My reason for dragging myself away from the
grindstone today is two fold. Firstly I have been away from home over the
weekend and got home late today, limiting the time available to really get my
teeth into the book anyway, and secondly I have had a very interesting and
though-provoking comment posted to my last offering (Saturday) which needed
replying to and which required a more detailed response than I could have
managed over the weekend using my phone to access the internet as I might
ordinarily have done. So anyway, I set
out on the reply and slowly began to realise two things: 1) It was going to require more than the word
limit for comments would allow in one bite and
2) the subject is thought-provoking enough that I’d quite like more folk
see it, think about it and perhaps give their take on it.
The comment was posted by Frise (Hi, Frise!
Many thanks for the link – and the idea!)
and I think it best to reproduce it here in its entirety - along with
the link he kindly provided - followed by my reply. So here goes….
Posted by Frise:
“I found this link about the effects of
infrasound, how they cause uneasiness, anxiety, make you feel sick. I've suspected
that for a number of years now. I was on a cruise with my wife and we went to
see a movie on the ship. The cinema house was just over the engine room and my
wife felt sick 30 minutes into the movie. The engine most likely emitted
infrasound that we could only sense as vibrations. Imagine an institutional
setting where the patient is subjected to this in order to break their self
confidence, create anxiety... so many possibilities. Enjoy!
My reply:
“Yep, I am aware of the infrasound
phenomenon and its ability to induce feelings of unease, extreme sorrow,
disorientation and fear as well as symptoms of actual physical illness such as
vomiting and even induce pain at certain frequencies if the intensity is high
enough. But I have not (until now, that
is - but that may WELL change) thought of infrasound and its effects on the
human psyche in the context of the type of thing I write and the situations I
describe, although I have used in my writings high-pitched sounds right on the
edge of perception to cause irritation and disrupt sleep patterns and described
the masking effects of white noise.
Indeed there has been research into this
field using what amount to giant organ pipes to generate infrasound as the
basis of a non-lethal battlefield weapon system and also in the whelm of social
control to disperse demonstrating and / or rioting crowds / mobs. The
phenomenon has been invoked to explain so-called 'sick building' syndrome,
wherein people working within a certain office - or sometimes an entire
building - repeatedly report sick suffering from various unexplained and often
quite vague symptoms and maladies, feeling 'heady' and so on.
It is interesting that one of the instances
reported here seems to have been isolated to a resonating air conditioning duct
system as this has also often been mooted as the root cause of the
aforementioned 'sick building' syndrome and of course is directly analogous to
the military's experimentation with organ pipe / trumpet style infrasound
generation technology.
And therein lies the problem – the large dimensions
of any device designed specifically to produce the requisite low frequencies in
some controlled and tailored way. In the
above by ‘tailored’ I meant generating the specific frequency or band of
frequencies required to produce the desired effect. I.e. you may well want to induce
disorientation and a feeling of unease, subtle effects, but maintained over
long periods of time, rather than out and out symptoms of illness such as
vomiting or voiding of the bowels. But
having said that, used short term, the latter effects could be a wonderful
behaviour modifying tool if controllable on a fine enough scale.
Imagine if you will our young subject stood
stock upright, back ramrod straight and hands on her head in her mental
hospital pyjamas, skimpy hospital examination gown or institution uniform in
front of matron’s desk and being berated verbally over some suitably petty
misdemeanour or other; then she is taken back to her room; and in the lonely
desolation and apparently perfect silence within its bleak white walls she is
almost immediately overcome with a bout of vomiting and uncontrolled voiding,
the domineering woman’s comments still ringing in her ears!
“You’ll feel safe in here, in your room – but only in here; it’s because of your mental state, dear, the problem you have with your mind; you mustn’t go and try and run away because it only makes you ill; you know that, don’t you! You silly thing” And all the girl can remember doing in response is nodding in agreement and acquiescence and her own voice, simpering, a lisping near-whisper… “Yes, miss”. Of course she knows the subject will be brought up again, and she’ll be made to relive this experience, in her next one-to-one psychotherapy session, and she’ll likely suffer a good dose of the psychotherapist’s cane across her bottom for trying to abscond, to reinforce the lesson she has just learned…
Or imagine something of the opposite, that
hour after hour, day after day, night and day, she sits alone in her room,
being eaten away by a feeling of
deep-seated near-phobic fear, self-doubt and dizzying spells of
disorientation. The smiling nurse
arrives, or perhaps the psychotherapist, and suddenly all those dread
sensations are swept away – until once again the key is turned in the lock and
once again she is left alone.
