What Are These Unsettling Sounds?

0:01Welcome to the Rest of Science, I'm Hannah Fry. And I am Michael Stevens. We know it's Halloween. Michael's got something up his sleeve. We're just going to keep it focused. We're going to do one little episode Halloween themed. So get your ears ready because we are going to be listening to some of the most unintentionally spooky, creepy sounds. These are sounds that sound scary, but aren't like actually dangerous, scary, disturbing things. They might be big things. Okay, here's a little spoiler there. But I've emailed you a little zipped up file of audio files and I wanna play them for you and for our audience. And then we're going to talk about what they actually are and try to put your guesses in as well when you listen to these.

0:52Some of them you guys might know. We're talking sort of like cute scary. Yeah. Ominous but not horrifying. That's right. These sounds are not actually disturbing, but if you were going to score a horror film, you should use them because they sound scary. Okay. Let's begin with the file called ACDLH. Okay, here we go. I'm listening now. Cool. Okay, I actually think I know what this is. Okay, what is it? Is this one of the very earliest gramophone recordings? Or maybe not even gramophone, maybe pre-gramophone. One of the earliest recordings of a voice. That's it. It's the earliest known recording of a human voice. It didn't involve a gramophone. It involved a phonautograph. The phonautograph was invented by Edward Leon Scott

1:52de Martinville, a French dude who, after learning about the way the ear worked, after learning about the eardrum, said, I think I could build a big eardrum out of like a trumpet bell and like a membrane and I could get it to shake because of sound. But then, you know, if I put like a little like stiff thing at the end of that membrane, like I think he used a boar's hair or something, I could I could get that little little hair to move back and forth and then I could drag it as it vibrated across a piece of paper covered with like smoke particles. And I would get myself a little jagged line and I could turn sounds into visuals. Now, he never intended these recordings to be played back. And he was doing this in 1860.

2:41Wow. Yeah. Wow. 1860. Wow. Yeah. Wow. 1860. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. All right, here's something really cool. The earliest written description of cancer that we've ever found is from an ancient Egyptian papyrus that was around before even Cleopatra was on the throne. It described tumors being removed by a tool that they called the fire drill, which we think was used to burn off disease tissue. Beating a disease that's so ancient and complex with over 200 different types, it's not going to happen overnight. But thanks to research, cancer treatment has advanced a lot. And Cancer Research UK is driving further innovations like cancer sniffing robots and drugs made from gut bugs that could change the future of medicine. Over the past 50

3:36years, Cancer Research UK's work has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And today it's continuing to save and improve lives around the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org slash rest is science. Hi, this is Garyllinica from Goalhangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer and no surprises along the way.

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5:44Ask your doctor about Tramfiya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tramfiyradio.com. So hang on, I'm going to play it again one more time just to really do it because i seem to remember that it's this i mean you can sort of vaguely hear the sound of somebody singing there's a lot of static a lot of a lot of like underground you know noise underlying noise in in the audio but they're singing something is it mary had a little lamb or something no it's claire de la lune right That is so wild to me. That is the sound of somebody who was born 1840s, maybe earlier. Yes. So Scott de Martonville was born in 1817. Is it him singing? And that's him singing. But you might say, why is the voice

6:42so high pitched? Right. It sounds like a woman. Exactly. So there's a whole story behind this recording. For a long time, we thought that the earliest recordings of a human voice were done by Edison, okay, in the 1880s. But in 2008, these phonautographs were discovered that had just been in an archive in France and some researchers, some like audio historians from this group called First Sounds, they said, I think that we can take these pieces of paper with squiggles on them, scan them and then convert them to audio. We can derive from the squiggle what sound caused a hair to move like that. Because it's etching in the physical sound wave, essentially. Now, Edison, of course, did this with wax cylinders, and he actually pressed into the

7:36wax with a vibrating needle. And the whole purpose of those was we can play them back. But the same technique should, in principle, make it possible for us to recover the original sound even from the phonautographs that Scott DeMartinville made. And that turned out to be possible. So we moved the earliest known human voice audio recording from the 1880s to 1860. Wow. Wow. Incredible. And so what we're hearing is the voice of Scott de Martonville singing A Claire de la Lune. But they didn't think it was him at first because that voice is so high-pitched they thought it was a woman. It was a child. And then they realized that they had misunderstood an included reference frequency and they were playing it at like double speed.

