The Emotional Brain- The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
Joseph LeDoux
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
New York London Toronto Sydney
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Emotional responses are mostly generated unconsciously.
We have little direct control over our emotional reactions. anyone who has tried to feak an emotion, or who has been the recipient of a faked one, knows all too well the futility of the attempt. While conscious control over emotions is weak, emotions can flood consciousness. This so because the wiring of the brain at this point in out evolutionary history is such that conncetions from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems are stronger than conncetions from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems.
Emotions easily bump mundane ebents out of awareness, but non-emotional events (like thoughts) do not so easily displace emotions from the mental spotlight-wishing that anxiety or depression would go away is usually not enough.
Finally when emotions occur they become powerful motivators of future behaviors.
Although our emotions are at the core of who we are, they also seem to have their own agenda, one often carried out without our willful participation.
Unfortunately, one of the most significant things ever said about emotion maybe that everyone knows what it is until they are asked to define it.
Humans have found it compelling to separate reason from passion, thinking from feeling, cognnition from emotion.
However, in fact, cognitive science is really a science of only a part of the mind, the part having to do with thinking, reasoning, and intellect. It leaves emotions out. and minds without emotions are not really minds at all. They are souls on ice-cold, lifeless creatures devoid of any desires, fears, sorrows, pains, or pleasures.
In order for you to consciously perceive an apple in front of you in space, the apple must be represented in your brain and that representation must be made available to the conscious part of your mind. But the mental representation of the apple that you consciously perceive is created by the unconscious turnings of mental gears.
The brain has mechanisms for computing the shape, color, location, and movement of objects we see, and the loudness, pitch, and location of sound we hear. If we are asked to say which of two objects is closer or which of two sounds is louder, we can do so, but we cannot explain what operations the brain performed to allow us to reach these conclusions. We have conscious access to the outcome of the computation but not to the computation itself. The processing of physical stimulus features makes possible all other aspects of perception, including our conscious awareness of perceiving something. It is just as well that we are unaware of these processes, as we would be so busy doing the computations that we would never get around to actually perceiving anything if we had to do it all with deliberate concentration.
Just because your brain can do something does not mean that you know how it did it.
The inner workings of important aspects of the mind, including our own understanding of why we do, are not necessarily knowable to the conscious self.
Many emotions are products of evolutionary wisdom, which probably has more intelligence than all human minds together.
There is really nothing more or less subjective about the experience of an emotion than about the experience of the redness of an apple or the menory of eating one.
The brain does not usually function independently of the body. Most emotions involve bodily responses. But no such relation exists between cognitions and actions. In the case of cognitively driven responses, the response is arbitrarily linked to cognition. This is partly why cognition is so powerful-cognitions allow us to be flexible, to choose how we will respond in certain situation. Such responses are used by but are not essential to the cognition.
The conversion of emotions into thoughts has allowed emotion to be studied using the tools and conceptual foundations of cognitive science. There are now numerous computer simulations of appraisal and other emotional processes and some proponents of this AI approach to emotion beleive that emotions can be programmed in computers.
Minds feel as well as think, and feelings involve more than thinking.
Emotion is not merely a collection of thoughts about situations. It is not simply reasoning. It cannot be understood by just asking people what went on in their minds when they had an emotion. Emotions are notoriously difficult to verbalize. They operate in some psychic and neural space that is not readily accessed from consciousness.
How does one go about figuring out the selective channels of information flow in the brain? There are billions of neurons and each give rise to one or more axons. The axons themselves branch, so that the number snapses is far greater than the number of neurons. And each neuron has multiple dendrites that receive thousands of synaptic contacts from many others.
Numerous studies of humans have conditioned autonomic nervous system responses, such as changes in heart rate or in sweat gland activity, by pairing tones or other neutral stimuli with mild shocks.
It is now known that there are multiple memory systems in the brain, each devoted to different memory functions. The brain system that allowed me to hit a baseball is different from the one that allows me to remember trying to hit the ball and failing, and this is still different from the system that made me tense and anxious when I stepped up to the plate after having been beaned the last time up. Though these are each forms of long-term memory they are mediated by different neural networks. Different kinds of memory, like different kinds of emotions and different kinds of sensations, come out of different brain systems.
Sensory processing areas of the cortex receive inputs about external events and create perceptual representations of the stimuli. These representations are then shuttled to the surrounding cortical regions, which, in turn, send further processed representations to the hippocampus. The hippocampus then communicates back with the surrounding regions, which communicate with the neocortex. The maintenence of the memory over the short run requires that the temporal lobe memory system be intact, either because components of this system store the memory trace or because the trace is maintained by interactions between the temporal lobe system and the neocortex. Gradually, over years, the hippocampus relinquishes its control over the memory to the neocortex, where the memory appears to remain as long as it is a memory, which maybe a lifetime.
We can get a pretty good idea about what makes the hippocampus so important for its brand of memory by examining the kinds of inputs that the hippocampus receives from the neocortex. As we mentioned above, the major link between the hippocampus and the neocortex is the transition cortex. This region receives inputs from the highest stages of neocortical processing in each of the major sensory modalities. So once a cortical sensory system has done all that it can do with a stimulus say a sight or a sound, it ships the information to the transition region, where the different sensory modalities can be mixed together. This means that in the transition circuits we can begin to form representations of the world that are no longer just visual or auditory or olfactory, but that include all of these at once. We begin to leave the purely perceptual and enter the conceptual domain of the brain. The transition region then sends these conceptual representations to the hippocampus, where even more complex representaions are created.
The sound of the horn having become a conditioned fear stimulus, goes straight from the auditory system to the amygdala and implicitly elicits bodily responses that typically occur in situations of danger; muscle tention, changes in blood pressure and heart rate, increased perspiration, and so on. The sound also travels through the cortex to the temporal lobe memory system, where explicit declarative memories are activated. You are reminded of the accident. You consciously remember where you were going and who you were with. You also remember how awful it was. But in the declarative memory system there is nothing different about the fact that you were with Bob and the fact that the accident was awful. Both are just facts propositons that can be declared about the experience. It is mediated by the temporal lobe memory system and it has no emotional consequences itself. In order to have an aversive emotional memory, complete with the bodily experiences that come with an emotion, you have to activate an emotional memory system, for example the implicit fear memory system involving the amygdala.
Memory is selective: Not all aspects of an experience are remembered equally well, and the memory improvement produced by emotional arousal may effect some aspects more than others.
Memories are imperfect reconstructions of experiences: Even though a memory of an emotional experience is strong and vivid it is not necessarily accurate. Explicit memories regardless of their emotional implications, are not carbon copies of the experiences that created them.
Memory of emotional events may also be poor: It is sometimes said that emotional events, especially traumatic ones, are accompanied by a selective amnesia for the experience, rather than an improved memory of it.
HIppocampal circuits, with their massive neocortical interconnections, are well suited for establishing complex memories in which lots of events are bound together in space and time. The purpose of these circuits to provide representational flexibility. No particular response is associated with these kinds of memories - they can be used in many different ways in many different kinds of situations. In contrast, the amygdala is more suited as a triggering device for the execution of survival reactions. Stimulus situations are rigidly coupled to specific kinds of responses through the learning and memory functions of this brain region. It is wired so as to preempt the need for thinking about what to do.
If looked at microscopically, which is to say molecularly implicit (unconscious) emotional memory and explicit (conscious) memory of emotion may be indistinguishable. But at the level of neural systems and their functions, these are clearly unique operations of the brain. Although we know much more at this point about the separate operation of these two systems, we are beginning to also see how they interact. And these interactions are at the core of what gives emotional qualities to memories of emotions past.
Emotional habits can be very useful. If you find out that going to a certain water hole is likely to put you face to face with a blood-thirsty predator, then the best thing to do is to avoid going there. But if you stop going to water holes because you become anxious whenever you begin to look for water, or you start drinking less water than you need to maintain your health whenever you do get around to drinking, then your avoidance response has become detrimental to routine life. You have an anxiety disorder.
An emotion is an subjective experience, a passioante invasion of consciousness, a feeling.
Thinking occurs in a mental workspace that has a limited capacity. When you started using the workspace to do the substraction problem you bumped hte stored number out. This workspace is called working memory, a temporary storage mechanism that allows several pieces of information to be held in mind at the same time and compared, contrasted, and otherwise interrelated.
Working memory is pretty much what used to just be called short-term memory. However the term working memory implies not just a temporary storage system but an active processing mechanism used in thinking and reasoning.
That short-term memory has a capacity limit of about seven pieces of information. Borrowing a term from computer technology, memory researchers sometimes refer to temporary storage mechanisms as buffers. It is now believed that a number of specialized buffers exist. For example each sensory system has one or more temporary buffers. These aid in perception, allowing the system to compare what it is seeing or hearing now to what it saw or heard a moment ago. The specialized memory buffers work in parallel, independent of one another.
The stuff in working memory is the stuff we are currently thinking about or paying attention to. But working memory is not a pure product of the here and now. It also depends on what we know and what kinds of experiences we have had in the past. In other words, it depends on long-term memory. In order to be aware that you are looking at a basketball, it is not enough for the basketball to be represented as purely visual pattern by your visual system. The pattern also has to grabbed the attention of the working memory executive. This means that the pattern is what is being held in the visual shart term memory buffer and that the visual buffer as opposed to the auditory or other buffers, is the one with which the executive is working. Only when the visual pattern is matched with information in long-term memory does the visual stimulus become recognized as a basketball. But in addition to being important in figuring out the meaning of information being picked up by lower level speciallized systems, stored knowledge also influences the workings of the lower level systems.
The conscious and unconscious aspects of thought are sometimes described in terms of serial and parallel functions. Consciousness seems to things serially, more or less one at a time, whereas the unconscious mind being composed of many different systems seems to work more or less in parallel. Some cognitive scientists have suggested that consciousness involves a limited capacity serial processor that sits at the top of the cognitive hierarchy above a variety of special purpose processors that are organized in parallel. serial processors create representations by manipulating symbols and we are only conscious of information that is represented symbolically. Information processing by the lower level parallel processors occurs subsymbolically in codes that are not decipherable consciously.
Working memory is the limited capacity serial processor that creates and manipulates symbolic representations.
How something as intangible as feeling could be part of something so tangible as a brain.
--What I am doing is using working memory as an "in principle" way of explaining feelings. I am saying that feelings come about when the activity of specialized emotion systems gets represented in the system that gives rise to conciousness, and I'm using working memory as a fairly widely accepted version of how the latter might come about.
The activation of amygdala outputs that converts an experience into an emotional experience. Amygdala outputs provide basic ingredients that when mixed together in working memory with short-term sensory representations and the long-term memories activated by these sensory representations, create an emotionalexperience.
Direct Amygdala Influences on the Cortex: The amygdala has projections to many cortical areas. In fact as we have already seen the projections of the amygdala to the cortex are considerably greater than the projections from the cortex to the amygdala. In addition to projecting back to cortical sensory areas from which it receives inputs, the amygdala also projects to
some sensory processing areas from which it does not receive inputs.
Amygdala Triggered Arousal: There are a number of indirect channels through which the effects of amygdala activation can impact on cortical processing. An extremely important set of such connections involves the arousal systems of the brain.When you are alert and paying attention to something important, yur cortex is aroused. When you are drowsy and not focusing on anything, the cortex is in the unaroused state. During sleep the cortex is in the unaroused state, except during dream sleep when it is highly aroused. In dream sleep, in fact, the cortex is in a state of arousal that is very similar to the alert waking state, except that it has no access to external stimuli and only processes internal events.
Arousal is important in all mental functions. It contributes significantly to attention, perception, memory, emotion, and problem solving. Without arousal we fail to notice what is going on we don;t attend to the details.But too much arousal is not good either. If you are overaroused you become tense and anxious and unproductive.
Emotional reactions are typically accompanied by intense cortical arousal. Certain emotion theories around mid-century proposed that emotions represent one end of an arousal continuum that spans from being completely unconscious to asleep to awake but drowsy to alert to emotionally aroused. This high level of arousal is in part the explanation why it is hard to concentrate on other things and work efficiently when you are in an emotional state. Arousal helps lock you into the emotional state you are in. This can be very useful but can also be an annoyance.
Bodily Feedback: Activation of amygdala results in the automatic activation of networks that control the expression of a variety of responses: species-specific behaviors (freezing, fleeing, fighting, facila expressions), autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses (changes in blood pressure and heart rate, piloerection, sweating) and hormonal responses (release of stress hormones, like adrenaline and adrenal steroids, peptides into the bloodstream) (GSR)
When cortical sensory buffers that hold the informaton about the currently present sitimuli, working memory executive that keeps track of the short-term buffers, retrieves information from long-term memory, and interprets the contents of the short-term buffers in terms of activated long-term memories, cortical arousal, bodily feedback-somantic and visceral information that returns to the brain during an act of emotional responding - when all of these systems function together a conscious emotional experience is inevitable.
When some components are present and others lacking emotional experiences may still occur depending on what's there and what's not.
Conscious emotional feelings and conscious thoughts are in some sense very similar. They both involve the symbolic representation in working memory of subsymbolic processes carried out by systems that work unconsciously. The difference them is not due to the system that does the consciousness part but instead is due to two other factors. One is that emotional feelings and mere thoughts are generated by different subsymbolic systems. The other is that emotional feelings involve many more brain systems than thoughts.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Music and the Emotions--by Malcolm Budd
Book Review---Music and the Emotions--by Malcolm Budd
Routledge & Kegan Paul
London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley
Emotions----Chpt 1
Emotions have intensive magnitude and lack extensive magnitude.
An emotion is not itself assigned a location in the body, but only any bodily change that is felt when the emotion is experienced
Emotions can have opposites
A person's emotions can be mixed
An emotion need not be manifested
Person's emotions can be misdirected, unfounded, unreasonable, amenable to reason, excessive or of insufficient strength.
A person's happinness is a function of the kinds of emotion that fill his life
(I DON'T AGREE WITH SOME OF THESE)
The Repudiation of Emotion
There are two aspects to the listener's attitude to music. Firstly, the listener listens to music. He He does not merly hear the music while he is engaged in some other activity that occupies all or part of his attention and which the music is an adjunct or stimulus to or a distraction from or an enhancement of- as when music is danced or marched to or accompanies rhythmical labour or provides a background to a social gathering or is used to induce a mood appropriate to a ceremony. The listeners attention is focused on the music. Secondly, the listener listens to music in the knowledge or hope that he will find the experience of the music intrinsically rewarding and not solely with some other end in mind.
