October 30, 2014 • 38 mins
Why is scary music so scary? Why does an uncanny tune creep us out so? Is it all context and culture or is there something deeper at work? In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie provide the answers and Christopher Gladwin of The Wyrding Module provides some unsettling tunes and a few answers of his own.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, everybody, wasn't the Stuff to Blow
Your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
It is Halloween weak here at Stuff to Blow Your
Mind and then the rest of the world really to
be honest, and so we wanted to roll out a
(00:23):
couple of our favorite Halloween episodes. So today we are
resurrecting the science of Uncanny Music, which is one of
our favorites and one that we've received a lot of
of praise for from listeners. So we thought, hey, let's
bring it back. Yeah, if I remember correctly, this, this
is when we explore the violent streams in Psycho and
the psychological effect, which is pretty interesting because can you
(00:47):
imagine a world without Psycho and that? Yeah, yeah, we
really get to the question, you know, is the is
the music in Psycho scary in and of itself or
is it dependent entirely upon the movie that you're watching,
or is it some shade of gray between the two?
Find out. Since this is the Halloween season and we're
(01:11):
talking about creepy, uncanny, scary, frightening sonic experiences, let's kick
this episode off with just a little bit of the
uncanny from the Weirding Module. We should talk about this
(01:45):
weird module. Yes, yeah, just yeah, real quick, this is
the Weirding Module. This is a solo project from musician
Christopher Gladwin uh as soon as you may name, is
one half of Team do Yobi and very accomplished musician
has his hands in a number of different projects, but
this one is all about the uncanny, about at times
(02:05):
the frightening, the unsettling. This particular track was titled Chapter
one Abysmal Cathedrals Arise from mel flurious ire from some
less regions. And right there that gives you a clue. Yeah,
it gives you a clue. And uh and if you
recognize the tune, and that's because he's utilizing Symphony Fantastic
(02:25):
from Hector Berlioz. And you may also recognize it because
Wendy Carlos used it in the theme to The Shining.
So what we are introducing to you today is this
idea that a scary movie could perhaps be less scary
or not even scary without the sort of soundtrack that
(02:46):
goes along with it, really amping up our experiences while
we're watching something on the screen, and when you listen
to something like the Weirding Module, you can already start
to sense that this ease, that that sort of d
centering that that music makes you feel with some of
the chords and some of the ways that it's arranged. Yeah,
so it it raises the question, and this is the
(03:07):
question we're gonna explore in this episode to what extent
is there something just innately creepy, uncanny, scary, frightening about
music like this or is it all cultural? Is it
all contextual? So we're gonna unravel that. But but first,
just to to to rehash, we did an episode of
a while back called music on the Brain where we
talked about the various ways that didn't music Uh speaks
(03:29):
to us on a conscious and subconscious level. Uh, And
we have to think about music and stuff. What is music?
You know? It's obviously it's a deep part of our
cognitive architecture. It changes our mood, it heightens our emotions. Uh.
And we'd have to find a culture that didn't or
doesn't have it. And some evidence even suggests that the Neanderthals,
in absence of language, may have used music as a
(03:51):
means of communication. Um. Indeed, there are also parts of
the brain that respond to music. They don't respond to languid,
separate parts of the brain that respond to the male
pality of language, different from the parts that respond to
the melody of music. So music is really kind of
this uncanny thing in and of itself. Yeah. I like
to bring up cognitive psychologists and ling with Stephen Pinker
(04:12):
because he's the guy who he's probably pretty brilliant guy,
but he did say music is just auditory cheesecake, an
accident of evolution. But when we look at music a
little bit deeper than we really begin to see that
the case that was made in the documentary The Music
Instinct with Bobby McFerrin, that music actually maybe a precursor
(04:34):
to languages. You had said, um is there because you
think about music and there's no one music center in
our brains. And as you had said, their music used
a certain parts of our brain that language doesn't. UM.
One of the parts that music recruits, and I think
this is so interesting is the visual cortext And it's
thought that the visual cortex actually maps a visual of
(04:55):
how the pitch and tone are changing, and in turn,
music moves us literally moves us. We dance to it
because we envision the movement in it. So keep that
in mind as we continue to talk a little bit
more about music and how it manipulates this um, and
particularly spooky music, how that might motivate us. The manipulation
(05:16):
is key here because when when music psychologists talk about
music and emotion, they often distinguished between emotion perception, which
refers to the perception of emotions expressed by the music.
Like oh um, the sprint the boss is singing about
some sort of sad working class story and run in
with the law. That's a sad story. The song is sad.
(05:37):
I'm interpreting the sadness of it. Can you say the
boss you're talking about? Of course, of course he's still
the boss. I don't I don't think he's that that
position has has not been vacated yet. Uh. And then
there But then there's emotion induction, and this refers to
the listeners effective response to the music. But I think
it's interesting about this. It's not just the emotional arousal.
It's that we actually will show a physical demonstration of emotion.
(06:01):
And there's a two thousand and nine study of twenty
six people who it turns out for a strong correlation
between subjective emotional response and objective physical response to music.
The paper is called the Rewarding Aspects of music listening
are related to a degree of emissional arousal, and it
details the chills that someone can feel when they're listening
(06:22):
to something flesh, whatever you want to call it, and
have you you yourself experience this when you listen to
any music. Um, I think the one that comes to
mind is um Centerman by Nana Simone, and I'm talking
about the live version. It's like a ten minute long song.
It is Actually you don't want me to do that,
(06:45):
because I would do that for ten minutes gonna be insane.
But if you listen to that piece of music, it's
a rollicking right of emotions and the piano just gets
crazy at some points, and it's a it's a very
emotional song and there's um a lot of syncopated rhythm
with the clapping which is a stand in for the
percussion in it. Very nice. Well, well, I was trying
(07:06):
to think of songs that have the similar effect on me,
and for my own part, radioheads everything in its right place.
Every time I listened to that, particularly just the first
few seconds of it, when with this kind of cascade
of notes, sort of finding synchronicity like that always gives
me chill bumps. Again, I think if you stay cascading
and there's that movement, yeah, it's definitely the movement of
(07:28):
the music, and and my body moves with it. I
just get to get the chills every time. These twenty
six people who underwent this experiment, well machines measured their
heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, and galvanic skin response.
This is how much basically they were sweating in response
to the music and their blood volume pulse and uh.
(07:48):
They were asked to click a button every time that
they felt really aroused. And so number four, they're four
clicking button was the button that correlated with chills. And
so they found that the chills occurred at the highest
moment of pleasure reported I think that's interesting that it's
a pleasurable response and yet chills is the expression of
(08:09):
the body. Yeah, you're you're intensely satisfied by the music,
but it's giving giving you chills. Um. And there's another
study we looked at here from You're All just Jack
Panckship of Bowling Green State University. This one's interesting because
he found that people listening to music often experienced goose
bumps because of sad feelings more so than happy or
excited emotions. But a lot of this came down to
(08:30):
um melancholy associations with the past, which which is kind
of like, you know, getting into the context issue of
all of this. For instance, that song that you listen
to a hundred times in a row during a breakup,
you listen to it ten years later. You don't care
the least bit about that individual, but that music can
still stir something and there's a bit of nostalgi in
(08:51):
that as well. You know, it sort of sucks you
back a little bit into that emotional state. It wasn't.
The idea behind that is that the listener is filling
us logic or sad because they and having these bumps
as a response because they physically are missing the warmth
of that person. Yes, the researcher argues that music and
news chills are tied into the chemicals released in our
(09:13):
brain to deal with social loss. So the idea is
that our ancient ancestors might have experienced as if they
are separated from a family member all right, you you
wander off, and then the cries you hear in the
air of of of of the lost family members that
that will call it cause a chill inside you and
cause you to have this desire to reach out to
(09:33):
the warmth of others. And I thought it was interesting
that this was the response, that these chill bumps, even
for someone who would be singing or listening to the
Star Spangled Banner. And I thought, Okay, that's a little
bit odd. But when you a little cheesy, no, it's fine,
it's fine, it's nice, it's nice. But if you peel
that back a little bit, and then you can say, okay,
(09:54):
well what is it to be to be moved by
that song? You feel united with your countrymen and country women.
