A Study of Psychoacoustic Mechanisms of Fear in Horror Sound Design
Abstract
Sound in horror movies and games can be used to change a person's perception of a scene before a visual threat appears. The five psychoacoustic factors of horror sound design in this paper are auditory roughness, nonlinearity, dissonance and pitch instability, low-frequency sound, and temporal contrast. Previous studies have shown that these factors cause fear and anxiety through various ways, such as increased auditory prominence, reduced predictability, tonal instability, spatial pressure and expectation. Then, based on the above research, a 90-second procedural horror-music piece was created using two layers of wind, thunder and a main melody. Rather than using a single frequency, interval or distortion device as the standard "formula for fear", the project generates tension through changes in texture, pitch, low-frequency energy and silence. According to the analysis, the effect of these features depends on the time and interaction; stable background materials serve as references, and later modifications are more prominent due to contrast. As no large-scale listening experiment was conducted, this project is presented as a literature-informed design application rather than an experimental verification of causality.
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