October 8, 2013 • 20 mins
The Science of Uncanny Music: 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? Robert and Julie provide the answers and Christopher Gladwin of The Wyrding Module provides some unsettling tunes and a few answers of his own. Be sure to check out Robert's interview with Gladwin, as well as his roundup of uncanny musical tracks. Image: Ivan Bliznetsov/E+/Getty
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind somehow stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
since this is the Halloween season and we're talking about creepy, uncanny, scary,
(00:23):
frightening sonic experiences, let's kick this episode off with just
a little bit of the uncanny from the Weirding Module. Oh,
(00:53):
we should talk about this weird module. Yes, yeah, just yeah,
real quick, this is the Weirding Module. This is a
solo project from musician Christopher Gladwin. Uh some of you
may name him. Is one half of Team do Yobi
and very accomplished musician has hands in into a number
of different projects, but this one is all about the uncanny,
about times, the frightening, the unsettling. This particular track was
(01:18):
titled Chapter one, Abysmal Cathedrals Arise from mel flurious I
Corps 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 from Hector Berlioz. And you may
also recognize it because Wendy Carlos used it in the
(01:41):
theme to The Shining. So what we are introducing to
you guys today is this idea that a scary movie
could perhaps be less scary or not even scary without
the sort of soundtrack that 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,
(02:04):
you can already start just sense that dis ease, that
that sort of decentering 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 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?
(02:27):
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 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
(02:48):
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 means of communication. Um. Indeed, there
are also parts of the brain that respond to music.
They don't respond to language. Separate parts of the brain
that respond to the melody of language differ from the
(03:10):
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 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
(03:32):
a little bit deeper than we really begin to see
that the case that was made in the documentary The
Music Instinct with Bobby McPherrin, that music actually maybe a
precursor to language. As 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 uses certain parts of our brain that language doesn't um.
(03:55):
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
how the pitch and tone are changing, and in turn,
music moves us, literally moves us. We danced to it
because we envision the movement in it. So keep that
in mind as we continue to talk a little bit
(04:17):
more about music and how it manipulates us um and
particularly spooky music, how that might motivate us. The manipulation
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 of the Boss is singing
(04:40):
about some sort of sad working class story and run
in with the law. That's a sad story. The song
is sad. 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 list there's effective response to the music.
(05:02):
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 that emotion. 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
(05:23):
Aspects of Music listening are related to a degree of
emotional arousal and details the chills that someone can feel
when they're listening to something flesh, whatever you want to
call it. And have you you yourself experienced this when
you listen to any music. Um, I think the one
that comes to mind is um Centerman by Nana Simone,
(05:46):
and I'm talking about the live version. It's like a
ten minute long song. It is also actually you don't
want me to do that, because I would do that
for ten minutes gonna be insane. But if you listen
to that piece of music, it's a all looking 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
(06:09):
a lot of syncopated rhythm with the clapping, which is
a stand in for the percussion in it. Very nice. Well,
I was trying 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
(06:32):
like that always gives me chill bumps. Again, I think
you stay cascading and there's that movement. Yeah, it's definitely
the movement of the music, and and my body moves
with it. I just get 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
(06:52):
in response to the music and their blood volume pulse
and uh. They were asked to clear a button every
time that they felt really aroused, and so number four,
they're the four clicking button was a button that correlated
with chills, and so they found that the chills occurred
at the highest moment of pleasure reported. I think that's
(07:14):
interesting that it's a pleasurable response and yet chills is
the expression of a body. Yeah, you're you're intensely satisfied
by the music, but it's giving giving you chills. Um.
