create sounds for the flowers coming in and out of focus, the dandelions, and the blurred background rather than describe a meadow or collection of plants. The way these sounds weave around is designed to accompany how your eye my explore the photograph. Similarly, with the second picture I chose to create sounds to represent the smooth grey backdrop of the photograph; the gloopy appearance of some of the raindrops, as well as the sheen on them; and the blurred sections. I think that this second photograph doesn’t invite the eye to explore it as much as the first due to the figures (droplets) seeming more randomly placed. In my experience when confronted with a random array of something, the brain doesn’t like to try and piece it together but instead tries to take it all as a whole. So for that reason I randomly spattered varying gloops and their sheens across the backdrop. However, underlying this the patches of differing shade do invite some eye movement so it was this aspect I chose to vary in a narrative manner. In hindsight, the sounds used are like falling rain which would push your brain into processing the semantics, something I didn’t want to do; so I may have to go back and rethink this aspect or just see if this particular picture is less successful than the others. This is all a learning process!

Now you know a bit more about the work maybe take another look/listen and see if you experience it differently. Any comments on your experience would be most welcome!

Thursday 12th May 2011 – Are you a music person?

Posted on May 12, 2011 by transientmusic

You may recall from previous blog posts that I’m an advocate of the idea that any music is good music in it’s own context and there is no such thing as bad music (see ‘Why should you give ‘shit’ music a chance?’ , ‘Galvanise your music taste aka ‘Metal Up Your Ass!” or ‘What is music?’).

This is because there are many different opinions on what good music is and what bad music is; and basically, how can they all be right!? You may think that you know a lot about music and therefore have a valid opinion on what good music actually is compared to somebody that you or anyone else (including themselves) deem unknowledgeable. The very fact that music is a human construct and is seen through subjective eyes could point out the idea that there may be no objective truth. In a previous post (‘Why do we like music?’) I took a brief look at the biological factors in the enjoyment of music but as this only looked at why we enjoy music in general it left questions about why it can have these effects on our brains. Is the love of music fully innate (ie are we born with it?)…? Are there social causes that influence these physical factors? As a factor that seems to appear in-between the nature/nurture debate I will talk a little about how personality has been found to influence music preference.

Studies have shown (click here to see original citations) that most people like a song more the more they hear it. However, these studies also show that if they hear a song too much they start to dislike it. This ‘mere exposure’ effect has also been shown with many stimuli outside of music. This effect would seem to explain why many pop songs fall out of favour after a while; that melody you originally couldn’t get enough of doesn’t do it for you anymore or that catchy tune you appreciated is actually starting to get on your nerves now. The most straight-forward explanation for this is a model that states novel stimuli arouse our senses because, evolutionarily speaking, it could pose a threat. Continued exposure that causes no harm then leads our brains to become uninterested in the stimuli as it has been deemed safe, although we tend to be affected by it positively for a while. Interestingly enough, this pattern has been shown using music which is focused upon (by performing a task relating to the music being played) but when music is just played in the background (whilst a completely unrelated task is performed) liking for the music keeps on increasing in a linear manner. This means that this affect occurs because we are mentally interacting with the music.

Is it as simple as exposure though..? A study by Patrick G. Hunter and E. G. Schellenberg found that a certain personality type actually has a similar although meaningfully different response to repeated music. Previous studies have found that different personality types actually bring about a preference to different genres of music but, as I have whined about in the past, genre categories here seem to be less meaningful than more general, abstract qualities outside of genre (ie. its not as clear cut as one group likes rock whilst another likes classical). This is shown because results aren’t always fully replicated. The study mentioned above looked at a personality type called ‘Openness-to-Experience’ which is among five main personality types that have been shown to exist throughout the population. An individual can score low or high on each personality type showing that any person could have each of the types to differing degrees. Individuals that score highly on this particular trait are more comfortable with new ideas and ambiguity. The researchers found out that (in relation to classical music), personality type can influence whether or not you like music (well, classical music). Those that scored highly on ‘Openness -to-Experience’ tended to like music more quickly but also disliked music more quickly than the rest of the sample. It was the ‘mere-exposure effect’, but accelerated. Personality therefore does have an affect.

After informally talking to a few people about why they like music, it seems that the sentiment of the music is something rated highly quite a lot. In relation to this, successful music seems to be that which manages to convey whatever sentiment is intended well enough for enough people to understand it. This seems to be a sort of emotional communication that the listener is picking up on and it would make sense that a personality type more sensitive to understanding emotion would be attracted to music that conveys such an abstract concept.

Of course, the experimental findings on personality all make a lot of sense but it’s interesting to think that if this theory is refined it could be possible to guarantee music sales in a way that makes it less necessary for musicians to take part in hard slogging on the road to develop an audience. If you know who your audience is you can target them. In the light of previous difficulties of replicating results based on genre, it is also interesting to note that you could categorise your music by something more abstract than genre to enable you to sell more music, and that these definitions are not necessarily understood by your audience…. In fact, traditional genre labels would help customers categorise their tastes as they do now but those selling the music could be using completely different definitions to actually sell to them…

Thursday 21st April 2011 – Why do we like music?

