TheSoundofFear1
We were working secretly for the military They told us all they wanted was a sound that could kill someone from a distance.
Kate Bush
A force I’ve never felt before hits me in the face during a dub music concert. Compacted air, squashed cheeks: sound pressure created by the concert’s high decibels. Possibly the most powerful sonic force I’ve ever been exposed to.
Far from auditory perception, there are sonorities that do not seek to convey a message, and about which it could be said that they are pure power.
The sounds we live with are measured by the amount of pressure they generate in the air This pressure is produced by the collision between molecules, a force capable of moving or levitating objects or exploding them:
daggers of frequency
sonic bursts, deadly sounds.
Sound Pressure
At 120 dB the pain threshold begins. Exposure to that amount of sound pressure (or more) can cause irreversible damage to the hearing system and can even be lethal.
In the chapter “Cosmic Anacrusis,” I discuss microwave background radiation, the remnant sound of the Big Bang, “the fossilized sigh of the beginning,” as Marcia Bartusiak would say In that text I propose that everything is created from a collision, pointing to the violent character of nature, far from human morality [I have long thought
that if the cosmos could communicate with us, it would use a word other than violence, likely a word unknown to mankind.]
Everything is created via a collision, sound not excepted. Ultimately, for sound to exist in a physical form, one needs an elastic medium in which the collision between molecules can take place.
Lethal waves.
Deadly frequencies.
Spies listening in.
Breaking the Decibel Meter
The volume of a sound is determined by the amplitude of the waves in relation to the ambient air pressure. A sound of 194 dB is the maximum sound pressure level in the atmosphere. Thus, a sound that exceeds this threshold will start to create holes in the air, causing a shock wave. Shock waves are characterized by creating extreme pressure and rising temperatures. They can be caused by the explosion of volcanoes, bombs, supersonic aircraft, or supernovae traversed by moving bodies… by dangerous things, let’s say
Natural Shrillness
One of the greatest milestones mentioned when talking about high decibels is the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883. It reportedly killed more than 36,000 people with its shock wave alone. It is possibly one of the loudest events ever to occur on earth, approaching 310 dB.
The clicks produced by sperm whales are considered the loudest sounds produced by a (known) animal: they reach approximately 236 dB. Science journalist James Nestor commented in a talk that while diving with sperm whales a colleague of his received a click on his arm; it left him paralyzed for about four hours.1
Decibles are logarithmic; this means that 20 dB is not twice as powerful as 10 dB, but rather ten times as powerful. Thus, 1,100 dB is10109 times louder than 10 dB; that is, this figure that I don’t even know how to pronounce:
1,100 dB is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times more powerful than 10 dB.
The physicist Jeff Steinhauer relied on Hawking radiation to measure the temperature of a laboratory-made sonic black hole (which traps sound instead of light). We have already said that a shock wave is created at 194 dB. At 200 dB the air pressure would be so strong that it would cause the lungs to explode. According to one hypothesis, if a sound of 1,100 dB were produced, enough gravity would be generated to create a black hole larger than the known universe, which would instantly disintegrate our existence.2 Thus, I am not very enthusiastic about Steinhauer’s research.
The great universal implosion
The DeBigBangnaiser
In 1997, the hydrophones of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) detected a sound in the Pacific Ocean with a source located 5,000 km
1 Sustainability Media, “Sperm whales clicking you inside out James Nestor at the Interval,”Long Now Foundation, YouTube video, 6:01 min, April 26, 2017
2 Ibrahim El Noshokaty, Hadeir Mohamed Mohamed etal,“Sonic Black Hole,” available on the portal ResearchGate. It is a tiny but powerful two-page paper that is well worth reading.
away from the sensors. The sound was loud enough to be heard by multiple sensors over a 3,000 km perimeter Initially it was thought to be military activity or an unknown animal. The Acoustic Program of PMEL (Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory) is an organization that measures and records geophysical, biological, meteorological, cryogenic, and anthropogenic sound sources throughout the global ocean. In 2005, through sound recordings in Antarctica, this organization unmasked what was then known as “the bloop”: the cause of the strange sound was an ice earthquake, commonly triggered when an iceberg breaks away from an Antarctic glacier.
The Infrasonic Phantom, the Sound of Fear
In the early 1980s, the researcher Vic Tandy was warned that his laboratory was haunted. One night, while working there alone, he had the sensation that someone was watching him, and he felt a pressure in his chest that made it difficult to breathe. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a gray shape seemingly approaching, but when he turned to face it, it disappeared. The next day, Tandy, who was an avid fencer, took his sword to the laboratory for repairs. When attached to a vise on the bench, the sword’s tip began to vibrate frantically!3
A shoutout to Tandy all the way to heaven for having had the nerve not to run away After pondering possible logical explanations for the phenomenon, he discovered that a newly installed fan system was generating an infrasonic sound, specifically at 19 Hz, the resonant frequency of the sword. That explained the vibration—but what about the gray entity and the difficulty breathing?
Although some infrasonic sounds are known to cause adverse reactions in animals and humans, it is an underexplored field. What is indeed known is that 19 Hz is close to the resonant frequency of a large part of the body: the apparition was created owing to ocular vibration caused by infrasound. This same frequency would explain the pressure in the chest.
3 Vic Tandy and Tony R Lawrence, “The Ghost in the Machine,” in JournaloftheSocietyforPsychical Research,vol. 62, no. 851, April 1998.
So now you know, before you run away from a supernatural event, to check your trusted spectrum analyzer for the 19 Hz.