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Social Sounds is a sound art installation which is based on the theory of coupled nonlinear oscillators. An essential inspiration to this project is the nature of group behavior, how individuals get influenced by other individuals in their surroundings.
Phenomena of this kind are for example frogs that synchronize their singing to surrounding frogs, fireflies that synchronize their illumination to other fireflies' illumination, and crickets that chirp in unison. Also, humans seem to adjust their behavior to other people in their surroundings in a way similar to how, for example, frogs adjust their behavior to surrounding frogs. People's tendency to adopt their behavior to their surroundings emerges in many situations, and may lead to phenomenon such as the spreading of fashion trends throughout our society, booms and crashes in the stock market, etc.
The way people are being influenced by their current surroundings and thereby adapt their behavior according to that of surrounding people is to me both fascinating and frightening. Social Sounds is a metaphor for social behavior. For example, how people conform to surrounding trends to fit in to an adjacent pattern, or similarly how frogs synchronize their singing to each other.
Phenomenon of this kind, how individuals can get synchronized to other individuals in the surroundings, can be explained by models of coupled oscillators. My objective has been to create a sound art installation that is based on social interaction between individuals; that is based on the phenomenon of entrainment. Thereby, the intention has been to create an installation which functions as a metaphor for social behavior.
Apart from creating this installation as a metaphor for social behavior, the other artistic objective for this project has been to explore the concept of entrainment (i.e. how two or more processes interact with each other in such a way that they adjust towards each other) and to use this as a basis for creating rhythm-based abstract music.
The overall idea for the installation has been to let a set of sounds influence each other, in a way similar to how frogs synchronize their singing to each other, or how people get influenced by their surroundings. The theory of coupled nonlinear oscillators, or specifically the Kuramoto model , has been appointed to be a suitable representation for the way a group of individuals synchronize their behavior to each other. My intention has therefore been to use the Kuramoto model as a basis for controlling a set of sounds, to thereby let sounds influence each other in a way similar to how individuals influence each other. Thus, I have created what could be referred to as social sounds that are largely controlled by the Kuramoto model.
I have chosen to represent each individual, or oscillator described by the Kuramoto model, with a sound. In this manner I built the installation on a set of sounds, each representing an individual, which get influenced by their neighboring sounds and thus works as a metaphor for the way individuals conforms to surrounding trends.
There are many artists that have used the sounds of, for example, synchronized frogs and crickets in their works, such as the avant-garde composer and electronic musician Pauline Oliveros who is deeply influenced by the sound of frogs and which is reflected in the music she makes (for example in Alien Bog ). Similarly to Oliveros, the sound artist Marc Behrens also uses frogs and insects as sources for his compositions . On the contrary to Oliveros' and Behrens' work, which includes recordings of synchronized singing frogs, the work in this thesis deals with the synchronization phenomenon in itself rather than the sound generated from a frog pond or a field of crickets.
The sounds in this installation are thus more of a representation of the interaction between individuals, and also how people get influenced by others. The work by the artist and field biologist Henrik Håkansson has also often a focus on the relation between humans, animals, insects and plants, and is also very technology based and often close to scientific experiments. However, the objective of this work is to study the phenomenon of individuals' influence on each other, more than the relations that Håkansson's work focuses on. Individuals' influence on each other is also the subject of Norwegian Dag Svanæs' work Pulse: Wearable Jewellery, where blinking jewellery worn by different persons adjusts its blinking to the jewellery worn by the other persons. In a similar way, the sounds in this installation get influenced by surrounding sounds.
This sound art installation is based on mathematical models for coupled nonlinear oscillators. The sounds used in the installation are influenced by the surrounding sounds, similar to how individuals get influenced by other individuals in real life. Thus, apart from being a sound art installation that explores the concept of entrainment as a basis for creating abstract rhythm-based music, the installation is also intended as a metaphor for social behavior.
