Orienting to Volume Changes--More IFS data!!!

Classes start for the Fall Semester tomorrow...well, today for those on a Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule. And, I've spent the past few days getting syllabi ready for the coming term. One of the fortunate things is that I'm teaching "This is your Brain on Media,", the class I taught for IFS, again this semster as an S105 seminar. I was therefore able to keep what worked during IFS and revise what didn't.


As you may suspect if you've been following this blog lately, one thing that did work well was the student experiments. And, it's time to report on another one.


This was the second "Attention Group." They were interested in abrupt changes in volume in media and whether such a change would result in the automatic allocation of cognitive resources to processing the message. This is a phenomenon known as the orienting response. At first, the group seemed intent upon testing this in movie clips...but they had trouble finding examples...even though they were "sure they had seen them"!

In the end, music was what they selected (which The Audio Prof did not discourage!). The found four songs where the music was very quiet for an extended time and then got very loud. Furthermore, two of the songs were familar (Ironic from Alanis Morrisette and Bring Me to Life from Evanescence) and two of them were unfamiliar local bands that one of the students knew.


The students collected heart rate data during the songs presentations, which were played in random order to 4 other students. Then, they identified the points in each song where the volume change occurred. Here's what they found:

Now an orienting response is identified with a momentary deceleration in heart rate. And, this graph shows changes from the point at which the volume change occurred (the place where both lines are at "0" on the left side of the figure). And, you see that heart rate went down for both types of songs...so, they oriented to the volume changes just like the students thought would happen. Plus, they wondered whether familiarity with the song would have an impact. And, it seems that it did...the orienting responses were larger if the subject didn't know the song. Makes sense, right?

Congratulations to "Attention Group, Music" members:

David Benmen, Michelle Feder, Eliot Suitor-Feld, and Alexandra Wojtal

A look at some IFS data

I'm sure I have said this at least once over the last three weeks, but IFS is extremely intensive. Not only for the students, but also for the professors. At church this morning I saw two other professors who are in the program, and all three of us are exhausted. I don't know whether to feel discouraged or uplifted that the other two professors have done IFS before...and are still wiped out!

My family has gone off on this hot and muggy Indiana afternoon to go swimming at a friend's pool. I decided to stay home, somewhat because I wanted to get a blog posting up, but also because I'm just tired.

Looking back on the three-week experience, I am amazed at how far the students and I were able to get. Over the course of 15 days, four different student groups were able to generate their own original research hypotheses, identify the independent and dependent variables in them, find examples of media stimuli to satisfy the different levels of the independent variable, collect physiology data as dependent variables, analyze that data and present it to the class!!

Over the next few blog postings I've like to give you a sense of the very interesting questions and results they generated. The first week was devoted to questions about attention to media. In the ICR we primarily use heart rate as an indication of attention/cognitive effort. The first group to collect data wondered whether people would pay different amounts of attention to television stories depending upon whether they were exposed to audio-video presentations, video-only presentations, or audio-only presentations. Those of you familiar with this type of media research, will find this question to be highly influenced by the reading the students did in the Reeves & Nass book entitled The Media Equation. Of course, as an instructor, this made me ecstatic because it meant they were actually reading the textbook!

So, the members of "attention group lizard" found segments of video online from the National Geographic Channel (that's where they got their name) and manipulated them to meet the different levels of their independent variable. And although, like all the data I'll present from IFS, they only had time to run three or four of their classmates through the experiment, here's what they found:

It's obvious that most of the differentiation is in the early part of each message, which appears on the left-hand side of the graph. Substantially lower heart rate (indicating more attention) occurs during the "monkey" video clip. In this video clip there was only video in the students concluded that subjects paid more attention early on during that portion of the stimulus presentation because we are quite unpracticed at processing television shows without any sort of audio. Helping them to reach this conclusion, was the fact that the least amount of attention was paid during the clip that contains both audio and video -- the same way we are so accustomed to watching television.

Congratulations to the members of this group:

Andrew Platkin · Jeremy Rytych · Adam Siemer · Tommy Scott · Logan Gants

and best of luck during your time here at IU!

Quick bit of Audio News

I'm in the middle of adminstering the second unit exam to the IFS class. I can't believe how hard these guys have been working, and how much ground we've covered in 10 days!

