I bought an expensive juicer, but I am not permitted to use it for making juice! Score zero for behavioral design. But so what? I proudly display the juicer in my entrance hall. Score one hundred for visceral appeal. Score one hundred for reflective appeal. (But I did use it once for making juice—who could resist?)
Seduction is real. Take the Global kitchen knife of figure 4.6, shown alongside the juicer. Unlike the juicer, which is primarily an object for display, not for use, the knife is beautiful to look at and a joy to use. It is well balanced, it feels good to the hand, and it is sharper than any other knife I have ever owned. Seduction indeed! I look forward to cutting when I cook, for these knives (I own three different types) fulfill all the requirements of seduction put forth by Khaslavsky and Shedroff.
Music and Other Sounds
Music plays a special role in our emotional lives. The responses to rhythm and rhyme, melody and tune are so basic, so constant across all societies and cultures that they must be part of our evolutionary heritage, with many of the responses pre-wired at the visceral level. Rhythm follows the natural beats of the body, with fast rhythms suitable for tapping or marching, slower rhythms for walking, or swaying. Dance, too, is universal. Slow tempos and minor keys are sad. Fast, melodic music that is danceable, with harmonious sounds and relatively constant ranges of pitch and loudness, is happy. Fear is expressed with rapid tempos, dissonance, and abrupt changes in loudness and pitch. The whole brain is involved—perception, action, cognition, and emotion: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Some aspects of music are common to all people; some vary greatly from culture to culture. Although the neuroscience and psychology of music are widely studied, they are still little understood. We do know that the affective states produced through music are universal, similar across all cultures.
The term “music,” of course, covers many activities—composing, performing, listening, singing, dancing. Some activities, such as performing, dancing, and singing, are clearly behavioral. Some, such as composing and listening, are clearly visceral and reflective. The musical experience can range from the one extreme where it is a deep, fully engrossing experience where the mind is fully immersed to the other extreme, where the music is played in the background and not consciously attended to. But even in the latter case, the automatic, visceral processing levels almost definitely register the melodic and rhythmic structure of the music, subtly, subconsciously, changing the affective state of the listener.
Music impacts all three levels of processing. The initial pleasure of the rhythm, tunes, and sounds is visceral, the enjoyment of playing and mastering the parts behavioral, and the pleasure of analyzing the intertwined, repeated, inverted, transformed melodic lines reflective. To the listener, the behavioral side is vicarious. The reflective appeal can come several ways. At one extreme, there is the deep appreciation of the structure of the piece, perhaps of the reference it makes to other pieces of music. This is the level of music appreciation exercised by the critic, the connoisseur, or the scholar. At the other extreme the musical structure and lyrics might be designed to delight, surprise, or shock.
Finally, music has an important behavioral component, either because the person is actively engaged in playing the music or equally actively singing or dancing. But someone who is just listening can also be behaviorally engaged by humming, tapping, or mentally following—and predicting—the piece. Some researchers believe that music is as much a motor activity as a perceptual one, even when simply listening. Moreover, the behavioral level could be involved vicariously, much as it is for the reader of a book or the viewer of a film (a topic I discuss later in this chapter).
Rhythm is built into human biology. There are numerous rhythmic patterns in the body, but the ones of particular interest are those that are relevant to the tempos of music: that is, from a few events per second to a few seconds per event. This is the range of body functions such as the beating of the heart and breathing. Perhaps more important, it is also the range of the natural frequencies of body movement, whether walking, throwing, or talking. It is easy to tap the limbs within this range of rates, hard to do it faster or slower. Much as the tempo of a clock is determined by the length of its pendulum, the body can adjust its natural tempo by tensing or relaxing muscles to adjust the effective length of the moving limbs, matching their natural rhythmic frequency to that of the music. It is therefore no accident that in playing music, the entire body keeps the rhythm.
All cultures have evolved musical scales, and although they differ, they all follow similar frameworks. The properties of octaves and of consonant and dissonant chords derive in part from physics, in part from the mechanical properties of the inner ear. Expectations play a central role in creating affective states, as a musical sequence satisfies or violates the expectations built up by its rhythm and tonal sequence. Minor keys have different emotional impact than major keys, universally signifying sadness or melancholy. The combination of key structure, choice of chords, rhythm, and tune, and the continual buildup of tension and instability create powerful affective influences upon us. Sometimes these influences are subconscious, as when music plays in the background during a film, but deliberately scored to invoke specific affective states. Sometimes these are conscious and deliberate, as when we devote our full conscious attention to the music, letting ourselves be carried vicariously by the impact, behaviorally by the rhythm, and reflectively as the mind builds upon the affective state to create true emotions.