And there was another study we looked at here from ne'
allis Jack pack Sip 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
(07:36):
than happy or excited emotions. But a lot of this
came down to, 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
(07:57):
that music can still stir something and there's a bit
of a nostalgian 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 nostalgic or sad because they and having goose
bumps as a response because they physically are missing the
warmth of that person. Yes, the researcher argues that music
(08:19):
and news chills are tied into the chemicals released in
our 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 lost family members, that that
will call it cause a chill inside you and cause
(08:41):
you to have this desire to reach out to 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 and a little cheesy no, it's fine,
it's fine, it's nice. But if you peel that back
(09:01):
a little bit, and then you can say, okay, 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
(09:24):
enough layers of human complexity and human cognition and it
just turns it into a maze. Yeah. And just to
further compound that the amaze too, of course, we're going
to have to look back at the brain because I
want to look at the amgdala for a moment, in
particular when we talk about scary music, because the amingdalas
we know, processes emotion, memory, fear, and to test out
(09:46):
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 Amingdoala's
had been removed because of an illness or an act stents,
and then people without this part of the brain the
actually had trouble recognizing scary music, whereas people with their
(10:07):
amigdela is 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 an overviewer probably wanted, well,
to what extent is it contextual? Is it cultural? Um
for instance, that the music we heard at the top
(10:28):
of the the program um A, it's by an act
known as the weirding module. 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, example in the work as
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 interpret it as creepy. So if you
(10:51):
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 that is typically thought to be sad,
(11:13):
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, classifying somebody to
the railroad tracks kind of a thing right in the
music speeds up. Um, all right. These Cameroonians were also
(11:33):
shown something called Ekman faces, and these e Men 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 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.
(11:56):
Now that's not There are other studies that say no,
the second you know, some that negate this because there
are other cultures that might hear certain notes and interpret
in different ways. Yeah, when you get in deep and
to say the differences 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
(12:17):
Chinese opera, which the tones in the 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 b our Peace in the past year
about western Western musician, a Western opera singer traveling to
China and engaging in Chinese opera and sort of dealing
(12:40):
with the the the contrast between Western opera and Chinese opera,
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 tell language
and if you look at something like Vietnamese, one word
(13:01):
can be said in five 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
(13:22):
had a lot of great 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.
(13:45):
The reason for this UH is that we're it's hardware
tor 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
(14:05):
appreciate this. Many industrial bands have used such casual tactics
throbbing gristle and their use of recordings of dogs are
tappicking of 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
are certain things that just as an organism, we UH
(14:26):
feel this either discussed with or this aversion to or
it just sets up all our alarms. I mean the
baby crying. I I to him 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
(14:46):
to where even after I put him back to sleep,
my heart is just still beating like crazy, 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 cap biscuit mimick 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 their humans,
(15:09):
And so yeah, we'll have they'll be situations where the
child is authentically crying and 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. Y yeah um. Christopher Gladwin
also mentioned there was a sound that he found difficult
to describe. Michael Geret of the Swans, he said, put
(15:30):
it best that sex death sound that comes from somewhere
deep inside. There are some experiences of sound that you
just get that you tried to spell out. 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
(15:52):
still have this the sigil fish ears, you know, And
I thought, you know what that sound. Let me tell
you this, and it's I'm to give you the context.
It was not a sexual context, so you don't have
to put your hands up to your ear to say no, no,
no no. I did something called the seven minute workout.
Do you know about this? It's awful. It is like
this ramped up, high density crazy workout you do for
(16:16):
seven minutes, just the best and highest rate that you can. Okay,
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 like guttural like,
oh my god, I'm dying inside noise that I had
(16:37):
never heard come out of myself before. And so there
is something too 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 he was super
jet lagged down his jet lag And so I was
listening to Radio lab catching up in some Radio Lavish episodes,
(16:59):
and there's an excellent one they did recently on rabies.
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 going to cross over, that this
(17:20):
this idea, that that that is on some level human,
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
(17:41):
sing some of the strains of music classics, not because
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
(18:02):
the original cut of Psycho that Hitchcock did not want
those high pitched violin screams to accompany the shower scene
famous iconomy. Sorry about that again, we have no budgets,
so that's what you guys are getting. Um. It was
actually his wife, Alma Revel, who was a script writer
(18:26):
and actually a director of her own right and an
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
(18:47):
were a little like, okay, so that this one is
getting hacked to death in a shower. But when they
accompanied the violence strains of Bernard Herman, people freaked out.
