In today's exercise we attempted to recognize sonically represented emotions. Some radically different approaches were used in portraying the "rasa" such as:- Sampling different styles of commercial music
- Downloading the pure, instinctive cries of yet-to-be-conditioned babies from youtube
- Traditional western art music conventions
- Moody synthesized textures
- Drawing on the cliches of mainstream cinema
- Speaking about emotional subjects in a foreign language
Some techniques definitely seemed more effective than others. While I thought it was really cool, we didn't seem to be very good at understanding Sanad's Persian even with strong inflections. People who drew strongly on obvious cliches and used a range of different forms (eg acoustic instrument, synth, nature sound) seemed to be most successful.
I think it is very interesting that many of the baby cries were quite understandable and Stephen suggested that there may be some aspects of language and aural association that are fundamentally built into our physiology and not learnt. Thanks to Freddy for this interesting point.
I was particularly impressed by the guy that used a lot of synthesized/processed sounds. I think he did a great job at portraying emotion through sonic texture (which is what we should be focusing on in our course) and without using obvious cliches.
Reference: Stephen Whittington. "Week 6 Music Technology Forum - Emo Music." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 5 September 2008.
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