The Science of Scary Music

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Joe McCormick, and my regular co host
Robert Lamb is not with us today. He's he's out
on vacation on the day we're recording this. So I

(00:25):
am joined by a special guest for today's episode, which
is our producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. What's going on? Seth? Hello,
happy to be here, happy to be talking to our wonderful,
wonderful audience. Don't don't flatter him too much. Um now,
so Seth, you've been on Stuff to Blow your Mind
as a guest before, wants to talk about the sensation

(00:46):
of free song, which is the name for when you
get goose bumps and chills as a reaction to music.
And uh, and of course you're a music guy. You
you play music, you record music. You think what is
it called when you make records? Are you a music publisher? Um?
Technically I own a record label and I manufacture records.

(01:09):
So however you want to phrase that in today's world?
Who knows, you know, because we're so far beyond the
traditional label system. And then screaming gets involved, so I
could say those words, I am a record label and
I manufacture records. I think it's technically you are a
you are a disc lord. Yes, that's a good way
to put it. Yes, so as as a resident disc

(01:30):
lord here. But oh but also also I should mention
that you have hosted a number of music related podcasts,
and I'm genuinely so excited because You've got a brand
new one coming out that by the time this episode airs,
I think you will have your first episode live. Is
that right? I believe by the time this air's at
least two episodes will be alive. Yes, yes, And depending

(01:53):
upon when you listen to this, maybe three, maybe twelve,
who knows. So tell me about the new show. That
the show is called Rusty Needles Record Club, And um,
it's a very simple concept, honestly, all it is. It's
like a book club, but it's for music. That's that's
That's really as simple as it gets. My ludicrous goal
for this podcast is to listen to every album ever made.

(02:16):
I know I'm not gonna do that's like, that's that's ridiculous,
but that's my goal. And so the fun of that
is that me and my guests. We are one album
per episode. Everyone's gonna listen to the same album and
then we talk about it and we go on all
kinds of tangents. We'll give it a quick review at
the end. But honestly, what the show is, it's a

(02:39):
surrogate for people out there who just want a music friend,
you know, someone who they can talk to about music
and listen to a good music conversation. And you know,
I've been in this place in my life and I'm
sure others too. Sometimes you just don't have a friend
around to talk to about music. That's what this podcast
can be for you. If if you're a lonely music
nerd as I've been, and I'm sure I'm sure every

(03:00):
it has been at some point in their life, listen
to this podcast. It's for you. You know, I literally
made it exclusively for you out there. So um, but
that's what it is. It's a rusty Needles record club.
Find it literally wherever you find any podcast. I mean,
in a way, that's sort of what all podcasts are,
right Like, uh, sometimes I think of what is stuff
to blow your mind? It's like if you really wish

(03:21):
you had someboddies to talk to about science and goblins
and medieval poetry. Here are those goblin friends? Yeah no,
And I honestly do think that that podcasts in general
serve a very valuable purpose in that in that space,
you know, and sometimes like stuff to blow your mind
if they're genuinely informative, genuinely researched. My other show, Rusty

(03:43):
Needles Record Club is much more conversational, much lighter fare.
But if you enjoy listening to my voice, and more importantly,
if you really like music and music recommendations, hop on over,
give it a give us a listen, and a big
goal of mine. I don't think I've even told Joe this.
I want to get Joe on so we can talk
about some Neil Young. Oh. I know Joe loves Neil Young,

(04:03):
and yet we've never had a full blown Neil Young conversation.
So you just start thinking about your favorite Neil Young album. Well,
Neil Young for me, If you know anything about my
my taste in in uh perhaps underappreciated movies of the
weird Sword of the kind we talked about on Weird
House Cinema, Uh, you might better understand my love for

(04:23):
Neil Young because he is both a genuinely wonderful rock
musician with I love his singing voice, I love his
guitar playing, I love his weird, atypical creativity. But he
is also just full of bad ideas for music and
just strangely realized, poorly thought out ideas put into practice

(04:44):
with reckless abandon and I love that too. Oh yeah,
I know. And it's not just for music. I think
it's for every piece of his artistic output, Like um didn't.
Let's see. I believe one of his album covers was
taken with a game boy. Do you remember that album cover?
I think it was the silver and gold one or
something like that. I can't relate, yeah boy camera, Yeah no,

(05:06):
I mean, what a wonderful idea. He has to be
in some sort of record book for the only album
cover taken with a game boy, you know, like, congratulations
to him. You know, he doesn't care. He does exactly
what he wants, despite the fact that he is like
a heralded, you know, very well respected, very very critically
applauded musician, you know, so congratulations to him for you know,

(05:27):
sticking to himself. Yeah, okay, well we'll save that for
the episode where I come on again it is Rusty
Needles Record Club, so you can look that up wherever
you get your podcasts. But for today's episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, set your music guy. So I
thought we got to talk about music of some kind.
It's October here on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
It is the most hallowed time of the year for us,

(05:50):
where we we talked about all things spooky and monstrous
and uh and and uncanny, So we got to talk
about some uncanny melodies. Obviously, the place we had to
go today is to talk about horror movie music. And
I also recognize that we are doing, uh, we're currently
doing a great injustice that Robert wasn't here for this
conversation today. So we may have to revisit the subject

(06:12):
in some in some episode later on in the in
the month or something like that, because I know Robert
loves horror movie music. He's got tons of interesting thoughts
about it too, so so this may be something that
we'll have to like continue as an ongoing conversation and
and follow up from this episode with him. Absolutely, But
before we get into any of the real mysteries about

(06:33):
scary music and horror movie tunes, Uh, that that I
wanted to be the meat of the episode. Today, I
was wondering if we could kick off by exploring a
kind of strange thought I was having earlier. I don't
know if this is if this is an insight, or
if this is just sort of like me staring at
my tone nails and thinking it's interesting. But maybe you'll
be the judge. So I was just thinking the other

(06:55):
day about how music is extremely important to the experience.
It's of pretty much all modern cinema, not just as
a pleasurable enhancement to the drama of the film, but
as one of the techniques that makes the experience of
movie going feel beyond the power of regular observation and cognition.

(07:18):
It's one of the things that makes watching a movie
feel like you have superpowers. Um So, to explain that
because modern film has high definition video and audio uh
and and modern editing techniques. I've talked about this before
that I think modern film very much feels like observing
real life. In the words of the character Professor Brian

(07:39):
Oblivion in the movie Videodrome, the television screen is the
retina of the mind's eye, and what takes place on
that screen emerges pretty much as raw experience for the
viewer watching TV or watching a movie is in many
ways as realistic as observing real life. It certainly feels
that way most of the time, unless you unless something

(08:01):
breaks the spell and you get distracted, which which um
ultimately leads to a few things you guys have talked
about in episodes in the past, like, um, why you
cry while watching a movie when it's like, oh, I
know this is fake. There's no part of me that
thinks these are real people experiencing anything close to reality,
and yet I'm feeling a real emotion. I'm feeling sad,

(08:23):
I'm feeling scared. Perhaps, yes, yes, So the illusion is
so strong that it becomes raw experiences. It's as if
you're experiencing it yourself. Unless again, the spell gets broken
because I don't know, your phone rings or something. You
get distracted and suddenly you realize, oh, yeah, this is
not real life. The boom mic dips into the screen. Right, yeah,

(08:43):
I mean that's another thing, like like shoddy your filmmaking
techniques can also break that spell, but also modern filmmaking
techniques uh create a simulation of raw experience that contains
information that tends to give the viewer insights that are
not possible when observing the natural world. Uh. So, just

(09:06):
some some very simple examples. Think about the way that
editing and camera work can draw your attention automatically to
details in movie scenes that will be significant in understanding
something about a character's personality, or or maybe through uh
foreshadowing by highlighting something will automatically uh suggest to you

(09:28):
objects or statements that will later become very important to
the plot. So think about the information content implied by
a zoom in on a pair of scissors on somebody's desk,
or especially if it's in a horror movie, or a
flashback of a character saying I hope we meet again soon. Uh.
And so, when compared to viewing reality, the viewer of

(09:50):
TV or film has a sense of precognition or extrasensory perception.
The drama that you watch happen on screen un holds
as raw experience, but it's also imbued with this extra
layer of godlike knowledge and insight that's not available to
you when you're just observing mundane reality from a fixed perspective,

(10:12):
and also not available to the others who are supposedly
living in this world that we're observing. So for example,
we we do have this omniscience of we're we we
know information that they don't know about each other, like
as if we are a god looking in on their lives.
It's it's similar to reading a book where you can
kind of see inside someone's mind and you can feel

