The Silent Frequency That Makes Old Buildings Feel Haunted (scienceblog.com)
- Reference: 0183017706
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/04/28/0413216/the-silent-frequency-that-makes-old-buildings-feel-haunted
- Source link: https://scienceblog.com/the-silent-frequency-that-makes-old-buildings-feel-haunted/
> Infrasound sits below roughly 20 Hz, the lower limit of what the human ear can ordinarily detect. It's generated by storms, by volcanic activity, by tectonic rumblings deep in the Earth's crust, and (this is the part that matters) by the mundane mechanical heartbeat of cities: ageing pipes, HVAC systems, traffic, industrial machinery. "Infrasound is pervasive in everyday environments, appearing near ventilation systems, traffic, and industrial machinery," says Schmaltz. Most of the time, we walk through it without a second thought. The question the team wanted to answer was whether walking through it was actually doing something to us, whether the frequency was registered somewhere below consciousness, somewhere we couldn't readily name.
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> The experimental setup was deliberately ordinary. Thirty-six undergraduate students filed one at a time into isolated testing rooms and sat alone with a piece of music, either a calming instrumental or a horror-themed ambient track designed to provoke discomfort. Hidden subwoofers, including a 12-inch unit positioned in an adjacent hallway and a 16-inch speaker oriented toward the ceiling in a neighboring room, pumped infrasound at approximately 18 Hz into half those spaces. The participants had no idea. That last point turned out to be rather important. When the team ran the numbers, they found that participants couldn't reliably identify whether infrasound had been present. Their guesses were, statistically speaking, no better than chance. And according to Schmaltz, participants' beliefs about whether the infrasound was on had no detectable effect on their cortisol or mood. The physiological response didn't care what the participants thought was happening. It just happened anyway.
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> What happened, specifically, was this: those exposed to infrasound reported higher irritability, lower interest in the music, and a tendency to rate the music as sadder, irrespective of whether it was the calming or the horror track. Cortisol levels, measured before and about 20 minutes after exposure, were also elevated. Kale Scatterty, the PhD student who led the work, notes that irritability and cortisol do tend to move together under ordinary stress, but adds that "infrasound exposure had effects on both outcomes that went beyond that natural relationship." That distinction matters more than it might seem. Previous theories about infrasound and paranormal experience have often leaned on anxiety as the explanatory mechanism, the idea that low-frequency sound triggers a kind of free-floating dread that the mind then reaches for supernatural explanations to account for. The new data don't really support that picture. Measures of anxiety didn't budge significantly. What went up was irritability and disinterest, a kind of sour, low-grade aversion rather than fear. That's perhaps a more honest description of how a lot of ghost stories actually feel in the telling: not screaming terror, but wrong atmosphere, a sense of unease that never quite crystallizes into something you can point at.
The study has been [3]published this week in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound
[2] https://scienceblog.com/the-silent-frequency-that-makes-old-buildings-feel-haunted/
[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1729876/full
For real? (Score:1)
Old buildings don't seem haunted to me, nothing does.
EM sensitivity (Score:3)
I'm surprised how rarely infrasound emissions are measured. The health effects are well known, and it wouldn't surprise me if the symptoms of most "EM sensitive" people were actually caused by infrasound coming from a crappy antenna.
Re: (Score:2)
As someone who grew up in exactly those supposedly haunted houses, I call bullshit. The house I lived for my first 10 years was built in 1905, the next house in 1895, and my children grew up in a house built in 1822. My brother moved into a house from 1378 (sic!), and has since moved into a house from 1890. None of those houses ever felt haunted.
Re: (Score:2)
Did they have old mechanical systems that could cause Infrasound? You probably had no way to measure infrasound, much less knew what it was. You're strawmanning.
The article has nothing to do with houses that "look haunted." It's talking about old houses that may produce infrasound due to old boilers, radiators or other old mechanical systems.
Re: (Score:2)
The medical establishment is still trying to pretend mold doesn't cause health problems, you're surprised they don't want to acknowledge infrasound noise?
