Fear and Trembling in Music: Music Theory and Psychology

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Night and music. The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.
-Friedrich Nietzsche - Daybreak. Book IV - Aphorism # 250

In this article, I’ll be discussing the concepts of dissonance, harmony and nonlinear sounds. I will focus on how these can be used to create a sense of dread, anxiety or fear in the listener. I’ll explain why this is rooted in specific mechanisms in the brain.

To start, I love fear. Maybe that’s absurd or overwrought to state, but it’s true. The concept of fear as a phenomenon, its alluring beauty, it’s function in art. Hell, its massive political importance (arguably how Trump was elected) Something I really enjoy are horror soundtracks. I’ve been trying to learn how to effectively create soundtracks for my podcast, The Forlorn Realm.

The Apprehension Engine!

For our first (and best) auditory example of the concepts I'll be discussing, we have this:

I mean, let’s just start with the name. The Apprehension Engine! Like, what?
The artist uses the following elements to create nightmarish noises that fit perfectly in an existential tale of dread and gore:

1. Rulers, creating dull metal thuds. These sounds are particularly dissonant.

2. The reverb tank, producing that metallic shattering and crashing (like the crashing of your mind’s façade from fear)

3. The e-bow, that lovely invention, able to produce a continuous whine, perfect for the moments where you bear witness to that which cannot be! The whine emulates that cognitive dissonance of viewing the impossible, and the terror which results.

4. Some kind of crank system that works alongside a bass string, producing that jarring, deep resonating reverb. The crank turns a piece of wood that rubs against the strings (covered with cloth) to create the numbed reverb.

5. Violin bow against a curved piece of metal, generating that screeching finers-on-blackboard-feeling. These sounds are particularly dissonant and nonlinear.

6. That classic THUMP, the step of an impossibly large monster, no doubt on its way to find you.

The question I drew from this video is, what is it specifically about these sounds
that cause anxiety and dread? Why do these sounds work so well with fear?

These sounds all rely on dissonance and their nonlinear qualities.

First, lets start with the concept of dissonance. We can understand this by grasping its opposite: consonance.

Dissonance

In music theory, we can say two notes are in consonance with one another if they create harmony. Now, remember that notes are simply sound waves at specific frequencies. Harmony, in this sense, develops from the relationship of the two notes, or two sound waves combined. That is, they work together to build something. This is not in terms of melody, which is a ‘line’ of notes, but two notes played together. source

Two notes are harmonious if they work together to form a chord. For example, we have below the G major chord.

http://www.piano-keyboard-guide.com/key-of-g.html

Now, if I were to play the following notes on a guitar: G, B and D. These notes are in harmony, and in fact express what we call a Major Chord. Major Chords produce a 'happy' sound but understand that this is a purely subjective phenomenon. It's just our brains cultured through thousands of years of music telling us that the major chord is happy and not another emotion.

If I were to instead play G, C# and C, those notes would be outside of the major scale (and outside of any normal scale our ears are used to) and, instead of being in consonance, they would create disonance.

This leads to a point about music, harmony and our brains. I say that G, C# and C, when played together, creates dissonance. But really, its only dissonance because our brains are hardwired for a specific kind of harmony. This hardwiring is, arguably, cultural, but nevertheless a neurological fact.

As Wired explains:

“If the chord is harmonic, or "consonant," the notes are spaced neatly enough so that the individual fibers of the auditory nerve carry specific frequencies to the brain. “

Put another way, in “This Is Your Brain on Music” by Daniel J. Levitin,

“When an instrument creates energy at frequencies that are integer multiples such as this (overtones, e.g. 100 Hz, 200 Hz, 300 Hz...), we say that the sound is harmonic, and we refer to the pattern of energy at different frequencies as the overtone series. There is evidence that the brain responds to such harmonic sounds with synchronous neural firings—the neurons in auditory cortex responding to each of the components of the sound synchronize their firing rates with one another, creating a neural basis for the coherence of these sounds.” Pg. 81

For a dissonant sound, the notes may be too close together, instead of neatly spaced, so that they strike the same auditory nerve fibers.

The dissonant sounds from the Apprehension Engine! shown above do just that. They create notes that are too close together, are out of familiar scales and chords, which marble our nerve fibers in the ears.

