Wed 16th Feb 12:00 – 13:00
Connor Welham, PhD Student, Acoustics Research Centre, Salford
Tension: That unnerving and stimulating feeling you get when watching a scary movie or riding a rollercoaster. The short, sharp shock felt when an apparition jumps out from behind the camera. The uncomfortable sense present when a piece of music conjures up thoughts of fight or flight. This feeling, particularly in its most fun, engaging, and light form has been a powerful tool for generations of composers, sound designers, cinematographers, ghost tour providers and haunted house proprietors. This seminar will showcase work which attempts to isolate that percept and to draw links between itself and various acoustical and musical parameters. Looking into fields of biometric data, subjective listening tests, synthesis of sounds, and synthesiser design.
Including this, the project aims to better understand the percept of tension, separate from typical music nomenclature and more akin to the psychological understanding of this phenomenon. Importantly, the project tries to conceptualise the synthesis of a tension driven sound as an amusical element of a film scene, as an extension of sound design rather than pure composition.
This seminar will focus on work already completed and will discuss future work and concepts to be attempted with a view to designing a synthesiser which may be used to aid a feeling of tension. It will also veer towards discussing other potential outcomes for the overall project, such as potential relationships that may be found between synthesiser parameters, acoustic features, and rated tension values.