Brown Note / Live-Action TV

Brown Notes in live-action TV.

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• 7 Yüz: In "Hayatın Musikisi", Pınar grows increasingly reliant on Oşa's trigger, reaching the point that she hears the trigger song constantly. Initially pleased by the idea of perpetual confidence, it turns out to be less of a blessing than a curse, as the song begins to plague her with painful headaches, insomnia, and tinnitus. Worst of all, she finds that she can no longer stop the song using the old methods.
• 1000 Ways to Die featured an episode where an iDoser (a drug dealer of sorts who uses special MP3s that can create hallucinogenic effects when listened) creates a low-frequency sound called "Satan's Jackhammer", which first makes him wet and soil his pants, then makes his cells pop and his organs suffer catastrophic failure.
• On the Lockdown episode of The 4400, there was a fairly literal example of a brown note. In the episode, T.J. Kim, one of the 4400, had the ability to send out a frequency that caused extreme violence, paranoia and aggression... however, it only affected men. It was to the point where completely ordinary, even meek men were scrambling to kill anything that moved out of fear it would kill them first.
• Adam Adamant Lives!: Aside from developing Mind-Control Music, the evil sound engineer Carson in "Sing a Song of Danger" is developing a sound bomb that will kill through applied sonics. He attempts to test it on Adam, Georgina and Simms.
• The Adventures of Pete & Pete: The only thing capable of instantly defeating Artie the Strongest Man in the World is the sound of a whammy bar.
• Andor: When the Empire wiped out the Dizonites of the planet Dizon Frey before building a refueling station there, the dying Dizonites cried out with a unique screech that sounded like a "choral, agonized pleading" which had harmful psychological effects on those who heard it. The Imperial officers who were monitoring the proceedings remotely recorded the cries, and were all found huddled underneath their ship's bridge. Due to its value as a torture device, the Empire tested it to select the most effective section for use in torture, and repeated listenings are proven to leave permanent damage. It's used on Bix and Salman.
• Angel:
  • In the demon dimension of Pylea music does not exist. When Lorne, exile from this dimension begins to sing, the locals react with pain and terror, taking it for malevolent sorcery.
  • Then there was Jasmine. People fell under her mind control just by looking at her face.
• Mundane example: On Blue Bloods, Jamie learns that a murder witness can no longer listen to a certain song without cringing, because that song was playing nearby when he saw the crime. Realizing that the killer's mind may have acquired the same aversion, Jamie sets his cell phone's ringtone to play the same tune, then arranges for it to ring several times as he's questioning suspects. Sure enough, hearing the song leaves the guilty party flinching involuntarily.
• The British Mythbusters knockoff Brainiac: Science Abuse also "tested" the Brown Note, but they claimed it worked. On the other hand, Brainiac's unprofessionalism stems not from a preference for showing the two goofiest personalities injuring themselves to showing their scientific scrupulosity, but from their not testing anything more than once and faking results if reality proves less than accommodating. In this case, they stuffed their victim in the porta-john with a speaker; when the test was over, the host (but not the camera) looked into the john and said, "We're going to need a bucket." Take that as you will.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Hush", the Gentlemen could only be killed by hearing a human voice's scream. In this case though it's non specific, any human voice will do as long as it's a live person and not a recording of a scream.
• Chuck:
  • The series has this as its core trope, in the form of the Intersect, a pattern-recognition and confidential storage computer designed to be installed into human brains through a long, high-speed sequence of seemingly random images. Watching the Intersect installation program run paralyzes you temporarily and makes you nauseous at best, and has been shown to kill people at worst.
  • Two unnamed spies had it installed and became almost entirely unfeeling robots, expressing pity to Chuck's predicament after they had it uninstalled. Another subject began to think of himself as a god and made a Face–Heel Turn, eventually suffering amnesia. Sarah was another victim of this, losing all memories of her time with Chuck and Casey after the person who was originally supposed to receive the Intersect back in season one kidnapped and showed her flash cards designed to activate the Intersect. Every time he did, she would suffer an intense cluster headache and lose more time.
