Do You Recognise These Creepy Sounds?

Some of the creepiest sounds ever recorded aren't from horror films. They're real. From mysterious noises from the deepest parts of the ocean to the eerie voices of people who died more than a century ago, the world is full of sounds stranger than anything we could dream up. But what on Earth is making them? In this Halloween special of The Rest Is Science, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) listen to some of the world's most mysterious and unsettling recordings, attempting to identify their origins and uncover the surprising science behind them. They travel back to 1860 to hear a voice that was never intended to be heard again, investigate a bizarre underwater noise that baffled scientists for a decade, and encounter a sound so strange that Hannah suspects it might have come from outer space. Turn up the volume, put on your headphones, and see how many you can identify…before Hannah does. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:03Michael Stevens?

  And I am Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Hannah Fry?

  We know it's Halloween. Michael's got something up his sleeve. We're just gonna, we're just gonna keep it focused. We're gonna do one little episode. Halloween themed.

• 0:15Michael Stevens?

  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. There'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 gonna talk about what they actually are. And try to put your guesses in as well when you listen to these. Some of them you guys might know.

• 0:54Hannah Fry?

  We're talking sort of like cute scary.

• 0:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 0:58Hannah Fry?

  Ominous, but not horrifying.

• 1:00Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 1:10Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 1:11Michael Stevens?

  Let's begin with the file called ACDLH.

• 1:16Hannah Fry?

  Okay, here we go. I'm listening now.

• 1:29Hannah Fry?

  Okay, I actually think I know what this is.

• 1:31Michael Stevens?

  Okay, what is it?

• 1:33Hannah Fry?

  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?

• 1:40Michael Stevens?

  That's, that's it. It's the earliest known recording of a human voice. It didn't involve a gramophone. It involved a phone autograph. The phone autograph was invented by Edward Leon Scott de Martinville. Okay, 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 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

• 2:24Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 2:41Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 2:42Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 2:44Michael Stevens?

  1860.

• 2:53Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 2:56Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 3:07Hannah Fry?

  It described tumors being removed by a tool that they called the fire drill, which we think was used to burn off diseased tissue.

• 3:16Michael Stevens?

  Beating a disease that's so ancient and complex with over 200 different types, it's not gonna happen overnight.

• 3:22Hannah Fry?

  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.

• 3:35Michael Stevens?

  Over the past 50 years, 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.

• 3:46Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/RestIsScience.

• 3:56Speaker 02

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• 4:40Speaker 02

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• 5:32Hannah Fry?

  So hang on, can I, I'm gonna play it again one more time just to really do it. Because I seem to remember that it's, 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,

• 5:45Michael Stevens?

  Noise.

• 5:45Hannah Fry?

  underlying noise in the audio. But they're singing something. Is it Mary Had a Little Lamb or something?

• 5:51Michael Stevens?

  No, it's Claire de la Lune.

• 5:53Hannah Fry?

  Right, that is so wild to me. That is the sound of somebody who was born 1840s, maybe earlier?

• 6:00Michael Stevens?

  Yes, so Scott de Martinville was born in 1817.

• 6:06Hannah Fry?

  Is it him singing?

• 6:07Michael Stevens?

  And that's him singing. But you might say, "Why is the voice so high pitched?"

• 6:13Hannah Fry?

  Right, it sounds like a woman.

• 6:15Michael Stevens?

  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 phone autographs 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."

• 6:56Hannah Fry?

  Because it's etching in the physical sound wave essentially.

• 7:00Michael Stevens?

  Now Edison, of course, did this with wax cylinders. And he actually like pressed into the wax 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 phone autographs that Scott de Martinville made. And that turned out to be possible. So we moved the earliest known human voice audio recording from the 1880s to 1860.

• 7:33Hannah Fry?

  Wow, wow, incredible.

• 7:35Michael Stevens?

  And so what we're hearing is the voice of Scott de Martinville singing "Claire de la Lune." But they didn't think it was him at first because that, that voice is so high pitched. They thought it was a woman. It was a child. And then they, they realized that they had misunderstood an included reference frequency and they were playing it at like double speed. So go ahead and play the next file I sent you.

• 8:02Hannah Fry?

  Yes, please. High and low. That's what the H and the L stand for. Here we go.

• 8:06Michael Stevens?

