The Science of Uncanny Music

of praise for from listeners. So we thought, hey, let's bring it back. Yeah, if I remember correctly, this, this is when we explore the violent streams in Psycho and the psychological effect, which is pretty interesting because can you imagine a world without Psycho and that? Yeah, yeah, we really get to the question, you know, is the is the music in Psycho scary in and of itself or is it dependent entirely upon the movie that you're watching, or is it some shade of gray between the two?

Find out. Since this is the Halloween season and we're talking about creepy, uncanny, scary, frightening sonic experiences, let's kick this episode off with just a little bit of the uncanny from the Weirding Module. We should talk about this weird module. Yes, yeah, just yeah, real quick, this is

the Weirding Module. This is a solo project from musician Christopher Gladwin uh as soon as you may name, is one half of Team do Yobi and very accomplished musician has his hands in a number of different projects, but this one is all about the uncanny, about at times the frightening, the unsettling. This particular track was titled Chapter one Abysmal Cathedrals Arise from mel flurious ire from some less regions. And right there that gives you a clue. Yeah,

it gives you a clue. And uh and if you recognize the tune, and that's because he's utilizing Symphony Fantastic from Hector Berlioz. And you may also recognize it because Wendy Carlos used it in the theme to The Shining.

So what we are introducing to you today is this idea that a scary movie could perhaps be less scary or not even scary without the sort of soundtrack that goes along with it, really amping up our experiences while we're watching something on the screen, and when you listen to something like the Weirding Module, you can already start to sense that this ease, that that sort of d centering that that music makes you feel with some of

the chords and some of the ways that it's arranged. Yeah, so it it raises the question, and this is the question we're gonna explore in this episode to what extent is there something just innately creepy, uncanny, scary, frightening about music like this or is it all cultural? Is it all contextual? So we're gonna unravel that. But but first, just to to to rehash, we did an episode of a while back called music on the Brain where we talked about the various ways that didn't music Uh speaks

to us on a conscious and subconscious level. Uh, And we have to think about music and stuff. What is music? You know? It's obviously it's a deep part of our cognitive architecture. It changes our mood, it heightens our emotions. Uh. And we'd have to find a culture that didn't or doesn't have it. And some evidence even suggests that the Neanderthals, in absence of language, may have used music as a means of communication. Um. Indeed, there are also parts of

the brain that respond to music. They don't respond to languid, separate parts of the brain that respond to the male pality of language, different from the parts that respond to the melody of music. So music is really kind of this uncanny thing in and of itself. Yeah. I like to bring up cognitive psychologists and ling with Stephen Pinker because he's the guy who he's probably pretty brilliant guy, but he did say music is just auditory cheesecake, an

accident of evolution. But when we look at music a little bit deeper than we really begin to see that the case that was made in the documentary The Music Instinct with Bobby McFerrin, that music actually maybe a precursor to languages. You had said, um is there because you think about music and there's no one music center in our brains. And as you had said, their music used

a certain parts of our brain that language doesn't. UM. One of the parts that music recruits, and I think this is so interesting is the visual cortext And it's thought that the visual cortex actually maps a visual of how the pitch and tone are changing, and in turn, music moves us literally moves us. We dance to it because we envision the movement in it. So keep that in mind as we continue to talk a little bit more about music and how it manipulates this um, and

particularly spooky music, how that might motivate us. The manipulation is key here because when when music psychologists talk about music and emotion, they often distinguished between emotion perception, which refers to the perception of emotions expressed by the music. Like oh um, the sprint the boss is singing about some sort of sad working class story and run in with the law. That's a sad story. The song is sad. I'm interpreting the sadness of it. Can you say the

boss you're talking about? Of course, of course he's still the boss. I don't I don't think he's that that position has has not been vacated yet. Uh. And then there But then there's emotion induction, and this refers to the listeners effective response to the music. But I think it's interesting about this. It's not just the emotional arousal. It's that we actually will show a physical demonstration of emotion.

