The Hidden Soundscape Beneath Hearing
Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan has built a reputation for chasing sounds most people never think about. In his latest investigation into infrasound -- pressure waves vibrating below the 20-hertz floor of human hearing -- he combines DIY seismograph recordings, field expeditions across the American West, and a survey of peer-reviewed research to argue that what cannot be heard may still be doing real damage to human health. The result is a fascinating, if occasionally overreaching, tour of a phenomenon that sits at the intersection of acoustics, medicine, and the paranormal.
Making the Inaudible Audible
Jordan's central conceit is simple and effective: record infrasound with modified seismographs, speed the recordings up until they enter the audible spectrum, and let listeners hear what has always surrounded them. The recordings from his own property reveal persistent rumbles on mysterious schedules, including a particularly puzzling burst at 3:30 a.m. that defied all attempts at triangulation. Recordings from airports, train yards, and wind farms paint a picture of modern civilization as an infrasonic noise factory, with urban environments blanketed in low-frequency energy that dissipates only in the most remote landscapes.
I even strategically moved the microphone around to try and triangulate the source. And it was as if this sound just resonated all over my property, whether it was near a building or not.
The contrast with his recordings from the Oglala reservation in South Dakota, where the nearest paved road sits eleven miles away, is striking. There, even with amplification cranked to twenty times the volume of his urban recordings, the infrasonic landscape was nearly silent. The implication is clear: infrasound pollution is overwhelmingly a product of human infrastructure, and escaping it requires a remoteness that few people will ever experience.
The Health Case: Strong Claims, Uneven Evidence
Jordan presents a catalog of health effects attributed to infrasound exposure: headaches, fatigue, loss of concentration, mood changes, depression, sleeping disorders, panic attacks, nausea, and dizziness. He cites a peer-reviewed study showing that 100 decibels of infrasound at around 10 hertz caused a 9% decrease in cardiac contraction force for every 10 dB above that threshold.
This research strongly suggests that your heart, an organ that some people would argue is necessary for survival, has to work quite a bit harder when you're exposed to high levels of infrasound.
The cardiac research is genuinely concerning, but it deserves context that Jordan only partially provides. The 100 dB threshold used in that study represents an extremely loud infrasonic environment -- far louder than what most people encounter in daily life, even in cities. Typical urban infrasound levels hover well below that mark. The gap between "infrasound exists around you" and "infrasound is damaging your heart right now" is wider than the video sometimes implies.
To his credit, Jordan flags one of the most significant confounders in this entire field: the fossil fuel industry's outsized role in funding infrasound health research, almost entirely directed at wind turbines.
A lot of the research that goes into the health effects of infrasound is overwhelmingly concentrated on infrasound caused by wind turbines. And yes, wind farms do generate infrasonic noise pollution. And it turns out that a lot of this research is either partially or completely funded by the fossil fuel industry to try and find something nefarious or wrong with wind energy.
This is a critical observation that undermines a substantial portion of the available literature. When the largest body of research on a topic is bankrolled by parties with a financial interest in a particular conclusion, the entire evidence base must be treated with skepticism. Jordan notes the irony that fracking-induced earthquakes -- which produce their own infrasonic signatures -- have received comparatively little health scrutiny. The asymmetry in research funding has left real gaps in the science.
Ghosts in the Machine
The most entertaining segment revisits Vic Tandy's famous 1998 paper, "The Ghost in the Machine." Tandy, an engineer at a Warwick laboratory with a reputation for being haunted, traced staff members' reports of unease, depression, and peripheral visual apparitions to an exhaust fan generating infrasound at 18.9 hertz -- a frequency that happens to match the resonant frequency of the human eye. Once the fan was adjusted, the hauntings stopped. Tandy later found the same 18.9-hertz signature in a reputedly haunted cellar in Coventry.
Jordan also covers a 2003 experiment at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral in which researchers from the UK National Physical Laboratory embedded a 17.5-hertz tone at 90 dB into live musical performances without the audience's knowledge. Twenty-two percent of attendees reported strange sensations -- sadness, chills, fear, anxiety -- during the infrasound-laced performances.
22% of the audience said that they felt some type of strange or unexplainable effect such as sadness, chills, or even feelings of fear and anxiety.
A separate study from Goldsmiths College attempted to create a "haunted room" using infrasound and electromagnetic fields, finding that roughly 80% of participants exposed to either stimulus reported dizziness, tingling, or a sense of unseen presence. Jordan is appropriately measured here, calling the Goldsmiths study "fun, but not very well organized and definitely not conclusive." That candor is welcome. The haunted-room experiments have small sample sizes and methodological quirks that make them more suggestive than definitive. They point toward something worth investigating further, not something proven.
The Physics of Persistence
One of the video's strongest sections explains why infrasound is so pervasive. Lower-frequency waves have longer wavelengths, which means fewer interactions with the atmosphere per unit distance, which means less energy loss. Infrasound can travel extraordinary distances -- Jordan detected infrasonic signatures from a SpaceX launch in California as far as West Hollywood, 142 miles away, eleven minutes after liftoff. He also explains Helmholtz resonance, the phenomenon responsible for that uncomfortable throbbing when a single car window is opened at speed, and notes that infrasound can actually be louder indoors than outdoors because enclosed spaces amplify it.
These physics fundamentals underscore the core difficulty: infrasound is not something that can be easily blocked, muffled, or escaped. Traditional soundproofing targets audible frequencies. The wavelengths involved in infrasound -- potentially tens of meters long -- pass through walls, buildings, and terrain with minimal attenuation. If infrasound does pose health risks at environmental exposure levels, the engineering challenges of mitigation are substantial.
Where the Argument Thins
Jordan's weakest moments come when personal experience substitutes for evidence. His acknowledgment that he felt nauseous and dizzy during self-administered infrasound experiments is offered with the caveat that he is "very aware of the placebo effect," but the anecdote still colors the surrounding claims. Knowing you are being exposed to something purportedly harmful is exactly the condition under which placebo and nocebo effects flourish. Rigorous blinding protocols exist for a reason.
There is also a tension between the video's two implicit audiences. For general viewers, the message is alarming: invisible sound is everywhere, and it might be hurting you. For technically inclined listeners, the DIY equipment tutorials and data-conversion workflows are genuinely useful. The shift between these registers can leave the health claims feeling more settled than the evidence warrants, while the technical content sometimes gets lost in the narrative arc.
Bottom Line
Benn Jordan's infrasound investigation is at its best as an exercise in curiosity-driven field recording and at its most cautious as health journalism. The recordings themselves are remarkable -- genuinely novel audio from places and frequencies that most people will never experience directly. The health research he surveys is real but preliminary, complicated by funding biases and small sample sizes. The strongest takeaway is not that infrasound is an immediate threat to most people's health, but that it is a massively under-studied environmental exposure with suggestive early evidence that deserves far more rigorous, independently funded research. Jordan is right that the asymmetry between wind-turbine studies and fossil-fuel-extraction studies represents a serious gap in the science. Whether infrasound turns out to be a genuine public health concern or a marginal irritant, the current state of knowledge is inadequate to answer the question -- and that, in itself, is worth paying attention to.