8:28So go ahead and play the next file I sent you. Yes, please. High and low. That's what the H and the L stand for. Here we go. That's right. That's my code. You cracked it. So this that you're hearing is Scott DeMartinville's true voice. And he sang the song very slowly, probably because he wanted the squiggles to be easier to see. You know what? You're absolutely right. This would make an amazing soundtrack for a horror film. And that's what I'm saying. These these sounds, like there's nothing actually menacing about what he did here or why he's doing it. Freaky though. But out of context, it's kind of creepy with all the noise. But to think that we lifted this sound off of squiggles on a piece of paper and we recovered an audio recording of someone's voice a

9:26person who was born in 1817 it's just incredible it's wild it's also i just think there's something so deliciously rich about the physical representation of a sound you know it is a physical phenomenon but we don't think of it in that way. And that idea to like, you know, to DeMartinville purposefully made these etchings. But what about someone thousands of years ago who is turning a clay pot on a wheel and they're using a tool to make a little spiral design on the pot. And while they do that, someone's shrieking in the background that causes micro vibrations in their tool that are then implanted in the clay pot. So we should be able to put a, like a little record needle on this pot, spin it around and hear sounds from thousands of years ago, from prehistory even. That idea is very cool. However,

10:48it's very, very unlikely to ever give us anything. Well, you need it to be a completely clear recording, effectively. You need them to have only gone over the area once. You need there to have been sort of the correct amount of sound so the correct energy of wave um in order to to impact on the needle that's right there's just way way too much precise fine detail that you're you're not trying to capture because you're just trying to make a pot but also um clay pots aren't known for being like microscopically stable. They can crumble and turn to dust in very slow ways that completely destroy the sound. The Mythbusters famously tried this out by making a fresh pot and they just could not recover anything satisfying.

11:39I think a really big noise could be recovered that like something happened at that point in the making some audio event happened, but what it was is just unrecoverable. Unfortunately. So it's sad. It's sad that we can't, uh, recover these old sounds. Uh, however, it has inspired artists. In fact, there was an artist named Adrian Goldner who about maybe 12 years ago and made all these clay pots and then never, ever even tried to get the sound back off of them and just said, this is a clay pot created with the influence of this sound. So they have names like Vase with Sound of Child's Voice. Another he made while someone recited Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. And now they're just art objects. Wow, that's cool. And I kind of love that, like, in a way that piece of sound,

12:55that audio was part of their creation. And he's kind of admitted, you probably can't recover it. And I'm not even going to try, but maybe you could. Like, how does that change how you look at this vase? But let's move on to recordings of, well, I won't give you any more clues. I'll just say, let's move on to a different recording. Yes, please. Go ahead and play I.I.E. Okay, here we go. Oh. Sound like a train. Oh, no, it's not. Mm-mm. Because there's a... Most of that is just noise, but can you hear what's happening under or over it? Is it... Yes, it's like an orchestra singing like Handel or something. Did you say Handel? Yeah. Okay. Do you know what this sound is? Or are you just that good at classical music?

13:55I mean, I said it was a train first, Michael, so. Oh, true. But you were just doing that to hustle us, to throw us off. Is it actually Handel? It actually is. It is a crowd of people singing Handel in 1888 in the Crystal Palace in London. Wow. That's so beautiful. Thomas Edison's responsible for this recording. It was recorded onto a wax cylinder and it is the oldest known recording of a crowd of people singing. Thousands of people are singing on this recording from 1888. And hence why it sounds like a train, because it's the revolving of the cylinder, presumably. Yeah. You hit that. Any imperfections keep boom, boom, boom. So it was recorded on Friday the 29th of June at 2 p.m., 1888. Oh, gosh, that's actually 2 p.m., 1888.

