As Alfred Hitchcock was quick to point out, Janet Leigh behind the wheel of a car could just as easily be on her way to the supermarket. It’s only when you putBernard Herrmann’s justly celebrated score for “Psycho”behind that scene – with its jabbing string textures and angular rhythms – that the viewer’s stomach begins to tighten in anxious anticipation.
Music has a direct, hard-wired line to our most elemental physical and emotional responses. The right combination of pitches, rhythms and sonorities, deployed in just the right way, has the ability to inspire anything from jubilation to terror.
But right now Halloween is approaching, so we’ve got terror on our minds.
What is it that makes scary music so downright scary? How can something as seemingly innocuous as a cheery pop tune – or for that matter as overtly tempestuous as an explosion of orchestral sound – translate so directly into the physical symptoms of abject fear?
There’s no single answer to that question, says composer David Conte, who teaches a course in film music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The techniques a composer can use to inspire dread in an audience range from contextual cues to the inherent properties of musical sounds themselves.
“Any abrupt shift in our experience can give our nervous system a kind of jolt,” he says. “Reversing a listener’s expectations – reversing what we think we understand about what we’re hearing – can be a scary thing. Asymmetric rhythms are scary for the same reason.”
Frights can come from extreme sonorities, like creepy violins playing at the top of their range, or big instrumental crashes. Unstable musical intervals that don’t settle into an obvious key are also reliable shock delivery systems – particularly the tritone, known since medieval times as the “Devil in Music.”
Conte points to the “Mars” movement of Holst’s “The Planets” as a paragon of horror compressed into a few minutes of music.
“Holst said he wanted the music to convey the brutal stupidity of war, and every choice he makes in that movement supports it – the extreme high and low notes, the asymmetrical meter, the ominous beating of the tam-tam, the harmonies that are always resolving on a dissonance. I think that might be the scariest music I know.”
Finally, of course, music becomes frightening through the force of association. Even music that has nothing inherently terrifying about it can shift allegiances once you hear it in conjunction with something unsettling. Ask anyone who’s seen “A Clockwork Orange” how long it took them to feel all right about Rossini or “Singin’ in the Rain” again.
In a less-than-rigorous search for more data, we asked around The Chronicle office to see what came to people’s minds when they were asked to identify the music that frightened them most. The responses arehere;通过电子邮件哒权衡自己的选择tebook@sfchronicle.com.
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