week 3

Lecture Discussion.

We started off talking about academic hoaxes which was amusing but led onto a key point about choosing articles wisely making sure that they are trustworthy by checking authors, references and other information that might make it unreliable. This led on to us talking about literature reviews thinking about key feautures such as style, scope, field of study and structure relative to the rest of the text. When writing my essay lit reviews are something I will definitely include as it makes a paper much more reliable and can backup points. Mind maps were the next thing we discussed in relation to essay planning, and we downloaded some free software called “Freeplane”. I found it really useful as I could mind map efficiently and have it stored digitally, but in my opinion the whole point of a mind map is to be able to creatively express ideas in a space where you can link them together non-linearly so I will stick to pen and paper as to not constrain myself to the less-creative software.

Essay planning and research.

This week I was determined to find some scientific articles that would back up my ideas that composers might be able to scientifically induce fear through music. I found an article on the ‘effects of music on psychophysiological responces to stressful film’ (https://bpl.berkeley.edu/docs/23-Effects%20of%20music83.pdf) which was an experiment where they showed the same piece of film with different soundtracks and then monitored the subject’s anxiety through electrodermal responces. It’s an interesting insight into how we can monitor anxiety levels and that there is empirical evidence into how ‘scared’ we are.

I found another paper on “Emotional response to music: Experience, expression and physiology” (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0305735607086048?casa_token=3EQOY86CNIkAAAAA:PXY87IghKYX0kZKG0g_P58k1SfmQofVEaaYZhheD26aFVn1Xoyf0LZ-VAyF9yzs1mb9OZv0Hx7Aj) in this research they used facial muscle activity, finger temperature and facial conductivity analyze which emotions where being felt during certain types of music was played.

I found a review of a book “sweet anticipation: music and the psychology of expectation”  (https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/24826/EMR000024a_..?sequence=1) which I found really interesting because the reviewer was reading from a cognitive psychologists point of view and had some important points like ‘expectancy mechanisms’ and how they have evolved which backup the authors original points.

All of these articles were really interesting but they don’t really link to composition so I need to find out how composers use this scientific evidence in the film scores so my next step is to get in contact with a few film composers with some questions on the composition methods and if they take advantage of this type of research.