Using all the knowledge

In many ways this article confirms the excessive, verging on creepy lengths that the marketing and consumer research industries will go to catch their target market and reduce the threat of substitute products or suppliers. On the other hand, why when the technology is affordable and accessible shouldn't the medical industries be taking money from the fat consumer industries especially if they can put this money back into research pots. (There is no suggestion in the article that this is the case - only hopefully speculation on my part.) 

It seems sensible if I am the researcher or marketing agency that I would only be doing my job to the best ability to impliment these methods. Afterall as a designer I'm questioning why we aren't using fMRI to design better experiences.

What is the hierarchy for the tech revolution? Who deserves the next stage of affordable medical research, and who is going to get it  I suspect are two very different answers. Creative business and financing models may have some work to convince these guys that they could be helping a third sector out here, who have a perfect market - just no means of paying with money yet.

http://prote.in/briefings/2011/05/neuromarketing-is-good-for-you

Soundtrack to Life

Evocative and monumental or achingly suspense soaked!

This great little video from Michiko Nitta captures an idea that has been buzzing about in my mind since a conversation with Ben Hammersley about the future of super luxury shopping in the time when on and offline let face it really don't belong as two separate words. I might even stop using the word 'online' I'm not sure what it's replacement is though!

The original idea was closer to the movie soundtrack that allowed you to play through location based gaming with what your future might feel like alongside the 'luxury item' that you were pondering to purchase. This however has resurfaced the idea...video available at from http://www.michikonitta.co.uk/ and currently in the exhibition http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1080

Tickling Neurons

"When everything is perfectly in time, the ear or mind tends to ignore it, much like a clock ticking in your bedroom - after a while you don't hear it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/science/19brain.html?pagewanted=all

Sounds from a life teetering on the edge

 

'I'm telling you about life and you are not listening.'

A short film exploring the delicate difference between people; between living and life.

It's a special kind of people that stay true to this trail, who search for something that perhaps, cannot be found. Eyes and ears that are not distracted by a call from the masses. They are the people who sometimes fall over the edges. But in teetering so close to that edge they see and understand something differently. We all would perhaps be wiser, if we can find a way to listen to these minds talk, and step closer to saying;

'I have no regrets; I was looking for something really hard to find.'

Music to make the Brain quiver

Plug into some good quality speakers, turn up the volume. I've begun listening to music lying on the floor with one speaker on either side of my head, and am adamant it's the best way aside from mega headphones to absorb music. (The visuals, though nice are entirely unrelated to the purpose of this). Close your eyes and listen. Feel.

Anything?

As a narrative there isn't much going on, and admittedly it comes to a rather untimely and abrupt ending. It is, as a song unsatisfying but for me there is something much more powerful. There is a deep and kind of uncomfortable murmuring in the sound. The sound of being able to feel your insides. Vibrations. Layers of mixed up rhythms and beats that pull into a suffocating chest tightening bass, that makes me feel even now 10 minutes after listening, a bit nauseous. I almost turn it off every time. I'm quite sure this won't happen to everybody, but I'm also sure that it isn't just me. 

There is something interesting in this song, I don't know what yet but I think it could be important to us as experience designers to find out.

I heard this song the the other week whilst lost in an internet wandering and it stuck me as one of those song that stays lodged in your sub surface being for years. A little reading led me to an article on Sean Paul's song Temperature causing a girl to lapse into epileptic seizures. The article questions whether the seizures are related to the music's rhythm generating a pattern of rhythmic activity in the brain, and that rhythm being similar to a negative pattern that your brain has a tendency toward, this could, the article proposes cause the brain to create a particular associations and actions with a type of music.

Here I guess begins a new blip on my radar, music that makes the heart quiver, it began with the Opera Project earlier this year, and remains an unsolved mystery.

Infra Sonic Sounds

Infrasonic 17 Hz tone experiment

On May 31, 2003, a team of UK researchers held a mass experiment where they exposed some 700 people to music laced with soft 17 Hz sine waves played at a level described as "near the edge of hearing", produced by an extra-long-stroke subwoofer mounted two-thirds of the way from the end of a seven-meter-long plastic sewer pipe. The experimental concert (entitled Infrasonic) took place in the Purcell Room over the course of two performances, each consisting of four musical pieces. Two of the pieces in each concert had 17 Hz tones played underneath. In the second concert, the pieces that were to carry a 17 Hz undertone were swapped so that test results would not focus on any specific musical piece. The participants were not told which pieces included the low-level 17 Hz near-infrasonic tone. The presence of the tone resulted in a significant number (22%) of respondents reporting anxiety, uneasiness, extreme sorrow, nervous feelings of revulsion or fear, chills down the spine and feelings of pressure on the chest. In presenting the evidence to British Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Richard Wiseman said, "These results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound. Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost—our findings support these ideas." (Wikipedia)

(image: http://www.zemos98.org/controlsonoro/2008/03/11/organ-music-instils-religious-feelings/)

It turns out that this infrasonic sound can be produced accidentally by something as harmless as a faulty motor in a ceiling fan, it also happens to be the sound frequency naturally caused by natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and giant animals like rhinos or alligators. All things that we as humans are pretty much hard wired to flee from with an uneasy sense of instinctive weariness or outright fear.  No wonder then that such controversy was bourne by horror film Paranormal Activity when suggestions arose that it was using infrasonic frequencies in the soundtrack. A neat idea, if it weren't that it seems from the reading I have done, quite difficult to make a speaker which will effectively emit infrasonic sounds. Certainly not possible on your regular TV or computer speakers. So there is a lot of buzz around these sounds, people understand that they are a useful tool and it's amazing how much you can freak your self out in an empty telephone factory by downloading an infrasonic sound app!

Painting dots...making stories

Repeatedly I have been convinced by the strength that the audience has in bringing the experience that they are going to have with them. It's something to do with the complexity of experiences, and the impossibility of completely designing the experience someone will have. It seems that the mind is most satisfied when it has the story fits exactly to it's own experiences. This probably has something to do with mirror neurons and empathy which we seem to talk a lot about.

Here is one of my favorite example of giving the audience just enough dots to make their own stories, attach their own memories and build upon their own experiences. For these reasons this short film, touches a lot of people. People love and don't exactly know why. It's a story, it's a journey, it's music and it's poetic.