A piece of music can be related either to an instance of a certain general kind of emotion or to the kind itself. It can be connected with a particular incident in the history of the world - or with the kind of emotion of which this is one instance. There are three significant instances of emotion with which a piece of music might in some way be connected: the emotion the composer experienced when he composed the work, or which he experienced on some other specific occasion in his life, the emotion a performer experienced when he performed the work, and the emotion a listener experienced when he heard a performance of the work. But instances of emotion of the first two kinds are irelelvant in themselves from the point of view of music as something to be listened to for its intrinsic rewards. When someone listens to music in this manner there is never any reason for him to be concerned whether the composer felt a certain emotion at a certain time or the performer feels or felt a certain emotion at a certain time or the performer feels or felt a certain emotion when performing the work. The fact that the composer or performer of a musical work experienced a particular emotion on a certain occasion might be relevant instrumentally to the character the work or the performance possesses and the listener must grasp if he is to appreciate what he hears is an audible character the work or the performance has in itself and which the listener can take in throughhis attention to the performance. And the emotion the composer or performer once felt is not a feature of what the listener hears and that he can perceive in the music.
If music can move us without arousing a definite extra-musical emotion, its abstract purity will not be compromised by the possibility of an aesthetic response of an emotional kind.
Music possesses an emotional quality.
Words higher and lower stand for relations between the pitch of notes. Tones differ not only in duration, timbre and loudness, but also in another respect, which exhibits a one-dimensional ordering that can be marked, for example, by the use of the terms higher and lower.
Characteristically sad music is slow, quite and low in pitch and sad people move relatively slowly and speak bith softly and low in pitch. Now this allaged correspondance might be intended to provide the outline of a casual explanation of the fact that the term sad is used to stand for a certain purely audible feature, or it might be intended to provide a justification for this use.
Motion and Emotion in music -- cnpt 3
What a person experiences as outside his body is for that person objective and that what he experiences as belonging to or or inside his body is for him subjective. By this criterion moods and emotions are subjective for the person who feels them: what someone feels when he feels worry, anxiety, uneasiness, fear and joy belongs to or lies within his body. An emotion is subjective in the sense that waht is felt is located within, rather than outside, the subject's body. When a person experiences an emotion he feels the contraction of his brow, the tention of his muscles, the pounding of his blood, or some other happenings, in or to his body. But moods and emotions are sometimes spoken as f though it were thought that they could be properties of phenomena that are for each person objective -inparticular, as though they could be properties of music. Yet it can not be literally true that music embodies emotion, for it is not a living body which feels its own bodily processes.
If someone who listens to music is so powerfully affected by the music that he comes to think of it as animate and to perceive it as something which is in an emotional state then this falseness in his consciousness is an instance of the pathetic fallacy: the stregth of the feelings has led him to project the emotion that he feels into the music. However, if the fact that music arouses emotions in the listener it is hard to see how he could be genuinely under the impression that the subject of the emotions he feels is the music and not himself.
Perhaps, then, the emotive description of music is merely a fanciful manner of speaking in which the emotion apparently attributed to the music should be understood as felt by the listener, so that what the listener means by what he says may be true eben though he expressses himself in a misleading manner. (DO NOT AGGREE)
When the terms high and low are applied to tones they are used metaphorically and spatial metaphors are used to describe differences of pitch because by certain associations differences of picth remind people differences of height.
A musical instrument usually emits both high and low notes from the same place, so that in listening to a musical instrument the condition under which, high notes are heard from coming from higher position.
When a note is followed by another note do we always experience the succession merely as a tone at one position of the scale followed by a tone at a higher or lower position of the scale followed by a tone at a higher or lower position? Isn't it sometimes the case that we hear movement within the dimension that pitch provides, so that a later note is heard as the end of an upward or downward movement? The idea of movement that can be heard in music is problematic, as we have seen, because not only is there nothing that moves from the position of one note to the position of a succeesing note but there is not even the apperance or illusion of something that moves between positions.
Physical movement is change of spatial location.
The experience of movement in music is not a form of perceptual illusion. When we speak of an ascending phrase all we mean is that later notes of the phrase increase in pitch.
When we experience an emotion or are subject to a mood what we feel are processes which involve movements of or within our body. Now if a movement, or an inclination to movement, is involved in a certain psychological state there will be a character of the movement which we feel when we are in that state.
When someone is in agitated state he is liable to behave agitatedly, and if he does behave agitatedly he feels the agitated movements that his body makes. Id someone feels restless he does not feel at rest. He feels such things as an inability to keep still and increased rate of breathing and heartbeat. Much the same kinds or aspects of movement can be found in music:
Reason musical phrases can contain movements which possess the character of indecision and vacillation is that they can have the sme character as a bodily movement which is part of a subjective state that is apprpriately described as indecisive and vacilating.
Music can be agitated, restless, triumphant or calm since it can possess the character of the bodily movements which are involved in the moods and emotions that are given these names precisely because it is this character of the bodily movements which is felt when the mood or emotion is experienced.
Emotion, therefore, is nt really experienced as embodied in music. Its apparent embodiment is explained by two facts: that musical movements have properties very similar to characteristics of felt bodily movements, and that emotions are described by terms for these characteristics because they include movements with these characteristics and it is these movements which are felt when the emotions are experienced. There are characteristics of musical movement that bear a close resemblance to certain features of bodily movements.
Music embodies not psychological conditions but the characters of the bodily movements (feelings of) which are included in or compose psychological conditions.
In these works there are embodied, reflected, expressed, symbolised or in some other way presented phenomena that are integral to human life: we recognise moods, feelings, emotions, attitudes and various other states and activities of our inner life manifested in such a way that, if we are sensitive to their presence and responsive to the manner in which music makes them present to us, we value these musical works because of their essential human reference.
Aesthetic experience consists in disinterested contemplation to the assertion that aesthetic experience is free from emotion would be liable to make itself felt particularly strongly in the case of music because of the manifest emotionality of much musical experience.
Music As the Expression of Emotion---Chapter VII
The creator of a work of art undergoes an experience which he wishes to transmit or communicate to others. He wishes to communicate the experience to others in the sense that he wishes others also to undergo the experience; and to this end he creates or imagines an object which is or can be made perceptible- a painted canvas, a complex of musical sounds, a structure of words and which is to designed as to make it possible for someone who experiences the artist intendent to transmit. His experience is inside him; in order ot make it available to others he must externalise it; and by expressing it he hopes to pass it on to others. To the extent that the artist is successful in his enterprise, and in so far as the experience he communicates is worth experiencing, the work of art he creates is valuable.
Tolstoy-The better the feeling transmitted the better is the art that transmits it.
Music can sound like the vocal expression of emotion. But even when it does it doesn't sound very much like the vocal expression of emotion. the difference between our reaction to such music and to the real vocal expression of emotion is partly a function of the perceived differences in the sounds.
We can derive satisfaction from the ways in which emotions naturally discharge themselves in non-linguistic forms of behaviour or kinds of bodily process. A natural outlet for our grief is tears, for our anger blows, for our joy bodily movement. the stronger the emotion the more difficult it is to inhibit its natural expression in the body. And if the emotion pursues its natural course and issues in overt bodily activities which express it they can provide a satisfaction that is forgone if the emotion's natural expressions are repressed.
We hear in the music a variety of feelings, moods, emotions, and qualities of mind and character: emotional turbulence, exquisite tenderness, mounting excitement, exstatic release, passionate release, passionate regret, sincerity, wistfulness...and these features of mind, character and feeling are integral to the value the music has for us:our response to the music is a function of the psychological states and processes it contains. Much expressive music is heard as containing states of mind that create the impression of a personality whose depth or shallowness of feeling, vitality or torpor, sincerity or insincerity, warmth or coldness attracts or repels. And the fact that our ordinary human sympathies and antipathies are engaged by expressive music is dependent not merely on our being made aware of a state of mind by the music, but on our entering imaginatively into that state of mind or on our experiencing imaginatively a sympathetic or antipathetic response to that state of mind. Hence it is indeed true that we can experience the state of mind a musical passage expresses, and this experience can be an experience from within or from without. Nothing less than this can explain the power of expressive music to move us in the manner it sometimes achieves. What we lack is a satisfying account of how music can be a humanistic art.
A composer can consider his work from the point of view of the listener in the act of composition itself-he can imagine how his work will sound and he can intend that it should be heard in a certain manner. Hence, there is possibility of musical communiaction. For a composer can create something that he intends should sound a certain way and that he intends the listener to hear in a certain manner; and if he succeeds in his intention, the listener understands his work and undergoes the experience the composer intended. And if the listener undergoes the experience the composer imagined, and intended the listener to undergo, the composer has communicated that experience to the listener.
Conclusion
The value of music is intrinsic, not merely instrumental: the listener values the experience of a musical work in itself; the experience he values can be specified only by reference to the music that is experienced in undergoing the experience; the experience is not repaceable by a different experience that offers the listener exactly what he values in the original experience - for it is the experience itself, not some separable component or effect of the experience, that is valued. It is the failure of the transmission form of the expression theory of music to meet this requirement that diqualifies the theory.
Music is not restricted to outer world of the expression of emotion but reaches as far as the inner world of emotion itself. The value of a musical work is dependent upon the music's power to generate a certain intramusical emotion in a listener who understands the absolute meaning of the music. This theory appears in two forms:
-The emotion specific to music is a quality of emotion that nothing other than the experience of music can be clothed in.
-Intramusical emotion is emotion that is differentiated from other emotion only by the fact that it involves the awareness of music as its stimulus.
Routledge & Kegan Paul
London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley
Emotions----Chpt 1
Emotions have intensive magnitude and lack extensive magnitude.
An emotion is not itself assigned a location in the body, but only any bodily change that is felt when the emotion is experienced
Emotions can have opposites
A person's emotions can be mixed
An emotion need not be manifested
Person's emotions can be misdirected, unfounded, unreasonable, amenable to reason, excessive or of insufficient strength.
A person's happinness is a function of the kinds of emotion that fill his life
(I DON'T AGREE WITH SOME OF THESE)
The Repudiation of Emotion
There are two aspects to the listener's attitude to music. Firstly, the listener listens to music. He He does not merly hear the music while he is engaged in some other activity that occupies all or part of his attention and which the music is an adjunct or stimulus to or a distraction from or an enhancement of- as when music is danced or marched to or accompanies rhythmical labour or provides a background to a social gathering or is used to induce a mood appropriate to a ceremony. The listeners attention is focused on the music. Secondly, the listener listens to music in the knowledge or hope that he will find the experience of the music intrinsically rewarding and not solely with some other end in mind.
A piece of music can be related either to an instance of a certain general kind of emotion or to the kind itself. It can be connected with a particular incident in the history of the world - or with the kind of emotion of which this is one instance. There are three significant instances of emotion with which a piece of music might in some way be connected: the emotion the composer experienced when he composed the work, or which he experienced on some other specific occasion in his life, the emotion a performer experienced when he performed the work, and the emotion a listener experienced when he heard a performance of the work. But instances of emotion of the first two kinds are irelelvant in themselves from the point of view of music as something to be listened to for its intrinsic rewards. When someone listens to music in this manner there is never any reason for him to be concerned whether the composer felt a certain emotion at a certain time or the performer feels or felt a certain emotion at a certain time or the performer feels or felt a certain emotion when performing the work. The fact that the composer or performer of a musical work experienced a particular emotion on a certain occasion might be relevant instrumentally to the character the work or the performance possesses and the listener must grasp if he is to appreciate what he hears is an audible character the work or the performance has in itself and which the listener can take in throughhis attention to the performance. And the emotion the composer or performer once felt is not a feature of what the listener hears and that he can perceive in the music.
If music can move us without arousing a definite extra-musical emotion, its abstract purity will not be compromised by the possibility of an aesthetic response of an emotional kind.
Music possesses an emotional quality.
Words higher and lower stand for relations between the pitch of notes. Tones differ not only in duration, timbre and loudness, but also in another respect, which exhibits a one-dimensional ordering that can be marked, for example, by the use of the terms higher and lower.
Characteristically sad music is slow, quite and low in pitch and sad people move relatively slowly and speak bith softly and low in pitch. Now this allaged correspondance might be intended to provide the outline of a casual explanation of the fact that the term sad is used to stand for a certain purely audible feature, or it might be intended to provide a justification for this use.
Motion and Emotion in music -- cnpt 3
What a person experiences as outside his body is for that person objective and that what he experiences as belonging to or or inside his body is for him subjective. By this criterion moods and emotions are subjective for the person who feels them: what someone feels when he feels worry, anxiety, uneasiness, fear and joy belongs to or lies within his body. An emotion is subjective in the sense that waht is felt is located within, rather than outside, the subject's body. When a person experiences an emotion he feels the contraction of his brow, the tention of his muscles, the pounding of his blood, or some other happenings, in or to his body. But moods and emotions are sometimes spoken as f though it were thought that they could be properties of phenomena that are for each person objective -inparticular, as though they could be properties of music. Yet it can not be literally true that music embodies emotion, for it is not a living body which feels its own bodily processes.
If someone who listens to music is so powerfully affected by the music that he comes to think of it as animate and to perceive it as something which is in an emotional state then this falseness in his consciousness is an instance of the pathetic fallacy: the stregth of the feelings has led him to project the emotion that he feels into the music. However, if the fact that music arouses emotions in the listener it is hard to see how he could be genuinely under the impression that the subject of the emotions he feels is the music and not himself.
Perhaps, then, the emotive description of music is merely a fanciful manner of speaking in which the emotion apparently attributed to the music should be understood as felt by the listener, so that what the listener means by what he says may be true eben though he expressses himself in a misleading manner. (DO NOT AGGREE)
When the terms high and low are applied to tones they are used metaphorically and spatial metaphors are used to describe differences of pitch because by certain associations differences of picth remind people differences of height.
A musical instrument usually emits both high and low notes from the same place, so that in listening to a musical instrument the condition under which, high notes are heard from coming from higher position.
When a note is followed by another note do we always experience the succession merely as a tone at one position of the scale followed by a tone at a higher or lower position of the scale followed by a tone at a higher or lower position? Isn't it sometimes the case that we hear movement within the dimension that pitch provides, so that a later note is heard as the end of an upward or downward movement? The idea of movement that can be heard in music is problematic, as we have seen, because not only is there nothing that moves from the position of one note to the position of a succeesing note but there is not even the apperance or illusion of something that moves between positions.
