SciShow Tangents - SciShow Tangents Classics - The Science of Scary Sounds - A SciShow Tangents Adventure

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

It's almost October, and SciShow Tangents is getting ready for its month-long Halloween blowout! While we make final arrangements, please enjoy this classic, sound-filled journey through Tangents Manor! Try not to get too scared!!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen

October is right around the corner, and we here at Tangents are getting ready for our annual Halloween blowout. For all of our new listeners, each October we pick a haunting theme and spend the whole month talking about topics related to that theme. Like one year, all of the hosts picked the thing that scared them the most. Another year, we did a bunch of monsters like vampires and zombies. This year, we're calling October Trick or Treat Month, and it's going to be an extra good one. This year, we're calling October Trick or Treat Month, and it's going to be an extra good one. But while we put the finishing touches on our month of tricks and treats,

please enjoy this encore presentation of our eerie audio adventure through Tangents Manor, where we learned about the science of spooky sounds. See you next week! Come in, come in from the storm. I promise it's safe and we'll entertain you with tales from the SciShow Tangents Critics. I, Sari Riley, am your ghost host, and I'll be joined by the usual ghouls, Hank Green, Stefan Chin, and Sam Schultz, as we tantalize and torment your eardrums with some of the scariest sounds out there and the science of what makes our skin crawl. Take a seat wherever you like. Oh, not the science couch. It's got some slime

residue from our last guest, but please join us for our chat. Hello, friends. What is fear? It's what I'm feeling right now. You're being too scary. There's a Sam-shaped hole in the wall. I ran out of the room. Fear is the emotion when something bad might happen. I guess I was thinking of it, like, maybe more specifically, and, like, if you think that something might physically or emotionally harm you. But I think actually your definition is broader and encapsulates more things that could probably be considered fear.

Oh, yeah. I definitely get scared of things that will not harm me. Like movies and haunted houses and all kinds of stuff that aren't really scary, like objectively speaking. Most of the things that I've been afraid of have not threatened my my physical body is there a different types of fear or is all fear the same fear because there is like test fear but there is also like scary movie fear and i don't i can't step back and see if those are the same feeling like they feel different to me. Like there's gut fear, maybe. Heart fear, head fear. Foot fear. That is the same question that scientists ask.

Some of them, they equate fear and anxiety and like lump that under the same umbrella. But then depending on the particular study, some scientists qualify fear different than anxiety, where anxiety is the broader bubble that incorporates all sort of like psychological, physiological, and behavioral, like fearful behaviors or fearful feelings and any sort of arousal in your autonomic nervous system, which is like your heart rate, digestion, breathing, fight or flight response. But then animal behavioralists tend to define fear as a specifically defensive behavior or escape. So like it's stimuli that leads to that behavior. But anxiety describes like a lot of the things that we would consider fear. I guess it almost feels like the fear without anxiety, like fear without anxiety is funner than fear with anxiety. Because it's like, go do a scary movie or something. It's not exactly you're anxious for the scare to happen.

You're just experiencing that shock with none of the repercussions afterwards. I like the idea of being afraid without being worried. That's what I want. What I really don't want is to be worried, which is what I am all the time. I don't want to be afraid either. I just want to be quiet and content and watching The Good Place on Netflix. Yeah. Scientists describe both surprise and fear as wide-eyed, information-gathering facial expressions.

I want to stop doing that and just have a relaxed facial expression. I'd rather not gather any more information for a little while, please. Well, I guess now that we've agreed on what frightens us, let's take a tour of this mansion and some of the creepiest sounds it contains. Our first stop is the conservatory to explore classically horrifying nature sounds. Watch your step for that creaking floorboard and Sam's pet rat. So natural sounds are this classic horror thing, like howls of wolves or scurrying feet or creaking

and you don't know where it's coming from. And they're rooted in the fact that humans fear the unknown, basically the question of whether there's something dangerous or not. And in evolutionary psychology, there's this idea called agent detection mechanisms, which basically says that if you have a rustle in the bushes or you see a footprint, your brain will automatically say there is an intelligent agent there that is trying to harm you so you have this fearful gut reaction and air on the side of caution because if you don't react when there's an actual threat you will be dead that makes sense to me but also i was thinking about the scurrying thing because usually things that scurry like they're not i could take whatever it is if it's a mouse if it's a guinea pig yeah a good stomp and you win.