Social behavior and group dynamics
In many aspects humans appear not to be that different from many other species that synchronize their behavior to the other individuals in the surroundings. Humans adjust their behavior to other people that of in their surroundings; in a way similar to how fireflies adjust their illumination to other fireflies illumination, or the way frogs adjust their singing to other frogs' singing. For example, it is very common that the applause of an audience suddenly fall into sync after a while. The people in the audience spontaneously adjust their clapping to the others' frequency of clapping. Each person has his or her own “natural frequency” of clapping; a frequency that the person starts to clap in, but after a while the frequency of the surrounding applause influences each individuals clapping and synchronizations evolve. Parts of the audience then start to clap in a common tempo.
Another example might be the consequence of a person watching another person that starts to yawn. Then it is very likely that the observing person also starts to yawn. Or, what can happen at a party when some people suddenly stop talking is that everybody might consequently stop talking and it gets all quiet. Similarly, people tend to adjust to other people's way of dressing, and fashion trends spread. Suddenly one clothing brand can go from not being sold at all to a state where millions of pieces are sold all over the world. An example is the Hush Puppies shoes, which barely sold any pairs at all in 1994 and the model was about to be discontinued when a few club kids in the East Village in New York suddenly started to buy Hush Puppies in some cheap stores. A couple of Manhattan designers then used these shoes for a couple of shows, and within a couple of years the shoes were sold in every mall throughout America and in stores all over the world. In this way, fashion trends can evolve and spread rapidly as a result of people's social behavior. People get influenced by some people in their surroundings and to a certain extent behave in a similar way. Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his book The Tipping Point – how little things can make a big difference how human behaviour crosses thresholds and “tips”, i.e. how humans get influenced by their neighbours and cause a spreading tendency throughout society.
Individuals' social behavior, and their tendency to adjust their behavior to other individuals' behavior, seems to be a phenomenon that exists at many levels. Looking at the earth as a whole, people seem to gather in clusters. Everybody wants to be where everybody else is, doing what other people do. More and more people are moving to the bigger cities around the world - major cities that act like nodes which attract more and more people to move there. In the cities there are certain paths that are popular, where everybody wants to be, some streets that people want to walk. Why is it that a massive amount of people choose to gather at that specific street? Or in a wider perspective, why do they gather in a big city? Similarly, why is it that some restaurants always are fully booked? And, why do people want to wear clothes that are “trendy”? Or why are they trendy? Likewise, how could the Nazi leaders get millions of people to participate in the Holocaust? Or why is it that the stock market exhibits occasional large fluctuations that cannot be traced to any correspondingly significant piece of information, which results in booms and crashes in the market?
There are numerous examples of the way people adapt their behavior to their surroundings, as a consequence of group pressure or powers of authority, etc. The following subchapters discuss some examples of this tendency.
The pioneering social psychologist Solomon Asch did a study of conformity in 1958, later known as the Solomon Asch experiment , where he let a number of college students participate in an experiment and scheduled them to participate one at a time. When each subject arrived they were seated at a table together with seven to nine other people who were supposed to be subjects as well but were in fact associates of the experimenter and their behavior had been well scripted. Asch told the subjects that they were to participate in a study on visual perception. Two cards were placed on the table, one showing a vertical line and the other is showing three vertical lines of varying length. The experimenter asked the people around the table, one by one, which line on the second card that had the same length as that on the first card. The procedure was repeated with a total of 18 sets of bars. The confederates were told to give false answers on 12 of the 18 trials and the only real subject was arranged to be the second last person to announce his answer. The question was really simple and the answer was obvious. The cards looked like in the figure below and the subject was to say which two lines have the same length.
Figure 1: The Solomon Asch Experiment
The confederates announced their incorrect answers aloud one by one and by the end of the round the real subject in most cases also gave the same incorrect answer as a consequence of the social pressure. Out of 50 subjects, 37 conformed to the majority at least once, and 14 of them conformed in more than 6 of the 12 trials. When the subject was faced with a unanimous incorrect answer by the group members, the mean subject conformed in one third of the trials. Asch was shocked by the results: “The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct."