Physical movement is change of spatial location.
The experience of movement in music is not a form of perceptual illusion. When we speak of an ascending phrase all we mean is that later notes of the phrase increase in pitch.
When we experience an emotion or are subject to a mood what we feel are processes which involve movements of or within our body. Now if a movement, or an inclination to movement, is involved in a certain psychological state there will be a character of the movement which we feel when we are in that state.
When someone is in agitated state he is liable to behave agitatedly, and if he does behave agitatedly he feels the agitated movements that his body makes. Id someone feels restless he does not feel at rest. He feels such things as an inability to keep still and increased rate of breathing and heartbeat. Much the same kinds or aspects of movement can be found in music:
Reason musical phrases can contain movements which possess the character of indecision and vacillation is that they can have the sme character as a bodily movement which is part of a subjective state that is apprpriately described as indecisive and vacilating.
Music can be agitated, restless, triumphant or calm since it can possess the character of the bodily movements which are involved in the moods and emotions that are given these names precisely because it is this character of the bodily movements which is felt when the mood or emotion is experienced.
Emotion, therefore, is nt really experienced as embodied in music. Its apparent embodiment is explained by two facts: that musical movements have properties very similar to characteristics of felt bodily movements, and that emotions are described by terms for these characteristics because they include movements with these characteristics and it is these movements which are felt when the emotions are experienced. There are characteristics of musical movement that bear a close resemblance to certain features of bodily movements.
Music embodies not psychological conditions but the characters of the bodily movements (feelings of) which are included in or compose psychological conditions.
In these works there are embodied, reflected, expressed, symbolised or in some other way presented phenomena that are integral to human life: we recognise moods, feelings, emotions, attitudes and various other states and activities of our inner life manifested in such a way that, if we are sensitive to their presence and responsive to the manner in which music makes them present to us, we value these musical works because of their essential human reference.
Aesthetic experience consists in disinterested contemplation to the assertion that aesthetic experience is free from emotion would be liable to make itself felt particularly strongly in the case of music because of the manifest emotionality of much musical experience.
Music As the Expression of Emotion---Chapter VII
The creator of a work of art undergoes an experience which he wishes to transmit or communicate to others. He wishes to communicate the experience to others in the sense that he wishes others also to undergo the experience; and to this end he creates or imagines an object which is or can be made perceptible- a painted canvas, a complex of musical sounds, a structure of words and which is to designed as to make it possible for someone who experiences the artist intendent to transmit. His experience is inside him; in order ot make it available to others he must externalise it; and by expressing it he hopes to pass it on to others. To the extent that the artist is successful in his enterprise, and in so far as the experience he communicates is worth experiencing, the work of art he creates is valuable.
Tolstoy-The better the feeling transmitted the better is the art that transmits it.
Music can sound like the vocal expression of emotion. But even when it does it doesn't sound very much like the vocal expression of emotion. the difference between our reaction to such music and to the real vocal expression of emotion is partly a function of the perceived differences in the sounds.
We can derive satisfaction from the ways in which emotions naturally discharge themselves in non-linguistic forms of behaviour or kinds of bodily process. A natural outlet for our grief is tears, for our anger blows, for our joy bodily movement. the stronger the emotion the more difficult it is to inhibit its natural expression in the body. And if the emotion pursues its natural course and issues in overt bodily activities which express it they can provide a satisfaction that is forgone if the emotion's natural expressions are repressed.
We hear in the music a variety of feelings, moods, emotions, and qualities of mind and character: emotional turbulence, exquisite tenderness, mounting excitement, exstatic release, passionate release, passionate regret, sincerity, wistfulness...and these features of mind, character and feeling are integral to the value the music has for us:our response to the music is a function of the psychological states and processes it contains. Much expressive music is heard as containing states of mind that create the impression of a personality whose depth or shallowness of feeling, vitality or torpor, sincerity or insincerity, warmth or coldness attracts or repels. And the fact that our ordinary human sympathies and antipathies are engaged by expressive music is dependent not merely on our being made aware of a state of mind by the music, but on our entering imaginatively into that state of mind or on our experiencing imaginatively a sympathetic or antipathetic response to that state of mind. Hence it is indeed true that we can experience the state of mind a musical passage expresses, and this experience can be an experience from within or from without. Nothing less than this can explain the power of expressive music to move us in the manner it sometimes achieves. What we lack is a satisfying account of how music can be a humanistic art.
A composer can consider his work from the point of view of the listener in the act of composition itself-he can imagine how his work will sound and he can intend that it should be heard in a certain manner. Hence, there is possibility of musical communiaction. For a composer can create something that he intends should sound a certain way and that he intends the listener to hear in a certain manner; and if he succeeds in his intention, the listener understands his work and undergoes the experience the composer intended. And if the listener undergoes the experience the composer imagined, and intended the listener to undergo, the composer has communicated that experience to the listener.
Conclusion
The value of music is intrinsic, not merely instrumental: the listener values the experience of a musical work in itself; the experience he values can be specified only by reference to the music that is experienced in undergoing the experience; the experience is not repaceable by a different experience that offers the listener exactly what he values in the original experience - for it is the experience itself, not some separable component or effect of the experience, that is valued. It is the failure of the transmission form of the expression theory of music to meet this requirement that diqualifies the theory.
Music is not restricted to outer world of the expression of emotion but reaches as far as the inner world of emotion itself. The value of a musical work is dependent upon the music's power to generate a certain intramusical emotion in a listener who understands the absolute meaning of the music. This theory appears in two forms:
-The emotion specific to music is a quality of emotion that nothing other than the experience of music can be clothed in.
-Intramusical emotion is emotion that is differentiated from other emotion only by the fact that it involves the awareness of music as its stimulus.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
MUSIC IN ITS RELATION TO THE INTELLECT AND THE EMOTIONS---book review
MUSIC IN ITS RELATION TO THE INTELLECT AND THE EMOTIONS
John Stainer
Mus. Doc., M.A., Prof. Mus., Oxon.
London New York
Novello, Ewer And Co.
Copyright, 1892, by Novello, Ewer and Co.
-------
The cause of the sound works its way to us in absolute silence; sound, in fact, does not exist in itself but only in us, it is purely subjective. It does not exist externally to us, is not objective, is not an entity. Some one may exclaim, this cold scientific explanation of sound deprives music of all its romantic charms! Nothing of the short!
When a symphony or accompanies chorus is being performed, the various instruments or voices, according to their quality of tone and pitch, are sending fourth waves of various shapes and outlines, which as they join each other on their outward course, become merged and superposed into waves of a single form; each of which, of course, contains in itself the sum of the waves which constituted it. When a thread of this complicated wave enters the human ear., it beats against the tympanum of the ear as before, and again the fibres of Corti's organ are ready to tell the brain what has reached them.
This organ of Corti is the most marvellous musical instrument kanown to us, it consists of many thousands of fibres or rods which are fixed at one end, while the other end lies in minute sacs of nerve tissue; so delicate and clever is this instrument that it analyses the contents of the complicated sound-wave, takes it to pieces, passes on to the intellect the fact that such and such instruments are being played, or, such and such voices used; it first analyses and then allows the intellect to reconstruct and know the many and several external causes of the one complicated wave. Could anything be more romantic or poetical than this! It is more than a romance, it is a miracle! So you see how important it is that we should never forget that when we are listening to music each hearer has sound only in his own head; there is no noise or sound whatever existing in the space between the hearer's heads; no noise or sound whatever between each single head of the hearers and the instruments or organs of voice causing vibrations, and no noise or sound whatever in the instruments themselves or the organs of voice themselves.
All sound therefore is purely subjective; there is no such thing as sound in itself.
-------------
-----Your interpretation---
If there is no one to hear there is dead silence in a room/globe/universe.
--------------------------
Sound is an effect on us, not a cause which effects us.
Not only do we habitually speak of effects as being causes, but we are constantly depicting imaginary realities and entities which are merely creations of our forms of thought.
With the adjustment of a scale simultaneously, perhaps intuitively, arose the recognition of the fact that a succession of sounds can embody Rhythm just as mush as a succession of mere noises.
It is clear that for Analysis of music, what is required of the listener is primarily the power of receiving the physical sensations of sound, then of rapidly exercising his intellect upon these sensations by coordinating and arranging them, and passing a mental judgment on what the composition is; lastly, he can (still by his intellect) pass a verdict on its correctness or incorrectness, that is to say, how far it is or is not in accordance with those accepted rules and regulations which we call the grammar of music in its widest sense; this grammar being, as we have said, nothing more than a series of quotations drawn from the works of the masters, analysed and arranged. A grammar of a language is exactly the same kind; and like it, our grammar of music has its acidence, its syntax, and its prosody.
The only fact which raises Music, Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture to a higher grade than the processes of Touch, Taste, Smell, is that the former, n their own various spheres, make a demand upon the intellect, and by means of the intellect upon the emotions, which the latter do not. The only thing which prevents us from composing a symphony in Touch, by a succession and combination of various materials to be touched; and similarly symphony in tastes or smells, is that separate sensations of Touch, Taste, or Smell do not present themselves to the intellect as capable of being coordinated and systmatized, and therefore do not effect the emotions. It is evident then that Art can not be said to exist unless there is an appeal to the emotions by means of the Intellect. If the thing created appeals only to the Intellect, it is not a work of art. It is for this reason that our multiplication table, or a complicated geometrical figure, wonderful as they would seem to a rude savage, never can be considered a "works of art."
The task of a composer is synthetical-he puts together the material of his art according to some aim; on the other hand, the task of the hearer is analytical, he resolves the whole into its component parts before he can finally pass a judgment on it. But no aiming at good art by the creator, no critism of music by its hearer, no separation of good and bad can take place, untill creator and hearer have on some common ground passed judgment on certain questions which are not within the scope of mere intellect, but are within the realm of taste. The judge in this Court of taste is our sentiment of the Beautiful. Whence comes this sentiment of the Beauiful?
If an attempt were made to catalogue the duties of this sentiment we might, perhaps, say that it should be able to appreciate the beauty of-uniformity-which does not sink into dulness; variety-which does not produce a sense of confusion; relation of component parts-which gives an idea of unity; contrast without opposition between the contrasting elements, and over and above all this, the artistic aim of the composer-that is, the thought undelying his mode of expression; and lastly, it must be able to grasp and sympathize with that emotional frame of mind of the composer which compelled him to exert his creative gift.
There is something besides a Thought underlying a work of musical art; there is the emotional condition of its creator. Veron says:"The valus of a work of art rests entirely on the degree of energy with which it exhibits the intellectual character and emotional condition of its author. The only rule imposed on it is the necessity for a certain comformity with the mode of thinking and feeling of the public to which it appeals."
Feeling and knowledge are, finally, only two sides of the original fundemental fact, conciousness, which is a dynamic creative thing in relation to its own content. It begins by creating blindly, impulsively, under the lead of cerebral processes; this is feeling. It ends by creating prevision, selection, thought; this is knowledge. An interpretation of Sensations is requisite to the production of all emotions, the more difficult the interpretation the higher and more rare will be the emotion. Emotion, therefore, presupposes Intellect and elevated emotions and elevated Intellect. (by Holmes-Forbes)
A perception of form; whether it be in melodic succession of sounds or in organised combinations of sounds, lies at the root of our appreciation of the Beautifull in Music, and therefore no emotion consequent upon the appriceation of the Beautiful can exist until the Intellect has apprehended the form, and therefore, n legitimate emotions can precede the intellectual precess."
In the hearer the sensations of sound are apprehended, analysed, grouped, and formulated by the Intellect; next, that the Intellect is occupied in passing judgment on the conformity of the work to the recognised regulations of the art; next that this intellectual operation calls into activity our sentiment of the beautiful, with which a certain amount of emotion is always inseparably allied. In short, the action of hearing music requires 1) Sensation, 2) Intellect, 3)Sentiment of the Beautiful, 4)Emotion; or, to satet it in another way, "there can be no emotion where there is no sentiment of the Beautiful; no sentiment of the Beautiful without an operation of the Intellect; no operation of the Intellect without Sensations of the Sound."
There is no such thing as Sound in itself, it is merely the name of a sensation. It follows that Music, being made out of Sounds as its only materila, must also be purely subjective. This is obvious. The fact that musicans have made into a system, have codified and analysed the commonest "expressions" or "sayings" of music, until we have a well-marked series of grammatical treatises, in no wise shakes tha fect that the Art exists only in our brains, and is not an external entity.
Feelings are the proximate cause of the laws of counterpoint.
Music is the most subjective of all arts. (Hegel) Hegel simply means that in some arts the external cause is more permanent than in others; for example, no one can deny that in Sculpture the external cause of our sensations is in a way more permanent than in Painting. From one point of view Music can hardly be said to have any permanent external cause at all: a full score of a symphony, opera, or oratorio, is nothing more than a description of the manner in which the causes of sounds are to be made use of at every performance of a great work of musical art the tone-picture has to be re-painted according to these directions or descriptions; and as we all know by experience the attempts to reproduce these tone-pictures vary in every possible degree, from very good to very bad.
"Music is the most subjective of all arts- it is, in fact, purely subjective; so please beware of the use of such expressions as "art in itself", "music in itself", "objective art." And never speak of beauty as "existing in the medium of an art!" Never try to perform the impossible intellectual feat of realising that music is a "self-subsistent form of the beautiful!"
The beauty of music, which exists, and onlt can exist, inside the preceiving subject, exists also outside perceiving subject: and it is beautiful in itself although it has no objective reality or separate existence. Sentiment of beauty cannot exist without an operation of the Intellect.
Every device of change in melody and harmony, in tone-colour, and time, may be freely resorted to, while at the same time all ends of pleasing symmetry and proportion of parts are fully satisfied.
Music has strong power as an abstract expression.
How far and within what limits can a composer/genius express emotion in his composition, and how far and within what limits can the hearer feel emotion.
There is a general concurrence that the more emotional the mood of a composer, the more emotional will be his musical production, assuming that he has the technical skill and training to express hsi thoughts. It must also beyond dispute that a composer must be of a highly imaginative, as well as sensitive temperament, otherwise invention would be impossible, and art would find itself walking round and round in a circle incapable of expansion. But the most widely divergent opinions exist as to the limitation of this power of a composer of causing emotion, and hearer of feeling it.
Are there definite emotions to which we can give such names as sarrow, joy, hope, fear, love?
