The University of Sydney
Question
Asked 17 October 2012
Who are some leading psychologists in auditory psychophysics?
I am writing my dissertation on the correlation between sound design and viewers' sense of discomfort during tension-building scenes in different film genres and therefore need to examine the psychophysical principles and theories which relate to it. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Most recent answer
Catherine Best, Catherine Stevens, Rick Van der Zwan (combines visual and auditory psychophysics). Just to name a few.
All Answers (7)
Telethon Kids Institute
Sounds like an interesting project Fred. Not an expert on this myself, but you could maybe try Mike Forrester at the University of Kent, he might be able to give you a few pointers.
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University
I agree with Christopher - sounds like a great project!
By coincidence I am working on a project which uses VERY similar psychophysics to what you might like to use, where participants are asked to rate the unpleasantness of a sound on a Likert scale. I would recommend doing this, then using various methods of measuring the acoustic, temporal and emotive qualities of the various film scenes. However I can envisage two main problems (which you might have already thought about): (1) the scenes should be presented to the participant without visualisation (as this could be a potentially huge confounding factor) and (2) the potential recognition of actors' voices or dialogue and/or vocalisations themselves could prove to have further confounding effects, which you might like to minimise.
Hope this helps and good luck with the project :) Feel free to message me for extra help.
Tampere University
Very interesting project! For resources, I do not think there is a simple answer. Most work on sound emotions is related to music or voice, but for film (and other media) sound (I'm personally into games) the work consists of patching together findings across disciplines.
Here are some sources you might find relevant:
On the neuropsychology of fear, look into LeDoux. You will receive good understanding of how fear operates, how it triggers and probably some good ideas for putting together your pack of methods.
For film and emotion, Annabel Cohen should provide a good starting point. She looks at the musical score, but her framework will be relevant for considering the other sound sources as well. Joseph Anderson has also written a really good book on embodied perception and film, which is not sound specific but might be very relevant especially in understanding the kind of perceptual processes you will be dealing with in a film viewing context (and also give you a sense of the time frames relevant for you experiments).
Of course, a good source is to look into the designer's accounts of what they do and why they do that. Weis & Belton, Altman, Chion, Whittington and Sonnenschein are good names for film sound design.
Daniel Västfjäll has some interesting research on emotion and acoustics and maybe used psychophysiology, check out the following sites for more info:
There is also some specific research on nasty environmental sounds, e.g. by Trevor Cox, e.g.
Cox, T. J. “Scraping Sounds and Disgusting Noises.” Applied Acoustics 69, no. 12 (2008): 1195–1204.
———. “The Effect of Visual Stimuli on the Horribleness of Awful Sounds.” Applied Acoustics, 2007. http://usir.salford.ac.uk/426/.
Finally, for fear and anxienty building within computer games (which admittedly uses some different techniques than film sound), I can offer you mine and Petri Lankoski's paper on building horror with sound in games:
Ekman, I., and P. Lankoski. “Hair-Raising Entertainment: Emotions, Sound, and Structure in Silent Hill 2 and Fatal Frame.” Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (2009): 181–199.
I will love to hear how your projects progresses, feel free to message.
Cheers,
Inger
University of Southampton
Brian C.J Moore at university of cambridge has several good introductory books to psychoacoustics and psychophysics of hearing
Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
Charles Spence at Oxford might be a good person.
He looks at how are senses tie in with emotion etc, and uses it to good effect to consult for advertisers etc how the sound of crunchiness of a crisp makes us perceive that it tastes better!
thanks
penny
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