Mythbusters (Score:3)
I seem to recall the Mythbusters did a reasonably well designed practical experiment and found this just wasn't likely - if you think a place is haunted, it's because you're susceptible to that kind of thinking, not because of infrasound.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh god, please don't ever attempt to counter actual controlled scientific studies which demonstrated statistically significant results with p=0.05 for all results, and p=0.002 (very statistically significant) for the emotional respons, with the word "Mythbusters" again. Mythbusters isn't science. It's entertainment. The fact that it sometimes aligns with actual scientific results is complete coincidence given their often flawed methodologies.
I'm reminded of the boat bifurcation episode. They put so much eff
Mythbusters (Score:3)
Mythbusters debunked this.
Re: (Score:3)
When mythbusters debunks something, they usually debunk it in a single scenario. They don't go through all the effort to exhaustively explore the search space. That is why they are criticized for not being scientific.
Mythbusters shines when they prove something is possible. [1]Break a glass with your voice? [youtube.com] That's where they are at they strongest. (There is still room for alternate hypothesis, maybe the singer held the glass too tightly? But it's a solid piece of experimental evidence).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OHLLIKDEuHk
Re: (Score:3)
But they found it was not possible for anyone to break a glass with just their voice. They did it with amplifiers it I recall but that is not what the myth is. Also for the haunted noise they set up speakers with the exact sound that was expected to do it in an abandoned creepy house and no one felt anything. Sure it's hard to be scientific when it is human psychology but I don't see how they could have done it any differently.
Re: (Score:2)
I am irritated that you completely ignored the substance of my post. Way to attack a strawman.
Re: Mythbusters (Score:2)
But you provided the glass as proving something is possible.. but they didn't. So I'm confused why that isn't a strawman.
Re: (Score:1)
> But they found it was not possible for anyone to break a glass with just their voice. They did it with amplifiers it I recall but that is not what the myth is.
You must have not watched the entire episode, then, because they eventually did break a glass by singing at it unamplified. Granted, it involved a rock singer at point-blank range, but they still did it (and they even got a high-speed recording of it).
Re: (Score:2)
It is very hard to prove a negative. However when it comes to stuff like this, proving it does not happen under likely conditions.
Proving you can use infra-sound to make people more prone to certain kinds of imagination under very controlled conditions is interesting but does not explain why people often think old buildings are haunted, even when some infra-sound is present.
Once you get to 'and all the stars are aligned' territory what have shown is maybe that one guy that had some sudden psychic break one
Re: (Score:2)
It's more nuanced than that. There may be some particular characteristic of infrasound that cause the issue.You would need to look at the infrasound in places that have reports of the phenomenon and try to replicate that first, then try to find commonalities in the sound characteristics and come up with a wholly artificial sound that replicates the phenomenon.
The Mythbusters showed that whatever particular Infrasound they used in the test did nothing statistically significant is their small sample.
Consider,
Re: (Score:2)
> When mythbusters debunks something, they usually debunk it in a single scenario.
Mythbusters also needed a production assistant to help them spell "scientific method." They weren't scientists, they were entertainers (and damned good ones). They occasionally did some very good work, but not when it came to real science with double blind testing.
Re: (Score:2)
Mythbusters debunking something isn't science. It's entertainment. The only thing mythbusters did is cause you to become a science denier, declaring a result incorrect without examining the methodology that lead to their statistically significant results.
Congrats. You dumbed yourself with TV!
Re: (Score:2)
They showed that the particular infrasound they used did nothing with a handful of people.
Re: (Score:2)
Ok well the implication here is that it works with most people.
You can hear below 20 hz (Score:5, Informative)
20hz is not the level you can hear, it's the level where repeated pressure changes get unified in your brain to a single tone.
Below that level, your brain perceives them as individual beats. At 20hz they are coming pretty quick, but if you listen (and they are loud enough) you can distinguish each one.
Re: (Score:3)
> 20hz is not the level you can hear, it's the level where repeated pressure changes get unified in your brain to a single tone. Below that level, your brain perceives them as individual beats. At 20hz they are coming pretty quick, but if you listen (and they are loud enough) you can distinguish each one.
Something somewhat related to this low frequency sounds are "binaural beats" sounds that purposely generate infrasound. You wear headphones, and one ear gets a frequency, and the other gets a frequency that is shifted away slightly. so the two beat against each other, which produces that third sound.