  That's right. That's my code. You cracked it. So this that you're hearing is Scott de Martinville's true voice. And he sang the song very slowly, probably because he wanted the, the squiggles to be easier to see.

• 8:29Hannah Fry?

  You know what? You're absolutely right. This would make an amazing soundtrack for a horror film.

• 8:34Michael Stevens?

  And that's what I'm saying. Like these sounds, like there's nothing actually menacing about what he did here or why he's doing it.

• 8:42Hannah Fry?

  Freaky though.

• 8:44Michael Stevens?

  But out of context, it's kinda 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 person who was born in 1817. It's just incredible.

• 9:00Hannah Fry?

  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, to, to translate it into something that is visual. It's really amazing. Love that.

• 9:20Michael Stevens?

  So yes, I love that idea. And of course, we've probably talked about this before, but this eventually led, or, or I guess doesn't, didn't lead to, but this is very much similar to one of the ideas in archaeoacoustics, where we say, you know, Scott de Martinville 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.

• 10:03Michael Stevens?

  So we should be able to put 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, it's very, very unlikely to ever give us anything.

• 10:22Hannah Fry?

  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, the correct amount of sounds, sort of the correct energy of wave in order to, to impact on the needle.

• 10:40Michael Stevens?

  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, clay pots aren't known for being like microscopically stable. They, they can crumble and then 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. I 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.

• 11:21Hannah Fry?

  Unfortunate.

• 11:22Michael Stevens?

  So it's sad. It's sad that we can't recover these old sounds. However, it has inspired artists. In fact, there was an artist named Adrian Goulner, who about maybe 12 years ago or so, created some clay pots, using a tool connected to a big microphone. It was actually just like a big cone and had a child speak into the cone while the design was, was carved on into the clay and had different poems read 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.

• 12:06Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 12:18Hannah Fry?

  Wow, that's cool.

• 12:19Michael Stevens?

  And I kind of love that, like in a way, that, that piece of sound, that, that 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 even, I won't give you any more clues. I'll just say, let's move on to a different recording.

• 12:43Hannah Fry?

  Yes, please.

• 12:44Michael Stevens?

  Go ahead and play IIE.

• 12:47Hannah Fry?

  IIE, okay, here we go.

• 12:52Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 12:57Hannah Fry?

  Sounds like a train.

• 13:00Hannah Fry?

  Oh no, it's not.

• 13:03Hannah Fry?

  Cause there's a.

• 13:06Michael Stevens?

  Most of that is just noise, but can you hear what's happening under or over it?

• 13:12Hannah Fry?

  Is it, yes, it's like an orchestra singing, like Handel or something.

• 13:18Michael Stevens?

  Did you say Handel?

• 13:19Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Michael Stevens?

  Okay. Do you know what this sound is? Or are you just that good at classical music?

• 13:25Hannah Fry?

  I mean, I said it was a train first, Mike, or so.

• 13:28Michael Stevens?

  Oh, true. But you were just doing that to hustle us, to throw us off.

• 13:31Hannah Fry?

  Is it actually Handel?

• 13:33Michael Stevens?

  It actually is. It is a crowd of people singing Handel in 1888 in the Crystal Palace in London.

• 13:42Hannah Fry?

  Wow. That's so beautiful.

• 13:47Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 14:00Hannah Fry?

  And hence why it sounds like a train, because it's the revolving of the, of the cylinder presumably.

• 14:05Michael Stevens?

  You, you, you hit that, that any, any imperfections keep vroom, vroom, vroom. So it was recorded on Friday, the 29th of June at 2:00 PM, 1888.

• 14:15Hannah Fry?

  Oh gosh, that's actually quite moving. It's really amazing.

• 14:18Michael Stevens?

  Isn't that beautiful?

• 14:19Hannah Fry?

  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, the amazing new era that had been created as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the scientific boom that followed?

• 14:39Michael Stevens?

  Yes, we are.

• 14:41Hannah Fry?

  I love it. I love it.

• 14:43Michael Stevens?

  You, you love it and I, 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.

• 14:52Hannah Fry?

  Agreed.

• 14:52Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 15:04Hannah Fry?

  Voices of the dead. It is, it's voices of the dead. In one of what must have been what 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've been the same for these people.

• 15:28Michael Stevens?

  And, and for these people, they knew they were being recorded. You know, they know that like, in a way, they're achieving an immortality because of this weird machine. And they did.

