Recognition is a tricky one

So, we’ve been talking about recognition and identification.
Seeing as this project is meant to lead to a visual/audio result, I started thinking how sound could have the same effect on us.
As with the letters, could sound actually be stored, and then when we can’t quite hear something, think we hear that same sound again.

Well, here’s one of the most common examples. Backmasking.

Backmasking (also known as backward masking) is a recording technique in which a sound or message is recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward. Backmasking is a deliberate process, whereas a message found through phonetic reversal may be unintentional.

The question for most songs we find this in though, still remains, is this actual backmasking or just coincidence?
I’ll give you a little example:

if you listen to the following soundbite, most people will hear text, but can’t really recognize anything.
Backmask of Stairway to Heaven

now, this is what some people believe as the backmasking track is in this song:

Oh, here’s to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is satan.
He’ll give those with him 666. There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad satan.

With that text in your head, listen to the audio sample again, see if you can make out the words.
Does that prove a theory? Are we busy sampling and using that to understand the rest of our world?

Here are some more examples of backmasking in songs:
Backmasking

It does show us that recognition is one of the major aspects that is involved here, and something
that has a major impact on all of us. No matter if it is used in sound, commercials, business, logo’s or language.
Recognition and identification is part of our daily lives.

Who?

Another visual conclusion? Trying to include different points of view I’d like to address, I started thinking about actors and how we all know these people…as different people. Good actors play their roles so that we identify ourselves with the character that’s being played, not with the actor. In the post “Who is Chanel” I’ve included a picture of who Chanel is, so the same question might be asked about who a certain actor is. Public images made of actors are always made with a certain point of view. So HOW do we really know this person?

Are we programmed to recognize?

Retracing some steps. Reading back the article this research started with, I started looking for the publication that was mentioned there, about how structures and letters are extracted from our surrounding, or, in my words, the way we re-use our visual knowledge in other aspects, or areas we work in.

the full publication can be found here:
American Naturalist (May 2006) The Structures of Letters and Symbols

and a small excerpt to give you an idea as to what it is about:

Are there empirical regularities in the shapes of letters and other human visual signs, and if so, what are the selection pressures underlying these regularities? To examine this, we determined a wide variety of topologically distinct contour configurations and examined the relative frequency of these configuration types across writing systems, Chinese writing, and nonlinguistic symbols. Our first result is that these three classes of human visual sign possess a similar signature in their configuration distribution, suggesting that there are underlying principles governing the shapes of human visual signs

So are we programmed to recognize? and do we use this, once we have an example. Is that why we all see people with perfectly symmetric faces as beautiful?
The publication talks about recognition and reproduction, so in moving image and sound, does this transfer to recognition and relating to the subject?

Interpretation

Interpretation. Profiling, Stereotyping, Marketing, all of these won’t work as long as they’re not interpreted (correctly).
Part of people embracing logo’s, faces and other people is the way they interpret things.

While reading a book on hawaiian mythology (Hawaiian Mythology – Martha Beckwith) I came across an explanation maybe one of the most logical examples of interpretation and misinterpretation available right there and then.

The story goes that a child is killed because he broke a kapu (taboo) law. The body is found due to a god entering a blowfly’s body and leading the parent to the burial place of the child. The killer is killed, but to escape from vengeance from his family,the parent flees with a canoe. The killer’s family casts a bad weather curse, but the fleeing person is saved by his gods who drive away the storm while in the form of a school of fish.

Though this is an interesting mythological tale, all the symbols can be retraced to natural occurrences.
If we rationalize all the symbols, the tale becomes a lot less exciting.
- Blowflies are attracted to putrefying flesh
- Bad weather is caused by meteorological disturbances
- Schools of fish come with clearing water
It shows that all these signs aren’t the cause of the occurrences but merely accompany them or even more so, follow them.

