Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Joe McCormick, and my regular co host
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb is not with us today. He's he's out
Speaker 1: on vacation on the day we're recording this. So I
Speaker 1: am joined by a special guest for today's episode, which
Speaker 1: is our producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. What's going on? Seth? Hello,
Speaker 1: happy to be here, happy to be talking to our wonderful,
Speaker 1: wonderful audience. Don't don't flatter him too much. Um now,
Speaker 1: so Seth, you've been on Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: as a guest before, wants to talk about the sensation
Speaker 1: of free song, which is the name for when you
Speaker 1: get goose bumps and chills as a reaction to music.
Speaker 1: And uh, and of course you're a music guy. You
Speaker 1: you play music, you record music. You think what is
Speaker 1: it called when you make records? Are you a music publisher? Um?
Speaker 1: Technically I own a record label and I manufacture records.
Speaker 1: So however you want to phrase that in today's world?
Speaker 1: Who knows, you know, because we're so far beyond the
Speaker 1: traditional label system. And then screaming gets involved, so I
Speaker 1: could say those words, I am a record label and
Speaker 1: I manufacture records. I think it's technically you are a
Speaker 1: you are a disc lord. Yes, that's a good way
Speaker 1: to put it. Yes, so as as a resident disc
Speaker 1: lord here. But oh but also also I should mention
Speaker 1: that you have hosted a number of music related podcasts,
Speaker 1: and I'm genuinely so excited because You've got a brand
Speaker 1: new one coming out that by the time this episode airs,
Speaker 1: I think you will have your first episode live. Is
Speaker 1: that right? I believe by the time this air's at
Speaker 1: least two episodes will be alive. Yes, yes, And depending
Speaker 1: upon when you listen to this, maybe three, maybe twelve,
Speaker 1: who knows. So tell me about the new show. That
Speaker 1: the show is called Rusty Needles Record Club, And um,
Speaker 1: it's a very simple concept, honestly, all it is. It's
Speaker 1: like a book club, but it's for music. That's that's
Speaker 1: That's really as simple as it gets. My ludicrous goal
Speaker 1: for this podcast is to listen to every album ever made.
Speaker 1: I know I'm not gonna do that's like, that's that's ridiculous,
Speaker 1: but that's my goal. And so the fun of that
Speaker 1: is that me and my guests. We are one album
Speaker 1: per episode. Everyone's gonna listen to the same album and
Speaker 1: then we talk about it and we go on all
Speaker 1: kinds of tangents. We'll give it a quick review at
Speaker 1: the end. But honestly, what the show is, it's a
Speaker 1: surrogate for people out there who just want a music friend,
Speaker 1: you know, someone who they can talk to about music
Speaker 1: and listen to a good music conversation. And you know,
Speaker 1: I've been in this place in my life and I'm
Speaker 1: sure others too. Sometimes you just don't have a friend
Speaker 1: around to talk to about music. That's what this podcast
Speaker 1: can be for you. If if you're a lonely music
Speaker 1: nerd as I've been, and I'm sure I'm sure every
Speaker 1: it has been at some point in their life, listen
Speaker 1: to this podcast. It's for you. You know, I literally
Speaker 1: made it exclusively for you out there. So um, but
Speaker 1: that's what it is. It's a rusty Needles record club.
Speaker 1: Find it literally wherever you find any podcast. I mean,
Speaker 1: in a way, that's sort of what all podcasts are,
Speaker 1: right Like, uh, sometimes I think of what is stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind? It's like if you really wish
Speaker 1: you had someboddies to talk to about science and goblins
Speaker 1: and medieval poetry. Here are those goblin friends? Yeah no,
Speaker 1: And I honestly do think that that podcasts in general
Speaker 1: serve a very valuable purpose in that in that space,
Speaker 1: you know, and sometimes like stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: if they're genuinely informative, genuinely researched. My other show, Rusty
Speaker 1: Needles Record Club is much more conversational, much lighter fare.
Speaker 1: But if you enjoy listening to my voice, and more importantly,
Speaker 1: if you really like music and music recommendations, hop on over,
Speaker 1: give it a give us a listen, and a big
Speaker 1: goal of mine. I don't think I've even told Joe this.
Speaker 1: I want to get Joe on so we can talk
Speaker 1: about some Neil Young. Oh. I know Joe loves Neil Young,
Speaker 1: and yet we've never had a full blown Neil Young conversation.
Speaker 1: So you just start thinking about your favorite Neil Young album. Well,
Speaker 1: Neil Young for me, If you know anything about my
Speaker 1: my taste in in uh perhaps underappreciated movies of the
Speaker 1: weird Sword of the kind we talked about on Weird
Speaker 1: House Cinema, Uh, you might better understand my love for
Speaker 1: Neil Young because he is both a genuinely wonderful rock
Speaker 1: musician with I love his singing voice, I love his
Speaker 1: guitar playing, I love his weird, atypical creativity. But he
Speaker 1: is also just full of bad ideas for music and
Speaker 1: just strangely realized, poorly thought out ideas put into practice
Speaker 1: with reckless abandon and I love that too. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I know. And it's not just for music. I think
Speaker 1: it's for every piece of his artistic output, Like um didn't.
Speaker 1: Let's see. I believe one of his album covers was
Speaker 1: taken with a game boy. Do you remember that album cover?
Speaker 1: I think it was the silver and gold one or
Speaker 1: something like that. I can't relate, yeah boy camera, Yeah no,
Speaker 1: I mean, what a wonderful idea. He has to be
Speaker 1: in some sort of record book for the only album
Speaker 1: cover taken with a game boy, you know, like, congratulations
Speaker 1: to him. You know, he doesn't care. He does exactly
Speaker 1: what he wants, despite the fact that he is like
Speaker 1: a heralded, you know, very well respected, very very critically
Speaker 1: applauded musician, you know, so congratulations to him for you know,
Speaker 1: sticking to himself. Yeah, okay, well we'll save that for
Speaker 1: the episode where I come on again it is Rusty
Speaker 1: Needles Record Club, so you can look that up wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. But for today's episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, set your music guy. So I
Speaker 1: thought we got to talk about music of some kind.
Speaker 1: It's October here on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
Speaker 1: It is the most hallowed time of the year for us,
Speaker 1: where we we talked about all things spooky and monstrous
Speaker 1: and uh and and uncanny, So we got to talk
Speaker 1: about some uncanny melodies. Obviously, the place we had to
Speaker 1: go today is to talk about horror movie music. And
Speaker 1: I also recognize that we are doing, uh, we're currently
Speaker 1: doing a great injustice that Robert wasn't here for this
Speaker 1: conversation today. So we may have to revisit the subject
Speaker 1: in some in some episode later on in the in
Speaker 1: the month or something like that, because I know Robert
Speaker 1: loves horror movie music. He's got tons of interesting thoughts
Speaker 1: about it too, so so this may be something that
Speaker 1: we'll have to like continue as an ongoing conversation and
Speaker 1: and follow up from this episode with him. Absolutely, But
Speaker 1: before we get into any of the real mysteries about
Speaker 1: scary music and horror movie tunes, Uh, that that I
Speaker 1: wanted to be the meat of the episode. Today, I
Speaker 1: was wondering if we could kick off by exploring a
Speaker 1: kind of strange thought I was having earlier. I don't
Speaker 1: know if this is if this is an insight, or
Speaker 1: if this is just sort of like me staring at
Speaker 1: my tone nails and thinking it's interesting. But maybe you'll
Speaker 1: be the judge. So I was just thinking the other
Speaker 1: day about how music is extremely important to the experience.
Speaker 1: It's of pretty much all modern cinema, not just as
Speaker 1: a pleasurable enhancement to the drama of the film, but
Speaker 1: as one of the techniques that makes the experience of
Speaker 1: movie going feel beyond the power of regular observation and cognition.
Speaker 1: It's one of the things that makes watching a movie
Speaker 1: feel like you have superpowers. Um So, to explain that
Speaker 1: because modern film has high definition video and audio uh
Speaker 1: and and modern editing techniques. I've talked about this before
Speaker 1: that I think modern film very much feels like observing
Speaker 1: real life. In the words of the character Professor Brian
Speaker 1: Oblivion in the movie Videodrome, the television screen is the
Speaker 1: retina of the mind's eye, and what takes place on
Speaker 1: that screen emerges pretty much as raw experience for the
Speaker 1: viewer watching TV or watching a movie is in many
Speaker 1: ways as realistic as observing real life. It certainly feels
Speaker 1: that way most of the time, unless you unless something
Speaker 1: breaks the spell and you get distracted, which which um
Speaker 1: ultimately leads to a few things you guys have talked
Speaker 1: about in episodes in the past, like, um, why you
Speaker 1: cry while watching a movie when it's like, oh, I
Speaker 1: know this is fake. There's no part of me that
Speaker 1: thinks these are real people experiencing anything close to reality,
Speaker 1: and yet I'm feeling a real emotion. I'm feeling sad,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling scared. Perhaps, yes, yes, So the illusion is
Speaker 1: so strong that it becomes raw experiences. It's as if
Speaker 1: you're experiencing it yourself. Unless again, the spell gets broken
Speaker 1: because I don't know, your phone rings or something. You
Speaker 1: get distracted and suddenly you realize, oh, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: not real life. The boom mic dips into the screen. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's another thing, like like shoddy your filmmaking
Speaker 1: techniques can also break that spell, but also modern filmmaking
Speaker 1: techniques uh create a simulation of raw experience that contains
Speaker 1: information that tends to give the viewer insights that are
Speaker 1: not possible when observing the natural world. Uh. So, just
Speaker 1: some some very simple examples. Think about the way that
Speaker 1: editing and camera work can draw your attention automatically to
Speaker 1: details in movie scenes that will be significant in understanding
Speaker 1: something about a character's personality, or or maybe through uh
Speaker 1: foreshadowing by highlighting something will automatically uh suggest to you
Speaker 1: objects or statements that will later become very important to
Speaker 1: the plot. So think about the information content implied by
Speaker 1: a zoom in on a pair of scissors on somebody's desk,
Speaker 1: or especially if it's in a horror movie, or a
Speaker 1: flashback of a character saying I hope we meet again soon. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so, when compared to viewing reality, the viewer of
Speaker 1: TV or film has a sense of precognition or extrasensory perception.
Speaker 1: The drama that you watch happen on screen un holds
Speaker 1: as raw experience, but it's also imbued with this extra
Speaker 1: layer of godlike knowledge and insight that's not available to
Speaker 1: you when you're just observing mundane reality from a fixed perspective,
Speaker 1: and also not available to the others who are supposedly
Speaker 1: living in this world that we're observing. So for example,
Speaker 1: we we do have this omniscience of we're we we
Speaker 1: know information that they don't know about each other, like
Speaker 1: as if we are a god looking in on their lives.
