- When I was a toddler, my siblings and I sometimes played PC games together on the one family computer. One of these games was I Can Be An Animal Doctor. In it, you went to different biomes and clicked on animals there to bring them up to the medical table. Sometimes they were quite obviously ill or injured. Other times, you had to examine them with instruments to find out if they were sick and then treat them. I remember it all very clearly: my brother clicked on a desert tortoise in the desert that wasn’t obviously ill. Once it was on the medical table, he placed the stethoscope on it.
Suddenly this hideous low rasping noise came through the speakers. It triggered something primal in me and I began to scream and wail and roll on the floor in raw terror. My brother was somewhat alarmed and amused and kept replaying the sound. I continued to cry and shut my ears.
I could never play the game or watch it being played again because I kept thinking about that sound. Much later in life, I would come to realise the tortoise had pneumonia and that had been its ragged breathing. Why was that so frightening? When I did try the game again many years later, I found it a bit creepy but not as bad as it once was.
Concept
I’m very interested in creepy sounds and creepy music. I asked some musical people what made sounds creepy, and they usually said ‘lots of minor chords’. But that’s music. How do sounds change into something that can suddenly evoke dread or panic in the listener? Not through jumpscares, but through ‘non-linear elements’.
According to VSauce, things that give us the creeps while not really being scary are things we recognise but have some altered element to them that makes them uncanny.
So a huge alien beast is scary, but a bunny rabbit with fangs is creepy.
I assume that’s why horribly discordant music is unpleasant but not creepy as music that synchronises sometimes and then… doesn’t. Sounds played in reverse are similarly creepy because they toy with our psychological expectations. So does distortion.
Our brain expects instruments to sound a certain way, it expects a piano to begin with the attack, a quick rise in intensity, then stabilize somewhere along the way and then fade away smoothly. When we hear a reversed piano all these aspects are now reversed and it becomes a sound that begins quietly and ends with a powerful attack, something we’re not familiar with because it’s a rare thing to hear in nature (it might not even exist naturally).
The same goes for all instruments. Our brain uses the wave shape and variations in volume and other aspects of a sound to extract musical information. When it’s listened in reverse the lack of familiarity with the sound structure makes it sound “odd”, “scary”, “demonic”. This is even used as a compositional element, as you might be aware of artists recording reversed vocal tracks or instruments.
If there’s a science behind it, I think you could drive someone mad with just sounds. Like you could hum a recognisable tune over and over without variation to establish an underlying pattern.
Then
hum somepartstoofast
hum some
parts…
…too
slow
leave long pauses between so that the listener helplessly waits for the next part
When it comes, violently desynchronise.
You set up expectations, then violate them, but not in a consistent pattern. And you do it over and over.
I want to accomplish something like that. The purpose of my soundscape will be to evoke an unsettling, inexplicable sort of fear.
Stephen King delineated three kinds.
“The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm.
The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm.
Terror: when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”
Wen Lei suggested the trajectory of the soundscape should be familiar to unfamiliar to uncanny to scary back to uncanny/unfamiliar.
I’m going to begin with very typical ‘domestic’ sounds – door opening, cutlery clinking, maybe pet noises. Perhaps the classic family scene. Father’s car pulling up to the driveway. He enters the house, and it’s full of sounds of the household, like a mother cooking, a baby laughing, children playing, but then something ominous happens. Maybe the father turns out to be homicidal and the place turns into a bloodbath? I should think of something more subtle.
Execution
I changed my initial plan in favour of this: someone comes home to make a cup of tea. It’s perfectly ordinary, until it’s not.
I recorded sounds from around the house with the H4 mic. Walking around. Shutting doors, windows and cupboards. Shuffling around. Crinkling plastic bags. Putting things down. Rummaging through the cabinet. Boiling water in a pot (I added steam whistle sounds in post). Pouring water down the sink and getting the pipes to gurgle. The cat refused to meow for me for some reason, so I did the meowing myself (hahaha).
I could make some of the creepier sounds myself through distortion, speed-altering and audio reversal, but there were some I found online. For example, the bronchitis breathing sounds. (I had to have them because like I said, I think desert tortoise pneumonia is the scariest of sounds). I cut them from medical educational videos about abnormal lung conditions.
Then came the editing. It was pretty straightforward because I had the trajectory in mind, but it took a lot of experimentation to get the sounds to overlap and transition nicely, as well as make the ambient audio align right.
Inspirations
Lavender Town, the infamous chiptune track that causes headaches and sparked the urban legend that children in Japan committed suicide upon listening to it. There are certain frequencies that can induce migraines and nausea. Lavender Town does it by playing two frequencies simultaneously – it uses ‘binaural beats’. I think it’s pretty amazing that sounds can cause physiological effects. I played with frequencies as well.
Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, everyone’s favourite disturbing web series! While I was stitching the recordings together, it occurred to me that what I was making was very similar to DHMIS’ style. I wanted to lull the listener into a false sense of security with ‘normal’ sounds, interspersed with more ominous ones. Then at the end, something surprising would happen.
Challenges
So… many… tracks…
Editing was really fun. I had quite a bit to work with. Arranging the clips, adding transitions and various effects – it wasn’t hard but it did require a great deal of thought.
I’ve never done this much layering before! I had a lot of problems with recordings being compromised by muffling and other unwanted audio, and some of those sounds made it into my final drafts. I had to ferret them out by isolating bits and pieces from various tracks. In the end, I couldn’t get all of the corrupted audio out in time, so there are some wrong-sounding parts – particularly near the start. Also, in my final video, some of the audio seemed to glitch when I played it. Yet there was no such glitch in the Premiere file when I checked. I don’t know if it’s a media player issue.
Oh well. Next time, I’ll take recordings more carefully and clean them up before stitching them together. I should learn to stabilise the volume too. I did adjust it sometimes where necessary, but it could sound a bit iffy for no reason in the final.
I think I could have made the ending more intense, but I was concerned about overdoing it.