The Master’s thesis I chose for this task was written by Diogo da Costa Alves Pinto for the acquisition of a Master Degree in Sound Design at the Portuguese Catholic University of Arts. It aims to explore the taxonomic and causal link between emotions and sound objects and is titled “A Sound is Worth a Thousand Words”.
I chose this thesis because I was hoping it might give me pointers in my own research, since the abstract hinted that there is an element of deconstruction in the audio experiments.
- Level of Design
As has been observed with multiple Master’s theses in the field of Sound Design, this one also just seems to follow university protocol – there are no special elements that stick out in terms of visual design, and it also does not seem like it was a requirement for fulfilment of the task. However, I did notice that there are mixed fonts throughout the thesis (i.e. index is formatted differently from the main body of text, headings are different than continuous text), so the coherence throughout the whole document in terms of readability is missing a bit.
- Degree of Innovation
The topic itself does not seem to bring an entirelynew idea into the field, however, there are good points that are being made about the translation of studies into other languages and possible bias or issues that could stem from that – in that sense, taking the field of study into an environment with a different mother tongue brings new insights.
- Independence
It seems like the author has carried out multiple experiments on their own and managed to evaluate the results thereof on their own, in addition to doing literature research in advance to inform those experiments.
- Outline and Structure
On the first glance, the structure makes sense in the index. However, when reading the thesis, the layout begins to seem a bit clumsy in a way that does not fully support the intended structure or the reading flow (e.g. numbering of chapters and subchapters). There is a separate chapter titled ‘Structure’ which is mostly self-explanatory or reiterates the methodology chapter. Overall, in its outline, the topic appears to be a bit too broad for its initially stated purpose. There is also one sub chapter which only consists of one sentence – this could have probably been combined with another sub chapter.
- Degree of Communication
The author does a good job of explaining basic concepts and ideas using appropriate literature and references from the field of study. Connections and comparisons in between sources and experiments are drawn, but sometimes in illogical order (e.g. comparison to other method is made before the reader has been introduced to other method). There is an awareness that external factors influence associations with sounds and that the rationalized involved in causal listening influences test results. This is expressed well, and there is a lot of needed detail about variances and why specific models are utilised more in sound and music.
- Scope of Work
There is mixed detail when it comes to analysis of the work that was undertaken. A lot of value was placed on literature research, but especially the evaluation and setup of the second experiment might have required a little more detail in the explanation. It was not clear whether the alterations in the sound should bring about a specific emotion or whether the individual original sounds were to be considered for their emotional feedback, and there is no Appendix showing the details of the test results in a way that could clarify that. The author managed to recruit quite large sample groups for the scope of the study twice, but there was not a lot of background on which sounds were used, why they were used and what the use of these specific sounds would bring to the conclusion, so in some ways, the thesis felt a little too broad-angled to concisely and effectively bring depth into a field that has been explored before.
- Orthography and Accuracy
Overall, the work is quite neat in terms of orthography. The citations seemed to be incomplete at time, so there is an aspect of the work that appears as if the diligence has been placed on other aspects, such as the experiment and the content over the formatting.
- Literature
The thesis cites mostly papers, books, dissertations and standard literature for the field. It draws back on historical references, but always puts them into context with more up-to-date literature examples.
Overall, this thesis tries to approach a large topic with the help of two empirical experiments. A lot of effort has been put into those and the literature research, but it appears that some of the insights and critical evaluations get lost in the communication and the broad scope of the thesis.