Speaker 1: It's it's similar to reading a book where you can
Speaker 1: kind of see inside someone's mind and you can feel
Speaker 1: their own thoughts and etcetera, etcetera. It's very similar to
Speaker 1: that in that Let's let's take it to music for
Speaker 1: a second. If we're watching Jaws and we hear the
Speaker 1: Jaws theme start up the butt on but on, We
Speaker 1: as the viewer, we know the shark is coming. They
Speaker 1: might not know that because they can't hear the Jaws
Speaker 1: theme starting. You know, he's they're chumming the water. He's
Speaker 1: he's facing the wrong direction. We're looking right behind. We
Speaker 1: know the shark is coming, but he doesn't like like
Speaker 1: we are one step ahead. We are superhuman compared to
Speaker 1: these these fictional characters on the screen. Yes, so that's exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, this is where I was going with this.
Speaker 1: Music is another one of these modern cinematography techniques that
Speaker 1: contains super mundane information that imbuse the viewer with a
Speaker 1: sense of godlike insight about what's going on. Uh. So
Speaker 1: you know, in reality, you could be walking down a
Speaker 1: sidewalk alone on a windy day, or you can imagine
Speaker 1: that same point of view. Maybe it's a p o
Speaker 1: V shot in a movie of somebody walking down a
Speaker 1: sidewalk on a windy day with the Halloween theme playing, right,
Speaker 1: and in the context of a movie, the latter almost
Speaker 1: certainly tells you something is something about what's going to
Speaker 1: happen in the future. So the music in a movie
Speaker 1: doesn't just set a mood. It does set a mood,
Speaker 1: but it also provides information that's not available to the characters.
Speaker 1: Um though, I think it's also interesting that some times
Speaker 1: characters in movies behave as if they can hear the
Speaker 1: same music that the audience can, and I mean assuming
Speaker 1: that it is music that's not like coming from a
Speaker 1: radio on screen, and we'll talk more about the distinction
Speaker 1: in a minute. I think, um but I think maybe
Speaker 1: in those cases, the the suggested effect is really that
Speaker 1: the character either somehow knows or believes they know something
Speaker 1: in an extra sensory or precognitive way, and the music
Speaker 1: sort of shares that supermundane knowledge they have or they
Speaker 1: believe they have with the viewer. This is a big word.
Speaker 1: I used to have to use a lot. Um. If
Speaker 1: anyone in the audience doesn't know, I've spent a big
Speaker 1: chunk of my life making TV and movies as an animator.
Speaker 1: That was a big part of my life for about
Speaker 1: a decade or so. And then UM, one element we
Speaker 1: would have to pay attention to is the idea of
Speaker 1: diagetic versus non diagetic music. Um, if anyone doesn't know. Basically, uh,
Speaker 1: here's a very simple definition. Diagetic music is what is
Speaker 1: happening on screen. You can see someone doing something. It
Speaker 1: is making a noise and you are experiencing it. So
Speaker 1: someone turns on their radio and you're hearing the radio,
Speaker 1: and that is the sound you hear on screen. That's
Speaker 1: diagetic music. Someone picks up an obo and starts playing it,
Speaker 1: and you hear the music of the oboe playing. That's diagetic.
Speaker 1: So basically, there's a real logical explanation for where that
Speaker 1: sound is coming from. I think the word diagetic comes
Speaker 1: from the Greek for meaning something like narrative or something,
Speaker 1: doesn't it meaning that the sound emerges from the narrative
Speaker 1: as opposed to on top of the narrative. Exactly, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's that, it's it's a part of this. It's
Speaker 1: it's not. Um, it's not a subliminal thing. It's a
Speaker 1: limital thing. It's right there in the front, you know.
Speaker 1: So um, non diagetic is actually what we experience the most.
Speaker 1: Non diagetic music is basically every score that you see
Speaker 1: pretty much when you see any movie, any TV show,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Now, nine percent of it is a score
Speaker 1: that is just kind of overlaid, you know, with with
Speaker 1: like the images and the dialogue and the sound effects.
Speaker 1: It's just this thing on top. But it didn't always
Speaker 1: used to be that way. So yeah, Like the the
Speaker 1: very first time a mainstream movie had sound it was
Speaker 1: this Al Jolson film back in seven. It's called The
Speaker 1: Jazz Singer. It's very famous. Um. I don't necessarily recommend it.
Speaker 1: It's got some very iffy subject matter. I don't think
Speaker 1: you should watch it personally, but it's very famous. It's
Speaker 1: something you watch in like, you know, film theory classes. Um.
Speaker 1: But then if we jump ahead six years, like I said,
Speaker 1: that was seven jump ahead six years and the first
Speaker 1: mainstream film to use a traditional score was King Kong.
Speaker 1: That was three and that was scored by Max Steiner.
Speaker 1: So so think about that nine popularization of sound in
Speaker 1: movies nineteen thirty three. We've basically figured it out and
Speaker 1: we're using the same technique today. That's pretty remarkable for
Speaker 1: just six years. Uh. But right there in between, in
Speaker 1: that little six year gap, we have Todd Browning's Dracula
Speaker 1: starring which was released in one I mean a classic, right, Oh, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean, it can't be denied. I I've I don't
Speaker 1: know how many times I've watched this movie at this point.
Speaker 1: But but but um, I think I've made this opinion
Speaker 1: clear on the show before. And I'm not the only
Speaker 1: person to think this. I've I've read other people, uh,
Speaker 1: saying that they had feelings to the same effect. I
Speaker 1: think that the simultaneously produced Spanish language version of Dracula
Speaker 1: that Universal filmed concurrently with this. I think they were
Speaker 1: filming at night while Browning's a team was filming during
Speaker 1: the day, is actually better except for lacking bell leegosie.
Speaker 1: So if you could pair the Spanish language version with
Speaker 1: Bella Leegosi as Dracula, that would be the perfect form.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, I fully agree, and yeah, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: something we could get into a whole other episode. But
Speaker 1: the other short version is is that the Mexican production
Speaker 1: had the benefit of watching what happened during the American
Speaker 1: production and learn from it and just kind of heighten everything,
Speaker 1: make everything is proving it better. It's just it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a wonderful thing. I've seen documentaries about it,
Speaker 1: like it's it's a fascinating subject. But one thing that
Speaker 1: actually both of those movies have in common very little score,
Speaker 1: so little in fact that I would say no score. Um. So,
Speaker 1: there's only two moments of music in Todd Browning's Dracula. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's one point where they're at an opera house and
Speaker 1: they're having like a scene at an opera house in London,
Speaker 1: and they're talking and then in the background you can
Speaker 1: hear some Wagner and some Schubert, and that's just like
Speaker 1: what happens to be occurring in the background in the scene,
Speaker 1: because they're they're at the London opera house. This is
Speaker 1: what's happening in the background, and it does heighten the
Speaker 1: moment and kind of add some feelings to things. But
Speaker 1: that is majetic. To bring it back to that word again,
Speaker 1: it is what is happening on screen, and so that's
Speaker 1: pretty much the only thing in the movie that has
Speaker 1: any music at all period. And then if you look
Speaker 1: at the very very beginning, over the opening credits, before
Speaker 1: the film actually begins, there's a little bit of Tchaikovsky's
Speaker 1: Swan Lake which plays over literally the opening credits exclusively.
Speaker 1: And I believe that is two things. Um. One, it's
Speaker 1: kind of a holdover from just like the silent era,
Speaker 1: where it's just like, oh, well, there's this thing on
Speaker 1: screen and there's no people talking. I gotta do something here,
Speaker 1: just put some music up there, you know. But too,
Speaker 1: I also have read that um, Chaikovsky's Swan Lake was
Speaker 1: also just very stock standard, where it was just like, hey,
Speaker 1: we can just use this one, like this is just
Speaker 1: a standard song we can stick in wherever we need
Speaker 1: it in the studio system. UM. I'm not sure how
Speaker 1: true that is, but I find that fascinating because to me,
Speaker 1: when I watched that film, that moment from Swan Lake
Speaker 1: fits that Dracula opening credit sequence so perfectly that I
Speaker 1: can't see it being stock. I guess kind of like
Speaker 1: Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where their entire sound library is
Speaker 1: stock you know, um um score stuff. And when I
Speaker 1: hear it in something else, like a TV commercial, I
Speaker 1: get confused. That's a tangent. I'm moving back to to Dracula.
Speaker 1: Well no, no no, no, I know exactly what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: Like I can't. It's uh, I think the part with
Speaker 1: swan Lake is it's that creaky violin melody. Yeah, am
Speaker 1: I right about the game. Well, maybe we can stop
Speaker 1: and just play a clip of that real quick, good call. Okay.
Speaker 1: I can't hear that without thinking about Todd Browning's Dracula, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it has established itself, like I think of
Speaker 1: Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake as Dracula music more than I think
Speaker 1: that as swan Lake music. Clearly it is made for
Speaker 1: swan Lake anyway. But I've I've also seen Todd Browning's
Speaker 1: Dracula way more than I've ever seen Swan Lake. So
Speaker 1: you know, it's I'm sure it'll be different from person
Speaker 1: to person. But but but here, here's the point. Here's
Speaker 1: the point. So back in again, this is the jazz singer. Uh.
Speaker 1: That movie was very, very popular, but all of the
Speaker 1: music was taking place on screen diagetically because it was
Speaker 1: a musical. Everyone's singing was singing right there in front
Speaker 1: of you. Every all the musical musical instruments was a stage.
Speaker 1: It was all about performance, stage work, the vaudeville scene, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So this was understandable for a lot of reasons. Um. One,
Speaker 1: musicals were just very popular at the time, so that
Speaker 1: that was like a big reason why they made this
Speaker 1: film be a musical and why it was so popular
Speaker 1: just in the modern consciousness of wow, the jazz singer
Speaker 1: winning all the awards, making all the money, all the
Speaker 1: people have seen it, but also be it's an excellent
Speaker 1: showcase of early sound and vision singing together. Two in
Speaker 1: this brand new medium, which is the talkie, because before that,
Speaker 1: um you know, obviously there was like a lone organist
Speaker 1: sitting in most silent movie theaters playing along, you know,
Speaker 1: with whatever is happening in the background. Or two there
Speaker 1: was a brief period where they were actually playing records
Speaker 1: along with the film. But this was a very short
Speaker 1: lived technology because they would go out of sync perpetually.
Speaker 1: Because I mean, if you just even think about that,
Speaker 1: like even in your own world, you know. You uh,
Speaker 1: let's say you're trying to sink what's playing on your
Speaker 1: radio with what's happening on your television. It's just not
Speaker 1: gonna quite always line up. It'll be close enough, probably,
Speaker 1: but it won't. It's not going to be exactly right.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if anybody what we got a
Speaker 1: lot of Mystery Science Theater three thousand fans out there.
