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