The (noisy) Science Bit…

I wrote a version of the following as a ‘briefing document’ for our new Exec Director Mark Hollander who’s organising a series of events with our consultant scientists exploring the science behind our new show THE NOISE . Details on those events at the bottom of  The Noise show page. Here though, is The Science Bit for those of you interested. There’s a lot of links so if you’re embarking on a read here (and it *is* VERY interesting, I promise) then you should make a brew/open a tinny/pour a glass of whatever you prefer before settling in for a good 30-60 minute explore…

The Science of The Noise

A briefing document (turned blog post)…

So the research for this show started with an interest in:

“the effects of sound and noise on human beings – physical, emotional, psychological”

Also, it’s relationship and affect on memory…

We asked Mic Pool (a sound designer and at the time resident technologist at the West Yorkshire Playhouse) what “Noise” is and he told us it is “any uncorrelated sound” – it is constantly changing, has no pattern in it and is impossible for humans to produce it naturally – it can only be created digitally: wikipedia entry on “noise” here

When we started this process, we spent a week in Leeds Library with our now board member, the lovely Alison Andrews and very much enjoyed this description of sound:
<click on the small image to open a larger, more readable file>
<if you want or need to listen to the introduction, I’ve recorded me speaking the text and embedded it here>

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/63893696″ params=”auto_play=false&show_artwork=true&color=ff7700″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Since then, we started conversations with two scientists:

Dr Denis McKeown
and
Professor Tim Griffiths

The following is my description of headlines and understanding from conversations with, in particular Dr McKeown.

I’m going to write a separate blog post with notes from (and a link to) a great paper by Prof Griffiths about “auditory objects”. Hopefully, all of this will give you a sound (!) overview of the subject matter we’re interested in.

ENJOY!

SOUND & MEMORY

If you’re trying to remember something, you have to visit the “thing” you’re trying to remember with an “attentional spotlight”. But ‘attention’ is capacity limited so, if your attention goes to another task, it becomes much harder to recall that “thing”.

<reference here: Barrouillet’s article “Time causes forgetting from working memory” in which he writes that memory is affected by temporal decay because of the “time-based resource-sharing model framework” i.e. “The aim of [this] study was to provide direct evidence that memory traces decay with time while attention is diverted by intervening activities.” >

Dr McKeown posits that there are two “systems” for paying attention.

One is subconscious and based on experience and assumptions that are basically a short cut to (for the best part) making every day decisions about the constant experience of being alive. The other is more conscious, more effortful and capable of processing information that is less familiar to you. To keep you safe, essentially.

Evolutionarily, human beings are designed to notice novelty in their environment and either:
–  dismiss it because, having been examined under your attentional spotlight the new or unexpected “thing” has been identified as not posing a threat to your safety
OR
–  deal with it, because it does pose some sort of threat

In his book Thinking Fast & Slow, the psychologist and 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize winner Daniel Kahneman describes these two systems as:

• System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
• System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious

And this is the basis of the idea that what memory is for is for noticing new things, not remembering old things. As Dr  McKeown described it to us:

“We are novelty detectors.”

Sound is particularly interesting in this sense because it is both spatially organised and frequency specific.

<as opposed to attention in vision for example, which is purely spatial and its demand on your attention is dependent on you being able to see it, have it in your line of sight and not be blind or vision impaired. And of course it’s never that simple [1] but since we’re focussing on sound, I don’t think we need to be distracted by the detail of visual attention?>

If you’re at a party, in a room full of women talking you will be much more likely to notice and be able to place (in space) the lone voice of a solitary male speaker (segregation by voice pitch is the technical description here).

So sound, being ever present in any environment, has a much more “intrusive” affect on one’s attention. Unless you’re deaf, of course, which is an interesting aspect to pay attention too – even though, as we’ve heard from our deaf or hard of hearing collaborators, you still experience sound because of its physical manifestation as waves of particles vibrating in air (percussionist Evelyn Glennie: “I feel the music through my body”).

In relation to theories of memory and forgetting, there is still intense debate as to how and why we “forget” things [2]. There has been a long held belief that forgetting occurs due to the decay of the information in the brain over time. However… Dr McKeown’s theory, based on evidence from experiments working with sound stimuli and a theory that has been gathering support in modern psychology, is that the decay of memory occurs, in part at least, because you’re paying attention – as Dr McKeown says “Forgetting is due to interference, rather than decay.”

If your attention is driven to a new thing (for example “extra ordinary” events that intrude on your attention, like novel sounds) then the ‘older’ information is literally overwritten by the new information and you no longer hold it in your memory.