Asch's experiment on the question to which extent pressure from other people affects us resulted in Asch's conclusion: “Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to be liked by the group and because they believe the group is better informed than they are.”
Asch also found that one of the factors that influence conformity is the size of the opposing majority. He made additional studies where he varied the number of confederates, which resulted in that fewer subjects followed the opposing majority if they had another person thinking the same way as themselves. The studies showed that it is difficult to be a minority of one but not so difficult to be part of a minority of two. Therefore the group size and the cohesiveness of the group's opinion are parameters for the degree of conformity. Asch concluded that it is difficult to maintain that you see something when no one else does. Asch found that “the group pressure implied by the expressed opinion of other people can lead to modification and distortion that effectively can make you see almost anything”.
Another example of the way people conform to their current situation and surroundings is the Stanford Prison Experiment which was executed at Stanford University in 1971.
An advertisement in the Palo Alto Times got volunteers, mostly college students, to participate in an experiment on prison life. After interviews and a series of psychological tests, the two dozen that were judged to be the most normal, average and healthy were selected to participate, assigned randomly either to be guards or prisoners. Those who would be prisoners were put into a provisional prison that had been constructed in a basement in one of the university buildings. Those who were assigned to be guards got uniforms and were instructed that they should not use any violence, just maintain control of the prison.
The increasing discomfort that the prisoners experienced during the first day made them stage a revolt on the second day. The guards got control over the revolt and the humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners were after that steadily increased. The staff frequently had to remind the guards that they were not allowed to use any abuse on the prisoners. The guards' aggression towards the prisoners increased and the worst abuses occurred in the middle of the night when the guards thought the staff was not watching. The guards had the prisoners to clean toilets with their bare hands and act out degrading scenarios. Push-ups were also used frequently to punish the prisoners (in a similar way to how it was used in the Nazi concentration camps). The guards stepped on the prisoners' backs while they were doing push-ups, or let other prisoners step or sit on the other prisoners while they were doing sit-ups.
Christina Maslach, a researcher at Stanford, was to do subject interviews and came to the “prison”. She soon experienced changed personalities among the guards. Referring to one of the guards, which she initially had found charming, funny and smart, she later declared: "This man had been transformed. He was talking in a different accent, a Southern accent, which I hadn't recalled at all. He moved differently, and the way he talked was different, not just in the accent, but in the way he was interacting with the prisoners. It was like seeing Jekyll and Hyde…It really took my breath away."
The study had to be ended on the sixth day for two reasons: videotapes showed that the guards' abuses escalated during night when they thought that no researchers were watching, and secondly Maslach strongly objected when she saw how the guards had the prisoners to march with bags over their heads and legs chained together, etc. So, after only six days, the planned two-week prison simulation had to be called off as the guards' abuses of the prisoners had escalated too far.
The Stanford Prison Experiment research project showed how people, when put in a new situation, soon can adjust their personality and behavior to the new situation. A recent example of what can happen in the experiment in real life is the human rights abuse that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison under the authority of American armed forces in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war. There, soldiers were thrust into the role of prison guards and began to sadistically torment prisoners there and at other detention sites in Afghanistan and Iraq . Many of the specific acts of humiliation were similar to those that occurred in the Stanford Prison Experiment, according to Philip Zimbardo , researcher and leader of the experiment.
Zimbardo's experiment also has many resemblances to psychologist Stanley Milgram's studies on the Obedience to Authority, as described in the following chapter.
During the Eichmann Trials in 1961, the world was shocked by all the new facts about the Holocaust that were then revealed. Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind behind moving the Jewish people from their homes to the ghettos and concentration camps, was then on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The question is: Is it possible that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following order? Could we call them all accomplices? Did they just do what the others in their surroundings did, what the people in their surroundings told them to do?