Such feelings are very distinct, and it is the unquestionable province of music to produce them.
But when one is held under the spell of an emotional mood, such as any one of those just named, the memory often places before us, very vividly , scenes and memories which have long past by, and it invests them with new meaning and new force.
These mental results are entirely limited to each person individually, to write down these efects of memory, and renewed reflections on past events, and ascribe them either to the composer's hearth or head, to the composition itself, is most foolish and most unprofitable. Yet this is a common and not unpopular path of current literature; let us, in the truest interests of our art, discourage it in every way.
The operations of the intellect and the emotions have to be carefully and delicately balanced against each other, bith in the composer and hearer.
The beauty of pure music is grasped and felt by an intellect musically trained, emotions and deep emotions will undoubtedly be stirred up. In the case of an untrained listener, words added to music, and especially words, scenery, acting, and music combined, may greatly intensify his emotional condition; but he must not therefore as people usually do, attribute all the emotion to the effect of the music, and jump to the conclusion that no training is necessary for its due appreciation. More music becomes a language the more necessary is it that its grammar should be studied by all who pretend to enjoy its beauty and meaning, and certainly by those who venture to critise it.
John Stainer
Mus. Doc., M.A., Prof. Mus., Oxon.
London New York
Novello, Ewer And Co.
Copyright, 1892, by Novello, Ewer and Co.
-------
The cause of the sound works its way to us in absolute silence; sound, in fact, does not exist in itself but only in us, it is purely subjective. It does not exist externally to us, is not objective, is not an entity. Some one may exclaim, this cold scientific explanation of sound deprives music of all its romantic charms! Nothing of the short!
When a symphony or accompanies chorus is being performed, the various instruments or voices, according to their quality of tone and pitch, are sending fourth waves of various shapes and outlines, which as they join each other on their outward course, become merged and superposed into waves of a single form; each of which, of course, contains in itself the sum of the waves which constituted it. When a thread of this complicated wave enters the human ear., it beats against the tympanum of the ear as before, and again the fibres of Corti's organ are ready to tell the brain what has reached them.
This organ of Corti is the most marvellous musical instrument kanown to us, it consists of many thousands of fibres or rods which are fixed at one end, while the other end lies in minute sacs of nerve tissue; so delicate and clever is this instrument that it analyses the contents of the complicated sound-wave, takes it to pieces, passes on to the intellect the fact that such and such instruments are being played, or, such and such voices used; it first analyses and then allows the intellect to reconstruct and know the many and several external causes of the one complicated wave. Could anything be more romantic or poetical than this! It is more than a romance, it is a miracle! So you see how important it is that we should never forget that when we are listening to music each hearer has sound only in his own head; there is no noise or sound whatever existing in the space between the hearer's heads; no noise or sound whatever between each single head of the hearers and the instruments or organs of voice causing vibrations, and no noise or sound whatever in the instruments themselves or the organs of voice themselves.
All sound therefore is purely subjective; there is no such thing as sound in itself.
-------------
-----Your interpretation---
If there is no one to hear there is dead silence in a room/globe/universe.
--------------------------
Sound is an effect on us, not a cause which effects us.
Not only do we habitually speak of effects as being causes, but we are constantly depicting imaginary realities and entities which are merely creations of our forms of thought.
With the adjustment of a scale simultaneously, perhaps intuitively, arose the recognition of the fact that a succession of sounds can embody Rhythm just as mush as a succession of mere noises.
It is clear that for Analysis of music, what is required of the listener is primarily the power of receiving the physical sensations of sound, then of rapidly exercising his intellect upon these sensations by coordinating and arranging them, and passing a mental judgment on what the composition is; lastly, he can (still by his intellect) pass a verdict on its correctness or incorrectness, that is to say, how far it is or is not in accordance with those accepted rules and regulations which we call the grammar of music in its widest sense; this grammar being, as we have said, nothing more than a series of quotations drawn from the works of the masters, analysed and arranged. A grammar of a language is exactly the same kind; and like it, our grammar of music has its acidence, its syntax, and its prosody.
The only fact which raises Music, Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture to a higher grade than the processes of Touch, Taste, Smell, is that the former, n their own various spheres, make a demand upon the intellect, and by means of the intellect upon the emotions, which the latter do not. The only thing which prevents us from composing a symphony in Touch, by a succession and combination of various materials to be touched; and similarly symphony in tastes or smells, is that separate sensations of Touch, Taste, or Smell do not present themselves to the intellect as capable of being coordinated and systmatized, and therefore do not effect the emotions. It is evident then that Art can not be said to exist unless there is an appeal to the emotions by means of the Intellect. If the thing created appeals only to the Intellect, it is not a work of art. It is for this reason that our multiplication table, or a complicated geometrical figure, wonderful as they would seem to a rude savage, never can be considered a "works of art."
The task of a composer is synthetical-he puts together the material of his art according to some aim; on the other hand, the task of the hearer is analytical, he resolves the whole into its component parts before he can finally pass a judgment on it. But no aiming at good art by the creator, no critism of music by its hearer, no separation of good and bad can take place, untill creator and hearer have on some common ground passed judgment on certain questions which are not within the scope of mere intellect, but are within the realm of taste. The judge in this Court of taste is our sentiment of the Beautiful. Whence comes this sentiment of the Beauiful?
If an attempt were made to catalogue the duties of this sentiment we might, perhaps, say that it should be able to appreciate the beauty of-uniformity-which does not sink into dulness; variety-which does not produce a sense of confusion; relation of component parts-which gives an idea of unity; contrast without opposition between the contrasting elements, and over and above all this, the artistic aim of the composer-that is, the thought undelying his mode of expression; and lastly, it must be able to grasp and sympathize with that emotional frame of mind of the composer which compelled him to exert his creative gift.
There is something besides a Thought underlying a work of musical art; there is the emotional condition of its creator. Veron says:"The valus of a work of art rests entirely on the degree of energy with which it exhibits the intellectual character and emotional condition of its author. The only rule imposed on it is the necessity for a certain comformity with the mode of thinking and feeling of the public to which it appeals."
Feeling and knowledge are, finally, only two sides of the original fundemental fact, conciousness, which is a dynamic creative thing in relation to its own content. It begins by creating blindly, impulsively, under the lead of cerebral processes; this is feeling. It ends by creating prevision, selection, thought; this is knowledge. An interpretation of Sensations is requisite to the production of all emotions, the more difficult the interpretation the higher and more rare will be the emotion. Emotion, therefore, presupposes Intellect and elevated emotions and elevated Intellect. (by Holmes-Forbes)
A perception of form; whether it be in melodic succession of sounds or in organised combinations of sounds, lies at the root of our appreciation of the Beautifull in Music, and therefore no emotion consequent upon the appriceation of the Beautiful can exist until the Intellect has apprehended the form, and therefore, n legitimate emotions can precede the intellectual precess."
In the hearer the sensations of sound are apprehended, analysed, grouped, and formulated by the Intellect; next, that the Intellect is occupied in passing judgment on the conformity of the work to the recognised regulations of the art; next that this intellectual operation calls into activity our sentiment of the beautiful, with which a certain amount of emotion is always inseparably allied. In short, the action of hearing music requires 1) Sensation, 2) Intellect, 3)Sentiment of the Beautiful, 4)Emotion; or, to satet it in another way, "there can be no emotion where there is no sentiment of the Beautiful; no sentiment of the Beautiful without an operation of the Intellect; no operation of the Intellect without Sensations of the Sound."
There is no such thing as Sound in itself, it is merely the name of a sensation. It follows that Music, being made out of Sounds as its only materila, must also be purely subjective. This is obvious. The fact that musicans have made into a system, have codified and analysed the commonest "expressions" or "sayings" of music, until we have a well-marked series of grammatical treatises, in no wise shakes tha fect that the Art exists only in our brains, and is not an external entity.
Feelings are the proximate cause of the laws of counterpoint.
Music is the most subjective of all arts. (Hegel) Hegel simply means that in some arts the external cause is more permanent than in others; for example, no one can deny that in Sculpture the external cause of our sensations is in a way more permanent than in Painting. From one point of view Music can hardly be said to have any permanent external cause at all: a full score of a symphony, opera, or oratorio, is nothing more than a description of the manner in which the causes of sounds are to be made use of at every performance of a great work of musical art the tone-picture has to be re-painted according to these directions or descriptions; and as we all know by experience the attempts to reproduce these tone-pictures vary in every possible degree, from very good to very bad.
"Music is the most subjective of all arts- it is, in fact, purely subjective; so please beware of the use of such expressions as "art in itself", "music in itself", "objective art." And never speak of beauty as "existing in the medium of an art!" Never try to perform the impossible intellectual feat of realising that music is a "self-subsistent form of the beautiful!"
The beauty of music, which exists, and onlt can exist, inside the preceiving subject, exists also outside perceiving subject: and it is beautiful in itself although it has no objective reality or separate existence. Sentiment of beauty cannot exist without an operation of the Intellect.
Every device of change in melody and harmony, in tone-colour, and time, may be freely resorted to, while at the same time all ends of pleasing symmetry and proportion of parts are fully satisfied.
Music has strong power as an abstract expression.
How far and within what limits can a composer/genius express emotion in his composition, and how far and within what limits can the hearer feel emotion.
There is a general concurrence that the more emotional the mood of a composer, the more emotional will be his musical production, assuming that he has the technical skill and training to express hsi thoughts. It must also beyond dispute that a composer must be of a highly imaginative, as well as sensitive temperament, otherwise invention would be impossible, and art would find itself walking round and round in a circle incapable of expansion. But the most widely divergent opinions exist as to the limitation of this power of a composer of causing emotion, and hearer of feeling it.
Are there definite emotions to which we can give such names as sarrow, joy, hope, fear, love?
Such feelings are very distinct, and it is the unquestionable province of music to produce them.
But when one is held under the spell of an emotional mood, such as any one of those just named, the memory often places before us, very vividly , scenes and memories which have long past by, and it invests them with new meaning and new force.
These mental results are entirely limited to each person individually, to write down these efects of memory, and renewed reflections on past events, and ascribe them either to the composer's hearth or head, to the composition itself, is most foolish and most unprofitable. Yet this is a common and not unpopular path of current literature; let us, in the truest interests of our art, discourage it in every way.
The operations of the intellect and the emotions have to be carefully and delicately balanced against each other, bith in the composer and hearer.
The beauty of pure music is grasped and felt by an intellect musically trained, emotions and deep emotions will undoubtedly be stirred up. In the case of an untrained listener, words added to music, and especially words, scenery, acting, and music combined, may greatly intensify his emotional condition; but he must not therefore as people usually do, attribute all the emotion to the effect of the music, and jump to the conclusion that no training is necessary for its due appreciation. More music becomes a language the more necessary is it that its grammar should be studied by all who pretend to enjoy its beauty and meaning, and certainly by those who venture to critise it.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Thesis Presentation (Preliminary Concept Doc)
Here is my preliminary concept document. I will update this over time--before midterm--
Preliminary Presentation (PDF)
Preliminary Presentation (PPT)
Preliminary Presentation (PPS)
Preliminary Presentation (PDF)
Preliminary Presentation (PPT)
Preliminary Presentation (PPS)
My Goals for-Feb 12- Feb 18 and Feb 19 - Feb 25
Feb 12- Feb 18
Research and work on the survey for visual language-by Friday
Finalize and categorize sound selection-by Sunday morning
Test GSR on yourself and one of the study group member(synesthesia)
Finish reading--Emotional Brain---book "Joseph Ledoux"
Feb 19 - Feb 25
Test GSR on rest of the study group
Recreate graphs - using value from GSR
Categorize charts - emotions-person
Finalize the survey and if time permits run it through study group
Read some of your research---books(quick overview of 2 books)
Research and work on the survey for visual language-by Friday
Finalize and categorize sound selection-by Sunday morning
Test GSR on yourself and one of the study group member(synesthesia)
Finish reading--Emotional Brain---book "Joseph Ledoux"
Feb 19 - Feb 25
Test GSR on rest of the study group
Recreate graphs - using value from GSR
Categorize charts - emotions-person
Finalize the survey and if time permits run it through study group
Read some of your research---books(quick overview of 2 books)
Some Research for the Survey--Visual Language
SmartMobs
Mobs, the fourth movement, consists of five smaller movements, each of which utilizes a self-organizing particle system to configure its shape, color, distribution and physics to best express the different zeitgeists of: feeling, gender, age, weather, and geographical location. Mobs (Feeling) displays the most common feelings in the sample population. In this movement, the particles self-organize into rows of shared feelings. The rows are sorted by the number of particles they contain, and the particles within each row are sorted by the length of the sentence that each particle contains. The rows are colored to inherit the chosen color of the feeling they represent. Any particle can be clicked to reveal the sentence within.
Color therapy training and learning ability improvement
Color healing, light therapy and chromo therapy are all terms used interchangeably with Color Therapy, which is a set of principles used to create harmonious color and color combinations for healing. Color therapy (chromo therapy) help improve and balance emotional state when gaze at selected colors and absorb their energy. A therapist trained in color therapy uses color to balance energy wherever our bodies are lacking, be it physical, emotional , spiritual, or mental.
Relationship between color and emotion
Finally, the color gray was mainly associated with negative emotions (89.8%); including the feelings of sadness, depression, boredom, and confusion, as well as tiredness, loneliness, anger, and fear. Reasons given for negative emotional responses to gray consistently showed that the color gray tends to make reference to bad weather, rainy, cloudy or foggy days and brings out the feelings of sadness, depression, and boredom.
Does Dream Color Reflect Emotion?
Color has been shown by researchers to stimulate human emotio n in the waking state.
Would it not therefore make sense that those same emotions stimulate colors in the dream
state? This paper describes the results of an investigation into this question. It provides
support for a hypothesis that color not only reflects emotional content within a dream
image, but that the frequency of color recalled from a persons dreams over the long term
can reflect the occurrence of emotional events and perhaps even be influenced by, or an
indicator of, personality. Investigation into the physiology and psychology of color,
established a basis for quantifying the human response to color. Investigation with
individual dreamwork supported the premise that color in dreams relates directly to the
waking emotional situations that stimulated the dream. This was done by correlating the
results of a Gestalt role-play technique (to reveal emotional content within a dream
image) with a color based emotional profile tool (the Luscher Color Test) and then with
the waking life situation reflected in the dream. Further research, on the long term
journaling of dream color data from approximately 8000 dream records, gave support to
the premise that the frequency of colors we recall from dreams respond to emotional
events in our waking life, as well as personality traits. Results presented here are
preliminary in that more investigation and controlled study is required, however it is
presented here as an indication of a potential relationship between dream color and
emotion, as well as an invitation to join us in further research.