And there's a two thousand and nine study of twenty six people who it turns out for a strong correlation between subjective emotional response and objective physical response to music. The paper is called the Rewarding Aspects of music listening are related to a degree of emissional arousal, and it details the chills that someone can feel when they're listening to something flesh, whatever you want to call it, and have you you yourself experience this when you listen to

any music. Um, I think the one that comes to mind is um Centerman by Nana Simone, and I'm talking about the live version. It's like a ten minute long song. It is Actually you don't want me to do that, because I would do that for ten minutes gonna be insane.

But if you listen to that piece of music, it's a rollicking right of emotions and the piano just gets crazy at some points, and it's a it's a very emotional song and there's um a lot of syncopated rhythm with the clapping which is a stand in for the percussion in it. Very nice. Well, well, I was trying to think of songs that have the similar effect on me, and for my own part, radioheads everything in its right place.

Every time I listened to that, particularly just the first few seconds of it, when with this kind of cascade of notes, sort of finding synchronicity like that always gives me chill bumps. Again, I think if you stay cascading and there's that movement, yeah, it's definitely the movement of the music, and and my body moves with it. I

just get to get the chills every time. These twenty six people who underwent this experiment, well machines measured their heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, and galvanic skin response. This is how much basically they were sweating in response to the music and their blood volume pulse and uh. They were asked to click a button every time that they felt really aroused. And so number four, they're four

clicking button was the button that correlated with chills. And so they found that the chills occurred at the highest moment of pleasure reported I think that's interesting that it's a pleasurable response and yet chills is the expression of the body. Yeah, you're you're intensely satisfied by the music, but it's giving giving you chills. Um. And there's another study we looked at here from You're All just Jack

Panckship of Bowling Green State University. This one's interesting because he found that people listening to music often experienced goose bumps because of sad feelings more so than happy or excited emotions. But a lot of this came down to um melancholy associations with the past, which which is kind of like, you know, getting into the context issue of all of this. For instance, that song that you listen to a hundred times in a row during a breakup,

you listen to it ten years later. You don't care the least bit about that individual, but that music can still stir something and there's a bit of nostalgi in that as well. You know, it sort of sucks you back a little bit into that emotional state. It wasn't. The idea behind that is that the listener is filling us logic or sad because they and having these bumps as a response because they physically are missing the warmth

of that person. Yes, the researcher argues that music and news chills are tied into the chemicals released in our brain to deal with social loss. So the idea is that our ancient ancestors might have experienced as if they are separated from a family member all right, you you wander off, and then the cries you hear in the air of of of of the lost family members that that will call it cause a chill inside you and cause you to have this desire to reach out to

the warmth of others. And I thought it was interesting that this was the response, that these chill bumps, even for someone who would be singing or listening to the Star Spangled Banner. And I thought, Okay, that's a little bit odd. But when you a little cheesy, no, it's fine, it's fine, it's nice, it's nice. But if you peel that back a little bit, and then you can say, okay, well what is it to be to be moved by that song? You feel united with your countrymen and country women.

So in a sense, there there's that community based longing. Well, it's like with with with so many issues we've discussed. You can find the sort of core of like ancestral animal organism sense to what happens, but then you pile enough layers of human complexity and human cognition and it

just turns it into a maze. Yeah, And just to further compound that the maze too, of course, we're going to have to look back at the brain because I want to look at the amygdala for a moment, in particular when we talk about scary music, because the amygdala, as we know, processes emotion, memory, fear, and to test out the theory that certain strains of music can ramp up or dial down the fear response, researchers in Oxford, England played different kinds of music for people's who who'se

amygdala's had been removed because of an illness or an accident, and then people without this part of the brain the actually had trouble recognizing scary music, whereas people with their amygdala's intact had a definite response when scary music was played, as shown by the brain scanners. So again there's an idea that there's so many different parts from your brain that are weighing in on the notes that you hear. Now, I know what in a reviewer probably wondering to what

extent is it contextual? Is it cultural? Um For instance, the music we heard at the top of the the program um A, it's by an act known as the weirding modul So some of you would if you hear that you interpret this kind of strange sounding name you're bringing that into the game, or you're recognizing the piece of music sample in the work as a as being familiar to something in the shining. We're bringing all this context, we're bringing all this culture, and so of course we