So in a sense, there there's that community based longing. Well,
it's like with with with so many issues we've discussed.
You can find the sort of core of like ancestral
animal organism sense to what happens, but then you pile
(10:14):
enough layers of human complexity and human cognition and it
just turns it into a maze. Yeah, And just to
further compound that the maze too, of course, we're going
to have to look back at the brain because I
want to look at the amygdala for a moment, in
particular when we talk about scary music, because the amygdala,
as we know, processes emotion, memory, fear, and to test
(10:37):
out the theory that certain strains of music can ramp
up or dial down the fear response, researchers in Oxford,
England played different kinds of music for people's who who'se
amygdala's had been removed because of an illness or an accident,
and then people without this part of the brain the
actually had trouble recognizing scary music, whereas people with their
(10:58):
amygdala's intact had a definite response when scary music was played,
as shown by the brain scanners. So again there's an
idea that there's so many different parts from your brain
that are weighing in on the notes that you hear. Now,
I know what in a reviewer probably wondering to what
extent is it contextual? Is it cultural? Um For instance,
(11:18):
the music we heard at the top of the the
program um A, it's by an act known as the
weirding modul So some of you would if you hear
that you interpret this kind of strange sounding name you're
bringing that into the game, or you're recognizing the piece
of music sample in the work as a as being
familiar to something in the shining. We're bringing all this context,
we're bringing all this culture, and so of course we
(11:39):
interpret it as creepy. So if you were to play
creepy music for someone who had zero experience with any
of that, would they still find it scary. You're talking
about the study of the MafA people in Cameroon who
had never ever heard any sort of strains of Western music,
and they were introduced to three Western musical clips. One
(12:01):
that is typically thought to be sad, one that's happy,
and one that's spooky. All three examples. By the way,
it sounds like something that would play during like a um,
an old silent film that would be played on the piano,
you know, trying somebody to the railroad tracks kind of
a thing right in the music speeds up, um all right.
These Cameroonians were also shown something called Ekman faces, and
(12:26):
these Ekman faces are photos of standardized expressions of emotions.
So in this case, they had a happy, sad, and
scared face to look at while they listened to the music.
And just like Westerners the Cameroonians correlated the music type
with the same facial expressions. So that would tell you
that there's some universality to it. Now that's not There
(12:48):
are other studies that say, no, that's there. You know,
some that negate this because there are other cultures that
might hear certain notes in interpret in different ways. Yeah,
when you get in deep into saity of difference between
Eastern and Western music trends in Middle Eastern music versus
Western music, then things get a little more complicated. Well,
I was just thinking about Chinese opera, which the tones
(13:12):
in a Chinese opera might sound very um, harsh or
dissonant to the Western year, but very pleasant to Eastern year. Yeah,
there's a fabulous I think in ther piece in the
past year about Western and Western musician a Western opera
singer traveling to China and engaging in Chinese opera and
sort of dealing with the the the contrast between Western
(13:33):
opera and Chinese opera, I mean, some of the overlap
of the performers, and it's it's interesting because they are
such different animals well and even in language. And Alison
and I had kind of talked about this a little bit.
There's a musicality to language, and if you look at
something like Vietnamese, one word can be said in five
(13:53):
different tones, I mean five entirely different things. So similar
thing in Mandarin. Yeah, yeah, so it's much more nuanced
and it has to be taken into account. But Christopher Gladwin,
the man behind the Weirding module, had some very interesting
thoughts on this universality. Yeah. It was exchanged some emails
UH with Chris and he had a lot of great
(14:14):
in photo to share and sadly between the two of us,
we didn't have time to do an audio interview, but
I'll hopefully be sharing some stuff on the blog from
him in the weeks they had. He said, quote, there
are sounds which almost universally caused revulsion or fight or
flight responses. The sound of vomiting came out is the
most obnoxious auditory experience in a worldwide Internet survey conducted
by Professor Trevor Cox. The reason for this, UH is
(14:37):
that we're it's hardware to our biology avoid those that
are disgorging the contents of their stomachs unless you want
the same to happen to you. Other sounds that came
out on top where babies crying and nails down at blackboard.
Both of these sounds have relatively complex, high frequency tones
that we are evolutionarily designed to respond to. Having a
year old daughter, I can appreciate this. Many industrial bands
(14:59):
have used such a casual tactics robbing gristle and their
use of recordings of dogs attappicking a dummy, etcetera. And
he goes on to UH to discuss this in further depth,
and I will hopefully share that with everyone later on.
But but yeah, there's certain things that just as an organism,
we feel this either discussed with or this aversion to,
(15:20):
or it just sets up all our alarms. I mean,
the baby crying. I I too am experiencing that one
with the toddler that time my wife and I have
have adopted and he will he'll start, you know, crying
or tuning up a little bit in the middle of
the night, and it just has this intense effect on me,
uh to where even after I've I've put him back
to sleep, my heart is just still beating like crazy,
(15:42):
like it's just it's reaching behind my brain and uh
and you know, grabbing hold of the reptilian portion there
right now, is your camp biscuit mimicking the cries of
a newborn? Yeah, well, you know there's that argument that
that's what cats are doing anyway, and they're they're perverse
means of manipulating a humans, And so yeah, we'll have
they'll be situations where the child is authentically crying and
(16:05):
then the cat is also crying and it's mock human voice,
and it's it's you know what this is like, it's frustrating.
It becomes a loud household at three am. Yes, yeah, um.
Christopher Gladwin also mentions there was a sound that he
found difficult to describe. Michael Geret of the Swans, he said,
put it best that sex death sound that comes from
somewhere deep inside. There are some experiences of sound that
(16:28):
you just get that right. You tried to spot off.
That's the best I can do. Feeling from and some
sort of possession occurs. I believe that this connects with
some subterranean evolutionary memory, something in our ancestral reptilian fish brain.
We still have this the sigil fish ears, you know,
and I thought, you know what that sound? Let me
(16:49):
tell you this and I'm gonna give you the context
it was not a sexual context, so you don't have
to put your hands up to your ears and say no,
no, no no no. I did something called the seven minute workout.
Do know about this? It's awful. It is like this
ramped up, high density crazy workout you do for seven minutes,
just the best and highest rate that you can. Okay,
(17:11):
And I heard these noises coming out of myself that
I was a little bit ashamed of. I felt a
little bit like freaked out that they were actually coming out.
But I understand what he's saying. There's a guttural like,
oh my god, I'm dying inside noise that I had
never heard come out of myself before. And so there
(17:31):
is something to that, this evolutionary like, oh there's something wrong. Yeah.
An example of that, I was driving my child around
in the middle of the night, trying to get him
to sleep immediately after returning home, and his super jet
lagged now his jet lag, And so I was listening
to Radio Lab catching up in some Radio Lavish episodes,
and there's an excellent one they did recently on rabies.
(17:52):
And in that episode they play some audio of humans
who have rabies and are experiencing that rage and that
just you know, the mindless rage that is associated with
the later stages of Rabies. And it was extremely unsettling
to hear those sounds like and it's and I wonder
to what extent that's kind of cross somebody, that this
this idea, that that that is on some level human,
(18:13):
but it must be bodily possessioned by some outside force
that is making that kind of noise. And you're right,
that bodily possession, as if you are outside of yourself
or something was outside of itself. All right, we should
probably take a quick break, and when we get back,
we you and I Robert Lamb are going to actually
sing some of the strains of music classics, not because
(18:35):
we necessarily want to do that to your ears, but
because we have no budget, correct, right, So stand by
all right, we're back, Robert. Did you know that in
the original cut of Psycho that Hitchcock did not want
(18:57):
those high pitched violin screens to accompany the shower scene
fa iconomy. He sorry about that. Again, we have no budgets,
so that's which you guys are getting. Um. It was
actually his wife, Alma Revel, who was a script writer
and actually a director of her own right, and an
(19:20):
editor who said, no, no, no, you need to check
out Bernard Herman's score that he's created for this. It's amazing.