They presumably get your brain to sync to the infrasound, in relation to the Alpha, Beta, Theta, and Delta frequencies naturally present in the human brain - depending on what the person is doing at the time.
Sure (Score:2)
But what explains haunted houses in the 19th century?
Re: (Score:3)
They answered this: "tectonic rumblings deep in the Earth's crust, and (this is the part that matters) by the mundane mechanical heartbeat of cities: ageing pipes, HVAC systems, traffic, industrial machinery. "
so we are missing the HVAC systems and industrial machinery. The traffic was horsedrawn lorries. Plus, I might be wrong but it seems to me the further one goes back in time, the less people were likely to look for common explanations for things they didn't understand and quicker to ascribe those going
Re: (Score:3)
Absinthe, Laudanum, bad moonshine, nose powder, you name it.
Re: (Score:2)
Ghosts were common up until the late twentieth century until a trio of researchers from Columbia University, NY - well you know the story...
Re: (Score:2)
They had plumbing back then?
Re: (Score:2)
Wood is always moving, it swells with humidity and shrinks when dry. It does this all the time, more so where there is no modern vapor barrier or insulation to steady the daily humidity changes.
If wood sits on a stone or masonry foundation, the wood is always moving relative to the foundation. Even wood on wood the nails will flex a bit with the movement, sometimes popping if the wood hangs up on itself - There be vibrations!
Ob: Benn Jordan (Score:2)
Auditory uncanny valley: [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8
Or, what's obviously really happening... (Score:2)
Clearly, ghosts are attracted to infrasound. I don't see how these results could be said to indicate anything else.
Hand-waiving (Score:2)
> In an old building, there is a good chance that infrasound is present, particularly in basements where aging pipes and ventilation systems produce low-frequency vibrations
This was a long summary and offered no support for these claims.
Why would aging pipes *resonate* at sub-20Hz frequencies?
Why wouldn't modern pipes?
What about a metal "aging process" would cause this?
What are we to make of a "haunted" Scottish castle built 800 years ago?
Look, when I was five my parents' oil burner would kick off with a
Re: (Score:2)
> Why wouldn't modern pipes?
Because modern pipes are normally PEX, not metal?
Do elephants and whales commune with the dead? (Score:2)
They can hear very low frequencies. Has anyone asked them if them if they experience overwhelming ennui and an impending sense of dread? Or is it just people who hellucinate ghosts? Or perhaps they need even lower frequencies to experience those effects?
Debunked (Score:2)
Mythbusters did an experiment to disprove this. I'd say they are about as credible as these researchers. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oN5awl7jhA
So infrasound attracts ghosts (Score:2)
(Sorry, I didn't have time to read the headline. I only read the experimental results.)
So it looks like either infrasound attracts ghosts, or the lack of it repels them. Has anyone tried noise cancellation as a ghost-busting deterrent/defense?
Can't resist (Score:2)
Now explain why cats heard ghosts at 03:30.
Other Factors (Score:2)
I think more directly obsevable factors are more important. An old building is likely to smell musty and have visible signs of decay. Humans are evolutionarily programmed to be wary of anything exhibiting signs of death or decay, as it can be a sign of danger.
I Call BS (Score:2)
This is misleading. I am not surprised that infra-sound can bother people in various ways. What they did not do was survey various buildings for infra-sounds. I saw no coherent explanation of why old buildings would have more of it. It also leaves off that plenty of ghost stories occurred in pre-industrial and pre-plumbing eras. What they needed to do was use 4 buildings, 2 new and 2 old, with one of each having infra-sound. There may be some psychology where feeling unsettled in a 10 year old building mean
Your house isnt haunted (Score:1)
You are lonely.
Infrasound might explain other fenomena (Score:4, Interesting)
Like the feeling of dizziness near industrial sites, or near data centers. One person made a video about infrasound pollution from data center: [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe their birth language isn't American. Other modern languages in recent centuries have gone through spelling reforms.
'Ph' is a historical throwback to a 2500 year old dead language, old Greek, via Latin. In the time of Homer, its original pronunciation was an aspirated p.