Athough this sound design blog will primarily be used for theories and ideas in relation to film sound design, other ramblings will also appear from time to time. The origins for this idea sprang from something I thought of a while ago along a similar vain, although different. That was looking at the frequency that musicians suffering from manic depression wrote music at 3 beats to a bar - a rythym commonly associated to alleviate symptomos of depression. Was it a coincidence or were they self medicating? From that, I started looking at the detailed celluar response of the human body to common emotions that we have all experienced, and continue to experience throughout our lives - love, anger, jealousy, euphoria and so on.
So, what is the human rhythm? Here is how I attempted to summarise it: Synopsis Music and emotion are intrinsically linked. This is an experiment, which involves looking at the body’s response to an emotion, mapping the body’s cellular responses in specifc organs, then using this blue print to form a classical score. For instance, fear makes your heat beat faster (such a 'simple' thing has trillions of individual cell responses). Is this 'mapable' to music? Could the activity translate into a musical score? Going forward on that basis, every emotion would have it's own symphony, with each part being played by an instrument performing the organs response to that emotion. So still looking at fear, the beating heart wall muscle would be the drum, the flute would be the adrenline travelling to the muscles, the violin the pituitary gland etc etc. The next stage of the process would be involve a biologist and composer to ellaborate the idea, working closely together - perhaps the biologist could plot the rate of activity on a graph that could be set on top of a traditional score sheet? Ideally, it would be interesting at the end of the experiment to shoot a silent short movie which acted out the emotions, with the score playing as the soundtrack. |