I'll be posting some of the (quite impressive) data that the research groups collected during their lab days over the next few posts.

But, for now, I thought I'd pass on a story of a big radio conglomerate--one that often gets bad press as the evil empire--doing good.

Story (thanks to Media Week): Clear Channel creates The Pink Channel.

Here's the XM page for The Pink Channel

First week of IFS is in the books

It's been a wonderful week in S105 as me and a group of 18 freshmen have embarked on exploring how the human brain interacts with mediated messages as psychological stimuli rather than just genres of entertainment.

I've been amazed at how far the group has come in a short time. They are exhausted and slightly overwhelmed at the speed with which we've covered stuff. And, frankly, so am I. That's why they are called INTENSIVE Fresmen Seminars, I suppose.

But, in five short days we've been able to have two different groups (my attention groups) come up with separate hypotheses concerning what causes us to pay different amounts of attention to media. Plus, we have been in the ICR lab collecting data to test those hypotheses. Interestingly, one of the hypotheses focused on television and the other on audio-only media (music).

Here's a few pictures of some of them in the lab yesterday.


Eliot making sure Brittany is comfortable getting ready to have her heart rate measured.

Eliot again (I think, with his back to us) and Alex (watching the EKG on the computer monitor) discuss the heart rate data being collected with my IFS intern Jeremy.
In Lab A, Tommy kept meticulous notes about the four subjects his group collected data from...plus had a great sense of humor about it all that helped those being "hooked up" relax.

Tommy's group has already been able to analyze their data, and found some pretty interesting results. I won't spoil the story now...they haven't presented it to the other students yet, but be checking back.

And then There Was One

Today, as expected for several days, the final vote was cast by the FCC signing off on the merger between XM and Sirius, the two satellite radio services.

You can read a story about the swing vote here.

Those of you who, like me, are subscribers to one of the current services may be interested in what the two companies promised the FCC they will provide in exchange for merger approval.
Read the conditions that were provided by the companies earlier in the summer and approved virtually unchanged today (at least, that's what the B&C story says).


We'll see if it's too good to be true or if the wording is vague enough that consumers get the short end of it.

Spring Break Storm Reminds Me of Music's Influence

As my friend Sam Bradley wrote in a recent blog posting, one of the things you get by living in the midwest is and unpredictable, cold, and snowy winter. Here's how my family and I spent Saturday...the first full day of Spring Break.

The storm actually came through Friday morning...starting while I was waiting to meet a friend at the Bloomington Bagel Company when the power went out. There were about a dozen or so of us sitting around there...a few of us "regulars" who know each other primarily as faces we recognize we see several mornings a week as we take advantage of their good bagels/muffins/coffee and free wi-fi. Three was the chatter of people making or filling orders and talking amongst themselves. And, as usual, in the background was the music of XM Radio. They usually have The Loft playing.

So, anyway, after a subtle 'pop' sound all the power went off and we sat there in only the natural light and silence. After about 45 seconds the power came back on, allowing the sound of orders being placed and filled. The chatter started up again....but something was wrong. What was it? It was the music. It was absent. And the place just wasn't the same. The energy seemed the drop down about 20 notches! It was amazing. I've recently been thinking more and more about the influence of music. I've published a piece with Francesca Dillman Carpentier in Media Psychology on tempo as a structural feature in music. Plus, I've been reading a great book on the topic recently...a title that I hope to finish over break.

But, this personal experience really drove it home.

Great link forwarded by a former student

Several times a semester I remind my undergrads that, when they are rich and famous and working dutifully in the telecommunications industry, I would certainly appreciate it if they would remember to send me information and articles they come across that I could use in my current classes.

My thanks to Amy Alyward a former T344 student who sent me this terrific blog entry by Paul Grein of Yahoo Music.

It's a reminder of the importance of knowing the CRITERIA researchers base their findings on. In this case, the findings are the top music albums in the land. Turns out, the #2 album last week by numbers was Michael Jackson's 25th Anniversary Album of Thriller. Then, why doesn't it appear in the Billboard 200? Find out by reading Grein's article.

Find it here.

Twitter--Not sure about it, but it pays off with a new website

After almost a year of planting little bugs in my ear by friends and the occassional student I have spent this weekend exploring and playing around with TWITTER.

This still seems to be like some sort of terrible, addictive drug for someone who tends to obsess about stuff anyway...and I'm not quite sure I'll stick with it for the long term.