It's going to do its thing. And they actually tested
two versions, one with the with the violins and one without,
and apparently when they showed the audience when without, they
were a little like, okay, so this this one is
getting hacked enough in a shower. But when they accompanied
(19:42):
the violence strains of Bernard Herman, people freaked out. It's
interesting to think of having not scene the scene without
the music, and it's hard to imagine because such an
iconic scene and you go together so well, and when
I imagine the scene in my mind, and I think
that's a really horrific scene. You know, even even though
it it doesn't show as much um in way in
(20:06):
the way of nudity or bloodshed that you might. You
know that I'm sure you can get away with today. Uh.
It's so effective and so disturbing, and yet the music
is what seems to make it so effective, like in
in a sense we can't feel or even imagine what
those the stabs feel like physically, because most of us
have not been brutally stabbed with a butcher knife before,
(20:28):
but the music kind of fills that place. It's interesting
that you say that it's it's not that much nudity
and it's not that much violence, because then what you thought,
because a lot of people when they when they ask people,
you know, about that scene, they tend to envision much
more violence and nudity than there actually is because of
that heightened emotionality there. I think, Um, and of course
(20:50):
it's that high pitch sound, and we'll get a little
bit more into that in terms of the animal world. Um,
but I wanted to mention that in terms of pitch.
Daniel Blumstein uh He scrutinized on two films and found
that horror films had a higher than expected number of
abrupt shifts up and down and pitch, which he reported
in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters. So already you
(21:14):
can see that they are very different ways that UM
filmmakers and musical composers can manipulate the brain. In terms
of psycho that was just something that they didn't necessarily know, like, hey,
we've got all these neuroscientists saying like the amygdala is
going crazy. It was just sort of a hunch that
this music would heighten the effect. Yeah. So, like you said,
(21:34):
they didn't have the neuroscientists, but they did have musical tradition. Obviously,
run Herman knew what worked because when you look at
stuff like Peter and the Wolf, you know, that's a
classic one that we always learned in like elementary music class,
where every character has kind of their own little jaunty
number and you you're you're told by your music teacher, oh,
well this this music is behaving like this, because this
is what's happening in the story. Um. Some of the
(21:57):
basics though, cord tempo in amplitude. Okay, So with chords,
we have minor and major chords, and in a very
very broad sense, minor chords evoke sad feelings. Major chords
are happy. Um, at least again in Western music. Um,
you tay. And the interesting thing is if you take
(22:17):
something in a major key and you translate it into
a minor key, you go from happy too sad. As
a as an engineer, a musician by the name of
Oleg Berg has demonstrated he's a from the Ukraine and
he has a YouTube account. Takes a number of songs
such as the rhythmic sweet dreams are made of these
minor key transforms. It tweaks, it makes it a major
(22:41):
key song, and it's suddenly a different entire emotional experience.
Suddenly it's upbeat and not kind of dark and uh
and you know foreboding. Uh. That's the same thing with
losing my religion. Instead of it being this kind of
you know, down song about oh I've lost my religion,
I've kind of lost my way, it's more like I've
lost my religion, I'm free, I'm happy, and Michael Stipes
is sansing around. It's more in keeping with you know,
(23:03):
it's the end of the world as I know it,
as opposed to what we we have come to expect
from losing my religion. Now. He also took the song
don't Worry Be Happy, recorded by Bobby mcfarren. Are you
familiar with that? Yeah, don't worry as long I wrote,
I mean just relentlessly upbeat, right, And he put that
in a minor key and I don't know, it's it
(23:26):
sounds like the beginnings of a mental breakdown. Yeah, it's
like it brings to mind the happy bobbing Farren reduced
to hopping on a box car somewhere like shivering. Yeah,
you're like, there's there's gonna be problems ahead. I know
you're saying don't worry, be happy, but it doesn't sound
like you really mean it. So it's amazing that just
that shift can create that sense of dread and doom.
(23:48):
Now it's interesting with pop music, is pointed out by
Glenn Shellenberg of the University of Toronto. If you look
at through the nine eighties and the nineties, UH, there's
definitely a dominance of the major key in the top forties,
but it begins to shift slowly at first and then
really radically, and by two thousand nine only eighteen out
of the top forty songs are in the major key.
(24:08):
So there various explanations for this. And partially, people get
kind of used to the major key UH preference in
pop music and it becomes more and more cliche. So
avoiding cliches, the trend moves towards the minor key. But
also there's the the idea that people were coming around
more to the idea that life is not so happy,
(24:30):
that life is maybe a little more nuanced and a
little more ambiguous, and then their sadness uh at least
around the corner from any happiness, if not meshed in
it to begin with. So even something that is more
or less universal, you start applying enough cultural influence to it,
it can begin to shift. It's interesting that that's, Um,
(24:51):
that that's something that's happening, because I was just thinking
about the Halloween music that the are you familiar with
that one? The John Carper John you are, yeah, John Carpenter,
Alan Howorth both both I mean John Carpenter excellent director, fighter, etcetera,
but also an accomplished musician, and his work with Allan
Howorth is is some of my favorite stuff. But that
music has been sampled in pop music. And yeah, and
(25:15):
that actually is a really good example of tempo in
an odd meter. And we talk about tempo, we're talking
about how how fast or slow the intent intent intent entent. Again,
you feel the motion in that music, right, Yeah, Like
even as you were you were doing that, you were
(25:35):
bopping back and forth as if you were running right.
And Um, the thing about that is that most music
uses beat counts divisible by two, but the Halloween score
uses an odd meter of five four. That sort of
creates that weird like catch up feeling to do like
you just can't really quite get there. Yeah, Like you're
just you're trying to stay one step ahead of the
(25:56):
mass killer. You're trying to get to the car before
the mass kill that gets you, but you're not quite
there exactly. And now think about your visual cortex trying
to map that and all while you're watching Jamie Lee
Curtis do that. It works perfectly. Yeah, yeah, girl, you
in danger. Yeah, all of that is happening. And according
to Neil Learner, he is a professor of music at
(26:17):
Davidson College and Davidson, North Carolina and an expert in
horror film music, one that music technique is messing with
that tempo to suggest that chase, and he says that
musical music typically speeds up and grows louder as the
danger closes in. And he says, my hunch is that
our brains here that music in terms of being hunted,
Our instincts tell us a creature is upon us and
(26:39):
we need to run away or just turn and fight it. Well,
there's obviously one great example of that that everyone's already
thinking of. Boom boom boom, bum boom boom boom, pumomum pomummmmmm,
(26:59):
pump pump, bump, bump, and then the shark attacks Jaws.
Of course, of course, yes, classic John Williams score, iconic
John Williams score been sampled all over the place, but
not here because we can't afford it, so that you
know that I'll have to do. But yeah, you've got
those Christian doing minor chords that again slicing in. And
(27:21):
obviously you can't run from a shark. Um. I mean
you can't. But if you're running from the shark, you're
really okay, you don't run land, Yeah, you're good. But
but it does bring this ideas like I'm stepping, I'm stepping,
I'm walking a little faster, and then I'm running. Uh
and and it just grabs us right uh, you know,
right right at the root of our reptilian brain. Yeah.
And then in the middle of that you have a
(27:41):
high pitched noises in in terms of the whistle, right,
you've got the lifeguard on the beach blowing the whistle.
And then when Jaws finally gets victim, you've got the
big note pulling the person under corresponding with it. I'm
telling you right now, if I had some sort of
galvanic skin response that was looking at my like how
(28:02):
much I was sweating? They would feel it right now.
