New Art Installation Proves That Music Totally Gives You the Feels
Anyone who has ever wandered from stage to stage at a music festival knows that various sonic styles have the power to evoke corresponding moods. Bass music makes you feel powerful; house music makes you feel sexy; hardstyle makes you feel discombobulated, and so forth.
Sound Affects: Music and Mood, an immersive art installation currently on view at Sonos Studio in Los Angeles, demonstrates just how fundamentally affected we humans are by the sounds we listen to. The single-room gallery has been divided into three sections, each hosting an immersive sound and environmental experience designed to make visitors feel a specific emotion. The intended effect of each area is not revealed to guests as they enter, in order to keep reactions pure.
The show is a collaborative effort between artist and VJ Jemma Woolmore, who works under the name Jem the Misfit; San Francisco-based musician, writer and multimedia artist Jon Bernson; and Los Angeles-based design firm P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S.
The sound aspect for each of the three sections was made of stems from the same song, tUnE-yArDs’ “Water Fountain.” While the original track is playful, fun and percussive, the three versions of the song incorporated into the show have been so massively pared down that one can’t hear much of the original track in them at all. Bernson had about a month to design this sound aspect, working on the fly in various airports while traveling. “I stayed up all night to finish this,” he says with a smile on the night of the show’s opening. While he and Woolmore did not work closely together while designing his audio and her visual projections, the two elements came together seamlessly, as the emotions dictated a complimentary design for each.
Bernson knew he had gotten to the correct place with each sound when the track made him feel the intended emotion. In one section, primordial sorts of noises—similar to that of rolling thunder or an airplane engine—play as visitors are barraged with flashing lights. In another section, shimmery beeps and blips play as visitors stand in a room bathed in warm, pink light. In the final space, guests put medical booties over their shoes and step into a room lined floor-to-ceiling with plush, white carpeting and equipped with benches on which to sit. Here, simple tonal sounds fill the room. The spaces are intended to inspire feelings of anger, playfulness and serenity, respectively. And they do indeed work.
But why do we respond to sound in such predictable ways? According to Bernson, it’s because various forms of media have trained us to feel specific ways in response to particular sounds. Movie soundtracks, for example, largely dictate the emotional response of the audience. (Remember when “I Will Always Love You” plays at the end of The Bodyguard? Yeah.)
“Music is a language,” Bernson says. “People who don’t play music don’t think of themselves as knowing this language, but it’s something that we’ve all learned. Different music tells us to feel things, and we have been educated to feel those things.”
More scientifically, every style of music carries a particular vibration. Because our bodies are composed largely of water, these vibrations cause us literally to vibrate in the same manner as the music we’re listening to. If you’re listening to a track at 132 bpm, your body will likely become energized, and your emotions will follow that lead. This field is called cymatics. Of course, music also affects heart rate, in turn affecting energy levels.
Behind this science, however, there is still the magical aspect of music that we’ve all felt while standing in a theater—or a field, or a parking lot—and crying as our favorite artist played our favorite song. “I think music holds a lot of mystery,” Bernson says, “and we don’t know why it has such a strong hold on all of us.” This esoteric aspect likely has something to do with why humans around the world love music so damn much.
Bernson equates the installation at Sonos to experiencing a pared-down version of the musical environments of festivals. Guests are encouraged to sit and reflect in each space for as long as they like. Ideally, Bernson aspires for Music and Mood to be a contemplative and thus useful experience for people.
“The installation guides you,” he says, “but it also leaves enough space to reflect on your own life. I hope it gives people an experience that they will take back into the world.”
Sound Affects: Music and Mood is on view at Sonos Studio through February 9, 2015. Admission is free.
