Emotion in Music Experiment

S

Shatera

New member
The following message is from my research advisor.

Hello. My name is Tyson Platt, and I am a Professor of Psychology at Alabama State University. I am currently investigating how listeners detect and experience emotional content in experimental music. To that end, I need your help! I am conducting an experiment on the detection of emotional content in experimental music, and I am seeking participants for the experiment. If you are interested in participating in the experiment, please follow this link to learn more about the research and participate in the experiment. The experiment will take approximately 20 minutes to complete. During the experiment, you will be asked to listen to a clip of music and indicate what emotional content you detect in the music. You will not be asked to provide any identifiable information (e.g., name, address, etc.) during the experiment. Please be aware that you must be at least 18 years of age to participate in the experiment. If you are willing to participate in this research, please only complete the experiment once. Thank you for your help.
 
Well, that is ten minutes of my life I won't get back. I doubt Tyson will ever check back to see how it was received, but it was a piece of atonal, random pap. Unless my musical education was really poor, I'm not even certain Jean deBarre is a real composer. I suspect strongly that the piece is a randomly generated piece of music designed to envoke responses from listeners. The Biog given sets the stage, the music then is framed in a historic tradition that it's clearly not from. It's not music, but a parody of music to annoy people and the questions then frame how annoyed you feel. What gets me is the purpose? Why would an academic actually do this? Why? It seems to serve no useful purpose at all - UNTIL - I looked for his other soundcloud posts where other composers are mentioned, with biogs then the same 'music'. It seems that the real test is to compare the impressions different contributers supply when they are told different things about the composer. Clever. You tell the back story, then listen to the music. Did the back story influence the test? Probably. The emotion I feel now is 'used'.

Educational clap trap - after hearing the same music with a mention of Hitler and Austria, not France and impressionists you have to wonder ...... why?
 
rob aylestone said:
Well, that is ten minutes of my life I won't get back. I doubt Tyson will ever check back to see how it was received, but it was a piece of atonal, random pap. Unless my musical education was really poor, I'm not even certain Jean deBarre is a real composer. I suspect strongly that the piece is a randomly generated piece of music designed to envoke responses from listeners. The Biog given sets the stage, the music then is framed in a historic tradition that it's clearly not from. It's not music, but a parody of music to annoy people and the questions then frame how annoyed you feel. What gets me is the purpose? Why would an academic actually do this? Why? It seems to serve no useful purpose at all - UNTIL - I looked for his other soundcloud posts where other composers are mentioned, with biogs then the same 'music'. It seems that the real test is to compare the impressions different contributers supply when they are told different things about the composer. Clever. You tell the back story, then listen to the music. Did the back story influence the test? Probably. The emotion I feel now is 'used'.

Educational clap trap - after hearing the same music with a mention of Hitler and Austria, not France and impressionists you have to wonder ...... why?
Click to expand...
Thanks for the heads up.
 
I've had a response. It was indeed a thought experiment. Seeing if the preamble explaining what will be heard alters the perception. So the composer didn't come from France and did not write this music (if you can call random notes and random sounds, music). The other different made up composers, have different back stories. It's totally flawed. He didn't know soundcloud would make the other tracks available to anyone searching, and I'm not sure that ethically, posting this kind of research is on? It makes people think they are helping the stated aim, when they're actually guinnea pigs to show things about their way of thinking. The standard university requirement where theres no payment, perks, or other benefits fails when people give up their time to complete research with hidden purposes.
 
The more I thought about this, the more I got grumpy - A university project to go out and join internet communities and make people think they are contributing to research into how music is perceived, but it's actually designed to show up the contributors opinions as flawed due to them having been given specific steerage - to basically see if their thoughts are able to be influenced. That's a bit sneaky - make you think one thing, to actually study how you responded in a way not made remotely obvious. Is it actually OK to generate a false composer, with fake history to complete the task. How many people now actually think there was a French guy who wrote such dreadful music, unaware that it was a lie? You would have contributed, thinking you had helped, but you'd been used, lied to and secretly tested in your thought processes. I just find this devious. If at the end of the survey a response had popped up explaining the data was false and indicating how the real test was in changing your opinion to something it could have been acceptable, but it was rather underhand.

It's not actually even new - he did the same experiment in 2017 - so I suspect he uses the 'experiment' as part of his teaching so people can understand how perception gets changed with altered context. Feel used? I do.
 
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Just got up my nose. Educational folk doing this kind of thing on forums. Thousands of students post dreadful research topics, and that's understandable, but when you get a Professorial research post, with the university standards and ethics agreements, email addresses where you can check validity, you feel to are contributing to a worthy project. I did a little research and discovered the wool was being pulled before the contributors eyes - they were told one thing, but the research was actually on them. Which is morally and ethically dubious. The conclusion I came to was that this was an experiment, and repeated, which elicits proof that opinions can be shaped by the context they're wrapped in. As a music forum (and he posted on some pretty heavyweight and unfunny forums) we were faced with a clearly awful composition. I suspect created randomly in a DAW. It sounded dreadful and musically lacking in everything a typical forum user would appreciate. So people being kind, would not state it's a pile of poo - perhaps bolstered by the circumstances and time period of the 'composer'. Change that, and people are more likely to get angry, irritated and the negative descriptive words in thr questions. I can see how the point of proving you can shape opinion in this way would be useful - but it's taking the pi55 out of the people who donate their time and effort. He seems to have been a professor in 2017 with this research, and he's still using it today. That's unethical - If a politician lied to get feedback, he'd be all over the internet.
 
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