But like, I think my fear is more about the unpleasantness of the sensation of like, if it decides to scurry onto me. It's just that experience that I'm afraid of. But I'm not necessarily afraid of like a physical harm. Or maybe I'm just fooling myself. Yeah, snakes make that noise when they go through the leaf litter. And I definitely don't want to, I definitely don't want to get bitten by a snake because that really can be the end. Yeah. Also, I think that there are a lot of animals that make pretty, they don't make a ton of noise. Like a mountain lion doesn't make a ton of noise when it's coming up on you. It can make

a little noise and you could definitely be like, there is an intelligent agent that sees my ham hock as a ham hock. So non-human animals are natural sounds, but also human screams, I feel like, fit into this category where there's a specific psychological response to hearing this kind of sound. And screams are actually not super well studied by neuroscientists and psychologists, but they have a very clear definition of them. It is a communication signal used for survival that's virtually universal, and it's loud, high pitch, and has these fluctuations called roughness, which are unique to screams. So a yell or raising your voice or singing a loud note doesn't generally have this roughness.

And that roughness equates to more fearful sounding screams in psychological studies. So basically we figured out a noise no one else makes. And we were like, that one will be the one that we will assign to something terrible is happening to me. Run away.

Our second stop will be the library with our grand piano and Stefan's other musical instruments. Since we've had music, there have been melodies that send shivers down our spines. Evolutionarily speaking, and this is related to yelps or screams, harsh or nonlinear sounds are more stressful because they possibly are interpreted by our brains similarly to like human screams. It reminds me of like the roughness quality. Unhuman animals respond to sounds with background noise and abrupt frequency changes in similar stressful ways because those sorts of sounds are If those sounds are more divorced from emotion and just like sound like the franticness of whatever communication an animal uses,

then that is why it can be scary. Do we understand why music invokes any kind of response no matter what kind of response it is? It's never made any sense to me. It's like, here, have a noise. And your brain is like, yeah. That's a nice noise. I like that one.

I feel like it's trained a lot of it that we just grow up in a system and are exposed to certain things and we learn to associate them with good experiences. There has to be a way to do that research. There's gotta be people who haven't heard any of like the music that I hear. And we can be like, here's a song that Hank thinks is a happy song. Do you think it's a happy song? We did those experiments on the Chimane people in Bolivia, in the Amazon, and they are not, they have not been exposed to uh western music or or at least are not didn't grow up with

it the way that we did and to them like we hear major scales and chords as a happier sound and we interpret minor chords or scales or dissonance as like a sadder or scarier sound. But to them, they could differentiate between the two, but they didn't label them the same way. They didn't find it unpleasant the way that we do. It was just like, this is a different quality that sound or music can be, but it's not necessarily worse or negative. It could be that there are some innate qualities to it, but also some learned qualities to it,

but also some learned qualities to it. I don't know. This gets into like epigenetics, which I'm very much not an expert in, but because we have generations and generations of people saying, here's the same good sounding music than when you have a baby. You think we have epigenetic music tastes? That would be wild. I got some methylated chromosome

somewhere being like, you're going to like Elton John. Stefan, have you ever heard of like the devil's interval? Oh yeah, yeah. You have to use that. If you want to be cool. So if there are two notes

that are seven semitones apart, that's like, I feel like that's one of the strongest intervals that you can have that's like a perfect fifth and the devil's interval is like one semitone short of that six semitones apart and for some reason it just sounds

evil or really cool if you use it correctly this is Halloween Stefan it's all evil it's gotta be evil This is Halloween, Stefan. It's all evil. It's got to be evil. Yeah. And our last stop is the laboratory. This is where us scientists hang out. And it's where Hank conducts his definitely safe experiments with extreme high and low pitches on any unsuspecting passersby. high and low pitches on any unsuspecting passersby.