Speaker 1: I don't know if anybody ever tried in that middle
Speaker 1: period to manually synchronize a riff tracks m P three
Speaker 1: with a movie that they were trying to watch it
Speaker 1: paired with it was a pain. Yeah, yeah. Or even
Speaker 1: trying to sink Dark Side of the Moon with the
Speaker 1: Wizard of Oz always fun, always fun. I've I've spent
Speaker 1: many hours doing that. Um. But but anyway, it's getting
Speaker 1: back to my point though. So these were musicals, and
Speaker 1: so that was like there was a reason for it
Speaker 1: all to be happening on stage King Kong. It was
Speaker 1: a a real score because they had finally figured out
Speaker 1: that that was okay. One Both the filmmakers and the
Speaker 1: film critics did not think that the audience could understand
Speaker 1: where the music was coming from. They thought that we
Speaker 1: were too simple, that like we would be confused. We
Speaker 1: would say, wait, is there a violinist behind them? Like
Speaker 1: like where where is this music coming from? Oh, they
Speaker 1: aren't alone, there's a musician right over there. You know.
Speaker 1: Well that is interesting. I mean I wonder if did
Speaker 1: and I mean so obviously we don't think that now.
Speaker 1: But also we grow up watching movies that have non
Speaker 1: diagetic music in them. It did audiences for say King Kong,
Speaker 1: like the earliest movies with non diagetic scores, did they
Speaker 1: react with confusion or was this pretty much metabolized instantly?
Speaker 1: I can say this, and I don't think this is
Speaker 1: proof of anything, but it is something that happened at
Speaker 1: the time. Um I have, you know, I like classic cinema.
Speaker 1: Um I have. I have this one box set of
Speaker 1: pretty much all of the old Laurel and Hardy um
Speaker 1: Um shorts and features. And what's very funny is that
Speaker 1: in this collection they have the original shorts, which, much
Speaker 1: like Todd Browning's Dracula, were released. Basically, they're they're barely
Speaker 1: not silent films. You know, they are one step past
Speaker 1: the silent film. You can hear them talking, but they
Speaker 1: had not figured out non diagetic scores yet. And on
Speaker 1: the same in the same box set, they also have
Speaker 1: the re releases that happened post three where they actually
Speaker 1: scored them, and it's the same short. They just had
Speaker 1: to include this music because people had grown to accept
Speaker 1: it so quickly that these long, you know, periods of
Speaker 1: silences that were like, I guess a part of the
Speaker 1: filmmaking for a moment, we're now seen as completely passe
Speaker 1: and old old fashioned. You needed that, mu zick. So
Speaker 1: they had to re release all these shorts with with
Speaker 1: a brand new score a tacked onto them. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: speaking of which, uh, this ultimately happened to Todd Browning's
Speaker 1: Dracula as well. Um oh yeah, So I think maybe
Speaker 1: the could it be true that the first time I
Speaker 1: ever saw it in full it was with the Philip
Speaker 1: Glass score. I think that might be true. It could
Speaker 1: be it came out in a so depending upon when
Speaker 1: you saw it, it's very possible it was after that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and I was not watching classic cinema as
Speaker 1: a child, and so what's what's funny about that? So yeah,
Speaker 1: they they they re scored um and but it's official
Speaker 1: universal They released a brand new version of Todd Browning's
Speaker 1: Dracula with a brand new score made by Philip Glass,
Speaker 1: and I think it's very very good. However, I do
Speaker 1: think it's very funny that they went from a film
Speaker 1: that had basically no music and almost no folly and
Speaker 1: added the most maximalist, you know, perpetual ar paggio maker himself,
Speaker 1: Philip Glass, to score it. So it went from a
Speaker 1: movie with like almost no sound to a movie with
Speaker 1: like NonStop sound, and I love it. I actually I
Speaker 1: prefer the Philip Glass version now. But anyway, that's that.
Speaker 1: But I guess technically anybody can make their own score
Speaker 1: to Dracula. Yeah, yeah, no, I feel that way, and
Speaker 1: I there have been a lecture. We could go off
Speaker 1: on this all day. We have so much to talk about. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll hold my opinions about Air and La Voyage Dan's
Speaker 1: Laloon for another time. Oh. I think somehow we have
Speaker 1: actually talked about that on the show before. I think
Speaker 1: maybe in the past we were talking about music videos
Speaker 1: and that came up. Yeah. But but the practice of
Speaker 1: scoring an old silent film with modern technology and modern
Speaker 1: sensibilities is a very fun practice. Many people have done
Speaker 1: it over the years, and it's it's fun. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: that really sticks in my mind. I remember I watched
Speaker 1: a pretty awesome modern rescore of Well, I guess it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a rescore because this was a silent film
Speaker 1: to begin but of Fritz Long's Metropolis. Yes, do you
Speaker 1: remember who did the score? I unfortunately do not, So
Speaker 1: that is not a very useful comment. I'm sorry, I'm
Speaker 1: sorry for asking. Thank but it's really interesting what you
Speaker 1: point out. Yeah, so that this Todd Browning Stracula is
Speaker 1: absolutely one of the foundational texts of of horror cinema.
Speaker 1: Is like a lot of what horror cinema is goes
Speaker 1: back to traditions that can be traced step by step
Speaker 1: back to the universal monster movies, the first of which,
Speaker 1: of course, was Browning Stracula. Wait, I am right about that.
Speaker 1: It was the first one, right, definitely. Well, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: technically we can go back to the silent era where
Speaker 1: we had like you know, Phantom of the Opera and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. But of the talkies, we can definitely
Speaker 1: say it's Todd Browning Stracula. Yeah. And yet now the
Speaker 1: idea of a of a horror movie without not just
Speaker 1: some music, but like lots of music and very horton music.
Speaker 1: That's that's critical in uh setting both setting the tone
Speaker 1: and establishing that sort of godlike feeling of of superhuman
Speaker 1: insight that you get when you're watching a horror movie.
Speaker 1: You know, something that the characters don't know. It contributes
Speaker 1: to the sort of dramatic irony of watching the scene
Speaker 1: that that gives you this weird superhuman ability. Uh, that's
Speaker 1: like absolutely crucial to what modern horror is. And if
Speaker 1: you have a movie that is very light on soundtrack
Speaker 1: or has no soundtrack, that's notable. Now that's like a
Speaker 1: thing to point out about the movie. Um, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think of examples. Does the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Speaker 1: lack music or does it mostly lack music? It's definitely
Speaker 1: very little, that's for sure. And yeah, it actually makes
Speaker 1: it feel more real. It makes it feel like a
Speaker 1: documentary because we aren't given this insights, we aren't given
Speaker 1: this extra layer of telling us how to feel. Almost
Speaker 1: almost hand holding if you want to look at it
Speaker 1: and like that kind of way that like that the
Speaker 1: score tells us this way, this way, you know, here's
Speaker 1: how you feel over here. You know, Well, that's another
Speaker 1: interesting question that uh, I don't know if I'm prepared
Speaker 1: to answer right now, But it is fun to notice
Speaker 1: the difference between music that is highly emotionally manipulative and
Speaker 1: that's okay with us, versus music that's highly emotionally manipulative
Speaker 1: and it makes us mad. Like when a TV commercial
Speaker 1: has really emotional music and you're like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: get out of here with that, right rights, Like perhaps
Speaker 1: that uh that Dying Pets commercial and it's like a
Speaker 1: Sarah McLaughlin song on top that's like very very sad.
Speaker 1: Do you remember what we're talking about. I wasn't thinking
Speaker 1: about that in particular. I think about like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: when it's it's like a commercial for a telecom company
Speaker 1: or something, and they're like connecting people across the world,
Speaker 1: but to love to share and the happy music playing,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I feel like folgers used to do
Speaker 1: that back in the day too. I think they've grown
Speaker 1: past that, and the late eighties early nineties a bunch
Speaker 1: of folders commercials were very like family emotional. But didn't
Speaker 1: you know anyway, anyway, we're going on tangents nothing right here?
Speaker 1: All right, Well, maybe one of the places we should
Speaker 1: go from here to Uh. To think about the function
Speaker 1: of scary music in horror movies is to ask, what
Speaker 1: are some of the objective characteristics of music that is
Speaker 1: often subjectively associated with fear or used in horror movies? UM,
Speaker 1: and I think some obvious places to start. Probably the
Speaker 1: most obvious place to start for me would be that
Speaker 1: horror music or or fearful music overwhelmingly favors minor key
Speaker 1: tonality over major key. In fact, I was trying to
Speaker 1: think of a single good counter example of of a
Speaker 1: horror movie that had scary major key music, and I
Speaker 1: literally could not bring a single example to mind. Uh.
Speaker 1: The only my general feeling is that the only way
Speaker 1: major key music plays a plays a big role in
Speaker 1: horror movies is either in the sort of like normal
Speaker 1: part of the world before things get bad, or to
Speaker 1: to automatically suggest a spirit of irony, that there's a
Speaker 1: kind of mean sense of humor in playing major key
Speaker 1: music in a horror movie, or perhaps sometimes as a
Speaker 1: bait and switch. UM. I don't want to give anything away,
Speaker 1: so spoiler alert for the original Friday the Thirteenth Part one.
Speaker 1: If you don't want to hear a spoiler, You can
Speaker 1: spoil that one. Yeah, ever, watch out if most people
Speaker 1: will remember, at the very very end of Friday Thirteenth,
Speaker 1: Part one, there is a final scare where I believe
Speaker 1: her name is Alice. She's out there on the boat.
Speaker 1: She's um feeling all happy because she's killed Mrs Vorhees,
Speaker 1: the killer from that film. She's safe. She can see
Speaker 1: the cops arriving on the shore, and we have a
Speaker 1: nice major key song playing that's like, hey, everything's all right,
Speaker 1: the movie's over, we can relax now we're safe. And
Speaker 1: then immediately boom, it switches to minor. It switches to
Speaker 1: become very aggressive, much more like a tonal, like stabs
Speaker 1: of strings and stuff, much like a the Psycho score perhaps,
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, yeah, that shift happens when Jason jumps
Speaker 1: out of the water and grabs her that last scare.
Speaker 1: It makes that major shift right there, from hey, everything's fine,
Speaker 1: major key, No, it's not minor key. You know that's
Speaker 1: that's obviously on purpose. Yeah, So that's that's that spirit
Speaker 1: of irony I was talking about. But I mean, like,
Speaker 1: can you think of a single instance of a horror
Speaker 1: movie where there's music that is itself supposed to be
Speaker 1: scary and not like by irony or by contrast, and
Speaker 1: it's in a major key. I'm sure it must exist
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of movies out there, but I
Speaker 1: could not come up with a single example, I would bet,
Speaker 1: and again I don't know this off top of my head.
Speaker 1: There have been a large number of repurposing pop songs
Speaker 1: into horror themes lately, like for the past I'll say,
Speaker 1: what five ten years. I would bet at least one
Speaker 1: of those stances they did not convert it into a
Speaker 1: minor key. So let's say, hypothetically, I'd have to go
Speaker 1: back and check this because seven watch this movie A
Speaker 1: ton Um that that wonderful film us by Um Jordan Peel, Right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he The main theme is a I've Got five on
Speaker 1: It exactly. It's an interpretation of the of the pop
Speaker 1: song I've Got five on It. I bet I've got
Speaker 1: five on it is in a major key. I'd have
Speaker 1: to really listen to the score to see if they
Speaker 1: changed it to make it minor. But anyway, this is
Speaker 1: all speculation, so this is useless. That's a great example
Speaker 1: of pop music being used in a horror movie. By
Speaker 1: the way, the way it's woven through the whole score
Speaker 1: and comes. But yeah, yeah film. Actually, you and I
Speaker 1: both watched recently um called oh gosh, what's it called?