(10:34):
their own thoughts and etcetera, etcetera. It's very similar to
that in that Let's let's take it to music for
a second. If we're watching Jaws and we hear the
Jaws theme start up the butt on but on, We
as the viewer, we know the shark is coming. They
might not know that because they can't hear the Jaws
theme starting. You know, he's they're chumming the water. He's

(10:57):
he's facing the wrong direction. We're looking right behind. We
know the shark is coming, but he doesn't like like
we are one step ahead. We are superhuman compared to
these these fictional characters on the screen. Yes, so that's exactly. Yeah,
you're right, this is where I was going with this.
Music is another one of these modern cinematography techniques that
contains super mundane information that imbuse the viewer with a

(11:21):
sense of godlike insight about what's going on. Uh. So
you know, in reality, you could be walking down a
sidewalk alone on a windy day, or you can imagine
that same point of view. Maybe it's a p o
V shot in a movie of somebody walking down a
sidewalk on a windy day with the Halloween theme playing, right,
and in the context of a movie, the latter almost

(11:42):
certainly tells you something is something about what's going to
happen in the future. So the music in a movie
doesn't just set a mood. It does set a mood,
but it also provides information that's not available to the characters.
Um though, I think it's also interesting that some times
characters in movies behave as if they can hear the

(12:04):
same music that the audience can, and I mean assuming
that it is music that's not like coming from a
radio on screen, and we'll talk more about the distinction
in a minute. I think, um but I think maybe
in those cases, the the suggested effect is really that
the character either somehow knows or believes they know something
in an extra sensory or precognitive way, and the music

(12:26):
sort of shares that supermundane knowledge they have or they
believe they have with the viewer. This is a big word.
I used to have to use a lot. Um. If
anyone in the audience doesn't know, I've spent a big
chunk of my life making TV and movies as an animator.
That was a big part of my life for about
a decade or so. And then UM, one element we

(12:47):
would have to pay attention to is the idea of
diagetic versus non diagetic music. Um, if anyone doesn't know. Basically, uh,
here's a very simple definition. Diagetic music is what is
happening on screen. You can see someone doing something. It
is making a noise and you are experiencing it. So

(13:08):
someone turns on their radio and you're hearing the radio,
and that is the sound you hear on screen. That's
diagetic music. Someone picks up an obo and starts playing it,
and you hear the music of the oboe playing. That's diagetic.
So basically, there's a real logical explanation for where that
sound is coming from. I think the word diagetic comes
from the Greek for meaning something like narrative or something,

(13:30):
doesn't it meaning that the sound emerges from the narrative
as opposed to on top of the narrative. Exactly, it's
it's it's that, it's it's a part of this. It's
it's not. Um, it's not a subliminal thing. It's a
limital thing. It's right there in the front, you know.
So um, non diagetic is actually what we experience the most.

(13:52):
Non diagetic music is basically every score that you see
pretty much when you see any movie, any TV show,
et cetera. Now, nine percent of it is a score
that is just kind of overlaid, you know, with with
like the images and the dialogue and the sound effects.
It's just this thing on top. But it didn't always
used to be that way. So yeah, Like the the

(14:14):
very first time a mainstream movie had sound it was
this Al Jolson film back in seven. It's called The
Jazz Singer. It's very famous. Um. I don't necessarily recommend it.
It's got some very iffy subject matter. I don't think
you should watch it personally, but it's very famous. It's
something you watch in like, you know, film theory classes. Um.

(14:35):
But then if we jump ahead six years, like I said,
that was seven jump ahead six years and the first
mainstream film to use a traditional score was King Kong.
That was three and that was scored by Max Steiner.
So so think about that nine popularization of sound in
movies nineteen thirty three. We've basically figured it out and

(14:59):
we're using the same technique today. That's pretty remarkable for
just six years. Uh. But right there in between, in
that little six year gap, we have Todd Browning's Dracula
starring which was released in one I mean a classic, right, Oh, absolutely,
I mean, it can't be denied. I I've I don't

(15:21):
know how many times I've watched this movie at this point.
But but but um, I think I've made this opinion
clear on the show before. And I'm not the only
person to think this. I've I've read other people, uh,
saying that they had feelings to the same effect. I
think that the simultaneously produced Spanish language version of Dracula
that Universal filmed concurrently with this. I think they were

(15:42):
filming at night while Browning's a team was filming during
the day, is actually better except for lacking bell leegosie.
So if you could pair the Spanish language version with
Bella Leegosi as Dracula, that would be the perfect form.
Yeah no, I fully agree, and yeah, yeah, this is
something we could get into a whole other episode. But
the other short version is is that the Mexican production

(16:05):
had the benefit of watching what happened during the American
production and learn from it and just kind of heighten everything,
make everything is proving it better. It's just it's it's
a it's a wonderful thing. I've seen documentaries about it,
like it's it's a fascinating subject. But one thing that
actually both of those movies have in common very little score,

(16:26):
so little in fact that I would say no score. Um. So,
there's only two moments of music in Todd Browning's Dracula. Okay,
there's one point where they're at an opera house and
they're having like a scene at an opera house in London,
and they're talking and then in the background you can
hear some Wagner and some Schubert, and that's just like

(16:46):
what happens to be occurring in the background in the scene,
because they're they're at the London opera house. This is
what's happening in the background, and it does heighten the
moment and kind of add some feelings to things. But
that is majetic. To bring it back to that word again,
it is what is happening on screen, and so that's
pretty much the only thing in the movie that has

(17:07):
any music at all period. And then if you look
at the very very beginning, over the opening credits, before
the film actually begins, there's a little bit of Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake which plays over literally the opening credits exclusively.
And I believe that is two things. Um. One, it's
kind of a holdover from just like the silent era,

(17:27):
where it's just like, oh, well, there's this thing on
screen and there's no people talking. I gotta do something here,
just put some music up there, you know. But too,
I also have read that um, Chaikovsky's Swan Lake was
also just very stock standard, where it was just like, hey,
we can just use this one, like this is just
a standard song we can stick in wherever we need

(17:48):
it in the studio system. UM. I'm not sure how
true that is, but I find that fascinating because to me,
when I watched that film, that moment from Swan Lake
fits that Dracula opening credit sequence so perfectly that I
can't see it being stock. I guess kind of like
Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where their entire sound library is
stock you know, um um score stuff. And when I

(18:11):
hear it in something else, like a TV commercial, I
get confused. That's a tangent. I'm moving back to to Dracula.
Well no, no no, no, I know exactly what you're talking about,
Like I can't. It's uh, I think the part with
swan Lake is it's that creaky violin melody. Yeah, am
I right about the game. Well, maybe we can stop
and just play a clip of that real quick, good call. Okay.

(18:42):
I can't hear that without thinking about Todd Browning's Dracula, right, Yeah,
you know, it has established itself, like I think of
Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake as Dracula music more than I think
that as swan Lake music. Clearly it is made for
swan Lake anyway. But I've I've also seen Todd Browning's
Dracula way more than I've ever seen Swan Lake. So

(19:03):
you know, it's I'm sure it'll be different from person
to person. But but but here, here's the point. Here's
the point. So back in again, this is the jazz singer. Uh.
That movie was very, very popular, but all of the
music was taking place on screen diagetically because it was
a musical. Everyone's singing was singing right there in front
of you. Every all the musical musical instruments was a stage.

(19:26):
It was all about performance, stage work, the vaudeville scene, etcetera, etcetera.
So this was understandable for a lot of reasons. Um. One,
musicals were just very popular at the time, so that
that was like a big reason why they made this
film be a musical and why it was so popular
just in the modern consciousness of wow, the jazz singer
winning all the awards, making all the money, all the

(19:47):
people have seen it, but also be it's an excellent
showcase of early sound and vision singing together. Two in
this brand new medium, which is the talkie, because before that,
um you know, obviously there was like a lone organist
sitting in most silent movie theaters playing along, you know,
with whatever is happening in the background. Or two there

(20:08):
was a brief period where they were actually playing records
along with the film. But this was a very short
lived technology because they would go out of sync perpetually.
Because I mean, if you just even think about that,
like even in your own world, you know. You uh,
let's say you're trying to sink what's playing on your
radio with what's happening on your television. It's just not
gonna quite always line up. It'll be close enough, probably,

(20:31):
but it won't. It's not going to be exactly right.
So I don't know if anybody what we got a
lot of Mystery Science Theater three thousand fans out there.
I don't know if anybody ever tried in that middle
period to manually synchronize a riff tracks m P three
with a movie that they were trying to watch it
paired with it was a pain. Yeah, yeah. Or even
trying to sink Dark Side of the Moon with the

(20:52):
Wizard of Oz always fun, always fun. I've I've spent
many hours doing that. Um. But but anyway, it's getting
back to my point though. So these were musicals, and
so that was like there was a reason for it
all to be happening on stage King Kong. It was
a a real score because they had finally figured out