But...one of the things that happened is I was very quickly being "followed" by people I don't even know. It sounds pretty ominous when I put it that way...and it seems pretty harmless (as long as I don't release too many specific details.)

Anyway, I digress...although I think I'll eventually just purge the darn program from my desktop, it one of the people that started "following" me visited my website (www.theaudiprof.com) and happened to send me a nice note saying that my research looks interesting.

So, being nice, I figured I should go visit this guy's website and be able to comment on it in my reply. While there, I found this terrific website:

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php

I have only started poking around there...but it seems fabulous for all those interested in audio.

Check it out.

Think you're hearing voices? It may be a new cable promotion

I regularly listen to a podcast called The Business which comes out of KCRW in Santa Monica. It talks about goings on in the business of Hollywood. This week the show gave a very brief mention of a promotional campaign going on in the Soho district of NYC.

Imagine this...you are walking down the sidewalk in Soho and all of a sudden hear someone audibly say "Who's there? Who's there!?!" You look around because you are sure someone's asking YOU that question. But all you see are other hectic Sohoians (?) walking to their destinations. Except, now they are wondering why you are spinning around looking for someone that's talking to you. But there isn't anyone. It's a BILLBOARD for the new A&E show callled Paranormal State--and it's talking only to you!

The board uses the same technology developed for personalized audio tours in museums to speak to isolate single people walking by and send an isolated audio signal to you. Read about this campaign here in an Ad Age article. Or, for a slightly less institutionalized take, here's a blog about it on Gawker.

This also just reminded me of another story I heard on a favorite podcast, On the Media.
It's about a billboard that doesn't narrowcast to just one passerby...but broadcasts it's thoughts about MANY passersby on the streets of Las Vegas. This is a promotional gimmick for an outdoor advertising company. Listen to this story here:

It's The Audio Prof...Not the Radio Prof

I have mentioned earlier that I am in my tenure year...and happy to report that the faculty of my department have voted to send my case up to the next levels of consideration. While that is a cause for momentary celebration, it is only the beginning of a LONG process. There are, indeed, next levels...seven of them (assuming I haven't forgotten one).

The case now goes to:
The College Committee
The Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences
The Dean of Faculties Committee
The Dean of Faculties
The University Provost
The University President
The Board of Trustees.

It's a long year. But tenure is a big deal--not only for the faculty candidate (trust me, it IS that), but also for the institution. So, they want to make sure that all those with a stake have a peek at every candidate.

Part of the documentation that the candidate must prepare is a personal statement explaining primarily how they came about their area of research interests...what they have done so far during their research careers...and what they will do later. So during that process I have been reminded of how important my experiences with radio were in guiding me to what I now do. Radio was an important companion for me as a child. It was an early career choice and what started my interest in exactly what attributes of radio messages can capture peoples' attention.

But, when I was a graduate student at IU, one of the most respected scholars in communication came to visit our department and give a talk to our lab group. His name is Byron Reeves, a Professor from Stanford. As is typical during informal talks like this one was, each grad student gave a brief introduction of their work. As you might expect, my introduction talked all about radio--explaining how I was interested in how radio messages capture attention, how we can make them more memorable, etc.

After I was through, Professor Reeves told me that I should not describe my interests as being in radio. Actually, what I was interested in, he taught me, wasn't the "box" called radio. It wasn't the delivery system...it was what was being delivered...it was AUDIO.

That was great advice. It took me a long time to break that "radio" habit. But eventually I did.

Not only did writing my tenure statement make me remember this formative event...but so did this article describing how even ad agencies are no longer saying they are interested in radio...with satelite and ipods and websites and radio all being used to deliver audio information. It's not just radio anymore.

That's why I'm not the Radio Prof.

Catch-up Catch-up

Almost 2 weeks since the last post. Lots has happened. I've finished up my tenure dossier...a little thing that encapsulates the work of the last 10 years. That took a little bit of time, and I keep pretty good records! Now the full faculty of The Department meet to discuss my case and vote whether to send it up the line to the next level. It's out of my hands now...I'll keep you updated as things go along.

Also I've been preparing for a new semester. Two classes this semester:

T344--Programming Strategies
and
T511--Research Methods in Audience Analysis

Looking forward to both of them. And, even though I've taught them before, they took time to prepare. Especially since the graduate one is meeting only once a week this semester...and the last time I taught it we met twice a week. Had to shrink everything into have the days.

