Film Theory: Why Musicians Will ALWAYS Survive A Quiet Place

this video contains spoilers for multiverse madness yep you heard that right oh and it also includes spoilers for a quiet place but uh figure you care less about that one hello internet welcome to film theory the show that's probably best described as the loud place usually also the obnoxious place certainly the nerdy place and also hopefully the place you want to subscribe ah a quiet place one of two horror movies in which we watch jim from the office get ripped apart in front of our eyes i guess there's just something about his face that screams put me through a paper shredder just saying he might be the new mr fantastic but there is nothing fantastic about his track record surviving on the big screen anyway seeing him in multiverse of madness got me revisiting his past works and i gotta say a quiet place one still a banger when this thing came out in 2018 it was game changing not only did it provide huge representation for deaf actors but in a pop culture landscape where everything is constantly screaming in your face for attention the movie's silent ad campaign stood out as completely unique the film introduces us to a race of aliens known as the death angels yeah that is their official name based on the news clippings that are shown in the film but these aren't your garden variety xenomorphs my friends these are apex predators that hunt purely by sound the opening minutes make it immediately clear just how deadly these things are when we watch little bow find himself a loud toy and get absolutely wrecked come to think of it these guys should probably team up with the invisible creatures from bird box and the weeping angels from doctor who they'd be like an unbeatable sensory legion of doom as a result of their sensitivity to sound the world has become as the title says a quiet place in order to survive people walk on sand to muffle the sound of their footsteps they use sign language to talk and they play board games using fabric pieces because plastic pieces would be too darn loud hold up is that are they playing monopoly if that is the entertainment that they have available i don't know i might be sacrificing myself to the death angels the survivors have set up security systems that use fireworks as distraction mechanisms and one of the few bits of relief that we and the characters get from the oppressive silence is when they go and visit a waterfall that allows them to safely shout and you see it's all of these details that make the world of this movie so darn good the world feels really thought out lived in like the people who've lasted this long have truly done their homework in order to survive and then part two came out and threw most of that away but you know sequel anyway i think at this point we've all seen at least one how to survive a quiet place video and the survival tips tend to amount to something like live near the waterfall so the sound of the water covers you great thanks a lot captain obvious i want to go deeper i don't want preschool survival tactics i want post grad stuff i want to scientifically pinpoint the exact decibel ranges that'll keep me alive is stepping on an errant leaf and instant death is going shoeless on a path of sand really necessary or is it just there for dramatic effect what happens if i have a really loud fart well as it turns out director john krasinski did think about that last one when working on the films he told his actors and i quote just try to crop dust what that tells me other than the fact that a quiet place is a silent but deadly world in more ways than one is that there is a limit to how loud you can be it's clear that the death angels aren't bothered by certain sounds otherwise they'd be drawn to the family's nightly fire or the rustling of the clothesline in the wind so what do these monsters define as a tolerable volume how loud can you afford to be in a quiet place and still survive since volume seems to be the key factor here we're gonna need to look into measuring sound in decibels so i grabbed my trusty decibel meter from the crunchiest chip episode of food theory and got to some real life testing first was establishing a baseline of what the aliens would and wouldn't respond to in the film the first kill in a quiet place happens when a toy rocket ship noise blasts off so i found a similar toy irl and measured it with my meter to find that it rang in at about 105 decibels a loud inorganic noise like that is gonna be easily heard by the aliens no surprises there however we also have to factor in the variable of distance as we all know being further away from a noise makes it much quieter so the alien wasn't responding to a hundred plus decibel sound it was actually able to hear something much lower and immediately go on the attack so how far away was the alien well it took bow out in roughly 30 seconds sprinting at what appears to be top speed based on the car chase sequence at the beginning of the second film we can roughly estimate the distance that it covered in that scene an alien catches up to a 1975 oldsmobile delta 88 royale after it's been floored for eight seconds that's a car that can go zero to 60 in 11.9 seconds meaning that these death angels can accelerate to a speed of at least 40 miles per hour just as quickly doing some quick calculations it means that in order to hear the noise bose rocket ship made and reach him in time the creature was at most 1758 feet or 535.8 meters away now 1700 feet might seem like a long way off however according to a noise attenuation calculator even at that extreme distance the noise would still clock in at 54 decibels that is data point number one another attack happens in the first movie when evelyn steps on a nail and drops a glass picture frame here we don't get a sense of the alien's distance but real world testing shows that glass breaking would clock in around 90 decibels in other instances a metal silo door opens which would be around 100 db shotguns are fired which is about 150 db and fireworks are used as a distraction which makes a lot of sense considering they're very loud 150 to 175 db in the sequel aliens are alerted when people scream when they rattle bottles and when they crash into objects what do all of these noises have in common two things the noises aren't naturally occurring and they always have sound levels above 50 decibels these two factors seem to be the things that always wind up alerting the aliens so based on the first part of this analysis i immediately have to call bs on the corn that the abbott family has there are several acres of perfectly planted rose it's not like it's last year's crop either because we see that harvest slowly dying in the fields these stalks are lush green they've clearly been planted after the invasion i'm sorry but tending to all this land is gonna make over 60 decibels worth of noise you ever crack corn off its stalk as a solid alien whistle right there so now equipped with a baseline of what it takes to trigger an attack i then started to test the things that we see the survivors do in their