Cross - modal correspondence between facial expression and guitar solos

• Main Author: Lim, Joel Deng Feng
• Other Authors: Suzy Styles
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Mass media
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/63895
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The face pulling guitarist seems to be more entertaining to watch, as if there is an agreement between the performer and the audience that facial expressions themselves enhance and affirm the tunes being played. Ramachandran (2003) suggests that artists are a group of people who create their life works and designs through intuition, and thus are able to tap on hardwired aspects of the human perception. This allows them to use their artwork to hypoeractivate specific parts of the viewer’s brain, which results in pleasure. Along a spectrum of neural cross activation strength, between the domains of normal shared experience and abnormal shared experience, there is the possibility for some individuals within the community to be productive and generate new and novel forms of shared experience. These individuals might be our artists. To test the hypothesis that listeners are able to guess the correct guitar face at various moments in guitar solos at rates more than chance, participants underwent an online quiz. They were presented a solo track to listen to and were asked to pay attention to the specific moment of the target guitarface during the solo, which was marked by the sudden appearance of a blue box on a time progress display. A short 100ms sound slice at the moment of the guitarface was also provided for them to play for their reference. Two faces were shown to the participant (one target and one distractor) and participants had to identify which of the faces went with the specified moment. The guitarface quiz is a novel model of testing for cross modal correspondence that has shown potential, having demonstrate robust effects of cross-modal correspondence between facial expression and sound contours.