interpret it as creepy. So if you were to play creepy music for someone who had zero experience with any of that, would they still find it scary. You're talking about the study of the MafA people in Cameroon who had never ever heard any sort of strains of Western music, and they were introduced to three Western musical clips. One that is typically thought to be sad, one that's happy,

and one that's spooky. All three examples. By the way, it sounds like something that would play during like a um, an old silent film that would be played on the piano, you know, trying somebody to the railroad tracks kind of a thing right in the music speeds up, um all right. These Cameroonians were also shown something called Ekman faces, and these Ekman faces are photos of standardized expressions of emotions.

So in this case, they had a happy, sad, and scared face to look at while they listened to the music. And just like Westerners the Cameroonians correlated the music type with the same facial expressions. So that would tell you that there's some universality to it. Now that's not There are other studies that say, no, that's there. You know, some that negate this because there are other cultures that

might hear certain notes in interpret in different ways. Yeah, when you get in deep into saity of difference between Eastern and Western music trends in Middle Eastern music versus Western music, then things get a little more complicated. Well, I was just thinking about Chinese opera, which the tones in a Chinese opera might sound very um, harsh or

dissonant to the Western year, but very pleasant to Eastern year. Yeah, there's a fabulous I think in ther piece in the past year about Western and Western musician a Western opera singer traveling to China and engaging in Chinese opera and sort of dealing with the the the contrast between Western opera and Chinese opera, I mean, some of the overlap of the performers, and it's it's interesting because they are

such different animals well and even in language. And Alison and I had kind of talked about this a little bit. There's a musicality to language, and if you look at something like Vietnamese, one word can be said in five different tones, I mean five entirely different things. So similar thing in Mandarin. Yeah, yeah, so it's much more nuanced and it has to be taken into account. But Christopher Gladwin, the man behind the Weirding module, had some very interesting

thoughts on this universality. Yeah. It was exchanged some emails UH with Chris and he had a lot of great in photo to share and sadly between the two of us, we didn't have time to do an audio interview, but I'll hopefully be sharing some stuff on the blog from him in the weeks they had. He said, quote, there are sounds which almost universally caused revulsion or fight or

flight responses. The sound of vomiting came out is the most obnoxious auditory experience in a worldwide Internet survey conducted by Professor Trevor Cox. The reason for this, UH is that we're it's hardware to our biology avoid those that are disgorging the contents of their stomachs unless you want the same to happen to you. Other sounds that came out on top where babies crying and nails down at blackboard. Both of these sounds have relatively complex, high frequency tones

that we are evolutionarily designed to respond to. Having a year old daughter, I can appreciate this. Many industrial bands have used such a casual tactics robbing gristle and their use of recordings of dogs attappicking a dummy, etcetera. And he goes on to UH to discuss this in further depth, and I will hopefully share that with everyone later on. But but yeah, there's certain things that just as an organism, we feel this either discussed with or this aversion to,

or it just sets up all our alarms. I mean, the baby crying. I I too am experiencing that one with the toddler that time my wife and I have have adopted and he will he'll start, you know, crying or tuning up a little bit in the middle of the night, and it just has this intense effect on me, uh to where even after I've I've put him back to sleep, my heart is just still beating like crazy, like it's just it's reaching behind my brain and uh and you know, grabbing hold of the reptilian portion there

right now, is your camp biscuit mimicking the cries of a newborn? Yeah, well, you know there's that argument that that's what cats are doing anyway, and they're they're perverse means of manipulating a humans, And so yeah, we'll have they'll be situations where the child is authentically crying and then the cat is also crying and it's mock human voice, and it's it's you know what this is like, it's frustrating. It becomes a loud household at three am. Yes, yeah, um.

Christopher Gladwin also mentions there was a sound that he found difficult to describe. Michael Geret of the Swans, he said, put it best that sex death sound that comes from somewhere deep inside. There are some experiences of sound that you just get that right. You tried to spot off. That's the best I can do. Feeling from and some sort of possession occurs. I believe that this connects with some subterranean evolutionary memory, something in our ancestral reptilian fish brain.