(21:13):
that that was okay. One Both the filmmakers and the
film critics did not think that the audience could understand
where the music was coming from. They thought that we
were too simple, that like we would be confused. We
would say, wait, is there a violinist behind them? Like
like where where is this music coming from? Oh, they

(21:33):
aren't alone, there's a musician right over there. You know.
Well that is interesting. I mean I wonder if did
and I mean so obviously we don't think that now.
But also we grow up watching movies that have non
diagetic music in them. It did audiences for say King Kong,
like the earliest movies with non diagetic scores, did they

(21:54):
react with confusion or was this pretty much metabolized instantly?
I can say this, and I don't think this is
proof of anything, but it is something that happened at
the time. Um I have, you know, I like classic cinema.
Um I have. I have this one box set of
pretty much all of the old Laurel and Hardy um
Um shorts and features. And what's very funny is that

(22:17):
in this collection they have the original shorts, which, much
like Todd Browning's Dracula, were released. Basically, they're they're barely
not silent films. You know, they are one step past
the silent film. You can hear them talking, but they
had not figured out non diagetic scores yet. And on
the same in the same box set, they also have
the re releases that happened post three where they actually

(22:41):
scored them, and it's the same short. They just had
to include this music because people had grown to accept
it so quickly that these long, you know, periods of
silences that were like, I guess a part of the
filmmaking for a moment, we're now seen as completely passe
and old old fashioned. You needed that, mu zick. So
they had to re release all these shorts with with

(23:02):
a brand new score a tacked onto them. Oh yeah,
speaking of which, uh, this ultimately happened to Todd Browning's
Dracula as well. Um oh yeah, So I think maybe
the could it be true that the first time I
ever saw it in full it was with the Philip
Glass score. I think that might be true. It could

(23:24):
be it came out in a so depending upon when
you saw it, it's very possible it was after that.
So yeah, and I was not watching classic cinema as
a child, and so what's what's funny about that? So yeah,
they they they re scored um and but it's official
universal They released a brand new version of Todd Browning's

(23:44):
Dracula with a brand new score made by Philip Glass,
and I think it's very very good. However, I do
think it's very funny that they went from a film
that had basically no music and almost no folly and
added the most maximalist, you know, perpetual ar paggio maker himself,
Philip Glass, to score it. So it went from a

(24:06):
movie with like almost no sound to a movie with
like NonStop sound, and I love it. I actually I
prefer the Philip Glass version now. But anyway, that's that.
But I guess technically anybody can make their own score
to Dracula. Yeah, yeah, no, I feel that way, and
I there have been a lecture. We could go off
on this all day. We have so much to talk about. Well,

(24:27):
I'll hold my opinions about Air and La Voyage Dan's
Laloon for another time. Oh. I think somehow we have
actually talked about that on the show before. I think
maybe in the past we were talking about music videos
and that came up. Yeah. But but the practice of
scoring an old silent film with modern technology and modern
sensibilities is a very fun practice. Many people have done

(24:48):
it over the years, and it's it's fun. Yeah, one
that really sticks in my mind. I remember I watched
a pretty awesome modern rescore of Well, I guess it
wouldn't be a rescore because this was a silent film
to begin but of Fritz Long's Metropolis. Yes, do you
remember who did the score? I unfortunately do not, So
that is not a very useful comment. I'm sorry, I'm

(25:10):
sorry for asking. Thank but it's really interesting what you
point out. Yeah, so that this Todd Browning Stracula is
absolutely one of the foundational texts of of horror cinema.
Is like a lot of what horror cinema is goes

(25:31):
back to traditions that can be traced step by step
back to the universal monster movies, the first of which,
of course, was Browning Stracula. Wait, I am right about that.
It was the first one, right, definitely. Well, I mean, yeah,
technically we can go back to the silent era where
we had like you know, Phantom of the Opera and
stuff like that. But of the talkies, we can definitely
say it's Todd Browning Stracula. Yeah. And yet now the

(25:52):
idea of a of a horror movie without not just
some music, but like lots of music and very horton music.
That's that's critical in uh setting both setting the tone
and establishing that sort of godlike feeling of of superhuman
insight that you get when you're watching a horror movie.
You know, something that the characters don't know. It contributes

(26:14):
to the sort of dramatic irony of watching the scene
that that gives you this weird superhuman ability. Uh, that's
like absolutely crucial to what modern horror is. And if
you have a movie that is very light on soundtrack
or has no soundtrack, that's notable. Now that's like a
thing to point out about the movie. Um, I'm trying

(26:34):
to think of examples. Does the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre
lack music or does it mostly lack music? It's definitely
very little, that's for sure. And yeah, it actually makes
it feel more real. It makes it feel like a
documentary because we aren't given this insights, we aren't given
this extra layer of telling us how to feel. Almost
almost hand holding if you want to look at it
and like that kind of way that like that the

(26:55):
score tells us this way, this way, you know, here's
how you feel over here. You know, Well, that's another
interesting question that uh, I don't know if I'm prepared
to answer right now, But it is fun to notice
the difference between music that is highly emotionally manipulative and
that's okay with us, versus music that's highly emotionally manipulative
and it makes us mad. Like when a TV commercial

(27:17):
has really emotional music and you're like, oh, you know,
get out of here with that, right rights, Like perhaps
that uh that Dying Pets commercial and it's like a
Sarah McLaughlin song on top that's like very very sad.
Do you remember what we're talking about. I wasn't thinking
about that in particular. I think about like, I don't know,
when it's it's like a commercial for a telecom company

(27:38):
or something, and they're like connecting people across the world,
but to love to share and the happy music playing,
I don't know. I feel like folgers used to do
that back in the day too. I think they've grown
past that, and the late eighties early nineties a bunch
of folders commercials were very like family emotional. But didn't
you know anyway, anyway, we're going on tangents nothing right here?

(28:01):
All right, Well, maybe one of the places we should
go from here to Uh. To think about the function
of scary music in horror movies is to ask, what
are some of the objective characteristics of music that is
often subjectively associated with fear or used in horror movies? UM,
and I think some obvious places to start. Probably the

(28:21):
most obvious place to start for me would be that
horror music or or fearful music overwhelmingly favors minor key
tonality over major key. In fact, I was trying to
think of a single good counter example of of a
horror movie that had scary major key music, and I

(28:42):
literally could not bring a single example to mind. Uh.
The only my general feeling is that the only way
major key music plays a plays a big role in
horror movies is either in the sort of like normal
part of the world before things get bad, or to
to automatically suggest a spirit of irony, that there's a

(29:03):
kind of mean sense of humor in playing major key
music in a horror movie, or perhaps sometimes as a
bait and switch. UM. I don't want to give anything away,
so spoiler alert for the original Friday the Thirteenth Part one.
If you don't want to hear a spoiler, You can
spoil that one. Yeah, ever, watch out if most people
will remember, at the very very end of Friday Thirteenth,

(29:23):
Part one, there is a final scare where I believe
her name is Alice. She's out there on the boat.
She's um feeling all happy because she's killed Mrs Vorhees,
the killer from that film. She's safe. She can see
the cops arriving on the shore, and we have a
nice major key song playing that's like, hey, everything's all right,

(29:45):
the movie's over, we can relax now we're safe. And
then immediately boom, it switches to minor. It switches to
become very aggressive, much more like a tonal, like stabs
of strings and stuff, much like a the Psycho score perhaps,
And uh yeah, yeah, that shift happens when Jason jumps

(30:07):
out of the water and grabs her that last scare.
It makes that major shift right there, from hey, everything's fine,
major key, No, it's not minor key. You know that's
that's obviously on purpose. Yeah, So that's that's that spirit
of irony I was talking about. But I mean, like,
can you think of a single instance of a horror

(30:29):
movie where there's music that is itself supposed to be
scary and not like by irony or by contrast, and
it's in a major key. I'm sure it must exist
because there's a lot of movies out there, but I
could not come up with a single example, I would bet,
and again I don't know this off top of my head.
There have been a large number of repurposing pop songs

(30:53):
into horror themes lately, like for the past I'll say,
what five ten years. I would bet at least one
of those stances they did not convert it into a
minor key. So let's say, hypothetically, I'd have to go
back and check this because seven watch this movie A
ton Um that that wonderful film us by Um Jordan Peel, Right, yeah, yeah,
he The main theme is a I've Got five on

(31:15):
It exactly. It's an interpretation of the of the pop
song I've Got five on It. I bet I've got
five on it is in a major key. I'd have
to really listen to the score to see if they
changed it to make it minor. But anyway, this is
all speculation, so this is useless. That's a great example
of pop music being used in a horror movie. By
the way, the way it's woven through the whole score

(31:36):
and comes. But yeah, yeah film. Actually, you and I
both watched recently um called oh gosh, what's it called?
The It was on HBO Max Malignant Malignant because they
worked in Where Is My Mind by the Pixies on
multiple occasions throughout that score as both a a theme
as well as just kind of like a um oh,

(31:58):
perhaps foreshadowing in a way, you know, yeah, yeah, so yeah,
it's a common practice. So I at least one time
there have been one of those pop songs made into
a horror score that was still major, but I definitely
can't think of it. No, Um, there was a thing
you actually shared a link that I had not seen before,
but I thought it was really funny. It was a
video that somebody put together of horror theme music that

(32:19):
was modulated to be in a major key instead of
a minor key, so it had the Halloween theme and
all this stuff. But I thought that the funny So
it's it's so obviously inappropriate that it is immediately and
automatically hilarious. But I thought that the best one was
the major key version of the theme from Saw, which

(32:40):
sounded to me again to come back to TV commercials. Yeah,
it sounded like a commercial. Uh, it sounded like music
that would play in a telecom commercial, you know, while
the narrators sank together. We're connecting people across the globe
because these are the moments that make us who we are. No,
I fully agree. I think my favorite was the nightmare
on on Elm Street theme turned into a major key.