• 15:38Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Michael Stevens?

  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 make 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.

• 16:06Hannah Fry?

  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.

• 16:24Michael Stevens?

  So they had a lot of questions, like, how could the increased breast cancer risk be passed down? And how could they stop it?

• 16:32Hannah Fry?

  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 a variation or a fault in a gene. The problem was, nobody could work out what that gene was.

• 16:49Michael Stevens?

  So today we're asking, how did a London lab help solve the mystery of breast cancer risk? The, the method is let's, 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 non-stop. Now, let's talk about Professor Sir Mike Stratton.

• 17:31Michael Stevens?

  He is a Cancer Research UK scientist who sets up a research group in a London laboratory to 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, 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 BRCA 1.

• 18:06Hannah Fry?

  Here's the thing, Mike was, he was convinced there must be more to this story, right? The, the search wasn't over. So back by Cancer Research UK, he set out to see if there was a, a second breast cancer gene. And a lot of people just dismissive of this whole possibility, though, what I was found is it's, it's, 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 by breast cancer. And he manually searched through the DNA in these donated blood samples for a, a second breast cancer gene, a second BRCA gene.

• 18:48Hannah Fry?

  Until one day, one of Mike's team runs up, knocks on his office window. He's in a meeting, by the way, he's like, I'm with a guest, go, go away, 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 rushes 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, 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.

• 19:28Michael Stevens?

  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 million letters of code. That's called sequencing. But sequencing at the time was, 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 BRCA 2 gene.

• 20:02Hannah Fry?

  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, how we diagnose, and how we treat these cancers.

• 20:24Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 20:35Hannah Fry?

  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.

• 20:57Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 21:07Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/rrestisign.

• 21:17Speaker 04

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• 22:20Michael Stevens?

  I don't want to give you context for each next clip, but why don't you pull up the clip called W P B?

• 22:28Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 22:31Hannah Fry?

  Oh, creepy.

• 22:33Michael Stevens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:35Hannah Fry?

  All right, I've got a guess. Do you want to hear my guess?

• 22:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Hannah Fry?

  I wonder whether this might be a satellite.

• 22:41Michael Stevens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:42Hannah Fry?

  It's got a hint of the electronica about it. Something artificial in the signal that's very, um, it kind of cuts through you, but yeah, that would be my guess. It must be, I reckon it's something like SETI or something like that.

• 22:57Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 23:11Hannah Fry?

  Whoa, no. Wait, I want to listen to it again.

• 23:15Michael Stevens?

  That's a sound from the ocean.

• 23:20Hannah Fry?

  Whoa, what is it? Do we even know?

• 23:24Michael Stevens?

  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 that 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 Bio Twang.

• 24:02Hannah Fry?

  Oh, the Bio Twang. What a great name.

• 24:06Michael Stevens?

  The Bio Twang.

• 24:07Hannah Fry?

  That's a great band name, right there.

• 24:10Michael Stevens?

  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, including, you know, aliens. It's some, it's some advanced civilization living beneath the crust of the earth.

• 24:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Michael Stevens?

  Well, in September of 2024, using, um, actually, machine learning and like Google's help, they figured it out. And now we've got like very clear confirmation that it is the sound of a brudis whale.

• 24:46Hannah Fry?

  A what whale?

• 24:47Michael Stevens?

  A brudis whale.

• 24:48Hannah Fry?

  Brudis, how do you spell it?

• 24:50Michael Stevens?

  That is a great question, because believe 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 brudis, brudis whale.

• 25:04Hannah Fry?

  No, that's what they sound like.

• 25:08Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 25:08Hannah Fry?

  What? That was amazing. That's, 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. And all it has to do is work out how to get its body on land and then will wreak havoc amongst all populations.

• 25:25Michael Stevens?

  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 M W.

• 25:36Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 25:37Michael Stevens?

  Now, I want to preface by saying that this has been sped up 10 times.

• 25:41Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 25:47Hannah Fry?

  I mean, it sounds like a guitar, Michael.

• 25:49Michael Stevens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:51Hannah Fry?

  But it's not.

• 25:53Michael Stevens?

  It's not a guitar.

• 25:54Hannah Fry?

  There's no way that you would play me a guitar sound.

• 25:56Michael Stevens?

  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?

• 26:06Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 26:08Michael Stevens?

  This is the sound of a minky whale.