We still have this the sigil fish ears, you know, and I thought, you know what that sound? Let me tell you this and I'm gonna give you the context it was not a sexual context, so you don't have to put your hands up to your ears and say no, no, no no no. I did something called the seven minute workout. Do know about this? It's awful. It is like this ramped up, high density crazy workout you do for seven minutes,

just the best and highest rate that you can. Okay, And I heard these noises coming out of myself that I was a little bit ashamed of. I felt a little bit like freaked out that they were actually coming out. But I understand what he's saying. There's a guttural like, oh my god, I'm dying inside noise that I had never heard come out of myself before. And so there is something to that, this evolutionary like, oh there's something wrong. Yeah.

An example of that, I was driving my child around in the middle of the night, trying to get him to sleep immediately after returning home, and his super jet lagged now his jet lag, And so I was listening to Radio Lab catching up in some Radio Lavish episodes, and there's an excellent one they did recently on rabies. And in that episode they play some audio of humans who have rabies and are experiencing that rage and that just you know, the mindless rage that is associated with

the later stages of Rabies. And it was extremely unsettling to hear those sounds like and it's and I wonder to what extent that's kind of cross somebody, that this this idea, that that that is on some level human, but it must be bodily possessioned by some outside force that is making that kind of noise. And you're right, that bodily possession, as if you are outside of yourself

or something was outside of itself. All right, we should probably take a quick break, and when we get back, we you and I Robert Lamb are going to actually sing some of the strains of music classics, not because we necessarily want to do that to your ears, but because we have no budget, correct, right, So stand by all right, we're back, Robert. Did you know that in the original cut of Psycho that Hitchcock did not want those high pitched violin screens to accompany the shower scene

fa iconomy. He sorry about that. Again, we have no budgets, so that's which you guys are getting. Um. It was actually his wife, Alma Revel, who was a script writer and actually a director of her own right, and an editor who said, no, no, no, you need to check out Bernard Herman's score that he's created for this. It's amazing.

It's going to do its thing. And they actually tested two versions, one with the with the violins and one without, and apparently when they showed the audience when without, they were a little like, okay, so this this one is getting hacked enough in a shower. But when they accompanied

the violence strains of Bernard Herman, people freaked out. It's interesting to think of having not scene the scene without the music, and it's hard to imagine because such an iconic scene and you go together so well, and when I imagine the scene in my mind, and I think that's a really horrific scene. You know, even even though it it doesn't show as much um in way in the way of nudity or bloodshed that you might. You

know that I'm sure you can get away with today. Uh. It's so effective and so disturbing, and yet the music is what seems to make it so effective, like in in a sense we can't feel or even imagine what those the stabs feel like physically, because most of us have not been brutally stabbed with a butcher knife before,

but the music kind of fills that place. It's interesting that you say that it's it's not that much nudity and it's not that much violence, because then what you thought, because a lot of people when they when they ask people, you know, about that scene, they tend to envision much more violence and nudity than there actually is because of that heightened emotionality there. I think, Um, and of course it's that high pitch sound, and we'll get a little

bit more into that in terms of the animal world. Um, but I wanted to mention that in terms of pitch. Daniel Blumstein uh He scrutinized on two films and found that horror films had a higher than expected number of abrupt shifts up and down and pitch, which he reported in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters. So already you can see that they are very different ways that UM

filmmakers and musical composers can manipulate the brain. In terms of psycho that was just something that they didn't necessarily know, like, hey, we've got all these neuroscientists saying like the amygdala is going crazy. It was just sort of a hunch that this music would heighten the effect. Yeah. So, like you said,

they didn't have the neuroscientists, but they did have musical tradition. Obviously, run Herman knew what worked because when you look at stuff like Peter and the Wolf, you know, that's a classic one that we always learned in like elementary music class, where every character has kind of their own little jaunty number and you you're you're told by your music teacher, oh, well this this music is behaving like this, because this is what's happening in the story. Um. Some of the

