58 replies to this topic

[Authentic Drama Queen]

Infrasound: The Sound Too Awesome for Us to Hear

Infrasound is too low-frequency for humans to hear. It has been mistaken for ghosts, has been known to cause nausea and headaches in humans, and is used to monitor the testing of nuclear weapons.

It's difficult to write about infrasound, because while some people consider it just an ordinary wavelength of sound, others have considered it magic. For every semi-credible link, there's a link to a bigfoot page, or a magic healing center.

Infrasound is like any other sound wave. Something vibrates, and the vibrations pressurized the air around the object. That pressure travels through the air until it hits an eardrum. The number of pressurized waves that hit an ear per second determines the pitch. A high frequency will produce a high note. A low one will produce a low note.

The lowest frequency that humans can hear is about 20 hertz, or twenty waves per second. Anything below that is infrasound. It doesn't register as sound, but it still does jam its way into a human ear, like that worm in Wrath of Khan, and it can be felt.

How? Like the worm in Wrath of Khan - not pleasantly. Infrasound is said to cause headaches and nausea that can last for days. At other times, it supposedly results in a feeling of generalized dread, sorrow, or fear. Some people have even reported seeing or feeling the presence supernatural entities after seeing when influenced by infrasound.

That infrasound is not without tangible proof. Elephants use it to communicate with each other, as do whales and giraffes. It's even said that whales use blasts of infrasound to stun prey. The waves are real, and there's no doubt that they can be heard and used by living things.

But the effect is still sometimes disputed. So many things create infrasound. When winds pass over mountain ranges, or waves crash down in bays, or earthquakes begin, infrasound can be created. Some people even say that they can feel it when they look at the northern lights. Maybe all the depression and anxiety in the world can be chalked up to nature screwing with us.

Fortunately, the human race has developed enough that we have a chance to screw back, and to do it with a certain poetic vindictive irony. Nuclear bombs are one of the most reliable man-made producers of infrasound. And infrasound is one of the most reliable ways of figuring out whether or not a country is testing nuclear bombs.

So if you feel anxious, nauseous, or sorrowful, be sure to pick up the phone and call your local branch of the military. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to know you're doing your part for non-proliferation.

Source

[Authentic Drama Queen]

Pursuing the chain o' links started on the io9 article page...

In 1998, Vic Tandy, experimental officer and part-time lecturer in the school of international studies and law at Coventry University, and Dr. Tony Lawrence of the psychology department wrote a paper called "Ghosts in the Machine" for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. They cited infrasound as the cause of apparitions seen by staff at a so-called haunted laboratory in Warwick.

Several years earlier, Tandy was working late in the "haunted" Warwick laboratory when he saw a gray thing coming for him. "I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck," he said. "It seemed to be between me and the door, so the only thing I could do was turn and face it."* But the thing disappeared. However, it reappeared in a different form the next day when Tandy was doing some work on his fencing foil. "The handle was clamped in a vice on a workbench, yet the blade started vibrating like mad," he said. He wondered why the blade vibrated in one part of room but not in another. The explanation, he discovered, was that infrasound was coming from an extractor fan. "When we finally switched it off, it was as if a huge weight was lifted," he said. "It makes me think that one of the applications of this ongoing research could be a link between infrasound and sick-building syndrome." When he measured the infrasound in the laboratory, the showing was 18.98 hertz--the exact frequency at which a human eyeball starts resonating. The sound waves made his eyeballs resonate and produced an optical illusion: He saw a figure that didn't exist.

Source

[Authentic Drama Queen]

Next link in the chain...

EARTHQUAKE

The sound of Krakatoa exploding up into space, a vertical excess of one hundred miles, succeeded in blasting out windows at a thousand mile radius from the epicenter. Certain earthquake activities produce large and virtually insensate vertical displacements of the ground surface, in extreme instances amounting to a few feet per pulse. In this case, the ground becomes the surface of a drum, ringing out its deadly cadence at infrasonic pitch hours before the event. The ground undulates with infrasonic tones, an elasticity that eventually cracks under the heaving stress.

Ultralow pitch earthquake sounds are keenly felt by animals and sensitive humans. Quakes occur in distinct stages. Long before the final breaking release of built up earth tensions, there are numerous and succinct precursory shocks. Deep shocks produce strong infrasonic impulses up to the surface, the result of massive heaving ground strata. Certain animals (fish) actually can hear infrasonic precursors. Precursory shocks are silent, being inaudible in humans. Animals, however, react strongly to the sudden surface assault of infrasonic shocks by attempting escape from the area. Animals cannot locate the source and center of these infrasonic impulses, behaving in a pitiful display of circular frenzies. The careening motion of wild horses and other domestic animals indicates their fear and anxiety. Poor creatures, neither they nor we can escape the infrasonic source. Encounters with natural infrasound reveal their vast extent, covering hundreds of square miles of surface area.

