Soundless Music Shown to Produce Weird Sensations
By Patricia Reaney
MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) - Mysteriously snuffed out candles, weird
sensations and shivers down the spine may not be due to the presence of
ghosts in
haunted houses but to very low frequency sound that is inaudible to
humans.
British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment that the
extreme bass sound
known as infrasound produces a range of bizarre effects in people
including anxiety,
extreme sorrow and chills -- supporting popular suggestions of a link
between infrasound
and strange sensations.
"Normally you can't hear it," Dr Richard Lord, an acoustic scientist at
the National Physical
Laboratory in England who worked on the project, said Monday.
Lord and his colleagues, who produced infrasound with a seven meter
(yard) pipe and
tested its impact on 750 people at a concert, said infrasound is also
generated by natural
phenomena.
"Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present
at some
allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that
they attribute to
a ghost -- our findings support these ideas," said Professor Richard
Wiseman, a
psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England.
In the first controlled experiment of infrasound, Lord and Wiseman
played four contemporary
pieces of live music, including some laced with infrasound, at a London
concert hall and
asked the audience to describe their reactions to the music.
The audience did not know which pieces included infrasound but 22
percent reported more
unusual experiences when it was present in the music.
Their unusual experiences included feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting
chills down the
spine or nervous feelings of revulsion or fear.
"These results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual
experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound," said
Wiseman, who
presented his findings to the British Association science conference.
Infrasound is also produced by storms, seasonal winds and weather
patterns and some
types of earthquakes (news - web sites). Animals such as elephants also
use infrasound
to communicate over long distances or as weapons to repel foes.
"So much has been said about infrasound -- it's been associated with
just about
everything from beam weapons to bad driving. It's wonderful to be able
to examine the
evidence," said Sarah Angliss, a composer and engineer who worked on the
project.
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