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Haunted Houses Explained: Infrasound
anagama writes "For anyone who cringes whenever accosted by topics such as psychics, haunted houses, or any sort of new age drivel; for anyone who thinks James Randi is cool or has an active subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer - you're gonna love this story about infrasound. Here's a quote: "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. ... 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.""
I saw this on discovery channel, they even demonstrated it with a guy who was next to a fan (22hz) and saw a "ghost". ... like 3 years ago.
Yet, on slashdot, this is breaking news.
Hey, can infrasound be reproduced in the lab. I would love to use this for my next annual Halloween party.
Scientists find 1 explanation for 1 spooky phenomena, and all paranormal happenings are written off as rubbish?
Whatever..
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Probably could go a long way to explaining a lot of these phenomena - emotions are a powerful force that lead people to all sorts of irrational conclusions.
:) I am very skeptical of most of these things. I do remember reading once that reports of UFO sightings and haunted house occurances went in cycles throughout a year, and at the times when there was an increase of UFO sightings there would also be an increase in haunted house reports. Sounds like the same source to me (and I am *not* suggesting that aliens are causing it, or ghosts, but rather something less supernatural).
However, there are some reports I have heard that may not be encompassed in this, unless the feelings infrasound induces also result in visions. I have heard stories of objects moving, seeing ghosts and such, and other less intangible occurances.
Of course, I've never personally witnessed any of these, so I have little to go on
That said, I think it be contradictory to this study because it seems like to me that ghost sightings and the paranormal are not as common as they were in the 80's - to me things like this are only a fad - after movies/books like Poltergeist and Amityville Horror.
Also, strange sensations like Deja Vu or Premonition I don't think can be explained through this study.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
A man willing to test his own beliefs! My goodness, what more do we want?!!?!
...tizzyd
Damn! You beat me to this. Reading the article, it isnt obvious to me as to what exactly is "new" about this research. Perhaps the "facts" quoted by Mr. Hitchcock in the "Three Investigator" books werent really facts after all, but speculations / common knowledge among film industry technicians, and this is really the first time someone has conducted a scientific study on this matter. I remember reading these books in the 1980 - 84 range, and at that time, the books were a few years old already, so this is quite old knowledge / speculation.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
This sort of closed-mindedness led to 'experts' being sure it was safe to turn cows into cannibals by mixing dead cow-parts into their feed, because 'obviously' no disease could possibly spread via proteins (ha!). If those experts had respected the fuzzy-headed tree-huggers who protested that cannibalism was unnatural, how many lives would have been saved?
The same cynical BS is responsible for hundreds of thousands of birth defects as depleted uranium and other poisons are poured into the environment-- let the cynics devote their lives to caring for crippled children.
Robert Anton Wilson calls it 'fundamentalist materialism' (in his book "The New Inquisition": Amazon) because its advocates make exactly the same logical errors they claim to attack. [more ranting]
And what's the big deal here...instead of the ghosts scaring people, it's the ghosts producing infrared sound that scares people.
I'm still scared of my Infrasound producing ghost-overlords.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Poor research methodologies produce ambiguous results: Film at 11
First, the ambiguous results: 22% reported feeling odd when the infrasound was playing. Howabout when it wasn't playing? 78% also didn't notice ANYTHING. This doesn't really demonstrate anything. Can anyone reliably determine, in a double-blind study, when the infrasound is playing? That would be interesting.
Now, the poor research methodologies: This wasn't a double-blind study. Heck, they crammed all these people TOGETHER in a concert hall. Can you IMAGINE all the "Hey, do you feel funny? I feel funny!" discussion polluting the results? If this had been a one-at-a-time, double-blind study then I suppose the results might actually be meaningfull.
I lived in a house a few years ago where at night you'd be asleep in a bedroom upstairs and hear footsteps walking around and down/up the stairs when you're sure it's no other person, your unalarmed overnight guests unanimously report being creeped out by some incident during the night, you see curtains moving and when you go to close the windows you find them firmly shut, your cat that was snoozing at the other end of the room and glancing at you ever few minutes suddenly looks freaked out and watches the the blank between you from left to right as if he's watching someone walking across the room, a vase falls and a voodoo doll pops out, you find unexplained knots in random places that apparently serve no logical function... etc etc.
Infrasound doesn't sound like a logical explanation to me.
Anyone who has ever witnessed a show by a heavy dub sound system (e.g. Jah Shaka) can tell you about the effects long and heavy bass signals can have on a person. Anything from dizzieness, nausea
and heavy headaches comes along. No wonder people see ghosts under the influence of ultrasound
fx! kicking and screaming
Remember all those blue, brown, beige boxes that used to float around the net? When I was a kid myself and a friend teamed up to build the pandora's box we found on the net. It was a hacker tool to annoy people. Not that we needed much help though.
