With most of our brainstorming on concept out of the way, this week our group explored how to convey our message as a project. We decided that making a short film that had small snippets of footage matched up with sound would be the best way to go about it. We came up with ideas like, only showing small parts of the face in shot to communicate or capture the idea of facial expression, whilst layering the footage with the sound of another person for example matching a feminine face with a masculine voice. We thought that shooting some of the footage like this would be somewhat disorientating for the viewer and thought it would be a cool component of the film to investigate communication. Further to have shots where snippets of sentences are edited out so that the viewer has to fill in the blanks, this would be interesting in itself because viewers may come up with different words that fill in the blanks based on their own social cues. During the class the group filmed a small scene as a rough idea of what our bigger production could look like, this was a work in progress presentation.

Upon doing some of my own research, I came across an article called ‘Forming social impressions from voices in native and foreign languages’. The article is written by Cristina Baus, Phil McAleer, Katherine Marcoux, Pascal Belin and Albert Coasta. The article explores “acoustical properties of the voice (e.g., pitch)” and the fact that acoustic properties can be “very powerful” when it come to “forming social impressions.” The article was very interesting it spoke about “languages” being a pivotal competent to the investigation and research in regards to understand voice and the way people communicate regardless of their language. The results of the experiment or investigation done in the article “revealed that listeners across languages form very similar personality impressions irrespective of whether the voices belong to the native or the foreign language of the listener. A social voice space was summarised by two main personality traits, one emphasising valence (e.g., trust) and the other strength (e.g., dominance).”. This to me was very interesting as we as a group were planning to conduct our own version of this exact investigation. 

Forming Social Impressions From Voices in Native and Foreign Languages, January 2019, Cristina Baus, Phil McAleer, Katherine Marcoux, Pascal Belin & Albert Costa https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-36518-6#Abs1