Annoyance.

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I participated in this really cool research experience thing today.


Research Experience is something we have to do for Psychology, it's a course requirement - at least three hours this semester. What it basically means is that you're the guinea pig for others to do their experiments on. =P


So I did my first hour today, and it was COOL.


I suspect one of the few reasons I found it cool was because I was in a sound-proofed room. Hmm. I wished I'd thought of this sooner - I wonder what it'd sound like if I screamed in there. Heee. =)


The researcher person who was doing this experiment for his PhD was really nice. He called me by my name - I didn't expect him to know it. Especially since I didn't know his. Heh. XD Anyway, he explained everything and brought me to the sound-proof room. It was so cool, when I stepped inside!! It was like, suddenly everything was muffled. Super cool.


And then he had me do some tests. Oh, the experiment was called "Pitch and Timbral Processing". Music stuff. Something about being exposed to the sound more allows us to recognise the sounds when they are played later on. So what I had to do was basically listen to a tone, and try to imitate the sound by moving the mouse across the screen until I got the sounds the same (or as close to it as possible- or guess if I didn't know it).


Okay that's probably a little hard to imagine. But anyway, it was COOL. Like, the screen was virtually blank, and I had to change the tone by moving the mouse across the screen (as in, different tones would start playing as I moved the mouse across the screen). Heeee I still think it's cool.


But anyway, there were four trials of about 25 tones each. Some of them had 1 pitch, some had 2, some had 3. And OMG it was sooooooooo annoying!!


The 1 pitch ones were really easy. The 2 pitch ones were not too bad, but when the program asked me to imitate the lower note, I found it quite hard sometimes. And THE 3 PITCH ONES! OMG!! They were soooooo frustrating. Because I KNEW the chord. I KNEW the sounds. But I couldn't seem to imitate it exactly right! And I didn't want to click on the wrong tone, because I KNEW WHAT THE RIGHT ONE SHOULD BE.

It's like, deliberately answering the question wrongly when you know the correct answer!! It's just wrong! The worst ones were when the program asked me to imitate the middle tone or the lowest tone. I couldn't actually HEAR some of them properly, although I could figure it out from hearing the top note, but I have a sinking feeling that I still got quite a bit of it wrong. The top note kept distracting me. That was always the worst part of the Aural bit in piano exams for me, I could never hear the lower notes. =(


The researcher explained that they weren't really looking for whether we got the notes right or wrong, they were more looking for whether we thought the tones were dissonant or not dissonant, and the difference between musicians and non-musicians.

BUT I STILL FEEL SO DISSATISFIED WITH MYSELF.

Haha.


But it was fun. I hope the rest of the Research Experience stuff are like this. =)

When will you come around?