(33:02):
That one was actually oddly beautiful. Um, if anyone's looking
this up, this was from a Slate article. Um, I
believe from two where it was just a theme songs
and a major key are chilling, le hauntingly dorky, and
it was fascinating. It's it's it's an interesting couple of
minutes you can spend looking at this for sure. Yeah,
that was where the link. Let's see, I just wanted.

(33:24):
It was by a YouTube user called muted Vocal. I
don't know anything about them otherwise me either, although I
did see that they they've made videos going the other
way where they have found uplifting positive major key songs
switched them to a minor key and then that's something too,
so like for example, the theme song too. Oh, I
don't know, I haven't watched this video Jurassic Park or big.

(33:46):
You know, you take that that uplifting key, minorize it
suddenly it's scary you know. Oh oh wait, I I
just thought of an example of a of a major
key pop song that I have always thought was incredibly creepy,
creepier than people give it credit for, and should be
used in a horror movie. It's Rod Stewart Forever Young.

(34:07):
I think if you like listen to that song with
the right frame of mind, it is the most unsettling.
It sounds like, you know, something that would be playing
while like a serial killer is preparing their instruments or something. Yeah, yeah,
for sure, for sure. And I could also see in
the near future someone making a horror film and that
can be the pop song that's been interpolated into us

(34:29):
scoring the the new theme. You know. Now, there are
a ton of other musical features that we could identify
as being common in horror movie music. One that pops
up over and over again in uh, in scary music,
not just in horror movies, but say like It's Big
in It's It's on Black. Sabbath's first album is the
musical interval, known sometimes as the Devil's try tone. It's

(34:51):
a series of three notes that has a long interesting
history in music. I know Rob has gone into depth
on this in some episodes in the past, so I
think I'm not going to rehash that here. They'll maybe
maybe Rob and I will come back to it at
some point. Um. But Yeah, clearly this one shows up
a lot when you're trying to get people to think
about demons. Yeah, the the the Devil's triad, and the

(35:12):
Devil's interval as it's sometimes known these chords, I guess,
and these intervals I think they're going to play in
later when we start talking about kind of like the
internal like subconscious like logic and kind of like source
of scariness. I think this is gonna come up again.
So I'm gonna I'm gonna keep this in mind. I'm
gonna keep a pin in it. Okay, There's another thing

(35:35):
that I was wondering about, if if you have any
thoughts on this, is uh, particular instrumentation. You know, that's
how horror movie themes, maybe less so these days, but
at least for a long time, I feel like they
tended to favor particular instruments, especially instruments that sound archaic
to us, So like the pipe organ, the harpsichord, UH,

(35:59):
instruments that are not exactly thought of as like the
most modern of sounds. And I wonder if that's because
for the same logic that generally associates UH antiquity with spookiness,
you know, like why are more horror movies set in
an old house than a new house? No, I think
you're absolutely correct. I think, well, a lot of elements

(36:19):
of storytelling are trying to convey something without saying it directly.
And I do think antiquated things just seem more spooky
because I think, yeah, either subconsciously or consciously, we recognize, oh,
they're all dead, you know, like the terror of history. Yeah,
there's the past contains many stories, uh, and at any time,
to to bring back one of those stories is to

(36:40):
invite the idea of ghosts, or or of secrets maybe
better left uncovered or something. Oh, definitely. I mean think
about The Shining, for example, UM, in that film. Uh,
there's a very eerie use of nineteen twenties big band music, right,
you know, it's kind of like this impression of other

(37:00):
worldliness and very spookiness. I'm sure in the nineteen twenties
is we're considered very upbeat songs, but when you hear
it's in that context with that story, it is very spooky.
It's nothing but spooky. You know, I can't imagine being
happy while listening to that music. We're definitely gonna have
to come back to The Shining in a bit, because
that's got some of my favorite horror movie music from

(37:23):
in multiple ways, from the you know, the the Wendy
Carlos synths to uh do some really good percussion stings
in it. That illustrates something I want to get to
in a minute. Pendarecki, Yes, no, I I think from
everything we're about to talk about, the Shining is like
almost a perfect example of every kind of scary music.
And yeah, we'll definitely get to that. Thank Okay, well,

(37:50):
so I get let's get right into this. There's a
thing that I was trying to tease out about how
there might be different types of horror movie music that
we can recognize patterns, but they're not all. It's not
just one homogeneous mass that there are different types of
music associated with the different types of emotions that horror

(38:11):
wants to conjure. And so this will get into something
that horror writers discuss a lot. Might be less familiar
to people who don't play around in such obsessive literary circles,
But horror writers talk a lot about the difference between
horror and terror, and they make the point that these
are two very distinct emotional states. They're not the same

(38:34):
thing at all, and it's usually explained like this. I'll
try to do the simplest version. Terror is the feeling
of dread you experience at the anticipation of encountering something awful,
and horror is the feeling of shock and revulsion you
experience when you actually encounter it. So you know, if

(38:56):
horror is you throw open the door and you see
the monster, terror is the feeling as you creep down
the hall toward the door, not knowing what's behind it.
I was looking this up trying to find who who
is the earliest person to articulate this difference, and it
seems to me maybe the earliest person to talk about
this is the eighteenth and nineteenth century English author of

(39:17):
Gothic fiction and Radcliffe, who wrote about this in a
piece called on the Supernatural in Poetry, which was published
in eighteen twenty six. Might have been published posthumously, but
she wrote as follows, they must be men of very
cold imaginations, with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise.

(39:39):
Terror and horror are so far opposite that the first
expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high
degree of life. The other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.
And I would say this remains the prevailing sentiment among
horror writers these days, that the terror is the really
prized emotion. That ror writers generally think it is better

(40:02):
to to be successful at making you feel that dread
of anticipation and ambiguity of creeping up to the door
not knowing what's behind it, than just going for that,
you know, like ah, the shock and revulsion when you
finally see the monster. Right, I think I think most
people would agree with that. I definitely do. And so

(40:23):
concurrent with these two very different emotions that are elicited
by by horror fiction and thus by horror movies, I
think we can hear some extremely pronounced differences between the
kinds of music that are usually used for each one,
for terror sequences versus horror sequences. So I would offer
as a sort of emblematic contrasting pair of examples, the

(40:45):
Jaws theme versus the stabbing violins from the score of
Psycho Um. So the Jaws theme is you know, the
classic that the two note progression dun dun dun, dun dunt.
I would say that is terror music to the core.
You don't see the monster yet, but something bad is approaching.