Speaker 1: The It was on HBO Max Malignant Malignant because they
Speaker 1: worked in Where Is My Mind by the Pixies on
Speaker 1: multiple occasions throughout that score as both a a theme
Speaker 1: as well as just kind of like a um oh,
Speaker 1: perhaps foreshadowing in a way, you know, yeah, yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a common practice. So I at least one time
Speaker 1: there have been one of those pop songs made into
Speaker 1: a horror score that was still major, but I definitely
Speaker 1: can't think of it. No, Um, there was a thing
Speaker 1: you actually shared a link that I had not seen before,
Speaker 1: but I thought it was really funny. It was a
Speaker 1: video that somebody put together of horror theme music that
Speaker 1: was modulated to be in a major key instead of
Speaker 1: a minor key, so it had the Halloween theme and
Speaker 1: all this stuff. But I thought that the funny So
Speaker 1: it's it's so obviously inappropriate that it is immediately and
Speaker 1: automatically hilarious. But I thought that the best one was
Speaker 1: the major key version of the theme from Saw, which
Speaker 1: sounded to me again to come back to TV commercials. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounded like a commercial. Uh, it sounded like music
Speaker 1: that would play in a telecom commercial, you know, while
Speaker 1: the narrators sank together. We're connecting people across the globe
Speaker 1: because these are the moments that make us who we are. No,
Speaker 1: I fully agree. I think my favorite was the nightmare
Speaker 1: on on Elm Street theme turned into a major key.
Speaker 1: That one was actually oddly beautiful. Um, if anyone's looking
Speaker 1: this up, this was from a Slate article. Um, I
Speaker 1: believe from two where it was just a theme songs
Speaker 1: and a major key are chilling, le hauntingly dorky, and
Speaker 1: it was fascinating. It's it's it's an interesting couple of
Speaker 1: minutes you can spend looking at this for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was where the link. Let's see, I just wanted.
Speaker 1: It was by a YouTube user called muted Vocal. I
Speaker 1: don't know anything about them otherwise me either, although I
Speaker 1: did see that they they've made videos going the other
Speaker 1: way where they have found uplifting positive major key songs
Speaker 1: switched them to a minor key and then that's something too,
Speaker 1: so like for example, the theme song too. Oh, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I haven't watched this video Jurassic Park or big.
Speaker 1: You know, you take that that uplifting key, minorize it
Speaker 1: suddenly it's scary you know. Oh oh wait, I I
Speaker 1: just thought of an example of a of a major
Speaker 1: key pop song that I have always thought was incredibly creepy,
Speaker 1: creepier than people give it credit for, and should be
Speaker 1: used in a horror movie. It's Rod Stewart Forever Young.
Speaker 1: I think if you like listen to that song with
Speaker 1: the right frame of mind, it is the most unsettling.
Speaker 1: It sounds like, you know, something that would be playing
Speaker 1: while like a serial killer is preparing their instruments or something. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, for sure. And I could also see in
Speaker 1: the near future someone making a horror film and that
Speaker 1: can be the pop song that's been interpolated into us
Speaker 1: scoring the the new theme. You know. Now, there are
Speaker 1: a ton of other musical features that we could identify
Speaker 1: as being common in horror movie music. One that pops
Speaker 1: up over and over again in uh, in scary music,
Speaker 1: not just in horror movies, but say like It's Big
Speaker 1: in It's It's on Black. Sabbath's first album is the
Speaker 1: musical interval, known sometimes as the Devil's try tone. It's
Speaker 1: a series of three notes that has a long interesting
Speaker 1: history in music. I know Rob has gone into depth
Speaker 1: on this in some episodes in the past, so I
Speaker 1: think I'm not going to rehash that here. They'll maybe
Speaker 1: maybe Rob and I will come back to it at
Speaker 1: some point. Um. But Yeah, clearly this one shows up
Speaker 1: a lot when you're trying to get people to think
Speaker 1: about demons. Yeah, the the the Devil's triad, and the
Speaker 1: Devil's interval as it's sometimes known these chords, I guess,
Speaker 1: and these intervals I think they're going to play in
Speaker 1: later when we start talking about kind of like the
Speaker 1: internal like subconscious like logic and kind of like source
Speaker 1: of scariness. I think this is gonna come up again.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna I'm gonna keep this in mind. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna keep a pin in it. Okay, There's another thing
Speaker 1: that I was wondering about, if if you have any
Speaker 1: thoughts on this, is uh, particular instrumentation. You know, that's
Speaker 1: how horror movie themes, maybe less so these days, but
Speaker 1: at least for a long time, I feel like they
Speaker 1: tended to favor particular instruments, especially instruments that sound archaic
Speaker 1: to us, So like the pipe organ, the harpsichord, UH,
Speaker 1: instruments that are not exactly thought of as like the
Speaker 1: most modern of sounds. And I wonder if that's because
Speaker 1: for the same logic that generally associates UH antiquity with spookiness,
Speaker 1: you know, like why are more horror movies set in
Speaker 1: an old house than a new house? No, I think
Speaker 1: you're absolutely correct. I think, well, a lot of elements
Speaker 1: of storytelling are trying to convey something without saying it directly.
Speaker 1: And I do think antiquated things just seem more spooky
Speaker 1: because I think, yeah, either subconsciously or consciously, we recognize, oh,
Speaker 1: they're all dead, you know, like the terror of history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's the past contains many stories, uh, and at any time,
Speaker 1: to to bring back one of those stories is to
Speaker 1: invite the idea of ghosts, or or of secrets maybe
Speaker 1: better left uncovered or something. Oh, definitely. I mean think
Speaker 1: about The Shining, for example, UM, in that film. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a very eerie use of nineteen twenties big band music, right,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of like this impression of other
Speaker 1: worldliness and very spookiness. I'm sure in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: is we're considered very upbeat songs, but when you hear
Speaker 1: it's in that context with that story, it is very spooky.
Speaker 1: It's nothing but spooky. You know, I can't imagine being
Speaker 1: happy while listening to that music. We're definitely gonna have
Speaker 1: to come back to The Shining in a bit, because
Speaker 1: that's got some of my favorite horror movie music from
Speaker 1: in multiple ways, from the you know, the the Wendy
Speaker 1: Carlos synths to uh do some really good percussion stings
Speaker 1: in it. That illustrates something I want to get to
Speaker 1: in a minute. Pendarecki, Yes, no, I I think from
Speaker 1: everything we're about to talk about, the Shining is like
Speaker 1: almost a perfect example of every kind of scary music.
Speaker 1: And yeah, we'll definitely get to that. Thank Okay, well,
Speaker 1: so I get let's get right into this. There's a
Speaker 1: thing that I was trying to tease out about how
Speaker 1: there might be different types of horror movie music that
Speaker 1: we can recognize patterns, but they're not all. It's not
Speaker 1: just one homogeneous mass that there are different types of
Speaker 1: music associated with the different types of emotions that horror
Speaker 1: wants to conjure. And so this will get into something
Speaker 1: that horror writers discuss a lot. Might be less familiar
Speaker 1: to people who don't play around in such obsessive literary circles,
Speaker 1: But horror writers talk a lot about the difference between
Speaker 1: horror and terror, and they make the point that these
Speaker 1: are two very distinct emotional states. They're not the same
Speaker 1: thing at all, and it's usually explained like this. I'll
Speaker 1: try to do the simplest version. Terror is the feeling
Speaker 1: of dread you experience at the anticipation of encountering something awful,
Speaker 1: and horror is the feeling of shock and revulsion you
Speaker 1: experience when you actually encounter it. So you know, if
Speaker 1: horror is you throw open the door and you see
Speaker 1: the monster, terror is the feeling as you creep down
Speaker 1: the hall toward the door, not knowing what's behind it.
Speaker 1: I was looking this up trying to find who who
Speaker 1: is the earliest person to articulate this difference, and it
Speaker 1: seems to me maybe the earliest person to talk about
Speaker 1: this is the eighteenth and nineteenth century English author of
Speaker 1: Gothic fiction and Radcliffe, who wrote about this in a
Speaker 1: piece called on the Supernatural in Poetry, which was published
Speaker 1: in eighteen twenty six. Might have been published posthumously, but
Speaker 1: she wrote as follows, they must be men of very
Speaker 1: cold imaginations, with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise.
Speaker 1: Terror and horror are so far opposite that the first
Speaker 1: expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high
Speaker 1: degree of life. The other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.
Speaker 1: And I would say this remains the prevailing sentiment among
Speaker 1: horror writers these days, that the terror is the really
Speaker 1: prized emotion. That ror writers generally think it is better
Speaker 1: to to be successful at making you feel that dread
Speaker 1: of anticipation and ambiguity of creeping up to the door
Speaker 1: not knowing what's behind it, than just going for that,
Speaker 1: you know, like ah, the shock and revulsion when you
Speaker 1: finally see the monster. Right, I think I think most
Speaker 1: people would agree with that. I definitely do. And so
Speaker 1: concurrent with these two very different emotions that are elicited
Speaker 1: by by horror fiction and thus by horror movies, I
Speaker 1: think we can hear some extremely pronounced differences between the
Speaker 1: kinds of music that are usually used for each one,
Speaker 1: for terror sequences versus horror sequences. So I would offer
Speaker 1: as a sort of emblematic contrasting pair of examples, the
Speaker 1: Jaws theme versus the stabbing violins from the score of
Speaker 1: Psycho Um. So the Jaws theme is you know, the
Speaker 1: classic that the two note progression dun dun dun, dun dunt.
Speaker 1: I would say that is terror music to the core.
Speaker 1: You don't see the monster yet, but something bad is approaching.
Speaker 1: You can feel this sense of dread welling up in you,
Speaker 1: but you're you're not at the moment of conflict and
Speaker 1: confrontation yet. And also anyone if they aren't familiar with
Speaker 1: a song, or if they just haven't thought about it
Speaker 1: in a while, I think it's very important that the
Speaker 1: notes not only are getting faster, they're getting louder. It's
Speaker 1: it's as if the song is approaching you. You you
Speaker 1: are feeling the literal feelings of something getting closer, something
Speaker 1: getting faster, something coming right at you. And that's that's
Speaker 1: what it's trying to evoke. And that's I think very successfully.
Speaker 1: It doesn't, you know. But there's also something that's genius
Speaker 1: about the Jaws theme, And you know, John Williams often
Speaker 1: has an incredible intuitive sense of of evoking concepts like this.