Posted on April 21, 2011 by transientmusic

Some of my readers will know that I studied Psychology at university. And a smaller group will know that I considered taking my study further and incorporating it into my love of music. During this time I visited some of the few universities that were home to Music Psychology. I found it all very interesting but I had a few problems… Firstly and most predictable, cost was a massive factor; it’s not cheap studying for a masters degree. Secondly, I needed to be going somewhere with my life and felt further study would just allow me to amble along not really knowing my direction. In any case, most courses also required that I have some kind of formal music qualification. Yeah, the best I had here was grade 2 piano which I passed when 13. However, the most compelling reason for me not to take such a course was that I hadn’t really finished investigating myself in relation to music and the thought of dedicating myself to this rather than objective study was far more exciting for me. Now, with a wiser head on my shoulders I realise that studying music in relation to your own thoughts and feelings never ends; music can never be accomplished and it can never fully explain anything. There are plenty of people out there who will tell you otherwise in the form of awards and recognition but dig a little deeper and you will probably find that there are subtler forces at work: Music awards, like the Brit Awards etc, are designed to tell everyone how important and significant the industry is so it can continue to make money (which I’m obviously not against!). Social factors are also at work here as, in my opinion, social-standing in relation to one’s peers is very important and music is regularly used to bolster this.

Anyway, now that I am fully comfortable exploring what I have to explore (and at the moment it feels like I have enough to last me a lifetime at least), I am finding room to ask myself questions about music and am actually finding a small amount of time to read about these questions. I hope to expand this available time though as I really want to integrate these questions and answers into my output. This all means that you may start seeing some blog posts from me that consider the psychological aspects of music more. This doesn’t mean that I will be using longer words and talking about things in such a way that only a graduate would understand but it does mean that I will be looking at research more and pointing the reader in the right direction to learn more. Through looking at actual research there will be a better chance of me being able to hone my thoughts through the filter of scientific finding and actually use them to progress my own music and my understanding of it. However, please to bare in mind that that I am not an active researcher, cannot dedicate my life to such study and have been out of such academic thinking since 2003… I will try my best though…

I have written a previous post that asks the question: ‘What is music?’ and have presented a couple of examples that challenge popular culture’s belief regarding this here and here. The next most obvious question could be said to be: ‘why do we like music?’. Music seems to be something that everybody likes (although frustratingly in modern culture, people wont support or attempt to understand it’s core beyond how fit the singer is…). The anthropologist Donald Brown wrote that music is one of the ‘Human Universals’ that appear in every culture, meaning that it cannot be something that is totally culturally dependant: there is something about being human that ensures we have an enjoyment of music no matter what our culture teaches us, meaning that it must have biological/genetic causes. So, what is it that creates this love for music? Even though music has genetic connections, I am of the opinion that liking music is also dependant on societal aspects (especially modern western music) and that this is different and more complex than a particular society influencing people to like music in general; it is worth noting that ‘concern of having a positive self-image’ is also one of Brown’s Human Universals… Also, it is interesting that music doesn’t seem to have any biological value even though it seems to be part of our biology. Is it’s genetic function social and is this factor needed for evolutionary survival?

Some researchers have looked into this physiological basis of the enjoyment of music and a focus of this has been looking at the ‘chills’ music fans experience. These chills are the feeling you get when you reach a part of a song that you really love which causes you to experience a shiver down your spine, goosebumps etc. Not everyone experiences this but nonetheless it has still been tested due to the interesting physiological effects. Neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor gathered a group of people that told her they experience these ‘chills’ and also tested a group that did not experience these chills for comparison. It turns out that chills are actually part of the brain’s reward system in that they are related to the release of something called ‘dopamine’ in the brain, which makes us feel nice (if anything feels nice this chemical is involved). Also, the researchers found a similar yet different effect for the period of time leading up to the most pleasurable part of the music just as we are about to experience this chill. This could show that enjoying expecting our favourite part is part of the actual enjoyment. Think of how the thought of eating McDonalds food can be great but eating it is rarely as good… it’s the complete experience we go for.

So, we enjoy the experience of chills much like biologically important events like eating (as you can see, expectation is part of the pleasure system). It might seem obvious but here is biological proof of why we like music: It triggers parts of our brain that make us feel nice in a similar way as biologically important events do except music does not seem to have any relevance to our survival; and the expectation of what is to come in the music we like increases our enjoyment.

The next question could be: ‘why does the brain treat music in this way..?’. It might also be worthwhile looking at whether or not the chill effect is cross-cultural… after all, it could still be an association to pleasure that our society has taught us somehow. Also, is music’s relevance to our survival just more subtle than expected? Could it be a social factor that groups us together? Considering we are social animals could this be a valid point? If you know of any article that talks about these questions please do let me know…

Click here to read Valorie Salimpoor’s original research article and here for further information from the article by Victoria Williamson that introduced me to the topic.