(41:08):
You can feel this sense of dread welling up in you,
but you're you're not at the moment of conflict and
confrontation yet. And also anyone if they aren't familiar with
a song, or if they just haven't thought about it
in a while, I think it's very important that the
notes not only are getting faster, they're getting louder. It's
it's as if the song is approaching you. You you
are feeling the literal feelings of something getting closer, something

(41:32):
getting faster, something coming right at you. And that's that's
what it's trying to evoke. And that's I think very successfully.
It doesn't, you know. But there's also something that's genius
about the Jaws theme, And you know, John Williams often
has an incredible intuitive sense of of evoking concepts like this.
Something about the Jaws theme suggests a form that isn't

(41:53):
yet understood that it is, you know. It almost suggests
like something coming up from out of deep water that
you can't see. Um, you just know that there's this
approaching menace, that something awful is coming out of the
literally out of the murk, but you can't find its
form yet. And I think that again goes right back
to what you were just saying about, Um, the anticipation

(42:14):
being far worse than the actual violence. It's it's the
build up. And famously for Jaws, it was because they
weren't a hundred percent happy with the build of Bruce
the shark. And um, I think everyone would agree that
makes it even better. You know, Yeah, the movie is
much better because you see less of the shark. Um.
Though then again, eventually in a movie, you're going to

(42:36):
have to confront the horrible thing, right or usually you're
gonna have to, and you gotta have the right kind
of music for that too. Uh though that the characteristics,
the objective physical sonic characteristics of the music, where the
actual conflict happens, where you see the monster or the
you know or the you know, the killer jumps out
with the knife that is very different music. And again

(42:57):
I think the violins from Psycho are a pretty perfect
example of what what formed that music usually takes. It
creates mental pictures, for sure, like and perhaps it is

(43:21):
because Psycho has just become, you know, part of our
shared d n a of visual imagery, you know, and
just cinema in general. Button that sound with the violin
feels like a knife stabbing, you know. And I don't know,
I I don't know if I can unmarry those sounds.
To come back to the shining again, there's actually another

(43:41):
thing that I think is a really great example of
horror music in particular, meaning that moment of horror as
opposed to terror. It's the rattling percussion that's used, for example,
in the scene where I think it comes up multiple
times in the movie. But think about when Wendy is
running up the stairs and she looks down the hall
and sees the Man of the Dog costume and you
hear that shaking, rattling drumbeat. Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, if

(44:10):
we're ready to talk shining, I'm ready to talk shining. Okay.
So um, we're also going to go and bring this
up to a third kind of music. In a moment.
But I think The Shining will lead us there with
something we've already talked about. Um So, terror music in
The Shining is definitely the Wendy Carlo score. Ye think

(44:39):
about it with like the opening credits, it's these big
droning synthesizer you know, things that are just building and
groaning and like you know, you're it's it's like the
creaking of the trees in the forest. It's it's just
it's just slow and dull and it's coming, you know.
And then the horror music in that film, uh, it's

(45:00):
it's a conductor. His name is Christophe Penderrecki and he
did a lot of the like like picture of the
shots where like, um, you see Danny's face and he's
like in revulsion and it's those very oh gosh, what

(45:22):
what's what's the best word for I want to say,
violent strings, That's what I want to say. But it's
it's it's the the atonal strings that have very little
rhythm to them and very little melody and they're just
happening all at once. That's very um that that's very
typical Christoph Pandarecki and he's very very known for that
and he's very successful at that. Uh. Johnny Greenwood is

(45:44):
a contemporary um um film scorer musician who works in
that pender wreck E school, no question about I think
about what he did for like there will be blood
or stuff something like that. But um, but anyway, I
think that's a really good uh a difference between those two.
Terror is the Wendy Carlos part, Horror is the Pandarecki part.

(46:06):
And now what can we move into eerie music because
I think that is shown very well in The Shining
with something we've already mentioned right, right, So I think
the two categories I just mentioned, I would say are
not even exhaustive of of scary movie music. Both of
these two tend to be used in sequences of heightened
tension or you know, you're you're you're really trying to
build dread. There's also just what you might call spooky

(46:28):
music or eerie music, and I think actually a lot
of the most iconic horror movie themes fit more into
this category. They're not used during scenes that are at
the height of terror or where you're feeling something terrible
coming on, but rather they tend to play early in
the film. They set a kind of uneasy mood that's

(46:49):
that's charged with other worldliness and uh, and these tend
to be more melodic than the other two kinds, and
they tend to sort of recur as themes throughout. So
I think of the tubular bells theme from The Exorcist
I would put in this category, or maybe even the

(47:19):
main Suspiria theme by Goblin in the original movie Suspiria.
I was thinking a lot of um, the nursery rhyme
sing song from Nightmare on Elm Street. I think that

(47:41):
that has that eerieness and to bring it back to
the shining like like we promised we would. That's where
I think all that nineteen twenties big band stuff lives.

(48:02):
All that is the eerie stuff where there's actually nothing
building about it. There's nothing violent happening from it. So
it's not terror, it's not horror. It's just setting a
vibe and it's a it's a spooky, eerie vibe. Yeah,
it invites you to uh, it invites you to a
different state of mind, and it just sort of invites

(48:22):
you to a realm in which other worldly things are possible.
I feel a lot of the the eerie music sort
of puts you in a mood to accept the supernatural
elements of horror plots. Uh this, I love this kind
of breakdown between terror into horror into eerie and like
just you know, I'm sure obviously we're still gonna be

(48:44):
missing some elements because the world is a multifaceted place.
But but with these three, I feel like you can
really break down most music and horror films. And so
I was thinking about a lot of my favorites. So
think about Friday thirteenth, you know, the families like kick
Mo Mama. That would definitely to me be a terror
because it's building, it's it's setting a tone, it's getting louder,

(49:06):
it's it's it's cre it's it's um. It's for telling
what's about to happen, you know, think about UM Dawn
of the Dead, where a lot of the Goblin synthesizer bits.
You know, it's it's the terror, it's the building, it's
it's the almost like um, almost like a machine out
of control. It's going faster and faster, and there's a there,

(49:26):
there's something happening in the background, and then all of
a sudden, there are these horror bits that when the
violence occurs. But again, getting back to major stuff, I
feel like the like the mall theme song stuff counts
as herey in the The Dawn of the Dead films,
you know, the bump bump bump, bump, bump, bump, bump,
bump bump, like all that stuff because we are in

(49:50):
a place and I guess kind of ironic too. It's
it's ironic that there are these happy songs playing, that
we're in a happy place, a shopping mall, and yet
it's the end of the world and these zombies are
destroying everything and killing us, you know, totally yeah, but yeah, yeah. Anyway,
I was just thinking about, like all my favorite scores,
and a lot of them kind of fit into these
these places. And I also noticed, based on these distinctions

(50:11):
between terror, horror, and eerie, I've noticed that a lot
of my favorite scores are all I think in the
terror realm. I think they're all that building a tonal
nonsense stuff like UM. I was thinking about the Mika
Levi score two Under the Skin. I was thinking about

(50:31):
the Tom York's score to the remake of Suspiria UM.
And I was thinking about the Colin Stetson score to
hereditary All all go ahead, Well, no, I was just
gonna say, I love all three of these examples. Yeah,
you single these out ahead of time, and I listened
to them, and yeah, just excellent, excellent choices, and uh,

(50:52):
they sort of have something in common, which is that
I don't think any of these are something you could
really like. Hum the tune too, so they're not They're
not really melodic. And I think perhaps kind of we're
talking about before about perhaps hand holding, I think perhaps
the terror element of this three different kinds of music,
the terror music does the least amount of hand holding

(51:14):
when it comes to comforting you. I think it is
intending to make you feel uncomfortable. It is and I
think all three of those I just mentioned because there
is no melody, because there is no rhythm, because there
is no harmony, because there is no there's no music
for for lack of a better word, it's mostly sound.
It makes you feel uncomfortable because anything could happen. And

(51:36):
I think that kind of lack of knowing what's around
the corner, that uncertainty, that lack of the world of
the unknown, is what makes a lot of people scared.
And I think that bringing back to the Devil's Interval
and the Devil's Triad that we mentioned before. A big
reason I've heard why the Devil's Triad is so eerie

(51:59):
is that because there is no logical next step for
the Devil's Triad. That when someone plays that note, you
don't know what the next note is going to be.
It could settle over here, it could settle over there.
It's unknown. It's it's not part of our common linear
musical thought. So that that that that sense of the unknown,

(52:21):
I think is in general spooky. I think that's I'm
not making any new assumptions there. Well, I mean this
was a big part of what we talked about in
our the episode You and I did on Free Song,
where uh it was it's clear that a big part
of people's experience of and reaction to music is tied
up in prediction. Uh. The people's ability to predict what's

(52:44):
going to happen next in music, and the degree to
which the music either conforms to those predictions or breaks
from those predictions is a major factor in determining how
we feel about music and the reactions that it gets
from us. You know that when we listen to music,
it is not out to passive exercise as much as
it feels like it. Our brains are always trying to
stay one step ahead of the music and and sort

(53:06):
of think what's going to be the next note, what's
going to happen next in the next bar? And so yeah,
I think clearly music has a great power to unsettle
us by denying us that predictive power by saying like
I'm not going to tell you what key I'm in?

(53:27):
Than all right, So I wanted to go on to uh,
the question of seeing if there's anything we can learn
about why some of these objective characteristics of horror music
feel subjectively scary to people. Uh, you know, why is
it that horror movie music tends to have these features
and not these Why is it why does it tend

(53:48):
to be in minor keys instead of major for example?
And I think the answer in a lot of these
cases is probably just going to be culturally and historically contingent,
as many things are so like why are hype organs
so often used in scary horror movie music? I mean,
I guess it's possible that somebody could make a convincing
argument that there's some interaction between the objective characteristics of

(54:11):
pipe organ sounds and our neurobiology. But I'm naturally kind
of doubtful of that. I think that's probably just a
result of random historical associations. But I think in some
cases there could be actual deeper reasons, biological reasons why
certain things sound scary to us. And so I was interested.