Just in talking about it now. To return to Daniel Bloomstein,
he also pointed out that when he looked at a
hundred and two different film scores, he found it, among
other things, the screams of animals were used in several
key scenes in horror films, including such iconic films as
The Exorcist and The Shining Um. And and this is
(28:23):
this is a is very interesting because in a sense,
it's very straightforward. The cries of animals are going to
resonate with us in the same way the cries of
of humans are going to resonate with us. Yeah, and
didn't he get this idea of of really looking at
these film scores for animal cries because he was working
with actually yellow bellied marmots and he notices that when
(28:44):
the research went to go and grab the marmots that
they would have these high pitched screams. And he thought, wow,
I wonder you know what that's doing to our brains.
And then he examined those film scores and then found
those the animal screess I thought was really interesting. So he,
along with film composer Michael Kay, created a study here,
(29:05):
of course pattern on these screaming marmots, and they had
a neutral music clip as well as music segments with
nonlinear sounds, so that Mormot was creating a discordant nonlinear sound. Yeah,
and that's something that the Christopher Gladwin brought up as well.
That Discordia, of course is big. And the music you
think of all the shrieking, clanging noises, the one that
(29:27):
comes instantly to mind Texas Chainsaw Masca has a highly
effective score and it's another film that isn't nearly as
violent or bloody as some people think it is. That
it's just everything just fell together perfectly in that film.
So you have Discordia and then you have you have
these these animal sounds popping up and uh. And another
thing Gladwin mentioned is the taking of animal sounds or
(29:51):
other sounds that are natural, tweaking them into an unnatural
area and then they hit us in a way wherever
like what is that? I don't know what that is?
And the fear of the unknown is summoned. Yeah. I
noticed this when we visited nether World last year. In
the hunting house in the background, there were these sort
of clinging elements that were going on. Now this was
just the house music before they have actual music though, no, right,
(30:14):
there was no like um, but you know, is this
way of kind of setting the scene and making people
feel a little bit uncertain about it because you're going
to do what's it? What sound is coming next? You know,
our pattern recognition craving brains don't know what to make
of it. So we're on edge where we don't know
what's happening next. Yeah, someone please play that chasing music
so I know to run alright. So in this experiment
(30:37):
that that k and Plumstein created, uh, they found that
participants were far more stimulated by the nonlinear music segments.
In addition, this is so interesting to me. If the
nonlinear melodies became higher, the emotional reaction was more pronounced,
much like a mother tuning into the tensed vocal cord
screams of the baby mormot. And so what he's saying
is that um that these vocal cords straining sounds are
(31:02):
unbluffable signs of fear in the animal world, and of
course they would be in in the human world as well.
And it made me think back to those high pitched,
strangled um pitches of the violin during the Psycho shower scene.
In fact, let's listen to a marmot screen because we
have a little clip, all right, so you can kind
(31:29):
of hear that there's there's that element. And how did
they get the scream out of the marmot? Do we
want to know? I think that they continually advanced upon
the mormot until they were like, you're you're in my
zone here feeling uncomfortable. Okay, as long as no marmots
were harmed. Okay. So we've talked a lot about the
way that that's scary music, on settling music, on canny music,
(31:51):
how it will enhance some the visuals of a horror
movie or what have you. But what happens when we
take take away the visual text from the music, Well,
it turns out that it can do a couple of
different things. If you if you take away from the context,
you can actually water down the effect. Because Bloomstein had
(32:11):
a second stage of his study and participants were asked
to watch objectively boring videos we're talking about drinking coffee
or reading a book, which was paired with nonlinear music. Okay,
So they found that the same disort of music was
much less emotionally stimulating and much less scary when it
(32:32):
went along with something that was just kind of wrote.
So watching a guy press his pants while a music
box track plays is just pretty ho hum, right, yeah,
And you know there's no room for interpretation in these
examples either. It's not like, say, imagine like a film
of a of a mother approaching a cradle, where it
seems like that's asitution at which and where if you
(32:54):
played happy music, you know, sad music or or scary music,
you could really force us to to to make the
story in our own head. It's like, oh my, you know,
oh my goodness, what's in that cradle? What's not in
that cradle but a guy ironing his shorts. You know,
that's probably not going to be a pitch for a
horror movie anytime soon, unless those tinny strains of a
music box are playing and then they pan to like
(33:15):
a Portla indulve batting her eyes and you hear door creek. Yeah,
and then you have a student film, Yes, how did
you know that was my fil And then here's another
aspect of this, of the visual context is that when
you shut your eyes, you change the emotional landscape. And
(33:36):
I want you guys to guess out there, would it
be more horrific or less horrific. I would have guessed
less horrifically yes before this, simply because it's something that
I do when I don't, you know, I think that
I'm lessening the experience. And I'm watching watching some scary
and then you close your eyes and it's like my
my friend Dave will blur his eyes out during scary
(33:57):
parts in the movie to accomplish the same thing, like
to sort of stare at nothing. Um. I guess it
didn't surprise me because I listened to enough creepy music
that I do find that, like I'm listening to weirding
module where I'm listening to like Throbbing Gristle or or
what have you, Chris Carter, and it's uh, if I'm
if I'm zoning out or I'm closing my eyes, it
(34:19):
really takes on a richer, darker form in my mind.
I'm still stuck on Throbbing Gristle. Oh, They're one of
the mainstays. It's just the combination. One of the creepiest
tracks of all time. Hamburger lady, look it up if
you want to feel terrified. Okay, throbbing gristle, hamburger lady.
All right, and research published in the Public Library of
(34:39):
Science one by Tel Aviv University researchers found that the
premise of squinting your eyes shut during a freaky scene
may actually heightened your fear responses. We've just said. Volunteers
listened to Hitchcock style music twice, once with their eyes
open and once with their eyes shut, and with their
eyes closed, their migdalas were far more active, and volunteer
(35:00):
said that they also felt the emotional effects being much
more pronounced when when they were completely in the dark
listening to this. So it seemed to wire together a
direct connection to the regions of our brain that process emotions.
And it's not merely subjective. They're using a functional m
r I and I can see the distinct changes in
the brains were more pronounced in the person's eyes were
(35:20):
not being used. Yeah, so the idea is that you're
actually better able to focus on your fear response. Yeah,
which is you know, climbing to this fMRI machine listened
to some really unsettling music and want to see what happens. Yeah,
that's cool, right, So I mean those are a couple
of ways that that music can actually game our response.
And I was thinking about this in terms of political ads.
(35:42):
Oh yeah, you know those sort of dot notes that
are played sometimes to cast one of the politicians really
does know what's best for America. Don't, don't, but she really. Yeah.
Another great example of this in terms of changing the
music changing the tone of something. If you've ever seen
(36:03):
the trailer for Shining um so available on YouTube, where
someone took the trailer for the Shining Kubrick's adaptation to
Stephen King's novel How that we've been talking about here,
took that recut, it added some happy music and and
I think through in one little Jack Nicholson quote from
another movie about fatherhood, and made the film look like
(36:24):
a romantic comedy that maybe involved ghosts a little bit,
as opposed to a horrific journey into horror. It is
hilarious because it looks like this inspirational tale of fatherhood
and being a writer as well. Yeah, and Shelley Davall
actually looks perky in those clips. So there you have it.
