Heather's Portfolio

During the course of this class I looked into the different ways sound and image interact and supplement or change each other. Mostly I ended up looking into the ways we express ourselves.
As a class we began by writing some research questions; the goal was to focus our thoughts and see what we were all interested in and see what we could do together. Below are my original research questions.

Research Questions
“A painter who had lost his hands and sought to express the picture he envisaged by means of song, would still reveal more by this exchange of spheres than the empirical world reveals of the essence of things.”
-Friedrich Nietzche on Rhetoric and Language: On Truth and Lying in and Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
I had to read this portion of Nietzche for another class and thought that this particular line from his essay pertains to this class particularly well and thought I’d share it with you all.
As far as questions or directions of inquiry go:
1. How is it that certain sounds evoke emotions and how do you evoke the same emotions using color and images? (I’m going to reference the movie The Sixth Sense think about how they used the color red and music to create suspense at all the right moments.)
2. In the world of advertising what is it that makes television ads and signage compelling? How do they tie together to create a cohesive ad campaign? (I think I might want to see this rooted in how the different presidential campaigns are running ads.)
3. Within the scope of advertising, how can lighting be used to affect the way a place, issue, or object is perceived? Does music change these perceptions?
I’ll explain these mostly by pointing out that I usually express myself visually. I actually can’t talk if I can’t use my hands (I’ve tried sitting on them and I just get confused about what it is that I’m saying.) and I use color, visual aids, and sound effects when telling a story or describing anything. I’m particularly interested in lighting effects, I don’t know why but I think lighting is pretty cool. I went to see Dark Knight a second time just so I could watch the extreme lighting changes that occurred whenever there was a change from Bruce Wayne to Batman or vice-versa. Anyways, I hope this helps explain my questions a bit. Oh, and I’ve always been intrigued by advertising.
After asking our original questions we did a warm-up exercise in which we listened to one song over and over in different settings and then posted our findings; did the song affect the mood of one type of setting or was the song out of place or did it fit? Why did the song or the listener(s) react the way they did? Below is my original post from this exercise.

During the last week I chose to listen to the song “Stand” by Rascal Flatts. What I noticed was that this song affected my mood more than it seemed to affect the mood of those around me. In general this song made me feel better about pretty much anything. Since I’m perpetually busy and almost always running on empty by the end of the day I found that this song gave me a little boost when I was particularly drained. The opening “You feel like a candle in a hurricane” became an apt description for how I felt by about 5pm everyday this week, especially on Wednesday. I think the imagery is particularly good because every time I hear that line I am reminded of the many hurricanes and typhoons I been through and I think about the wind howling and the rain pouring down and then I can see (In my mind’s eye) a tapered candle holding strong against it all, continuing to burn and spread light. The only time the song frustrated me was when it started and I was standing on the bus, in traffic, for about 30 minutes. In the end I think that for the most part the song affected my mood, but maybe not the mood of those around me.

You feel like a candle in a hurricane
Just like a picture with a broken frame
Alone and helpless like you've lost your fight
But you'll be alright
You'll be alright
Cause when push comes to shove
You taste what you're made of
You might bend, till you break
Cause it's all you can take
On your knees you look up
Decide you've had enough
You get mad you get strong
Wipe your hands shake it off
Then you stand
Then you stand
Life's like a novel with the end ripped out
The edge of a canyon with only one way down
Take what you're given before its gone
Start holding on, keep holding on
Cause when push comes to shove
You taste what you're made of
You might bend, till you break
Cause it's all you can take
On your knees you look up
Decide you've had enough
You get mad you get strong
Wipe your hands shake it off
Then you stand (then you stand)
Yea, then you stand (then you stand)
Everytime you get up
And get back in the race
One more small piece of you
Starts to fall into place, yea
Ooohhh
Cause when push comes to shove
You taste what you're made of
You might bend, till you break
Cause it's all you can take
On your knees you look up
Decide you've had enough
You get mad you get strong
Wipe your hands shake it off
Then you stand (then you stand)
Then you stand (then you stand)
Yea, then you stand (then you stand)
Yea (then you stand)
Ohhh (then you stand)
Ohhh (then you stand)
Ohhh (then you stand)
Ohhh (then you stand)
Then you stand

On another note one of my apartment mates was particularly hooked on the song “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band, and this song, in my experience, affects the mood of everyone around. I think we walked around singing that song all week, and it was always a party. Personally I can’t think about this song without wanting to dance and sing and party. It also makes me hungry for some Southern Home Cooking.