(54:31):
Has anybody written anything about this with regard to minor keys? Um?
And I couldn't find a really solid answer here, but
I was kind of interested by what I did turn up. So,
of course, minor keys in music are not just associated
with fear, but with a whole range of negative valenced emotions,
with sadness, with uncertainty, with ambiguity. Apparently this is a

(54:53):
robust finding across psychology of music research. Um. But the
question would be why, like why minor keys associated with
negative emotions, including fear. This appears to be a somewhat
unsolved question, but there are a lot of hypotheses floating around.
And so I came across a couple of interesting resources

(55:13):
commenting on this question. One was a scientific paper that
I'm going to talk about in a second. One was
just a popular press article in enemy by a music
psychology researcher named Vicky Williamson and she and this article
argues that negative emotional valance of minor keys is mostly
cultural conditioning, but there may be some deeper, something deeper

(55:34):
going on as well. And as one hint of associations
between tonality and emotion being deeper than pure cultural contingency.
UM she points to a scientific article that I thought
was interesting. So it was one that was published in
Current Biology in two thousand nine called Universal Recognition of
Three Basic Emotions in Music, and this was by Thomas

(55:56):
Fritz at All. And basically, this study exposed people of
different cultures to music from other cultures with which they
were previously unfamiliar to see if they could pick out
the intended emotional qualities of that music. UM. So, it compared,
for example, of the Western popular music to the music

(56:17):
of people of the MafA culture, who are people who
live primarily in Cameroon and Nigeria, and it turned out
that MafA people were able to pick out the emotional
valence and this has been between three major emotions, so
happy music, sad music, or fearful music. Uh. They were
able to pick out these emotions of pieces of Western

(56:38):
music at a rate above chance, even though they were
totally unfamiliar with it. Uh, though their performance at recognizing
these emotions was much lower than people who had a
previous cultural familiarity with it. And I think you could
take studies like this as perhaps evidence that some, certainly
not all, and maybe not even most, but but some

(56:59):
of the emotional associations of musical sound are in fact
neurobiological and common to all people. I would think so,
at least to a certain degree. But then again, that's
the kind of finding that's like, it's like, it's interesting,
but it's not quite enough for me to to like
fully conclude, Yeah, there's definitely like a universal biological association,

(57:19):
but it's like getting there so so so. Yeah, that
that that seems interesting. Um. Also not really related to
today's topic, but she pointed out something that I thought
was interesting in this paper, which is that, uh, there
was other research showing that pop music of the post
two thousand's apparently has more minor key tonality than pop
music of previous decades I think specifically of like the sixties,

(57:41):
and I wonder why that would be. Yeah, I'm sure
part of it is. Um, in all arts, there's always
actions and reactions. So if you just get too much
of something, artists are you know that they they feel
very uh, very much driven to do the opposite, like no,
I forget your cube is a man and I'm doing this,
you know. But I think we reached a similar uh

(58:06):
points of view and similar kind of stances when we
were discussing frisson in a previous episode, which is that, like,
it's really difficult to pin down the facts of music
because it does feel so ethereal, so personal, and the
only thing I think we really have to like definitely
established as music is that sometimes other people feel the

(58:28):
same way too about this thing that I'm experiencing. That's
that's about all you can say about it. But but,
but but I think this is a good point. The
the better than chance is something interesting about that? Yeah,
So that would tend to suggest to me that there
there might be something going on there. Maybe there is
a deeper neurobiological association between certain types of sounds that

(58:50):
we pair with certain types of emotions and and that
that could be approaching universality. But I'm still unconvinced on that.
I found another thing. It was a sud from published
in a journal called music key sciente and this was
called the Emotional Connotations of Major Versus Minor Tonality one
or more origins. This was by an Austrian researcher named

(59:13):
Richard Parncutt, who works on the psychology of music. Uh
and UH. I thought this paper was interesting just because
it collects a lot of the existing hypotheses about why
there are emotions associated with major versus minor key tonality. UM.
So I'm not going to get into these in depth.
And in fact, there's one that I honestly don't. I

(59:34):
gotta come clean, I do not understand enough about music theory,
but I'll try to explain the other ones as felt
as well as I understand. So one of them just
test to do with the concept of dissonance. Um, this
is that minor keys contain more dissonance than major keys.
So I'll try to make simple sense of this. And
also I'm not like, I don't know a whole lot
about music theory, but at least what I understand is that, um, okay,

(59:57):
when when you play any note, you play a note
within that one note, there are harmonics, and these harmonics
when you play a note tend to suggest what other
notes you could play with that note and what it
would sound like. You know, So a major key includes
natural harmonics of a root note, but a a minor key,

(01:00:24):
or especially a minor third, is kind of somewhat dissonant.
Perhaps we can hear an example. So the minor third
is a half step down from the major third, which
is the major third is a natural harmonic of the
root note, and the minor third is dissonant instead. It's

(01:00:45):
it's dissonant with that harmonic, so we find it less
harmonically harmonious. And uh. And so maybe this one's kind
of obvious, but it doesn't need a kind of final
connecting principle. Why is it exactly that harmonic dissonance is
associated with negative emotions? I don't know that that's kind
of hard to get under, but it just that one

(01:01:06):
feels very baseline natural that when you hear two dissonant notes,
it does sound like something is unresolved, or something is ambiguous,
or something is wrong. But how do we all know that?
That's the real question. Yeah, so I think there's probably
something very much to the fact that minor keys suggest

(01:01:27):
more negative valence to motions because they contain more dissonance
but that that, yeah, it still leaves this second level
question unanswered. Why is it that the dissonance is associated
with negative emotions? Um, and maybe some of these other
hypotheses have something to do with this. So the next
one is alterity and markedness. So in the abstract he
rights quote, major triads and scales are more common than minor,

(01:01:51):
and positive valance is more common than negative. Major and
positive valance are the norm. Minor and negative are marked others.
So maybe it's just the fact that major tonality is
common and normal, therefore we associate it with the good,
and minor tonality is a violation of what's common and normal,

(01:02:12):
of violation of the normal order. Therefore we interpret it
as bad or not necessarily bad. I don't know what
yet negative negative emotional content. And then thinking about what
you said a moment ago about how post two thousand's
songs in the minor key are on the charts far
more often than they wear back, let's say, in the
nineteen sixties. Yeah, I do wonder if there's a need

(01:02:34):
for that, if perhaps has to do with them just
kind of the tone and vibe of the world at
the time, if it has to do simply with trends.
Maybe certain songs become inexplicably popular that are in a
minor key, and others are just mimicking it, you know,
I mean it could be so many things. But um,
but yeah, but but not to be too negative towards
minor keys. Minor keys are just as popular as major

(01:02:56):
you know, they're they're great. Yeah, they're beautiful too. Again,
I'm not going to mention all these explanations, but one
more he brings up is, Uh, this is kind of
an interesting idea that it that major versus minor key
associations could have to do with speech. Um. There, it's
been suggested by some people that there are ways in

(01:03:16):
which major key tonality is more similar to typical speech
or happy speech, and minor key tonality is more similar
to sad speech. Uh. He singles out the idea that
minor keys and sad speech both contain pitches that violate
expectations by being lower than normal. So in a minor key,

(01:03:37):
think about hitting that major third and then versus hitting
that minor third, the minor third is a half step
lower than the major third. But okay, so it seems
to me like some of the major minor stuff. It
does probably have something to do with dissonance, dissonance being
associated with uncertainty and ambiguity, and that being being of

(01:03:58):
course associated with negative emotions. But there's still a lot
of sort of unclear steps in the logic there. I
don't know. It's this very much has my interest, but
I don't think we fully understand it, certainly I don't.
But there's there's another aspect here that I think is
probably much clearer when you're looking for biological reasons why

(01:04:19):
we might associate certain kinds of sounds or music with fear,
and this would be uh, mimicry of sounds that are
produced in our ancestral environment or by our ancestors themselves.
So this is the biomimicry segment here. Uh this is
probably not all that surprising, but it has been borne
out by research. And the question is this, what if

(01:04:41):
scary music works by mimicking sounds that our brains naturally
associate with danger, i e. Human screams. So I was
looking at a paper by Caitlin Trevor at All from
the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America published in
and uh so the author's right as follows, and they're abstract,
they say, quote, regarding fear, it has been informally noted

(01:05:04):
that music for scary scenes in films frequently exhibits a
scream like character. Here this proposition is formally tested. This
paper reports acoustic analyzes of four categories of audio stimuli screams,
non screaming vocalizations, scream like music, and non scream like music.