To quote Christopher Glad when one last time. He said,
it is my belief that our reaction to music we
(36:45):
find unsettling is triggered by a combination of inherited biological
responses modified by culturally acquired behavior. See. I think that
pretty much sums it up right there. So as we
close out the podcast here, let's just listen to one
last clip from the Weirding module of this the fourth
track from No Lifus I Corps from some Lost Regions. Yes,
(37:35):
all right, So there you have it, the science of
Uncanny music. And uh and hey, if you enjoyed the
Weirding Module, go look him up. He has I'm sure
he's putting out at a mix for Halloween this year,
and I think he has a new release coming out
in the new year, so uh so, definitely definitely check
him out. He's one of my favorites. And Sundays even
your memories of your most frightening movies as a child
(37:58):
and how the music affected you, And you can do
that by sending us an email to blow the mind
at how staff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, everybody, wasn't the Stuff to Blow
Your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
It is Halloween weak here at Stuff to Blow Your
Mind and then the rest of the world really to
be honest, and so we wanted to roll out a
(00:23):
couple of our favorite Halloween episodes. So today we are
resurrecting the science of Uncanny Music, which is one of
our favorites and one that we've received a lot of
of praise for from listeners. So we thought, hey, let's
bring it back. Yeah, if I remember correctly, this, this
is when we explore the violent streams in Psycho and
the psychological effect, which is pretty interesting because can you
(00:47):
imagine a world without Psycho and that? Yeah, yeah, we
really get to the question, you know, is the is
the music in Psycho scary in and of itself or
is it dependent entirely upon the movie that you're watching,
or is it some shade of gray between the two?
Find out. Since this is the Halloween season and we're
(01:11):
talking about creepy, uncanny, scary, frightening sonic experiences, let's kick
this episode off with just a little bit of the
uncanny from the Weirding Module. We should talk about this
(01:45):
weird module. Yes, yeah, just yeah, real quick, this is
the Weirding Module. This is a solo project from musician
Christopher Gladwin uh as soon as you may name, is
one half of Team do Yobi and very accomplished musician
has his hands in a number of different projects, but
this one is all about the uncanny, about at times
(02:05):
the frightening, the unsettling. This particular track was titled Chapter
one Abysmal Cathedrals Arise from mel flurious ire from some
less regions. And right there that gives you a clue. Yeah,
it gives you a clue. And uh and if you
recognize the tune, and that's because he's utilizing Symphony Fantastic
(02:25):
from Hector Berlioz. And you may also recognize it because
Wendy Carlos used it in the theme to The Shining.
So what we are introducing to you today is this
idea that a scary movie could perhaps be less scary
or not even scary without the sort of soundtrack that
(02:46):
goes along with it, really amping up our experiences while
we're watching something on the screen, and when you listen
to something like the Weirding Module, you can already start
to sense that this ease, that that sort of d
centering that that music makes you feel with some of
the chords and some of the ways that it's arranged. Yeah,
so it it raises the question, and this is the
(03:07):
question we're gonna explore in this episode to what extent
is there something just innately creepy, uncanny, scary, frightening about
music like this or is it all cultural? Is it
all contextual? So we're gonna unravel that. But but first,
just to to to rehash, we did an episode of
a while back called music on the Brain where we
talked about the various ways that didn't music Uh speaks
(03:29):
to us on a conscious and subconscious level. Uh, And
we have to think about music and stuff. What is music?
You know? It's obviously it's a deep part of our
cognitive architecture. It changes our mood, it heightens our emotions. Uh.
And we'd have to find a culture that didn't or
doesn't have it. And some evidence even suggests that the Neanderthals,
in absence of language, may have used music as a
(03:51):
means of communication. Um. Indeed, there are also parts of
the brain that respond to music. They don't respond to languid,
separate parts of the brain that respond to the male
pality of language, different from the parts that respond to
the melody of music. So music is really kind of
this uncanny thing in and of itself. Yeah. I like
to bring up cognitive psychologists and ling with Stephen Pinker
(04:12):
because he's the guy who he's probably pretty brilliant guy,
but he did say music is just auditory cheesecake, an
accident of evolution. But when we look at music a
little bit deeper than we really begin to see that
the case that was made in the documentary The Music
Instinct with Bobby McFerrin, that music actually maybe a precursor
(04:34):
to languages. You had said, um is there because you
think about music and there's no one music center in
our brains. And as you had said, their music used
a certain parts of our brain that language doesn't. UM.
One of the parts that music recruits, and I think
this is so interesting is the visual cortext And it's
thought that the visual cortex actually maps a visual of
(04:55):
how the pitch and tone are changing, and in turn,
music moves us literally moves us. We dance to it
because we envision the movement in it. So keep that
in mind as we continue to talk a little bit
more about music and how it manipulates this um, and
particularly spooky music, how that might motivate us. The manipulation
(05:16):
is key here because when when music psychologists talk about
music and emotion, they often distinguished between emotion perception, which
refers to the perception of emotions expressed by the music.
Like oh um, the sprint the boss is singing about
some sort of sad working class story and run in
with the law. That's a sad story. The song is sad.
(05:37):
I'm interpreting the sadness of it. Can you say the
boss you're talking about? Of course, of course he's still
the boss. I don't I don't think he's that that
position has has not been vacated yet. Uh. And then
there But then there's emotion induction, and this refers to
the listeners effective response to the music. But I think
it's interesting about this. It's not just the emotional arousal.
It's that we actually will show a physical demonstration of emotion.
(06:01):
And there's a two thousand and nine study of twenty
six people who it turns out for a strong correlation
between subjective emotional response and objective physical response to music.
The paper is called the Rewarding Aspects of music listening
are related to a degree of emissional arousal, and it
details the chills that someone can feel when they're listening
(06:22):
to something flesh, whatever you want to call it, and
have you you yourself experience this when you listen to
any music. Um, I think the one that comes to
mind is um Centerman by Nana Simone, and I'm talking
about the live version. It's like a ten minute long song.
It is Actually you don't want me to do that,
(06:45):
because I would do that for ten minutes gonna be insane.
But if you listen to that piece of music, it's
a rollicking right of emotions and the piano just gets
crazy at some points, and it's a it's a very
emotional song and there's um a lot of syncopated rhythm
with the clapping which is a stand in for the
percussion in it. Very nice. Well, well, I was trying
(07:06):
to think of songs that have the similar effect on me,
and for my own part, radioheads everything in its right place.
Every time I listened to that, particularly just the first
few seconds of it, when with this kind of cascade
of notes, sort of finding synchronicity like that always gives
me chill bumps. Again, I think if you stay cascading
and there's that movement, yeah, it's definitely the movement of
(07:28):
the music, and and my body moves with it. I
just get to get the chills every time. These twenty
six people who underwent this experiment, well machines measured their
heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, and galvanic skin response.
This is how much basically they were sweating in response
to the music and their blood volume pulse and uh.
(07:48):
They were asked to click a button every time that
they felt really aroused. And so number four, they're four
clicking button was the button that correlated with chills. And
so they found that the chills occurred at the highest
moment of pleasure reported I think that's interesting that it's
a pleasurable response and yet chills is the expression of
(08:09):
the body. Yeah, you're you're intensely satisfied by the music,
but it's giving giving you chills. Um. And there's another
study we looked at here from You're All just Jack
Panckship of Bowling Green State University. This one's interesting because
he found that people listening to music often experienced goose
bumps because of sad feelings more so than happy or
excited emotions. But a lot of this came down to
(08:30):
um melancholy associations with the past, which which is kind
of like, you know, getting into the context issue of
all of this. For instance, that song that you listen
to a hundred times in a row during a breakup,
you listen to it ten years later. You don't care
the least bit about that individual, but that music can
still stir something and there's a bit of nostalgi in
(08:51):
that as well. You know, it sort of sucks you
back a little bit into that emotional state. It wasn't.
The idea behind that is that the listener is filling
us logic or sad because they and having these bumps
as a response because they physically are missing the warmth
of that person. Yes, the researcher argues that music and
news chills are tied into the chemicals released in our
(09:13):
brain to deal with social loss. So the idea is
that our ancient ancestors might have experienced as if they
are separated from a family member all right, you you
wander off, and then the cries you hear in the
air of of of of the lost family members that
that will call it cause a chill inside you and
cause you to have this desire to reach out to
(09:33):
the warmth of others. And I thought it was interesting
that this was the response, that these chill bumps, even
for someone who would be singing or listening to the
Star Spangled Banner. And I thought, Okay, that's a little
bit odd. But when you a little cheesy, no, it's fine,
it's fine, it's nice, it's nice. But if you peel
that back a little bit, and then you can say, okay,
(09:54):
well what is it to be to be moved by
that song? You feel united with your countrymen and country women.
