Musical Emotions – Discoveries
Ambience: Electronic Music
We’re listening to music that’s being performed in a novel way: the performers and the audience’s emotional responses, such as their heart beat and other indicators – are being monitored by computers, and that feedback helps shape the music. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Digital Luthier Ben Knapp has helped create this music and some of the results have surprised him.
Knapp: One of the shocking discoveries that happened is that some of the audience members’ physiology was exactly tracking mine,
We’re measuring the physiology of the audience. We’re measuring my physiology as I perform, and we were looking at the results afterwards because in some of the performances we do ,we actually record the physiology for later analysis, and it was like, “Wow. Where did that come from?” These were the audience members that were tracking exactly what I was doing.
]I’m really incredibly interested in this concept of empathy that we understand what each other is feeling. And music has always been a way to convey how we’re feeling. So, I’m interested to figure out if there’s a way to go more directly to music to instead of having to be able to play a piano to express how I feel, I could actually use an instrument that goes straight from my feeling into a sound to convey how I’m feeling to you. If know what music you hear and you feel is sad, could I convey that I’m sad through music? So I will be sad, and the sound that you hear is that thing that makes you sad. And that’s kind of where we’re hoping to head is this direct empathetic relationship between two people.
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