• On an episode of CSI, a video game player intentionally induces a seizure in his opponent in a FPS game by dropping a large number of flashbang grenades in front of his character knowing he was epileptic.
• On The Colbert Report, due to the massive size of his balls, Stephen has a very, very low speaking voice. So low, in fact, that he is constantly in danger of hitting the brown note, so his doctor gave him a prescription for helium in order to maintain the pitch we normally hear him speaking in.
  "My apologies to Doris Kearns Goodwin."
• Parodied on Community, where Jeff warns the group not to look at Annie when she turns on the Puppy-Dog Eyes. Abed doesn't think they'd work on him, until Jeff puts it in terms he'd understand; "She's the Ark of the Covenant!"
• In Curb Your Enthusiasm, a maid goes into insane fury every time she hears the Looney Tunes theme song. This is due to her hearing the song playing on loop back when she used to work at a theme park.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Fury from the Deep": Victoria Waterfield's screaming defeats the weed monster.
  • "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords": It's revealed that the Master was forced to stare into the Time Vortex as a child, and was driven mad by the sound of drums calling him to war. This sound has been running through his head without a break for close to a millennium now. It preys on him so much that when he dies (this time), his last words are "Will it stop, Doctor? The drumming, will it stop?" "The End of Time" reveals that the drums are actually the sound of a Time Lord's double heartbeat.
  • "Partners in Crime": The Doctor demonstrates that holding two sonic devices produces an ear-splitting sound that can shatter glass and incapacitate anyone in range (although Time Lords apparently aren't affected).
  • "The Time of Angels" reveals that any image or recording of a Weeping Angel can become an Angel. This goes double if you look an Angel in the eyes...
  • "Extremis" has the Veritas, a book that causes anyone who reads it to kill themselves. The book is proof that the entire universe the reader is in, including the reader themselves, is nothing but a simulation with nothing real in it. Naturally, it isn't the series' main 'verse.
• This theme also becomes an important plot point in Dollhouse. In the first season, we see an example of a "remote wipe", which removes the imprinted personality of the doll and restores him or her to their doll state. In the second season, Topher develops a device that can wipe anyone you point it at, even normal humans.
• Evil (2019): The episode “7 Swans a’Singin’” features an internet meme song about Santa tripping on edibles, which turns out to be an incredibly powerful Ear Worm that people literally can’t get out of their heads. That’s creepy enough, but then it starts driving teenagers to stab themselves in the ears.
• In Firefly, "The Hands of Blue" pursuing Simon and River Tam would kill anyone that got in their way or came in contact with the two fugitives by pulling out a small device that emitted a noise causing anyone to hear it to bleed from, well, everywhere. "The Hands of Blue" were not affected by the device, presumably due to protective body armor under their suits (the blue armor extends to their hands, hence their name).
• Fringe
  • "The No-Brainer" involves a virus that downloads itself onto computers (and it's 666 megabytes in size, go figure). Once it successfully downloads, a popup ad appears on the screen called "What's That Noise?" Clicking on it produces a series of seizure-inducing images that place the viewer in a hypnotic state due to audio waves stimulating the brain. The viewer then hallucinates a ghastly hand coming out of the computer screen, and when it touches them, their brains melt into liquid due to overstimulation and flow out of every orifice.
  • A later episode has a frequency broadcast over the radio that completely wipes the memories of everyone who hears it. The backstory alludes to a radio broadcast that existed before the existence of radios. The broadcast itself is composed of a random series of numbers spoken in every different language. As it turns out, the radio broadcast gives the co-ordinates to the pieces of the Machine that can bridge/break/destroy universes. Who built the machine? Walter Bishop did. Then he travelled back in time to a prehistoric age, broke the Machine into pieces, buried them across the world and set up the radio broadcast that led to their eventual discovery. Gnarly. The memory-wiping part was put there by agents from the Alternate Universe to capture the attention of the Fringe Division — it wasn't a part of the original broadcast.
• MTV's Fur TV features an episode where Fat Ed's Heavy Metal band Stinkhole discovers the literal Brown Note. Many innocents shit themselves to death listening to the song.