You know I like my chicken fried
Cold beer on a Friday night
A pair of jeans that fit just right
And the radio up
Well I was raised up beneath the shade of a Georgia pine
And that’s home you know
Sweet tea pecan pie and homemade wine
Where the peaches grow
And my house it’s not much to talk about
But it’s filled with love that’s grown in southern ground
And a little bit of chicken fried
Cold beer on a Friday night
A pair of jeans that fit just right
And the radio up
well I’ve seen the sunrise
See the love in my woman’s eyes
Feel the touch of a precious child
and know a mother’s love
Well its funny how it’s the little things in life that mean the most
Not where you live or the car you drive or the price tag on your clothes
There’s no dollar sign on a piece of mind this I’ve come to know
So if you agree have a drink with me
Raise you glasses for a toast
To a little bit of chicken fried
Cold beer on a Friday night
A pair of jeans that fit just right
And the radio up
well I’ve seen the sunrise
See the love in my woman’s eyes
Feel the touch of a precious child
and know a mother’s love
I thank god for my life
and for the stars and stripes
May freedom forever fly, let it ring.
Salute the ones who died
the ones that give their lives so we don’t have to sacrifice
all the things we love
like our chicken fried
Cold beer on a Friday night
A pair of jeans that fit just right
And the radio up
well I’ve seen the sunrise
See the love in my woman’s eyes
Feel the touch of a precious child
and know a mother’s love

Following this warm-up exercise we jumped into research and projects. For my first project I chose to do some research about why certain colors are more effective in certain advertising campaigns than others. However this just wasn’t working for me so I chose to be a little more artistic and try to draw/paint what I saw in my head every time I heard a certain song. This worked out much better and you can see the posting of my work on the catalyst site: https://catalysttools.washington.edu/sharespaces/space/danieldn/4171 .

I found this exercise to be particularly challenging because I had to put onto paper something that I only saw in my head, and having finished it I’ve found that if I re-orient the picture so that it it upside down (relative to the way I originally drew it) it fits the images in my head much better.

I think that though I didn’t get to research a question I’d originally posed, this project helped me to see how difficult it can be to force an image onto paper and decide if it actually works or not. I found that for what I was seeing the still image was not working because I saw the image in motion so if I were going to do this again I would like to find a way to make it digitally and put it in motion.

For my second project I worked with Stephanie and Kaitlin to see how people acted out the emotion happiness. We asked them to make a happy noise, make a happy dance, and make a happy motion. People were most comfortable making a happy noise. The happy dance worked out very well too. The happy motion was really difficult for people to do without making a sound and really, most of them ended up doing a dance of some sort. Even when people made a happy noise they made a hand motion with it.

If I were going to do this project again I would ask each person to do each of the three instead of having different people to do each one. The full video is posted on the catalyst site at: https://catalysttools.washington.edu/sharespaces/space/danieldn/4171.

Looking back at these projects I’ve decided that although they don’t complimant each other they each enhanced my understanding of the ways in which sound and image interact and affect each other. The second project is the one I would most like to continue because it involes a total body interaction; it involves not only sound and image, but also motion and emotion.

If I were to go into more depth and detail with any of these projects I would, like I mentioned earlier, look at the expression of emotion and try to do a better study with it. I think I would start by picking one emotion (like we did before) and seeing what kind of research has been done in this area. I would be looking for common themes: modes of expression, sounds associated with the emotion, maybe look at psychology studies related to the subject.

I would find a variety of people looking at: age, schooling, hobbies, interests, ethnic background, anything that might cause a variation in ways of expressing emotions. From this point I would (after getting the proper permission and forms out of the way) ask people to make a sound that represents the chosen emotion; ask people to make a motion (without using sounds) that express the emotion; ask people to sing something that reminds them of that emotion; have people draw a picture representing that emotion; and ask them to write something about that emotion.
After gathering the data I would like to compile and study it, looking for common themes in the responses: a common sound, a common pictorial representation, a common written description. When looking for these commonalities it will also become apparent what representations of emotion are consistently different. By knowing what representations are (or aren’t) similar it may be possible to what types of representation (for emotions at least) are created culturally and which representative forms are created internally, or at least not as affected by the culture.

The different representative forms for the emotion are needed because people express themselves very differently; some people like to talk and some like to draw, some are eloquent and others express themselves using motion and simple phrases. By drawing on the different forms of expression of the emotion the study will be able to draw on many different types of people.

As I walk away from this quarter I think I will definitely continue with these types of projects independently and on my own time, but I think that mostly I just want to learn to use video and sound editing software.

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