So in a sense, there there's that community based longing. Well,
it's like with with with so many issues we've discussed.
You can find the sort of core of like ancestral
animal organism sense to what happens, but then you pile
(10:14):
enough layers of human complexity and human cognition and it
just turns it into a maze. Yeah, And just to
further compound that the maze too, of course, we're going
to have to look back at the brain because I
want to look at the amygdala for a moment, in
particular when we talk about scary music, because the amygdala,
as we know, processes emotion, memory, fear, and to test
(10:37):
out the theory that certain strains of music can ramp
up or dial down the fear response, researchers in Oxford,
England played different kinds of music for people's who who'se
amygdala's had been removed because of an illness or an accident,
and then people without this part of the brain the
actually had trouble recognizing scary music, whereas people with their
(10:58):
amygdala's intact had a definite response when scary music was played,
as shown by the brain scanners. So again there's an
idea that there's so many different parts from your brain
that are weighing in on the notes that you hear. Now,
I know what in a reviewer probably wondering to what
extent is it contextual? Is it cultural? Um For instance,
(11:18):
the music we heard at the top of the the
program um A, it's by an act known as the
weirding modul So some of you would if you hear
that you interpret this kind of strange sounding name you're
bringing that into the game, or you're recognizing the piece
of music sample in the work as a as being
familiar to something in the shining. We're bringing all this context,
we're bringing all this culture, and so of course we
(11:39):
interpret it as creepy. So if you were to play
creepy music for someone who had zero experience with any
of that, would they still find it scary. You're talking
about the study of the MafA people in Cameroon who
had never ever heard any sort of strains of Western music,
and they were introduced to three Western musical clips. One
(12:01):
that is typically thought to be sad, one that's happy,
and one that's spooky. All three examples. By the way,
it sounds like something that would play during like a um,
an old silent film that would be played on the piano,
you know, trying somebody to the railroad tracks kind of
a thing right in the music speeds up, um all right.
These Cameroonians were also shown something called Ekman faces, and
(12:26):
these Ekman faces are photos of standardized expressions of emotions.
So in this case, they had a happy, sad, and
scared face to look at while they listened to the music.
And just like Westerners the Cameroonians correlated the music type
with the same facial expressions. So that would tell you
that there's some universality to it. Now that's not There
(12:48):
are other studies that say, no, that's there. You know,
some that negate this because there are other cultures that
might hear certain notes in interpret in different ways. Yeah,
when you get in deep into saity of difference between
Eastern and Western music trends in Middle Eastern music versus
Western music, then things get a little more complicated. Well,
I was just thinking about Chinese opera, which the tones
(13:12):
in a Chinese opera might sound very um, harsh or
dissonant to the Western year, but very pleasant to Eastern year. Yeah,
there's a fabulous I think in ther piece in the
past year about Western and Western musician a Western opera
singer traveling to China and engaging in Chinese opera and
sort of dealing with the the the contrast between Western
(13:33):
opera and Chinese opera, I mean, some of the overlap
of the performers, and it's it's interesting because they are
such different animals well and even in language. And Alison
and I had kind of talked about this a little bit.
There's a musicality to language, and if you look at
something like Vietnamese, one word can be said in five
(13:53):
different tones, I mean five entirely different things. So similar
thing in Mandarin. Yeah, yeah, so it's much more nuanced
and it has to be taken into account. But Christopher Gladwin,
the man behind the Weirding module, had some very interesting
thoughts on this universality. Yeah. It was exchanged some emails
UH with Chris and he had a lot of great
(14:14):
in photo to share and sadly between the two of us,
we didn't have time to do an audio interview, but
I'll hopefully be sharing some stuff on the blog from
him in the weeks they had. He said, quote, there
are sounds which almost universally caused revulsion or fight or
flight responses. The sound of vomiting came out is the
most obnoxious auditory experience in a worldwide Internet survey conducted
by Professor Trevor Cox. The reason for this, UH is
(14:37):
that we're it's hardware to our biology avoid those that
are disgorging the contents of their stomachs unless you want
the same to happen to you. Other sounds that came
out on top where babies crying and nails down at blackboard.
Both of these sounds have relatively complex, high frequency tones
that we are evolutionarily designed to respond to. Having a
year old daughter, I can appreciate this. Many industrial bands
(14:59):
have used such a casual tactics robbing gristle and their
use of recordings of dogs attappicking a dummy, etcetera. And
he goes on to UH to discuss this in further depth,
and I will hopefully share that with everyone later on.
But but yeah, there's certain things that just as an organism,
we feel this either discussed with or this aversion to,
(15:20):
or it just sets up all our alarms. I mean,
the baby crying. I I too am experiencing that one
with the toddler that time my wife and I have
have adopted and he will he'll start, you know, crying
or tuning up a little bit in the middle of
the night, and it just has this intense effect on me,
uh to where even after I've I've put him back
to sleep, my heart is just still beating like crazy,
(15:42):
like it's just it's reaching behind my brain and uh
and you know, grabbing hold of the reptilian portion there
right now, is your camp biscuit mimicking the cries of
a newborn? Yeah, well, you know there's that argument that
that's what cats are doing anyway, and they're they're perverse
means of manipulating a humans, And so yeah, we'll have
they'll be situations where the child is authentically crying and
(16:05):
then the cat is also crying and it's mock human voice,
and it's it's you know what this is like, it's frustrating.
It becomes a loud household at three am. Yes, yeah, um.
Christopher Gladwin also mentions there was a sound that he
found difficult to describe. Michael Geret of the Swans, he said,
put it best that sex death sound that comes from
somewhere deep inside. There are some experiences of sound that
(16:28):
you just get that right. You tried to spot off.
That's the best I can do. Feeling from and some
sort of possession occurs. I believe that this connects with
some subterranean evolutionary memory, something in our ancestral reptilian fish brain.
We still have this the sigil fish ears, you know,
and I thought, you know what that sound? Let me
(16:49):
tell you this and I'm gonna give you the context
it was not a sexual context, so you don't have
to put your hands up to your ears and say no,
no, no no no. I did something called the seven minute workout.
Do know about this? It's awful. It is like this
ramped up, high density crazy workout you do for seven minutes,
just the best and highest rate that you can. Okay,
(17:11):
And I heard these noises coming out of myself that
I was a little bit ashamed of. I felt a
little bit like freaked out that they were actually coming out.
But I understand what he's saying. There's a guttural like,
oh my god, I'm dying inside noise that I had
never heard come out of myself before. And so there
(17:31):
is something to that, this evolutionary like, oh there's something wrong. Yeah.
An example of that, I was driving my child around
in the middle of the night, trying to get him
to sleep immediately after returning home, and his super jet
lagged now his jet lag, And so I was listening
to Radio Lab catching up in some Radio Lavish episodes,
and there's an excellent one they did recently on rabies.
(17:52):
And in that episode they play some audio of humans
who have rabies and are experiencing that rage and that
just you know, the mindless rage that is associated with
the later stages of Rabies. And it was extremely unsettling
to hear those sounds like and it's and I wonder
to what extent that's kind of cross somebody, that this
this idea, that that that is on some level human,
(18:13):
but it must be bodily possessioned by some outside force
that is making that kind of noise. And you're right,
that bodily possession, as if you are outside of yourself
or something was outside of itself. All right, we should
probably take a quick break, and when we get back,
we you and I Robert Lamb are going to actually
sing some of the strains of music classics, not because
(18:35):
we necessarily want to do that to your ears, but
because we have no budget, correct, right, So stand by
all right, we're back, Robert. Did you know that in
the original cut of Psycho that Hitchcock did not want
(18:57):
those high pitched violin screens to accompany the shower scene
fa iconomy. He sorry about that. Again, we have no budgets,
so that's which you guys are getting. Um. It was
actually his wife, Alma Revel, who was a script writer
and actually a director of her own right, and an
(19:20):
editor who said, no, no, no, you need to check
out Bernard Herman's score that he's created for this. It's amazing.
