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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.""
Does infrasound include the "brown note", by chance? If so, then I think that they might be on to something. I'm always shitting myself...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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.
There have been news articles about infrasound and ELF sound experiments since the Cold War began. Both the US and Soviet scientists experimented extensivel y with infrasound as a weapon, and found that it was effective against troops, except for that one annoying minor problem - it affected both sides equally.
. htm
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The BBC story on the subject also attributes religious feelings in churches to the sound produced by the infrasound generated by the largest organ pipes in many churches and cathedrals.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Or......infrasound is how the ghosts are trying to communicate with us! All we have to do is record it and then speed up the tape! Maybe play it backwards too? You'd probably hear "Iiiii...am the ghost of Caldera.....bring me $699 or I shall not find eternal peeeaaaaace....."
...
Bah, infrasound ? low bass rumble ? thats just the ghost farting......
...had this in 1964. See The Three Investigators #1: The Secret Of Terror Castle (by Robert Arthur 1964).
----- On the requirements it said: Windows 98 or better - so I installed Linux
I remember reading The Mystery of the Green Ghost (Robert Arthur, part of the Three Investigators Series) back in 4th grade (1980ish). It's originally published back in 1965, and one of the "techniques" used by the perpetrators to scare people off was using extremely low notes on a pipe organ, too low for them to hear as sound.
Putting the sig back into +1, Insightful since 1995!
"Infrasound is also produced by storms, seasonal winds and weather patterns and some types of earthquakes. Animals such as elephants also use infrasound to communicate over long distances or as weapons to repel foes."
So now we just have to explain how the elephants got into the haunted houses. Or how it is we don't see ghosts every time there's a thundershower.
Seriously, trying to come up with a physical explaination of ghost stories that doesn't include the mind of the person is dumb. The range of reported phenomina is so wide as to be clearly "made up".
(sigh) Oh Great - Just when I thought I had my Home Theater set up correctly, they invent Even Deeper Bass.
I guess I'll need to upgrade if I ever want to truly enjoy such movies as this Scary Movie
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Does anybody remember those "The Three Investigators" books? In one of those, the Investigators were investigating some "haunted house" or something and, in the story, they talked about how a pipe organ playing a very low frequency tone was causing the fearful sensations that everybody was getting.
/. I didn't RTFA... so, is this research claiming to have discovered something new and previously unknown, or are they saying they've simply confirmed something which has been suspected for some time?
Of course, being
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Scientists find 1 explanation for 1 spooky phenomena, and all paranormal happenings are written off as rubbish?
Whatever..
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Or, of course it could be ghosts USING infrasound to make people feel fear, revulsion, etc.
Clever ghosts.
-Styopa
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 was exactly what I was thinking.
Lord and his colleagues, who produced infrasound with a seven meter (yard) pipe
Sounds like something do-able. Just don't go trying to making an MP3 of it.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
It was a most effective tool in keeping the invaders away from places where they were not welcome.
Phoenix
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
Seriously, they don't mention what frequencies were used (can someone extrapolate from the pipe length), but getting transducers to work so low isn't easy and you would need a DC coupled amp. Bass speakers theoretically go down to 20Hz but the performance falls off.
See my journal, I write things there
From the article:
"[...] It's wonderful to be able to examine the evidence," said Sarah Angliss, a composer and engineer who worked on the project.
Hmmm. Let me get this straight:
I think I am in love... Will you marry me, Sarah? I just hope my wife is not reading this...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
phenomenon Audio pronunciation of phenomena ( P ) Pronunciation Key (f-nm-nn, -nn)
n. pl. phenomena (-n)
1. An occurrence, circumstance, or fact that is perceptible by the senses.
2. pl. phenomenons
1. An unusual, significant, or unaccountable fact or occurrence; a marvel.
2. A remarkable or outstanding person; a paragon. See Synonyms at wonder.
3. Philosophy. In the philosophy of Kant, an object as it is perceived by the senses, as opposed to a noumenon.
4. Physics. An observable event.
There goes one.
Now we just have the IR cameras to worry about. I'd say that any type of sound manifesting itself through a medium (wall, floor, etc) would indeed raise the temperature of the medium, which would be detectable by an infrared camera. After all, isn't sound just motion, and isn't heat motion?
But what do I know?
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.
