I created a survey for the sole purpose of testing out my research on Non-linearity, Dissonance, infrasound's and cultural acoustic symbols
What the survey consisted of
The survey contained 9 open ended questions, I went with open ended questions designed to produce a meaningful answer and create rich, qualitative data using the subject’s own knowledge and feelings. Open-ended questions also tend to be more objective and less leading than closed-ended questions.
The all but one of the questions ask the participants to give there emotional states after listening to a sound or piece of music. the final question asks participants to listen to a piece of music and relate sed music to a film genera
I didn’t want all the music and sounds to be horror based as I believe the participants would have picked up on the theme and the sounds and would be influenced by that fact, and answer with fear based bias in mind for all the questions.
One of these control measures was this happy music I found online. It had played in consonant major chords with an upward progression, as well as instruments widely associated with positive music, Ukulele and triangle for example.
As a means of further ensuring this music would yield a positive response in the survey, observed Frederich Marpung’s Acoustic expression of emotional states.
I looked specify at the happy section of this table and chose a piece of music based off that.
34 people participated in the survey; These are the results:
What the results mean:
Marmot scream
In the survey I included the sound of a marmot’s distress call, in order to confirm what Daniel Blumstein observed when studying the little beaver like mammals. He found their distress call were nonlinear and disturbed most people that hear them. To test his observation, I included the sound in my survey.
The biggest response I had was alarm. This makes sense as in nature, a distress call is supposed to alarm other animals in the area earth as a cry for help or a warning to stay away.
This then perhaps explains the second biggest survey response I had which was worry. Not just worry from a fear for your safety point of view, but from fear for a child’s safety point of view.
Theses were a few of the responses:
“Worried, bit like a child screaming”
“Scream, child, scared, fear”
“Scream, child, fear”
These tree answers all relating to children were answered by female participants. I looked into why this may be and found a research paper called ’Sex Differences in Hearing’ by Leonard Sax, Montgomery Center for Research in Child & Adolescent Development.
This paper explains and describes evidence to support the idea that women have increased sensitivity to high frequency sounds. This is an excerpt from the paper:
“Corso (1959) was among the first to report that females have superior auditory acuity (i.e. lower thresholds) compared with same-age males, particularly for test frequencies above 2 kHz. The same general finding – adult females having more sensitive hearing at high frequencies, compared with same-age males – has been replicated in other studies of adults (e.g. Chung, Mason, Gannon, and Willson, 1983; Royster, Royster, and Thomas, 1980), including studies with Caucasian, African-American, and Asian adults (Dreisbach and colleagues, 2007; Shahnaz, 2008).”
It is theorised that the reason for females having a higher sensitivity to high frequency sounds is so they can more easily hear children what there crying out for help. This is something that is suggested to be part of a female’s maternal instincts. An evolutionary trait that is not as present amongst men and boys.
The reason this is relevant to my study on sound design is I may be able to use maternal instincts to my advantage and create more emotionally engaging content based of theses instincts. Though similar high frequency sounds like a child screaming or a marmots distress call are suggested to be more effective to the female ear, men do still have these instincts, and elicit similar feelings when exposed to such sounds. This means I may be able to use this information to my advantage when needing to grab the audience’s attention in a sound design project.
Non-linear sounds and music
All questions containing sounds and music with nonlinear and or dissonant qualities (Marmot scream, Psycho music, and Alien ambiance) returned results relating to negative emotions usually associated in the horror genera: scared, anxious, tense, etc. However, there were a couple of exceptions to this; one of which was the ambiance from the horror game ‘Alien isolation’. Though a large percentage of the participants reactions were fear based, (similar to the other sounds and pieces of music containing dissonance and nonlinearity) fear was only the second most common answer, first of which being anticipation.
When observing these results, I re-listened to the music I found there was a steady increase in instruments, dynamics and overall intensity, by use of risers and a thumping low frequency bass that hits every second. I believe it is these aspects of the music that created the feeling of anticipation in its listener. A valuable and interesting piece of data that required more research
Tiger
Another surprising statistic I found was in the answers relating to the sound of the tiger. Though most people associated this sound with fear, as expected, a surprising 13% of participants stated they found it nostalgic. Initially this data surprised me, while 13% is relatively small, it is still a trend which was completely unforeseen, making it a significant and confusing statistic. Naturally I tried to figure out why 4 out of the 32 participants associated a tiger’s roar with nostalgia:
The majority of my survey participants were from the UK, so unless they spent a lot of the zoo, I don’t see how they could find a tiger roar nostalgic. I then remembered the company ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’. Huge film studio that’s worked on hundreds of movies over the course 100+ years, all of which containing the same intro. The widely recognised logo accompanied with the iconic sound of a particular lion’s roar. I theorise that due to the popularity of this film company, and the sound that almost every western cinema fan has heard just before watching an emotionally engaging and evoking movie, I believe through emotional anchoring, Leo the lion (the lion from the MGM logo) is the reason 13% of my survey participants, found the very similar roar of the tiger featured in the survey, nostalgic.
This information opened my eyes and made me realise I shouldn’t just look at the characteristic that make a sound scary, but also the emotions people may have associated with certain sounds due to where the sounds come from in relation to their upbringing and cultural backround. An interesting point I had not previously considered; a point that is further supported in my results on the dentist drill sound.
Dentist Drill
I included the sound of a dentist drill in order to replicate the results of a study learned about in the book ‘Sound Design’ by David Sonnenschein
“It was found that the whizzing sound of a dentist drill creates a phobic reaction in all countries polled exept for Jamaca, where there existed little to no dental care to create that cultural acoustic symbol.”(reference page and author)
Though this book is written by a credible author, I cannot comment on the credibility of the study he is referring to, as the book does not state who ran the study, how many counties were involved, or how the it was carried out. I could not find the exact study online either, however I did find a similar more credible study with very similar results.
The study was called ‘Statistical Analysis for Subjective and Objective Evaluations of Dental Drill Sounds’ by Tomomi Yamada at the Department of Restorative Dentistry and Endodontology, at Oaka University Graduate School of Dentistry, Osaka, Japan
How the study was assessed
21 participants each were placed in sound isolated rooms and given headphones to listen to 30 recordings from 12 different types of dental drill. Half of the recordings where when the drills were idling, and the other half were of the drills in use. The participants were given a list of opposing adjectives (unpleasant, pleasant for example) and rated them between I and 7 (1 being unpleasant, 7 being pleasant).
The Participants:
Three females and eighteen males aged between 21 and 29 years (average 23.2 years) with normal hearing ability participated in this experiment. All the participants were Japanese and had experienced dental treatment, none were qualified dentists or dental students.
The Results:
As you can see on average the results corelate toward the more negative words and emotions like “harsh”, “tense”, “unpleasant”, “Fearful”
I found similar results in my survey, with 69% of participants feeling anxious after hearing the sound of a dentist’s drill. Two participants were even able to identify that it was a dentist drill from the sound alone.
These results combined with the nostalgic result form the tiger sound, taught me the significance of past emotional anchoring; the strong memory’s attached to persons experience/s, whether it be through long term fear and trauma brought about by unpleasant feelings and memories brought about by childhood visits to the dentist, and the sounds attached, or be it the iconic lions roar that reminds you of some of the great movie experiences one associates with the universally known movie opening of MGM. Emotions seem to play a big role in our memories and memories seem to play a big role in our emotions; a topic I need to look into further in order to take advantage of the entertaining and immersive power it holds, in regard to sound design for film and games.