Horror shows and games often rely to some extent on the effect of off-putting music and sounds. Is it because we’ve heard these things before that our brain associates them with scary things? Does it have something to do with how our bodies react to the dissonant notes/minor keys?
I just watched someone play a horror game and felt unsettled for a little bit because of the music, so I was just curious!
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It’s what we associate the sound with that makes it considered creepy and scary.
Think about it, if the effect of what we perceive as scary is a biographical process in our brain, why do we think hearing a lullaby (A children’s song) in an abandoned house is scary (In games) ? Lullabies are supposed to help us fall asleep and such.
Instead, we have played games or watched movies that used lullabies in horror settings, making us perceive hearing that in a similar setting give us the same effect as in the movie/game.
A lot of horror is based around the subversion of expectations. People feel stressed or uneasy when they are put in unfamiliar situations, be it entering a foreign place, or hearing something unusual. Dissonance is relatively unused in pop music, so your brain reacts to it negatively.
As mentioned in another comment, even lullabies in a horror setting could be creepy, that’s because you don’t expect it in a horror setting. Once it feels out of place, it will start to feel creepy. Horror can be implemented in a multitude of ways: a pitch black room, a constant whisper/murmur in your ears, skittering bugs, complete silence, etc. Out-of-place music is just another way to build anxiety.
From a music theory standpoint, unsettling frequencies come from dissonance, or, notes that clash with eachother in a specific context. Take a peaceful lullaby and detune a couple of notes and it becomes dissonant. That’s because the note frequencies we expect to hear are *slightly* out of tune and clash with our expectations. Pair that with the visual and atmospheric anticipation, and it can become *very* unsettling and scary.
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