IIRC it consisted of a variable capacitator, 555 timer, and a directional speaker. What you would do was tune the device until it was just the tiniest bit past the perceptible human sound range. Then you would walk around and point it at people and see how stressed you could make them. It worked pretty good. People would get irritated very easily without knowing precisely why. Those who were very susceptible would start to sweat. It clearly induced stress.
Seems like it might be useful for haunted houses too...
I'm not trying to pass off either of the above sources as remotely scientific, for the record. :)
I know that using infrasound as a weapon was mentioned in Robert Heinlein's "The Sixth Column" which was first published in 1949. Any earlier examples out there?
Only dead fish swim downstream......
The whole "religious experience" thing is kind of interesting. There is a particular system in the brain responsible for it that can be seen with fMRI. It normally responds to a very personal set of stimuli, if anything. On the other hand, there are things that tend to trigger it, including frontal lobe epilepsy and LSD. It wouldn't be too surprising if low frequency sound did, as well.
Of course, not all religious experiences are due to any of the automatic factors, but they could help significantly with getting a whole group of people to have religious feelings together. (There has, in fact, been a study of this using LSD, and it worked well). There's actually a lot of fascinating research on the subject, with very interesting philosophical implications.
Yes there are. For instance the "giant squid" was long thought to be a myth, but they have been found in the past couple of years. There are studies that suggest prayer and meditation have positive effects. The Will O' the Wisp may have been swamp gas. etc.
But the skeptics tend dismiss any evidence for paranormal activity. Blurry UFO photo? Must be a hoax because the photographer blurred the picture to cover-up the hoax. Clear UFO photo? obviously must be a hoax because it's too good. Or "We faked a UFO picture that looks just like yours, so yours must be fake as well. It doesn't matter that there are tons of pictures, videos, physical evidence (burned ground), radiation burns on victims, radar trackings, etc. The skeptics are right in saying that none of these is conclusive evidence, but collectively it should be considered noteworthy circumstantial evidence, and not automatically dismissed out of hand. What sort of evidence, short of a captured UFO, could conclusively prove some UFOs are a previously unknown phenomena? In the skeptics eyes, nothing, since just about anything could be faked, and therefore (according to them), the whole phenomena is not even worth investigating.
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How far below human hearing range are these infrasound notes anyway?
Plenty of psychos build pipe organs whose fundamental pitch are too low to be heard.
Pipe organ pitches are notated in terms of the length of an open flue pipe that it would take to create a pitch. An 8' long pipe plays a "C", two octaves below middle C. A 16' pipe sounds three octaves below middle C. A 32' pipe sounds four octaves below. The note E on a 32' rank is about 21 Hz. So C, Db, D, Eb are all below what you can hear.
Many large organs come with these 32' pitches. Why? It adds an incredible dimension of power to the sound when you play the full organ. You feel the music, not just hear it. It adds to the visceral experience of hearing the music. The fact that you can't hear it actually is part of the point!
Also, to drastically over simplify, there are two kinds of pipes. Flue and Reed. Flue pipes play like a flute-- just the vibration of the air creates the pitch. Reed pipes use the beating of a reed to produce the sound. If you ever heard a 32' reed like a Bombarde play, it definitely makes an audible sound. All the overtones of the reed slowly banging away. Then you have that fundamental 32' pitch shaking the floor. Really neat stuff, actually.
A very small number of instruments in the world have a 64' pitch. The Washington National Cathedral has one. The Atlantic City Convention Hall has another. http://www.acchos.org/ for more info on that one.
--Thad
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Much like a newborn puppy...
During the late 1980s I worked in ZLB - a HF transmitting station in NZ.
Imagine a hall big enough to park up a 737 or 2, incluind the tail, made of concrete block and hard flat surfaces - with a sprung wooden floor, 8-10 feet above concrete.
Now put ~20 1940-60 era valve HF tramsmitters on that floor, each with a 5hp 3-phase blower keeping things cool.
Result: lots of low frequency beat from the motors all running at slightly different speeds (they never run true, even when syncronous), unbalance fan rotors and a drum effect from the floor. Cap it off with high level white noise from the blade tips.
It was a recipe for a sick building. People working there spent most of their off hours sleeping. It wasn't unusual for staff to come off a week long shift and sleep the entire weekend till the shift started again.
While we knew high level infrasonics was probably the cause, there's no legal limits or recognised testing regime, so people put up with it...
This page at noaa.gov mentions some of the environmental sources on infrasound: earthquakes, avalanches, meteors, large ocean waves, severe weather systems, and volcanos. Negative emotional responses to those sounds could well have been a survival trait in mankind.
This article (PDF, 8mB) provides a nice overview and discussion of atmospheric infrasound.