The Mixed Signals-synesthesia
emotion -> syn
chronesthesia - emotion syn [unit of] time
esthesiesthia - emotion syn emotion
facetesthesia - emotion syn personality
geusesthesia - emotion syn taste
optesthesia - emotion syn sight
chromesthesia - emotion syn color (sight)
kinesesthesia - emotion syn movement (sight)
morphesthesia - emotion syn shape (sight)
osmesthesia - emotion syn smell
phonesthesia - emotion syn sound
tactesthesia - emotion syn touch
algesthesia - emotion syn pain (touch)
baresthesia - emotion syn weight/pressure (touch)
thermesthesia - emotion syn temperature (touch)
color -> syn
chronochromia - color syn [unit of] time
esthesiochromia - color syn emotion
facetochromia - color syn personality
geusachromia - color syn taste
optochromia - color syn sight
chromachromia - color syn color (sight)
kinesichromia - color syn movement (sight)
morphochromia - color syn shape (sight)
osmochromia - color syn smell
phonochromia - color syn sound
tactochromia - color syn touch
algichromia - color syn pain (touch)
barochromia - color syn weight/pressure (touch)
thermochromia - color syn temperature (touch)
shape -> syn
chronomorphia - shape syn [unit of] time
esthesiomorphia - shape syn emotion
facetomorphia - shape syn personality
geusamorphia - shape syn taste
optomorphia - shape syn sight
chromamorphia - shape syn color (sight)
kinesimorphia - shape syn movement (sight)
morphomorphia - shape syn shape (sight)
osmomorphia - shape syn smell
phonomorphia - shape syn sound
tactomorphia - shape syn touch
algimorphia - shape syn pain (touch)
baromorphia - shape syn weight/pressure (touch)
thermomorphia - shape syn temperature (touch)
sound -> syn
chronophonia - sound syn [unit of] time
esthesiophonia - sound syn emotion
facetophonia - sound syn personality
geusaphonia - sound syn taste
optophonia - sound syn sight
chromaphonia - sound syn color (sight)
kinesiphonia - sound syn movement (sight)
morphophonia - sound syn shape (sight)
osmophonia - sound syn smell
phonophonia - sound syn sound
tactophonia - sound syn touch
algiphonia - sound syn pain (touch)
barophonia - sound syn weight/pressure (touch)
thermophonia - sound syn temperature (touch)
Color Questionare for Dreamwork----good one use for the survey
The table contains emotional themes, related to common human associations with color. The table is intended to trigger your own personal associations as they might relate to the dream. It does NOT represent the "meaning" of color. The table was derived from color psychology literature, the Color Test by Dr. Max Luscher, augmented with the works of C. G. Jung, plus research by the author.
Abstract art experiment on children--color-shape-emotion
Your children have been learning about abstract art as they visit the exhibition Something to Look Forward To. It is art all about lines, shapes, colors and textures. While we adults may find it more challenging than narrative art, our young children seem to be uniquely able to appreciate its aesthetic qualities!
Color Matters--Color Symbolism
Dark and light shades of any color convey completely different meanings. For example, pink (light red) loses all of red's associations with energy and takes on new connotations of tenderness and sweetness. Likewise, dark blue is dignified and authoritative, sky blue is ethereal and softer.
Color Theory
Artist have known for centuries that color evokes emotions and creates powerful moods.
Color Symbolism Matching Test
What message do you want your design to convey? See how well you can match the colors with the emotions and symbolism they convey.
Symbolism Colors
According to Henry Dreyfus, Japanese, in contrast with Westerners, grasp colors on an intuitively horizontal plane, and pay little heed to the influences of light. Colors whether intense of soft, are identified not so much on the basis of reflected light or shadow, but in terms of the meaning or feeling associated with them. The adjectives used to describe colors, like iki (sophisticated or chic), shibui (subdued or restrained), or hannari (gay or mirthful), tend to be those that stress feelings rather than the values of colors in relation to each other. I've noted Mr. Dreyfus' conclusions where applicable.
Color symbolism can vary dramatically between cultures. Research has also shown that most colors have more positive associations with them then negative. So, although some colors do have negative connotations (such as Black for a funeral or for evil), these negative elements are usually triggered by specific circumstances. Peoples age also has an effect on how colors are perceived. For example, children tend to like bright, happy colors. I've included some of the meanings that each color can represent.
Color Symbolism Chart
---Refer to this site--has both scientific and cultural color symbolism charts---
Red - Excitement, energy, passion, desire, speed, strength, power, heat, love, aggression, danger, fire, blood, war, violence, aggression, all things intense and passionate.
Color Psychology
---Refer to this site--GOOD ONE---
Like death and taxes, there is no escaping color. It is ubiquitous. Yet what does it all mean? Why are people more relaxed in green rooms? Why do weightlifters do their best in blue gyms?
Colors often have different meanings in various cultures. And even in Western societies, the meanings of various colors have changed over the years. But today in the U.S., researchers have generally found the following to be accurate.
Color: Meaning, Symbolism & Psychology
Our reaction to color is almost instantaneous and has a profound impact on the choices we make everyday.
Mobs, the fourth movement, consists of five smaller movements, each of which utilizes a self-organizing particle system to configure its shape, color, distribution and physics to best express the different zeitgeists of: feeling, gender, age, weather, and geographical location. Mobs (Feeling) displays the most common feelings in the sample population. In this movement, the particles self-organize into rows of shared feelings. The rows are sorted by the number of particles they contain, and the particles within each row are sorted by the length of the sentence that each particle contains. The rows are colored to inherit the chosen color of the feeling they represent. Any particle can be clicked to reveal the sentence within.
Color therapy training and learning ability improvement
Color healing, light therapy and chromo therapy are all terms used interchangeably with Color Therapy, which is a set of principles used to create harmonious color and color combinations for healing. Color therapy (chromo therapy) help improve and balance emotional state when gaze at selected colors and absorb their energy. A therapist trained in color therapy uses color to balance energy wherever our bodies are lacking, be it physical, emotional , spiritual, or mental.
Relationship between color and emotion
Finally, the color gray was mainly associated with negative emotions (89.8%); including the feelings of sadness, depression, boredom, and confusion, as well as tiredness, loneliness, anger, and fear. Reasons given for negative emotional responses to gray consistently showed that the color gray tends to make reference to bad weather, rainy, cloudy or foggy days and brings out the feelings of sadness, depression, and boredom.
Does Dream Color Reflect Emotion?
Color has been shown by researchers to stimulate human emotio n in the waking state.
Would it not therefore make sense that those same emotions stimulate colors in the dream
state? This paper describes the results of an investigation into this question. It provides
support for a hypothesis that color not only reflects emotional content within a dream
image, but that the frequency of color recalled from a persons dreams over the long term
can reflect the occurrence of emotional events and perhaps even be influenced by, or an
indicator of, personality. Investigation into the physiology and psychology of color,
established a basis for quantifying the human response to color. Investigation with
individual dreamwork supported the premise that color in dreams relates directly to the
waking emotional situations that stimulated the dream. This was done by correlating the
results of a Gestalt role-play technique (to reveal emotional content within a dream
image) with a color based emotional profile tool (the Luscher Color Test) and then with
the waking life situation reflected in the dream. Further research, on the long term
journaling of dream color data from approximately 8000 dream records, gave support to
the premise that the frequency of colors we recall from dreams respond to emotional
events in our waking life, as well as personality traits. Results presented here are
preliminary in that more investigation and controlled study is required, however it is
presented here as an indication of a potential relationship between dream color and
emotion, as well as an invitation to join us in further research.
The Mixed Signals-synesthesia
emotion -> syn
chronesthesia - emotion syn [unit of] time
esthesiesthia - emotion syn emotion
facetesthesia - emotion syn personality
geusesthesia - emotion syn taste
optesthesia - emotion syn sight
chromesthesia - emotion syn color (sight)
kinesesthesia - emotion syn movement (sight)
morphesthesia - emotion syn shape (sight)
osmesthesia - emotion syn smell
phonesthesia - emotion syn sound
tactesthesia - emotion syn touch
algesthesia - emotion syn pain (touch)
baresthesia - emotion syn weight/pressure (touch)
thermesthesia - emotion syn temperature (touch)
color -> syn
chronochromia - color syn [unit of] time
esthesiochromia - color syn emotion
facetochromia - color syn personality
geusachromia - color syn taste
optochromia - color syn sight
chromachromia - color syn color (sight)
kinesichromia - color syn movement (sight)
morphochromia - color syn shape (sight)
osmochromia - color syn smell
phonochromia - color syn sound
tactochromia - color syn touch
algichromia - color syn pain (touch)
barochromia - color syn weight/pressure (touch)
thermochromia - color syn temperature (touch)
shape -> syn
chronomorphia - shape syn [unit of] time
esthesiomorphia - shape syn emotion
facetomorphia - shape syn personality
geusamorphia - shape syn taste
optomorphia - shape syn sight
chromamorphia - shape syn color (sight)
kinesimorphia - shape syn movement (sight)
morphomorphia - shape syn shape (sight)
osmomorphia - shape syn smell
phonomorphia - shape syn sound
tactomorphia - shape syn touch
algimorphia - shape syn pain (touch)
baromorphia - shape syn weight/pressure (touch)
thermomorphia - shape syn temperature (touch)
sound -> syn
chronophonia - sound syn [unit of] time
esthesiophonia - sound syn emotion
facetophonia - sound syn personality
geusaphonia - sound syn taste
optophonia - sound syn sight
chromaphonia - sound syn color (sight)
kinesiphonia - sound syn movement (sight)
morphophonia - sound syn shape (sight)
osmophonia - sound syn smell
phonophonia - sound syn sound
tactophonia - sound syn touch
algiphonia - sound syn pain (touch)
barophonia - sound syn weight/pressure (touch)
thermophonia - sound syn temperature (touch)
Color Questionare for Dreamwork----good one use for the survey
The table contains emotional themes, related to common human associations with color. The table is intended to trigger your own personal associations as they might relate to the dream. It does NOT represent the "meaning" of color. The table was derived from color psychology literature, the Color Test by Dr. Max Luscher, augmented with the works of C. G. Jung, plus research by the author.
Abstract art experiment on children--color-shape-emotion
Your children have been learning about abstract art as they visit the exhibition Something to Look Forward To. It is art all about lines, shapes, colors and textures. While we adults may find it more challenging than narrative art, our young children seem to be uniquely able to appreciate its aesthetic qualities!
Color Matters--Color Symbolism
Dark and light shades of any color convey completely different meanings. For example, pink (light red) loses all of red's associations with energy and takes on new connotations of tenderness and sweetness. Likewise, dark blue is dignified and authoritative, sky blue is ethereal and softer.
Color Theory
Artist have known for centuries that color evokes emotions and creates powerful moods.
Color Symbolism Matching Test
What message do you want your design to convey? See how well you can match the colors with the emotions and symbolism they convey.
Symbolism Colors
According to Henry Dreyfus, Japanese, in contrast with Westerners, grasp colors on an intuitively horizontal plane, and pay little heed to the influences of light. Colors whether intense of soft, are identified not so much on the basis of reflected light or shadow, but in terms of the meaning or feeling associated with them. The adjectives used to describe colors, like iki (sophisticated or chic), shibui (subdued or restrained), or hannari (gay or mirthful), tend to be those that stress feelings rather than the values of colors in relation to each other. I've noted Mr. Dreyfus' conclusions where applicable.
Color symbolism can vary dramatically between cultures. Research has also shown that most colors have more positive associations with them then negative. So, although some colors do have negative connotations (such as Black for a funeral or for evil), these negative elements are usually triggered by specific circumstances. Peoples age also has an effect on how colors are perceived. For example, children tend to like bright, happy colors. I've included some of the meanings that each color can represent.
Color Symbolism Chart
---Refer to this site--has both scientific and cultural color symbolism charts---
Red - Excitement, energy, passion, desire, speed, strength, power, heat, love, aggression, danger, fire, blood, war, violence, aggression, all things intense and passionate.
Color Psychology
---Refer to this site--GOOD ONE---
Like death and taxes, there is no escaping color. It is ubiquitous. Yet what does it all mean? Why are people more relaxed in green rooms? Why do weightlifters do their best in blue gyms?
Colors often have different meanings in various cultures. And even in Western societies, the meanings of various colors have changed over the years. But today in the U.S., researchers have generally found the following to be accurate.