Subjectivity of Dissonance and Consonance

I’m of the opinion that, though there’s a neurological basis for the concept of dissonance (the relation of tones to the auditory nerve), there’s a cultural/ subjective component to it.

Three examples of this.

First, the Devil’s Tritone.. A tritone, or three notes, which do not resolve in a ‘kind’ matter. The classic example of this is Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath The three note riff is the Devil’s Tritone. The notes are G to G (an octave) and then C#. If it had been a D, one interval higher, the riff would sound RADICALLY different. Now, this riff, to someone unfamiliar with the dissonance, may produce anxiety. But for me, I thoroughly enjoy it. I’m a metalhead and enjoy jazz music, so it doesn’t bother me.

Second, Gamelan.

The traditional music of Indonesia. Some forms of this traditional music operate on a tuning that is far different than traditional Western notations. Having more than one tuning system, one of those being pélog, the system has seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals. Each Gamelan ‘set’ tunes to itself, making each group unique to itself.. Many unfamiliar with the music would find the scales and harmonies as dissonant.

Third. Jazz music. Go listen to this. Most people wouldn’t sit through it, and yet others would call it genius. People who can’t stand the jazz likely can’t take the untraditional musical structures and dissonant scales and notes. But for jazzheads, they love it exactly because of this.

Half-step Intervals and Tension

That Black Sabbath song demonstrates best the use of half-step intervals to create anxiety and dread. In that case, from G to C#, create a sense of dread in the listener. Playing with intervals, particularly in ways that are unfamiliar to the listener, can create anxiety and dread. These contribute towards fear in the sense of a building of tension.

This is another song that perfectly demonstrates tension and anxiety built from half-step intervals.

Like an alarm bell, the piano keys. The notes are C and G, and the interval here is the perfect fifth. The dissonance comes into play when the second lead track comes in. The notes that guitar is playing are C#, D, E, F. That melody relies on half-step intervals between the C# and D, then between the E and F. These half step intervals build tension, alongside that alarm bell-like sound, which feed into anxiety in the listener. If these notes were played together instead of in a melody, they’d produce a pretty dissonant chord.

Unresolved tension, or tension built in unfamiliar ways, through dissonant sounds and clever intervals, bring us closer to how a musician can create fear in music. But perhaps the best way is through nonlinear sounds.

It should be noted the the tension here is subjective. Our brain hears a melody and expects a resolution, just as we expect a joke to have a punch line. The clear use of this expectation can allow a composer to play with the emotions of the listener like a musician plays a violin.

Nonlinear sounds

Nonlinear sounds refer to sounds that are too loud for the normal range of the instrument, or in the case of nature, an animal’s vocal chords. They can also occur when an instrument produces a sound whose frequency suddenly changes. Think of someone singing then screaming, to the point that the voice becomes raspy, breaking the threshold of what they’re capable of. You know, like a man crying for help. Or a woman suddenly shocked by the ghost of a dead relative.

You can hear more examples of nonlinear sounds here.

As Blumstein et. al. in "The sound of arousal in music is context-dependent" published in Biology Letters, states:

“These nonlinear sounds are somewhat unpredictable and this lack of predictability is hypothesized to make them difficult to habituate to.”

The above cited article argues that the reason these nonlinear sounds in particular create anxiety and fear in the listener is that they are linked to the cries of baby animals. The article states that human infants whose cries contain nonlinear sounds are more responded to than the cries lacking nonlinear sounds.

Quote, “ It is likely that this is because upshifts would naturally be associated with a sudden increase in vocal cord tension; something that might happen when a mammal is suddenly scared.”

That is to say, the nonlinear sounds are similar to a frightened mammal. That our brains respond to these sounds with fear and anxiety lends towards an obvious reason: survival. In nature, a frightened animal means an animal in danger. Danger for them could mean danger for you. Fear is the alert, the trigger for the flight-or-fight response. Our attraction or aversion to nonlinear sounds is an expression of our evolutionary survival mechanisms.

To conclude, dissonance, through the use of dissonant chords or intervals, can create anxiety and dread in the listener. Half-step intervals allow the same opportunity. Finally, nonlinear sounds produce the same response in the brain that a crying mammal does. All of these can create fear in the listener, which itself derives from our species' survival.

Some might hate dissonant sounds and music. I personally enjoy it. As Mark Korven says, wielder of the Apprension Engine, “It expresses what really cant be expressed any other way.”