SOUND AND THE UNCANNY VALLEY
Sine Wave Mechanism
In 1970, Mori defined the Uncanny Valley as the low point in negative perception that a robot provokes as it increasingly takes on human appearance. According to this theory, the effect is more pronounced when movement is involved. Conceptually, the theory has its grounding in early psychoanalytical work. Freud defines the uncanny as being something fundamentally familiar yet unfamiliar. A common thread running through his analysis deals with the feelings of the person experiencing the uncanny – feelings of eeriness, strangeness and fear. Later writers discussing Moris theory have emphasized the association of the uncanny with these emotional descriptors. In particular, the emotion term fear has been equated to the uncanny.
The theory of the Uncanny Valley has been developed further in the field of robotics and computer games suggesting that the eerie sensations associated with the uncanny might be used to advantage in the appropriate context (such as the survival horror genre of computer games. Not all authorities accept the theory, it is a pseudoscientific theory nevertheless, as a concept, it does provide the basis for some interesting discussion and can function as a stimulus for sound.
Sound, fear and the horror game design
What almost all studies dealing with the Uncanny Valley share, though, is a concentration on the image. Whether still or moving, such writings invariably deal with the appearance, and or motion, of the human-like character; there is a visual bias to the study of the uncanny.
Is it possible to apply the Uncanny Valley theory to the emotions aroused by sound and thus to include sound as a factor in the Uncanny Valley?
There has been surprisingly little work on the association of emotions with sound. In the area of sound design for the horror genre of cinema (which the parallel genre in computer games closely follows), and in the absence of any comprehensive and well- founded methodology, such design proceeds on the basis of experience, cliché or trial and error. It is usually no less effective for this. Some research in the area of computer games deals broadly with sound as a means to increase physiological and, therefore, emotional arousal in the player and other work suggests this physiological arousal and associated emotion leads to player engagement and immersion in the 3-dimensional environments of first-person shooter games. For a general overview of threat and associated emotions in computer games. Interestingly, most research and writing on emotion and sound in virtual reality and computer games deals with the negative emotions – terror, fear and apprehension and their semantic variants.
Alarms presage threats, they are the stimulus events leading to feelings of terror, fear and apprehension. Threat sounds are used to great effect in the computer game Left 4 Dead particularly where the actions of a player alert the swarm of zombies. In a comparison of the uncanny in Ringu and the American remake The Ring , Ball provides a short section on aural uncanniness which, in Ringu, is exemplified for the author by the audio processing applied to the familiar sound of a ringing digital telephone. Here, the uncanny is created through the process of making the familiar strange (the ringing heard is a combination of multiple telephone rings slightly processed to match the film‟s theme of water). According to Ball, it is this defamiliarization of a mundane sound – the distortion of a sound that yet retains its broadly recognizable original form and purpose – that leads to the uncanny. This is, perhaps, too broad and all-encompassing an explanation. There are many varieties of telephone ring, each approximating the classic and iconic telephone bell (both analogue and digital) but altering it in some way; there is no suggestion that any of these sounds are uncanny despite being defamiliarizing distortions of the original, familiar ring. Instead, the context of the ring plays an important role; not only is it framed within the horror film genre, it is signalled early as an apprehensive aural cue, a threat stimulus event, through the film‟s plot and narrative.
Ekman and Kajastila, rather than investigating the parameters of sound contributing to the feeling of being scared, conducted a small-scale, subjective study to determine the effect of localization on sounds already pre-judged to be “scary‟. Sounds comprised those made by “large predators, which motivates the importance of localizing the threat”. The results support the authors’ hypothesis that the scariness of a scary sound is causally related to how well it affords localizing a potentially harmful source and this, as the authors suggest, probably has its root cause in the evolutionary link between fear and survival. The inability to localize a sound is generalized to a lack of ease or fluency in processing sound; thus the less information available, the more threatening the situation will be. This seems a surprisingly broad assessment. It is unlikely that de-localizing all types of sound will promote fear in the listener. Low-frequency sine waves, and similar natural sounds such as whale song, are difficult to localize yet are not necessarily threatening because of that – recordings of whale song are often used for relaxation purposes. The same could be said for the general hum of traffic outside my office or the 50-60Hz mains hum in a house. In the case of the authors‟ study, a predatory sound (already judged to be scary) is made more scary by removing the ability to localize it – generalizing this to all sounds is perhaps a step too far. However, if uncanniness is related to negative emotions, such as fear and apprehension, then such a perception, presumably, is, in fact, wanted in the horror computer game.