Speaker 1: Something about the Jaws theme suggests a form that isn't
Speaker 1: yet understood that it is, you know. It almost suggests
Speaker 1: like something coming up from out of deep water that
Speaker 1: you can't see. Um, you just know that there's this
Speaker 1: approaching menace, that something awful is coming out of the
Speaker 1: literally out of the murk, but you can't find its
Speaker 1: form yet. And I think that again goes right back
Speaker 1: to what you were just saying about, Um, the anticipation
Speaker 1: being far worse than the actual violence. It's it's the
Speaker 1: build up. And famously for Jaws, it was because they
Speaker 1: weren't a hundred percent happy with the build of Bruce
Speaker 1: the shark. And um, I think everyone would agree that
Speaker 1: makes it even better. You know, Yeah, the movie is
Speaker 1: much better because you see less of the shark. Um.
Speaker 1: Though then again, eventually in a movie, you're going to
Speaker 1: have to confront the horrible thing, right or usually you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to, and you gotta have the right kind
Speaker 1: of music for that too. Uh though that the characteristics,
Speaker 1: the objective physical sonic characteristics of the music, where the
Speaker 1: actual conflict happens, where you see the monster or the
Speaker 1: you know or the you know, the killer jumps out
Speaker 1: with the knife that is very different music. And again
Speaker 1: I think the violins from Psycho are a pretty perfect
Speaker 1: example of what what formed that music usually takes. It
Speaker 1: creates mental pictures, for sure, like and perhaps it is
Speaker 1: because Psycho has just become, you know, part of our
Speaker 1: shared d n a of visual imagery, you know, and
Speaker 1: just cinema in general. Button that sound with the violin
Speaker 1: feels like a knife stabbing, you know. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: I I don't know if I can unmarry those sounds.
Speaker 1: To come back to the shining again, there's actually another
Speaker 1: thing that I think is a really great example of
Speaker 1: horror music in particular, meaning that moment of horror as
Speaker 1: opposed to terror. It's the rattling percussion that's used, for example,
Speaker 1: in the scene where I think it comes up multiple
Speaker 1: times in the movie. But think about when Wendy is
Speaker 1: running up the stairs and she looks down the hall
Speaker 1: and sees the Man of the Dog costume and you
Speaker 1: hear that shaking, rattling drumbeat. Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, if
Speaker 1: we're ready to talk shining, I'm ready to talk shining. Okay.
Speaker 1: So um, we're also going to go and bring this
Speaker 1: up to a third kind of music. In a moment.
Speaker 1: But I think The Shining will lead us there with
Speaker 1: something we've already talked about. Um So, terror music in
Speaker 1: The Shining is definitely the Wendy Carlo score. Ye think
Speaker 1: about it with like the opening credits, it's these big
Speaker 1: droning synthesizer you know, things that are just building and
Speaker 1: groaning and like you know, you're it's it's like the
Speaker 1: creaking of the trees in the forest. It's it's just
Speaker 1: it's just slow and dull and it's coming, you know.
Speaker 1: And then the horror music in that film, uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's a conductor. His name is Christophe Penderrecki and he
Speaker 1: did a lot of the like like picture of the
Speaker 1: shots where like, um, you see Danny's face and he's
Speaker 1: like in revulsion and it's those very oh gosh, what
Speaker 1: what's what's the best word for I want to say,
Speaker 1: violent strings, That's what I want to say. But it's
Speaker 1: it's it's the the atonal strings that have very little
Speaker 1: rhythm to them and very little melody and they're just
Speaker 1: happening all at once. That's very um that that's very
Speaker 1: typical Christoph Pandarecki and he's very very known for that
Speaker 1: and he's very successful at that. Uh. Johnny Greenwood is
Speaker 1: a contemporary um um film scorer musician who works in
Speaker 1: that pender wreck E school, no question about I think
Speaker 1: about what he did for like there will be blood
Speaker 1: or stuff something like that. But um, but anyway, I
Speaker 1: think that's a really good uh a difference between those two.
Speaker 1: Terror is the Wendy Carlos part, Horror is the Pandarecki part.
Speaker 1: And now what can we move into eerie music because
Speaker 1: I think that is shown very well in The Shining
Speaker 1: with something we've already mentioned right, right, So I think
Speaker 1: the two categories I just mentioned, I would say are
Speaker 1: not even exhaustive of of scary movie music. Both of
Speaker 1: these two tend to be used in sequences of heightened
Speaker 1: tension or you know, you're you're you're really trying to
Speaker 1: build dread. There's also just what you might call spooky
Speaker 1: music or eerie music, and I think actually a lot
Speaker 1: of the most iconic horror movie themes fit more into
Speaker 1: this category. They're not used during scenes that are at
Speaker 1: the height of terror or where you're feeling something terrible
Speaker 1: coming on, but rather they tend to play early in
Speaker 1: the film. They set a kind of uneasy mood that's
Speaker 1: that's charged with other worldliness and uh, and these tend
Speaker 1: to be more melodic than the other two kinds, and
Speaker 1: they tend to sort of recur as themes throughout. So
Speaker 1: I think of the tubular bells theme from The Exorcist
Speaker 1: I would put in this category, or maybe even the
Speaker 1: main Suspiria theme by Goblin in the original movie Suspiria.
Speaker 1: I was thinking a lot of um, the nursery rhyme
Speaker 1: sing song from Nightmare on Elm Street. I think that
Speaker 1: that has that eerieness and to bring it back to
Speaker 1: the shining like like we promised we would. That's where
Speaker 1: I think all that nineteen twenties big band stuff lives.
Speaker 1: All that is the eerie stuff where there's actually nothing
Speaker 1: building about it. There's nothing violent happening from it. So
Speaker 1: it's not terror, it's not horror. It's just setting a
Speaker 1: vibe and it's a it's a spooky, eerie vibe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it invites you to uh, it invites you to a
Speaker 1: different state of mind, and it just sort of invites
Speaker 1: you to a realm in which other worldly things are possible.
Speaker 1: I feel a lot of the the eerie music sort
Speaker 1: of puts you in a mood to accept the supernatural
Speaker 1: elements of horror plots. Uh this, I love this kind
Speaker 1: of breakdown between terror into horror into eerie and like
Speaker 1: just you know, I'm sure obviously we're still gonna be
Speaker 1: missing some elements because the world is a multifaceted place.
Speaker 1: But but with these three, I feel like you can
Speaker 1: really break down most music and horror films. And so
Speaker 1: I was thinking about a lot of my favorites. So
Speaker 1: think about Friday thirteenth, you know, the families like kick
Speaker 1: Mo Mama. That would definitely to me be a terror
Speaker 1: because it's building, it's it's setting a tone, it's getting louder,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's cre it's it's um. It's for telling
Speaker 1: what's about to happen, you know, think about UM Dawn
Speaker 1: of the Dead, where a lot of the Goblin synthesizer bits.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's the terror, it's the building, it's
Speaker 1: it's the almost like um, almost like a machine out
Speaker 1: of control. It's going faster and faster, and there's a there,
Speaker 1: there's something happening in the background, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, there are these horror bits that when the
Speaker 1: violence occurs. But again, getting back to major stuff, I
Speaker 1: feel like the like the mall theme song stuff counts
Speaker 1: as herey in the The Dawn of the Dead films,
Speaker 1: you know, the bump bump bump, bump, bump, bump, bump,
Speaker 1: bump bump, like all that stuff because we are in
Speaker 1: a place and I guess kind of ironic too. It's
Speaker 1: it's ironic that there are these happy songs playing, that
Speaker 1: we're in a happy place, a shopping mall, and yet
Speaker 1: it's the end of the world and these zombies are
Speaker 1: destroying everything and killing us, you know, totally yeah, but yeah, yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about, like all my favorite scores,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them kind of fit into these
Speaker 1: these places. And I also noticed, based on these distinctions
Speaker 1: between terror, horror, and eerie, I've noticed that a lot
Speaker 1: of my favorite scores are all I think in the
Speaker 1: terror realm. I think they're all that building a tonal
Speaker 1: nonsense stuff like UM. I was thinking about the Mika
Speaker 1: Levi score two Under the Skin. I was thinking about
Speaker 1: the Tom York's score to the remake of Suspiria UM.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking about the Colin Stetson score to
Speaker 1: hereditary All all go ahead, Well, no, I was just
Speaker 1: gonna say, I love all three of these examples. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you single these out ahead of time, and I listened
Speaker 1: to them, and yeah, just excellent, excellent choices, and uh,
Speaker 1: they sort of have something in common, which is that
Speaker 1: I don't think any of these are something you could
Speaker 1: really like. Hum the tune too, so they're not They're
Speaker 1: not really melodic. And I think perhaps kind of we're
Speaker 1: talking about before about perhaps hand holding, I think perhaps
Speaker 1: the terror element of this three different kinds of music,
Speaker 1: the terror music does the least amount of hand holding
Speaker 1: when it comes to comforting you. I think it is
Speaker 1: intending to make you feel uncomfortable. It is and I
Speaker 1: think all three of those I just mentioned because there
Speaker 1: is no melody, because there is no rhythm, because there
Speaker 1: is no harmony, because there is no there's no music
Speaker 1: for for lack of a better word, it's mostly sound.
Speaker 1: It makes you feel uncomfortable because anything could happen. And
Speaker 1: I think that kind of lack of knowing what's around
Speaker 1: the corner, that uncertainty, that lack of the world of
Speaker 1: the unknown, is what makes a lot of people scared.
Speaker 1: And I think that bringing back to the Devil's Interval
Speaker 1: and the Devil's Triad that we mentioned before. A big
Speaker 1: reason I've heard why the Devil's Triad is so eerie
Speaker 1: is that because there is no logical next step for
Speaker 1: the Devil's Triad. That when someone plays that note, you
Speaker 1: don't know what the next note is going to be.
Speaker 1: It could settle over here, it could settle over there.
Speaker 1: It's unknown. It's it's not part of our common linear
Speaker 1: musical thought. So that that that that sense of the unknown,
Speaker 1: I think is in general spooky. I think that's I'm
Speaker 1: not making any new assumptions there. Well, I mean this
Speaker 1: was a big part of what we talked about in
Speaker 1: our the episode You and I did on Free Song,
Speaker 1: where uh it was it's clear that a big part
Speaker 1: of people's experience of and reaction to music is tied
Speaker 1: up in prediction. Uh. The people's ability to predict what's
Speaker 1: going to happen next in music, and the degree to
Speaker 1: which the music either conforms to those predictions or breaks
Speaker 1: from those predictions is a major factor in determining how
Speaker 1: we feel about music and the reactions that it gets
Speaker 1: from us. You know that when we listen to music,
Speaker 1: it is not out to passive exercise as much as
Speaker 1: it feels like it. Our brains are always trying to
Speaker 1: stay one step ahead of the music and and sort
Speaker 1: of think what's going to be the next note, what's
Speaker 1: going to happen next in the next bar? And so yeah,
Speaker 1: I think clearly music has a great power to unsettle
Speaker 1: us by denying us that predictive power by saying like
Speaker 1: I'm not going to tell you what key I'm in?
Speaker 1: Than all right, So I wanted to go on to uh,
Speaker 1: the question of seeing if there's anything we can learn
Speaker 1: about why some of these objective characteristics of horror music
Speaker 1: feel subjectively scary to people. Uh, you know, why is
Speaker 1: it that horror movie music tends to have these features
Speaker 1: and not these Why is it why does it tend
Speaker 1: to be in minor keys instead of major for example?