(01:05:24):
And then they also they collected information from people listening
to these sounds about the valence of the emotional meaning
was a positive or negative, and the level of arousal
that they experienced in in reaction to it. So what
does this actually mean? What are the objective characteristics of
screams that could be mimicked by horror music? Well, they
write as follows. They say, quote, typically human screams are okay, here,

(01:05:46):
you got loud. They utilize a wide range of frequencies,
they're higher in pitch than one's average vocal range, and
they have a high amount of roughness. Uh. And they
say that roughness is a basic auditory phenomenon that is
characterized by a coarse, grating or harsh subjective experience. But

(01:06:07):
that one's really fascinating to me. In particular because UM,
I think about UM a vocal performer straining to reach
a note and not being able to do it. I
think about UM, obviously a real person screaming actually in terror,
and how they are, you know, not really in control
of their voice. They're not trying to hit a note.

(01:06:27):
It is that strain once again. And then I'm sure
you've experienced this, Joe, and I'm sure many people anyone
who has used a program like Ableton or any of
these other like you know, MIDI style programs. There are
instruments that you pop in that it's not just a
standard like boo. It's not like a dial tone tone.
You can see in the little wave that it's got

(01:06:48):
a roughness to it, that it's got kind of like
a almost like a disintegrating sound to it, um, a rasp,
if you will, And that those are always the spooky ones.
Those are always like you know, like the ancient Oregon
number three, you know. Yeah, So here, I think we're
starting to get into some some pretty interesting territory. And

(01:07:09):
this will connect to some other stuff I want to
talk about in a minute. But so for this study
in particular, the authors found that so, first of all,
they they isolate exactly the characteristic you were talking about.
I think because they say, well, the other common characteristics
of screams are more difficult to isolate for study. I think,
I think in part because they're sort of relative, right,

(01:07:30):
you know, relative to uh, like, what is somebody's normal
vocal range, what is the normal volume you'd be listening,
and so forth. Um, But roughness you can sort of
single out as something that's easy to manipulate in a
fairly objective way. And they found that, yes, there was
support for the hypothesis that scary movie music mimics qualities
found in natural screams. What what it sounds like when

(01:07:53):
people scream? So they write in their discussion section quote,
consistent with our hypotheses, we found that both screams and
scream like music exhibited a higher level of roughness and
be rated as having more negative valence and a higher
arousal level than their non screaming counterparts. However, contrary to
our hypotheses, screams had a higher roughness level than scream

(01:08:16):
like music. And so I thought this was a little
interesting regarding that last statement they're finding was counter to
something they called the super expressive voice theory which they
credit to Juice Land and Vastfjal in two thousand and eight.
And this is a hypothesis that music is quote capable
of amplifying vocal affective behaviors beyond the capability of the

(01:08:40):
vocal system. So I think this would be the idea
that music is sort of a uh is sort of
a a super super normal version of human vocalizations, that
music plays a role of giving us the power to
vocalize beyond what humans can normally vocalize. Um. But so
it seems that some horror movie music probably works at

(01:09:00):
least in part by simulating screams, but that horror movie
music is not like a super amplification of natural scream effects.
Screams themselves are more psychologically powerful than I don't know,
the Halloween theme or any scream like music, which that
makes sense to me. It's like that episode of The
Simpsons where um, there is uh Lieutenant Lt. Smash and

(01:09:25):
he's making everyone join the navy with the pop song
even at niage, right, do you remember this one? I
don't think what season is this. This has to be
like thirteen or fourteen Get out of Come On. But
he says that the Navy uses three tactics for recruiting subliminal, liminal,
and superliminal. When they say superliminal, what's that, he yells

(01:09:49):
out the window to Lenny, Hey, you join the Navy. Oh,
that's pretty good. That's superliminal. And I think a scream
in this instance would be the superliminal of scare. Well,
this is scary. Here's a screat Yeah, so here's something
I wonder about. So, assuming this holds true, I wonder
if scream like music is in a way a way

(01:10:14):
of making scream like stimuli more tolerable for his more
sustained period of time. So if you're watching a horror
movie and you are just confronted with constant screaming sound effects,
I think that would be kind of that would be
greating to the point that you would not want to
continue watching the movie, even though it might get you
in a sort of like high fearful arousal state like

(01:10:37):
the movie is trying to conjure. So maybe music is
a is a sort of best of both worlds compromise
that it can simulate the neurobiological response we have to
the sound of a scream, but without being as graating
as actual scream sounds would be. That makes perfect sense.
It also I'm jumping to conclusions now, but it's all

(01:11:01):
tying together. So let's go back to the shining once
again and and think about Midnight the Stars and You. Okay,
that's the nineteen twenties song that plays over the credits
when we're zooming out or not not over the credits,
over the last shot, or we see Jack Torrence in
that crowd of like the Hey nineteen twenty one, and
he's like in the old photo, right, So the song

(01:11:22):
playing is Midnight the Stars and You, and it's an
old nineteen twenties big band song, etcetera, etcetera. And it
feels very spooky and very eerie, both because of the
context of the film as well as just the song itself.
I wonder if Old like Crack Lee Records, because they
do have that interrupted, non rhythmic, non intentional like crack

(01:11:47):
and break up, if that has an element of this
replicating a scream, because it is for the most part unintentional. Sure,
some musicians will intentionally add a crack all to their thing,
but they're doing that because they wanted to sound spooky.
You don't add you know, phonograph crackle and hiss if
you want something to sound happy. So I wonder if
that's adding that scream aspect and making those old things

(01:12:10):
sound extra spooky. Like we're discussing before, This might not
be exactly the same as roughness, but a feature that
has been studied in in the context of arousing fear
and that is what's called nonlinearity sonic non linearity. UM.
So there's a good bit of research on this other factor,
and a major figure in this area of the study

(01:12:31):
of the relationship between fear and nonlinear sound has been
a U c. L A biologist named Daniel Blumstein. I
was looking at some of his papers and some media
reporting about them as well as I watched a TED
talk that he did that was pretty interesting that included
actually playing some of the sounds he talks about, So
that's kind of useful. Um. But Blumstein apparently got into

(01:12:54):
this because he was studying marmots. So he's like a
biologist and I think ethologist studies and animal behavior. And
he tells this story that one day during field work
out in the meadows of I think it was California,
somewhere out studying marmots. He's holding a baby marmot in
his hand. This is an animal that had just recently

(01:13:15):
emerged from the borough where it had been born. And
he says that he heard this sound that just startled
him so much he almost dropped the animal. Uh. And
he he was kind of surprised that he was so
startled because he listens to animal vocalizations all the time
as part of his job, but they and they don't
usually affect him emotionally, but this one did. And one

(01:13:38):
of the characteristics, apparently of this distress cry omitted by
this little marmot was that it was kind of ragged.
And he goes on to explain that he started looking
at the auditory qualities of a number of different distress vocalizations,
not just in marmots, but in all kinds of different animals,
primarily mammals, I think, but eventually some of this research

(01:13:59):
was applied to other types of tetrapod animals like birds.
Um there's been at least one study in grackles I
was reading about. But in essence, the distress vocalizations, the
screams of many different animals showed a lot of similarities,
auditory similarities and one of these being what the researchers
call nonlinearities, and the main thing that he singles out

(01:14:21):
here under the heading of nonlinearities is noise sounds beyond
the boundaries of a clear vocal signal. I almost wonder
if we can compare two tones like a like a
clear version of a tone and then a noisy or
distorted version of that tone. So bloom Stein and co

(01:14:53):
authors have gone on to explain that these non linearities,
the noisy quality of of these distress calls and animals,
are usually a result of um the vocal production organs
like the vocal chords or in the case of birds,
I think this would be the cy ranks in in
a in a bird's vocal system, but in a mammal
like a human, I guess would be vocal chords. Uh.

