Can Sound Kill You?

[00:00:04]Wherever you're sitting right now, there is a sound in the room with you and you will never hear it. It's too low. Below 20 hertz, sound stops being something your ears report and becomes something only your body knows about. The traffic outside makes it. The weather makes it.

[00:00:21]The machinery in your walls makes it.

[00:00:23]Your ears hear nothing. But you, you're already feeling it. Most of the time it's harmless. But tune it just right and that silent sound reaches inside you. It blurs your vision. It tightens your chest. It floods you with a dread you can't explain until you are certain, bone certain that someone [music] is standing behind you. There's no one there. There never was. It's just a sound you can't hear touching a part of you that you can't protect. If you ever felt paranoid or having visions or unexplained anxiety, this sound might be the reason because it literally drives legitimately normal people insane and sometimes even see ghosts. Now, don't touch your volume. Just listen here. 5 seconds.

[00:01:19]Tell me what you feel. cuz this is the exact silent sound with a perfect [music] frequency that make people see ghosts, which we'll get into it later in this video, which raises even a darker question. [music] If a sound you can't even detect can reach inside you and do that, what could a sound you can actually feel do? [music] And we all seen movies about people killing with swords, water, gun, pencil, or whatever.

[00:01:46]But we never seen or heard about people getting fatally hurt by a sound. What if we keep up the volume if there is no limit? Can it actually kill us? Did the US used a top secret silent sound weapon while kidnapping Maduro? The truth is so much worse. In 1998, an engineer named Vic Tandy learned this the hard way. He was working alone late at night in a laboratory in Warick, England, in a building [music] infamous for being haunted. Every single staff working there [music] felt watched. People would get paranoid. They'd get cold. Sudden sweats for no [music] reason. And one night, sitting at his desk, Tandy felt the hair on his neck stand up and saw it. A gray figure at the edge of his vision sliding toward him. He [music] spun to face it. Nothing. Empty room.

[00:02:42]Most people would have run. Tandy was an engineer, so he [music] stayed. The next day, he clamped his fencing foil in a vice to work on it, [music] and the blade began thrashing on its own, vibrating violently with nothing touching it. Something invisible was shaking it. He traced it to a newly installed fan, quietly pumping out a wave of sound at just under 19 hertz.

[00:03:06]and the wave peaked at the exact spot [music] where the ghost had appeared. Here's the part that should unsettle you. That fan was humming at 18.98 [music] hertz. The human eyeball resonates at almost exactly 19. The fan had been gently vibrating Tandy's [music] eyes in their sockets, just enough to smear the edge of his sight into a figure that was never there. [music] The ghost was a sound. It walked through his skin, rewrote what he saw and his ears never heard a thing. So, [music] if a broken fan can do that to you by accident, what could someone do on purpose? To answer that, forget the magic note. Here's the truth. The internet always skips. Sound isn't music. It's not information. It's a pressure wave. Air molecules physically slamming into each other. And the thing that kills you isn't the pitch, it's how hard they hit. Because decibb don't work the way you think. The scale isn't a ruler, it's exponential.

[00:04:13]Every 10 dB means 10 times more power, not 10%, 10 times. For example, a conversation is 60 dB and a gunshot beside your ear is 140. That gap isn't a bit louder. It's 100 million times more energy. If your voice were an ant, the gunshot would be the colossal titan. So when I start climbing this ladder, understand that every rung hits 10 times harder than the last. Let's start at the bottom with the sound you can't hear.

[00:04:47]Around 19 hertz, aka the ghost frequency at the right strength. Your vision smears and dread crawls up your spine.

[00:04:55]You won't die. You'll just feel haunted.

[00:04:58]Turn the volume up. At 130 to 140 dB, sound crosses into pain. At 140, a gunshot right beside your ear. A single burst can deafen you for life. Now you're taking real damage, but it's still just your ears. If you go where the astronauts went, the space program strapped test subjects into seats and shook them with 160 dB, fed straight into the body. They had their vision smeared, motor control gone, and they couldn't even speak. It's incredibly brutal, but still survivable. If [snorts] we keep climbing higher still, the pressure swing gets violent enough to rupture eardrums and hammer the chest like a fist. And then you reach a number where the sound itself simply runs out of room to grow. That number is 194. And what happens there is the strangest fact in this entire video. Sound cannot get louder forever. A soundwave is just air squeezed tight, then pulled thin. The louder it gets, the thinner those low points stretch until they hit a wall, a vacuum. You cannot have less than no air. The moment the quiet half of the wave empties to nothing, the wave is as big as the air can physically hold, that ceiling is exactly 194 dB. At 194, the pressure is swinging by a full atmosphere, about 15 lb per square in.