We use music to fill the void when pursuing otherwise mindless activities, while stuck on a long, tiring trip, walking a long distance, exercising, or simply killing time. Once upon a time, music was not portable. Before the invention of the phonograph, music could be heard only when there were musicians. Today we carry our music players with us and we can listen twenty-four hours a day if we wish. Airlines realize music is so essential that they provide a choice of styles and hours of selections at every seat. Automobiles come equipped with radios and music players. And portable devices proliferate apparently endlessly, being either small and portable or combined with any other device the manufacturer thinks you might have with you: watches, jewelry, cell phones, cameras, and even work tools (figure 4.7a & b). Whenever I have had construction work done on a home, I noted that, first, the workers brought in their music players, which they set up in some central location with a super-loud output; then they would bring in their tools, equipment, and supplies. DEWALT, a manufacturer of cordless tools for construction workers, noticed the phenomenon and responded cleverly by building a radio into a battery charger, thus combining two essentials into one easy-tocarry box.
FIGURE 4.7a and b Music everywhere.
While drilling holes or recharging batteries, while taking photographs, on your cell phone. And of course, while driving your car, jogging, flying in an airplane, or just plain listening to music. Figure a shows the DEWALT battery charger for portable tools, with built-in radio; figure b shows an MP3 player built into a digital camera.
(Image a courtesy of DeWALT Industrial Tool Co. Image b courtesy of Fujifilm USA. Note: This model is no longer available.)
The proliferation of music speaks to the essential role it plays in our emotional lives. Rhyme, rhythm, and melody are fundamental to our emotions. Music also has its sensuous, sexual overtones, and for all these reasons, many political and religious groups have attempted to ban or regulate music and dance. Music acts as a subtle, subconscious enhancer of our emotional state throughout the day. This is why it is ever-present, why it is so often played in the background in stores, offices, and homes. Each location gets a different style of music: Peppy, rousing beats would not be appropriate for most office work (or funeral homes). Sad, weepy music would not be conducive to efficient manufacturing.
The problem with music, however, is that it can also annoy—if it is too loud, if it intrudes, or if the mood it conveys conflicts with the listener’s desires or mood. Background music is fine, as long as it stays in the background
. Whenever it intrudes upon our thoughts, it ceases to be an enhancement and becomes an impediment, distracting, and irritating. Music must be used with delicacy. It can harm as much as help.
But if music can be annoying, what about the intrusive nature of today’s beeping, buzzing, ringing electronic equipment? This is noise pollution gone rampant. If music is a source of positive affect, electronic sounds are a source of negative affect.
In the beginning was the beep. Engineers wanted to signal that some operation had been done, so, being engineers, they played a short tone. The result is that all of our equipment beeps at us. Annoying, universal beeps. Alas, all this beeping has given sound a bad name. Still sound, when used properly, is both emotionally satisfying and informationally rich.
Natural sounds are the best conveyers of meaning: a child laughing, an angry voice, the solid “clunk” when a well-made car door closes. The unsatisfying tinny sound when an ill-constructed door closes. The “kerplunk” when a stone falls into the water.
But so much of our electronic equipment now bleats forth unthinking, unmusical sounds that the result is a cacophony of irksome beeps or otherwise unsettling sounds, sometimes useful, but mostly emotionally upsetting, jarring, and annoying. When I work in my kitchen, the pleasurable activities of cutting and chopping, breading and sautéing, are continually disrupted by the dinging and beeping of timers, keypads, and other ill-conceived devices. If we are to have devices that signal their state, why not at least pay some attention to the aesthetics of the signal, making it melodic and warm rather than shrill and piercing?
It is possible to produce pleasant tones instead of irritating beeps. The kettle in figure 4.8 produces a graceful chord when the water boils. The designers of the Segway, a two-wheeled personal transporter, “were so obsessed with the details on the Segway HT that they designed the meshes in the gearbox to produce sounds exactly two musical octaves apart—when the Segway HT moves, it makes music, not noise.”
Some products have managed to embed playfulness as well as information into their sounds. Thus, my Handspring Treo, a combined cellular telephone and personal digital assistant, has a pleasant three-note ascending melody when turned on, descending when turned off. This provides useful confirmation that the operation is being performed, but also a cheery little reminder that this pleasant device is obediently serving me.
Cell phone designers were perhaps the first to recognize that they could improve upon the grating artificial sounds of their devices. Some phones now produce rich, deep musical tones, allowing pleasant tunes to replace jarring rings. Moreover, the owner can select the sounds, allowing each individual caller to be associated with a unique sound. This is especially valuable with frequent callers and friends. “I always think of my friend when I hear this tune, so I made it play whenever he calls me,” said one cell phone user to me, describing how he chose “ring tones” appropriate to the person who was calling: joyful pleasant tunes to joyful pleasant people; emotionally significant tunes for those who have shared experiences; sad or angry sounds to sad or angry people.
FIGURE 4.8 Richard Sapper’s kettle with singing whistle, produced by Alessi.
Considerable effort was given to the sound produced by the whistling spout: a chord of “e” and “b,” or, as described by Alberto Alessi, “inspired by the sound of the steamers and barges that ply the Rhine.”
(Alessi “9091.” Design by Richard Sapper, 1983. Kettle with melodic whistle. Image courtesy of Alessi.)
But even were we to replace the grating electronic tones with more pleasant musical sounds, the auditory dimension still has its drawbacks. On the one hand, there is no question that sound—both musical and otherwise—is a potent vehicle for expression, providing delight, emotional overtones, and even memory aids. On the other hand, sound propagates through space, reaching anyone within range equally, whether or not that person is interested in the activity: The musical ring that is so satisfying to a telephone’s owner is a disturbing interruption to others within earshot. Eyelids allow us to shut out light; alas, we have no earlids.
