Here in New York

Well, it's ICA time here in New York City. I'm have a great time seeing old friends and such.
Plus, it is always good to hear what others are doing in their research.

Off to NYC

Well, it's been several busy days getting ready. In fact, as I type this my fingers are a littel stiff from typing so much over the last few days! But, mostly everything is ready for ICA. Last night Zheng Wang and I were working until VERY late last night--or early this morning to be exact, on the last poster.

So, it should be a nice day to fly.

I hope to be able to post while in the City.

And, I showed my summer school students the blog. They were interested in figuring out why I've been so scattered lately (!) Who knows, maybe they'll actually read it when I'm out of town!.

Whew!

Okay, I found the pster!
You know how when you "save as" something and put it someplace to back it up--like a server.
Well, if you just keep saving changes from that point on, it saves it to the backup location rather than where you think it is. Like my harddrive.

Anyway, here's a poster showing some of the latest work we've done in the lab on commercial clutter in radio advertising. Well, it's not the MOST recent work--but more on that later!

Radio Clutter.

Getting ready for ICA in NYC

Well, last minute progress is being made on teh ICA papers and such. Three of the four that I'll be presenting are mostly wrapped up. All my presentations are on Friday afternoon, in the same session. I've been jokingly telling people that ICA hoped to limit the damage I could do by putting me in the same room at the same time on one day!

Yesterday I finished the posters for three of the papers. I'm glad that my presentations will be part of what is called a "high density session." That's where each author gets only 5-minutes to talk about their study. Then, the remainder of the time the authors (usually there are 8 studies in all at a HDS) stand by posters explaining their work and those interested in each particular study can interact with the researchers. Sure is a good way to generate ideas and discussion with people interested in your work. Rather than the typical conference presentation setup where you have to sit through 15-minute presentations of papers you're not really interested in just to get to the one talk you want to hear. Not that those other papers are bad (well, soemtimes they are), it's just that you're not interested in them.

Anyway, today I have one last project to finalize (both finish the paper AND create the poster).

For now, I thought you may like to see the posters...

Okay, so I'm getting ready to upload those posters so you can take alook at them. . .and I can't FIND one of them. I'm hoping that I saved it to the server rather than my hard drive. I'll have to wait and check once I get to the office. Holy cow, the day just became much busier!

So, here are the two that I can still find.
And, they are ones I didn't even create. . .just edited.
The one I worked on all day yesterday, I can't find! GRRRRRR.

Well, here's one showing that tempo in music impacts physiological arousal. I worked on it with Francesca Carpentier when we were both at Alabama.

And, here's the one from Sungkyoung's emotional words paper.

So now there's more

Okay, so here's a little bit more about the work done by sungkyoung.
All of us in the Department and ICR are busting our butts trying to get everything ready for the upcoming conference of the International Communications Association

That is always Memorial Day weekend, and that means we leave in one week. For most of us, that means working hard to put the final touches on research we've been working on--and will be presenting at the conference.

Sungkyoung submitted an extended abstract of her thesis. An extended abstract is basically something that you submit to the conference saying what you PLAN on doing. The idea is that you are able to present the freshest research data by doing it that way. It also means that there is this last minute push to complete research that you promised.

So, Sungkyoung's study. . what was it all about.

In the past as PART of an earlier study, there was some tiniest bit of data that suggested that within a radio commercial an emotional word can cause listeners to automically pay attention to the commercial.

This is due to a physiological response called the orienting response. You can read more about this here.

So, what sungkyoung did was design an experiment that looks more systematically at whether merely using an emotional word when writing the copy can help radio producers increase attention.

What do I mean by using an emtional word?
okay, so say you're getting ready to write coyp, and you write:

"Sometimes, I wake up in the morning, look out the window at the sun up in the sky and think to myself. . . "

But if you instead write
"Sometimes, I wake up in the morning, look out the window at the Brilliant sun up in the sky and think to myself. . ."

[by the way, this copy is from ACTUAL radio ads that were taped off air or gathered from collections from Radio and Production Magazine or the Radio Advertising Bureau}


Sungkyoung's data show that this copy is more effective at gathering attention.

Cool, huh?

Visit the Power Point site (posted earlier) and I'll write more later.

Great new research results

I'll write more about this later tonight, but check this site out.
It shows that emotional words in radio messages cause listeners to AUTOMATICALLY pay attention to the message.

This is work done by a student of mine, Sungkyoung Lee.

http://www.theaudioprof.com/research/pp/emotionalwords.htm

Don't know what to expect

Well, I heard tonight on NPR that there is an international competition tonight of web programmers trying to find out who can produce the best viral web creation--like that dancing baby or the chubby singing kid in his New Jersey basement--

It's hard to believe that wnyone would be interested in this blog at all.
But, I heard a good speech on an audible download from David Weinberger talking about blogs and it was such a good lecture that I thought I'd try to start one myself.

The lecture was so good, part of the Library of Congress series on the digital future.
It's free, too, so give it a look, er a listen.

One of the things that the lecture talks about is how blogs are so powerful because they establish forgiveness and trust between all the participants. One of the way that forgiveness is manifest, he says, is that bloggers are all sloppy in their typing, spelling, etc.

Well, I'm a University professor, and already I've backed up and (I just did it on 'and' in fact, which I spelled 'adn') corrected tons of mistakes in this posting. I'm wondering if that will change, or if you all. . . yeah, all. . . er whoever is reading this. . will feel it too impersonal.

I'm hoping to be able to use this blog to keep anyone interested in research on audio and the way the brain processes audio up to date on what I'm doing in my lab in the Institute for Communication Research.

I'm also working lots on updating my website, and spend most of my evenings right now fiddling with it. So, for now the blog may be brief.

If you do read this, I'd be interested in having you respond. Even if it's just to let me know that you found me. I'm not holding my breath.

The Audio Prof

The Audio Prof

My First Posting

Well, I've never tired this before.
Seems all the rage.
Wonder what will happen.