It's interesting to think of having not glops in the
scene without the music, and it's hard to imagine because
it's such an iconic scene and you go together so well,
and when I imagine the scene in my mind and
(19:09):
I think that's a really horrific scene, you know, even
even though it it doesn't show as much um in
way in 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,
(19:29):
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, 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 they
mean what you saw it. Because a lot of people
(19:50):
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 it's that high pitch sound and we'll
get a little bit more into that in terms of
the animal world, but I wanted to mention that in
terms of pitch. Daniel Blumstein Uh he scrutinized one and
(20:12):
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 can see that there are very different
ways that UM, that filmmaker
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind somehow stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
since this is the Halloween season and we're talking about creepy, uncanny, scary,
(00:23):
frightening sonic experiences, let's kick this episode off with just
a little bit of the uncanny from the Weirding Module. Oh,
(00:53):
we should talk about this weird module. Yes, yeah, just yeah,
real quick, this is the Weirding Module. This is a
solo project from musician Christopher Gladwin. Uh some of you
may name him. Is one half of Team do Yobi
and very accomplished musician has hands in into a number
of different projects, but this one is all about the uncanny,
about times, the frightening, the unsettling. This particular track was
(01:18):
titled Chapter one, Abysmal Cathedrals Arise from mel flurious I
Corps 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 from Hector Berlioz. And you may
also recognize it because Wendy Carlos used it in the
(01:41):
theme to The Shining. So what we are introducing to
you guys today is this idea that a scary movie
could perhaps be less scary or not even scary without
the sort of soundtrack that 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,
(02:04):
you can already start just sense that dis ease, that
that sort of decentering 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 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?
(02:27):
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 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
(02:48):
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 means of communication. Um. Indeed, there
are also parts of the brain that respond to music.
They don't respond to language. Separate parts of the brain
that respond to the melody of language differ from the
(03:10):
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 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
(03:32):
a little bit deeper than we really begin to see
that the case that was made in the documentary The
Music Instinct with Bobby McPherrin, that music actually maybe a
precursor to language. As 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 uses certain parts of our brain that language doesn't um.
(03:55):
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
how the pitch and tone are changing, and in turn,
music moves us, literally moves us. We danced to it
because we envision the movement in it. So keep that
in mind as we continue to talk a little bit
(04:17):
more about music and how it manipulates us um and
particularly spooky music, how that might motivate us. The manipulation
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 of the Boss is singing
(04:40):
about some sort of sad working class story and run
in with the law. That's a sad story. The song
is sad. 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 list there's effective response to the music.
(05:02):
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 that emotion. 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
(05:23):
Aspects of Music listening are related to a degree of
emotional arousal and details the chills that someone can feel
when they're listening to something flesh, whatever you want to
call it. And have you you yourself experienced this when
you listen to any music. Um, I think the one
that comes to mind is um Centerman by Nana Simone,
(05:46):
and I'm talking about the live version. It's like a
ten minute long song. It is also actually you don't
want me to do that, because I would do that
for ten minutes gonna be insane. But if you listen
to that piece of music, it's a all looking 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
(06:09):
a lot of syncopated rhythm with the clapping, which is
a stand in for the percussion in it. Very nice. Well,
I was trying 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
(06:32):
like that always gives me chill bumps. Again, I think
you stay cascading and there's that movement. Yeah, it's definitely
the movement of the music, and and my body moves
with it. I just get 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
(06:52):
in response to the music and their blood volume pulse
and uh. They were asked to clear a button every
time that they felt really aroused, and so number four,
they're the four clicking button was a button that correlated
with chills, and so they found that the chills occurred
at the highest moment of pleasure reported. I think that's
(07:14):
interesting that it's a pleasurable response and yet chills is
the expression of a body. Yeah, you're you're intensely satisfied
by the music, but it's giving giving you chills. Um.
And there was another study we looked at here from ne'
allis Jack pack Sip 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
(07:36):
than happy or excited emotions. But a lot of this
came down to, 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
(07:57):
that music can still stir something and there's a bit
of a nostalgian 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 nostalgic or sad because they and having goose
bumps as a response because they physically are missing the
warmth of that person. Yes, the researcher argues that music
(08:19):
and news chills are tied into the chemicals released in
our 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 lost family members, that that
will call it cause a chill inside you and cause
(08:41):
you to have this desire to reach out to 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 and a little cheesy no, it's fine,
it's fine, it's nice. But if you peel that back
(09:01):
a little bit, and then you can say, okay, 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
(09:24):
enough layers of human complexity and human cognition and it
just turns it into a maze. Yeah. And just to
further compound that the amaze too, of course, we're going
to have to look back at the brain because I
want to look at the amgdala for a moment, in
particular when we talk about scary music, because the amingdalas
we know, processes emotion, memory, fear, and to test out
(09:46):
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 Amingdoala's
had been removed because of an illness or an act stents,
and then people without this part of the brain the
actually had trouble recognizing scary music, whereas people with their
(10:07):
amigdela is 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 an overviewer probably wanted, well,
to what extent is it contextual? Is it cultural? Um
for instance, that the music we heard at the top
(10:28):
of the the program um A, it's by an act
known as the weirding module. 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, example in the work as
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 interpret it as creepy. So if you
(10:51):
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 that is typically thought to be sad,
(11:13):
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, classifying somebody to
the railroad tracks kind of a thing right in the
music speeds up. Um, all right. These Cameroonians were also
(11:33):
shown something called Ekman faces, and these e Men 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 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.