And, there was a dissertation that I had to read, written by Zheng Wang who is going to join the faculty of Ohio State University. The dissertation was terrific, but as it was dealing with mathematical models of channel-changing behaviors and physiological reactions to media, it was not an easy read. But, the results were very exciting and I would expect to see MANY MANY pieces of research in top-tier journals in years to come. Congratulations to Dr. Wang.

And, last week was orientation week for new graduate students. Always an exciting time, filled with new possibilities. One of the things we do during orientation week is hold Area of Interest Meetings (AIMs). I was involved in one that was actually just a tour of the ICR, and one on the cognitive processing of media (which also included professors Fox, Grabe & Lang).

Another one I was a part of was the All Things Audio meeting. Often, in departments such as this, you are lucky to have even a single faculty member interested in audio issues. Most production AND research people focus primarily on the visual. But, our department is FORTUNATE to have three faculty members who are interested in sound/audio/music in some form or another. Andrew Bucksbarg, Norb Hebert and I hosted the group of students who are also interested in audio in their own ways. It was a blast.

But, busy.

Here's a link to a fascinating site that I actually got from the All Things Audio AIM. You should check it out:

peter chilvers generative music site

A peak behind the curtain--audio editing makes us sound better

Okay, first of all, there is nothing worse than being sick in the summer time.
I have strep throat!!

I'm really bugged about it...because not only can't I swallow or eat...but it's gorgeous outside and I'd much rather be doing things with my family than stuck inside wondering how long I can wait until my next nap.

GRRRRR. I haven't had this since I got my tonsils out at age 7.

Anyway, being mostly stuck inside has allowed me to do some podcast listening, and that reminded me of a piece I heard recently on ON THE MEDIA, a show out of WNYC in New York.

The piece was called "Pulling back the Cutain" and was produced by John Solomon. It's all about how much editing occurs on the audio obtained via interviews for a show like OTM...or any radio news show for that matter. To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, listen to this exerpt from the story which gives an example of how OTM/Advertising Age critic Bob Garfield sounds during the taping of an interview compared to how he sounds afterwards.

Part of the reason why this story fascinated me is because I always thought I was pretty good at noticing edits in audio stories. Local radio news doesn't try to hide when an edit takes place. The ambient sound doesn't match, the speaker's inflections are going in different directions at the point of the edit, etc. But with OTM, I never even THOUGHT about it. That's largely to the credit of the show's editor (and co-host) Brooke Gladstone. But, it's also due to increased sophistication in technology. When I first started editing audio it was done using magnetic tape as the source material...not digital bits. Edits were done by finding the beginning and ending point of where you wanted to cut out, marking it on the back-side of the tape with a grease pencil, and then cutting it with a razor blade...only to tape the two ends back together. If you messed up...you guessed it...you had to tape the whole thing back together and start again. Almost as much a pain in the neck as strep throat.

These days, editing is all done electronically using programs like Pro Tools or Saw or the one we use in the ICR Lab, Adobe Audition. These programs make editing downright fun. Try an edit...if it doesn't work, Ctrl-Z gets you right back where you were! I remember when working on the Double-Units clutter study I needed to edit down commercials from 60-seconds to 30-seconds in length while still keeping the original meaning and information. If I had to do that with a razor blade and splicing tape, forget it. With Audition, it was actually something I looked forward to doing.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Today is the Internet Radio Day of Silence.
It's to protest huge increases in the amount of royalties that these audio outlets would have to pay, retroactively, on July 15.

Read more here, on the Radio and Internet Newsletter Site.

No Radio for the Audio Prof

I've just spent a week on vacation with the family. It's good to get away...and more than I have in years I truly tried to leave work behind. In the past we have spent up to 6 weeks on the road in our home state of Washington. When on the road for that long of a stretch...it was almost mandatory that I bring my laptop and reading along and try to carve out some hours to write while the family went to the lake, or swimming, or whatever.

