The people who make movies want to use every trick they can muster to provoke a reaction from the audience. That reaction is the key that separates a box-office bomb from a billion-dollar picture. One of the key elements to any movie is the soundtrack: the music and ambient sounds that fill up the space between and behind dialogue. Now, sound engineers have discovered how a dirty little trick in the soundtrack can help scare the pants off the audience. It seems that using animal screams in the soundtrack of movies can help manipulate human emotions.
In a paper released by the Royal Society Biology Letters, researchers at UCLA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology have connected the panicked screams of animals to fear levels in the human listening audience. Said Daniel Blumstein, one of three men behind the project, said that “good composers and those putting the entire soundtrack together are tapping into a common mammalian, and probably avian, phenomenon — that certain types of sounds evoke certain sorts of emotions.” He added that these composers are, “tapping into our mammalian roots to evoke fear, a basic emotion. Everyone knows what a really upset dog sounds like, versus one just barking, and everyone knows what a fear scream sounds like. These (distress calls) are remarkably conserved among mammals and in birds.”
“As any of us movie lovers well know, when confronted by the supernatural, gigantic, or just plain nasty and gnarly, we humans will express our immediate emotions with passion and vigor,” added fellow researcher Peter Kaye. “It seems that all of us vertebrates do it!”
Pretty sneaky, sound guys!
Tags: weird science, fear, animal screams used to manipulate movie audiences, scaring audiences with sound effects, movie tricks, special effects, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA, Daniel Blumstein, Royal Society Biology Letters, Peter Kaye
