The purpose of this post is to explore some ideas that could potentially prove to be interesting and worthy research topics. There will be holes in it and probably some mistakes so please do raise any interesting or contradictory points.
If you haven't already watched Westworld, then you should. I won't give away any major spoiler details, but you should watch it because...it's great. Apart from the adventure and drama it is also creating an ethical discussion that we need to be having about robotics and AI. But I'm not here to talk about that, I'm here to talk about the soundtrack. You could say there are two parts to the soundtrack; the originally composed pieces from Ramin Djawadi and the Piano Players' interpretations of popular songs. I'll be looking at the latter. Westworld uses a Piano Player ( autonomous-piano) in the saloon to play these popular songs, (which becomes both diegetic and non-diegetic - sometimes we see the piano in the scene, other times we see short shots of it interlaced in the main narrative sequence). It's a clever trick in bringing in the emotional affordance of these pop songs, and using it to propel the narrative. It also creates a juxtaposition that aids the story. Here we are, hearing these jaunty, honky-tonk melodies in a Western. But we know that these melodies are out of place, out of time. They don't quite belong there. “The show has an anachronistic feel to it,” [ Ramin Djawadi] explained to Vulture. “It’s a Western theme park, and yet it has robots in it, so why not have modern songs? And that’s a metaphor in itself, wrapped up in the overall theme of the show.” It's a great soundtrack and it reminded me of an idea put forward by Daniel Levitin on musical categorisation and the Invariant Properties. It's an easy task for our brain to recognise different versions of the same song. We hear Audioslave's "Black Hole Sun" and the Westworld piano version, and we know it's the same song. Levitin explains in his book how difficult this task is for a computer, you'd need a supercomputer and some complex programming. Now, the "Black Hole Sun" cover retains the melody and rhythm, but it is played on a piano. Compare that to the "Paint It, Black" cover and while we retain melodic and rhythmic motifs we are treated to a vastly different arrangement and orchestration.
We can identify and categorize a piece as the same song when the intervals, timbre, tempo, pitch and key can be changed. Think about that for a moment. "Tune recognition involves a number of complex neural computations interacting with memory. It requires that our brains ignore certain features while we focus only on features that are invariant from one listening to the next—and in this way, extract invariant properties of a song." (Levitin, 2006). Levitin talks in detail about the different memory models and supporting evidence for each. To summarise quickly, the Record-Keeping model holds that memory is like a video camera - recording with high fidelity, whereas the Constructivist model holds that we ignore irrelevant details and only record the gist of what happens. There is a third, which now has the general consensus: The Multiple-Trace Memory Model, which is a hybrid between the two. I refer to Levitin's chapter on the topic of Categorization. "Music works because we remember the tones we have just heard and are relating them to the ones that are just now being played. Those groups of tones—phrases—might come up later in the piece in a variation or transposition that tickles our memory system at the same time as it activates our emotional centers." (Levitin, 2006). Considering this, it may actually be easier to develop the level of AI shown in Westworld than to actually build a computer than can do this as well as our brains. So, regarding our emotional centres. When you hear Radiohead, Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse (to name a few) it may take a moment to recognise it, or maybe you just feel a vague sense of familiarity. At first you're not expecting to hear these pop songs in this scenario and while you eventually become accustomed to it, there isstill a 'tickling' sensation as you hear and recall what the original track is. Levitin states his book that the brain builds a model of expectation and then is delighted when there is a violation of these models. "These Violent Delights, Have Violent Ends." Each time we hear a pop song in Westworld, this violates our memory model of that song and our brain is excited by it. As previously mentioned, we bring in our own affordances, our own emotional connections to these tracks, but is the lyrical connection an important enhancement. There's a scene involving a house of decadence, where a character is questioning who they are and what their purpose is. It's accompanied by NIN's Something I Can Never Have. I knew this, and I brought in my affordance. It did enhance the scene for me, bringing in feelings and thoughts from another place, and using them to place me in the scene, in the characters mind. But I'm wondering if the canonical versions of these tracks would work as well in comparison to the Player Piano versions, or would this bring a disrupted connection between sound and image, a weaker audio-visual contract (Chion, 1994). Would there be a competitive narrative between the lyrics of a track and the scene itself? Is the lyrical hook of a track enough to buy into the idea ? I think I'm crazy,maybe... I just want something i can never have... We died a hundred times, ...and I go back to black... When I hear Paint It Black I make the emotional connection to war,(specifically Vietnam) and a sense of rebellion, (not necessarily the lyrics) which suited the characters needs at the time. Or is the affordance we bring to the track more important? The soundtrack is causing a bit of a stir, and fans are looking for hidden meanings within the songs. This demonstrates the area of interest here between these culture-rich pop songs and the connections we make, have, and take along with us, wherever these songs appear. http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/westworld-modern-songs.html http://daniellevitin.com/publicpage/books/this-is-your-brain-on-music/ https://cup.columbia.edu/book/audio-vision/9780231078993
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