The theory of the Uncanny Valley (and its various expositions thus far) deals solely with visual appearance, movement and/or behaviour. It is clear, though, that there are parameters and ways of representing sound that lead to perceptions of uncanniness and associated negative affect. Future work, based on further empirical research, will investigate whether the Uncanny Valley can be used as a model for the perception of uncanny sound or whether that sound follows its own uncanny logic.
In 1970, Mori defined the Uncanny Valley as the low point in negative perception that a robot provokes as it increasingly takes on human appearance. According to this theory, the effect is more pronounced when movement is involved. Conceptually, the theory has its grounding in early psychoanalytical work. Freud defines the uncanny as being something fundamentally familiar yet unfamiliar. A common thread running through his analysis deals with the feelings of the person experiencing the uncanny – feelings of eeriness, strangeness and fear. Later writers discussing Moris theory have emphasized the association of the uncanny with these emotional descriptors. In particular, the emotion term fear has been equated to the uncanny.
The theory of the Uncanny Valley has been developed further in the field of robotics and computer games suggesting that the eerie sensations associated with the uncanny might be used to advantage in the appropriate context (such as the survival horror genre of computer games. Not all authorities accept the theory, it is a pseudoscientific theory nevertheless, as a concept, it does provide the basis for some interesting discussion and can function as a stimulus for sound.
Sound, fear and the horror game design
What almost all studies dealing with the Uncanny Valley share, though, is a concentration on the image. Whether still or moving, such writings invariably deal with the appearance, and or motion, of the human-like character; there is a visual bias to the study of the uncanny.
Is it possible to apply the Uncanny Valley theory to the emotions aroused by sound and thus to include sound as a factor in the Uncanny Valley?
There has been surprisingly little work on the association of emotions with sound. In the area of sound design for the horror genre of cinema (which the parallel genre in computer games closely follows), and in the absence of any comprehensive and well- founded methodology, such design proceeds on the basis of experience, cliché or trial and error. It is usually no less effective for this. Some research in the area of computer games deals broadly with sound as a means to increase physiological and, therefore, emotional arousal in the player and other work suggests this physiological arousal and associated emotion leads to player engagement and immersion in the 3-dimensional environments of first-person shooter games. For a general overview of threat and associated emotions in computer games. Interestingly, most research and writing on emotion and sound in virtual reality and computer games deals with the negative emotions – terror, fear and apprehension and their semantic variants.
Alarms presage threats, they are the stimulus events leading to feelings of terror, fear and apprehension. Threat sounds are used to great effect in the computer game Left 4 Dead particularly where the actions of a player alert the swarm of zombies. In a comparison of the uncanny in Ringu and the American remake The Ring , Ball provides a short section on aural uncanniness which, in Ringu, is exemplified for the author by the audio processing applied to the familiar sound of a ringing digital telephone. Here, the uncanny is created through the process of making the familiar strange (the ringing heard is a combination of multiple telephone rings slightly processed to match the film‟s theme of water). According to Ball, it is this defamiliarization of a mundane sound – the distortion of a sound that yet retains its broadly recognizable original form and purpose – that leads to the uncanny. This is, perhaps, too broad and all-encompassing an explanation. There are many varieties of telephone ring, each approximating the classic and iconic telephone bell (both analogue and digital) but altering it in some way; there is no suggestion that any of these sounds are uncanny despite being defamiliarizing distortions of the original, familiar ring. Instead, the context of the ring plays an important role; not only is it framed within the horror film genre, it is signalled early as an apprehensive aural cue, a threat stimulus event, through the film‟s plot and narrative.
Ekman and Kajastila, rather than investigating the parameters of sound contributing to the feeling of being scared, conducted a small-scale, subjective study to determine the effect of localization on sounds already pre-judged to be “scary‟. Sounds comprised those made by “large predators, which motivates the importance of localizing the threat”. The results support the authors’ hypothesis that the scariness of a scary sound is causally related to how well it affords localizing a potentially harmful source and this, as the authors suggest, probably has its root cause in the evolutionary link between fear and survival. The inability to localize a sound is generalized to a lack of ease or fluency in processing sound; thus the less information available, the more threatening the situation will be. This seems a surprisingly broad assessment. It is unlikely that de-localizing all types of sound will promote fear in the listener. Low-frequency sine waves, and similar natural sounds such as whale song, are difficult to localize yet are not necessarily threatening because of that – recordings of whale song are often used for relaxation purposes. The same could be said for the general hum of traffic outside my office or the 50-60Hz mains hum in a house. In the case of the authors‟ study, a predatory sound (already judged to be scary) is made more scary by removing the ability to localize it – generalizing this to all sounds is perhaps a step too far. However, if uncanniness is related to negative emotions, such as fear and apprehension, then such a perception, presumably, is, in fact, wanted in the horror computer game.
