How Haunted Attractions and Dark Rides Make Sound Follow You

A film knows exactly when you will see each thing. A haunted attraction does not. Take a Danish haunted house that researchers studied in 2020. Visitors walked through 42 connected rooms in groups of three to six. The actors brought a "high degree of improvisation," and the visitors sometimes showed "unpredictable and chaotic behavior."

Sound has to keep up with all of that. On Halloween weekend, here is how haunts and dark rides manage it, and what adaptive music can borrow from them.

One tune, many rooms

The Haunted Mansion is a well-documented case. Its theme song, "Grim Grinning Ghosts" by Buddy Baker and X Atencio, plays throughout the attraction in different versions. Disney's parks blog describes them as running from "the slow funeral dirge in the foyer, to an elegant waltz, and finally to an upbeat and jazzy composition towards the end of the attraction."

The single theme was a fix. In a 1999 interview with Laughing Place, Atencio said that in the graveyard "we had a cacophony of sound" because each little scene carried its own bit of music. That did not work, so "finally Buddy had to put a general sound throughout," with the theme "working through the whole ride so we could concentrate on the things like the busts singing."

He also described a bigger change. Early plans had guests move through in groups, so each effect had a start and an end. Once the ride became a continuous line of Doom Buggies, there was "no beginning and no end," and that "changed the whole philosophy of the ride." In a ride with no scene breaks, a theme that never stops is one way to hold things together.

Wikipedia's entry on the song adds two details. Speakers are disguised in the sets so the music fades in and out as guests pass through different areas, and every version rests on the same chord progression. A shared harmonic home is one way to let neighboring rooms overlap without clashing.

Switches and sensors fire the cue

Walk-through haunts rarely run on a fixed timeline, because no two groups move alike. They lean on triggers. A 2014 case study in Mix magazine describes the audio at Knott's Scary Farm. It has 89 audio file players feeding 88 outputs. Some outputs play "distributed audio over multiple loudspeakers." Others play "one off sound effects triggered by a footswitch or sensor." That is a steady bed of sound plus single shots on cue. Before that, the park's designers had used loop tape decks, hard disc recorders and mixing consoles.

One maze shows the whole chain. A switch inside the maze starts a network player, which sends a command to the audio system, which plays its cues and tells the lighting, video and animatronics controllers to start theirs. Guests see the lights dim, hear the audio swell and watch a crystal ball change color.

Bigger haunts add space. A Texas haunt covered in a 2013 Mix case study managed about 60 audio zones. A typical area might have as many as eight speakers, each playing its own source, such as heartbeats, piano, ambience and whispering ghosts. In its spinning tunnel, four speakers fire at different times along the length, so the sound seems to spin too.

On a ride, the vehicle is the playhead

A ride vehicle moves along a known path, so its position can stand in for time. Two Disney patents filed in 1993 describe the idea. Control data is stored so that "each piece of data is indexed by the position of the vehicle chassis along the path," and position can mean elapsed time, distance, or the vehicle's presence in a predefined setting.

One of them, US 5,583,844, shows how closely ride audio and music technology were related even then. The vehicle's engine and tire sounds are produced from MIDI-style note commands, each given a countdown time counted in musical beats. It also describes a "hold-pattern" for when the vehicle is stopped, during which the vehicle can run a motion sequence or certain sounds, such as engine revving.

Modern systems use the same logic with newer parts. An integrator's project pages for two rides at an Abu Dhabi theme park describe infrared sensors and reflectors used as "ride vehicle position triggers." The control system is programmed "to detect vehicle approach and exit for each scene." On the park's trackless dark ride, vehicles follow two different paths with an alternating story. The system must match the right story to the right route, and keep audio and video in sync to within 5 milliseconds.

Turning the dial

Fear is a dial, and every designer is adjusting it. In the 2020 Danish study, published in Psychological Science, 110 visitors signed up to wear heart-rate monitors and rate their fear and enjoyment at three scare points; 92 were included in the analysis. Across those ratings, enjoyment followed an inverted U: it rose with fear up to a point, then fell. The authors call the peak a "sweet spot."

The study did not test sound or music on its own, and it describes averages, so treat the sweet spot as a reminder rather than a recipe. Still, it explains why designers want a dial they can turn down as well as up.

What carries over to adaptive music

Four habits from the haunt carry over to any music that has to follow people around:

• Give each place its own sound, and give the whole place one identity. The Mansion's answer to a cacophony was a single theme in many costumes.
• Fire cues from events, but keep a bed running underneath. A bed plus single shots is how Knott's described its system, and it means a missed trigger leaves atmosphere, not silence.
• Plan the hold. The 1990s patent had a "hold-pattern" for a stopped vehicle. An adaptive score needs a state that can wait for as long as it must.
• Leave room to turn things down. If the best fear is moderate fear, a system that can soften as well as intensify has more chance of landing there.

A Halloween listening exercise

Next time you walk through a haunt or ride a dark ride, listen for the handoffs: where one room's sound fades, where a cue fires, and whether the same tune returns in a new costume. It is the same idea that lets one song be heard in different styles. On Starchild, every song can be heard in different styles and voices before licensing. Our look at how horror games build dread covers the video game side.

Sources

• Disney Parks Blog: Hauntingly Historic Mansion Celebrates 55 Years Next Week (2024)
• Laughing Place: Interview with Disney Legend X Atencio and the Haunted Mansion (originally published 1999)
• Wikipedia: Grim Grinning Ghosts
• Mix: Knott's Berry Farm Employs QSC Q-Sys Network (2014)
• Mix: QSC Q-Sys Core 500i Controls Haunted House Attraction in Texas (2013)
• Google Patents: US 5,403,238, Amusement park attraction (Walt Disney Co.)
• Google Patents: US 5,583,844, Programming device and method for controlling ride vehicles in an amusement attraction (Walt Disney Co.)
• Electrosonic: Justice League Warworld Attack at Warner Bros. World, Abu Dhabi
• Electrosonic: Tom & Jerry's Swiss Cheese Spin at Warner Bros. World, Abu Dhabi
• Psychological Science via PubMed Central: Playing With Fear, A Field Study in Recreational Horror (Andersen et al., 2020)