At Yale University in 1961-1962, at the same time as the proceedings of the Eichmann Trials, Psychologist Stanley Milgram did a series of studies on the obedience to authority, later referred to as the Milgram Experiment . The study focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Eichmann's defense, as well as the defense of many of those accused in the earlier Nuremberg War Criminal trials, were often based on "obedience" – they stated that they were just following the orders of their superiors.
In Milgram's experiment, so-called "teachers", who were actually the unknowing subjects of the experiment, were recruited by Milgram through a newspaper ad. The ad said that it was a psychology experiment investigating memory and learning. The recruited person turned up and was introduced to a stern looking experimenter in a white coat and a rather pleasant and friendly co-subject. The experimenter explained that the experiment would look into the role of punishment in learning, and it was (after lots of drawing to determine roles) decided that the person that answered the ad would be the “teacher” and the other person to be the “learner”. The “learner” was taken to a room where he was strapped in a chair to prevent movement and an electrode was placed on his arm. The "teacher" was taken to an adjoining room which contained a generator. The "teacher" was instructed to read a list of two word pairs and ask the "learner" to read them back. If the "learner" got the answer correct, then they moved on to the next word.
If the answer was incorrect, the teacher was asked to administer an electric shock to the “learner”, starting at 15 volts. For each incorrect answer, the “teacher” was supposed to increase the intensity to the "learner" by 15 volts at a time.
The story given to the "teacher" was that the experiment was exploring effects of punishment (for incorrect responses) on learning behavior. The "teacher" was not aware that the "learner" in the study was actually an actor - merely indicating discomfort as the "teacher" increased the electric shocks.
The generator had 30 switches in 15 volt increments; each was labeled with a voltage ranging from 15 up to 450 volts. Each switch also had a rating, ranging from "slight shock" to "danger: severe shock". The "teacher" was supposed to automatically increase the shock one step each time the "learner" missed a word in the list. Although the “learner” was an actor that were never harmed, the “teacher” believed that he was given the “learner” real electric shocks. At some times the “teachers” got worried and questioned the experimenter whether he should continue to increase the shocks and asked who was responsible for any harmful effects, but was then verbally encouraged to continue by the experimenter and were told that the experimenter assumed full responsibility, and the “teachers” then accepted the response and continued the shocking even if some of the “teachers” were extremely uncomfortable in doing so.
65 percent of the “teachers” obeyed the orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale. No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts.
Milgram's results discarded the theory that only the most severe monsters on the sadistic fringe of society would submit to such cruelty. He found that "two-thirds of this studies participants fall into the category of ‘obedient' subjects, and that they represent ordinary people drawn from the working, managerial, and professional classes (Obedience to Authority)."
Figure 2 : The Milgram Experiment
The experiments and studies described above are examples of related research that has been made on the nature of people's tendency to adopt their behavior to their current situation and surroundings. Another field of studies that relate to the way a group of individuals (or oscillators ) influence each other is studies of entrainment, which is discussed in the next chapter.
The concept of entrainment describes the phenomenon of two or more independent rhythmic processes that interact with each other in such a way that they adjust towards each other and eventually lock into a common phase and/or periodicity – they get synchronized .
Entrainment as a concept was first identified by Christiaan Huygens (see further below) in 1665 and has been applied in various disciplines, from mathematics, physics and biology to linguistics, psychology and social sciences, as well as in the field of music.
There are two basic components involved in all instances of entrainment: there must be two or more autonomous rhythmic processes or oscillators, and the oscillators must interact. The tendency for rhythmic oscillators to adjust in order to match other rhythms has been described in a wide range of systems and over a wide range of periodicities: from fireflies that illuminate in synchrony, through humans adjusting their speech rhythms to match each other in conversation, to sleep-wake cycles synchronizing to the changes of dark and light during the day. Examples have been claimed from the fast frequency oscillators of brain waves to periods extending over many years, and in organisms from the simplest to the most complex. The concept of entrainment describes the coordination of events through interaction, for example the foot tapping that possibly emerges when a person listens to a song. There are many naturally occurring rhythms within the human body; for example the heart beat, blood circulation, respiration, locomotion, eye blinking, secretion of hormones, female menstrual cycles, and many others. It has been suggested that all human movements are inherently rhythmic. For example Mari Jones writes that “all human performance can be evaluated within a rhythmic framework ” and Bernieri, Reznick and Rosenthal write that “human behavior is understood to occur rhythmically and therefore can be described in terms of cycles, periods, frequencies, and amplitudes ”.