• Game of Thrones: Ramsay uses horns as a psychological weapon against his victims. His warhorn, which he loves to use, is a terrifyingly effective psychological weapon against Theon, and a single blast of it is capable of reducing him to a trembling, sobbing wreck within seconds.
• In the Haven episode "When the Bough Breaks", whenever a member of the Harker family cries, a random person in town hears it and dies. If the person continues to cry, more and more people will be killed. It normally manifests at puberty, so the family keeps it in check by teaching their kids to never cry. Unfortunately, William triggers the ability in Aaron Harker, a baby.
• In the Heroes online comic, a man with sound control powers ("Echo DeMille") makes use of the Brown Note. As he puts it, instead of killing the men following him, he lays waste to them.
• I Survived A Zombie Apocalypse: The Zombie Apocalypse starts because of a 'new Wi-Fi signal' that mutates people into the undead.
• Look Around You:
  • The Music episode in series one features the boîte diabolique, an extension to the piano keyboard containing the nineteen forbidden notes, which is normally kept locked for safety. The technician plays one note and starts bleeding from the ear. Naturally, the sound in the recording is muted during the demonstration to save the viewers' own ears.
  • The Food episode of series two featured an image so frightening that it causes users of the Slimby diet shakes to sweat all of the fat out of their bodies. The joke is that this is a huge Anti-Climax: after copious warnings about the dangers of looking for too long, the picture itself turns out to be a hilariously tame image of a bear and a model skeleton.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Morgoth's tilt acts like a proto One Ring toward it bearers, corrupting and influencing their minds. Theo, who held the tilt several times, confesses to Arondir that he misses holding the weapon because of how powerful it made him feel.
• The Lost Room featured a number of objects with Brown Note effects, including a pack of cards that would cause the viewer to suffer startling visions, a nail file which induces sleep in anyone who sees light reflected from it and an umbrella which causes people to find the holder familiar.
• An episode of Masters of Horror titled "Cigarette Burns" revolves around a certain film, La Fin absolue du Monde, all copies of which were thought to have been destroyed after its first screening sparked a homicidal riot amongst the audience. It is revealed at the end that the reason for this is that La Fin absolue du Monde is a video of an angel being mutilated, and the evil of that horror affects all who view the film.
• Blipverts in Max Headroom, supercompressed TV commercials that occasionally make Your Head Asplode.
• One episode of The Middleman involves a cursed tuba from the Titanic that causes anyone who hears it to "drown in the icy waters of the North Atlantic". Including people who are on dry land at the time.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus had a classic Brown Note in the form of the "Funniest Joke Ever Written", so funny that anyone who heard it would die laughing, used to parody documentaries on World War 2 (more specifically, those about the atomic bomb). We could tell you more about it, but instead, why don't you see for yourself? (At your own peril.)
  • The premise is that a British humorist writes a joke so unimaginably funny that anyone who reads or hears it quickly dies from fatal hilarity. The British army then translate the joke word-by-word to German using different translators (some of them fall into a coma after translating more than two words) and use it as a weapon against the Germans in WWII. And that joke is: "Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!" This cannot really be coherently translated given that it involves many nonexistent words, but whatever they're talking about apparently involves both dogs and pinball, and one can only imagine the possibilities of what humor could be made of that.
  • An implied case in the "Buying a Bed" sketch, in which customers are warned not to say the word "mattress" to the eccentric salesman Mr. Lambert (Graham Chapman), because this will cause him to put a paper bag over his head, which he will only remove when his colleague stands in an upside down tea chest and sings "Jerusalem". Mr. Lambert is apparently not aware of this, and confused as to why people say "dog kennel" to him instead of "mattress".
• The Mr. Potato Head Show: Mr. Potato Head works hard writing a masterpiece script, hoping it will satisfy the man his TV Bosses put in charge of his show. He actually writes something that causes anyone who reads it to go bug-eyed and scream "I have gazed into the nameless horror of the void!". Which actually works perfectly in this case.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: The initial purpose of the bad-movie "experiments" is to find one bad enough to be weaponized to Take Over the World. They got close a few times. The creators said the worst movie they ever featured was Monster a-Go Go. The movie was so boring they couldn't even think of anything to do in the out of theater segments.
