Putting Fear In Your Ears: What Makes Music Sound Scary

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Susan Backlinie swims as the great white shark rises toward her in publicity art for the 1975 film Jaws.

Universal/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Susan Backlinie swims as the great white shark rises toward her in publicity art for the 1975 film Jaws.

DUH-duh...DUH-duh...DUH-duh!

Like those ominous bars of music signaling the approaching shark in Jaws, some of the most recognizable film scores were designed to terrify us.

But how do our brains recognize that music is supposed to be scary? The answer lies in our animal instincts, says UCLA evolutionary biologist Daniel Blumstein, whose research is published in the latest issue of the journal Biology Letters.

? Jonathan Fox/Flickr

Another scary pair of jaws? A yellow-bellied marmot's scream helped a scientist figure out the secret to scary sounds.

Blumstein's study of human sound perception began in an unlikely place: a community of yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado. "The thing that struck me was that every once in a while when we catch a baby marmot, they scream," Blumstein said.

Screams, like those of the baby marmot, are created when animals hurriedly blow air past their vocal cords releasing an irregular scratchy noise, called nonlinear sound.

Nonlinear noises, used by young animals to grab the attention of their parents, seem to also evoke an emotional response in humans. "Clearly, people in Hollywood know this, but it's not as though they're going out and using biologically tested algorithms," Blumstein said.

So Blumstein and his colleagues set out to discover if there truly was a formula for fear involving nonlinear sound. He teamed up with film score composer Peter Kaye and communications professor Greg Bryant to create two groups of original music: a group of emotionally neutral scores and scores that incorporated nonlinear elements.

In one study, a score with irregular noises elicited plenty of emotional stimulation and negative feelings.

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An emotionally neutral control score

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The same score with irregular, "nonlinear" sounds

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