Speaker 1: And I think the answer in a lot of these
Speaker 1: cases is probably just going to be culturally and historically contingent,
Speaker 1: as many things are so like why are hype organs
Speaker 1: so often used in scary horror movie music? I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess it's possible that somebody could make a convincing
Speaker 1: argument that there's some interaction between the objective characteristics of
Speaker 1: pipe organ sounds and our neurobiology. But I'm naturally kind
Speaker 1: of doubtful of that. I think that's probably just a
Speaker 1: result of random historical associations. But I think in some
Speaker 1: cases there could be actual deeper reasons, biological reasons why
Speaker 1: certain things sound scary to us. And so I was interested.
Speaker 1: Has anybody written anything about this with regard to minor keys? Um?
Speaker 1: And I couldn't find a really solid answer here, but
Speaker 1: I was kind of interested by what I did turn up. So,
Speaker 1: of course, minor keys in music are not just associated
Speaker 1: with fear, but with a whole range of negative valenced emotions,
Speaker 1: with sadness, with uncertainty, with ambiguity. Apparently this is a
Speaker 1: robust finding across psychology of music research. Um. But the
Speaker 1: question would be why, like why minor keys associated with
Speaker 1: negative emotions, including fear. This appears to be a somewhat
Speaker 1: unsolved question, but there are a lot of hypotheses floating around.
Speaker 1: And so I came across a couple of interesting resources
Speaker 1: commenting on this question. One was a scientific paper that
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about in a second. One was
Speaker 1: just a popular press article in enemy by a music
Speaker 1: psychology researcher named Vicky Williamson and she and this article
Speaker 1: argues that negative emotional valance of minor keys is mostly
Speaker 1: cultural conditioning, but there may be some deeper, something deeper
Speaker 1: going on as well. And as one hint of associations
Speaker 1: between tonality and emotion being deeper than pure cultural contingency.
Speaker 1: UM she points to a scientific article that I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting. So it was one that was published in
Speaker 1: Current Biology in two thousand nine called Universal Recognition of
Speaker 1: Three Basic Emotions in Music, and this was by Thomas
Speaker 1: Fritz at All. And basically, this study exposed people of
Speaker 1: different cultures to music from other cultures with which they
Speaker 1: were previously unfamiliar to see if they could pick out
Speaker 1: the intended emotional qualities of that music. UM. So, it compared,
Speaker 1: for example, of the Western popular music to the music
Speaker 1: of people of the MafA culture, who are people who
Speaker 1: live primarily in Cameroon and Nigeria, and it turned out
Speaker 1: that MafA people were able to pick out the emotional
Speaker 1: valence and this has been between three major emotions, so
Speaker 1: happy music, sad music, or fearful music. Uh. They were
Speaker 1: able to pick out these emotions of pieces of Western
Speaker 1: music at a rate above chance, even though they were
Speaker 1: totally unfamiliar with it. Uh, though their performance at recognizing
Speaker 1: these emotions was much lower than people who had a
Speaker 1: previous cultural familiarity with it. And I think you could
Speaker 1: take studies like this as perhaps evidence that some, certainly
Speaker 1: not all, and maybe not even most, but but some
Speaker 1: of the emotional associations of musical sound are in fact
Speaker 1: neurobiological and common to all people. I would think so,
Speaker 1: at least to a certain degree. But then again, that's
Speaker 1: the kind of finding that's like, it's like, it's interesting,
Speaker 1: but it's not quite enough for me to to like
Speaker 1: fully conclude, Yeah, there's definitely like a universal biological association,
Speaker 1: but it's like getting there so so so. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: that that seems interesting. Um. Also not really related to
Speaker 1: today's topic, but she pointed out something that I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting in this paper, which is that, uh, there
Speaker 1: was other research showing that pop music of the post
Speaker 1: two thousand's apparently has more minor key tonality than pop
Speaker 1: music of previous decades I think specifically of like the sixties,
Speaker 1: and I wonder why that would be. Yeah, I'm sure
Speaker 1: part of it is. Um, in all arts, there's always
Speaker 1: actions and reactions. So if you just get too much
Speaker 1: of something, artists are you know that they they feel
Speaker 1: very uh, very much driven to do the opposite, like no,
Speaker 1: I forget your cube is a man and I'm doing this,
Speaker 1: you know. But I think we reached a similar uh
Speaker 1: points of view and similar kind of stances when we
Speaker 1: were discussing frisson in a previous episode, which is that, like,
Speaker 1: it's really difficult to pin down the facts of music
Speaker 1: because it does feel so ethereal, so personal, and the
Speaker 1: only thing I think we really have to like definitely
Speaker 1: established as music is that sometimes other people feel the
Speaker 1: same way too about this thing that I'm experiencing. That's
Speaker 1: that's about all you can say about it. But but,
Speaker 1: but but I think this is a good point. The
Speaker 1: the better than chance is something interesting about that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that would tend to suggest to me that there
Speaker 1: there might be something going on there. Maybe there is
Speaker 1: a deeper neurobiological association between certain types of sounds that
Speaker 1: we pair with certain types of emotions and and that
Speaker 1: that could be approaching universality. But I'm still unconvinced on that.
Speaker 1: I found another thing. It was a sud from published
Speaker 1: in a journal called music key sciente and this was
Speaker 1: called the Emotional Connotations of Major Versus Minor Tonality one
Speaker 1: or more origins. This was by an Austrian researcher named
Speaker 1: Richard Parncutt, who works on the psychology of music. Uh
Speaker 1: and UH. I thought this paper was interesting just because
Speaker 1: it collects a lot of the existing hypotheses about why
Speaker 1: there are emotions associated with major versus minor key tonality. UM.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to get into these in depth.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there's one that I honestly don't. I
Speaker 1: gotta come clean, I do not understand enough about music theory,
Speaker 1: but I'll try to explain the other ones as felt
Speaker 1: as well as I understand. So one of them just
Speaker 1: test to do with the concept of dissonance. Um, this
Speaker 1: is that minor keys contain more dissonance than major keys.
Speaker 1: So I'll try to make simple sense of this. And
Speaker 1: also I'm not like, I don't know a whole lot
Speaker 1: about music theory, but at least what I understand is that, um, okay,
Speaker 1: when when you play any note, you play a note
Speaker 1: within that one note, there are harmonics, and these harmonics
Speaker 1: when you play a note tend to suggest what other
Speaker 1: notes you could play with that note and what it
Speaker 1: would sound like. You know, So a major key includes
Speaker 1: natural harmonics of a root note, but a a minor key,
Speaker 1: or especially a minor third, is kind of somewhat dissonant.
Speaker 1: Perhaps we can hear an example. So the minor third
Speaker 1: is a half step down from the major third, which
Speaker 1: is the major third is a natural harmonic of the
Speaker 1: root note, and the minor third is dissonant instead. It's
Speaker 1: it's dissonant with that harmonic, so we find it less
Speaker 1: harmonically harmonious. And uh. And so maybe this one's kind
Speaker 1: of obvious, but it doesn't need a kind of final
Speaker 1: connecting principle. Why is it exactly that harmonic dissonance is
Speaker 1: associated with negative emotions? I don't know that that's kind
Speaker 1: of hard to get under, but it just that one
Speaker 1: feels very baseline natural that when you hear two dissonant notes,
Speaker 1: it does sound like something is unresolved, or something is ambiguous,
Speaker 1: or something is wrong. But how do we all know that?
Speaker 1: That's the real question. Yeah, so I think there's probably
Speaker 1: something very much to the fact that minor keys suggest
Speaker 1: more negative valence to motions because they contain more dissonance
Speaker 1: but that that, yeah, it still leaves this second level
Speaker 1: question unanswered. Why is it that the dissonance is associated
Speaker 1: with negative emotions? Um, and maybe some of these other
Speaker 1: hypotheses have something to do with this. So the next
Speaker 1: one is alterity and markedness. So in the abstract he
Speaker 1: rights quote, major triads and scales are more common than minor,
Speaker 1: and positive valance is more common than negative. Major and
Speaker 1: positive valance are the norm. Minor and negative are marked others.
Speaker 1: So maybe it's just the fact that major tonality is
Speaker 1: common and normal, therefore we associate it with the good,
Speaker 1: and minor tonality is a violation of what's common and normal,
Speaker 1: of violation of the normal order. Therefore we interpret it
Speaker 1: as bad or not necessarily bad. I don't know what
Speaker 1: yet negative negative emotional content. And then thinking about what
Speaker 1: you said a moment ago about how post two thousand's
Speaker 1: songs in the minor key are on the charts far
Speaker 1: more often than they wear back, let's say, in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties. Yeah, I do wonder if there's a need
Speaker 1: for that, if perhaps has to do with them just
Speaker 1: kind of the tone and vibe of the world at
Speaker 1: the time, if it has to do simply with trends.
Speaker 1: Maybe certain songs become inexplicably popular that are in a
Speaker 1: minor key, and others are just mimicking it, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean it could be so many things. But um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, but but not to be too negative towards
Speaker 1: minor keys. Minor keys are just as popular as major
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're great. Yeah, they're beautiful too. Again,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to mention all these explanations, but one
Speaker 1: more he brings up is, Uh, this is kind of
Speaker 1: an interesting idea that it that major versus minor key
Speaker 1: associations could have to do with speech. Um. There, it's
Speaker 1: been suggested by some people that there are ways in
Speaker 1: which major key tonality is more similar to typical speech
Speaker 1: or happy speech, and minor key tonality is more similar
Speaker 1: to sad speech. Uh. He singles out the idea that
Speaker 1: minor keys and sad speech both contain pitches that violate
Speaker 1: expectations by being lower than normal. So in a minor key,
Speaker 1: think about hitting that major third and then versus hitting
Speaker 1: that minor third, the minor third is a half step
Speaker 1: lower than the major third. But okay, so it seems
Speaker 1: to me like some of the major minor stuff. It
Speaker 1: does probably have something to do with dissonance, dissonance being
Speaker 1: associated with uncertainty and ambiguity, and that being being of
Speaker 1: course associated with negative emotions. But there's still a lot
Speaker 1: of sort of unclear steps in the logic there. I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's this very much has my interest, but
Speaker 1: I don't think we fully understand it, certainly I don't.
Speaker 1: But there's there's another aspect here that I think is
Speaker 1: probably much clearer when you're looking for biological reasons why
Speaker 1: we might associate certain kinds of sounds or music with fear,
Speaker 1: and this would be uh, mimicry of sounds that are
Speaker 1: produced in our ancestral environment or by our ancestors themselves.
