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Ok. I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to sound. The effect sound has on the human body is phenomenal. Even frequencies we cannot hear can affect us in the most mysterious ways. There are certain frequency ranges that people respond to favorably over others. With knowledge of what frequencies invoke what kind of responses from people; an artist can take you on an incredible journey.

One thing that fascinates me is the nature of infrasound. Generally speaking, Infrasound is the frequency range that is just below the human hearing range. Although we cannot hear it, infrasound has some very unusual affects on the human body. Most times when we encounter infrasound it is usually accompanied by a sense of anxiety, dread, fear, foreboding, or sense of awe. A lot of times certain “haunted” locations give people these same feelings, like something supernatural is going on. But oddly enough, its usually just the area resonating acoustically with a low frequency.

Another strange phenomena infrasound is said to produce is the optical illusion of seeing a “ghost”. Probably makes you think, “Well how can sound make you see things? You can’t see sound!” Well unbeknownst to most people, the human eye resonates at about 19 hertz. Just slightly below average hearing. If you were to encounter a sound wave around that particular frequency, it could create interference with the frequency at which your eye resonates. The resulting optical illusion can make you feel like you just saw something out of the corner of your eye.

Cool stuff. It’s also said that large catastrophic events such as earthquakes or tsunami’ produce infrasounds to which animals respond, which is why their behavior seems to “predict” these kinds of events. They pick up on the sound before the event occurs because infrasound travels faster than higher pitched sounds because they encounters less resistance when traveling through objects.

But what does information like this mean to someone in the sound field? EVERYTHING. Learning your medium and all its capabilities just adds more ammo to your arsenal. Infrasound is currently being used in movies. Recording artists such as Lustmord use these frequencies to produce a feeling of anxiety or awe for moments that call for that type of human reaction. Once an artist finds a passage that generates a particular emotional response, its like a little gem they keep and show off when needed.

To learn more about infrasound go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound

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