So, at the weekend I went to http://continuityboy.blogspot.co.uk/...at-movies.html , which was very interesting. One particularly interesting bit was how much they ended up talking about music rather than film, and I was reminded (again) of how much we tend to underestimate the subjective in our experiences of music. Even when we're politely saying "IMHO" and "your mileage may vary", we still tend to act as if how much we enjoy a piece of music is an objective measure of quality, whereas the (scientifically demonstrable) reality is that how much we enjoy a piece of music is hugely affected by how we listen to it (when, where, in what mood etc.), how often we've heard it before, how often we've heard similar pieces before, our cultural context and other factors.
That said, there are some objective phenomena in our experiences of music, film and other art that can be studied. One speaker, for example, cited work by Grewe and others on 'chills'. You know, that moment in a piece of music when you get a physical sensation, a chill, a shiver. Grewe and others have shown that such moments are, to a degree, predictable and reproducible. For example, they are often associated with a crescendo or diminuendo, or with a new voice/timbre entering the music. You can read Grewe's work and deliberately build 'chillogenic' moments into music you're creating. At the same time, this isn't a perfectly reliable system, because the experience also depends on the familiarity with the music and whether one is in a receptive mood. The speaker, Sheena Rogers, was then extending these ideas to film and to experiences of the sublime, those rare moments of transcendence that go beyond mere 'chills', again looking at how these can be manipulated, but also reflect experience/mood etc.
Henry
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