basics though, cord tempo in amplitude. Okay, So with chords, we have minor and major chords, and in a very very broad sense, minor chords evoke sad feelings. Major chords are happy. Um, at least again in Western music. Um, you tay. And the interesting thing is if you take something in a major key and you translate it into a minor key, you go from happy too sad. As a as an engineer, a musician by the name of Oleg Berg has demonstrated he's a from the Ukraine and

he has a YouTube account. Takes a number of songs such as the rhythmic sweet dreams are made of these minor key transforms. It tweaks, it makes it a major key song, and it's suddenly a different entire emotional experience. Suddenly it's upbeat and not kind of dark and uh and you know foreboding. Uh. That's the same thing with

losing my religion. Instead of it being this kind of you know, down song about oh I've lost my religion, I've kind of lost my way, it's more like I've lost my religion, I'm free, I'm happy, and Michael Stipes is sansing around. It's more in keeping with you know, it's the end of the world as I know it, as opposed to what we we have come to expect from losing my religion. Now. He also took the song don't Worry Be Happy, recorded by Bobby mcfarren. Are you

familiar with that? Yeah, don't worry as long I wrote, I mean just relentlessly upbeat, right, And he put that in a minor key and I don't know, it's it sounds like the beginnings of a mental breakdown. Yeah, it's like it brings to mind the happy bobbing Farren reduced to hopping on a box car somewhere like shivering. Yeah, you're like, there's there's gonna be problems ahead. I know you're saying don't worry, be happy, but it doesn't sound

like you really mean it. So it's amazing that just that shift can create that sense of dread and doom. Now it's interesting with pop music, is pointed out by Glenn Shellenberg of the University of Toronto. If you look at through the nine eighties and the nineties, UH, there's definitely a dominance of the major key in the top forties, but it begins to shift slowly at first and then really radically, and by two thousand nine only eighteen out of the top forty songs are in the major key.

So there various explanations for this. And partially, people get kind of used to the major key UH preference in pop music and it becomes more and more cliche. So avoiding cliches, the trend moves towards the minor key. But also there's the the idea that people were coming around more to the idea that life is not so happy, that life is maybe a little more nuanced and a little more ambiguous, and then their sadness uh at least around the corner from any happiness, if not meshed in

it to begin with. So even something that is more or less universal, you start applying enough cultural influence to it, it can begin to shift. It's interesting that that's, Um, that that's something that's happening, because I was just thinking about the Halloween music that the are you familiar with

that one? The John Carper John you are, yeah, John Carpenter, Alan Howorth both both I mean John Carpenter excellent director, fighter, etcetera, but also an accomplished musician, and his work with Allan Howorth is is some of my favorite stuff. But that music has been sampled in pop music. And yeah, and that actually is a really good example of tempo in an odd meter. And we talk about tempo, we're talking

about how how fast or slow the intent intent intent entent. Again, you feel the motion in that music, right, Yeah, Like even as you were you were doing that, you were bopping back and forth as if you were running right. And Um, the thing about that is that most music uses beat counts divisible by two, but the Halloween score uses an odd meter of five four. That sort of creates that weird like catch up feeling to do like

you just can't really quite get there. Yeah, Like you're just you're trying to stay one step ahead of the mass killer. You're trying to get to the car before the mass kill that gets you, but you're not quite there exactly. And now think about your visual cortex trying to map that and all while you're watching Jamie Lee Curtis do that. It works perfectly. Yeah, yeah, girl, you

in danger. Yeah, all of that is happening. And according to Neil Learner, he is a professor of music at Davidson College and Davidson, North Carolina and an expert in horror film music, one that music technique is messing with that tempo to suggest that chase, and he says that musical music typically speeds up and grows louder as the danger closes in. And he says, my hunch is that our brains here that music in terms of being hunted, Our instincts tell us a creature is upon us and

we need to run away or just turn and fight it. Well, there's obviously one great example of that that everyone's already thinking of. Boom boom boom, bum boom boom boom, pumomum pomummmmmm, pump pump, bump, bump, and then the shark attacks Jaws. Of course, of course, yes, classic John Williams score, iconic John Williams score been sampled all over the place, but not here because we can't afford it, so that you know that I'll have to do. But yeah, you've got

those Christian doing minor chords that again slicing in. And obviously you can't run from a shark. Um. I mean you can't. But if you're running from the shark, you're really okay, you don't run land, Yeah, you're good. But but it does bring this ideas like I'm stepping, I'm stepping, I'm walking a little faster, and then I'm running. Uh and and it just grabs us right uh, you know, right right at the root of our reptilian brain. Yeah.