[00:06:40]And 15 pounds per square inch is the exact pressure at which human lungs begin to tear. Sit with that. The loudest sound the air on Earth can physically carry lands precisely on the threshold that kills you. The universe set the maximum volume right at the edge of your survival and then refuse to go any higher. Here's what happens at that number. Your lungs are filled with millions of microscopic air sacks called alvioli. They are built so thin they're almost nothing because that's the only way oxygen slips into your blood. At 194, the pressure wave hits your chest and those sacks pop like bubbles. Air leaks where air was never supposed to go into your bloodstream. Tiny bubbles race toward your heart, your brain, and shut them down. Doctors call it an air embolism. The very thing that lets you breathe is the first thing that kills you. Because if you force in more energy, the sound doesn't get louder. It stops being sound past 194, the wave collapses into a moving wall of compressed air, which is a shock wave.

[00:07:52]You got to give it to Hollywood in this one because it's exactly the same as in the boys TV show. Oh, father character whose superpower is a sonic scream. And when he does it too loud, it becomes a moving wall of pressure. In 1883, Crakatoa volcano violently erupted. It was so loud that it ruptured the eardrums of people 40 m away. It was the loudest sound in recorded human history, and it was even heard 3,000 mi away.

[00:08:23]Imagine a bomb went off in Los Angeles and it was heard in New York, or the bomb went off in London and was heard in Dubai. That's how loud that was. The pressure wave it threw off circled the entire planet and instruments caught it coming around again. But at the source, that wasn't a sound anymore. It was a bomb. And that is the secret hiding under this whole question to kill you with sound. The sound has to stop being sound unless you move the fight underwater. The 194 wall only exists because air runs out of pressure to give. Water doesn't have that problem.

[00:09:05]It's 800 times denser. So, the loudest animal on Earth doesn't even notice the limit. A sperm whale clicks at 230 dB.

[00:09:14]Divers near a clicking whale have reported their bodies heating up and their limbs going numb. At point blank range, that click could rupture the air inside your lungs. Nature didn't need a death machine. It gave a whale 230 dB and dropped it in the dark. So, humans being humans as usual tried to cheat that rule. In 1960s, France, a researcher named Vladimir Groau traced a wave of nausea in his lab to infrasound bleeding from a ventilation duct and became convinced he could build a weapon that vibrated a human body to death. The legend grew with every retelling. A machine that turned organs to jelly that nearly killed his own team. It's a fantastic story. It's also mostly fiction. He sold the world a spirit bomb. He built a really loud kazoo. The giant device was probably never even built. His actual whistle topped out around 150 dB [music] and it killed precisely no one. And there's a reason the death ray frequency never worked. We humans are mostly water and when airborne sound hits flesh, nearly all of it bounces [music] straight off. Air and tissue are too different for the wave to cross. We are not a sponge. We are a mirror. [music] There's only one way around that mirror, and it is contact. That's why the astronauts in the chair got wrecked. The vibration wasn't drifting through air.

[00:10:46]It was bolted to their bodies, shaking the organs directly. The real threat was never a magic frequency floating across a room. It was a machine touching you.

[00:10:56]Which leaves the obvious question, has anyone actually built one? The closest anyone has come is the long range acoustic device. A sound cannon that fires a focused beam at around 160 dB.

[00:11:10]It's mostly used against the pirates and protesters to make them disoriented and sick. It is genuinely vicious, deafening, agonizing, blamed for permanent hearing loss and drag through lawsuits. But past wrecking your ears, it does nothing to your body. It's a pain ray and a very loud speaker, not a killer. Essentially the world's angriest Bluetooth speaker. And then there's Havana syndrome, the ghost story of the modern age. Starting in 2016, American diplomats fell ill with splitting headaches and a fog that wouldn't lift.

[00:11:48]The world blamed a secret sonic weapon, but the evidence never arrived. Brain scans found no consistent injury. The leading suspect today isn't even sound.

[00:11:59]It's been assumed some sort of pulseed radio energy, if it's anything at all.

[00:12:03]So, after the ghost, the death machine, the volcano, and the syndrome, here's the honest answer, and it's stranger than the myth. There is no verified case of sound [music] alone traveling through the air, killing a healthy human being.

[00:12:19]No secret frequency, no forbidden note.

[00:12:22]The sound that could theoretically kill you was never a pitch you [music] could play. It's a threshold. The exact instant a sound grows so violent that it stops being sound and becomes a wall of pressure. And that wall stands at 194 dB, sitting directly on top of the number where your lungs give out. But there are frequencies that could do a lot of weird stuff to humans. But that's another video because YouTube doesn't like my longer videos, so I got to keep it shorter. One question before you go.

[00:12:56]If a sound you can't even hear can reach inside you and make you see a ghost, what else is in this room right now that your body already knows about and your brain doesn't? Is there any frequencies that affect us but we don't know or didn't discover yet? It's pretty terrifying if you think about it. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the like button. I spend hundreds of hours on these videos. I'd appreciate if you support this channel on Patreon and here on YouTube. Just a mere sharing [music] it, liking, and subscribing also helps a lot. Thanks for watching and stay curious.