14:47Oh, gosh, that's actually quite moving. It's really amazing. Isn't that beautiful? But also, when you say the Crystal Palace, are we talking about the Crystal Palace that was built by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, to celebrate science and technology and the amazing new era that had been created as a result of the industrial revolution and the scientific boom that followed. Yes, we are. I love it. I love it. You love it. And I think you're right. It is pretty beautiful. I can imagine in the right context in a film, it could be kind of creepy. Mainly because of all the noise in there. But also just to know, there's something eerie about looping time back on itself and allowing us to hear so far back in time.

15:35Voices of the dead. It is. It's voices of the dead. In one of what must have been their most memorable and glorious moments of each of their lives. I mean, if I had been there with thousands of people singing in unison, the most, I mean, heaven sent music in beautiful tone in the Crystal Palace, I think it would have been like genuinely one of the peak moments of my entire life. And it must have been the same for these people. And for these people, they knew they were being recorded. You know, they know that like yeah in a way they're achieving an immortality because of this weird machine and they did yeah unlike the first recording they knew that the first recording is of a guy who was just trying to make i mean he wasn't just trying to

16:18make art but he did not think ah this will be saved for posterity, my actual voice. He just thought that this visual representation of my sound could exist for a long time longer than me. This segment is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Research has come a long way. Look at breast cancer risk. The very first suggestion that it might even run in families was back in 1866 when a French surgeon noticed that a surprising number of women in his wife's family were affected by the disease. So they had a lot of questions. How could the increased breast cancer risk be passed down? And how could they stop it? Now, by the 1980s, scientists from all over the world, including those at Cancer Research UK, figured out that this increased risk must be caused by

17:11a variation or a fault in a gene. The problem was nobody could work out what that gene was. So today we're asking, how did a London lab help solve the mystery of breast cancer risk? The method is let's compare DNA from people, from families with a high number of cases of breast cancer to find patterns. And back in the 1990s, scientists had to analyze DNA manually, which is a major task because your cells each contain like two meters of DNA and the little base pairs that DNA is made up of are tiny. So two meters of it has 6.4 billion base pairs. If you were to type all of those out, it would take you 40 years if you worked nonstop. Now let's talk about professor Sir Mike Stratton. He is a cancer research UK scientist who sets up a research group in a London laboratory

18:06to take on the challenge of finding the genes responsible for breast cancer risk. And as soon as he gets his lab set up, he's late to the party because a different cancer research UK international team has at least found the location of the gene, like the neighborhood that it is in. And by neighborhood, I mean the chromosome. And they're scouring the chromosome to find the gene, like the neighborhood that it is in. And by neighborhood, I mean the chromosome. And they're scouring the chromosome to find the gene. And a US team of researchers found it. And it is now known as BRCA1. Here's the thing, Mike was, he was convinced there must be more to this story, right? The search wasn't over. So back by Cancer cancer research uk he set out to see if there was a

18:46second breast cancer gene and a lot of people just dismissive of this whole possibility they were like it's done already but there was some evidence that suggested that just one faulty gene wasn't going to be enough to explain all of these breast cancer patterns that you end up seeing in families so what mike did is he went out and worked with the families that are affected these breast cancer patterns that you end up seeing in families so what mike did is he went out and worked with the families that are affected by breast cancer and he manually searched through the dna in these donated blood samples for a second breast cancer gene a second brachygine until one day one of mike's team runs up knocks on his office window he's in the meeting by the

