Sacks, Oliver (2008) Musicophilia - Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition (Paperback)

The famous neurologist Oliver Sacks brings us, again, a book full of intriguing case studies, this time on music. The book is a collection of heart-breaking and -warming, familiar, puzzling, funny and surreal case descriptions of individuals with various neurological conditions - all somehow affecting the person’s ability to experience, or get emotionally involved with music. The book approaches the subject from the grass roots: Individual stories deliver thread after thread, snippets of information and after a dozen cases, a pattern emerges. The patchwork pattern is not conclusive, nor exact, but it provides a comfortable approximate web of explanations for musical perception. It is easy, however, to get swept away with the cases. For me, the grand picture, was easier to grasp by reading the table of contents than following the main text.

In terms of writing, Sacks does a great balancing act: he describes in intimate detail the personal dilemmas and conditions of his (and others’) patients, and still keeps the writing very tactful. There is no sense of voyerism, nor of sentimentality. Sacks is polite, empathetic, very precise, and clinically analytic. The cases are memorable, and so are also his conclusions.

In terms of the book’s scientific value, it definitely is a great collection of stories but I don’t expect to be citing it that much. Having said that, the text (at least in the revised version) is peppered with references to interesting studies, research groups and patient associations which can prove immensely valuable for people with scientific interest in the subject area. More so, the inspirational boost that comes from learning about neurology and auditory perception by reading stories about real people is definitely enough to recommend the read.

Citation info: Ekman, I. (2009) "Modelling the Emotional Listener: Making Psychological Processes Audible", Proc. AudioMostly 2009, Sepbember, Glasgow, Great Britain.
 
Abstract. There is an increasing tendency to use of procedural strategies for the creation and manipulation of sound in computer games. This development is motivating a shift in the design process; meaning is no longer tied to a specific asset or asset type, but is instead linked to the procedural manipulation of the sound material. Often the design phase for this type of game sound includes modelling sound within the virtual environment in terms of a source, a medium and a listener. This way of thinking about sound is not new; however, how it relates to emotional expression has not been investigated before. Particularly what has not been modelled is the listener as a perceptual entity, whose perception changes to reflect psychological states and processes. This study addresses the lack of research in this area. We identify four psychological processes that influence what and how sounds are heard: attention, emotion, multimodal perception and internal sound. We also provide a detailed investigation of a special case of psychological process: the perceptual distortions people suffer during extreme stress. Drawing from this empirical data, we form a listener model capable of expressing the avatar’s psychological qualities through sound manipulation. The listener model is described, along with examples on how to apply it in practise.
 
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Jourdain, Robert (1997) Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy. Harper Perennial.

Robert Jourdain’s book is a delight to read. The writing is fluent and the insights are frequent and not far apart. The whole book is structured like the best of detective stories, and the question: wherein lies the pleasures of music?

Where other books deal with cochlear stucture and Corti’s organ and sine waves, this one tackles the interdisciplinary and controversial questions that have only recently (think 20 years) been opening up to researchers: what in earth is it that happens in the brain that gives music its meaning, emotional powers and, ultimately, mind-altering characteristics. Jourdain´s answer synthesizes findings from psychoacoustics and sprinkle over some exciting personal thoughts, and does so in an exceptionally engaging way - with each revelation, the book tickles the reader’s curiosity with an equal amount of unanswered questions, new perspectives and busted myths.

Jourdain starts low level and gradually moves from there and "upwards". The chapters start with basic sound perception, and from there moves higher up the levels of musical hierarchy: tones, harmonies, temporal patterns, gradually all the way to the thematic structure of whole pieces. Jourdain also considers separately performance, musical imagery, and the process of composition. In the last parts of the book, all these pieces are combined into an exploratory discussion about some really tricky questions within music research: what it is in music that makes us tick, what makes a good melody, how do great composers become great, etc. While the answers are controversial (and at times I found myself slightly annoyed by Jourdain’s apparent preference for western tonal music) the argumentation is both insightful and careful and as a special treat to the meticulous reader, there are a lot of interesting tidbits and anecdotes to color the experience.

