The Low-Frequency Listener: Soundless Music, Weird Sensations

[pynchonoid]

Soundless Music Shown to Produce Weird Sensations
Sun September 07, 2003 07:09 PM ET 
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.
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.


<http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=3401200>

[...] So the closest thing in the Zone to an early
Christian is put on to listen for news of unauthorized
crucifixions. "Someone the other night was dying,"
Rohr tells him. "I don't know if he was inside the
Zone or out at sea. He wanted a priest. Should I have
got on an told him about priests? Would he've found
any comfort in that? It's so painful sometimes. We're
really trying to be Christians. . . ." (GR 681-682)


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