OFF: Soundless Music Shown to Produce Weird Sensations

[Karen Kusic]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=753&e=1&u=/nm/20030907/sc_nm/science_sound_dc

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.