What makes a song sound scary?
Like a knife scraping over glass or the creak of a floorboard in an empty house, fear has its own inherently scary sound. Halloween has a creepy cacophony. There simply seems to be chords that have made themselves synonymous with the spooky night in Autumn like jingle bells at Christmas, like synths with summer or smooth jazz with coffee houses. What’s more, there is even a scientific explanation for why we identify certain sounds with spooks.
Music mimics our vocal and physical expressions of emotion in order to convey the intended mood. This direct transposing of emotion into sound means that from an incredibly early age we can intrinsically interpret musical triggers like major or minor keys into feeling. Revolutionary studies have linked this interpretation of sound and emotion to evolutionary biology. Thus, in short, it is in our DNA to be scared by certain sounds.
So how do you craft a sound that seems inherently scary? Firstly, choosing instruments out of the ordinary is a great place to start. The Theremin and Waterphone are commonly used to create a scary sound partly because they are unconventional when it comes to usual pop standards. Thus, there is a very straightforward link between the out-of-the-ordinary and the extraordinary. It is important that we are both intrigued and wary of unusual things, so that we can cautiously gain an understanding. Sounds that we don’t often hear are no different.
When you pair this unusual sound with a minor key composition, the ghouls creep off the song sheet. Take, for instance, the F# Minor theme from the 1978 horror classic Halloween. John Carpenter couples this tonal dissonance with a 5/4-time structure and a wavering pace. This literally makes it seem like something is not right. The notes build tension without resolution. Thus, it continues to slowly mount without having to reach a crescendo of release.
Tritones further add to the tension of scary sounds. The technique is known as the ‘Devil in Music’ and consists of playing two notes simultaneously that are harmonically three tones apart. The dissonance created gives the music an imbalance. You want the syncopated notes to coalesce, but the pitch difference prevents it leaving you with an uneasy feeling akin to a door being left slightly ajar.
The last technique guaranteed to put the willies up you is the use of explosive dynamics. From silence to a loud bang or the sudden screech of a violin, anything booming will put you on edge. Once more, this is an evolutionary imperative. Any unknown loud bang could be dangerous, so it startles you into action. However, the flip side is also true in spooky music—you can play with the form of expectation by suddenly going quiet leaving a listener with the eery feeling that something is coming, or all is not as it should be.
