Russ Garcia’s 1959 album, Fantastica: Music From Outer Space, opens with the track, “Into Space,” which begins appropriately with a countdown featuring a heavily-reverbed male voice:

“Ten seconds till firing time. Mark (beep): five, four, three, two, one.”

The sound of a rocket blasts and then fades out as electronic shimmers fade in—the kind of sound effect that in radio dramas, film, and television came to represent journeys into alternate dimensions of time and space. A languid flute melody materializes out of the sonic distance accompanied by a harp, bells, and a gradually emerging orchestra. An oboe takes over the melody and a rhythm section enters, first just the low pulse of a string bass, then a vibraphone and the sweep of a brushed snare. As if we might forget that this familiar orchestral lounge jazz is meant to illustrate a trip into outer space, a slowly ascending sine wave enters twice, seemingly mimicking ascent into the cosmos.

In the liner notes, Ashley Warren describes this opening cinematically: “We are catapulted into the atmosphere, surrounded by the deafening roar of rockets which fade into nothingness, and are enveloped by the silence of space and swallowed into a nebulous mist of weightlessness…floating far into space.”

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In this collaborative project, we investigated how people infer the emotions of others, particularly looking at the role of empathic accuracy in creating a compelling artistic performance.

We designed a set of experiments that measured the physiology of actors and musicians while they simulated positive and negative emotions during a performance.

The emotional and physiological reactions of audience members were also recorded and compared to those of the performers to assess the emotional experiences of each group. The project team included Heather Harden (Department of Psychology), Elizabeth Necka (Department of Psychology), Patrick Fitzgibbon (Department of Music), and myself (Department of Music).