It's going to do its thing. And they actually tested
two versions, one with the with the violins and one without,
and apparently when they showed the audience when without, they
were a little like, okay, so this this one is
getting hacked enough in a shower. But when they accompanied
(19:42):
the violence strains of Bernard Herman, people freaked out. It's
interesting to think of having not scene the scene without
the music, and it's hard to imagine because such an
iconic scene and you go together so well, and when
I imagine the scene in my mind, and I think
that's a really horrific scene. You know, even even though
it it doesn't show as much um in way in
(20:06):
the way of nudity or bloodshed that you might. You
know that I'm sure you can get away with today. Uh.
It's so effective and so disturbing, and yet the music
is what seems to make it so effective, like in
in a sense we can't feel or even imagine what
those the stabs feel like physically, because most of us
have not been brutally stabbed with a butcher knife before,
(20:28):
but the music kind of fills that place. It's interesting
that you say that it's it's not that much nudity
and it's not that much violence, because then what you thought,
because a lot of people when they when they ask people,
you know, about that scene, they tend to envision much
more violence and nudity than there actually is because of
that heightened emotionality there. I think, Um, and of course
(20:50):
it's that high pitch sound, and we'll get a little
bit more into that in terms of the animal world. Um,
but I wanted to mention that in terms of pitch.
Daniel Blumstein uh He scrutinized on two films and found
that horror films had a higher than expected number of
abrupt shifts up and down and pitch, which he reported
in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters. So already you
(21:14):
can see that they are very different ways that UM
filmmakers and musical composers can manipulate the brain. In terms
of psycho that was just something that they didn't necessarily know, like, hey,
we've got all these neuroscientists saying like the amygdala is
going crazy. It was just sort of a hunch that
this music would heighten the effect. Yeah. So, like you said,
(21:34):
they didn't have the neuroscientists, but they did have musical tradition. Obviously,
run Herman knew what worked because when you look at
stuff like Peter and the Wolf, you know, that's a
classic one that we always learned in like elementary music class,
where every character has kind of their own little jaunty
number and you you're you're told by your music teacher, oh,
well this this music is behaving like this, because this
is what's happening in the story. Um. Some of the
(21:57):
basics though, cord tempo in amplitude. Okay, So with chords,
we have minor and major chords, and in a very
very broad sense, minor chords evoke sad feelings. Major chords
are happy. Um, at least again in Western music. Um,
you tay. And the interesting thing is if you take
(22:17):
something in a major key and you translate it into
a minor key, you go from happy too sad. As
a as an engineer, a musician by the name of
Oleg Berg has demonstrated he's a from the Ukraine and
he has a YouTube account. Takes a number of songs
such as the rhythmic sweet dreams are made of these
minor key transforms. It tweaks, it makes it a major
(22:41):
key song, and it's suddenly a different entire emotional experience.
Suddenly it's upbeat and not kind of dark and uh
and you know foreboding. Uh. That's the same thing with
losing my religion. Instead of it being this kind of
you know, down song about oh I've lost my religion,
I've kind of lost my way, it's more like I've
lost my religion, I'm free, I'm happy, and Michael Stipes
is sansing around. It's more in keeping with you know,
(23:03):
it's the end of the world as I know it,
as opposed to what we we have come to expect
from losing my religion. Now. He also took the song
don't Worry Be Happy, recorded by Bobby mcfarren. Are you
familiar with that? Yeah, don't worry as long I wrote,
I mean just relentlessly upbeat, right, And he put that
in a minor key and I don't know, it's it
(23:26):
sounds like the beginnings of a mental breakdown. Yeah, it's
like it brings to mind the happy bobbing Farren reduced
to hopping on a box car somewhere like shivering. Yeah,
you're like, there's there's gonna be problems ahead. I know
you're saying don't worry, be happy, but it doesn't sound
like you really mean it. So it's amazing that just
that shift can create that sense of dread and doom.
(23:48):
Now it's interesting with pop music, is pointed out by
Glenn Shellenberg of the University of Toronto. If you look
at through the nine eighties and the nineties, UH, there's
definitely a dominance of the major key in the top forties,
but it begins to shift slowly at first and then
really radically, and by two thousand nine only eighteen out
of the top forty songs are in the major key.
(24:08):
So there various explanations for this. And partially, people get
kind of used to the major key UH preference in
pop music and it becomes more and more cliche. So
avoiding cliches, the trend moves towards the minor key. But
also there's the the idea that people were coming around
more to the idea that life is not so happy,
(24:30):
that life is maybe a little more nuanced and a
little more ambiguous, and then their sadness uh at least
around the corner from any happiness, if not meshed in
it to begin with. So even something that is more
or less universal, you start applying enough cultural influence to it,
it can begin to shift. It's interesting that that's, Um,
(24:51):
that that's something that's happening, because I was just thinking
about the Halloween music that the are you familiar with
that one? The John Carper John you are, yeah, John Carpenter,
Alan Howorth both both I mean John Carpenter excellent director, fighter, etcetera,
but also an accomplished musician, and his work with Allan
Howorth is is some of my favorite stuff. But that
music has been sampled in pop music. And yeah, and
(25:15):
that actually is a really good example of tempo in
an odd meter. And we talk about tempo, we're talking
about how how fast or slow the intent intent intent entent. Again,
you feel the motion in that music, right, Yeah, Like
even as you were you were doing that, you were
(25:35):
bopping back and forth as if you were running right.
And Um, the thing about that is that most music
uses beat counts divisible by two, but the Halloween score
uses an odd meter of five four. That sort of
creates that weird like catch up feeling to do like
you just can't really quite get there. Yeah, Like you're
just you're trying to stay one step ahead of the
(25:56):
mass killer. You're trying to get to the car before
the mass kill that gets you, but you're not quite
there exactly. And now think about your visual cortex trying
to map that and all while you're watching Jamie Lee
Curtis do that. It works perfectly. Yeah, yeah, girl, you
in danger. Yeah, all of that is happening. And according
to Neil Learner, he is a professor of music at
(26:17):
Davidson College and Davidson, North Carolina and an expert in
horror film music, one that music technique is messing with
that tempo to suggest that chase, and he says that
musical music typically speeds up and grows louder as the
danger closes in. And he says, my hunch is that
our brains here that music in terms of being hunted,
Our instincts tell us a creature is upon us and
(26:39):
we need to run away or just turn and fight it. Well,
there's obviously one great example of that that everyone's already
thinking of. Boom boom boom, bum boom boom boom, pumomum pomummmmmm,
(26:59):
pump pump, bump, bump, and then the shark attacks Jaws.
Of course, of course, yes, classic John Williams score, iconic
John Williams score been sampled all over the place, but
not here because we can't afford it, so that you
know that I'll have to do. But yeah, you've got
those Christian doing minor chords that again slicing in. And
(27:21):
obviously you can't run from a shark. Um. I mean
you can't. But if you're running from the shark, you're
really okay, you don't run land, Yeah, you're good. But
but it does bring this ideas like I'm stepping, I'm stepping,
I'm walking a little faster, and then I'm running. Uh
and and it just grabs us right uh, you know,
right right at the root of our reptilian brain. Yeah.
And then in the middle of that you have a
(27:41):
high pitched noises in in terms of the whistle, right,
you've got the lifeguard on the beach blowing the whistle.
And then when Jaws finally gets victim, you've got the
big note pulling the person under corresponding with it. I'm
telling you right now, if I had some sort of
galvanic skin response that was looking at my like how
(28:02):
much I was sweating? They would feel it right now.