19:24way he's like i'm with a guest to go go Leave me alone. But the person on the other side of the window is waving this x-ray film at him. So as soon as his guest leaves, Mike rushed to the lab to go and see. And this x-ray contained proof that this second breast cancer gene existed. They knew that it was on chromosome 13 of our DNA. The only problem is that, you know, chromosome is sort of like, oh, this is in the neighborhood. The exact gene is like the single door in that neighborhood, right? And what they had to do next was figure out what door in that neighborhood to knock on, essentially. And to find that door, that gene, Mike and his team had to turn the section of chromosome 13 from the DNA molecule into a

20:06million letters of code. That's called sequencing. But sequencing at the time was new and it was expensive and it was slow. When Mike phoned up one of the only places at the time that could sequence DNA, they agreed to help. And so Mike's team scoured through the code looking for anomalies that might reveal the faulty gene. And one day, they spotted a tiny bit of code with six letters missing, and they had found the BRCA2 gene. And now we know that around one in 400 people carry a faulty BRCA gene, which increases their risk of developing breast cancer, as well as other cancers like ovarian and prostate and pancreatic cancer. But thanks to this discovery, it has completely transformed how we prevent,

20:50how we diagnose, and how we treat these cancers. Yeah, Cancer Research UK scientists were at the forefront of that discovery. And now they're continuing to uncover how BRCA genes work to find more ways to beat BRCA-related cancers. And whether that's through genetic testing or more frequent screening or preventative drugs and vaccines for people who are at high risk, Cancer Research UK scientists have even helped to develop PARP inhibitors, which is a groundbreaking class of drugs that destroy cancer cells with faulty BRCA genes. Already, they have treated thousands of people globally. Over the last 50 years, Cancer Research UK's work has helped double cancer survival in the UK, and it is saving and improving lives around the world. For more

21:37information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is signed. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Zepbound contains terzapatide and should not be used with other terzapatide containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe

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24:20Something artificial in the signal that's very, kind of cuts through you but yeah that would be my guess it must be i reckon it's something like seti or or something like that that's a great guess because it only enhances the creepiness that sound was first recorded in 2014 by a hydrophone listening down into the Marianas Trench. Whoa! No! Wait, I want to listen to it again. That's a sound from the ocean. Whoa! What is it? Do we even know? We know now. It is an explained sound now. But at first, you can imagine it was very scary because it didn't sound like anything we would expect. It wasn't an earthquake. It wasn't iceberg related. And it sounds so sci-fi, so technological, like you said, but it's not a satellite in space. So the only guess was

25:24that a living organism was creating that sound. And so the researchers who first heard it called it the, because of where it was found, they called it the Western Pacific Biotwang. The Biotwang, what a great name. The Biotwang. that's a great band name right there so 2014 this sound was heard and for 10 years for a decade no one knew what was causing it and a lot of speculation happened as you can imagine um including you know aliens it's some it's some advanced civilization living beneath the crust of the earth well in September of 2024 using machine learning and Google's help they figured it out and now we've got very clear confirmation that it is the sound of a Brutus whale a what whale? a Brutus

26:22whale. Brutus? how do you spell it? that is a great question because believe it it or not, it is spelled like Bride's Whale. B-R-Y-D-E apostrophe S. It looks like Bride's Whale, but it's pronounced Brutus. Brutus Whale. No! That's what they sound like! Yeah. What? That was amazing. I mean, look, this is going to be absolutely great for the part in the horror movie when the whale turns out to be the ultimate killer. Yeah. And all it has to do is work out how to get his body on land and then will wreak havoc amongst all populations. On that note, I want to see how much this has been sped up. The next sound I'm going to play for you. So go ahead and open up MW. Okay. Now I want to preface by saying that this has been sped up 10

27:15times. Okay. I mean, it sounds like a guitar, Michael. Mm-hmm. But it's not. It's not a guitar. There's no way that you would play me a guitar sound. No. These are unintentionally strange, creepy sounds. And someone playing a guitar, they know what they're doing. This is, you want me to tell you? Yeah, absolutely. This is the sound of a minke whale. Right. Sped up 10 times. It's called their Star Wars call. Because when researchers first heard it, they were like, this is either a lightsaber because of the like, shh, Indy. Yes. But then I just watched another researcher talk about it and say that to him, it's Beethoven's Fifth. Because you get these three beats and then a sustained beat. Da-da-da-da.

