Ghosts in the Playstation: The Unsettling Sounds of “Fearful Harmony” and “Personified Fear”

In the age of rapidly emerging technology, there have been a ton of strange noises and jingles signifying machine startup, shut down, and errors. These strange fragments of noise tend to cause irrational fear in people. For me, it is the <a href="https://youtu.be/miZHa7ZC6Z0" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Windows 95 startup noise</a> (some of Brian Eno’s best work.) For others it might be <a href="https://youtu.be/4FOOmoukpJc" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">old Mac crash noises</a>. These sounds exist in gaming as well. The original Xbox had <a href="https://youtu.be/C5TafRklne8" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">faint mechanical sounds</a> hidden in the console dashboard, sounding almost alien — turns out some of the sounds were conversations from Apollo missions. There’s the PS2’s <a href="https://youtu.be/1uHLQHjtPLE" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Red Screen of Death</a>, which would appear if you inserted a disc the PS2 couldn’t read. The BIOS of the console already had ambient atmospheric music and noise, but the dreaded red screen had a very negative atmosphere, driven home by the red clouds, descending music and distant wave noises. Sega CD games had an <a href="https://youtu.be/-z0zGgPwtWo" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">audio track</a> embedded into it that would play if the user inserted the disk into a CD player. It consists of a stern sounding woman with an urgent warning and dissonant distorted guitar chords echoing in the background. Definitely not a very nice warning. <a href="https://medium.com/@dani.hell/ghosts-in-the-playstation-the-unsettling-sounds-of-fearful-harmony-and-personified-fear-7981ffbc4d3a">Website</a>