Personally, my biggest enjoyment was to follow how Jourdain handles the body in relation to sounds and meaning making. I’ve always felt that there must be some very intricate relationship between how we perceive sounds of our environment and the way we perceive our body (and its sonic capacities). Jourdain starts out boldly, scrapping body as basis of rhythm in the early beginning, crushing any hopes of mappings to heart-rate, body size, walking speeds etc. But then, along the book and particularly in the very last chapters, he returns to the body assigning it the most grand of responsibilities there is in musical perception. Essentially, what he suggests is, that music’s emotionality relies in music’s capability to use the body as an amplifier for understanding (and enjoying) high-order abstract orderliness, imposing perfect structure on a body that is usually deprived from it, introducing organization into a world, that in everyday is messy, unorganized and chaotic. Writes Jourdain: "By providing the brain with an artificial environment, and forcing it through that environment in controlled ways, music imparts the means of experiencing relations far deeper than we encounter in our everyday lives. […] Thus, however briefly, we attain a greater grasp of the world (or at least a small part of it), as if rising from the ground to look down upon the confining maze of ordinary existence." (p. 331)

All in all, I highly recommend the book to any reader interested in expanding their understanding of what goes on inside the head when we listen to music. The book is a good read; even if the content deals with brainy topics (psychology, perception and neurology) the text should be both easy to pick up and hard to lay down. The book also has an excellent glossary, which helps a lot if the terms and concepts are not that familiar. However, I found myself at time missing exact pointers to relevant research as they were being dealt with in the text; the lack of references slightly diminishes the uses of the book in academic context. Then again, some of the most fascinating arguments in the book are, essentially, speculation, so in this sense the exact references to scientific back up aren’t that important. As a personal note, I did feel Jourdain has a certain bias to his writing, but this does not in any way undermine the value of the book as a mind-opener and source of inspiration.

Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play, is a collection of essays concerning horror video games. The book is edited by Bernard Perron and has a foreword by Clive Barker.

This publication is a first of its kind, as nowhere has the themes and variations of horror games previously been so thoroughly analyzed. The book provides 14 essays on various topics, by the following authors: Clive Barker, Inger Ekman, Ewan Kirkland, Tanya Krzywinska, Petri Lankoski, Christian McCrea, Simon Niedenthal, Michael Nitsche, Martin Picard, Bernard Perron, Dan Pinchbeck, Richard Rouse III, Guillaume Roux-Girard, Laurie N. Taylor, Carl Therrien, and Matthew Weise.

Together with Petri Lankoski, we contributed with an essay on horror sound called Hair-Raising Entertainment: Emotions, Sound, and Structure in Silent Hill 2 and Fatal Frame

The book will be available in October, but you can already pre-order it straight from McFarland, or alternatively from Amazon.

Autumn is here, and AudioMostly is again getting near. This year, AM goes Scotland, and the event will be hosted by the Glasgow Caledonian University. I really look forward to the event, not least because of the conference theme this year: "Sound and Emotion". The program can be found here.

Looks like a nice selection of presentations, but also intimate enough to foster great conversations. And I’m really looking forward to hear Patrik Juslin’s keynote… I will also give a presentation of my own, entitled "Modelling the emotional listener: making psychological processes audible". I’ll put it up online after the event, so stay tuned!

Sonic Interaction Design, or SID for short, is a COST-ICT Action aimed at strengthening the research, and technology development networks involved with sonic interaction. The action encompasses a number of strategic European concerted research actions concerning future technologies and services

This autumn, the SID network is hosting a workshop on Sonic Sketching. The workshop will deal with design, sketching in general and particularly in ways in which sound can be prototyped. There will also be a poster and demo session for people to present their work relating to the workshop topic. The deadline for poster and demo submissions is September 7th and authors will be notified of acceptance by September 15th.

You will find more details about the workshop, such as dates, topics and submission guidelines, on this page.

What does sonic sketching mean, then? Well, I suspect a part of this workshop will be precisely finding out that. As of now, there really is no established design methodology for working with sound, especially in the prototyping stage. Sound doesn’t have its storyboards, or paper prototypes.

What I use a lot, however, is the voice. There are really so many awesome things you can do with your voice, even without that much training. But with a little training, and a huge amount of self-confidence, the voice can become a very useful prototyping tool. Foreign languages, for example, are a great way to learn to make new sounds. How about these Xhosa sounds for a starter? And if you train a little (or a lot) more, you can do quite a lot just with your voice. Just listen to this lovely Pink Panther theme by Bobby McFerrin. Or how about a little polyharmonic singing - yeah, thats when you sing two tones at the same time. So how about using this cool device of ours for vocal prototyping?