Color: Meaning, Symbolism & Psychology
Our reaction to color is almost instantaneous and has a profound impact on the choices we make everyday.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Some research for Compositions for certain emotions
Rimsy Korsakov
mixed emotions---"Symphony" by Rimsy Korsakov
Samuel Scheidth
relaxation---"Courante in G" by Samuel Scheidth
Geza Anda
fear---"Bartok Piano Concerto No.1" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
tension,fear----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.1-2" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
excitement, danger----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.1-3" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
excitement, fantasy, happiness, joy, extreme joy, fear----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.2-1" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
tention,danger,mystery,search, discovery-----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.2-2" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
danger, fear, excitement, frustration---------"Bartok Piano Concerto No.2-3" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
excitement of a young girl, love, first kiss, obstacles, storm but calmness, search, lost, found happiness but lost again----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.3-1" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
calm, tension, little touch, increased passion but very slowly, almost like dreaming and floating on air---"Bartok Piano Concerto No.3-4" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
happiness, joy, dance, Rhythm(variation), move from happiness to danger than back to joy, kids running in a daisy field, butterflies,----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.3-3" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
whole CD "Flute Day Dreams"
calm, dreamy, flute, unknown joy, increased unknown joy, increased satisfaction-----Edvard Grieg " Morning"
dreamy, calm---whole CD "Flute Day Dreams"
spoiled rabit jumping from place to place and dancing-----The Nutcracker by Peter Ilyich
relaxation, lyrical, extreme calmness and happiness without ups and downs---Carmen:Intermezzo by Georges Bizet
romantic, poem, fantasy, nostalgic----FL Qt in d: adagio and Rondo by Wolfgang Amadra
Rostropovich
sad, lost, dead, down, cry, hopeless, moves to tension in mid section, still sad but there is some excitement and hope----Site for solo cello, Canto Prima by Mstislav Rostropovich
whole CD has tension, hope and danger and mostly sadness and last 2 have danger, close to death, end of an era, grieving after someone's death
the second CD has sad, nostalgy, knowing that you lost your chance, thinking of lost and sweet memories but too late and there is no hope to re-experience it, in past
ANNIE FISCHER---Mozart, schubert, Schuman
Mozart-Sonata--spring, happiness, joy, butterflies, sparks in your hearth, dance, shifting from one joy, taste to another, discovery of love, satisfaction, increased excitement----Fischer Annie
Adagio---calmness, relaxation, acceptance of situation and enjoying the moment, appreciation
Zach Layton's suggestions
John Cage-7 eternal motions/emotions
SAD-Arvo Part, Messaien:Quartet end of time (louange a la eternite de jesus)
EXCITING-Beethoven
JOY-Beethoven 4th-mvt. 9th symphony
FEAR- Ligeti (lux Aeterna, Atmospheres)-
Schoenberg (Etwartung)
PRIDE-Strauss(Zarathustra)
FRUSTRATION-Schoenberg (Opus II, 13 (Piano) - (Webern)
CALM-Erik Satie "Socrate", Gnossienne
Algorithmic Composition
Automated composition-process of using some formal process to make music w/ minimal human intervention
Algorithm=Predetermined set of instructions for solving a specific problem in a limited number of steps
Automation=Anything that can move or act of itself
Mozart="Dice Music" ---small musical fragments & combining them by chance
John Cage="Randomness" "Reunion" -- performed by playing chess on a photo-receptor equipped chesssboard
Olivier Messiaen= "Mode de Valeurs et d'inensites" -- piano etude 1949
had 36 pitch series, each pitch of was given specific rhythmic, dynamic, registral and attack
characteristics with which to be used in the composition. (Kostka 1995)
Use Of The Computer in Music
2 early pioneers--Lejaren Hiller
Jannis Xenakis
3 general approaches -- stochastic, rule-based, artificial intelligence (AI)
Iannis Xenakis=Book- "Formalized Music"
Music-Atrees, Morsima-Amersima
Kemal Ebcioglu=Choral
Hiller=Musicomp
William Shottstaedt
AI System(Artifical Intelligence)---it creates its own grammer and database of rules
David Cope=Experiments in Musical Intelligence
Genetic Programming= Generates its own musical materials as well as forms its own grammer
Brian Israel (Ldc 20881)--in praise of practically nothing---******
good for sudden excitement---calm-excitement--romantic----tention
below is how I felt when I listened to this (USE THIS--GREAT TENTION--MUSIC W VOCALS--some parts are acustic, glass, metal, flute, piano, jumps from calmness to crayzness)
John Cage(LDC 12833)--dances for soloist & company of 3
same type-sudden excitement, fear, tention, mystery--no vocals -- electronic music-- (GOOD YOU MIGHT USE THIS)*****
-David Cope(LSRX 15620)--The Way---
-tention, flow through different emotional states, sudden fear, msytery, darkness, doors(tention), lost, lonely, horror---
-(GOOD YOU MIGHT USE THIS TOO)*****
-Rochberg(LSRX 11460) Dialogues---
-tention, dynamic, teens, curiosity, innocence and curiosity, discovery, sweet, hide (GOOD FOR DYNAMIC MELODY PAINTING -BUT SIMILAR TO DAVID COPE'S STYLE--PICK ONE) (THE WAY(DAVID COPE)=DIALOGUES(ROCHBERG))
-Below are how I felt when I listened to him
David Cope(LZR 26807) -- Navajo Dedications--
nostalgy, mystery, whistle in desert, sweet and warm, touchy, unknown danger,storm after calmness, grief, excitement(igh and low in time)---(GOOD ONE MIGHT USE THIS TOO)******
mixed emotions---"Symphony" by Rimsy Korsakov
Samuel Scheidth
relaxation---"Courante in G" by Samuel Scheidth
Geza Anda
fear---"Bartok Piano Concerto No.1" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
tension,fear----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.1-2" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
excitement, danger----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.1-3" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
excitement, fantasy, happiness, joy, extreme joy, fear----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.2-1" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
tention,danger,mystery,search, discovery-----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.2-2" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
danger, fear, excitement, frustration---------"Bartok Piano Concerto No.2-3" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
excitement of a young girl, love, first kiss, obstacles, storm but calmness, search, lost, found happiness but lost again----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.3-1" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
calm, tension, little touch, increased passion but very slowly, almost like dreaming and floating on air---"Bartok Piano Concerto No.3-4" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
happiness, joy, dance, Rhythm(variation), move from happiness to danger than back to joy, kids running in a daisy field, butterflies,----"Bartok Piano Concerto No.3-3" by Geza Anda, Bela Bartok
whole CD "Flute Day Dreams"
calm, dreamy, flute, unknown joy, increased unknown joy, increased satisfaction-----Edvard Grieg " Morning"
dreamy, calm---whole CD "Flute Day Dreams"
spoiled rabit jumping from place to place and dancing-----The Nutcracker by Peter Ilyich
relaxation, lyrical, extreme calmness and happiness without ups and downs---Carmen:Intermezzo by Georges Bizet
romantic, poem, fantasy, nostalgic----FL Qt in d: adagio and Rondo by Wolfgang Amadra
Rostropovich
sad, lost, dead, down, cry, hopeless, moves to tension in mid section, still sad but there is some excitement and hope----Site for solo cello, Canto Prima by Mstislav Rostropovich
whole CD has tension, hope and danger and mostly sadness and last 2 have danger, close to death, end of an era, grieving after someone's death
the second CD has sad, nostalgy, knowing that you lost your chance, thinking of lost and sweet memories but too late and there is no hope to re-experience it, in past
ANNIE FISCHER---Mozart, schubert, Schuman
Mozart-Sonata--spring, happiness, joy, butterflies, sparks in your hearth, dance, shifting from one joy, taste to another, discovery of love, satisfaction, increased excitement----Fischer Annie
Adagio---calmness, relaxation, acceptance of situation and enjoying the moment, appreciation
Zach Layton's suggestions
John Cage-7 eternal motions/emotions
SAD-Arvo Part, Messaien:Quartet end of time (louange a la eternite de jesus)
EXCITING-Beethoven
JOY-Beethoven 4th-mvt. 9th symphony
FEAR- Ligeti (lux Aeterna, Atmospheres)-
Schoenberg (Etwartung)
PRIDE-Strauss(Zarathustra)
FRUSTRATION-Schoenberg (Opus II, 13 (Piano) - (Webern)
CALM-Erik Satie "Socrate", Gnossienne
Algorithmic Composition
Automated composition-process of using some formal process to make music w/ minimal human intervention
Algorithm=Predetermined set of instructions for solving a specific problem in a limited number of steps
Automation=Anything that can move or act of itself
Mozart="Dice Music" ---small musical fragments & combining them by chance
John Cage="Randomness" "Reunion" -- performed by playing chess on a photo-receptor equipped chesssboard
Olivier Messiaen= "Mode de Valeurs et d'inensites" -- piano etude 1949
had 36 pitch series, each pitch of was given specific rhythmic, dynamic, registral and attack
characteristics with which to be used in the composition. (Kostka 1995)
Use Of The Computer in Music
2 early pioneers--Lejaren Hiller
Jannis Xenakis
3 general approaches -- stochastic, rule-based, artificial intelligence (AI)
Iannis Xenakis=Book- "Formalized Music"
Music-Atrees, Morsima-Amersima
Kemal Ebcioglu=Choral
Hiller=Musicomp
William Shottstaedt
AI System(Artifical Intelligence)---it creates its own grammer and database of rules
David Cope=Experiments in Musical Intelligence
Genetic Programming= Generates its own musical materials as well as forms its own grammer
Brian Israel (Ldc 20881)--in praise of practically nothing---******
good for sudden excitement---calm-excitement--romantic----tention
below is how I felt when I listened to this (USE THIS--GREAT TENTION--MUSIC W VOCALS--some parts are acustic, glass, metal, flute, piano, jumps from calmness to crayzness)
John Cage(LDC 12833)--dances for soloist & company of 3
same type-sudden excitement, fear, tention, mystery--no vocals -- electronic music-- (GOOD YOU MIGHT USE THIS)*****
-David Cope(LSRX 15620)--The Way---
-tention, flow through different emotional states, sudden fear, msytery, darkness, doors(tention), lost, lonely, horror---
-(GOOD YOU MIGHT USE THIS TOO)*****
-Rochberg(LSRX 11460) Dialogues---
-tention, dynamic, teens, curiosity, innocence and curiosity, discovery, sweet, hide (GOOD FOR DYNAMIC MELODY PAINTING -BUT SIMILAR TO DAVID COPE'S STYLE--PICK ONE) (THE WAY(DAVID COPE)=DIALOGUES(ROCHBERG))
-Below are how I felt when I listened to him
David Cope(LZR 26807) -- Navajo Dedications--
nostalgy, mystery, whistle in desert, sweet and warm, touchy, unknown danger,storm after calmness, grief, excitement(igh and low in time)---(GOOD ONE MIGHT USE THIS TOO)******
Monday, February 5, 2007
Things I will accomplish by Feb 10
Personal and Thesis statement -- revise---To be completed by Friday
Define and Defend -- revise--To be completed by Friday
Music Selection -- finalize--To be completed by Wednesday
Preliminary Proposal -- To be completed by Thursday finalize
GSR--start building---weekend
Define and Defend -- revise--To be completed by Friday
Music Selection -- finalize--To be completed by Wednesday
Preliminary Proposal -- To be completed by Thursday finalize
GSR--start building---weekend
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Thesis-Timeline
Things I will accomplish by Feb 3rd
Meeting Thursday morning-Galvanic Skin response
Ask permission to use or decide if you want to build or buy it
Update personal and thesis statements
Go to the Music Library
Diagram my idea
Work on Preliminary Concept Documents
Live sound visualization with fire
Infernoptic
Most modern screens and displays are comprised of a grid of tightly-packed pixels, and by turning precise combinations of pixels on and off, complex moving images are formed. Now just substitute a 6" fireball for each of those demure little pixels, and the image jumps from the screen in licks and bursts of flame. That's the idea behind the latest creation from NAO, the Infernoptix Digital Pyrotechnic Matrix. Matrix because the screen is comprised of a grid 12 pixels wide by 7 pixels high, and Digital because to operate all 84 pixels in such elaborate ways requires a bit of digital processing. That processing starts with custom software, developed exclusively for the Infernoptix, and running on PC or Mac. Five separate modes allow a variety of effects from the screen, as well as the ability to perform the on-the-fly tuning that is necessary with complex pyrotechnics.
Most modern screens and displays are comprised of a grid of tightly-packed pixels, and by turning precise combinations of pixels on and off, complex moving images are formed. Now just substitute a 6" fireball for each of those demure little pixels, and the image jumps from the screen in licks and bursts of flame. That's the idea behind the latest creation from NAO, the Infernoptix Digital Pyrotechnic Matrix. Matrix because the screen is comprised of a grid 12 pixels wide by 7 pixels high, and Digital because to operate all 84 pixels in such elaborate ways requires a bit of digital processing. That processing starts with custom software, developed exclusively for the Infernoptix, and running on PC or Mac. Five separate modes allow a variety of effects from the screen, as well as the ability to perform the on-the-fly tuning that is necessary with complex pyrotechnics.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Galvanic Skin response (GSR)
A low level of cortical arousal is desirable for relaxation, hypnosis, and the subjective experience of psychic states and unconscious manifestations.
A high level of cortical arousal gives increased powers of reflection, focused concentration, increased reading speed, and increased capacity for long-term recall.
Cortical arousal has a simple relationship to skin conductivity. Arousal of the cortex increases the conductivity of the skin and conversely, a drop in arousal causes a drop in skin conductivity. With a sensitive meter the level of arousal can be brought under conscious control. With a few hours' practice the level of arousal can be consciously controlled over wide
Galvanic Skin Response(GSH/GSR) or Electrodermal Response (EDR)
Biofeedback Infocenter
Types of Biofeedback Machines or Biofeedback Techniques
Galvanic skin response (GSH) or Electrodermal Response (EDR)
Also known as Electrodermal Response (EDR), Galvanic skin response measures electrical conductance in the skin, which is associated with the activity of the sweat glands. A very slight electrical current (unnoticeable to you) is run through your skin. The machine measures changes in the salt and water in your sweat gland ducts. The more emotionally aroused you are, the more active your sweat glands are and the greater the electrical conductivity of your skin. GSR is effective in treating phobias, anxiety, excessive sweating, and, at times, stuttering since these emotions will affect your skin's conductivity. It is used as a lie detection test. Athletes use this technique to prepare for games - to make sure that they are not too anxious or have pre-game jitters.
A Place to buy GSR/EDR - $185
Media Research with a Galvanic Skin Response Biosensor: Some kids work up a sweat!
ABSTRACT
This study considers the galvanic skin response (GSR) of sixth-grade students (n=20) using print, video, and microcomputer segments. Subjects received all three media treatments, in randomized order. Data for analysis consisted of standardized test scores and GSR measures. A moderate positive relationship was shown between cumulative GSR and standardized test scores (r = 0.50). The higher achieving students obtained higher GSR values. Patterns of arousal with each media were analyzed by analysis of variance with repeated measures. The interaction of media and time was significant at the p < .05 level (F(14, 266) = 1.985). The patterns of response towards the print and microcomputer treatments were very similar, and both were quite dissimilar to the pattern of response for video. Specifically, video obtained the highest GSR response initially, and GSR response remained constant throughout the 21-minute data collection period. Print and microcomputer obtained relatively lower GSR responses initially, then matched the GSR response level of video after about 10 minutes, and continued to increase throughout the data collection period. This finding has not been previously reported and reconciles earlier conflicting findings.
Analysis methods for GSR
The wave shape is usually biphasic or triphasic and lasts several seconds. Because GSRs are such long lasting waveforms inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) should be long enough. When using short ISIs response overlapping should be considered by decomposing the overlapped responses.
Normally reproduced within-subject GSRs have common features in waveshapes. Amplitudes tend to habituate, latencies might increase slightly and waveshapes remain fairly unaltered in repetitions. The decrease in amplitudes and increase in latencies is affected by the weakening of the surprise effect of stimulation and by the weakening of alertness of the subject during the experiment.