And then in the middle of that you have a high pitched noises in in terms of the whistle, right, you've got the lifeguard on the beach blowing the whistle. And then when Jaws finally gets victim, you've got the big note pulling the person under corresponding with it. I'm telling you right now, if I had some sort of galvanic skin response that was looking at my like how much I was sweating? They would feel it right now.

Just in talking about it now. To return to Daniel Bloomstein, he also pointed out that when he looked at a hundred and two different film scores, he found it, among other things, the screams of animals were used in several key scenes in horror films, including such iconic films as The Exorcist and The Shining Um. And and this is this is a is very interesting because in a sense, it's very straightforward. The cries of animals are going to resonate with us in the same way the cries of

of humans are going to resonate with us. Yeah, and didn't he get this idea of of really looking at these film scores for animal cries because he was working with actually yellow bellied marmots and he notices that when the research went to go and grab the marmots that they would have these high pitched screams. And he thought, wow, I wonder you know what that's doing to our brains. And then he examined those film scores and then found

those the animal screess I thought was really interesting. So he, along with film composer Michael Kay, created a study here, of course pattern on these screaming marmots, and they had a neutral music clip as well as music segments with nonlinear sounds, so that Mormot was creating a discordant nonlinear sound. Yeah, and that's something that the Christopher Gladwin brought up as well.

That Discordia, of course is big. And the music you think of all the shrieking, clanging noises, the one that comes instantly to mind Texas Chainsaw Masca has a highly effective score and it's another film that isn't nearly as violent or bloody as some people think it is. That it's just everything just fell together perfectly in that film. So you have Discordia and then you have you have

these these animal sounds popping up and uh. And another thing Gladwin mentioned is the taking of animal sounds or other sounds that are natural, tweaking them into an unnatural area and then they hit us in a way wherever like what is that? I don't know what that is? And the fear of the unknown is summoned. Yeah. I noticed this when we visited nether World last year. In the hunting house in the background, there were these sort

of clinging elements that were going on. Now this was just the house music before they have actual music though, no, right, there was no like um, but you know, is this way of kind of setting the scene and making people feel a little bit uncertain about it because you're going to do what's it? What sound is coming next? You know, our pattern recognition craving brains don't know what to make of it. So we're on edge where we don't know

what's happening next. Yeah, someone please play that chasing music so I know to run alright. So in this experiment that that k and Plumstein created, uh, they found that participants were far more stimulated by the nonlinear music segments. In addition, this is so interesting to me. If the nonlinear melodies became higher, the emotional reaction was more pronounced, much like a mother tuning into the tensed vocal cord

screams of the baby mormot. And so what he's saying is that um that these vocal cords straining sounds are unbluffable signs of fear in the animal world, and of course they would be in in the human world as well. And it made me think back to those high pitched, strangled um pitches of the violin during the Psycho shower scene. In fact, let's listen to a marmot screen because we have a little clip, all right, so you can kind of hear that there's there's that element. And how did

they get the scream out of the marmot? Do we want to know? I think that they continually advanced upon the mormot until they were like, you're you're in my zone here feeling uncomfortable. Okay, as long as no marmots were harmed. Okay. So we've talked a lot about the way that that's scary music, on settling music, on canny music, how it will enhance some the visuals of a horror

movie or what have you. But what happens when we take take away the visual text from the music, Well, it turns out that it can do a couple of different things. If you if you take away from the context, you can actually water down the effect. Because Bloomstein had a second stage of his study and participants were asked to watch objectively boring videos we're talking about drinking coffee

or reading a book, which was paired with nonlinear music. Okay, So they found that the same disort of music was much less emotionally stimulating and much less scary when it went along with something that was just kind of wrote. So watching a guy press his pants while a music box track plays is just pretty ho hum, right, yeah, And you know there's no room for interpretation in these