In this scenario the idea is to induce a
child-like – or even babyish – fear of abandonment. In the previous example the
aim is to get her to the state where even if the door to her room is left wide
open she will stay precisely where she has been placed.
But the problem in all this is that it does
limit the scenario to the institutional – although I am rapidly coming to gain
more and more enthusiasm even as I write, despite the fact that ordinarily I
dislike the use of technology and overtly mind-altering drugs and so on in my
stories (let alone nanobots ‘re-wiring’ the brain and so on – oh for God’s
sake! Why not just build a robot and be
done with it?). At home, though it is
true if the ducting system is large enough you might just get lucky with an
air-con system, the likelihood of the successful application of infrasound to
aid gaining some sort of control over an individual is tiny; and NO, you can’t
just use your HiFi system to generate frequencies of 17Hz or perhaps as low as
7 or 8Hz. You’d need the kind of speaker
system only available in big cinemas just to get below 20Hz with any real intensity
- and even if you DID, there are two further problems; isolating the effect to
a certain area (very low frequencies travel all too well through the structures
of buildings – ask any sound-proofing engineer) and secondly the lowest
frequency that can be experienced is related to the dimensions of the space in
which it is being experienced, in terms of the sound’s wavelength (if that
makes sense); it is the reason the main.. erhemm!...‘beneficiaries’ of huge
speakers and sound systems in cars (automobiles) are those of us outside them
going about our business and ‘lucky’ enough to be within earshot.
BUT!
In an institution… Ah well… with
big heavy stone walls to isolate one section and another, it might be doable in
an acceptably plausible manner, perhaps using the aforementioned tuned air duct
/ organ pipe method.
Incidentally, referring to the link, two
things grabbed me. One is that the author
mentions two movies in which infrasound was used beneath the main soundtrack to
dramatic effect by manipulating unease in the audience as to enhance their
sense of horror at the drama unfolding on the screen. Now, I don’t doubt this is true, given a big
cinema with a sufficiently large auditorium and large sound producing apparatus
(think also ‘Sensuround’ in the film Earthquake back in the 70s) but my point
is, anybody buying either of those two movies on DVD is likely to be
disappointed at the result on their home system – it just aint gonna work! The second point is a technical one. The author states, in regards his example of
an air-con system and so on:
“…The reason for this is a phenomenon
called Helmholtz resonance, which changes the frequency of a wave by
constricting it in a cavity, in this case the long thin room.”
Err…No it don’t! It can EMPHASIS one of a band of frequencies
already present or within a harmonically-rich source over the others present
(or indeed diminish it, as if placing a notch in the frequency response of a
space or room) but it WONT change the frequency of the fundamental pitch. Indeed Helmholtz resonators – suitably
positioned - can be used to effectively cancel out and thus diminish sound
reflections from certain areas of an auditorium thus modifying the auditorium’s
acoustic ‘liveliness’.
By the way.
I just LOVE that there is an add for Nurofen tacked on at the bottom of
the page! Sooo apt somehow – don’t ya
think!”
Well there you have it, folks. Errr… folks… FOLKS… Is that snoring?
Oh well… Anyone wants to be bored with my
thoughts on infrasound, acoustics, soundproofing, harmonic theory and Fourier
analysis, electronic music synthesis (FM. Additive, subtractive – as long as
it’s analogue I don’t mind), just let me know. LOL!
Yeah, yeah… Guess what? As well as having been an electronics
engineer, biochemist, nutritionist and an interest in BSE / CJD I’ve also done
a course or two in sound recording and studio design as well, back in the day,
in addition to… oh never mind! Bye for now.
See you next time (if you’re still awake!)
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