In recording situations some low pass filter can be used to avoid high frequency noise. As the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the GSR signal is high individual responses are usually studied without any signal processing. In some studies several responses are averaged but this can lead false interpretation due to variability of the response. Thus, it is generally suggested that averaging should not be used.
Final Report on Project on An Examination of Response Parameters of Electrodermal Responding to Standard Stimuli
Abstract: This report contains the results of two studies of the relative merits of using skin conductance or skin resistance to evaluate the amplitude of electrodermal responses to external stimuli. The studies also addressed the relative merits of correcting responses for baseline, rather than using raw amplitude measures. The first study employed an oddball paradigm to determine whether skin resistance or skin conductance, or baseline corrected ratio measures are best suited to discriminating oddball stimuli from a background of frequently occurring standard stimuli. The results indicated that there is no empirical basis for assuming that any particular measure has any advantage in allowing for reliable indexing of response differences between oddball (i. e., "novel") and standard stimuli. This suggests the possibility that the use of uncorrected amplitude measures in field applications may be as reasonable as any other technique. The second study attempted to determine if any electrodermal index was more well suited than others for assessing the magnitude of response to external stimuli differing in intensity. The data indicated that there was no apparent advantage to using any particular index of electrodermal response magnitude in favor of any other. All indices showed the same response curves with respect to stimulus intensity and subjective magnitude estimation of stimulus intensity.
The Effect of Sound Delivery Methods on a User's Sense of Presence in a Virtual Environment
Abstract: The purpose behind this thesis was two-fold. First, the effect of sound delivery on a user's sense of presence in a virtual environment was investigated. Second, the physiological responses of electrodermal activity, heart rate, end temperature were measured end correlated to the user's subjective sense of presence in an attempt to determine if physiological measures can be used in the future as en objective measure of presence. A computer based first-person shooter gene (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault(Trademark)) was utilized as the virtual environment. The independent variable wee sound delivery method (no sound, 5.1 surround sound, headphones, end headphones with subwoofer). The dependent variables were physiological response end questionnaire results. Results indicated that sound contributed to the user's sense of presence as evidenced by electrodermal activity and temperature end questionnaire scores. Also, significant changes occurred between the speaker end headphone sound delivery methods. This response suggests that speakers crested a higher sense of emotion and possibly induced a higher level of presence in participants.
Galvanic Skin Response Experiments
Homemade GSR by ITP students-Tom Igoe
GSR-Image
A high level of cortical arousal gives increased powers of reflection, focused concentration, increased reading speed, and increased capacity for long-term recall.
Cortical arousal has a simple relationship to skin conductivity. Arousal of the cortex increases the conductivity of the skin and conversely, a drop in arousal causes a drop in skin conductivity. With a sensitive meter the level of arousal can be brought under conscious control. With a few hours' practice the level of arousal can be consciously controlled over wide
Galvanic Skin Response(GSH/GSR) or Electrodermal Response (EDR)
Biofeedback Infocenter
Types of Biofeedback Machines or Biofeedback Techniques
Galvanic skin response (GSH) or Electrodermal Response (EDR)
Also known as Electrodermal Response (EDR), Galvanic skin response measures electrical conductance in the skin, which is associated with the activity of the sweat glands. A very slight electrical current (unnoticeable to you) is run through your skin. The machine measures changes in the salt and water in your sweat gland ducts. The more emotionally aroused you are, the more active your sweat glands are and the greater the electrical conductivity of your skin. GSR is effective in treating phobias, anxiety, excessive sweating, and, at times, stuttering since these emotions will affect your skin's conductivity. It is used as a lie detection test. Athletes use this technique to prepare for games - to make sure that they are not too anxious or have pre-game jitters.
A Place to buy GSR/EDR - $185
Media Research with a Galvanic Skin Response Biosensor: Some kids work up a sweat!
ABSTRACT
This study considers the galvanic skin response (GSR) of sixth-grade students (n=20) using print, video, and microcomputer segments. Subjects received all three media treatments, in randomized order. Data for analysis consisted of standardized test scores and GSR measures. A moderate positive relationship was shown between cumulative GSR and standardized test scores (r = 0.50). The higher achieving students obtained higher GSR values. Patterns of arousal with each media were analyzed by analysis of variance with repeated measures. The interaction of media and time was significant at the p < .05 level (F(14, 266) = 1.985). The patterns of response towards the print and microcomputer treatments were very similar, and both were quite dissimilar to the pattern of response for video. Specifically, video obtained the highest GSR response initially, and GSR response remained constant throughout the 21-minute data collection period. Print and microcomputer obtained relatively lower GSR responses initially, then matched the GSR response level of video after about 10 minutes, and continued to increase throughout the data collection period. This finding has not been previously reported and reconciles earlier conflicting findings.
Analysis methods for GSR
The wave shape is usually biphasic or triphasic and lasts several seconds. Because GSRs are such long lasting waveforms inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) should be long enough. When using short ISIs response overlapping should be considered by decomposing the overlapped responses.
Normally reproduced within-subject GSRs have common features in waveshapes. Amplitudes tend to habituate, latencies might increase slightly and waveshapes remain fairly unaltered in repetitions. The decrease in amplitudes and increase in latencies is affected by the weakening of the surprise effect of stimulation and by the weakening of alertness of the subject during the experiment.
In recording situations some low pass filter can be used to avoid high frequency noise. As the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the GSR signal is high individual responses are usually studied without any signal processing. In some studies several responses are averaged but this can lead false interpretation due to variability of the response. Thus, it is generally suggested that averaging should not be used.
Final Report on Project on An Examination of Response Parameters of Electrodermal Responding to Standard Stimuli
Abstract: This report contains the results of two studies of the relative merits of using skin conductance or skin resistance to evaluate the amplitude of electrodermal responses to external stimuli. The studies also addressed the relative merits of correcting responses for baseline, rather than using raw amplitude measures. The first study employed an oddball paradigm to determine whether skin resistance or skin conductance, or baseline corrected ratio measures are best suited to discriminating oddball stimuli from a background of frequently occurring standard stimuli. The results indicated that there is no empirical basis for assuming that any particular measure has any advantage in allowing for reliable indexing of response differences between oddball (i. e., "novel") and standard stimuli. This suggests the possibility that the use of uncorrected amplitude measures in field applications may be as reasonable as any other technique. The second study attempted to determine if any electrodermal index was more well suited than others for assessing the magnitude of response to external stimuli differing in intensity. The data indicated that there was no apparent advantage to using any particular index of electrodermal response magnitude in favor of any other. All indices showed the same response curves with respect to stimulus intensity and subjective magnitude estimation of stimulus intensity.
The Effect of Sound Delivery Methods on a User's Sense of Presence in a Virtual Environment
Abstract: The purpose behind this thesis was two-fold. First, the effect of sound delivery on a user's sense of presence in a virtual environment was investigated. Second, the physiological responses of electrodermal activity, heart rate, end temperature were measured end correlated to the user's subjective sense of presence in an attempt to determine if physiological measures can be used in the future as en objective measure of presence. A computer based first-person shooter gene (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault(Trademark)) was utilized as the virtual environment. The independent variable wee sound delivery method (no sound, 5.1 surround sound, headphones, end headphones with subwoofer). The dependent variables were physiological response end questionnaire results. Results indicated that sound contributed to the user's sense of presence as evidenced by electrodermal activity and temperature end questionnaire scores. Also, significant changes occurred between the speaker end headphone sound delivery methods. This response suggests that speakers crested a higher sense of emotion and possibly induced a higher level of presence in participants.
Galvanic Skin Response Experiments
Homemade GSR by ITP students-Tom Igoe
GSR-Image
The Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Emotion
Interesting experiment---read it---could not copy-copy feature is disabled
The Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Emotion
The Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Emotion
Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)
Galvanic Skin Response
Galvanic skin response (GSR), also known as electrodermal response (EDR), psychogalvanic reflex (PGR), or skin conductance response (SCR), is a method of measuring the electrical resistance of the skin. There has been a long history of electrodermal activity research, most of it dealing with spontaneous fluctuations. Most investigators accept the phenomenon without understanding exactly what it means. There is a relationship between sympathetic activity and emotional arousal, although one cannot identify the specific emotion being elicited. The GSR is highly sensitive to emotions in some people. Fear, anger, startle response, orienting response and sexual feelings are all among the emotions which may produce similar GSR responses.
One branch of GSR explanation interprets GSR as an image of activity in certain parts of the body. The mapping of skin areas to internal organs is usually based on acupuncture point.
Practice
GSR is conducted by attaching two leads to the skin, and acquiring a base measure. Then, as the activity being studied is performed, recordings are made from the leads. There are two ways to perform a GSR - in active GSR, current is passed through the body, with the resistance measured. In passive GSR, current generated by the body itself is measured.
History
GSR originated in the early 1900s. It was used for a variety of types of research in the 1960s through the late 1970s, with a decline in use as more sophisticated techniques (such as EEG and MRI) replaced it in many areas of psychological research. GSR still sees limited use today, as it is possible to use with low-cost hardware (galvanometer).
Uses
GSR measurement is one component of polygraph devices and is used in scientific research of emotional arousal. GSR is also used by Scientologists, who call their devices E-meters, in their spiritual counseling. They claim to have developed a variety of techniques to improve the reliability and accuracy of the device.
Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)
A change in the ability of the skin to conduct electricity, caused by an emotional stimulus, such as fright.
Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)
GSR-built in ITP
http://www.funnydata.com/gsr/index.php?title=Main_Page
GSR Meter
The simple psycho-galvanometer was one of the earliest tools of psychological research. A psycho-galvanometer measures the resistance of the skin to the passage of a very small electric current. It has been known for decades that the magnitude of this electrical resistance is affected, not only by the subject's general mood, but also by immediate emotional reactions. Although these facts have been known for over a hundred years and the first paper to be presented on the subject of the psycho-galvanometer was written by Tarchanoff in 1890, it has only been within the last 25 years that the underlying causes of this change in skin resistance have been discovered.
The Tarchanoff Response is a change in DC potential across neurones of the autonomic nervous system connected to the sensori-motor strip of the cortex. This change was found to be related to the level of cortical arousal. The emotional charge on a word, heard by a subject, would have an immediate effect on the subject's level of arousal, and cause this physiological response. Because the hands have a particularly large representation of nerve endings on the sensori-motor strip of the cortex, hand-held electrodes are ideal. As arousal increases, the "fight or flight" stress response of the autonomic nervous system comes into action, and adrenaline causes increased sweating amongst many other phenomena, but the speed of sweating response is nowhere near as instantaneous or accurate as the Tarchanoff response.
The most advanced layers of the cortex, unique to Man, link to the thumb and forefinger especially, and there is a further complex physiological response which occurs when the forebrain is aroused. Changes in Alpha rhythms cause blood capillaries to enlarge, and this too affects resistance.
By virtue of the Galvanic Skin Response, autonomic nervous system activity causes a change in the skin's conductivity. The overall degree of arousal of the hemispheres, and indeed the whole brain, is shown by the readings of the GSR psychometer, which does not differentiate between the hemispheres, or between cortical and primitive brain responses. Higher arousal (such as occurs with increased involvement) will almost instantaneously (0.2 - 0.5 sec) cause a fall in skin resistance; reduced arousal (such as occurs with withdrawal) will cause a rise in skin resistance.
Thus a rise or fall relates directly to reactive arousal, due to re-stimulation of repressed mental conflict. Initially this may cause a rise in resistance as this emerging, previously repressed, material is fought against. When the conflict is resolved, by the viewing of objective reality - the truth of exact time, place, form and event - there is catharsis and the emotional charge dissipates; the release of energy giving a fall in resistance.
The Being or "Higher Self" is involved, because it is the Being that knows the objective truth and therefore is in conflict with distorted mental contents. The Being, however, is not part of the brain; it is a quality not a quantity, and is essentially not anywhere, except by consideration. The Being is a non-verbal knowingness that lies back of mental awareness and activity, but which is capable of influencing the composite human being, through will and creative choice, by postulate.
---------------
Biofeedback is the technique of self-regulation of awareness states by the subject. The level of cortical arousal is central to a person's level of awareness, so a machine that can measure this factor is of the first importance in biofeedback. Many papers have been presented on this subject over the last 25 years, and the most important findings of this research are:
A low level of cortical arousal is desirable for relaxation, hypnosis, and the subjective experience of psychic states and unconscious manifestations.
A high level of cortical arousal gives increased powers of reflection, focused concentration, increased reading speed, and increased capacity for long-term recall.
Cortical arousal has a simple relationship to skin conductivity. Arousal of the cortex increases the conductivity of the skin and conversely, a drop in arousal causes a drop in skin conductivity. With a sensitive meter the level of arousal can be brought under conscious control. With a few hours' practice the level of arousal can be consciously controlled over wide limits.
---------------
It has long been known in biofeedback research, that meditation and relaxation procedures cause a rise in skin resistance. It has therefore been assumed that high and low skin resistance correlate directly with relaxation and stress respectively, and that a high resistance indicates a pleasant relaxed state of mind, whereas low resistance indicates tension. However, the reverse is true in a psychotherapy session. When repressed material is coming to the surface (e.g. material associated with guilt or pain), the skin resistance rises and the client experiences feelings of tension; thus in a therapy session, high skin resistance indicates tension, and not relaxation as in meditation. Then, when the repressed material reaches the surface and the negative emotion discharges, there is usually a sudden large drop in skin resistance and the client experiences relief. This demonstrates a correlation between low skin resistance and relaxation of tension, which is in contradiction to the pattern of research findings in meditation.
This contradiction has been noted by Dr. Apter of Bristol University in his book "Reversal Theory". He refers to this as Paradoxical Arousal. His discoveries are that high arousal can be pleasant and exciting when a person is in the (active) Paratelic state, whereas high arousal is experienced as unpleasant in the (thinking) Telic state.
Apter's findings are that a person with a heavy traumatic history experiences high arousal as unpleasant, because the cortical arousal is unequal due to restimulation. It can be demonstrated in many cases that one hemisphere is aroused more than the other, as seen on the Bilateral Meter (a special type of differential GSR meter using twin double-electrodes). In contrast, when cortical arousal is uniform this is experienced as a pleasant state of high energy (the Bilateral meter reflects this).
This is similar to Freud's early findings, that high arousal in a neurotic is experienced as internal excitement, which is unpleasant, whereas a person who is substantially free from neurosis experiences arousal as energy for incitement, i.e. energy for action. Our findings substantiate Freud's early findings. Proportional to a client's erasure or transcendence of traumatic material there is an increased capacity to operate at high arousal, in a relaxed state without discomfort, and at a high emotional tone.
