Conference article

Hiroyuki Sawano’s musical pieces have the following common structure with videos where the musical sound fades out preceding the most exciting scene in a video, and silence comes for several seconds. Then, a loud solo vocal starts at the beginning of the most exciting scene, and the accompaniment follows the vocal. This structure was typically used in a musical piece in the anime, “Attack on Titan”. In Experiment 1, Sawano’s musical pieces composed for other anime replaced the original piece in “Attack on Titan” and participants continuously indicated their emotions. The results showed that the degrees of the arousal and congruency drastically increased at the most exciting scene when the pieces possess the same structure. However, a musical piece for a drama also showed low levels of arousal and congruency, in spite of the piece possessing the structure. In Experiment 2, the excerpt of “Attack on Titan” was consistently used for the preceding scene before the most exciting scene and the music is switched to one of various pieces for the most exciting scene. The results showed that the arousal and congruency degrees have drastically raised when the original piece was switched to the pieces that contains the same structure. This suggested that the silence preceding the exciting scene weakened the link between the different pieces. In the case of the drama piece, the degrees of the arousal and congruency were at low levels. This implies that the musical features other than the structure are also important for arousal and congruency.

Continuous measurement, emotion, congruency, Sawano Hiroyuki, Attack on Titan