Theory: 'psychic jukebox'
Jorn Barger
_song_ was running thru their head...
(If you already have dozens of mp3s, imagine programming the game by
dividing them up among your Sims characters.)
How would this be like/unlike background music in a movie? (Haven't some
videogames already experimented with associating characters with musical
motifs?)
How effective could it be at deepening the sense of reality, given our
coarse state-of-the-art at defining moods?
Could one dimension in the definition of their personality be 'favorite
genre of music'-- country, punk, easy listening? (My general theory is
that this choice is about coping with stress levels-- some people want
stress-enhancing music, others want all stresses eliminated.)
There may be an inherent paradox that the user/reader/viewer/listener
gets an un-esthetic experience if one scene contains multiple dissonant
genres-- but doesn't this correspond to consonance/dissonance in the
human relationships being represented? (When two characters hang out
together, do their psychic jukeboxes come more into tune?)
There's also a 'true cliche' where kids having anxiety attacks may start
singing loud, stupid songs to drown out their panic-- or (sort of
similarly) the 'song' on your psychic jukebox may be just stupid
repetitive chords that conceal rather than reveal feelings. (Meditation
helps resolve that, imho.)
--
Robot Wisdom Weblog: http://www.robotwisdom.com/ "If you worry that
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with the newspaper, Jorn Barger solves the problem." --Dan Gillmor
Atom Debris
>
> Could one dimension in the definition of their personality be 'favorite
> genre of music'-- country, punk, easy listening? (My general theory is
> that this choice is about coping with stress levels-- some people want
> stress-enhancing music, others want all stresses eliminated.)
As someone who, musically speaking, swings both ways, I find that
the actual motivation involved is more along the lines of some people
wanting a cathartic (NOT "stress-enhancing") musical experience, and
others wanting either an escape from stressful stimuli or an aid to
sublimating inner tension caused by recent stressful stimuli.
It is my feeling that the cathartic experience is healthier than the
escape/sublimation strategy, which perhaps accounts for the age-old
perception that people who listen to music that is considered 'wild'
tend to be relaxed and free-spirited... note the terms 'laid-back',
'copacetic', 'cool', etc.
> There may be an inherent paradox that the user/reader/viewer/listener
> gets an un-esthetic experience if one scene contains multiple dissonant
> genres-- but doesn't this correspond to consonance/dissonance in the
> human relationships being represented? (When two characters hang out
> together, do their psychic jukeboxes come more into tune?)
In the days before punk rock finally laid rock 'n' roll to rest,
people defined themselves by the music to a much greater degree than
they do today... I could tell you many stories, for instance, about
being yelled at, chased, and/or assaulted because of my tastes in
music. Nowadays, it is very common to hear people assert that they
"listen to everything." Perhaps your Sims characters should have a
new 'eclecticity' attribute that defines their tolerance of musical
genres outside of their specified favorite... or defines their
tolerance of specific musical genres (e.g., in the '70s, rockers and
funksters were miscible, rockers and discoids were not).
> There's also a 'true cliche' where kids having anxiety attacks may start
> singing loud, stupid songs to drown out their panic--
Or possibly to cathartically purge themselves of their panic?
-M. Otis Beard
John Brecht
> How would this be like/unlike background music in a movie? (Haven't some
> videogames already experimented with associating characters with musical
> motifs?)
If my head is any example, it would be completely unlike the
background music in a movie. It would be fairly random, somewhat
influenced by what I happen to have heard lately.
If you believe this study:
http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-100701tunes.story
then you'll be even more convinced the "song in your head" has little
to do with internal moods, and more to do with externals.
Jorn Barger
I'll respond to them generally (while the Net is down, locally):
I wrote:
> How would this be like/unlike background music in a movie?
If you picture a busy streetcorner, where you can tune in to each
person's 'jukebox', I agree that most of them would be banal and
unexpressive of mood, but the different genres of banality (rap,
classical, country) would still make an interesting contrast, and allow
some nice surprises (business man thinking rap, black kid who likes acid
rock).
The small percentage who have more obscure tastes will become highly
interesting, though, and here the more-obscure genres begin to express
moods too-- trip hop is mournful, punk is angry, lilith-fair might be
introspective etc.
And this contrast of popular/obscure is very literary in itself--
novelists normally, naturally explore one interesting person in the
context of less-interesting neighbors.
> How effective could it be at deepening the sense of reality, given our
> coarse state-of-the-art at defining moods?
On one level, genres and moods can be seen as orthogonal-- for each
genre there should be songs in that style that express each mood. So
even if trip-hop is mostly mournful, some songs will be more upbeat,
some more angry, etc.
Supposedly though, most people claim to like many different genres, and
in that case the genres themselves should reflect moods, somewhat-- if
Britney's "Hit Me" song is running thru my head, that's very different
than LeAnn's "I Hope You Dance" even though both are top-40 and might
just reflect the last song I heard on the radio station I favor.
On the Macintosh you can assign different sound-samples to different
operating-system 'events'-- eg, someone once recommended the sound of a
waterjug being filled to accompany file-transfers. (I think this was too
algorithmically complex to implement, actually.)
But you can similarly imagine a list of hundreds of emotional/mood
nuances like 'hopeful expectation' that could be assigned one song each,
or a list of alternate songs. ('Hopeful expectation' might be West Side
Story's 'Tonight'.)