A lot of recent research has concentrated upon studying the nature of rhythmic processes in living organisms. Steven Strogatz and others state that biological or psychological rhythms appear to be essential to life itself while some has gone so far as to characterize any organism as a loosely coupled population of oscillators .
Allen C. Bluedorn explains the entrainment process as “the process in which the rhythms displayed by two or more phenomena become synchronized, with one rhythm often being more powerful or dominant and capturing the rhythm of the other. This does not mean, however, that the rhythmic patterns will coincide or overlap exactly; instead, it means the patterns will maintain a consistent relationship with each other” .
As in Bluedorn's definition of the process of entrainment, it is the aim of this sound art installation project to let sounds have a tendency to synchronize with each other, but never lock on to a common frequency eternally. Instead, the sounds will be influenced by each other to a certain limited degree, as is further described in the following chapters.
Peoples' surroundings obviously have a lot of impact on their behavior. As the examples in the previous chapter illustrate, people's tendency to conform to a crowd can in some situations lead to very unpleasant results. People's tendency to adapt their behavior to their surroundings is very evident in many other situations as well; people appear to, to a great extent, listen to their neighbors and get influenced by what everybody else does, to synchronize their behavior to what surrounding people do and thereby behave, consume, etc. in a similar way.
In a very short time-frame a major group of people can change the way they dress, or the music they listen to, just like a flock of birds change direction. “If they do it, it must be right, I do it too”, as the persons participating in Solomon Asch's experiment thought. Or if some specific people say that it is right, then it must be the way to go. The subjects in Solomon Asch's experiment said they did as the majority of the people even if they doubted that the rest of the people were right, as they believed that the other people were better informed than themselves. What is it that makes people dress in a certain way – do they believe that the fashion designers or shop owners are better informed, or the other people around them? Or do they simply want to fit in to a common pattern, to a trend? And what is it that makes one album of an unknown debut artist sell millions of copies of the first album in just a few weeks? And similarly, why does a debut book of an unknown author turn into a bestseller?
A new fashion trend on the other side of the globe can rapidly spread to the entire world. The work Coca-Locust Family by artist Thomas Broomé, consisting of a lot of locusts (a kind of crickets) made out of Coca Cola cans is an illustration of how everybody tends to drink Coca Cola, and like crickets, or locusts, these cans are being spread over the world. Similar to Broomé's locusts, the sounds in this work can be seen as a metaphor for how social phenomenon spreads throughout our society.
The way individuals are influenced by surrounding individuals, and how synchronizations in a group of individuals can evolve, could as earlier said be explained by mathematical models of coupled nonlinear oscillators, which is used as a basis for this sound art piece. This sound installation is consequently intended to be seen as a metaphor for how people tend to adjust their behavior to their surroundings. However, the intention is also to present new musical expressions, based on the phenomenon of coupled oscillators. This is further discussed in the next chapter.
Coupled oscillators as musical expression
A major part of this project consists of studies of the nature of coupled oscillators, and how these mathematical models can be used for musical expression.
By using the phenomenon of coupled oscillators as a basis in a musical piece, new ways for creating rhythms are established. By letting a set of sounds, each sound representing an oscillator, be coupled to each other to a certain specified degree, it is possible to create rhythms and sounds that are strongly characterized by the nature of coupled oscillators explicitly, and that could not be achieved in any other way.
