Dee Blind Mice

NeuroPop White Paper – this is the White Paper of a company that claims to be able to affect your brain with their sound design. Sciency.

Sonic Weapons – an interesting Fortean Times article about the myths related to the use of sound as a weapon.

Neural Noise Synthesiser – another company that claims to be able to play with your brain through sound. This one seems both less threatening and less silly than the NeuroPop crowd.

NeuroPop Website – this website is funny for having the worst ever intro with the most annoying music. When you finally reach the home page you are assaulted by more annoying “brain wave” sounds. It’s fun to look at though – especially the big sound-nerd list of all their equipment.

This stuff if fascinating. That sound can have profound physical and emotional effects on people I have no doubt. I remain to be convinced that it is even theoretically possible to codify those effects and how they could be reproduced and don’t believe anyone has figured it out. From our class discussion it seems that pre-cortical responses can be elicited using sound – by playing different frequencies of sound in each ear. Ben knows all about it. Is it useful to be able to make a person look down? Useful if you sell shoes I guess. Beyond that though I feel the effects of sound aren’t unchanging – sound that you once loved can become annoying, you can phase out sound once you get used to it. Although perhaps when you’re not aware of it it’s having it’s greatest effect a la Muzak. Lots of thought fodder anyway.

The Overload – Sonic Intoxicant CD from NeuroPop is worth a listen. The third track did nauseate me as promised. I’m no stranger to being made feel ill by certain kinds of droney music – at least this time I didn’t throw up everywhere. The other two tracks are just spacey stuff that makes you feel a bit spacey. It’s funny.

McQuarrie and Mick, Visual Rhetoric – this is a long and pretty boring paper about a set of experiments to prove that people are affected by visual rhetoric. A field must really be in trouble if its writers need to be this turgid in their writing. It does contain the following gem in describing how people from different cultures won’t get “tropic” rhetorical devices:

That [croissant] looks like a foot, [while the other] is obviously a smiley face. . . . Is it because they have the almond on it so it becomes a happy face, and if you don’t have the almonds, then you’re not happy and you become a stinky foot? (Informant no. 11, Taiwanese, with respect to the visual pun in the almond ad)

Hee hee.

Direct and Indirect Approaches to Advertising Persuasion by YouJae Yi – this is a little easier on the sleep muscles. It’s a study that looks at the relationship between direct and indirect messages in advertising, both visual and verbal.

Here is my example of visual design intended to influence:

I think this is clever because the images of the blood clots echo the images of the cranes and scaffolding, which clearly dwarf the man. This supports the assertion of the text that the man is less strong than the clots, because the clots are associated with the machinery.