The theory of the Uncanny Valley (and its various expositions thus far) deals solely with visual appearance, movement and/or behaviour. It is clear, though, that there are parameters and ways of representing sound that lead to perceptions of uncanniness and associated negative affect. Future work, based on further empirical research, will investigate whether the Uncanny Valley can be used as a model for the perception of uncanny sound or whether that sound follows its own uncanny logic.
Magic in science
THE MARBLE BOT MECHANISM
Looking at De Bono's Black Cylinder experiment and what said around this experiment about thinking and learning, which include he said "Modern Magic". Magnetism and electricity seem like magic to people who haven't a technological or scientific background or even bent of thought. All too often folk end up thinking about levitation and Frankenstein's monster when one tries to get into a serious (technical) discussion about these two things. Folklore often comes into play when "explanations" are needed to describe the "why" of many things in the universe. Such is the fall of the black cylinder and the appeal to some of the (modern) magic of magnetism or electricity as part of some quasi-occult sounding rationalization or explanation. Ada Augusta Lovelace, (the poet) Lord Byron's daughter, an accomplished mathematician, was effectively the first programmer and wrote a number of seminal papers about same to Charles Babbage. Babbage almost everyone knows about as the fellow who designed a Rube Goldberg assemblage of gears that did arithmetic! (This in the days when only human clerks could possibly do something as mentally advanced as "cyphering".) Alan Turing was clearly a genius, and fortunately for us dimmer bulbs he wrote a bunch of papers. Some of these were about thinking and the operations of the mind (no not psychiatry or psychology). His "Turing Machine" was only one of the great cognitive insights which he gifted the rest of us with. One can't help but ponder the wonders (in computing) he could have shaped if he had lived into the 1990's and 2000's.
Magnetism and electricity seem like magic to people who haven't a technological or scientific background or even bent of thought. Even those of us with such a background can still think there is a bit of magic in there. De Bono points out that to truly "understand science' - you must of necessity understand the mathematics behind it. There is no "alternate language" that can be used to precisely describe what is going on. This brings to mind Penrose's description of the "three worlds" - where our "mential world" can only use the very deep isomorphism between the "Platonic world" (mathematics) and the "real world" to understand what is going on. It does seem a little "magical" that such an isomorphism even exists. Yet as De Bono points out in an interview - knowing how to say the name of a bird in multiple languages is not knowledge of the bird itself. Do we truly understand electricity and magnetism in the real world (whatever that might mean). De Bono's black cylinder - he clearly is after that part of what we do - "how we understand?". We are faced with an ordinary situation that suddenly acts in a curious way (black cylinder on a table suddenly falls over). Analyzing the answers from thousands of people may give you a clue as how this process works in the mind. People want to know "the right answer" - but there is no "right answer".... there is only how you came to an understanding of what went on. But one might say it certainly acted that way because of the way it was constructed. It had to be a rotational force created by some mechanism. This sounds a bit like a magic illusion. You see something that your "common sense" says - that can't be - and you search for an explanation of how it might be accomplished, calling upon your store of knowledge acquired over your lifetime. The difference is that the magician tries to lead you down a path that makes what happens even more non-common sense. One illusion is a board is placed upon the table. A dollar bill is placed on the board and an ordinary wine glass is placed on top of the bill. A paper napkin is picked up, shown to be an ordinary napkin. It is crumpled into a ball and placed in the wine glass. The illusionist then taks a pistol and fires it at the bill. It disappears before your very eyes. The paper napkin is picked up, unfolded- and there is the dollar bill inside the crumpled ball. Your immediate reaction is to try to figure out. How did the dollar disappear like that and how did he get it inside the napkin? The second one more easily done than the first. As it turns out it was careful use of several physics features that made this happen. Pressure waves in air, potential energy, inertia and characteristics of the eye. It seems that all that happens with us with more scientific training is that we try to find the physics in magic.