Of perhaps it was their unfortunate decision to place the infrasound in the Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails songs vs the Kylie Minogue and TATU songs (or is the the other way around?).
Is that why darth vader had such an impact ?
... the real explanation for ghosts is that it was old Mr McCavity, the janitor. He knew about the abandoned gold mine under the house and used the ghost disguse to try to scare away the house's rightful owners. And he would have got away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids.
Surely the use of "subsonics" to induce feelings of dread and awe was standard sixties SF fare, and was actually applied to good use in the movie "Earthquake," for which movie theatres installed special bass-enhanced sound-reproduction gear called "Sensurround." By all accounts "Sensurround" was very effective in its original form in that particular movie.
I don't have it at hand, but IIRC in Heinlein's 1966 novel, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," the central computer, "Adam Selene," uses his control over HVAC systems to generate fear-incuding subsonics at a critical point in the story?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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
all you need is a 7 metre pipe
BIG FUCKING DIDGERIDOO!!!
"Information wants to be paid"
"60db infrasound at around 6.9-7.1 Hz is capable of driving a human insane or even killing him within a few minutes."
I find this hard to believe... do you have a reference or link?
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
I don't know where you're coming from with this talk about a "DC coupled amp" but bass speakers go all the way down to DC (0Hz). There's certainly no practical or theoretical problems reproducing sub-20Hz signals from a bass speaker. Even your tiny 6" mid-range drivers can (and do) reproduce 1Hz signals. You just can't hear it because so little air is being moved.
The actual problem is that the lower the frequency, the more air you need to move in order to hear it. The amount of air a driver can move is partially determined by the Vd figure (volume of air moved). This is simply Sd (surface area of cone) multiplied by Xmax (cone excursion). The 1Hz signal out of your 6" drivers is so quiet that you can't hear it, but it's there. Not enough air is being moved for your ears (which are heavily tuned to 2-4kHz) to detect.
So the trick is to make the excursion large, the surface area large, thereby getting a large value for Vd. Of course, you now need a lot of power to move that much air around. That's why subwoofers have 18" cones with 1/2" excursions driven by 400W amplifiers. Grunt. Grunt. Grunt.
Of course, super-low frequency generators don't bother with all this nonsense. They just use huge pistons behind a suitably long tube. Much easier to move the required amount of air.
Scientists - 1,000,001
I can't prove something doesn't exist, but you should be able to prove something does exist.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
showing up in 1941 even had some occasional mentions of the use of subsonics to scare off invaders.
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. :)
A previous student had found a old organ that a church was throwing out. He had collected the assorted bits, repaired it, and put it in the back of the RPI playhouse. I had taken over maintenance of the organ. The job came with the right to tell others that you had the largest organ on campus.
As a side note, a succession of VERY talented people treated the RPI playhouse as their own personal stereo system. What appeared onstage may not have been great, but we could pump fabulous sound into that room.
One day we were running some new lines in order be able to patch the organ into our mixing board. We decided to try a test to see how hard we could drive the system. Our subwoofers were a pair of EV 20 inch speakers. Each was driven from its own Crown DC300 amplifier, located next to the speaker for minimum cable losses. The DC300s were crossed over so that both channels drove the same speaker, which has the effect of quadrupling the power output.
I played the lowest note on the foot peddles. It was around 20 Hz. We brought the power up to max and it was pretty impressive. Then I added in the second lowest note. That set up an approx. 2.5 Hz beat frequency. The curtains were up, exposing the cinder block wall behind the stage. Due to the insistance of some architects, the house was plaster, with no sound dampening. The beat frequency corresponded exactly with the length of the space, plaster wall at back of house to the cinder block wall behind the stage. At this point the house was quite uncomfortable.
We stopped the experiment, rigged the organ so that the two lowest notes would play continuously, then retired to the glass enclosed sound booth. We added an extra pre-amplifier to boost the signal a little more. Then we drove the systam as hard as we could. The technical director at the playhouse was in a classroom half a mile away. He later reported that he felt the vibration and said to himself, "What are those guys up to now." After running this for about 5 minutes we called the geology department. The seismograph did indeed capture our experiment from several miles away.
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?
