Essay title: “Have the advances in music technology over the last 85 years beneficially affected the film music and sound effects in horror films?

Background and motivation: The sound in films is something that I have been interested in for a while and horror music has, generally, one aim: to inspire fear. Having a greater understanding of techniques used by composers and the psychology of humans are great tools to use when trying to convey emotions to an audience. Another motivation is the fact that I have an opinion, which I hope to prove, that with all of these resources and new music technologies, it is easy for composers to fall into the trap of creating a generic, unoriginal soundtrack and maybe when composers had listed resources they had to be more creative.

Critical review of key sources and proposed method of research: I will be using a broad range of resources to give my essay sufficient credibility utilising scientific documents on psychology and neuroscientific research making sure I choose documents with peer reviews and other citations. All the way to books on films, and the reviews of these books giving different points of views. I will also be using websites and blogs and watching lots of horror films because to understand the reasoning for composition is to understand how composers think and for the same reason I will be conducting some email interviews with a few film composers. I am also using some papers and books by Claudia Gorbman who is one of the key authors and reviewers in film music. Here is a scientific paper which I will be using to give an example of how I search for sources : https://bpl.berkeley.edu/docs/23-Effects%20of%20music83.pdf It is a paper on ‘effects of music on psychophysiological responses to a stressful film’. It is well written, structured and has a good list of references, it uses a case study and has been cited a few hundred times, but was written in 1983. This is great to understand what knowledge composers and film scorers had access to in the 1980s and I will use it to compare to modern research and films.

Research Questions:

What are the key advances in music technology that allow composers and sound designers to create music better/easier?

With all of the scientific research into the human brain in modern-day, should composers scientifically be able formulate sound/music which is proven to scare and audience?

When composers/sound designers were composing and creating horror sounds with and music technology and limited resources where they more creative? Are the two linked?

What is the future of horror film scores in regards to using future music technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and other tools that might help or completely create a soundtrack?

Structure – I will have an abstract and keywords section, then move into an introduction listing the four research questions. There will be 4 chapters aimed at the advancement of composing tech, scientific research, creativity and the future. Followed by a concise conclusion, linking the chapters and outlining any conclusion or ideas that I have proven. The chapters all link on from each other going from music technology, to technology used in psychology, then into understanding creativity and then looking into the future. This essay structure is effective as it clearly tackles why research questions and links them all together.

Other sources and papers I have used are included in my weekly blog.

Lecture discussion.

Case studies where the first point we discussed in this weeks lecture. How useful can they? How are the used to argue a point succinctly? We analyzed a couple of papers which were case studies and realized, if used correctly, they could strengthen a point invaluably. It is something that I will be doing in my essay, comparing different films from different eras.

We went into detail into how one might structure an essay, mentioning adding abstracts, describing how to write a good intro and conclusion and how, in the main body, using chapters without stopping the text from flowing.

Essay research, ideas and planning.

Creativity: I was reading an article on “Psycho”’s score composer – Bernard Hermann. He originally wanted to use a full orchestra but due to money constraints he was only allowed a string section. He still managed to write one of the most chilling and memorable section of music ever. My question, is with limited resources or technology are composers forced to be more creative? We briefly discussed creativity in one of the lectures last year, but I want to expand on that and compare and contrast some films scores from different eras looking at their available technological resources and to see how creative they have been. (some readings I may reference in regards to creativity.: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00656/full,https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/S15326934CRJ1334_08?casa_token=0E_Emglm380AAAAA:JKe77qU2Jo7LNwePndaMTJ3AtVjjvY-e6hnxVttrkmapM2jb-1tEHx-wVdUG0BJDe4ib6awOMkWs,https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/21628171/sdarticle_009.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1540799563&Signature=NU5M1C4iHaJ0aPgMkO9TJMQAvRU%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DHow_the_mind_works.pdf)

Another way of discussing this Is trying to describe the phenomenon that I would call the ‘lull’ that a lot of modern horror scores have fallen into, creating unoriginal scores that comprise screechy strings and sharp stabs but talking about this may sound broad and unfocused and I’ll have to re-watch loads of horror films to have sufficient evidence.

The future – this is another key point to address. Throughout the course of the say we will have talked about how film music has evolved, but in this day there are technologies being used all ready which take film composing to another level. We are talking about tools such as Arificial intelligence. There are a few AIs that already ‘compose’ music if you give them an emotion. (some interesting papers on future of composition and AI: http://www.iba.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/papers/2000/tokuiGA2000.pdf,https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1513378.pdf?casa_token=gR7UbiMDcK8AAAAA:pyFsaqU6iEyWv_5Hr5HmFwL7zFQzfG5T_I1HEr2c3OwEDHO16xUb8k87FWpuSZkt3m0R0tkJvmEferPxTReygoqrkUIwi36poefDO6-6VNqsk-bOcMs,http://users.monash.edu/~jonmc/research/Papers/L-systemsMusic.pdf,https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Geraint_Wiggins/publication/209436205_AI_methods_for_algorithmic_composition_A_survey_a_critical_view_and_future_prospects/links/5464887b0cf2c0c6aec570ce/AI-methods-for-algorithmic-composition-A-survey-a-critical-view-and-future-prospects.pdf)

 

Another issue with this is that it may not be focused enough, so I will need to reaaly concentrate on film scorers are able to use this.