The combination of the two is what leads us to the making of the two mechanisms – the uncanny sine wave and the marble bot. The sine wave mechanism is mainly a representation of a sound wave in a physical form. The merging of motion/movement, which plays a key role in the uncanny valley theory, and sound, is what lead us to create a mechanism, which displays (not demonstrates) both. There is also a certain variable of uncanny in magnetism and electricity and its reputation of being known as “modern magic” as stated above. Thus our second mechanism (the marble bot) demonstrates and plays around De Bono’s theory. The random movement of the ball magnets on the surface of the box and the mechanism working from under plays a lead role raising questions on what they are looking at. Similar to the black cylinder experiment the effect of the marble bot forces one to engage in searching for an explanation. This mechanism is more than just a mechanism. More than an output it also gives technology the philosophical and psychological edge
Looking at De Bono's Black Cylinder experiment and what said around this experiment about thinking and learning, which include he said "Modern Magic". Magnetism and electricity seem like magic to people who haven't a technological or scientific background or even bent of thought. All too often folk end up thinking about levitation and Frankenstein's monster when one tries to get into a serious (technical) discussion about these two things. Folklore often comes into play when "explanations" are needed to describe the "why" of many things in the universe. Such is the fall of the black cylinder and the appeal to some of the (modern) magic of magnetism or electricity as part of some quasi-occult sounding rationalization or explanation. Ada Augusta Lovelace, (the poet) Lord Byron's daughter, an accomplished mathematician, was effectively the first programmer and wrote a number of seminal papers about same to Charles Babbage. Babbage almost everyone knows about as the fellow who designed a Rube Goldberg assemblage of gears that did arithmetic! (This in the days when only human clerks could possibly do something as mentally advanced as "cyphering".) Alan Turing was clearly a genius, and fortunately for us dimmer bulbs he wrote a bunch of papers. Some of these were about thinking and the operations of the mind (no not psychiatry or psychology). His "Turing Machine" was only one of the great cognitive insights which he gifted the rest of us with. One can't help but ponder the wonders (in computing) he could have shaped if he had lived into the 1990's and 2000's.
Magnetism and electricity seem like magic to people who haven't a technological or scientific background or even bent of thought. Even those of us with such a background can still think there is a bit of magic in there. De Bono points out that to truly "understand science' - you must of necessity understand the mathematics behind it. There is no "alternate language" that can be used to precisely describe what is going on. This brings to mind Penrose's description of the "three worlds" - where our "mential world" can only use the very deep isomorphism between the "Platonic world" (mathematics) and the "real world" to understand what is going on. It does seem a little "magical" that such an isomorphism even exists. Yet as De Bono points out in an interview - knowing how to say the name of a bird in multiple languages is not knowledge of the bird itself. Do we truly understand electricity and magnetism in the real world (whatever that might mean). De Bono's black cylinder - he clearly is after that part of what we do - "how we understand?". We are faced with an ordinary situation that suddenly acts in a curious way (black cylinder on a table suddenly falls over). Analyzing the answers from thousands of people may give you a clue as how this process works in the mind. People want to know "the right answer" - but there is no "right answer".... there is only how you came to an understanding of what went on. But one might say it certainly acted that way because of the way it was constructed. It had to be a rotational force created by some mechanism. This sounds a bit like a magic illusion. You see something that your "common sense" says - that can't be - and you search for an explanation of how it might be accomplished, calling upon your store of knowledge acquired over your lifetime. The difference is that the magician tries to lead you down a path that makes what happens even more non-common sense. One illusion is a board is placed upon the table. A dollar bill is placed on the board and an ordinary wine glass is placed on top of the bill. A paper napkin is picked up, shown to be an ordinary napkin. It is crumpled into a ball and placed in the wine glass. The illusionist then taks a pistol and fires it at the bill. It disappears before your very eyes. The paper napkin is picked up, unfolded- and there is the dollar bill inside the crumpled ball. Your immediate reaction is to try to figure out. How did the dollar disappear like that and how did he get it inside the napkin? The second one more easily done than the first. As it turns out it was careful use of several physics features that made this happen. Pressure waves in air, potential energy, inertia and characteristics of the eye. It seems that all that happens with us with more scientific training is that we try to find the physics in magic.
The combination of the two is what leads us to the making of the two mechanisms – the uncanny sine wave and the marble bot. The sine wave mechanism is mainly a representation of a sound wave in a physical form. The merging of motion/movement, which plays a key role in the uncanny valley theory, and sound, is what lead us to create a mechanism, which displays (not demonstrates) both. There is also a certain variable of uncanny in magnetism and electricity and its reputation of being known as “modern magic” as stated above. Thus our second mechanism (the marble bot) demonstrates and plays around De Bono’s theory. The random movement of the ball magnets on the surface of the box and the mechanism working from under plays a lead role raising questions on what they are looking at. Similar to the black cylinder experiment the effect of the marble bot forces one to engage in searching for an explanation. This mechanism is more than just a mechanism. More than an output it also gives technology the philosophical and psychological edge