To improve recall and long term memory storage therefore, Dr McKeown suggests it would be of benefit to “Stop paying attention. Decay occurs because you pay attention.”

Dr McKeown revised my above 3 paras with the following which is (I think) a little harder to follow, but clarifyingly accurate!

There has been a long held resistance to the idea that forgetting occurs due to the decay of the information in the brain over time, since behavioural studies in experimental psychology have supported forgetting through interference instead. Thus, the features of new stimuli or experienced information may effectively overwrite older information. Yet in recent years the neuropsychology of forgetting has pointed to decay-like loss of synchrony in populations of brain cells as a possible mechanism for decay. Thus, slow synchronous “gamma” brain activity identified in cortical EEG recordings are correlated with attention and memory and better recall of recent material [3]; loss of synchrony may therefore be a form of “decay.”

And recently, Dr McKeown has proposed, based on evidence from experiments working with sound stimuli and a theory that has been gathering support in modern psychology, that the decay of memory is “adaptive”, as a form of rubbish collection, freeing up mental resources for new information. He has studied specifically non-verbal memory – memory for abstract visual and auditory patterns. To date the evidence has pointed to a memory system working largely automatically, outside the focus of attention. This form of perceptual memory appears remarkably detailed, relatively enduring (minutes or even hours) and unconscious, acting as a “model of the recent environment”; for Dr McKeown states “It is only by maintaining a relatively intact and detailed model of recently experienced sights and sounds that we are able to detect novelty – we orient our attentional spotlight to the novel, to the event that is a change in the internal landscape of our recently experienced world.” In support of this idea, Dr McKeown has studied people’s ability to remember visual patterns. On each trial two patterns are presented and 30 seconds or so later a “probe” pattern. Is this one of the two just experienced? Now, the clever bit is that one some trials the probe does not match but – it does match a pattern experienced on a previous trial. The new manipulation was varying the time interval from that old trial. Apparently it does not matter – old patterns interfere on the current trial, almost indecently of the time span. The model of the experienced environment is help for long time and does not need to be rehearsed.

But what if you really attempt to rehearse. Controversially, Dr McKeown argues that bringing the contents of memory into focal attention may actually be a noisy process. To maintain the internal model, therefore, Dr McKeown suggests it might even be of benefit to “Stop paying attention. Decay occurs because you pay attention.”

So how do the above theories of forgetting most interestingly and usefully apply to the story (The Noise) that we are writing?

Questions:

If you are constantly being asked to pay attention to new, unfamiliar sounds (like the phenomenon of The Noise in our play), what effects would this have on the people exposed to it? For both the long term experience of those living on the island and the shorter term experience of those visiting it.

Specifically I’m wondering here:

–       what effects might The Noise have on both short and long term memory of the islanders and its visitors?
–       what are the emotional/psychological impacts of a constantly changing noise on the islanders and its visitors?

response to those questions from Denis…

Part science answer.  Noise as contextual and the memory of the people (the fishermen and the shawls of the womenfolk) –

From Radio 4 The Strand…

LINK to episode on BBC iPlayer (17mins)

They discuss composer Hafdís Bjarnadóttir whose music is performed by the Hlómeyki Chamber Choir – music she’s composed based on the knitting pattern for a traditional Icelandic shawl. Different sounds and rhythms for different types of stitch, and, for the lacey part a glissando and – silence! – a hole.

So for older islanders of Whitley the Noise could be conceived as the weave of the natural world, with the memories of old patterns (maybe the knitting patterns for the nets of the fishermen). The texture of the nets is held in sound – time and frequency strands interwoven, the memory of expeditions, of lost souls. I don’t know knitting patterns or nets very much – but a musical score is time and frequency so…

Above I mentioned the notion of brain waves “synchrony” and loss of synchrony being forgetting. So the new generation, lost to the Noise, out of synchrony, have not conditioned brain pattern synchrony – so they literally have no memory of their ancestors. That memory is physically present in the fishing nets, in the worn shawls, in the baskets. As the wind plays through those too, hanging over boats, the nets ring to the old sounds and memories. But like the loss of brain wave synchrony, a new noise (electronic, sinister) disturbs the synchrony? Perhaps there is also the Government’s attempt to ‘block’ the old patterns. Charlie is the only young person to ring in synchrony. Is her yellow woollen hat an old knitted pattern, surrounding her young brain and bringing it into sympathy with the past? If she removes her hat she starts to object to the Noise?

****

In an early conversation Denis referred to art as being “The awakening of observation.”

…which I really enjoyed. Maybe there’s something here about the positives and coming to terms with the effects of “paying attention” to new experiences, ideas and understandings, metaphored in our play by The Noise and The Iceberg.