Affective evaluation of sounds by the students of creative professions

Abstract

Background. The present-day mass media and cinema specialists do not pay much attention to the environmental sounds for the effect of creation and putting the viewers and radio listeners into the appropriate emotional atmosphere during the film dubbing and cultural events scoring. Each acoustic event has a specific range and type of emotional impact on people, i.e. each separate sound has a different sort of influence on human beings and brings out specific emotions. Therefore, we come up with an idea that each acoustic event can be classified from the point of view of its emotional impact on human beings by the type and the kind of sentiment. Objective. The aim is to study and analyze the features of the affective evaluation of the environmental sounds by the students of the creative professions. Sample. The pilot study involved 69 students of the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts — GITIS (acting faculty, ballet master faculty and musical theater faculty), of which 26 (38%) were boys and 43 (62%) were girls. 710 verbal units have been encrypted. Methods. The study participants have recorded the environmental sounds that have brought out different kinds of basic emotions in themselves such as guilt, anger, interest, disgust, sadness, scorn, joy, fear, shame, surprise. The audio-record also included the participant’s comments concerning the date and time, sound source and the reasons for the emotions’ uprise. Later on the received data were transformed into text and processed with the procedures of inductive and frequency analysis. Results. The results of the frequency analysis revealed the groups of the environmental sounds bringing out the basic emotions from the point of view of the students of the creative professions. Guilt was brought out by the sounds expressing the complaints against you from other people; anger and scorn were evoked by the sounds made by the person who intentionally breaks the rules of social behavior; interest and sadness were aroused with the sounds of musical instruments, music and speech; disgust was brought out by the physiological sounds of other people, and shame was evoked by the sounds of one’s own physiological sounds; fear arose with sudden shrilling sounds; surprise was brought out by the sounds giving us a notice about some new piece of information. Conclusion. The results of the frequency analysis confirm that the environmental sounds can help in modeling different kinds of emotional impact.