Seeing as this is just a story, what can it tell us about our real-life interpretation. Do we interpret real life situations differently then we do things we see on our television screens?
Are the people we see in the movies still people, personifications, or more gods, that we only look up to and hope to be related to – if only a little?

Stereotyping in Media 1

Stereotyping seems to be a big part of our current media. Carefully selected faces represent certain groups of people. The Media Awareness Network in Canada, has an interesting selection of articles about Media Stereotyping, which I’d like to point out to you. It has some interesting ideas and examples about stereotypes used and their influence on us, and seem to be quite applicable to any movie/commercial you might be watching.

Stereotypes act like codes that give audiences a quick, common understanding of a person or group of people—usually relating to their class, ethnicity or race, gender, sexual orientation, social role or occupation.

But stereotypes can be problematic. They can:
- reduce a wide range of differences in people to simplistic categorizations
- transform assumptions about particular groups of people into “realities”
- be used to justify the position of those in power
- perpetuate social prejudice and inequality
More often than not, the groups being stereotyped have little to say about how they are represented.

Interesting enough it turns out we are listening and viewing someone’s idea of what these groups are, if we focus on the last line. Groups that are displayed do not have actual influence on how they are shown, but are actually someone’s idea of how they are supposed to be. It seems that TV and marketing have found something in common that will be a big advantage: profiling. Stereotyping is merely their way of making us shop for the products they want I guess.

TIME Magazine has an interesting article on Breaking the American Stereotypes starting of with just a small example of how much stereotyping is already part of our daily lives:

The other day a white fellow, he said how wonderful my home is, and how good we get along together, and how impressed he was by it all. I wanted to say, ‘Don’t be giving us that kind of compliment, because it shows on you what you don’t know about us.’
—Mississippi black man

The article gives us some interesting examples of the many (for they are many) stereotypes that are actually out there. One option the article gives us for all this stereotyping that really stands out in my opinion is the following:

As one activist in Mississippi told Coles, people “don’t want to be troubled by finding anything ‘good’ in the people they come to save from everything ‘bad.’ “

It’s only a theory

Surfing the web I came across an interesting article on the site of the Open Mind Institute.
Wondering how it’s possible that we all have a largely similar idea of what beauty is, how we all recognize the villain in the movies, and many more, this article suggests the following: It’s only a theory!
Well of course it is, you might say, but that’s just the point.

the fact that most people agree with it does not necessarily translate in a serious validation of a theory. That many people say it does not make it so and to say it over and over does not help. Some people will accept something as the truth if they hear it often enough.

This surely offers a reason as to why we all know, accept and embrace the portrayed images we get on our plates. Would it be possible to change this though, or would that rather be another commercial misleading the public and making them think differently?

-ified

We all seem to recognize certain faces, and about each of them everyone has their own opinion. The first and most discussed interpretation, and probably the easiest to have an opinion about anyway, is of course beauty.
Where would the world of commercials be without it? Therefore, we might assume that each face/person we see in a commercial, has been carefully selected for a single purpose – the one that the
commercial wants you to look at.

Discussing this with my teacher and the other students this lead to the question if these people had been “-ified”.
For example, have the three sportsmen in the Gillette commercial been Gillette-ified?
Though that one is hard to prove, here are two examples that may suggest a certain model is applicable.

Dove is of course trying to prove the opposite point, they show that us that “the average modeling-agency” has a certain view about beauty (and therefore ours as well), and theirs differs from it.
That they want to change this is of course the whole idea of the commercial/movie, and thus they show us that the “beautiful” face we see
at the end has been tampered with a lot.

Old Spice tries to produce funny video’s every time they make a new commercial. On the other side, the product has to be sold as well.
For this one, the title already says enough in my opinion: “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”.

Stereotypes have their good uses. For one, everyone will immediately recognize them. Secondly, it makes it possible for other people to categorize them, and maybe even more important,
categorize themselves. Which does leave me with the following question: How come we know all these stereotypes and embrace them collectively?