In order to resolve the paradox, I suggest that it would be more effective to correlate high and low skin resistance, not with "relaxation" and "stress" but with "withdrawal and "involvement" respectively; both these terms can refer either to a relaxed or to a tense state. The state of withdrawal is relaxed when it means detachment from worldly cares or abandoning responsibility (Telic); and withdrawal is experienced as tense when it means an inability to confront repressed material (Paratelic).
Involvement is experienced as tense when it means over-reach or anxiety (Telic), and is experienced as relaxed when it means enhanced awareness, or when there is a flash of insight and the sudden clearing away of a mental blockage caused by repressed material (Paratelic). A client who is involved in the session of analysis will be in the Paratelic state; if he goes "out-of-session" this will be a reversal to the Telic state:
It is for the above reasons that a fall of the meter needle, i.e. an increase in arousal, is usually more useful than a rise, i.e. a decrease in arousal, when a list is being assessed to find a case entry point - the most appropriate item to handle. Usually, unless the arousal is too high due to overwhelm or terror, the fall of the needle indicates involvement, hence increased awareness and the ability to access and confront charged material. However, when the needle rises in response to a particular word or concept, this indicates withdrawal; it indicates in most cases that the client does not wish to take responsibility for this area of address.
URL: http://www.trans4mind.com/psychotechnics/gsr.html
http://www.funnydata.com/gsr/index.php?title=Main_Page
GSR Meter
The simple psycho-galvanometer was one of the earliest tools of psychological research. A psycho-galvanometer measures the resistance of the skin to the passage of a very small electric current. It has been known for decades that the magnitude of this electrical resistance is affected, not only by the subject's general mood, but also by immediate emotional reactions. Although these facts have been known for over a hundred years and the first paper to be presented on the subject of the psycho-galvanometer was written by Tarchanoff in 1890, it has only been within the last 25 years that the underlying causes of this change in skin resistance have been discovered.
The Tarchanoff Response is a change in DC potential across neurones of the autonomic nervous system connected to the sensori-motor strip of the cortex. This change was found to be related to the level of cortical arousal. The emotional charge on a word, heard by a subject, would have an immediate effect on the subject's level of arousal, and cause this physiological response. Because the hands have a particularly large representation of nerve endings on the sensori-motor strip of the cortex, hand-held electrodes are ideal. As arousal increases, the "fight or flight" stress response of the autonomic nervous system comes into action, and adrenaline causes increased sweating amongst many other phenomena, but the speed of sweating response is nowhere near as instantaneous or accurate as the Tarchanoff response.
The most advanced layers of the cortex, unique to Man, link to the thumb and forefinger especially, and there is a further complex physiological response which occurs when the forebrain is aroused. Changes in Alpha rhythms cause blood capillaries to enlarge, and this too affects resistance.
By virtue of the Galvanic Skin Response, autonomic nervous system activity causes a change in the skin's conductivity. The overall degree of arousal of the hemispheres, and indeed the whole brain, is shown by the readings of the GSR psychometer, which does not differentiate between the hemispheres, or between cortical and primitive brain responses. Higher arousal (such as occurs with increased involvement) will almost instantaneously (0.2 - 0.5 sec) cause a fall in skin resistance; reduced arousal (such as occurs with withdrawal) will cause a rise in skin resistance.
Thus a rise or fall relates directly to reactive arousal, due to re-stimulation of repressed mental conflict. Initially this may cause a rise in resistance as this emerging, previously repressed, material is fought against. When the conflict is resolved, by the viewing of objective reality - the truth of exact time, place, form and event - there is catharsis and the emotional charge dissipates; the release of energy giving a fall in resistance.
The Being or "Higher Self" is involved, because it is the Being that knows the objective truth and therefore is in conflict with distorted mental contents. The Being, however, is not part of the brain; it is a quality not a quantity, and is essentially not anywhere, except by consideration. The Being is a non-verbal knowingness that lies back of mental awareness and activity, but which is capable of influencing the composite human being, through will and creative choice, by postulate.
---------------
Biofeedback is the technique of self-regulation of awareness states by the subject. The level of cortical arousal is central to a person's level of awareness, so a machine that can measure this factor is of the first importance in biofeedback. Many papers have been presented on this subject over the last 25 years, and the most important findings of this research are:
A low level of cortical arousal is desirable for relaxation, hypnosis, and the subjective experience of psychic states and unconscious manifestations.
A high level of cortical arousal gives increased powers of reflection, focused concentration, increased reading speed, and increased capacity for long-term recall.
Cortical arousal has a simple relationship to skin conductivity. Arousal of the cortex increases the conductivity of the skin and conversely, a drop in arousal causes a drop in skin conductivity. With a sensitive meter the level of arousal can be brought under conscious control. With a few hours' practice the level of arousal can be consciously controlled over wide limits.
---------------
It has long been known in biofeedback research, that meditation and relaxation procedures cause a rise in skin resistance. It has therefore been assumed that high and low skin resistance correlate directly with relaxation and stress respectively, and that a high resistance indicates a pleasant relaxed state of mind, whereas low resistance indicates tension. However, the reverse is true in a psychotherapy session. When repressed material is coming to the surface (e.g. material associated with guilt or pain), the skin resistance rises and the client experiences feelings of tension; thus in a therapy session, high skin resistance indicates tension, and not relaxation as in meditation. Then, when the repressed material reaches the surface and the negative emotion discharges, there is usually a sudden large drop in skin resistance and the client experiences relief. This demonstrates a correlation between low skin resistance and relaxation of tension, which is in contradiction to the pattern of research findings in meditation.
This contradiction has been noted by Dr. Apter of Bristol University in his book "Reversal Theory". He refers to this as Paradoxical Arousal. His discoveries are that high arousal can be pleasant and exciting when a person is in the (active) Paratelic state, whereas high arousal is experienced as unpleasant in the (thinking) Telic state.
Apter's findings are that a person with a heavy traumatic history experiences high arousal as unpleasant, because the cortical arousal is unequal due to restimulation. It can be demonstrated in many cases that one hemisphere is aroused more than the other, as seen on the Bilateral Meter (a special type of differential GSR meter using twin double-electrodes). In contrast, when cortical arousal is uniform this is experienced as a pleasant state of high energy (the Bilateral meter reflects this).
This is similar to Freud's early findings, that high arousal in a neurotic is experienced as internal excitement, which is unpleasant, whereas a person who is substantially free from neurosis experiences arousal as energy for incitement, i.e. energy for action. Our findings substantiate Freud's early findings. Proportional to a client's erasure or transcendence of traumatic material there is an increased capacity to operate at high arousal, in a relaxed state without discomfort, and at a high emotional tone.
In order to resolve the paradox, I suggest that it would be more effective to correlate high and low skin resistance, not with "relaxation" and "stress" but with "withdrawal and "involvement" respectively; both these terms can refer either to a relaxed or to a tense state. The state of withdrawal is relaxed when it means detachment from worldly cares or abandoning responsibility (Telic); and withdrawal is experienced as tense when it means an inability to confront repressed material (Paratelic).
Involvement is experienced as tense when it means over-reach or anxiety (Telic), and is experienced as relaxed when it means enhanced awareness, or when there is a flash of insight and the sudden clearing away of a mental blockage caused by repressed material (Paratelic). A client who is involved in the session of analysis will be in the Paratelic state; if he goes "out-of-session" this will be a reversal to the Telic state:
It is for the above reasons that a fall of the meter needle, i.e. an increase in arousal, is usually more useful than a rise, i.e. a decrease in arousal, when a list is being assessed to find a case entry point - the most appropriate item to handle. Usually, unless the arousal is too high due to overwhelm or terror, the fall of the needle indicates involvement, hence increased awareness and the ability to access and confront charged material. However, when the needle rises in response to a particular word or concept, this indicates withdrawal; it indicates in most cases that the client does not wish to take responsibility for this area of address.
URL: http://www.trans4mind.com/psychotechnics/gsr.html
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Fractal Music
"I tried an experiment based on the generation of a Koch curve, assigning a relationship between note pitch and line angle, and another relationship between note duration and line length." by Gerald A. Edgar
url to the site
http://www.skepticfiles.org/en003/fractal.htm
url to the site
http://www.skepticfiles.org/en003/fractal.htm
Cambridge Journal
Music without Walls? Music without Instruments
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=96175&previous=true&jid=OSO&volumeId=6&issueId=02
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=96175&previous=true&jid=OSO&volumeId=6&issueId=02
FLEXIMUSIC COMPOSER
$20.00 software to create your own music on PC platform
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/emotion_software/
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/emotion_software/
THE GEOMETRY OF MUSIC
For years, string theorists have used music as a metaphor for fundamental particles, and now Tymoczko is usiing the mathematics of string theory to understand the fundamentals of music.
The math makes it easier to understand objectively what great musicians and composers do in their head. "When you sit down to interact with a piano, you're actually interacting with a non-Euclidean space, because there are many different ways you can play a C-major chord on a piano," Tymoczko said.
He said orbifolds capture the multidimensionality of music: how harmony interacts with counterpoint, how chords are connected with each other, even how notes are arranged "to minimize the amount of effort that musicians have to make when moving from chord to chord."
On Tymoczko's Web site, you can find additional resources, including his ChordGeometries software, a version of his Science paper and a series of four QuickTime video files that provide further audiovisual explanation. There's even a QuickTime depiction of the famous chords from Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water."
url to the site
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/07/07/950.aspx
This is important -- study Tymoczko's web site---SONGUL
The math makes it easier to understand objectively what great musicians and composers do in their head. "When you sit down to interact with a piano, you're actually interacting with a non-Euclidean space, because there are many different ways you can play a C-major chord on a piano," Tymoczko said.
He said orbifolds capture the multidimensionality of music: how harmony interacts with counterpoint, how chords are connected with each other, even how notes are arranged "to minimize the amount of effort that musicians have to make when moving from chord to chord."
On Tymoczko's Web site, you can find additional resources, including his ChordGeometries software, a version of his Science paper and a series of four QuickTime video files that provide further audiovisual explanation. There's even a QuickTime depiction of the famous chords from Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water."
url to the site
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/07/07/950.aspx
This is important -- study Tymoczko's web site---SONGUL
Magenta
Authors
Pietro Casella, and Ana Paiva
MAgentA ( Musical Agent Architecture), which is an Agent that automatically composes background music in real time using the emotional state of the environment within which it is embedded. Its goal is to generate a “film-like music ” output for a virtual environment emphasizing the dramatic aspects of such environment.
The approach followed in MAgentA is that of dynamically choosing an appropriate composition algorithm, among several others stored in a database, which were previously processed and duly associated to a particular emotional state.
MAgentA is in the process of being integrated from an level in the FantasyA Virtual Environment, a wide scale virtual environment game currently being researched with INESC.
url to the site
http://www.springerlink.com/content/89ea28gq2pcbmylp/
Pietro Casella, and Ana Paiva
MAgentA ( Musical Agent Architecture), which is an Agent that automatically composes background music in real time using the emotional state of the environment within which it is embedded. Its goal is to generate a “film-like music ” output for a virtual environment emphasizing the dramatic aspects of such environment.
The approach followed in MAgentA is that of dynamically choosing an appropriate composition algorithm, among several others stored in a database, which were previously processed and duly associated to a particular emotional state.
MAgentA is in the process of being integrated from an level in the FantasyA Virtual Environment, a wide scale virtual environment game currently being researched with INESC.
url to the site
http://www.springerlink.com/content/89ea28gq2pcbmylp/
Algorithmic Composition for Acoustic Instruments
Bruce Jacob developed an algorithmic composition system that produces scores for acoustic instruments.He is more interested in hearing it performed by live performers than realized upon synthesizers and samplers. He is also more interested in traditional instrumental music than the "beep snort growl" music heard in many computer music concerts and publications today.
He is a purist.
To this end, He has represented my personal composition methodology in a set of algorithms which his computer uses to write music for him. He has also developed a set of filters that "listen" to the music and grade it.
The system is comprised of several parts: one which generates music but pays no attention to the harmonic content, one which filters out the harmonic content that he does not care for, and one which takes small snippets and arranges them into larger pieces. The components are called the COMPOSER, EAR, and ARRANGER modules, respectively. The composer is hand-coded to produce music in a manner close to the way he does, and therefore the structure of the music is similar to that which he composes. The ear is evolved using genetic algorithms to become a filter approximating the way he listens to music. This architecture has been in development since the fall of 1994, coded in Perl5, and is about 5000 lines of code.
occam and nebula
The variations architecture has two implementations right now. The first, variations 1 or occam, focuses mostly on the EAR module, and how to use a musical filter to compose music with the least amount of human interaction. The second, variations 2 or nebula, focuses on the COMPOSER module and is concerned with thematic development. The first version of the system made simple variations on melodies and built up themes melody on top of melody. The newer version, in production as of this writing, is more intelligent at identifying the primary motives of the piece and extends them rather than simply modifying them.
I have his music in my research folder----and url to the site is
http://www.ee.umd.edu/~blj/algorithmic_composition/
He is a purist.
To this end, He has represented my personal composition methodology in a set of algorithms which his computer uses to write music for him. He has also developed a set of filters that "listen" to the music and grade it.
The system is comprised of several parts: one which generates music but pays no attention to the harmonic content, one which filters out the harmonic content that he does not care for, and one which takes small snippets and arranges them into larger pieces. The components are called the COMPOSER, EAR, and ARRANGER modules, respectively. The composer is hand-coded to produce music in a manner close to the way he does, and therefore the structure of the music is similar to that which he composes. The ear is evolved using genetic algorithms to become a filter approximating the way he listens to music. This architecture has been in development since the fall of 1994, coded in Perl5, and is about 5000 lines of code.
occam and nebula
The variations architecture has two implementations right now. The first, variations 1 or occam, focuses mostly on the EAR module, and how to use a musical filter to compose music with the least amount of human interaction. The second, variations 2 or nebula, focuses on the COMPOSER module and is concerned with thematic development. The first version of the system made simple variations on melodies and built up themes melody on top of melody. The newer version, in production as of this writing, is more intelligent at identifying the primary motives of the piece and extends them rather than simply modifying them.
I have his music in my research folder----and url to the site is
http://www.ee.umd.edu/~blj/algorithmic_composition/
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