• 26:11Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 26:12Michael Stevens?

  Sped up 10 times. It's called their Star Wars call. Because when researchers first heard it, they were like, this is, this is either a lightsaber because of the like, ending.

• 26:23Hannah Fry?

  Yes.

• 26:24Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 26:34Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Michael Stevens?

  Da, da, da, da. The minky whale. That one, I feel, is less creepy and just more surprising.

• 26:43Hannah Fry?

  I mean, it's also pretty cool, to be honest. It's also pretty cool.

• 26:45Michael Stevens?

  Okay, let's get scarier, though. I want you to open up, I've got some that begin with the letter O.

• 26:51Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:52Michael Stevens?

  Why don't you start with, um, B, O underscore B?

• 27:02Hannah Fry?

  I mean, I would have guessed that one. It sounds like it's underwater. I think that sounds like it's underwater. That, you know, had you not already given me the two whale sounds, I would have guessed that was a whale underwater.

• 27:13Michael Stevens?

  Yes, well, you're right. These are underwater, but this is not a whale.

• 27:16Hannah Fry?

  Is it a mechanical whale? By which I mean a submarine.

• 27:20Michael Stevens?

  It's not a submarine. We know what it is, though, so keep guessing.

• 27:25Hannah Fry?

  Do you know what? It sounds like a sad alien. It's something underwater.

• 27:30Michael Stevens?

  It is something underwater.

• 27:31Hannah Fry?

  Is it something biological?

• 27:33Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 27:34Hannah Fry?

  Something human-made?

• 27:35Michael Stevens?

  Nope.

• 27:36Hannah Fry?

  Is it a meteorite landing underwater?

• 27:38Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 27:39Hannah Fry?

  Volcano?

• 27:40Michael Stevens?

  Nope.

• 27:42Hannah Fry?

  Something not biological, something not human-made, something geological?

• 27:47Michael Stevens?

  Yes.

• 27:47Hannah Fry?

  At all?

• 27:48Michael Stevens?

  Yes.

• 27:48Hannah Fry?

  Something geological. Is it the, is it an earthquake?

• 27:52Michael Stevens?

  Not quite.

• 27:54Hannah Fry?

  Go on, tell me.

• 27:55Michael Stevens?

  It's an iceberg scraping along the surface of the ocean.

• 28:01Hannah Fry?

  Whoa.

• 28:01Michael Stevens?

  It's called being grounded. Yeah.

• 28:03Hannah Fry?

  Whoa, let me listen to it again.

• 28:08Michael Stevens?

  So that sound is called the Julia sound.

• 28:11Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:12Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 28:21Hannah Fry?

  Right, okay.

• 28:22Michael Stevens?

  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, woo, woo, woo. 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 S D.

• 28:41Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:42Michael Stevens?

  Try that one. This one is very much like a horror movie score.

• 28:52Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so it still very much feels underwater. Is this one, this one's not a submarine, is it?

• 28:58Michael Stevens?

  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, hmm, kind of sound.

• 29:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Michael Stevens?

  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 has 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.

• 29:34Hannah Fry?

  I mean, these are absolutely amazing. I think there's only one now that we haven't listened to, right? Obi for real, it's called.

• 29:40Michael Stevens?

  Yes.

• 29:41Hannah Fry?

  Okay, here we go. Okay, it's another odd one.

• 29:46Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 29:50Hannah Fry?

  It sounds like the ocean has gas.

• 29:53Michael Stevens?

  Yes, it does, right? It sounds like the earth farted underwater.

• 29:58Hannah Fry?

  Is burping, yeah. Needs a little bubbly tummy.

• 30:01Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 30:13Hannah Fry?

  What? Where was it recorded?

• 30:15Michael Stevens?

  So it was recorded in 1997 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So 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.

• 30:43Hannah Fry?

  Whoa.

• 30:45Michael Stevens?

  So it could be an ice quake. It could be ice caving, like breaking apart. So Christopher Fox from the NOAA, he says that he believes that it's just ice caving in Antarctica.

• 31:01Hannah Fry?

  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. Mostly, they are just icebergs or dead people singing. And occasionally, it's an ominous noise from the bottom of the ocean that's completely unexplained, but is biological in origin. So sleep well, everybody.

• 31:30Michael Stevens?

  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.

• 31:42Hannah Fry?

  Bye-bye.

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