The theory of coupled oscillators can thus be used as a base for controlling a sound art installation that is built on rhythm, and thereby create musical expressions that are based on rhythm. By letting different sounds influence each other and in that way creating rhythmic patterns that are built on individual sounds that to some degree becomes synchronized, the musical expression becomes a rhythmic structure that is consistently evolving, built on the patterns of the individual sounds that throughout maintain a consistent relationship to each other, just as in Allen C. Bluedorn's definition of the process of entrainment.
The Australian mathematician and composer Gordon Monro's music piece Peer Pressure , relates to the idea of this project: Monro simulates a group of 200 fireflies that flash in synchrony, using buzz from a cicada to represent each firefly. Jonathan Bachrach has also constructed a drum ensemble, Beatrix , at MIT, that is built on the composition of multiple drum patterns where Bachrach also uses temporal synchronizations between different drum patterns to create model of an African drum ensemble.
A musical piece that one could also associate to Christiaan Huygens discovery of the phenomenon of entrainment where he studied two ticking pendulum clocks, is the Hungarian composer György Ligeti's modernistic and abstract music piece ‘Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes' , composed in 1962. Ligeti's composition is performed by an orchestra of 100 metronomes, where each metronome is wound to its maximum extent and then left to tick down. The sound is at first a static crackle, but after a few minutes some patterns can be noticed in the sound and individual metronomes can be more clearly made out. The piece always ends with one final metronome that ticks alone for a few beats.
Similar to ‘Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes' is the art installation ‘On Potent Impotence' created in 1989 by Czech artist Ivan Kafka, which displays 20 identical clocks (also exhibited with metronomes instead of clocks) that sits on 20 pedestals. Kafka's installation also creates rhythms from the ticks that each clock produces each second, and can thereby be experienced as a musical piece similar to Ligeti's metronome piece (even though Kafka's intention of his installation was to metaphorically suggest the potential for revolution in the masses, both in the classic Marxist sense, and also the actual overthrow of the totalitarian regimes that was occurring at the time the work was made).
One can ask the question if the ticks of the individual metronomes in Ligeti's composition, and the clocks in Kafka's installation, influence each other in terms of entrainment. Whether they affect each other to some degree or not would apparently depend on their common support or possibly air movements. James Pantaleone at the University of Alaska has made a study on synchronization of metronomes , where the metronomes were placed on a freely moving common base, and found that the metronomes soon locks in to an in-phase synchronization and with anti-phase synchronization occurring under special conditions. However, Pantaleone's experiments had better conditions for entrainment as the metronomes were placed next to each other on a freely moving common support, compared to Kafka's installation where the clocks were standing on separated fixed pedestals. If there was any level of entrainment in Ligeti's and Kafka's pieces, it was probably to a very limited degree.
The intention in this work is to let the concept of entrainment play a lot bigger role in the shaping of the musical expression, compared to the pieces by Ligeti and Kafka (where it only enters accidentally and to a smaller degree).
The specific aims for this sound art installation have been to: create a sound installation that conceptually functions as a metaphor for social behavior and at the same time also elaborates with the concept of entrainment as a basis for creating rhythm-based abstract music.
As in Bluedorn's definition of the process of entrainment, it has been the aim to let sounds have a tendency to synchronize with each other, but never lock on to a common frequency perpetually. Instead, the aim has been to let the sounds be influenced by each other to a certain degree, so that the sounds clearly influence each other but do not totally fall into synchronization, and thereby essentially create rhythms that provide a musical expression that I personally find interesting, and which also metaphors the phenomenon of social interaction.
The idea for the presentation of the installation was to represent each oscillator (or individual) with a sound, a sound which is mapped to a physical location in the room and spatialized between four speakers, one in each corner of the room, in order to distribute each sound between the speakers according to its logic mapping in the space. A visual representation of the system to be projected on one of the walls was created, to illustrate and accompany the behavior of the sounds.
In order to realize the project with the aims described above, the theory of coupled oscillators and specifically the Kuramoto model is applied as a suitable representation for interaction between individuals.