 

Next week – the essay plan.

 

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.

The Homework.

The paper that I found on music technology was “Using electronic music technologies in music therapy: opportunities, limitations and clinical indications. The aim of the article was to make clinical recommendations on how to use technology in music therapy and comes to certain conclusions on which technologies and therapies are most effective. It draws off research recent research so has its points backed-up making the article seem quite informative. For quite a long article it has a fairly brief conclusion which, I felt, didn’t completely sum up some of the sections. However, there was a lot of technical jargon which I didn’t understand so I couldn’t get a full understanding of the paper. Throughout the paper it answers the questions that it asks in a clear and concise manner. It was published in 2008 so is not up to date and since then it’s only had 29 citations so that might make it less viable. Here is the link:

 

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/135945750802200102?casa_token=_Tr4207sEgkAAAAA:tjsDw5_NR1TanFdO2ZqBnusDvI7uHaTxmXPxtFKhYg9UK6W9a_rY3jApSYQ70H0lT68xBvX7TNXL

Lecture Discussion.

We were tasked to think of an academic filed that we were interested in during the lecture, then find a name of an academic whose work interests us in that field, look them up on academia.edu and then see what we could find about our chosen topic through the rest of their work.

I decided to look for Live Coding and instantly found this article on “Algorithms as scores: coding live music” (http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/46861/1/Magnusson.pdf). Coincidently this was written by one of the tutors at Sussex university – Thor Magnusson. I went on to academia.edu and found a lot of other papers that he had written and eventually got onto a paper on “The Threnoscope” . (http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/46859/1/Magnusson_Live2013.pdf)

It was an interesting excerise aimed to show us how we can use authors as another means of searching for relevant articles, but I found academia.edu disappointing as to take full advantage of it’s resources you have to pay a subscription.

Other things that we discussed were the importance of a good essay structure, keeping a record of research activity, and to start thinking about research questions that we might want to answer in our essays

Essay thoughts and research.

I started thinking about how I might link music technology and film and decided that the process of music composition for film must have changed immensely over the last 90 years going from literally handwriting scores to using digital software to not only score a film but also play it without the need of real instruments. My first port of call was to have a look at a the book Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear by Neil Lerner, which got me thinking that maybe I should really focus onto a certain genre – horror. I then had a look at a couple of websites just to find some interesting points and came upon these articles https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-hidden-sounds-of-horror-movie-soundtracks-freak-you-out and http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20161031-what-makes-a-great-horror-movie-soundtrack which got me thinking about the phycology of how with the advances of music technology we are able to understand what scares humans and therefore composers now should be able to create music which scientifically instils fear into an audience. I then decided to watch a couple of horror films. I watched “Physcho” – the classic Alfred Hitchcock with the ‘screachy’ violins which give me the chills and then I watched ‘A Quiet Place” – directed by John Krasinski which came out earlier this year. Despite the films premise – total silence at all times otherwise you might be malled to death by a sonically sensitive alien, I still had to watch half the film on mute because the music was so terrifying.

 

The first lecture of the term was an introduction to the module aimed to give us an understanding of what we would accomplish by the end of the term.

The essay.

We started of talking about essay writing and which parts of essay writing we felt we were good and bad at. I decided that my main weakness is forming a strong argument: I am able to find good ideas and compare different sources in a plan, but when it comes to writing it in a succinct and concise argument my argument sometimes becomes vague. We were asked to think about a topic in music technology that ‘really interested’ us and my immediate thoughts were Artificial Intelligence and film music. I am interested in the possible uses of AI in music production and it’s almost infinite applications in life. Film music is something I really enjoy and something I would like to pursue as a career so spending a term researching it may be incredibly beneficial. Discussing how the technology has affected film music over a period of time would be interesting. The only thing I might find difficult with an essay with this sort of title may be being ‘critical’ as a pose to just discussing the history.

The Research.

It hadn’t dawned on me how much research would be needed for an essay of 4500 words. Previously, the largest essay I had written was 2500 words. We discussed the methods of finding references: journals, scientific documents, university papers etc. Using search tools like Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search and Scirus. We then had to think about how to maximize the productivity of these search engines by thinking laterally to find a wide range of research papers that would agree/disagree and give another angle to an argument.

The Homework.

We were set some work to over the week which involved finding a paper on a certain topic, which was decided to be music technology and health. We would have to create a summary of the paper (i.e. what are the key issues and question it deals with) and analyze it critically asking whether it is a good paper.

My Name is Dominic and I am an undergraduate in my final year at the University of Sussex studying Music Technology. I am a musician and producer playing the piano and sax in several different bands and have been playing since a very young age. I acquired an interest in Music Technology in secondary school when I was introduced to a recording studio. This inspired me to start recording music and led me onto learning about new music technologies which eventually led me to be fascinated by Music Technology in Film.

In this Blog I will be giving weekly updates on my progress during the term mainly focusing on what we have discussed in lectures and the preparation I have done for my final assessment: a 4500 word essay on a topic of my choice, as well as showing how my research applies to my other musical commitments.