Having worked with different experience prototyping methods in the past, I’ve always felt there is a special tug in people’s stomachs whenever they start prototyping something that sounds. The voice is just so personal! Working to overcome these comfort barriers, both by myself personally and together with other designers, research colleagues, and students, has been quite interesting! I guess being an extrovert really helps in a field like this.

Earlier this year, I was fortunate to be able to attend the 35th conference on Audio for Games held by the Acoustical Engineering Society. This was a very special event since it was the first ever AES conference (in a long history of events) to deal with game sound. I enjoyed the conference very much. Particularly I was delighted with the relatively even representation of both academia and industry, and the fact that the two camps really did share thoughts and views with each other. Academia and industry mixing, you don’t get that so often.

The conference was a huge success, the downside of which was that the organizers were unable to squeezen in all of those who wanted to attend. (!) Well, in addition to organizing great conferences, the AES has a fantastic habit of providing conference reports on their webpage, and now the report for the 35th is also out. So if you weren’t able to attend, you can at least browse through the topics and the whos and whens.

The report is accessible directly from here [pdf] or alternatively you can browse your way through the long list of conference reports on this page. Maybe stumble on some other interesting topics there, too…

Unfortunately, the conference papers are not provided online by the AES. However, for anyone interested in the full story on my paper (with Raine Kajastila) "Localisation Cues Affect Emotional Judgements – Results from a User Study on Scary Sound", I provide it in full length online here.

I’ve always loved flamenco - I think the style matches my temper and moods better than any other music styles I know of. I’ve never had a go at the guitar, but I’ve been dancing for a while now, enough to dare call myself a bailaora, and I’m slowly getting into singing as well. Recently, flamenco has also entered my work interests. A couple of colleagues of mine - Antti Jylhä and Cumhur Erkut - have developed a hand-clapping based interface, that will be presented at CHI2009: "A Hand Clap Interface for Sonic Interaction with the Computer". Recently, I’ve been working together with them on an extension of that work, contributing among other with insights from flamenco. The first part of this work "Exploring self-induced sonic interactions in the context of performing arts" is being presented at the Workshop on Sonic Interaction Design and its relation to Film and Theatre sound design, at the University of York, 2. April 2009.

I was actually searching for info on similar projects, but instead ran across this very well written piece by David Rubin on creating flamenco sounds for your audio project: desktop flamenco. It’s a valuable read for anyone who works on a piece in need for some authentic-sounding Flamenco, as it covers the major principles of the flamenco style, and provides reviews of a bunch of sample libraries containing flamenco effects. Nice work bringing all that info together on one page!

The Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society Teosto is a copyright organization for composers, lyric writers, arrangers and music publishers in Finland. Teosto provides licensing products for performing and reproducing music that in their words "meets the needs of music using customers, and distributes the royalties to the rightholders - the music authors."

Teosto is commonly known to have a stiff structure, and consequently Teosto agreements may sometimes present problems for composers who e.g. want to cross between paid and unpaid work or, for example want to showcase their works online. Also, Teosto’s apparent lack of procedures for handling the lifespan of game music (the game itself, marketing material, derivatory products like soundtracks, their marketing material, etc.) and a narrow understanding for the particular practical conventions of the industry (for example, some game companies only hire musicians who will provide the game music as commissioned work) has made life hard for Finnish game sound people.

Teosto appears already to have unofficcially accepted certain common practises, overlooking instances such as when artists publishing one’s own music on private webpages. (Even so, commercial-but-private spaces like MySpace have been a problematic thing and may be so even in the future.) Teosto is also known to have made some individual agreements with musicians, but according to my understanding these private agreements have been a pain to negotiate and even still, the solutions have been at most inventive workaraounds to tackle the dated structures of Teosto agreements.

Now, the situation may be changing. According to a recent article in taloussanomat (in Finnish) Teosto is apparently reconsidering the limitations their deals put on musicians. The article tells us that the board of Teosto will meet as soon as April, to consider the new terms of agreements. I’m hopeful this meeting may at least put in black-on-white the unofficcially accepted practises, but even better would be if Teosto really took it upon themselves to reconsider the way the whole music licensing thing should be conducted. Either way, these are promising news for game composers. Let’s hope not only empty promises.

It’s official - the 4th Audio Mostly conference will be held in Glasgow, Scotland on September 2-3 and it will be hosted by Glasgow Caledonian University. The theme this year will be "Sound and Emotions".

The call for papers can be found here.