(11:56):
Now that's not There are other studies that say no,
the second you know, some that negate this because there
are other cultures that might hear certain notes and interpret
in different ways. Yeah, when you get in deep and
to say the differences 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
(12:17):
Chinese opera, which the tones in the 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 b our Peace in the past year
about western Western musician, a Western opera singer traveling to
China and engaging in Chinese opera and sort of dealing
(12:40):
with the the the contrast between Western opera and Chinese opera,
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 tell language
and if you look at something like Vietnamese, one word
(13:01):
can be said in five 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
(13:22):
had a lot of great 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.
(13:45):
The reason for this UH is that we're it's hardware
tor 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
(14:05):
appreciate this. Many industrial bands have used such casual tactics
throbbing gristle and their use of recordings of dogs are
tappicking of 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
are certain things that just as an organism, we UH
(14:26):
feel this either discussed with or this aversion to or
it just sets up all our alarms. I mean the
baby crying. I I to him 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
(14:46):
to where even after I put him back to sleep,
my heart is just still beating like crazy, 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 cap biscuit mimick 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 their humans,
(15:09):
And so yeah, we'll have they'll be situations where the
child is authentically crying and 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. Y yeah um. Christopher Gladwin
also mentioned there was a sound that he found difficult
to describe. Michael Geret of the Swans, he said, put
(15:30):
it best that sex death sound that comes from somewhere
deep inside. There are some experiences of sound that you
just get that you tried to spell out. 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
(15:52):
still have this the sigil fish ears, you know, And
I thought, you know what that sound. Let me tell
you this, and it's I'm to give you the context.
It was not a sexual context, so you don't have
to put your hands up to your ear to say no, no,
no no. I did something called the seven minute workout.
Do you know about this? It's awful. It is like
this ramped up, high density crazy workout you do for
(16:16):
seven minutes, just the best and highest rate that you can. Okay,
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 like guttural like,
oh my god, I'm dying inside noise that I had
(16:37):
never heard come out of myself before. And so there
is something too 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 he was super
jet lagged down his jet lag And so I was
listening to Radio lab catching up in some Radio Lavish episodes,
(16:59):
and there's an excellent one they did recently on rabies.
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 going to cross over, that this
(17:20):
this idea, that that that is on some level human,
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
(17:41):
sing some of the strains of music classics, not because
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
(18:02):
the original cut of Psycho that Hitchcock did not want
those high pitched violin screams to accompany the shower scene
famous iconomy. Sorry about that again, we have no budgets,
so that's what you guys are getting. Um. It was
actually his wife, Alma Revel, who was a script writer
(18:26):
and actually a director of her own right and an
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
(18:47):
were a little like, okay, so that this one is
getting hacked to death in a shower. But when they
accompanied the violence strains of Bernard Herman, people freaked out.
It's interesting to think of having not glops in the
scene without the music, and it's hard to imagine because
it's such an iconic scene and you go together so well,
and when I imagine the scene in my mind and
(19:09):
I think that's a really horrific scene, you know, even
even though it it doesn't show as much um in
way in 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,
(19:29):
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, 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 they
mean what you saw it. Because a lot of people
(19:50):
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 it's that high pitch sound and we'll
get a little bit more into that in terms of
the animal world, but I wanted to mention that in
terms of pitch. Daniel Blumstein Uh he scrutinized one and
(20:12):
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 can see that there are very different
ways that UM, that filmmaker
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