examples either. It's not like, say, imagine like a film of a of a mother approaching a cradle, where it seems like that's asitution at which and where if you played happy music, you know, sad music or or scary music, you could really force us to to to make the story in our own head. It's like, oh my, you know, oh my goodness, what's in that cradle? What's not in

that cradle but a guy ironing his shorts. You know, that's probably not going to be a pitch for a horror movie anytime soon, unless those tinny strains of a music box are playing and then they pan to like a Portla indulve batting her eyes and you hear door creek. Yeah, and then you have a student film, Yes, how did you know that was my fil And then here's another aspect of this, of the visual context is that when

you shut your eyes, you change the emotional landscape. And I want you guys to guess out there, would it be more horrific or less horrific. I would have guessed less horrifically yes before this, simply because it's something that I do when I don't, you know, I think that I'm lessening the experience. And I'm watching watching some scary and then you close your eyes and it's like my my friend Dave will blur his eyes out during scary parts in the movie to accomplish the same thing, like

to sort of stare at nothing. Um. I guess it didn't surprise me because I listened to enough creepy music that I do find that, like I'm listening to weirding module where I'm listening to like Throbbing Gristle or or what have you, Chris Carter, and it's uh, if I'm if I'm zoning out or I'm closing my eyes, it really takes on a richer, darker form in my mind. I'm still stuck on Throbbing Gristle. Oh, They're one of the mainstays. It's just the combination. One of the creepiest

tracks of all time. Hamburger lady, look it up if you want to feel terrified. Okay, throbbing gristle, hamburger lady. All right, and research published in the Public Library of Science one by Tel Aviv University researchers found that the premise of squinting your eyes shut during a freaky scene

may actually heightened your fear responses. We've just said. Volunteers listened to Hitchcock style music twice, once with their eyes open and once with their eyes shut, and with their eyes closed, their migdalas were far more active, and volunteer said that they also felt the emotional effects being much more pronounced when when they were completely in the dark listening to this. So it seemed to wire together a direct connection to the regions of our brain that process emotions.

And it's not merely subjective. They're using a functional m r I and I can see the distinct changes in the brains were more pronounced in the person's eyes were not being used. Yeah, so the idea is that you're actually better able to focus on your fear response. Yeah, which is you know, climbing to this fMRI machine listened to some really unsettling music and want to see what happens. Yeah, that's cool, right, So I mean those are a couple of ways that that music can actually game our response.

And I was thinking about this in terms of political ads. Oh yeah, you know those sort of dot notes that are played sometimes to cast one of the politicians really does know what's best for America. Don't, don't, but she really. Yeah. Another great example of this in terms of changing the

music changing the tone of something. If you've ever seen the trailer for Shining um so available on YouTube, where someone took the trailer for the Shining Kubrick's adaptation to Stephen King's novel How that we've been talking about here, took that recut, it added some happy music and and I think through in one little Jack Nicholson quote from another movie about fatherhood, and made the film look like a romantic comedy that maybe involved ghosts a little bit,

as opposed to a horrific journey into horror. It is hilarious because it looks like this inspirational tale of fatherhood and being a writer as well. Yeah, and Shelley Davall actually looks perky in those clips. So there you have it. To quote Christopher Glad when one last time. He said, it is my belief that our reaction to music we find unsettling is triggered by a combination of inherited biological responses modified by culturally acquired behavior. See. I think that

pretty much sums it up right there. So as we close out the podcast here, let's just listen to one last clip from the Weirding module of this the fourth track from No Lifus I Corps from some Lost Regions. Yes, all right, So there you have it, the science of Uncanny music. And uh and hey, if you enjoyed the

Weirding Module, go look him up. He has I'm sure he's putting out at a mix for Halloween this year, and I think he has a new release coming out in the new year, so uh so, definitely definitely check him out. He's one of my favorites. And Sundays even your memories of your most frightening movies as a child and how the music affected you, And you can do that by sending us an email to blow the mind

at how staff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.