week five

BOOM MOMENTS:

The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy by Joel Beckerman with Tyler Gray, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 21, 2014.

Sound also affects the way we taste food (e.g. sound of airplane makes airplane food bland, along with air),
“While the low humidity in an airplane cabin and the cabin pressure affects the way you perceive taste, the Unilever study suggests that the lack of flavor in onboard meals can be partially blamed on the dull drone of the airplane engines. That type of noise makes you less sensitive to salt, sugar, and spices. But you do notice more crunchiness, according to the study, which would help explain why you’re likely to pass on the in-flight Salisbury steak but ask for a second bag of peanuts.”
Listening to music we like makes us enjoy food more

“Iraq was the first time I noticed it,” says U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Robert Bateman, a military historian who’s taught at West Point Academy and did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his first tour, he lived in downtown Baghdad. Sound would bounce off buildings and down alleys, but he gathered a tremendous wealth of information by listening carefully to the details of what he heard. He could tell who was fighting, who was winning, and when the conflict was about to end; he could pinpoint the source of a battle or explosion to within fifteen or twenty degrees. The sound of the gunfire provided information. “You can tell when a unit is running out of ammo, because their rate of fire slows,” he says. The American weapons themselves had distinctive sounds; the M4, M16, A2, and M249 are 5.56 mm weapons, meaning they have relatively high-powered charges but small diameters. “They have a sharper sound,” Bateman says. By contrast, the venerable AK-47, used by insurgents as well as the Iraq and Afghan militaries, is a 7.62 mm weapon. “It’s bigger around, and a deeper or throatier round,” he says. “In addition to the sound of the gunfire, the frequency and patterns of it told Bateman stories. If, for example, an American army unit got hit with an improvised explosive device, he’d hear the boom . . . then silence . . . and then maybe, after a while, a burst of gunfire, but not always. If an Iraqi special police battalion was hit, he says, he’d hear the explosion, then mostly silence, then some sustained fire. “But if an Iraqi army unit was hit—their discipline tended to be lower, their enthusiasm for gunfire tended to be higher—then they would do what we called the ‘death blossom’” (a reference to the movie The Last Starfighter), Bateman says. “Every man would fire his entire magazine of ammunition randomly outward from his perimeter. You could tell what had just happened from kilometers away before any reports were sent.”
“In addition to the sound of the gunfire, the frequency and patterns of it told Bateman stories. If, for example, an American army unit got hit with an improvised explosive device, he’d hear the boom . . . then silence . . . and then maybe, after a while, a burst of gunfire, but not always. If an Iraqi special police battalion was hit, he says, he’d hear the explosion, then mostly silence, then some sustained fire. “But if an Iraqi army unit was hit—their discipline tended to be lower, their enthusiasm for gunfire tended to be higher—then they would do what we called the ‘death blossom’” (a reference to the movie The Last Starfighter), Bateman says. “Every man would fire his entire magazine of ammunition randomly outward from his perimeter. You could tell what had just happened from kilometers away before any reports were sent.”

That’s when you get a boom moment. Boom moments happen when a sound triggers this kind of multisensory experience — a complex mix of memories and expectations wrapped in feelings that aren’t immediately explained by the sound itself. If I played you the sound of sizzling fajitas, then told you it wasn’t, in fact, meat hitting a white-hot skillet but rather a person burning his or her hand on a hot stove, or water from a firefighter’s hose landing on the flaming roof of a home, you would react with a completely different set of feelings. The sizzle alone isn’t what’s so distinct; it’s the power of that sound to surprise and delight your ear in an unexpected setting, then usher you through the rest of the sensory experience that naturally follows. This chapter will show you how Chili’s and others put the powerful emotional impact of sound to work to create experiences you remember. It’s about discovering which sounds at which instants make for boom moments.

posted by sophia # 3:25 PM

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