28:08Yeah. Da-da-da-da. Got it. The Minky Whale. That one I feel is less creepy and just more surprising. I mean, it's also pretty cool to be honest. It's also pretty cool. Okay. Let's get scarier though. I want you to open up. I've got some that begin with the letter O. Why don't you start with B, O underscore B. I mean, I would have guessed that one sounds like it's underwater. I think that sounds like it's underwater. Had you not already given me the two whale sounds, I would have guessed that was a whale underwater. Yes. Well, you're right. These are underwater, but this is not a whale. Is it a mechanical whale? By which I mean a submarine. It's not a submarine. We know what it is though, so keep guessing.

28:59Do you know what? It sounds like a sad alien. It's something underwater. It is something underwater is it something biological no something human made nope is it a meteorite landing underwater no volcano nope something not biological something not human made something geological yes at all yes something geological geological. Is it an earthquake? Not quite. Go on, tell me. It's an iceberg scraping along the surface of the ocean. Whoa. It's called being grounded. Yeah. Whoa, let me listen to it again. So that sound is called the Julia sound. And it was recorded by hydrophones in the water, recording ocean sounds. And this one comes up, they name it Julia. It has also been sped up about 16 times.

29:55Right, okay. So a lot of these sounds, if you were just in the ocean, you would not go, oh, that sounded like some monster elephant or walrus going, but we couldn't explain them for a long time, these kinds of sounds. So I'll show you another iceberg sound. There's another one called SD. Try that one. This one is a very much like a horror movie score. Okay, so it's still very much feels underwater. Is this one, this one's not a submarine, is it? No, it's an iceberg. I'm not going to make you guess. It's another iceberg. This particular recording or event was called Slowdown because it's got this like, kind of sound. Now, in reality, again, it's been sped up about 16 times, so it wasn't quite so dramatic and quick. But again, that's another iceberg that

30:54has just floated into some shallower water, and it's now grinding at a magnificent scale against the bottom of the ocean floor, creating this infrasound, this low sound that in this case happens to go down in pitch over time. These are absolutely amazing. I think there's only one now that we haven't listened to, right? OB for Real, it's called. Yes. Okay, here we go. Yes, it does. Right. It sounds like the earth farted underwater. It's burping. Yeah. It's a little bubbly tummy. This sound, it's been sped up 16 times because it's a very ultra low frequency sound, but high amplitude. It was this big moment. And it is named The Bloop. What? Where was it recorded? So it was recorded in 1997 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

31:55So it's been triangulated because multiple sensors picked this up, some even 5,000 kilometers away. And they detected this probably happening in the South Pacific Ocean, west of the Southern tip of South America. So it was very like loud, okay? It could be heard 5,000 kilometers away from where it originated. Whoa. So it could be an ice quake. It could be ice calving, like breaking apart. So Christopher Fox from the NOAA, he says that he believes that it's just ice calving in Antarctica. That is by far and away the spookiest thing that you have said. Thank you for sharing those spooky sounds with us, Michael, if you want to use any of those sounds. You can play them out during trick-or-treating. You can watch people recoil in horror and then reassure them that it's okay.

32:51Mostly, they are just icebergs or dead people singing. Occasionally, it's an ominous noise from the bottom of the ocean that's completely unexplained, but is biological in origin. Sleep well, everybody. Yeah. We're going to leave you with this. I'm not going to even tell you what this sound is. It is not something scary or disturbing, but I want to know what you guys think. Can you figure it out? See you later. Bye-bye. Now for a quick message from Anthropic, the team behind Claude, the AI built for businesses. Imagination doesn't need permission, just room to play. Claude is an AI that works alongside you to give your ideas the space they need to grow. And then it helps you make them real and ready to ship.

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