My learning outcome for my dissertation is to become more knowledgeable on what sounds illicit a strong emotional response in viewers/listeners and why. The aim of this reaserch, is to apply the principals learned to my own sound design work, in order to make it more emotionaly compelling and memorable.
My first point of research for this topic would be found in film and games that contain emotion eliciting scenes; emotions such as happiness, sorrow and fear.
The reason for watching sceines of this nature is to try and analyse the sounds and music used, and figure out why they are effective in changing the emotional state of the viewer.
I started with fear, the brains defence mechanism; a powerful emotion that most people miss in day to day modern life. This is perhaps why horror movies are so popular; to fill a void in our regular emotional states, a feeling of excitement brought out by the fight or flight response that fear induces.
A classic horror film in regards to sound design would be 'Psyhco', a 1960's movie with possibly the most iconic murder scene in cinematic history. A woman in the shower getting violently stabbed by an unknown figure with a big kitchen knife. The music that goes with this scene are what make it so haunting and memorable.
Sharp, aggressive, high frequency violin strokes that pierce straight through your ears and immediately bring on the feeling of panic and unease.
I wanted to know why this music has the effect that it does and what elements are responsible for the viewers high level of emotional response.
The reason for watching scenes of this nature is to try and analyse the sounds and music used, and figure out why they are effective in changing the emotional state of the viewer.
With Psycho in mind, I did some research and found the violins used were pushed beyond its normal amplitude levels; this created a non-linear sound; of course I wanted to know what this meant. I did some research and this is what I found:
"Daniel Blumstein is professor in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. While studying marmots a few years ago, he noticed their distress calls were characterized by nonlinear noise patterns. He found this same pattern in other animals’ alarm calls.
After analysing music from different movie genres, Blumstein discovered that scary movies often included high-pitched screams with a lot of noise. In this context, “noise” doesn’t mean “loud sounds”, but describes a disturbance in the sound — like radio noise. According to Blumstein, these noisy screams in scary movies have the same effect on us as animal distress calls: They evoke strong feelings, and we’re conditioned to find them disturbing."
This is from an article I found on 'Medium.com', called 'What makes scary music scary'. it explains what makes non linear sound (like the scene in 'Psycho') disturbing to us. How it reminds us of animal destress calls.
This is exactly the kind of information I am looking to explore in my dissertation. This knowledge of non liner sounds alone has provided me with a greater understanding of one of the big sound design elements included most horror movies.
I will be looking further into information such as this as I continue my research, and craft my dissertation.