Just in talking about it now. To return to Daniel Bloomstein,
he also pointed out that when he looked at a
hundred and two different film scores, he found it, among
other things, the screams of animals were used in several
key scenes in horror films, including such iconic films as
The Exorcist and The Shining Um. And and this is
(28:23):
this is a is very interesting because in a sense,
it's very straightforward. The cries of animals are going to
resonate with us in the same way the cries of
of humans are going to resonate with us. Yeah, and
didn't he get this idea of of really looking at
these film scores for animal cries because he was working
with actually yellow bellied marmots and he notices that when
(28:44):
the research went to go and grab the marmots that
they would have these high pitched screams. And he thought, wow,
I wonder you know what that's doing to our brains.
And then he examined those film scores and then found
those the animal screess I thought was really interesting. So he,
along with film composer Michael Kay, created a study here,
(29:05):
of course pattern on these screaming marmots, and they had
a neutral music clip as well as music segments with
nonlinear sounds, so that Mormot was creating a discordant nonlinear sound. Yeah,
and that's something that the Christopher Gladwin brought up as well.
That Discordia, of course is big. And the music you
think of all the shrieking, clanging noises, the one that
(29:27):
comes instantly to mind Texas Chainsaw Masca has a highly
effective score and it's another film that isn't nearly as
violent or bloody as some people think it is. That
it's just everything just fell together perfectly in that film.
So you have Discordia and then you have you have
these these animal sounds popping up and uh. And another
thing Gladwin mentioned is the taking of animal sounds or
(29:51):
other sounds that are natural, tweaking them into an unnatural
area and then they hit us in a way wherever
like what is that? I don't know what that is?
And the fear of the unknown is summoned. Yeah. I
noticed this when we visited nether World last year. In
the hunting house in the background, there were these sort
of clinging elements that were going on. Now this was
just the house music before they have actual music though, no, right,
(30:14):
there was no like um, but you know, is this
way of kind of setting the scene and making people
feel a little bit uncertain about it because you're going
to do what's it? What sound is coming next? You know,
our pattern recognition craving brains don't know what to make
of it. So we're on edge where we don't know
what's happening next. Yeah, someone please play that chasing music
so I know to run alright. So in this experiment
(30:37):
that that k and Plumstein created, uh, they found that
participants were far more stimulated by the nonlinear music segments.
In addition, this is so interesting to me. If the
nonlinear melodies became higher, the emotional reaction was more pronounced,
much like a mother tuning into the tensed vocal cord
screams of the baby mormot. And so what he's saying
is that um that these vocal cords straining sounds are
(31:02):
unbluffable signs of fear in the animal world, and of
course they would be in in the human world as well.
And it made me think back to those high pitched,
strangled um pitches of the violin during the Psycho shower scene.
In fact, let's listen to a marmot screen because we
have a little clip, all right, so you can kind
(31:29):
of hear that there's there's that element. And how did
they get the scream out of the marmot? Do we
want to know? I think that they continually advanced upon
the mormot until they were like, you're you're in my
zone here feeling uncomfortable. Okay, as long as no marmots
were harmed. Okay. So we've talked a lot about the
way that that's scary music, on settling music, on canny music,
(31:51):
how it will enhance some the visuals of a horror
movie or what have you. But what happens when we
take take away the visual text from the music, Well,
it turns out that it can do a couple of
different things. If you if you take away from the context,
you can actually water down the effect. Because Bloomstein had
(32:11):
a second stage of his study and participants were asked
to watch objectively boring videos we're talking about drinking coffee
or reading a book, which was paired with nonlinear music. Okay,
So they found that the same disort of music was
much less emotionally stimulating and much less scary when it
(32:32):
went along with something that was just kind of wrote.
So watching a guy press his pants while a music
box track plays is just pretty ho hum, right, yeah,
And you know there's no room for interpretation in these
examples either. It's not like, say, imagine like a film
of a of a mother approaching a cradle, where it
seems like that's asitution at which and where if you
(32:54):
played happy music, you know, sad music or or scary music,
you could really force us to to to make the
story in our own head. It's like, oh my, you know,
oh my goodness, what's in that cradle? What's not in
that cradle but a guy ironing his shorts. You know,
that's probably not going to be a pitch for a
horror movie anytime soon, unless those tinny strains of a
music box are playing and then they pan to like
(33:15):
a Portla indulve batting her eyes and you hear door creek. Yeah,
and then you have a student film, Yes, how did
you know that was my fil And then here's another
aspect of this, of the visual context is that when
you shut your eyes, you change the emotional landscape. And
(33:36):
I want you guys to guess out there, would it
be more horrific or less horrific. I would have guessed
less horrifically yes before this, simply because it's something that
I do when I don't, you know, I think that
I'm lessening the experience. And I'm watching watching some scary
and then you close your eyes and it's like my
my friend Dave will blur his eyes out during scary
(33:57):
parts in the movie to accomplish the same thing, like
to sort of stare at nothing. Um. I guess it
didn't surprise me because I listened to enough creepy music
that I do find that, like I'm listening to weirding
module where I'm listening to like Throbbing Gristle or or
what have you, Chris Carter, and it's uh, if I'm
if I'm zoning out or I'm closing my eyes, it
(34:19):
really takes on a richer, darker form in my mind.
I'm still stuck on Throbbing Gristle. Oh, They're one of
the mainstays. It's just the combination. One of the creepiest
tracks of all time. Hamburger lady, look it up if
you want to feel terrified. Okay, throbbing gristle, hamburger lady.
All right, and research published in the Public Library of
(34:39):
Science one by Tel Aviv University researchers found that the
premise of squinting your eyes shut during a freaky scene
may actually heightened your fear responses. We've just said. Volunteers
listened to Hitchcock style music twice, once with their eyes
open and once with their eyes shut, and with their
eyes closed, their migdalas were far more active, and volunteer
(35:00):
said that they also felt the emotional effects being much
more pronounced when when they were completely in the dark
listening to this. So it seemed to wire together a
direct connection to the regions of our brain that process emotions.
And it's not merely subjective. They're using a functional m
r I and I can see the distinct changes in
the brains were more pronounced in the person's eyes were
(35:20):
not being used. Yeah, so the idea is that you're
actually better able to focus on your fear response. Yeah,
which is you know, climbing to this fMRI machine listened
to some really unsettling music and want to see what happens. Yeah,
that's cool, right, So I mean those are a couple
of ways that that music can actually game our response.
And I was thinking about this in terms of political ads.
(35:42):
Oh yeah, you know those sort of dot notes that
are played sometimes to cast one of the politicians really
does know what's best for America. Don't, don't, but she really. Yeah.
Another great example of this in terms of changing the
music changing the tone of something. If you've ever seen
(36:03):
the trailer for Shining um so available on YouTube, where
someone took the trailer for the Shining Kubrick's adaptation to
Stephen King's novel How that we've been talking about here,
took that recut, it added some happy music and and
I think through in one little Jack Nicholson quote from
another movie about fatherhood, and made the film look like
(36:24):
a romantic comedy that maybe involved ghosts a little bit,
as opposed to a horrific journey into horror. It is
hilarious because it looks like this inspirational tale of fatherhood
and being a writer as well. Yeah, and Shelley Davall
actually looks perky in those clips. So there you have it.
To quote Christopher Glad when one last time. He said,
it is my belief that our reaction to music we
(36:45):
find unsettling is triggered by a combination of inherited biological
responses modified by culturally acquired behavior. See. I think that
pretty much sums it up right there. So as we
close out the podcast here, let's just listen to one
last clip from the Weirding module of this the fourth
track from No Lifus I Corps from some Lost Regions. Yes,
(37:35):
all right, So there you have it, the science of
Uncanny music. And uh and hey, if you enjoyed the
Weirding Module, go look him up. He has I'm sure
he's putting out at a mix for Halloween this year,
and I think he has a new release coming out
in the new year, so uh so, definitely definitely check
him out. He's one of my favorites. And Sundays even
your memories of your most frightening movies as a child
(37:58):
and how the music affected you, And you can do
that by sending us an email to blow the mind
at how staff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
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