Hulu’s new sci-fi horror movie no one will save you, there are only two sentences of dialogue out of its 93-minute running time. But it’s not a quiet movie. The floor groans, feet thud, characters shriek, and something–I won’t spoil it–makes creepy noises. The ominous background noises are complemented by composer Joseph Trapanese’s menacing music, which trembles from deep electronic pulses to the squeal of a ripsaw. It’s creepy and effective. Prolific horror novelist Stephen King also took note, calling the film “wonderful, daring, involving, frightening” on social media platform X.
horror soundtrack etc. no one will save youhas a special goal. It’s hard to find another musical genre so defined by the need to create a single emotion: fear. To twist audio in disturbing ways, composers, musicians, and mixers use some special techniques. Some songs can have extreme dynamics, with long silences embedded within the sound that bounces around the screen. Others encapsulate the acoustic signature of human cries. According to a studymay set off alarm bells in our brains.
Spooky songs also have the freedom to be more experimental, since they don’t have to be fun. Pop songs and gentle soundtracks usually stick to well-worn concepts like harmony. But chilling content tends to be “more creative and breaks the mold of certain unwritten rules,” he says. ben marrmusician and software engineer. Music startup Rivet. Still, the nightmarish score uses some common compositional tricks to mess with the listener’s mind.
My ears feel uneasy
If you’ve ever thought that horror soundtracks just sound like someone screaming, you’re right.music cognition researcher caitlin trevor investigated the similarities between song structure and vocal signals or other natural sounds. A sad song may remind you that someone is crying, but it’s often in the most abstract sense, with something like the sound of a falling melody reinterpreted as a sigh, she says. To tell. “What I liked about scary music is that mimicry seems like a more direct, more obvious field,” Trevor explains. “It really does sound like a scream.”
There are many reasons to dislike screaming. The screams can be loud, deafening, and painful. Horror movies can use that to their advantage. “Humans perceive scream-like soundtracks as signals of danger, likely because they mimic the sound quality of human screams,” study co-authors say. Sasha Frewholza cognitive neuropsychologist at the University of Oslo.
in 2020 PapersTrevor, Frewholz, and their colleagues established that frightening music and human screams strongly share an audio characteristic known as roughness, which describes the degree of harshness or harshness of a particular sound. Coarse noise “has chaotic fluctuations in different sound frequencies,” Fruhholz says. When someone screams, their vocal cords are pushed beyond their limits, which Trevor likens to a musician playing too much of a flute or clarinet. The team performed acoustic analysis of 10 of his English horror films, including: cabin in the woods, it followsand Get outwe found that the scream-like music that often accompanies characters being attacked resulted in a much greater increase in roughness than scenes without scares.
In the study, 20 volunteers listened to recordings of people actually screaming, as well as excerpts from horror soundtracks that included scream-like music and more neutral songs. Participants were asked to rate their emotional impressions of what they heard on a scale from negative to positive. Human screams evoke the most negative emotions, but the subjects responded similarly, albeit less intensely, to music that sounded like screams. Trevor added that it’s as if the horror music is “piggybacking” on the natural audio signal. “But because it’s in this art space, they’re a little less powerful.” In other words, we may hear danger on the soundtrack, but we also know it’s make-believe.
“The correlation with screaming definitely makes sense to me,” says Rich Vreeland. Disaster Peace as an ArtistI composed the soundtrack for. it follows, body body body, and other Hollywood movies.His musical inspirations span film and real life: Bernard Herrmann’s jarring scores psycho It was “one of the touchstones of how to make high-pitched scary sounds”, as was “the scary sound of the Sony alarm clock I had as a kid”.
out of tune
Horror soundtracks are so different from other soundtracks that algorithms can pick out certain characteristics from the genre. A team of computer scientists, including Ma, reportedly used a custom computer model to analyze the music of 110 top-grossing films. in 2021 Pro Swan paper. Their goal was to take a quantitative approach to the impact of film music on audiences with “the first study to apply deep learning models to musical features to predict film genre,” the researchers said. are writing.
Although only 11 of the 110 films were horror films, the AI still had dozens of hours of audio left. Ultimately, I focused on the tonal aspects of horror music, specifically the aspect known as dissonance. “We were able to see empirical evidence that the characteristics of that tone have the greatest impact on the model’s predictions,” Marr says.
Harmony in Western musical scales is a combination of tones that are ratios of frequencies. (When you play the low, mid, and high notes A (corresponding to 220, 440, and 880 Hz) at the same time, a sound that is generally considered to be sweet is produced.) This is also a really pleasant-sounding harmony.” Point out.
Disharmony will ruin that nice round number. The notes played together may not exist on the keyboard. Imagine the sound coming from the space between the keys. “It’s something you can’t physically play on the piano,” Marr says. To achieve this, a continuous pitch instrument is required. The screeching strings of a violin psycho The soundtrack is a prime example of this, and Marr says it “really exemplifies on an atonal level” how horror music works, creating very unsettling frequencies.
sounds of anxiety and fear
Trevor’s most recent study of horror music was published earlier this year. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, divides the concept of fear into two parts. Some songs make me feel anxious, and some make me feel scared. Her acoustic analysis looked at several different characteristics of the soundtracks of 30 horror films to understand how their psychological effects were achieved. Notably, each category had a distinct tempo, which she and her colleagues described in her paper. An unsettling example is “heavy” or “pacing,” whereas a frightening example is “frenetic” and “throbbing” or a “wall of sound.” ”
In an additional experiment, the team asked 99 people to rate the song’s anxiety, fear, kindness, and happiness on a seven-point scale. On average, subjects were unable to completely categorize music into her two feared categories. Scary music was also rated as conveying a lot of anxiety. That may have been a product of research bias, Trevor said. “Perhaps the participants were responding more to how it felt than to what was being depicted.” She is now using MRI brain scans to show that human screams and frightening music are I’m participating in a study to see if it activates similar neural networks in listeners.
We may hear danger on the soundtrack, but we also know it’s make-believe.
But there’s more to a horror soundtrack than just clever compositions. The power of juxtaposition, for example, is one aspect that scientific research may not be fully designed to capture, but is highly effective, Marr explains. The best scores, like any scary movie, put the audience at ease, but then shatter it. “Horror soundtracks should also include beautiful moments,” says Marr. “They put you in this calm place and then they can drag you out of it in the most infuriating ways.”
Enjoy this spooky music playlist hand-picked by PopSci editors and tell us what your scariest soundtrack is.
