I’m sure that almost everybody in the seminar has seen the TV shows in which a team full of wildly pierced twenty-somethings (Paranormal State) or a couple of very skiddish middle-aged men (Ghost Hunters) travel to locations that have been “haunted” in order to do “research” (I’m making the finger quotation marks and speaking with sarcastic tone). Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first person to admit that I believe in the supernatural, and that for the most part if people claim to have encountered a ghost or spirit, I’ll likely believe them. However, there is a scientific explanation for that sinking I-think-something-wants-to-devour-my-soul feeling, as is outlined in an article that I recently stumbled on. What’s really giving you that feeling, apparently, is “infrasound.”
To sum up the article, a scientist named Vladimir Gavreau was working in his robotics laboratory when he noticed one of his researchers was bleeding from the ears. For one reason or another, Gavreau thought that perhaps vibrating steel pipes were the problem. Turns out they were. He discovered that at the right wavelength, sound from the vibrating steel pipes could induce unpleasant effects on those within earshot. However, the “sound” couldn’t actually be heard. Sound waves of between 7 and 19 Hz are below the level able to be heard by humans, though Gavreau proved they could cause feelings of dread and panic. Just below that number is the proper frequency for “the brown note,” which for those of you who have never watched TV is the frequency at which it is rumored (though not proven) that you will uncontrollably defecate.
Perhaps the scariest aspect of Gavreau’s research was that it was conducted as part of an attempt to create acoustic weaponry that could be employed by the military to cause crippling pain in the nerve endings of enemy troops. Think that’s crazy? Nobody would actually subject anyone to a test of this, would they? The United States 1st Air Cavalry Psy-Ops Division conducted field tests of infrasonic weaponry during Vietnam, though no decisive conclusion could be made as to whether or not this worked (Source). Infrasound has, however, been blamed as a possible cause of death when in which a student at a club told his friends that the bass from the speakers was disturbing him, and promptly keeled over and died of Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome (Source).
How does this relate to the supernatural? Well, suppose you happen to be tiptoeing through your dark house in the middle of the night, and are suddenly taken by feelings of panic and dread. They could be the demon sitting in your recliner waiting for you to come downstairs so he can devour your soul. Or, as the article above postulates, it could be the air conditioning unit producing infrasound as part of its normal operation. While this may sound kooky, the current accepted scientific conclusion as to why infrasound affects humans is that it is an evolutionary response to noise that some predatory animals make (you guessed it: infrasound) that humans cannot hear, but recognize subconsciously as a warning sign.
While this explains how natural infrasound affects humans, how could this be applied in the horror film world? Penny’s recent blog post on sound in horror films raises good questions, and I would definitely agree that sound can be used to create horror in a very powerful way. I’m not saying that filmmakers are pumping out infrasound in order to make your skin crawl. The human hearing range begins at 20 Hz, and I can only imagine the height of a producer’s eyebrow-raising when a director says, “I want to scare people by using sound they can’t hear.” However, knowing that just below the human hearing range is a sound that induces fear, it could be argued that as sound approaches that threshold, it may cause some mild to moderate discomfort.
This also touches on a much more natural explanation as to why horror movies scare us, and perhaps why we want to see them even though they do so. If we look at the human response to certain things such as natural sound and rapid motion, the question has to be raised that it could simply be that horror films engage our fight-or-flight response, that hair-raising, heart pounding feeling we get when we are scared out of our wits. If this is so, then why do we pay our hard-earned money to get scared? Don’t shoot me for saying this, but I think a Freudian wish-fulfillment theory has some merit here (and no, I’m not talking about testicles). Perhaps the real reason that we go to have this biological response induced by art is because we physically enjoy the sensation of being scared. Before you try to discredit this, keep in mind that while fight-or-flight may be part of our daily lives, for the most part few of us will have life-threatening encounters. If this is the case, perhaps answering the question of why we go to horror films is that we simply go for the rush; for the physical excitement that occurs when we are threatened.
3 comments:
This really makes a lot of sense. I've read about people induced to sickness because of imperceptable industrial hummings and such (notably, those living in too close a proximity to wind turbines), so it only follows that sounds at frequencies beyond our perception can also induce nerves. My brother once set his cell phone to a dog whistle for his alarm in the morning, and it woke me up every day without fail, even though I couldn't hear it. This also makes me wonder if there are other things that can affect our emotional states that can't be perceived, like colors at wavelengths we can't see or smells we can't consciously sense.
Thanks for your comment Penny. I bet that if anyone thinks hard about it they've probably had an instance when subsonic sound had some sort of effect on them. I've always noticed that late at night at one of the firehouses I work at, I always seem to feel a little uneasy (I've called the place haunted before), and after reading this article I looked around and found that at night the HVAC kicks in, and even though it can be heard, it is barely audible, and so it fits in the machinery category.
It really does make sense. Maybe that is why Murphy hall seems haunted...it's actually emitting infrasound. Kind of like pheremones for the ears...but not. Very interesting. Thanks for posting it Will.
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