Gravesend Inn-frasound: Subsonic Show Business

I’ve spent my career wandering around the crossroads of art, science and technology, and I’ve long been especially fascinated by the nexus of those fields: perception. Around 1999, when I started teaching Entertainment Technology full time at City Tech, I started exploring more of the science side of that intersection, and I ended up attending James Randi’s first “The Amazing Meeting” (TAM) in 2003.  This small conference featured speakers who gave rational explanations for “supernatural” phenomena, and I enjoyed it so much that I ended up going back to every conference through TAM 6.  These early meetings were especially interesting to me because of the mix of show business and science, best represented by magicians (including Randi), who were outraged by frauds who used magic tricks to rip people off.  And at TAM 3 in 2005, I saw an excellent presentation by magician and psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman.  Wiseman’s talk was entertaining and enlightening, and the next year, Wiseman brought his excellent “Theatre of Science”  to NYC.  I invited him out to Brooklyn for lunch and a tour of my school, and we talked about ways we might apply some of his research to our Gravesend Inn haunted hotel attraction.

One of Wiseman's more interesting perceptual investigations we discussed was was “Infrasonic”, a literal combination of art and science--a concert and psychological research study.  This fascinating 2003 project was initiated by Wiseman’s colleague Sarah Angliss (who I later met in London in 2009), and was an extension of fascinating work by Vic Tandy and Tony R. Lawrence, who wrote a paper in April, 1998 that outlined, “an as yet undocumented natural cause for some cases of ostensible haunting. Using the first author’s own experience as an example, we show how a 19Hz standing air wave may under certain conditions create sensory phenomena suggestive of a ghost.”  (More here in another paper which examined another “haunted” space).  Angliss and Wiseman’s “Infrasonic” concert project took this in a slightly different direction: intentionally generating infrasound and exposing an audience to it.  Half the pieces performed in this concert had infrasound (in this case, 17.4 Hz) and the other half (the control group) did not.  And the researchers found some fascinating results (from this page, where you can find many other details): “During our concert, infrasound boosted the number of strange experiences reported among the audience, even among those who were unaware of its presence. Unusual reports included a sense of coldness, anxiety and shivers down the spine.  On average, infrasound boosted the number of strange experiences by around 22 percent. It also increased the intensity of any feelings reported.”

As a sound and show control guy, I thought this was fascinating, and figured we could do some similar testing in conjunction with our own Gravesend Inn.  However, while I had done informal double-blind testing over the years, I had never run a real psychological research study, so the idea languished until Dr. Toija Riggins came to our department.  For Spring, 2010, Dr. Riggins was looking for a culmination project, and I mentioned the the infrasound experiment idea.  This led to Dr. Riggins developing the experimental design, and creating an application to City Tech’s Institutional Review Board, which was approved in mid-2010.  We ran our experiment from Friday, October 22 through Saturday, October 30, 2010, and tested just over 200 research subjects recruited from those who had just completed going through the Gravesend Inn.  What, exactly, was our experiment?  See Part II of this series to find out!

Comments

[Anthony Mark]

I look forward to seeing your research

[Mike Schatzberg]

Your article about the "Inn" frasonic experiment prodded my (admittedly shaky) memory to remember some not quite as scientific experiments done by me a VERY long time ago (around 1963). I was told (by whom, I don't remember) that exposure to infrasonics will cause a person to become sexually excited. As a 17-year-old uber-geek (and a horny one at that), this needed to be tested.

First the hardware - I built a tube amplifier from the pieces of an old unit. It was a push-pull 6V6 system that might have generated 10 watts built on an old meat loaf pan of my mother's. I could not afford to buy 6L6s, nor did I have an output transformer for them. Next was speakers. I only had access to 8 inch speakers, so I fastened 4 of them under my parent's couch propping them up with stacks of plywood. The generator presented a challenge, building an amplifier was one thing, a low frequency oscillator was a bit more of a challenge. At that time, someone donated a nice HP 200 variable oscillator to my high school, and I borrowed that.

Now for the software - I had to lure my unsuspecting girlfriend to my house when we would be alone. I casually plugged in the contraption and slowly cranked up the oscillator output. [Note to self - do not place tube equipment under flammable couch] No effect, so I cranked the output up. Still nothing, although my girlfriend seemed to think something was going on as I kept leaning over the side of the couch. Turned up oscillator and amplifier only to smell the odor of amplifier and couch burning. Experimental subject leaps up and runs from room. I unplug stuff and start sprinkling water under couch.

Results of experiment - Girlfriend refused to talk to me for a week. Parents never quite believed my explanation that under the couch was a good location for my new hi-fi set, and I fully believed that better equipment would have led me to the desired results.

Anxiously awaiting part II of your article.

[brycemeister]

Ah-I see-I finally read the Vic Tandy and Tony paper. Renders the issue rather more complex than at first assumed. Such as coupling 19hertz with another frequency. I can see how, if 19hertz seemed to be a signifigant factor, that they would focus on that. which makes you're experiment and subsequent paper very laudable in terms of the application of science-fact-checking the claims of another experiment. Immediately, I can think of any number of experiences that have happened sans the right type of resonator, or in any environment that has 19hertz as an allegedly dominant factor-like outside, where the soundscape is automatically vastly more complex. I'm reminded of a scientist who claims that the application of certain frequencies of electromagnetics to the brain, generates ghost and abduction experiences. And has left the research there, begging the question: "what if this is just one way of getting particular results?" Such as electromagentics, chemical composition of the air, etc. I haven't decided myself where I stand on the issue, except for thinking on the whole, it's much more complex than we think. That what we call 'paranormal' may consist, in part, of physically verifiable, empirical qualities and quantities, with elements that are inexplicable, and perhaps may remain so. And 'spiritworlds' and such need not be invoked.