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Episode 068: This Music Makes Me Feel… The Psychology of Star Wars (1977) Music with Jim Davies & Joe Kraemer
Join Alex and guest hosts Dr. Jim Davies and Hollywood composer Joe Kraemer as they discuss the powerful music of composer John Williams’ immaculate score of Star Wars (1977) and its subsequent film franchise. In 2015, the two guests hosts wrote a chapter — after decades of friendship and a shared love of nerd culture and music — on the psychology of the music from the famous sci-fi/fantasy film from George Lucas. The trio chat about how the music makes the viewer feel and how Williams uses the concept of leitmotifs to signal how characters interact and why certain sounds within music theory are associated with deeply subconscious processing.…
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Episode 052: We Might Love David If He Wasn’t So Creepy — A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) with Jim Davies
Join Alex and guest host Dr. Jim Davies in a discussion of the portrayal of artificial intelligence, consciousness, and love in Steven Spielberg’s Pinocchio-esque film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)! We explore the idea of artificial intelligence, what it means to be conscious or sentient, and how well the film works on these fundamentally hard-to-define fronts. Though Jim is a cognitive scientist, Alex also asks him about the film’s idea of love and what it means to be loved, which hits at The Velveteen Rabbit‘s ideal of what it means to be real and who is worthy of love! Listen, we think David, who was played so well by Haley Joel Osment, could be loved if he just didn’t act so oddly.…