day-to-day lives i stuffed a backpack and walked on all the surfaces that we see them cover in the movies sand gravel grass concrete i measured the noise of insects and birds i clanged glass bottles against each other i yelled as loudly as possible and stood there like a creeper to figure out the noise drop off of neighborhood joggers don't mind me i'm just recording how loud you are for a youtube video by the way would you help me find out how loud getting a leg stuck in a bear trap would be it's for science after tabulating all the results i'm kind of shocked to say this but all the stuff we see him doing in the movie yeah it's kind of a necessity for survival in this world walking on dried leaves is a literal death sentence clocking in at minimum of 55 decibels stepping on a stick even worse the resulting snap is upwards of 70 db and crunching along on gravel isn't that far off either topping out at 45 decibels dangerously close to our 50 db limits walking on sand meanwhile deadens the sound considerably lowering the volume down to a much safer 35 decibels grass same deal so for as ridiculously over the top as pouring out pathways of sand might seem in the movie turns out it's a great way to ensure the safety of our survivors also a necessity whispering a normal conversation tends to happen in the 60 decibel range which puts an immediate target on your back but by softening it down to a whisper which averages out at around 30 db you're gonna be in the clear however don't get too comfortable because our acoustic surroundings are always shifting and this is where advanced survival techniques start coming into play see during a quiet place evelyn warns lee that sundown is rapidly approaching watching the movie i and i think the rest of the audience assumed that this warning was because it's easier to travel during the day trails through the woods are home to roots and uneven roads that are begging for people to trip on them at night and while that's certainly a big threat one additional thing that most people wouldn't think about here is that sound travels further at night you see under normal conditions the sun heats the earth which means that during the day warm air tends to be near the surface and cooler air tends to be at higher elevations sound waves travel faster in warm air and tend to move towards cooler temperatures it's a bit of an oversimplification but roughly that's how it works as such during the day most sound refracts upwards into the sky and quickly disappears amongst the clouds however at night or when there's dense cloud cover a temperature inversion occurs cooler air stays near the earth's surface and the warmer air is found at higher elevations now when a sound happens that sound wave is refracted back down towards earth it doesn't want to pass from cool air to warm up the clouds the effect is that sounds can now be heard much more clearly over longer distances at night so that's survival skills 301 do all your business during the day also i know you want to live close to water but it might not be smart to live extremely close to a lake during the nighttime hours the colder water causes a natural amplification that allows the sound waves to travel further thus while it's certainly smart to live near a water source you just gotta make sure it's a running water source don't just move into the first lake house that you find it's the equivalent of living next to an organic megaphone this temperature amplification effect also applies to seasons of the year since the abbots live in new york where there are some incredibly cold harsh winters they have to be extra careful during those months according to david phillips senior climatologist for environment canada quote never tell a secret on a cold day because you can hear people talking from as far as 6 kilometers or 3.7 miles away but this is all defensive let's talk about going on the offense at the end of the movie reagan discovers the monster's weakness a specific pitch of feedback coming from her cochlear implant but did you notice that this feedback caused uncontrollable muscle vibrations in the death angel's body now it might just be sensory overload short-circuiting the death angel's brain function but a more accurate analysis of what's going on here appears to be tapping into the monster's resonant frequency see pretty much every material has a natural frequency that it likes to vibrate at when subjected to this frequency the natural vibrations of the material are at their most extreme in scientific terms the amplitude of the vibration is at its peak so if you can manage to hit a material with its specific resonant frequency loud and long enough it'll vibrate so violently that it'll eventually break this is how opera singers are sometimes able to shatter glassware now most living things are made up of numerous soft organic structures with varying resonant frequencies which makes it hard to weaponize sound but the death angels just so have to be covered clawed a fang in a singular dense armor-like material and reagan's cochlear implant tapped into exactly the right frequency so now the question is what frequency are we talking about listening to the scenes where this technique is used in both quiet place one and two you can tell that the pitch actually shifts quite a bit [Music] there's no one set frequency here however after testing these using various online frequency identification tools the killer tone appears to be somewhere between 1400 and 1900 hertz did i pinpoint an exact pitch no but have at least greatly narrowed the test range for reference the tv audio test sound yeah that is a pure 1000 hertz tone a typical smoke alarm meanwhile falls in at three thousand four thousand hertz range on youtube there are dozens of standalone videos where pure tones of these sonic ranges exist there's also a handful of musical instruments that can play in these frequencies high stringed instruments like the violin and viola high woodwinds like the flute and piccolo even the piano in short you don't need feedback from a cochlear implant to survive you just need a solid internet connection or you know some basic music skills then by building up a feedback loop of the armor's resonant frequency the death angels will have every inch of their exoskeletons buzzing in multiple directions unable to keep their plating aligned they open up exposing the soft juicy weak point inside which is the perfect opportunity to strike so there you have it friends a more scientific look at how to survive a quiet place if you have to make noise keep it under 50 decibels be extra careful at night or on cold days stay away from peaceful lakes that'll amplify sounds and if you truly want to fight back learn how to play an instrument glad to see that my three years of playing the viola badly throughout middle school will finally pay off but hey that's just a theory a film theory and cuts you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 8,185,770

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Id: HOSnJUYWh34

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sun May 15 2022