Speaker 1: So this is the biomimicry segment here. Uh this is
Speaker 1: probably not all that surprising, but it has been borne
Speaker 1: out by research. And the question is this, what if
Speaker 1: scary music works by mimicking sounds that our brains naturally
Speaker 1: associate with danger, i e. Human screams. So I was
Speaker 1: looking at a paper by Caitlin Trevor at All from
Speaker 1: the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America published in
Speaker 1: and uh so the author's right as follows, and they're abstract,
Speaker 1: they say, quote, regarding fear, it has been informally noted
Speaker 1: that music for scary scenes in films frequently exhibits a
Speaker 1: scream like character. Here this proposition is formally tested. This
Speaker 1: paper reports acoustic analyzes of four categories of audio stimuli screams,
Speaker 1: non screaming vocalizations, scream like music, and non scream like music.
Speaker 1: And then they also they collected information from people listening
Speaker 1: to these sounds about the valence of the emotional meaning
Speaker 1: was a positive or negative, and the level of arousal
Speaker 1: that they experienced in in reaction to it. So what
Speaker 1: does this actually mean? What are the objective characteristics of
Speaker 1: screams that could be mimicked by horror music? Well, they
Speaker 1: write as follows. They say, quote, typically human screams are okay, here,
Speaker 1: you got loud. They utilize a wide range of frequencies,
Speaker 1: they're higher in pitch than one's average vocal range, and
Speaker 1: they have a high amount of roughness. Uh. And they
Speaker 1: say that roughness is a basic auditory phenomenon that is
Speaker 1: characterized by a coarse, grating or harsh subjective experience. But
Speaker 1: that one's really fascinating to me. In particular because UM,
Speaker 1: I think about UM a vocal performer straining to reach
Speaker 1: a note and not being able to do it. I
Speaker 1: think about UM, obviously a real person screaming actually in terror,
Speaker 1: and how they are, you know, not really in control
Speaker 1: of their voice. They're not trying to hit a note.
Speaker 1: It is that strain once again. And then I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've experienced this, Joe, and I'm sure many people anyone
Speaker 1: who has used a program like Ableton or any of
Speaker 1: these other like you know, MIDI style programs. There are
Speaker 1: instruments that you pop in that it's not just a
Speaker 1: standard like boo. It's not like a dial tone tone.
Speaker 1: You can see in the little wave that it's got
Speaker 1: a roughness to it, that it's got kind of like
Speaker 1: a almost like a disintegrating sound to it, um, a rasp,
Speaker 1: if you will, And that those are always the spooky ones.
Speaker 1: Those are always like you know, like the ancient Oregon
Speaker 1: number three, you know. Yeah, So here, I think we're
Speaker 1: starting to get into some some pretty interesting territory. And
Speaker 1: this will connect to some other stuff I want to
Speaker 1: talk about in a minute. But so for this study
Speaker 1: in particular, the authors found that so, first of all,
Speaker 1: they they isolate exactly the characteristic you were talking about.
Speaker 1: I think because they say, well, the other common characteristics
Speaker 1: of screams are more difficult to isolate for study. I think,
Speaker 1: I think in part because they're sort of relative, right,
Speaker 1: you know, relative to uh, like, what is somebody's normal
Speaker 1: vocal range, what is the normal volume you'd be listening,
Speaker 1: and so forth. Um, But roughness you can sort of
Speaker 1: single out as something that's easy to manipulate in a
Speaker 1: fairly objective way. And they found that, yes, there was
Speaker 1: support for the hypothesis that scary movie music mimics qualities
Speaker 1: found in natural screams. What what it sounds like when
Speaker 1: people scream? So they write in their discussion section quote,
Speaker 1: consistent with our hypotheses, we found that both screams and
Speaker 1: scream like music exhibited a higher level of roughness and
Speaker 1: be rated as having more negative valence and a higher
Speaker 1: arousal level than their non screaming counterparts. However, contrary to
Speaker 1: our hypotheses, screams had a higher roughness level than scream
Speaker 1: like music. And so I thought this was a little
Speaker 1: interesting regarding that last statement they're finding was counter to
Speaker 1: something they called the super expressive voice theory which they
Speaker 1: credit to Juice Land and Vastfjal in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: And this is a hypothesis that music is quote capable
Speaker 1: of amplifying vocal affective behaviors beyond the capability of the
Speaker 1: vocal system. So I think this would be the idea
Speaker 1: that music is sort of a uh is sort of
Speaker 1: a a super super normal version of human vocalizations, that
Speaker 1: music plays a role of giving us the power to
Speaker 1: vocalize beyond what humans can normally vocalize. Um. But so
Speaker 1: it seems that some horror movie music probably works at
Speaker 1: least in part by simulating screams, but that horror movie
Speaker 1: music is not like a super amplification of natural scream effects.
Speaker 1: Screams themselves are more psychologically powerful than I don't know,
Speaker 1: the Halloween theme or any scream like music, which that
Speaker 1: makes sense to me. It's like that episode of The
Speaker 1: Simpsons where um, there is uh Lieutenant Lt. Smash and
Speaker 1: he's making everyone join the navy with the pop song
Speaker 1: even at niage, right, do you remember this one? I
Speaker 1: don't think what season is this. This has to be
Speaker 1: like thirteen or fourteen Get out of Come On. But
Speaker 1: he says that the Navy uses three tactics for recruiting subliminal, liminal,
Speaker 1: and superliminal. When they say superliminal, what's that, he yells
Speaker 1: out the window to Lenny, Hey, you join the Navy. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's pretty good. That's superliminal. And I think a scream
Speaker 1: in this instance would be the superliminal of scare. Well,
Speaker 1: this is scary. Here's a screat Yeah, so here's something
Speaker 1: I wonder about. So, assuming this holds true, I wonder
Speaker 1: if scream like music is in a way a way
Speaker 1: of making scream like stimuli more tolerable for his more
Speaker 1: sustained period of time. So if you're watching a horror
Speaker 1: movie and you are just confronted with constant screaming sound effects,
Speaker 1: I think that would be kind of that would be
Speaker 1: greating to the point that you would not want to
Speaker 1: continue watching the movie, even though it might get you
Speaker 1: in a sort of like high fearful arousal state like
Speaker 1: the movie is trying to conjure. So maybe music is
Speaker 1: a is a sort of best of both worlds compromise
Speaker 1: that it can simulate the neurobiological response we have to
Speaker 1: the sound of a scream, but without being as graating
Speaker 1: as actual scream sounds would be. That makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: It also I'm jumping to conclusions now, but it's all
Speaker 1: tying together. So let's go back to the shining once
Speaker 1: again and and think about Midnight the Stars and You. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's the nineteen twenties song that plays over the credits
Speaker 1: when we're zooming out or not not over the credits,
Speaker 1: over the last shot, or we see Jack Torrence in
Speaker 1: that crowd of like the Hey nineteen twenty one, and
Speaker 1: he's like in the old photo, right, So the song
Speaker 1: playing is Midnight the Stars and You, and it's an
Speaker 1: old nineteen twenties big band song, etcetera, etcetera. And it
Speaker 1: feels very spooky and very eerie, both because of the
Speaker 1: context of the film as well as just the song itself.
Speaker 1: I wonder if Old like Crack Lee Records, because they
Speaker 1: do have that interrupted, non rhythmic, non intentional like crack
Speaker 1: and break up, if that has an element of this
Speaker 1: replicating a scream, because it is for the most part unintentional. Sure,
Speaker 1: some musicians will intentionally add a crack all to their thing,
Speaker 1: but they're doing that because they wanted to sound spooky.
Speaker 1: You don't add you know, phonograph crackle and hiss if
Speaker 1: you want something to sound happy. So I wonder if
Speaker 1: that's adding that scream aspect and making those old things
Speaker 1: sound extra spooky. Like we're discussing before, This might not
Speaker 1: be exactly the same as roughness, but a feature that
Speaker 1: has been studied in in the context of arousing fear
Speaker 1: and that is what's called nonlinearity sonic non linearity. UM.
Speaker 1: So there's a good bit of research on this other factor,
Speaker 1: and a major figure in this area of the study
Speaker 1: of the relationship between fear and nonlinear sound has been
Speaker 1: a U c. L A biologist named Daniel Blumstein. I
Speaker 1: was looking at some of his papers and some media
Speaker 1: reporting about them as well as I watched a TED
Speaker 1: talk that he did that was pretty interesting that included
Speaker 1: actually playing some of the sounds he talks about, So
Speaker 1: that's kind of useful. Um. But Blumstein apparently got into
Speaker 1: this because he was studying marmots. So he's like a
Speaker 1: biologist and I think ethologist studies and animal behavior. And
Speaker 1: he tells this story that one day during field work
Speaker 1: out in the meadows of I think it was California,
Speaker 1: somewhere out studying marmots. He's holding a baby marmot in
Speaker 1: his hand. This is an animal that had just recently
Speaker 1: emerged from the borough where it had been born. And
Speaker 1: he says that he heard this sound that just startled
Speaker 1: him so much he almost dropped the animal. Uh. And
Speaker 1: he he was kind of surprised that he was so
Speaker 1: startled because he listens to animal vocalizations all the time
Speaker 1: as part of his job, but they and they don't
Speaker 1: usually affect him emotionally, but this one did. And one
Speaker 1: of the characteristics, apparently of this distress cry omitted by
Speaker 1: this little marmot was that it was kind of ragged.
Speaker 1: And he goes on to explain that he started looking
Speaker 1: at the auditory qualities of a number of different distress vocalizations,
Speaker 1: not just in marmots, but in all kinds of different animals,
Speaker 1: primarily mammals, I think, but eventually some of this research
Speaker 1: was applied to other types of tetrapod animals like birds.
Speaker 1: Um there's been at least one study in grackles I
Speaker 1: was reading about. But in essence, the distress vocalizations, the
Speaker 1: screams of many different animals showed a lot of similarities,
Speaker 1: auditory similarities and one of these being what the researchers
Speaker 1: call nonlinearities, and the main thing that he singles out
Speaker 1: here under the heading of nonlinearities is noise sounds beyond
Speaker 1: the boundaries of a clear vocal signal. I almost wonder
Speaker 1: if we can compare two tones like a like a
Speaker 1: clear version of a tone and then a noisy or
Speaker 1: distorted version of that tone. So bloom Stein and co
Speaker 1: authors have gone on to explain that these non linearities,
Speaker 1: the noisy quality of of these distress calls and animals,
Speaker 1: are usually a result of um the vocal production organs
Speaker 1: like the vocal chords or in the case of birds,
Speaker 1: I think this would be the cy ranks in in
Speaker 1: a in a bird's vocal system, but in a mammal
Speaker 1: like a human, I guess would be vocal chords. Uh.
Speaker 1: This would be these organs exceeding their capacity. Uh quite literally,
Speaker 1: analogous actually to turning up a speaker until the sound
Speaker 1: gets distorted. So whatever it is, whether that's a you know,
Speaker 1: an electronic speaker, or the organs in your in your
Speaker 1: throat when the audio output hardware pushes beyond its normal limits,
Speaker 1: especially I think in terms of volume, and maybe also pitch,
Speaker 1: it produces this noise, these nonlinear acoustic features, and apparently
Speaker 1: Blumstein found evidence of this trend in all kinds of animals,
Speaker 1: again not just marmots, but you know, mere cats and
Speaker 1: and other creatures that as they get more acutely distressed,
Speaker 1: their vocalizations become not just louder, but noisier. Apparently this
Speaker 1: is also true of what are known as recruitment calls.