Honestly, since when did the subjects of ghosts and haunted houses suddenly become "new age drivel?" I grew up in a small Southern town where every family has at least two dozen ghost stories to tell with some going back two hundred years. While I realize that many "psychics" jump on the ghost bandwagon, please don't confuse their profession with the subjects they cover. Ghost stories are as similar to a new age concept as napalm is a food for deer.
the long tube is a resonance chamber.
they are still only using a 1/2 inch to a 1 inch throw woofer.
I messed with this back in high school. a 4 meter pipe with a 8 inch driver can rattle all the ceiling tiles out of a room easily and create a DB increase that was off the scale of the meter we had at 30hz and caused headaches in everyone in the room woth only 100 watts rms being used.
they are simply creating a resonance chamber for much lower frequencies... no pistons or other magic.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No thanks. While it may be that these ultra-low sounds cause a range of sensations in human emotion does that really prove that any and all paranormal activity can be simply explained away? Aside from the obvious technical problems are the practical issues involved. Do we really need to explain away all of our dreams and fantasies until they're no more than mundane neural processes and heretofore unexplained natural phenomena? Trick or treating on Halloween "Oh, don't worry kids. That house isn't really haunted. That's just an ultra-low frequency sound causing you to have a negative emotional response. Nothing at all to be frightened of..." Either that or Old Mr. McCavity has really bad gas... (SBDs, is that smell real or the result of ultra-low frequency toots?)
http://www.randi.org/jr/10-29-2000.html
Extra-Low Frequency.
You know, wavelengths on the order of meters. Like a small fraction of the size of a joist, or A-frame.
If a standing wave that could be induced on something like that matches the resonance mode of a cavity of air (attic, exterior room), you could get powerful propogation effects.
Elves, on the other hand, are squishy.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I guess this means if we ever get orders to evacuate a colony on, say, Omicron Ceti III, which has been found to have been bomdarded by Berthold Rays, but the colonists don't want to leave because of the drug-like affects of the indigenous "spore plants" we can use a subsonic transmitter to bring everyone back to their senses so that thay are as unhappy as the rest of us...
RTFA, all you need is a 7 metre pipe
Well, I guess I'll finally have to respond to some of that spam I've been getting.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The speaker is what interests me. You can get sub-20Hz responses but as you put it without a nice big resonant cavity, it won't go very far. I seem to remember reading that some cinemas were once equipped with low-frequency generators for special effects, but that meant one speaker per seat.
See my journal, I write things there
There is a really well done french film, "Irreversible" by Gaspard Noe that includes infrasound during one of the more unsettling scenes. I commend Noe for using such a genious technique in this film, since it really expresses the gravity of such a significant scene.
::Bleaked::
If you are even in the mood for a quality film, I highly recommend this film.
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...
You need a DC coupled amplifier, otherwise the series capacitors found on one or both ends of an AC coupled amplifier tends to mess things up. You also need to couple this energy into the air.
..... Germanium was harder to make in N-type flavour, so germanium trannies were mainly PNP. Even when silicon took over from germanium, output stages typically were NPN-NPN. Complementary symmetric output stages - at least ones that work properly and don't give lots of even harmonic distortion - are a much later development} more cheaply than a circuit with one or more transistors ..... but that was a looooong time ago.
..... you need to make sure that the air moving away from the cone as it travels forward, doesn't simply travel around to the back of the speaker. If the cone moves slowly then this is more likely. Ideally you want to place the speaker in a heavy, sealed box. An exponential horn on the front might help too - it's the most efficient pattern for coupling a pressure wave into air. You can also use a tuned port to catch reflected sound from the rear of the cone, invert its phase by 1/2 wavelength, and then when the cone pushes at the front, the tuned port also pushes so you get reinforcement rather than cancellation.
Some stage amps are already DC coupled, others can be modded to DC couple them. Thanks to inherent close thermal matching, DC coupled amps built as ICs really do work. Think TDA2030 and bigger cousins - basically just an op-amp with a slew rate good enough for audio. Valve amps, however, almost invariably rely on transformer coupling somewhere and therefore are AC coupled. Same goes for older tranny amps where a transformer could provide the necessary phase-splitting for driving a push-pull output stage {nb, in those days they were invariably PNP-PNP
My old employer used a modified 1kW stage amp, a signal generator and a box of tricks I built with some op-amps and resistors, to apply weirdy DC+AC / DC+rectified AC waveforms to automotive kit they were testing for operation with a noisy supply. {a vehicle alternator gives out unsmoothed rectified AC; the battery acts like a massive smoothing capacitor but sometimes the lead inductance is too much for this to happen, and what if the battery becomes disconnected after the engine has started?}
As for the problem of getting air to move
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I am tired of being lectured on statistics and the weaknesses of the scientific method by people who evince no familiarity with either.
