Music & The Brain- Tutorial Assignment
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Musical Application
Horror movies often use music in order to elicit emotional responses from the audience. ‘Paranormal activity’ (2007) use of low frequency infrasound to create unease or Hitchcock’s classic movie ‘Psycho’ (1960) high frequency notes in the shower scene, demonstrate how the effectiveness of a score can impact the success of a movie. This study attempts to examine the human sensitivity to frequency, as well as determine what frequencies are considered more aversive in order to determine what frequencies make a good horror movie score.
Property of human hearing
Frequency is the number of sound waves produced per second, measured in hertz (Hz). The hearing capacity of…show more content… A computer program will also be used to run the trials. SPSS will be used to analyze and create a psychometric function.
Method
Methods that could be used either independently or in cooperation with each other are two interval forced choice (2IFC), adjustment method and a rating method. Although not a psychoacoustic method the rating method has proven effective in previous studies such as by Blumstein, Davitian and Kaye (2010) and as such can be used to back up any data found regarding sensitivities to certain frequencies.
A within subjects design would be used, with a fixed set of stimuli of twenty different frequencies, where each frequency is repeated against the standard twice. For both the 2IFC task and the method of adjustment, the results can be plotted as a psychometric function for analysis.
The standard tone used for both the 2IFC and adjustment method will be 1 kHz. This was chosen as it falls outside the range that I’m interest in as well as being closer to the range of human speech and as such possibly less aversive or the comparison stimuli. The duration of the stimuli for both methods will also be two…show more content… Frequency-based effects such as intentional sidebands are often found in horror movies, with a higher rate of non-musical sidebands than for example dramatic films. Where previous studies have focused on musical properties such as chords, such as the classic sequence in Jaws, this study was an attempt to dissect the same idea into smaller attributes.
Kumar et al. (2012) MRI study suggests that most unpleasant sounds fall within a frequency range of 2,000-5,000 Hz. The purpose of this study is to use psychoacoustic methods to replicate Kumar et al. (2012) study and identifying what frequencies the human ear is the most sensitive to or finds the most aversive. These frequencies could then be used to create scores for horror movies or determine what frequency to use during horror film techniques such as jump scares, in order to elicit the most intensive fear