Speaker 1: This is a term in animal ethology for sounds that
Speaker 1: an animal would make to summon other members of its
Speaker 1: of its species, or its groups someone con specific, so
Speaker 1: it'll bring allies to you, maybe if you've gotten lost
Speaker 1: and separated from your group, but often just for protection
Speaker 1: when you encounter a threat or a predator. Across all
Speaker 1: different kinds of mammals, the at the crescendo of distress
Speaker 1: and recruitment calls, there's this tendency to overload the vocal
Speaker 1: production organs and then thus release these noisier, raspier calls
Speaker 1: that are full of non linearities. And they did direct
Speaker 1: research to test this out on on marmots and then
Speaker 1: also on these these birds called Caribbean grackles and found that, yeah,
Speaker 1: the the the noisier versions of the alarm calls, the
Speaker 1: ones that had this more raspy, rough noisy quality, those
Speaker 1: were associated with with increased levels of alarm and would
Speaker 1: cause the animals to display less relaxation behaviors in response
Speaker 1: to hearing it. But eventually, Blumstein and some colleagues got
Speaker 1: together to study the sound characteristics of different movie genres
Speaker 1: to see if this the non linearities, if the noisy
Speaker 1: qualities of these vocalizations would also be found even in
Speaker 1: human media such as horror movies. Like horror movies, uh
Speaker 1: that they found that horror movies do tend to contain
Speaker 1: not surprisingly uh noisy female scream sounds in them, right. Um. Also, interestingly,
Speaker 1: in their data, they seem to find that sad films,
Speaker 1: I guess these would be largely drama films tend to
Speaker 1: include unusually low levels of noisy sounds in them. Huh Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wonder if there's a uh, conscious effort to lull
Speaker 1: you during a drama. I don't know. But then finally,
Speaker 1: there was a twelve study they did where they put
Speaker 1: together these original compositions, these little music clips, and they
Speaker 1: would play these clips for people one way or the other.
Speaker 1: One would play with very low levels of non lenier noise,
Speaker 1: and one would play with very high levels of nonlinear noise.
Speaker 1: And I listened to a couple of these back to back,
Speaker 1: and it sounds to me like the ones with high
Speaker 1: levels of nonlinearity would add things like fuzzy distortion type effects,
Speaker 1: and so people would rate these in terms of level
Speaker 1: of arousal and and valence positive or negative, And as
Speaker 1: you might predict, the study found that noisier music causes
Speaker 1: higher arousal and lower and more negative valence uh. Though interestingly,
Speaker 1: this study in particular found that this was dependent on
Speaker 1: visual context, so the music alone did have that predicted
Speaker 1: effect that the noisier it was, the more nonlinearities, the
Speaker 1: more it might be I don't know, say effective at
Speaker 1: making you afraid in a horror movie. But if you
Speaker 1: simultaneously prepaired those sounds with very benign or banal uh imagery,
Speaker 1: like showing people video of somebody sitting drinking a cup
Speaker 1: of coffee that appeared to mute the effects of the sound.
Speaker 1: And so I wonder about that, I mean, I I
Speaker 1: think about sort of the opposite experience of being able
Speaker 1: to watch a horror movie where something very benign is
Speaker 1: going on on screen, but there's ominous music playing, and
Speaker 1: that does sort of give you this sense of like,
Speaker 1: you know, a little bit of mounting terror irony about
Speaker 1: about what's happening. But maybe that's just because you know
Speaker 1: it's the context of watching a horror movie. I think
Speaker 1: it would be fascinating. I know there are definitely instances
Speaker 1: of people seeing horror films without realizing that their horror films,
Speaker 1: and it would be fascinating to see how this data
Speaker 1: shifts in those instances. Yeah, But anyway, this quality of
Speaker 1: the non linearities, the noisiness quality in the sound really
Speaker 1: got me thinking back about how I've I've never noticed
Speaker 1: this before, really, but how much horror movie music features
Speaker 1: some sort of kind of noisy percussion. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: I went back and I listened to the original Halloween theme.
Speaker 1: We all know that melody and the sort of mounting
Speaker 1: synthesizer bass, but there is also this noisy, skittering thing
Speaker 1: going on during the Halloween theme, this kind of skittering
Speaker 1: sixteen note uh that that's almost a little bit off
Speaker 1: tempo or or lagging slightly. It sounds kind of like
Speaker 1: synthesizer high hats I'm not sure exactly what it is,
Speaker 1: but this also got me thinking about the difference between
Speaker 1: horror music and terror music. Again, I think both of
Speaker 1: them there is a tendency to go for kind of
Speaker 1: noisier tones when possible, but just something else I was
Speaker 1: wondering about. I didn't find any research to this effect,
Speaker 1: but I was wondering if horror music in particular, so
Speaker 1: like think of the strings again in psycho horror music
Speaker 1: at the moment of confrontation tends to sound more like
Speaker 1: screams because it is communicating a definite and immediate rahet
Speaker 1: and you know, it makes sense that it mimics a
Speaker 1: distress call that an animal would make, whereas terror music
Speaker 1: is more about uncertainty. And this could be a coincidence,
Speaker 1: but it actually seems to me that maybe terror music
Speaker 1: tends to want to mimic the sounds of growling, to
Speaker 1: mimic the kind of low guttural warning growls of mammals.
Speaker 1: So if you've ever been like you, I don't know,
Speaker 1: approaching a dog that does not want you to approach it. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a kind of mounting, low thing that's releasing from
Speaker 1: almost sounds like it's coming down from caves, you know,
Speaker 1: like there's a warning of uncertain possibly impending violence that
Speaker 1: seems more suited to the terror themes. And and and
Speaker 1: this doesn't make me think more about like the Jaws theme. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that makes sense to me. Yeah, Like, like
Speaker 1: like you said, there's no science, uh to back this
Speaker 1: up currently, but yeah, think about a music score low
Speaker 1: rumbling and then violent violence, violence that is a dog grow, bark, bark, bark,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. Yeah, So kind of with all this
Speaker 1: information that's that's been dug up, I feel like we
Speaker 1: were reaching a conclusion similar to the conclusion that we
Speaker 1: reached when we were doing our episode on Freezon, which
Speaker 1: is that there's some research to indicate a direction leaning
Speaker 1: towards thoughts that kind of makes sense. However, because music
Speaker 1: is so ethereal and so interpretive and so such a
Speaker 1: magic trick, it's hard to pin it down, you know. So,
Speaker 1: so I I think we we've taken big steps towards
Speaker 1: something with understanding, but I don't think we can ever
Speaker 1: really nail down art right Well, I mean it's hard
Speaker 1: to give you know. I think sometimes people want to
Speaker 1: give very clear biological logic to two things that are
Speaker 1: complex in humans culture like art, and uh, I think
Speaker 1: they're the lines are not usually that clear, but I
Speaker 1: think you can identify interesting tendencies. So you know, you're
Speaker 1: you're not going to find a evolutionary biology reason that
Speaker 1: explains the melody of the theme to the shining, but
Speaker 1: you might well find that there are some broad tendencies
Speaker 1: in horror music that would be uh, that would be
Speaker 1: pretty well predicted by certain kinds of things about what
Speaker 1: the kinds of animals we are. And so I think
Speaker 1: that might well correlate with things like a scream like
Speaker 1: glassondi of violins in a horror movie, when you know
Speaker 1: when the killer comes out with the knife and the
Speaker 1: granny wig on or or the the growl like mounting
Speaker 1: terror music. But yeah, of because there's not a biological
Speaker 1: or deterministic code for what kind of art develops, you
Speaker 1: know that there's there's just too much. There are too
Speaker 1: many inputs on it. At the very least, Uh, anyone
Speaker 1: listening right now can think about their favorite horror score
Speaker 1: and pin down the differences between the terror songs, the
Speaker 1: horror songs, and the eerie songs. That's a fun game.
Speaker 1: But well, what do you what do you think about
Speaker 1: Chariots of Pumpkins. My this has got to be one
Speaker 1: of my all time favorites. The score for Halloween three
Speaker 1: is just the best, and that may come up again
Speaker 1: on this podcast quite soon. Yes, um, my first instinct
Speaker 1: is to say terror. However I'm leaning also towards erie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it just kind of sets the mood. I mean,
Speaker 1: Chariots of Pumpkins doesn't doesn't really make me tense up,
Speaker 1: kind of puts me in a in a in a jolly,
Speaker 1: in a jolly computer witchcraft mindset. It just makes me
Speaker 1: feel like, ah a a banshee virus has infected the synthesizer. Bang. Yes, fascinating.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. So yeah, it's October, so I'm sure many
Speaker 1: people listening are spending them on watching horror films. While
Speaker 1: you're watching, some start thinking to yourself horror versus terror
Speaker 1: versus eerie and what they're doing to your brain? Okay,
Speaker 1: well I think that's got to wrap it up here. Uh.
Speaker 1: This one also turned into a long episode. We you know,
Speaker 1: we end up talking about horror mo movies and horror music,
Speaker 1: uh for quite some time. Huh. But hey, seth one
Speaker 1: one more time. You wanna remind people where they can
Speaker 1: find your new music podcast. Yeah, if you'd like listening
Speaker 1: to me talk about music, go look up Rusty Needles
Speaker 1: Record Club wherever you find podcasts. It's very easy to find.
Speaker 1: Every Friday there's a new episode. Uh. When this is
Speaker 1: a brand new episode dropping, there are at least two
Speaker 1: episodes for you to listen to, and more will come
Speaker 1: every Friday after that. Amazing. Check it out Rusty Needles
Speaker 1: Record Club wherever you get your podcasts. As for Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, Rob's going to be back with
Speaker 1: me for our next core episode, so definitely tune in
Speaker 1: for that, and uh, it's gonna be a blast. We're
Speaker 1: so excited about October. We've been lighting candles and brewing
Speaker 1: potions for months now. Um. Anyway, so uh yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess that that about does it. So if you want
Speaker 1: to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: you know where to find us. We're on anywhere you
Speaker 1: get your podcast. This is the Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind podcast. Uh. We're offering pretty much daily episodes now,
Speaker 1: so on Monday's we do listener mail. On Tuesdays and
Speaker 1: Thursdays we do classic core episodes of the show, which
Speaker 1: tend to be about science off often intersecting with some
Speaker 1: kind of cultural topic, maybe with with history or monsters
Speaker 1: or literature or something. On Wednesdays we do a short
Speaker 1: form episode called the Artifact. On Friday as we run
Speaker 1: an episode from the Vault, and I guess generally an
Speaker 1: episode of Yesteryear. But but yeah, I guess that's it.
Speaker 1: So if you would like to get in touch with
Speaker 1: us with feedback on this episode or any other. Oh
Speaker 1: and as always, of course, big thanks to Seth for
Speaker 1: editing this one even though he's on it. Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining me and for editing this this monster episode. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, if you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us on this uh, in response to this episode
Speaker 1: or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or
Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For
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Speaker 1: favorite shows.