And I'm tired of being lectured on statistics and the scientific method, and how infallible it is, by people with no familiarity with either. (Note: this is not you, but other people.)
Science is a process. It is a method of attaching degrees of certainty to explanations of observed phenomena, of understanding our universe without bias or wishful thinking. The process has no ethical component
All true, but completely beside the point when dealing with people who don't understand that, and treat science as a mystical explanation of everything around us. Even when scientific method says "results cannot confirm or deny such phenomenon", they ignore the "deny" part, and harp on "confirm" - science cannot confirm it, so therefore it does not exist.
Unlike religion, science has no asserted dogma. If I so desire, I can follow every step in the chain from 2+2=4 through general relativity, and see, carefully footnoted, the areas where we think there needs to be further work, or we are not sure of our answers. (emphasis mine)
This is precisely my point - people who treat science as a religion believe that science provides all answers, all the time. There is no fallibility, and thus science itself becomes the asserted dogma.
Unlike religionists, the only time scientists get stuffy when someone questions their data is when that someone has made no effort to understand the process, and is speaking from a position of obvious fallacy.
This statement ignores people who don't question the data, and have made no effort to understand the process. These are the people to whom science is a religion - they are (as you say) speaking from a position of fallacy, but use reports of a scientific nature to assert their claims. People like this do exist (there are more of them than you know.)
So is the study valid? Can't tell from a Reuters article.
Yes, but there are people who will believe it - based solely on the article, and won't bother to check it, let alone understand it.
Science requires no faith...only hard work and an open mind.
Science doesn't need to require faith, but that doesn't exclude people from having faith in science.
In SOVIET RUSSIA, pr0n searches for you!
No matter where you live now, pr0n searches for you. Don't you have an email address? Maybe you've always had an intelligent server-side spam blocker so you don't understand...
I have to take extreme exception with this. Scientists are human and as such can be extremely biased and unaccepting of new ideas in the face of mountains of scientific evidence against their beliefs. In my field, I see this all the time.
It would be great if we could all be entirely objective and follow the scientific method to a tee all the time, but in reality, this is seldom the case... even for reputable "scientists".
Arrogance, and a need to have our beliefs vindicated are probably the most common downfalls I see. The good scientists are those who know they don't know it all and are willing to accept when theories they've been taught or developed are evidenced to be false. It can be a huge impact on the psyche to discover that you've based your life's work on something that's entirely wrong, and there are those who just cannot accept such an admission.
Someone earlier made a distinction between science (the method) and scientism (a belief system akin to materialism). Too many scientists treat their theories and ideas as religeon and show just as much dogmatic rigidness as any religeon.
I could go on and on or cite numerous examples, but you should have seen plenty of this around you (if you're truely objective).
I'm a bass fanatic and infrasound has sort of been a hobby of mine for the past several years. Detecting infrasound (frequencies less than 20 Hz) is easy if you have the right equipment and it can be very fascinating, educational, and fun.
Capturing and monitoring infrasound is easy with a PC, low end sound card, and a cheap microphone. The key is having a low enough sample rate and a spectrum analysis program that is designed for monitoring long term events. I am the author of a Linux signal analysis program called baudline. It has many features that make it ideal for infrasound monitoring. For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing I would recommend checking out the image entitled -session basso on the Screenshots page, also many of Mystery Signals contain some interesting bass phenomena.
For baudline infrasound monitoring, some good starting command line parameters would be:
baudline -memory 50 -samplerate 8000 -decimateby 16 -overlap 50
This will capture about 5 hours of data at a 500 samples/second rate which is good for frequencies up to 250 Hz. Increasing the -memory buffers to 230 MB, the decimation ratio to 64, and the -overlap to 100% will have a Nyquist frequency of 62.5 Hz and capture almost a weeks worth of data!
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.
So..... ghosts have cool stereos with awesome bass?
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ELF resonance??? You mean like Executable and Linkable Format? I didn't know old houses ran Linux! Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
Make sure to put the speaker directly underneath her chair.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin