After having continued to research further into my topic of audio driven animation, I have been particualy draw to the association between music and animation. I came across ‘music mood’ as an interesting idea to how to gage the design of the animation.
Mood Definition:
- a temporary state of mind or feeling
- an angry, irritable, or sullen state of mind
Music Mood Definition:
- music intended to create a particular mood or feeling:”the sound quality of the film was top-notch, with excellent mood music throughout”
There seems to be a perceived emotion associated with different sounds we hear. These interpretations are choices made from the musician, directors and illustrators of these audio driven animation e.g. Fantasia. I wanted to conduct a study to either support or disagree with this theory by collecting data from a wide target audience e.g different ages, professions etc.
I will conduct an experiment with a selection of different songs which differ from each other in genre, pitch, frequency, mood etc and ask participants to choose from a selection of images. i.e. colours, scenes, objects etc.
From this table that was created in one of the books I was reading. I want to try and play music that will either support or deny this table.
I wrote up a questionnaire which would bb accompanied by an online playlist of Fantasia (1940). I was going to look at a selection of genres and music that emulated different dynamics and pitches etc but I think that this would be too complicated and I haven’t enough skills to formulate a good experiment. I decided to keep it simple so that it would only support my work and not take over.
I decided to use Fantasia because a lot of my ideas have originated from the film. I found it interesting the interpretation of the music fascinating and wanted to see what people of the general public thought about this. Would it be different? How do different people interpret what music would look?
I took a colour wheel from online and took away their names and replaced them with numbers so there were no bias in choosing colour. I also arranged the numbers clockwise so that the numbers were not pared with the same colours. This could have jeopardised the validity of the experiment. I wanted it as simple and quick so that it was more about associating the colours with the sound and not dissecting what it might be using long term memory.
I was going to get people on zoom together to play the clips and get people to write down their answer in a controlled setting but I realised this would take a very long time to collect a lot of data. So I decided to rethink how I was going to execute this experiment so that it was accessible to anyone, anywhere.
I have now made a video on After Effects which I have uploaded to Vimeo which will be accompanied by an online questionnaire os I can collect as much data as possible.
I changed it from 15 songs to 9 as I was only allocated 10 free questions on Survey Monkey. I used the last question for a little bit of extra information that might be useful in my experiment. I have sent this messsage:
Hey,
I am collection primary research for my written thesis and was wondering if you could take 5 minutes to complete this ‘Sound Association Experiment’ to help towards my research. It is probably easier to do on a computer as you need to watch a video simultaneously to filling out an online questionnaire. Hope you enjoy it and also please pass this on to anyone you think would like it e.g. your parents.
Apologies for the layout of the experiment, it was the easiest way for me to collect data for free
Thanks in for advance for helping me out
Video link: https://vimeo.com/623248858 Questionnaire link: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/8NFDMCB
I have sent this message to about 200 people of all different ages, professions, countries etc. It was to get a more diverse and better representation of the public. I have had a few responses already so now I will be creating a table where I can collate the data so I can analysis once enough people have taken part.
I have designed a table to collate all my findings where it will be easy to create comparative /correlation charts, tables and observations. Here it the first 9 participant results. I have done it purposely where I wont use names as there could be preconceived ideas from me when analysing the data. I want it from an objective point of view to create a general public experiment.
I have added in the colour to the numbers in the table so I can get a visual representation of what people have chosen. I have already started to see correlations with peoples answers. Either there are more lighter colours which refers to the intensity of music or there are darker ones. There are also different variations of the same colour which shows a similarity in the mood of the music. These are just comparatives I have made off the top of my head but will make more accurate percentages later with more results.
This is quite exciting as I can see that there are some positive results which could either support or disprove the Fantasia theories of the art directors/animators/musicians. I think there is definitely music moods to analysis further. I am excited to see more result coming though on my online survey.