Good morning,
The forecast for Whitewater calls for a sunny day, with a high of eighty-two degrees.
It’s spirit day at Whitewater Middle School.
The Journal Sentinel Reports that that Wisconsin assemblyman Colon of Milwaukee will not seek re-election. He’s a Democrat, and his party could and will find someone better suited to office. For remarks on Colon, and his use of a bogus apology to another assemblyman, see Rushed Meetings in the Wisconsin Assembly.
I’d guess a fair number of readers are probably film fans, and Wired has a story online about “The Science of Horror-Movie Screams.” Here’s what researchers at UCLA found:
As horror-flick titles go, Night of the Living Chaos and Rosemary’s Nonlinearity aren’t the catchiest. But filmmakers know that chaos — the mathematical kind — is scary. Now scientists know it too.
Filmmakers use chaotic, unpredictable sounds to evoke particular emotions, say researchers who have assessed screams and other outbursts from more than 100 movies. The new findings, reported May 25 in Biology Letters, come as no surprise, but they do highlight an emerging if little-known area of study, says cognitive biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna in Austria, who was not involved in the study….
Cries are harder to ignore when they become irregular and chaotic, recent research suggests. Scientists think that these noises, uttered or roared when an animal is really worked up, have a crucial role in communication: They frantically demand attention.
By exploring the use of such dissonant, harsh sounds in film, scientists hope to get a better understanding of how fear is expressed, says study co-author Daniel Blumstein of the University of California, Los Angeles….
Blumstein and his co-authors acoustically analyzed 30-second cuts from more than 100 movies representing a broad array of genres. The movies included titles such as Aliens, Goldfinger, Annie Hall, The Green Mile, Slumdog Millionaire, Titanic, Carrie, The Shining and Black Hawk Down.
Not unexpectedly, the horror films had a lot of harsh and atonal screams. Dramatic films had sound tracks with fewer screams but a lot of abrupt changes in frequency. And adventure films, it turns out, had a surprising number of harsh male screams.
“Screams are basically chaos,” Fitch says.
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