When in public spaces—the streets of a city, in a public transit system, or even in the home—sounds intrude. The telephone is, of course, one of the worst offenders. As people speak loudly to make sure they are heard by their correspondent, they also cause themselves to be heard by everyone within range. Telephones, of course, are not the only intrusions. Radios and television sets, and the beeps and bongs of our equipment. More and more equipment comes equipped with noisy fans. Thus, the fans of heating and air-conditioning equipment can drown out conversation, and the fans of office equipment and home appliances add to the tensions of the day. When we are out of doors, we are bombarded by the sounds of passing aircraft, the horns and engine sounds of motor traffic, the warning back-up horns of trucks, the loud music players of others, emergency sirens, and the ever-present, shrill sounds of the cellular telephone ring, often mimicking a full musical performance. In public spaces, we are far too frequently interrupted by public announcements, starting with the completely unnecessary but annoying “Attention, Attention,” followed by an announcement only of interest to a single person.
There is no excuse for this proliferation of sounds. Many cell phones have the option to set their rings to a private vibration, felt by the desired recipient but no others. Necessary sounds could be made melodious and pleasant, following the lead of the Sapper kettle in figure 4.8 or the Segway. Cooling and ventilation fans could be designed to be quiet as well as efficient by reducing their speed and increasing their blade size. The principles of noise reduction are well known, even if seldom followed. Whereas musical sounds at appropriate times and places are emotional enhancers, noise is a vast source of emotional stress. Unwanted, unpleasant sounds produce anxiety, elicit negative emotional states, and thereby reduce the effectiveness of all of us. Noise pollution is as negative to people’s emotional lives as other forms of pollution are to the environment.
Sound can be playful, informative, fun, and emotionally inspiring. It can delight and inform. But it must be designed as carefully as any other aspect of design. Today, little thought is given to this side of design, and so the result is that the sounds of everyday things annoy many while pleasing few.
Seduction at the Movies
All the theatrical arts engage the viewer both cognitively and emotionally. As such, they are perfect vehicles to explore the dimensions of pleasure. In my research for this book, I discovered Jon Boorstin’s analysis of films, a marvelous example of how the three levels of processing have their impact. His 1990 book, The Hollywood Eye: What Makes Movies Work, was such a wonderful fit to the analyses of my book that I just had to tell you about it.
Boorstin points out that movies appeal on three different emotional levels: visceral, vicarious, and voyeur, which bear perfect correspondence to my three levels of visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Let me start with the visceral side of movies. Boorstin’s description of this component of a film is pretty much identical with my visceral level. Indeed, the match was so good, that I decided to use his term instead of “reactive,” the term I use in my scientific publications. The phrase “reactive design” didn’t quite capture the correct intention, but once I read Boorstin, it was obvious that the phrase “visceral design” was perfect, at least for this purpose. (But I still use “reactive” in my scientific publications.)
The passions aroused in film, says Boorstin, “are not lofty, they’re the gut reactions of the lizard brain—the thrill of motion, the joy of destruction, lust, blood lust, terror, disgust. Sensations, you might say, rather than emotions. More complex feelings require the empathic response, but these simple, powerful urges reach up and grab us by the throat without an intermediary.” He identifies the “slow-motion killing in The Wild Bunch, the monster in The Fly, or the bland titillation of soft-core porn” as examples of the visceral side of movies. Add the chase scene in The French Connection (or any classic spy or detective story), gun battles,
fights, adventure stories, and, of course, horror and monster movies, and you have classic visceral level adventures.
Note the critical role played by music and lighting: dark, creepy scenes and dark, foreboding music. Minor keys for sad or unhappy, jubilant bouncy melodies for positive affect. Bright colors and bright lighting versus dark, gloomy colors and lights all exert their visceral influence. Camera angle, too, exerts its influence. Too far away, and the viewer is no longer experiencing but, instead, observing vicariously. Too close, and the image is too large for direct immediate impact. Film from above, and the people in the scene are diminished; film from below, and the actors are powerful, imposing. These operations all work on the subconscious level. We are usually unaware of the techniques used by directors and photographers to manipulate our emotions. The visceral level becomes completely absorbed in the sights and sounds. Any awareness of the technique would occur on the reflective level and would distract from the visceral experience. In fact, the only way to critique a film is by becoming detached, removed from visceral reaction and able to ponder the technique, the lights, the camera movements and angles. It is difficult to enjoy the film while analyzing it.
BOORSTIN’S “VICARIOUS” level corresponds to my “behavioral” level. The word “vicarious” is appropriate because the viewers are not directly engaging in the filmed activities but are, instead, watching and observing. If the film is well crafted, they are enjoying the activities vicariously, experiencing them as if they were participating. As Boorstin says, “The vicarious eye puts our heart in the actor’s body: we feel what the actor feels, but we judge it for ourselves. Unlike relationships in life, here we can give ourselves up to other people in full confidence that we will always be in command.”
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