Pandora once named the scariest song of all time
Autumn brings with it crunchy leaves, premature sunrises, and a burning desire to engage with all of the spookiest media available. As audiences gear up for their annual Coraline and Halloween rewatches and repopulate their playlists with dark, brooding shoegaze, we’re looking at the scariest song of all time.
There are countless songs that could be considered – from Throbbing Gristle’s haunting ‘Hamburger Lady’ to Scott Walker’s ‘The Escape’ – but only one fear-inducing song can take the title. According to a study carried out by music streaming service Pandora, via The Mercury News, that song is Nine Inch Nails’ ‘The Becoming’.
To conclude, the company analysed 450 attributes, noting that scary songs use key, tempo and timbre to “create tension and manipulate the way the listener interacts with sound.” They also considered the use of non-linear sounds, which they described as “generally scratchy, disorganised and chaotic.”
These sounds can be reminiscent of “vocal cords vibrating violently during a blood-curdling scream,” which we are instinctively programmed to fear: “Humans (and many other species) are hard-wired to perceive such sounds as life-threatening.”
“The data science team identified structural and musicological properties best fit for frightening moods,” Pandora continued, “including anguished, distraught, eerie, harsh, menacing, spooky, tense, anxious, and volatile, and scored each song against these traits.”
After identifying and analysing these properties, Pandora identified the 1994 Nine Inch Nails track, ‘The Becoming’, as the scariest song of all time. Featuring as the seventh track on their second studio album, The Downward Spiral, the song certainly includes the aforementioned scratching, non-linear chaos – it even seems to sample screaming sounds.
According to the description by Pandora, “This song makes use of distorted ‘non-linear’ instrument timbres and effects, which humans are programmed to find distressing. This contrasts with the hushed and screaming vocals which creates a suspenseful and unsettling mood. Melodically, this song makes use of an exotic-sounding scale, which features a major third, but a flat second scale degree, which gives a dissonant quality.”
The Nine Inch Nails track just beat out Pixies’ similarly titled ‘The Happening’ from their 1990 record, Bossanova. Other names on the top ten list include Bauhaus, Joy Division, Tool and Nirvana. The list is comprised almost entirely of industrial, dark and grungy alternative staples – it’s no surprise that they forged some of the scariest songs of all time.
Revisit ‘The Becoming’ by Nine Inch Nails, the scariest song of all time, below.