Certain animals employ infrasound as weaponry. It has been known that certain whales are able to stun their prey with powerful blasts of inaudible sounds. Called “gunshots”, whales focus these powerful blasts at large squid and other fish to paralyze and catch them. In some instances, they have been known to burst their prey apart by tonal projection alone. Human experience with these inaudible blasts have been reported. The distress calls emitted by little beached whales was sufficient to push a veterinarian back several feet in the water. Others have experienced these pressure waves, reporting that their hands could not be brought close to the sinal area of small whales because of their inaudible acoustic projections.

Infrasonic shocks produce characteristic pressure effects on structures and organisms alike. The sensation flattens the body. It is as if one were struck with a solid invisible wall from which there is no escape. There are physiological effects as well. Anxiety, fear, extreme emotional distress, and mental incapacitation are all part of the unpleasant phenomenon. Notable among human exposures to quake-correlated infrasound is the precursory nausea which many report. This strong sensation leaves its more sensitive victims helpless. Feeling the momentary deep motion of the ground strata beneath them, numerous individuals have been used to report these sensations in a bizarre earthquake “alarm system”. Unfortunately, physiological reaction to infrasound remains continuous, long after their irritating presence has ceased. The harmfully stimulating influence of infrasound renders physiology permeable and ultrasensitive to every available environmental sensation. The extreme irritability of infrasound victims has been noted.

Earthquake infrasound manifests only at intermittent intervals, producing drastic and sustained negative modifications of consciousness. The human organism continues to reel under intermittent infrasonic assault for numerous reasons. After less than a five minute exposure to low intensity infrasound of 10 cycles per second, dizziness will last for hours. Infrasound of 12 cycles per second produces severe and long lasting nausea after a brief low intensity exposure.

Source (very long article with references to flood, fire, wind & engines)

[Fay]

So maybe it's not natural as of late.

[Authentic Drama Queen]

PDF Download of Vic Tandy's "The Ghost in the Machine".

[Authentic Drama Queen]

Yeah, I hear stuff supposedly beyond the human auditory range too, like dog whistles, deer & rodent repellents, and DVD/CD scanning (which REALLY sets my teeth on edge).

[Authentic Drama Queen]

PDF download of Vic Tandy's "Something in the Cellar" concerning his investigation into the haunted cellar of the Coventry Cathedral Tourist Information Centre in 2000.

[Authentic Drama Queen]

On May 31, 2003, a group of UK researchers decided to test out whether infrasound really worked. They decided to test out Vic Tandy’s claims by lacing infrasound (around 17Hz) with music. During the concert known as Infrasonic which took place in the Purcell Room (South Bank, London) over the course of 2 performances, each performance consisting of 4 musical pieces, infrasound was secretly inserted into 2 musical pieces of each performance. To prevent the test results from being skewed towards a particular musical piece, the 2 pieces that carried the 17Hz infrasonic undertone were swapped in the 2nd performance. The experiment was made to be as double blind as possible, with the audience and parts of the team not knowing which were the “faulty” pieces.

After the concert, the 750-large audience was given a questionnaire asking them to report their emotional state and any strange sensations felt. The result was promising – around 22% of respondents reported unusual feelings, including a sense of coldness, anxiety and shivers down the spine, pressure etc. This experiment makes the evidence that infrasound causes unusual sensations in humans even stronger.

Source

[Fay]

What does the DVD scanner thing sound like?

[Authentic Drama Queen]

Build your own experimental infrasound detector! Components needed: small speaker, audio transformer, oscilloscope (for visual display), cable.

[Authentic Drama Queen]

What does the DVD scanner thing sound like?

A high-pitched, scritchy screech when the DVD/CD player is looking for the menu upon insert and also between tracks on CDs if using the randomize function.

[Fay]

Yikes, I should ask my husband if he can hear that. He seems to have a much better sense of hearing then normal.
I hear a rumbling, gear like noise, probably just the turntable part.

[Authentic Drama Queen]

"researchers have recorded that, prior to an attack, a tiger's roar contains frequencies of about 18hz, which might disorientate and paralyse their intended victim. Is this the sound of fear itself?" Source

[Soak]

"researchers have recorded that, prior to an attack, a tiger's roar contains frequencies of about 18hz, which might disorientate and paralyse their intended victim. Is this the sound of fear itself?" Source

If an animal can make 'noise' in that low of a frequency and create those sort of results.... I wonder if we humans can?