Augustine Leudar wrote: ... > The sounds and settings have to > be convincing enough, believable enough, for cognitive effects to work - > then you can get away with all sorts of acoustic inaccuracies - thats why I > think so many sound installations in galleries leave me cold - you can see > all the nuts and bolts. > The best example I can think of is I left a microphone going in the rain > forest once - mosquitoes would land on the microphone. The recordings > exhibited the really annoying buzzing noise that mosquitoes make before > they land on your face (a study showed this is actually to deliberatly to > irritate you, raise your blood pressure, and cause the blood to be closer > to the surface of the skin !). Even though these recordings were played > over a PA speaker - because this speaker was hidden in a rainforest > setting, even though the sound was much louder than a real mosquito - it > still caught me by surprise a couple of times and had me brushing my face. > Still to use cognitive effects and have accurate spatial effects would be > the ideal.
I wasn't aware that a mosquito's buzzing was anything other than accidental. Below, is some conjecture. Mosquitoes don't just feed on humans, but on many warm blooded creatures. It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that the buzzing is "designed" to irritate a large number of species. This means that the buzzing probably triggers a primitive response in humans (allocortex, as opposed to neocortex), and it is this that makes it so difficult to ignore. So, finally, for powerful cognitive effects, aim to use sounds that trigger a primitive response. Regards, Martin -- Martin J Leese E-mail: martin.leese stanfordalumni.org Web: http://members.tripod.com/martin_leese/ _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
