10 How to scare people with music.

We all know the feeling: A few wellchosen string chords or a snippet of vocalizing reverberate through the movie theater, and suddenly you’re suffused with dread. The hairs on the back of your neck are rising. There’s a nagging ache in the pit of your stomach.

So what just happened?

If you’re in the hands of a canny film composer — a John Williams or Bernard Herrmann, say — or a director like Stanley Kubrick who understands how to marshal existing music to create an expressive effect, you’ve been a witness to music’s preternatural ability to shortcircuit the brain and get right to the deepest layers of our emotions. No one has to say anything, you don’t have to see anything frightening on the screen — the music tells you to be terrified, and you obey instantly.

“Fear is an absolutely primal emotion,” says composer and neuroscientist Joel Douek. “It is one of the most important lenses through which we perceive the world. In fact, many other emotions — peace or quiet or solitude — are really just the absence of fear.”

Comprehending precisely how music gets so swiftly and effectively to our fear response has been a subject of double interest for Douek. As a scientist, he wants to understand it. As a composer — he’s created soundtracks for a number of David Attenborough’s nature documentaries — he wants to mimic it.

There is an entire panoply of methods for scaring people with music, of which the most basic, Douek says, is direct symbolism.

“Low sounds are typically an important part of fear, because they correspond to something large in nature — an earthquake, a herd of wildebeest, a thunderstorm — that can be threatening to us as a relatively small species.”

The famous musical motif from “Jaws,” with its growling repeated twonote figure, achieves its effect in part because Williams sets it deep in the low strings. Without words, it tells the listener that something is approaching that is large, submerged and very dangerous.

Conversely, highpitched sounds like the jabbing strings in Herrmann’s classic score for “Psycho” hijack our innate tendency to react to the cries of a human or animal in distress — or to anything that mimics them.

Composer David Conte, who teaches film scoring at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, has an adage he passes along to his students on this subject.

“We think that we are playing or singing the notes, but the notes are also, in a way, playing us,” he says. “Various intervals and chords and rhythms and instrumental colors work over the pain and pleasure centers of our nervous systems in a way that creates a kind of respiration of emotion, tension and release.”

Symbolism is also in play when music mirrors a typical human response to a draSCARY

Universal Pictures Steven Spielberg’s film “Jaws” used music to optimal effect, in portraying, and suggesting, fear. The famous low twonote growl of strings imparts a sense of impending danger.