I’m going to try a new concept here at Word Munger today: “psychblogging.” I’m working on a book proposal on cognitive psychology, and as I do the research for it, I’ll include my notes here. It’s a little different from standard blog fare, since typically there’s no online article to link to, but you can follow along and learn some interesting stuff about psychology. If you prefer not to know anything about how your mind works, just click on the appropriate “category” link to the left to create your own customized, psychology-free version of Word Munger. [Those of you who were following the “marriage” thread may wonder what happened. Unfortunately, that book idea bit the dust. I think this book’s got more legs than that one, though.]

Okay, let’s get started!

Today’s reading is “Musical Soundtracks as a Schematic Influence on the Cognitive Processing of Filmed Events,” by Marilyn G. Boltz of Haverford College (Music Perception, Summer 2001).

All film is illusion. The illusion of motion is created by a sequence of static frames. The illusion of a three-dimensional world is created by a two-dimensional photograph. What role does music play in maintaining that illusion? A big one, it turns out. Marshall and Cohen (1988) found that by showing cartoons where the only “characters” were a triangle, a circle, and a square, changing the music could change viewer’s perceptions about the “characters” (it turns out, triangles are thugs). Other researchers have found that appropriate music can help you remember details about a scene in a film.

What Boltz wanted to know was whether music alone could change the way viewers thought about a scene in a film, and furthermore, whether it could actually affect viewers’ memory later on. She showed viewers three ambiguous scenes, from “Cat People,” “Vertigo,” and the TV show “The Hitchhiker,” and played either “positive,” “negative,” or no music to accompany the scenes.

Boltz found that when viewers watched Malcolm McDowell and Nastassia Kinski talk in a benign scene accompanied by “positive” music, they saw McDowell primarily as “kind/caring,” “loving,” or “playful.” When the “negative” music was played, he became “crazy/deranged,” “evil,” manipulative,” “controlling/possessive,” and “mysterious” (and this is without seeing him turn into a black leopard and rip someone’s arm off). When asked to predict what would happen next, viewers who had never seen the film and who saw the version with “positive” music (”Blossom Meadow” by George Winston) thought that McDowell and Kinski would have a happy life together and possibly fall in love. Viewers who instead saw a version with “negative” music (from Rubycon by Tangerine Dream — of “Risky Business” fame) thought McDowell would “harm,” “kill,” or “do supernatural harm” to Kinski. The results were similar for scenes from “Vertigo” and “The Hitchhicker.” So music matters, whether we’re watching a bad ’80s HBO series or a Hitchcock classic.

A separate group of viewers was not asked to give predictions. Instead, they were invited back to Boltz’s lab a week later to be given a pop quiz. It turns out, when shown a list of words, some of which were names of objects that appeared in the film clip and some of which weren’t, they correctly remembered about two-thirds of the objects. But people who listened to “positive” music remembered about 80 percent of the “positive” objects in the scene, as opposed to only half of the “negative” objects. For people who heard the “negative” music, the results were correspondingly reversed. Furthermore, people hearing “negative” music were more likely to remember negative objects that weren’t even present in the scene they were shown, such as an open grave and an ice pick in “Vertigo.”

This suggests a new way moviemakers can mess with viewers’ heads. By playing “positive” music in the presence of a “negative” object they don’t want viewers to remember, they can fool their audience into all sorts of misperceptions. Or they could use consistent music in a seemingly innocuous scene to force viewers to pay more attention. Of course, filmmakers didn’t need Boltz to tell them most of this stuff — they’ve known it for years. But Boltz has finally quantified it for us in a way that shows how significant it really is.

Yesterday I discussed Umberto Eco’s lecture on the future of books from the perspective of whether e-books can replace traditional books. I think Eco rightly distinguishes between “books to read” and “books to consult,” with electronic books to consult likely replacing traditional ones, but traditional books to read maintaining long-term dominance over e-books.

However, I do think the “books to read” / “books to consult” dichotomy oversimplifies things. I might read a computer manual cover to cover, but I might also consult it for just the information I need. Ditto for many (most?) scholarly works. The argument against Google print has often been that it treats all books as if they were books to consult, and this is true, but we might also consult any book, even the quintessential “book to read.”

Eco makes another important point about e-texts. Often e-books have been hailed as a revolutionary new medium because of the infinite possibilities of hyperlinking. Eco argues that the hyperlinking in itself does nothing to expand the original text:

Now suppose that a finite and limited text is organised hypertextually by many links connecting given words with other words. In a dictionary or an encyclopaedia the word wolf is potentially connected to every other word that makes up part of its possible definition or description (wolf is connected to animal, to mammal to ferocious, to legs, to fur, to eyes, to woods, to the names of the countries in which wolves exist, etc.). In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf can be connected only with the textual sections in which it shows up or in which it is explicitly evoked. The series of possible links is finite and limited. How can hypertextual strategies be used to “open” up a finite and limited text?

Eco is saying that the value of a text comes precisely from the static arrangement of its words. In theory, anyone could have written Hamlet — the words were available to them — but Shakespeare did it first, so we value Shakespeare.

There was a lively discussion at Future of the Book a few days ago about whether a “networked book” was still a book. It is a “text,” but it is infinitely variable and constantly modifiable. Eco would say it is not a book, or even a text. A “text” is a fixed sequence of words. It might be modified — even Hamlet might — but it would no longer be the same text.

There is certainly an inclination among wiki members to preserve a version of their work. Wikipedia is planning a static, printed version, and other, smaller wiki projects have published versions of what they create. Is this because they have some notion that a static text is a different (better?) thing from a networked text?

There are some real benefits to “fixing” texts. I can remember (but I’m too lazy to look up) a significant online debate a year or so ago on whether it’s ethical to change a blog posting once it’s up. The consensus seemed to be that other than to correct typos, it was not. Why? Because others would respond to the original text, and they’d be made to look like idiots if the original was subsequently changed. My personal practice follows this consensus — it certainly seems like a reasonable approach. Larger revisions can be made in the comments section or in clearly marked updates.

We value fixity, but we hail the e-text as a “revolutionary” medium because of its maleability. However, it seems that maleability is not its true virtue: interactivity is. Paradoxically, maleability inhibits interactivity, so we typically form conventions to suppress the ill effects of maleability. And sure, I don’t modify my blog posts, but I respond to others in my posts, and others respond to mine in theirs. Later, I might write a new post synthesizing these thoughts. Still later, I might write a book that brings these thoughts together with newer (and older) ones. All these are good things. Which one is a book? Probably only the last.