(01:15:15):
This would be these organs exceeding their capacity. Uh quite literally,
analogous actually to turning up a speaker until the sound
gets distorted. So whatever it is, whether that's a you know,
an electronic speaker, or the organs in your in your
throat when the audio output hardware pushes beyond its normal limits,

(01:15:36):
especially I think in terms of volume, and maybe also pitch,
it produces this noise, these nonlinear acoustic features, and apparently
Blumstein found evidence of this trend in all kinds of animals,
again not just marmots, but you know, mere cats and
and other creatures that as they get more acutely distressed,
their vocalizations become not just louder, but noisier. Apparently this

(01:15:58):
is also true of what are known as recruitment calls.
This is a term in animal ethology for sounds that
an animal would make to summon other members of its
of its species, or its groups someone con specific, so
it'll bring allies to you, maybe if you've gotten lost
and separated from your group, but often just for protection
when you encounter a threat or a predator. Across all

(01:16:20):
different kinds of mammals, the at the crescendo of distress
and recruitment calls, there's this tendency to overload the vocal
production organs and then thus release these noisier, raspier calls
that are full of non linearities. And they did direct
research to test this out on on marmots and then
also on these these birds called Caribbean grackles and found that, yeah,

(01:16:44):
the the the noisier versions of the alarm calls, the
ones that had this more raspy, rough noisy quality, those
were associated with with increased levels of alarm and would
cause the animals to display less relaxation behaviors in response
to hearing it. But eventually, Blumstein and some colleagues got
together to study the sound characteristics of different movie genres

(01:17:07):
to see if this the non linearities, if the noisy
qualities of these vocalizations would also be found even in
human media such as horror movies. Like horror movies, uh
that they found that horror movies do tend to contain
not surprisingly uh noisy female scream sounds in them, right. Um. Also, interestingly,

(01:17:30):
in their data, they seem to find that sad films,
I guess these would be largely drama films tend to
include unusually low levels of noisy sounds in them. Huh Yeah.
I wonder if there's a uh, conscious effort to lull
you during a drama. I don't know. But then finally,
there was a twelve study they did where they put
together these original compositions, these little music clips, and they

(01:17:53):
would play these clips for people one way or the other.
One would play with very low levels of non lenier noise,
and one would play with very high levels of nonlinear noise.
And I listened to a couple of these back to back,
and it sounds to me like the ones with high
levels of nonlinearity would add things like fuzzy distortion type effects,

(01:18:13):
and so people would rate these in terms of level
of arousal and and valence positive or negative, And as
you might predict, the study found that noisier music causes
higher arousal and lower and more negative valence uh. Though interestingly,
this study in particular found that this was dependent on
visual context, so the music alone did have that predicted

(01:18:35):
effect that the noisier it was, the more nonlinearities, the
more it might be I don't know, say effective at
making you afraid in a horror movie. But if you
simultaneously prepaired those sounds with very benign or banal uh imagery,
like showing people video of somebody sitting drinking a cup
of coffee that appeared to mute the effects of the sound.

(01:18:58):
And so I wonder about that, I mean, I I
think about sort of the opposite experience of being able
to watch a horror movie where something very benign is
going on on screen, but there's ominous music playing, and
that does sort of give you this sense of like,
you know, a little bit of mounting terror irony about
about what's happening. But maybe that's just because you know

(01:19:19):
it's the context of watching a horror movie. I think
it would be fascinating. I know there are definitely instances
of people seeing horror films without realizing that their horror films,
and it would be fascinating to see how this data
shifts in those instances. Yeah, But anyway, this quality of
the non linearities, the noisiness quality in the sound really

(01:19:40):
got me thinking back about how I've I've never noticed
this before, really, but how much horror movie music features
some sort of kind of noisy percussion. So, for instance,
I went back and I listened to the original Halloween theme.
We all know that melody and the sort of mounting
synthesizer bass, but there is also this noisy, skittering thing

(01:20:04):
going on during the Halloween theme, this kind of skittering
sixteen note uh that that's almost a little bit off
tempo or or lagging slightly. It sounds kind of like
synthesizer high hats I'm not sure exactly what it is,

(01:20:27):
but this also got me thinking about the difference between
horror music and terror music. Again, I think both of
them there is a tendency to go for kind of
noisier tones when possible, but just something else I was
wondering about. I didn't find any research to this effect,
but I was wondering if horror music in particular, so
like think of the strings again in psycho horror music

(01:20:51):
at the moment of confrontation tends to sound more like
screams because it is communicating a definite and immediate rahet
and you know, it makes sense that it mimics a
distress call that an animal would make, whereas terror music
is more about uncertainty. And this could be a coincidence,
but it actually seems to me that maybe terror music

(01:21:13):
tends to want to mimic the sounds of growling, to
mimic the kind of low guttural warning growls of mammals.
So if you've ever been like you, I don't know,
approaching a dog that does not want you to approach it. Uh,
there's a kind of mounting, low thing that's releasing from
almost sounds like it's coming down from caves, you know,

(01:21:36):
like there's a warning of uncertain possibly impending violence that
seems more suited to the terror themes. And and and
this doesn't make me think more about like the Jaws theme. Yeah,
I mean that that makes sense to me. Yeah, Like, like
like you said, there's no science, uh to back this
up currently, but yeah, think about a music score low

(01:21:58):
rumbling and then violent violence, violence that is a dog grow, bark, bark, bark,
you know. Yeah. Yeah, So kind of with all this
information that's that's been dug up, I feel like we
were reaching a conclusion similar to the conclusion that we
reached when we were doing our episode on Freezon, which
is that there's some research to indicate a direction leaning

(01:22:22):
towards thoughts that kind of makes sense. However, because music
is so ethereal and so interpretive and so such a
magic trick, it's hard to pin it down, you know. So,
so I I think we we've taken big steps towards
something with understanding, but I don't think we can ever
really nail down art right Well, I mean it's hard

(01:22:46):
to give you know. I think sometimes people want to
give very clear biological logic to two things that are
complex in humans culture like art, and uh, I think
they're the lines are not usually that clear, but I
think you can identify interesting tendencies. So you know, you're
you're not going to find a evolutionary biology reason that

(01:23:09):
explains the melody of the theme to the shining, but
you might well find that there are some broad tendencies
in horror music that would be uh, that would be
pretty well predicted by certain kinds of things about what
the kinds of animals we are. And so I think
that might well correlate with things like a scream like
glassondi of violins in a horror movie, when you know

(01:23:29):
when the killer comes out with the knife and the
granny wig on or or the the growl like mounting
terror music. But yeah, of because there's not a biological
or deterministic code for what kind of art develops, you
know that there's there's just too much. There are too
many inputs on it. At the very least, Uh, anyone
listening right now can think about their favorite horror score

(01:23:50):
and pin down the differences between the terror songs, the
horror songs, and the eerie songs. That's a fun game.
But well, what do you what do you think about
Chariots of Pumpkins. My this has got to be one
of my all time favorites. The score for Halloween three
is just the best, and that may come up again
on this podcast quite soon. Yes, um, my first instinct

(01:24:12):
is to say terror. However I'm leaning also towards erie. Yeah.
I think it just kind of sets the mood. I mean,
Chariots of Pumpkins doesn't doesn't really make me tense up,
kind of puts me in a in a in a jolly,
in a jolly computer witchcraft mindset. It just makes me
feel like, ah a a banshee virus has infected the synthesizer. Bang. Yes, fascinating.

(01:24:39):
Yeah yeah. So yeah, it's October, so I'm sure many
people listening are spending them on watching horror films. While
you're watching, some start thinking to yourself horror versus terror
versus eerie and what they're doing to your brain? Okay,
well I think that's got to wrap it up here. Uh.
This one also turned into a long episode. We you know,
we end up talking about horror mo movies and horror music,

(01:25:01):
uh for quite some time. Huh. But hey, seth one
one more time. You wanna remind people where they can
find your new music podcast. Yeah, if you'd like listening
to me talk about music, go look up Rusty Needles
Record Club wherever you find podcasts. It's very easy to find.
Every Friday there's a new episode. Uh. When this is
a brand new episode dropping, there are at least two

(01:25:23):
episodes for you to listen to, and more will come
every Friday after that. Amazing. Check it out Rusty Needles
Record Club wherever you get your podcasts. As for Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, Rob's going to be back with
me for our next core episode, so definitely tune in
for that, and uh, it's gonna be a blast. We're
so excited about October. We've been lighting candles and brewing

(01:25:43):
potions for months now. Um. Anyway, so uh yeah, I
guess that that about does it. So if you want
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you know where to find us. We're on anywhere you
get your podcast. This is the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcast. Uh. We're offering pretty much daily episodes now,
so on Monday's we do listener mail. On Tuesdays and

(01:26:04):
Thursdays we do classic core episodes of the show, which
tend to be about science off often intersecting with some
kind of cultural topic, maybe with with history or monsters
or literature or something. On Wednesdays we do a short
form episode called the Artifact. On Friday as we run
an episode from the Vault, and I guess generally an
episode of Yesteryear. But but yeah, I guess that's it.

(01:26:27):
So if you would like to get in touch with
us with feedback on this episode or any other. Oh
and as always, of course, big thanks to Seth for
editing this one even though he's on it. Thanks for
joining me and for editing this this monster episode. But
but yeah, if you would like to get in touch
with us on this uh, in response to this episode
or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or

(01:26:49):
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
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(01:27:09):
favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Science of Scary Music