The Silent Frequency That Makes Old Buildings Feel Haunted (scienceblog.com) 72
Researchers say infrasound -- low-frequency vibrations from things like pipes, HVAC systems, and traffic that humans can't consciously hear -- may help explain why some old buildings feel unsettling or "haunted." Rodney Schmaltz, senior author and professor at MacEwan, says: "Consider visiting a supposedly haunted building. Your mood shifts, you feel agitated, but you can't see or hear anything unusual. 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. If you were told the building was haunted, you might attribute that agitation to something supernatural. In reality, you may simply have been exposed to infrasound." ScienceBlog.com reports: 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.
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.
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 published this week in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
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.
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 published this week in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
Infrasound might explain other fenomena (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
Re: Infrasound might explain other fenomena (Score:2)
Re: Infrasound might explain other fenomena (Score:2)
Ironically, the Greeks spell it with what is essentially an 'f', while we spell it the "Greek" way with a 'ph'.
Anglo obsession with Latin really mucked up the language and orthography.
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Re: Infrasound might explain other fenomena (Score:2)
I bet the same community had no issue with driving oversized pickup trucks polluting the atmosphere with their oversized engines.
For real? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Old buildings don't seem haunted to me, nothing does.
Re: For real? (Score:2)
Or kill more people there.
EM sensitivity (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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:5, Informative)
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.
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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
So when you see a headline talking about science (Score:2)
The study isn't just saying that you think it's haunted it's saying that the ultrasound frequency these buildings emit puts humans on edge. As a consequence of that yeah if you are susceptible to believing in ghosts and scary things that aren't real then yeah you're going to be more likely to think something scary that isn't real is there and think that it is real.
But the headline of "ultrasonic waves admitted by some old
Mythbusters (Score:3)
Re:Mythbusters (Score:4, Interesting)
Mythbusters shines when they prove something is possible. 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).
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Re: Mythbusters (Score:2)
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Dogs are felines
No, dogs are canines
I am irritated that you completely ignored the substance of my post. Way to attack a strawman.
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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).
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But they found it was not possible for anyone to break a glass with just their voice
No. They found that they could not break glass with just a voice, nor did they know anyone who could. Did they test every single person on the planet?
It's not possible to prove a negative. Much of what Mythbusters claimed was that they had proved a negative.
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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
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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,
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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.
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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!
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They showed that the particular infrasound they used did nothing with a handful of people.
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You can hear below 20 hz (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Re: You can hear below 20 hz (Score:2)
Yeah. This is similar to a technique sometimes used with laptops and headphones where they produce what sound like bass tones coming from a speaker that shouldn't be able to produce them, but it's actually an illusion created by producing higher level harmonics your brain expects to hear when a bass sound is produced. Your brain fills in the gap and voila, you hear bass.
Re: You can hear below 20 hz (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised if 20hz is also close to a resonant frequency of most human skulls.
Sure (Score:3)
But what explains haunted houses in the 19th century?
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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
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Absinthe, Laudanum, bad moonshine, nose powder, you name it.
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Ghosts were common up until the late twentieth century until a trio of researchers from Columbia University, NY - well you know the story...
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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!
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But what explains haunted houses in the 19th century?
Firstly, they had infrasound in the 19th century. Think railways.
Also, carbon monoxide from badly adjusted gas lamps.
Ob: Benn Jordan (Score:2)
Or, what's obviously really happening... (Score:2)
Hand-waiving (Score:3)
> 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 terrifying rumble, but I'm not making any building science claims here.
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Why wouldn't modern pipes?
Because modern pipes are normally PEX, not metal?
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Modern pipes are often plastic, but a lot of technology is different in modern times as well. Lots of stuff done with mechanical relays and such are done with solid state stuff now.
Heck CRT screens even when "black" you could still tell when they were on - not because of some light, but because they had an almost imperceptible "hum" you could hear and they air around them felt more charged with static electricity.
Tech from different eras just sometimes feels and sound different.
Do elephants and whales commune with the dead? (Score:2)
Re: Do elephants and whales commune with the dead? (Score:2)
I don't know if they communicate, but elephants visit their dead.
Debunked (Score:2)
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.
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Cats can hear two octaves higher than you can, it's more likely they heard something ultrasonic.
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:4, Insightful)
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I think your comment is one of the more insightful and "on the money" here. But, I take issue with calling it BS.
It may have flaws, may ultimately be shown invalid. But - a lot of legitimate science and discovery starts with informal observations, pilot studies, and other such introductory investigation.
Starting with the observations made in the study, then further critiques, insights, and suggestions such as you provided, followup studies can start to discern the real truth in all of that.
Not like anybod
Your house isnt haunted (Score:1)
You are lonely.
keep it simple (Score:2)
Applying Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation for why some buildings seem to be haunted is that they are full of ghosts.
Known for 60+ years (Score:2)
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What was that!? (Score:2)
I'm not saying it was ghosts ... but it was ghosts.
So it's (Score:1)
not the neighbor's obese aunt snoring?