Exploration 9 - Lorenzo Palma

Part One:
I would say, that even though this essay wasn't the best out of all three essays, I'd say that my last paper was the best paper I've written in my opinion. I really changed up the way that I conveyed my voice in this paper. Instead of the 'claim-evidence-warrant' robot I am, I mixed it up and just went with what sounded essential in my head. It was sort of like a rant, but with structure to it. Also, it was an educated rant. I have done a lot of research in this topic because music is one of the things that really interest me and I'm really passionate about music.

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Passage #1
Music supplements, complements, and conjures emotion in all different settings whether it be, real-life, movies, video games, performances or advertisements. But what if someone told you that all of those emotions, like Hope, Triumph, Anxiety, Misery, Elation, Doom and Gloom; Music did not contain any of those emotions. Yes, the lyrics might, but the music does not. So, for example, Major Chords aren’t happy while Minor Chords aren’t sad. It’s just the fact that people have been “trained” to hear them that way. Plato had a theory: The Imitation Theory, which states that music imitates the movement or characteristics of a physical expression or “general feeling”. So essentially, wide intervals in music sound expansive and accepting while upward harmonic progressions sound uplifting and jaunty rhythms sound… jaunty.

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I'd say this passage is a good example of the rant-y, informed voice that I tried to convey. I was being really annoying, giving abrupt and abundant examples of what emotions music can exhibit, of all the things that music could be used for, because there are so many things that music can have people feel, see or hear that there's technically no time to stop and think about it all. Then, the evidence that I was using in my paper, like Plato's imitation theory, was something that people wouldn't think music would be related to but it is extremely related to music.

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Passage #2
Cultural Training explains why brake squeals or explosions don’t affect us as listeners because we simply think of them as not containing meaning but to some level they still could have the same characteristics that should affect us in an emotional aspect. We are not emotionally receptive to those sounds; we have that emotional wall because we are “Culturally Trained” to not expect any communication from those certain sounds. Two researchers, Patrik Juslin and Daniel Västfjäll, boiled the list of things that would cause us to be receptive to sounds into 6 main categories: Brain Stem Reflexes, Evaluative Conditioning, Emotional Contagion, Visual Imagery, Episodic Memory and Musical Expectancy all contribute to the ways we feel stuff while hearing things. In other words, sad music isn’t simply, “sad.”

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This passage is another good way to show the kind of research I did for this paper. I don't want to sound pretentious, but I'm proud of the amount of research I did for this project. I was willing to do a lot of digging in order to prove my point because "sad music" not being sad is not something that 95% percent of the world's population would think (I'm exaggerating here.)

Part Two & Three:
My final subject for this class (Oh man, that sounds so morose...) would be the story of "The Wolf Among Us". It's a video game that takes place in a little city in New York called Fabletown. It's where many fairy tale characters, called fables (which is also what the story arc of the game is based off of) have moved to so they could start new lives outside of their books.

This is the cover art for the game, showing the main character of this

story, Bigby Wolf a.k.a. The Big Bad Wolf of 'Little Red Riding Hood' and 'The Three Little Pigs.'

Bigby Wolf is the sheriff of Fabletown. In charge of managing all of the fables, keeping them from killing each other since, now that they live outside of their stories they have the freedom of making their own choices instead of following their story which tells them what to do, where to go, and essentially, when to live... or die. But, as fictional as these fairy tales get, the problems that these fables experience are more or less the same as most human beings, mundies, experience. First, there's the problem of the economy. Families that derived from royalty, Beauty and the Beast for example, are used to their higher-than-life lifestyle. They were used to having very intricate and expensive items.

Beauty and the beast being confronted by Sheriff Bigby for taking loans

out and spending all of it on all of their unnecessarily expensive belongings. 

Beauty and the Beast are pressured to take loans from a dangerous crime lord because, firstly, the government in place did not help them financially for things that they needed: Food, Clothing, and Shelter. When they started taking loans out, the money that they had in their possession, at the time, was more than enough to supply their needs so they used the extra to buy their other belongings. Their addiction to spending and taking out loans put them under more and more debt, just so they could get that little rush of luxury as they bought these things. This I feel like is a very real situation that, although not everybody will go through, is something that people could experience more than what most people would expect. But speaking of the government, another problem that The Wolf Among Us addressed is the corruption that exists in the government.

Ichabod Crane, the mayor of Fabletown. He abuses his employees

when things don't go well and he personally doesn't address them, instead having the same

employees he abuses take care of them.

Ichabod Crane, the acting mayor of Fabletown, was exactly how he was depicted in his story, 'The Legend of Sleeping Hollow,' which was that he was a scheming, selfish, character who only cared about his own self gratification. He ran Fabletown without actually running it himself instead leaving all the work to his assistant, Snow White. While he didn't do anything to help the city rise up from its people's problems, he was also stealing money from the city in order to supply his own pleasantries from a nice house and a nice car, to hiring hookers. Although this would be an extreme example of corruption, it's not something that is absent in reality and is not something that is essentially addressed and examined as much as it should.

These two examples aren't all of what The Wolf Among Us depicts in its story. What impresses me is that, although it may be a short story, it lets the player/reader know about how many problems that us real people experience.