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

Starting point is 00:00:00 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'd 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?

Starting point is 00:01:04 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 is broader and encapsulates more

Starting point is 00:01:32 things that could probably be considered fear oh yeah i definitely get scared of things that will not harm me like movies and uh 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 physical body. Is there 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 can't step back and see if those are the same feeling. Like, they feel different to me.

Starting point is 00:02:04 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 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

Starting point is 00:03:00 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.

Starting point is 00:03:24 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.

Starting point is 00:03:42 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

Starting point is 00:04:02 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,

Starting point is 00:04:42 there is an intelligent agent there that is trying to harm you. So you have this fearful gut reaction and err 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.

Starting point is 00:05:05 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 wanna,

Starting point is 00:05:28 I definitely don't wanna 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

Starting point is 00:05:42 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

Starting point is 00:06:15 that's virtually universal, and it's loud, high-pitched, 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

Starting point is 00:06:49 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 human screams.

Starting point is 00:07:37 It reminds me of the roughness quality. Both humans and many non-human animals respond to sounds with background noise and abrupt frequency changes in similar stressful ways because those sorts of sounds are produced when vocal folds are overused in like surprise or shouting situations. So it's possible that if like music is ultimately just a sequence of sounds, 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,

Starting point is 00:08:35 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 got to be people who haven't heard any of like the music that 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 chimene people in bolivia in Amazon, and they are not, they have not been exposed to Western music, 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.

Starting point is 00:09:26 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 can 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. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:09:50 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 gonna like Elton John. Stefan, have you ever heard of

Starting point is 00:10:16 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 the devil's interval is like one semitone short of that that's six semitones apart and for some reason it just sounds evil or really cool if you use it correctly this is halloween

Starting point is 00:10:43 stephan yes all evil. It's got to be evil. Yay. 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 passers-by. Some of these sounds occur naturally, but it makes sense to lump them together because this

Starting point is 00:11:15 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. And a 2006 Ig Nobel Prize found frequencies in the middle of the audio range when scratching

Starting point is 00:12:15 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 hypothesize and it's an ignoble 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.

Starting point is 00:12:58 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.

Starting point is 00:13:32 You mostly feel this as vibrations if it's loud enough, but your ear can't recognize it as a particular tone. And that's the thing 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. 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

Starting point is 00:14:26 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 would 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.

Starting point is 00:14:59 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 gonna 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, but... That's so terrifying! Well, it's not scary yet. That could be used for all kinds of ill intent. Don't give that power.

Starting point is 00:15:30 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.

Starting point is 00:15:59 Thank you for joining us. I have been Sari Reilly. I've 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

Starting point is 00:16:14 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.

Starting point is 00:16:33 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.

Starting point is 00:17:32 So if you ever feel a deep fear of your own fart, just 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.

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

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