Some of these sounds occur naturally, but it makes sense to lump them together because this is the realm where we are artificially generating sound and using a lot of technology to help us analyze exactly what they do. But to start with high-pitched sounds, they can be viscerally unpleasant if you know the trope of the nails on a chalkboard, but we're not quite sure why. In Spain, there's a word grima for this visceral sound like styrofoam rubbing against each other or a knife scratching on a plate that gives you like a physical unpleasant sensation or repulsion beyond just not enjoying the sound. And when these types of sounds were played, then there is a physiological change in heart rate that is slightly different from being shown or from hearing disgusting things. being shown or from hearing disgusting things.

And a 2006 Ig Nobel Prize found frequencies in the middle of the audio range when scratching a three-pronged garden rake on a chalkboard were the worst. It sounds really bad. But what was interesting, it wasn't like the highest pitched frequencies, like right on the edge of our hearing that made people the most uncomfortable with it. It was like the combination of all that. Right. They hypothesized, and it's an Ig Nobel, so take a grain of salt, but they said it was the range where our ear canal resonates,

so maybe it causes a stronger response in your brain. I have heard that, because you mentioned that our brains might be tuned to those frequencies in the middle that are like more for like a scream and I've heard that our ear shape

also reinforces those frequencies. It's like this is where a baby's scream is centered and so it's like just useful to be able to hear those

more clearly I guess. Speaking of vibrations that's a good transition into the low sounds that creep us out. So, for example, infrasound, which is anything generally under 20 hertz, below the frequencies of audible sounds to human ears. In nature, things like volcanoes or avalanches or earthquakes and some animal sounds, but also human-made things like nuclear tests or explosions can generate infrasound. You mostly feel this as vibrations if it's loud enough, but your ear can't recognize it as like a particular tone.

And that's the thing that can make you think you see ghosts, right? Yeah. That can make you think you see ghosts, right? Yeah. So acoustic scientists in 2003 played around 750 concert goers live music, including some laced with infrasound. And 22% of them reported more unusual experiences. So like uneasy, deep sadness, revulsion, fear when infrasound was played in the music. of fear when infrasound was played in the music.

And it's also like similar symptoms have been reported in a supposedly haunted laboratory or in cathedrals or castles where people have felt the presence of a ghost and people have gone back with sound detecting equipment and found infrasound at around 19 hertz. So you're saying people can't hear you can't hear it but you does make you sad is there a sound that i can't hear but makes me happy i guess not that's not allowed why does it only make people sad why can't we have a happy silent noise i think my so okay my theory is that it's just, it's something that's outside of our everyday experience. Yeah.

And so it's just unsettling. Like there's, it's part of that, like tapping into the unknown. Like we don't know what's happening and we have this sensation that we can't describe or can't make sense of given our everyday experience. And so it's just like, well, I'm scared now, or I'm going to poop my pants, which is there's that the theoretical like brown note, which is like the infrasound note that will make people poop. That's not that scary, I guess, but

that could be used for all kinds of ill intent. Don't give that power. Curing people who are constipated. This is medical marvel. Ah, it looks like the storm has passed and you're probably anxious to be on your way. I hope you found all our twists and turns and trivia welcoming.

If you liked what you heard, leave us a review, tell other people to pay us a visit, or send a raven to that Loud Bird website with your favorite moment. We might go on other mini-adventures if you enjoyed this one. Thank you for joining us. I have been Sari Reilly. I have been

Sam Schultz. I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Hank Green. Ooh, that was the scariest part of the whole thing so far. It was very unsettling. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the Wickedly Wonderful Team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our scary social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto.

Our eerie editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sinister sound design is by Joseph Tuna Medish. And we couldn't make any of this without our putrid patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a coffin to be filled, but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted.

Happy Halloween! But one more thing. So being afraid of making embarrassing sounds like farting is totally normal. But one study published in March 2018 had volunteers watch different clips, like a gas relief ad with a woman farting in yoga class, or one with a person farting in front of their crush at a party. And when they concentrated on feeling like the person doing the farting, they got self-conscious, deeply embarrassed.

But when they concentrated on being an outside observer, they reported feeling less embarrassed. So if you ever feel a deep fear of your own fart, just like pretend to be someone else and it'll be fine. Seems like iffy advice. You think people should just let them rip, huh? Yeah, just let them rip. Yeah, it's so natural. Well, I don't think people should be farting. And I've never farted, and I won't ever.