#i thought i could base one of the characters on miranda lol
god i’m not even through one episode of paranormal home inspectors and it rules, this lady thought she was being haunted by the wails of the restless dead but she was just listening to raccoons fuck in her attic
psychic: these are hieroglyphics… the spirits are trying to communicate…
home inspector: you put new paint over old paint and now the old paint is bleeding through, that’s why you’re not supposed to do that
homeowner: my daughter’s room is always cold… cold like the dead…
home inspector: you put furniture on top of her heating vent
business owner: i got locked in the bathroom even though the door has no lock
home inspector: it has a lock. the lock is right there. on the knob.
Fun fact a scientist who is very not spiritual or superstitious began seeing corner eye hallucinations and feeling intense fear and a presence in his lab around the same time that everyone else in the building was suddenly reporting it haunted.
Determined, he found that the “hauntings” stopped when the industrial air conditioning unit, that had just recently been installed, was turned off. We’ve found that measurable micro vibrations in a structure cause immense fear, and a feeling of a presence and corner eye hallucinations – just like when you watch a scary movie alone at night and you see things move in the corner of your eye or are afraid to go in the cellar because you’re convinced someone’s in there.
Why?
Because many members of our species built homes in and around cliffs and caves for tens of thousands of years. And it’s likely that these certain shaky vibrations give us intense fear and a need to move far away because that would have saved our lives if the cave were collapsing or unstable.
You’ll notice it’s always falling apart, dilapidated homes that are “haunted” - or very very old restored homes. These places might just be slightly structurally unsound. That’s all.
That’s infrasound, sounds that are below 20hz, or the limit of normal human hearing. Things that produce infrasound in nature include severe weather, earthquakes, volcanoes, tigers, alligators, rhinoceros; also known as things that can kill people. We developed an evolutionary sense of dread when our brains perceive sounds we cannot hear. The vibrations from infrasound can also vibrate the eye causing visual hallucinations.
You know what also causes infrasound? A LOT of machines, especially large industrial ones. There’s a reason haunted house stories started popping up in post industrialization. That scientist was Vic Tandy and he wrote about it in a the paper Ghosts in the Machines
“Vic Tandy, experimental officer and part-time lecturer in the school of international studies and law at Coventry University, along with Dr. Tony Lawrence of the University’s psychology department, wrote in 1998 a paper called “Ghosts in the Machine” for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Their research suggested that an infrasonic signal of 19 Hz might be responsible for some ghost sightings. Tandy was working late one night alone in a supposedly haunted laboratory at Warwick, when he felt very anxious and could detect a grey blob out of the corner of his eye. When Tandy turned to face the grey blob, there was nothing.The following day, Tandy was working on his fencing foil, with the handle held in a vice. Although there was nothing touching it, the blade started to vibrate wildly. Further investigation led Tandy to discover that the extractor fan in the lab was emitting a frequency of 18.98 Hz, very close to the resonant frequency of the eye given as 18 Hz by NASA. This, Tandy conjectured, was why he had seen a ghostly figure—it was, he believed, an optical illusion caused by his eyeballs resonating. The room was exactly half a wavelength in length, and the desk was in the centre, thus causing a standing wave which caused the vibration of the foil.“
Okay I didn’t need my eyes to have a resonation frequency but thanks for that, science
So this is actually my main issue with turian subvocals - if they’re not audible to humans, they’re either below 20Hz or above 20kHz (or even above 15k or less is reasonable once you’re talking about adults that grew up with modern noise exposure). As stated, if they’re low we got some hallucination shit going on.
And if it’s higher, I have an anecdote: in my high school physics class our teacher was using an open speaker and some kind of pitch generator during our sound unit, at one point slowly upping the frequency so that we could see how high we could hear.
Meanwhile in the other room another science class was taking a test, and apparently at one point they all started looking around, feeling something weird/unsettling and getting headaches, even though it wasn’t loud enough for them to physically hear through the closed door and was also eventually out of hearing range. The testing teacher came over to see what we were doing a couple of minutes later when we were still playing with high frequencies and that’s how we found out and figured out what was up. And our friends who were in that other class complained to us afterwards because the teacher told them about it lmao.
But basically, if turian subvocals are outside of human hearing? They’re either causing hallucination-type shit or hella feelings of unease. Which I think is actually a really interesting idea for fic especially since turians were the first species humans encountered, not to mention Shakarian implications.