But, this year, with the length of our visit cut back drastically for a variety of reasons...the laptop was primarily brought so the kids could watch movies on the plane. And it truly was a chance to just unwind. (Although I did have to spend a little bit of time finishing my grades for T340).
One of the ways this trip was differrent than my previous ones back to WA is the fact that I barely listened to broadcast radio at all. Now, you may have to know me pretty well to understand how big a deal this is. We spent time in the town in which I grew up...Richland Washington. Listening to the radio there during the 1980s while in high school was one of the reasons why...during the summer before my senior year...I sent letters to all the General Managers and Program Directors in the Tri-Cities (of which Richland is one...the others being Kennewick and Pasco) asking for any opportunity to be a part of their station operations. I eventually got an "internship" of sorts at a no-longer-existing country station: KOTY-AM and KHWK-FM.
I recognize voices of disk jockeys in the Tri-Cities, still. Enjoy hearing the tweaks in formats and positioning statements. The same is true for the Spokane Market...where I worked in formats ranging from CHR to jazz to sports talk. And so, every trip back would include listening to hear what was going on in my old stomping grounds.

But, like I said, this trip was different. No long periods of listening. No listening at all, to speak of. Why? Two reasons that perhaps highlight why my students similarly report NO radio listening. The first was my ipod, and the podcasts that I've been diggin' recently like (The Business, This American Life, On the Media, Radio Lab, and Science Talk).

But, the primary reason for my lack of listening was The first was that the rental car had XM satellite radio. Although I was surprised that several of the stations had COMMERCIALS in them...I was certainly only a few clicks away from music in the vein of the mood I was in due to their alignment of channels by genre (if I was listening to 80s and didn't like a song, checking out what was on the 90s channel one click away usually sufficed. When Nashville** went to commercials...Highway 16 or US Country had something on it that would do nicely). I can only imagine that my listening would have skyrocketed on the talk stations if the family hadn't been in the car...and I probably would have imposed the sports-talk stations ON my family if it was NFL season, not baseball season.

So, there really wasn't any reason to impose myself to commercials...voice-tracked DJs...or songs that I didn't want to hear. Even the nostalgia of listening to stations from my past didn't over-ride the easy entertainment that new technologies allowed me.


** Interestingly, when I was getting links together for this blog, I went to XM's page...of course. The Nashville channel (channel 11)... which was the most irritating in stopping for STUPID national commercials for dating services or car insurance...isn't listed as an option on their website. Wonder why?

Cool NPR story only gets my hopes up

I mentioned several postings ago about how much I was enjoying my new ipod nano. I don't use it much for music, so far (I keep telling myself that all of that will change once I start working out more...yeah, right). Instead, it use it fo listening to pod casts. A recent one on NPR's Pop Culture
talked about a new audio recognition program that allows you to hum a tune that you can't identify and it will name it for you. If you don't want to listen to the podcast, you can hear the story right here.

So, I've been waiting to try it and have it work as easily as it sounded to during the Scott Simon piece. Unfortunately, it was less than impressive. It may be simply because I'm the Tone Def Prof. But, even songs that I KNOW are in their database I was unable to get it to correctly identify when I hummed them.

With the exception of "Holding Back the Years" by Simply Red. Frightening.

Check out the program yourself...let me know if your humming is more easily identified.

My favorite gift this Christmas

Several years ago in graduate school, I came to Indiana University as a graduate student.
Deciding to make an investment in my educational future by purchasing a new computer. I had been using a VERY old Apple Macintosh. So, I bought a new "Power Mac" or whatever it was called. Shortly (like less than a year) after that, I started working with Annie Lang. She was (and is) a hardcore PC user and was somewhat reluctant to try to integrate system.

So, in 1995 I also became a PC user and--in all honesty--found them much more in-line with the type of work I like to do.

So, for the last two years or so I have struggled with PC-based portable music systems...primarily using my Palm pilot to listen to podcasts and music that I downloaded from Rhapsody. The trouble with Rhapsody was that darn licensing agreements made music that I thought I had just downloaded would not play. Very frustrating!!

And all around me were people using their ipods and raving about them. And, the huge market share that Apple was able to establish in the category. But, I couldn't bring myself to even much investigate an Apple product. I was a snobby PC user.

So, my absolute favorite Christmas gift this year was my ipod Nano.
It is the COOLEST thing. So convenient, and small, and light. And all the music plays without the annoying messages saying that I don't have the proper licensing agreement.

And on the itunes store site there are more podcasts than I'll know what to do with.

Great gift (from my inlaws...THANKS) and great design.