• MythBusters tests the myth of the "brown note", specifically the version about a tone around 9hz to 11hz that can cause symptoms including nausea, loss of motor and cognitive functions and (you guessed it) loss of bowel control. For what it's worth, they find that certain low frequencies can rattle the ears and stomach, inducing nausea, and the testing produces a physical sensation of anxiety in the chest for some of the crew — however, they don't find any that can loosen the bowels, even when the volume is cranked past 150db, the range of instant hearing loss if Adam and co. were not wearing protection, so they declare it "busted".
• The Outer Limits (1995): In the episode "Music of the Spheres", the titular music is a signal from space which, in addition to being extremely addictive, ends up causing a series of dramatic physical transformations in listeners. Notably, unlike most examples of the Brown Note, the changes the music causes ultimately turn out to be beneficial — it transforms humans into a form that is resistant to a high-UV environment, which is what the Earth is about to become due to the sun undergoing a "shift".
• In Pixelface, Romford claims to be able to play a tone that will make someone wet themselves.
• The Sarah Jane Adventures has the painting known only as "the abomination" in "Mona Lisa's Revenge". Then somebody tries to animate it.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • The painting in the digital short "Everyone's a Critic".
  • An early Saturday Night Live sketch, "Bad Opera", featured Dan Ackroyd as an arts presenter introducing the Bad Opera "The Golden Note". In this opera parody, the lead soprano is chosen by the Norse Gods to receive and sing the Golden Note, but the hero knows that the power of that note would kill her if she ever sang it. As Ackroyd's character explains during the performance, the Golden Note is a sustained high C of such tone, volume and length that the soprano singing the note suffers from "larynx lock", making her unable to stop singing that note.
• Seinfeld
  • An episode had to do with Elaine going out with a man who would go into near-catatonic states of bliss when he heard the Eagles song "Desperado". Irritated, she tried to get him to make a song "their song", suggesting "Witchy Woman", which he doesn't seem to particularly care for. At the end of the episode, he gets into a car accident, but unfortunately the surgeon goes into a similar state of lapse when he hears, irony of ironies, "Witchy Woman", which is playing on the speakers for some reason. It's implied the man dies as a result.
  • Kramer's hilarious reaction to Mary Hart's voice, which sends him into epileptic seizures. It's apparently Truth in Television. See the real life examples.
• Tony Blackburn attempts to escape from The Slammer by playing a record of his own creation that puts anyone who hears it to sleep.
• Spider-Man (Japan): Professor Monster weaponizes a hit single about Spider-Man so that it will cause the hero intense pain wherever it's played. Overlaps with Incessant Music Madness—the song is playing everywhere in Japan, and that's no hyperbole.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Is There in Truth No Beauty?", anyone seeing the true form of a Medusan becomes dangerously insane. An example of the surreal, Twilight Zoney, Space Is Magic philosophy that Star Trek started out with. The old writers didn't feel any need to "explain" everything, much less with the same Technobabble every week. The Medusans don't emit dangerous radiation or anything, they're just supposed to look so weird that you'll lose your mind if you see one. (When traveling among mundanes, they hide in little coffins like vampires.) Ironically, despite the madness they induce, the one Medusan we meet is actually pretty friendly and only intentionally exposes himself to a guy trying to kill him, and to telepaths, their minds are stated to be some of the most sublime in the galaxy.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • "The Game" features an addictive video game which stimulates the brain's pleasure centers.
  • Starfleet develops one of these in "I Borg" with the intent of using it against the Borg: a computer graphic of a shape that cannot exist in reality. The theory is that it would spread throughout the Collective as they attempted (and failed) to "solve" it. Picard eventually rejects the plan to inject it into the Collective via a disconnected drone, instead deciding to help "Hugh" gain individuality. In the relaunch series of novels, however, he's directly ordered to use it and all other available weapons against the resurgent, now much more dangerous and aggressive Borg.
• In Supernatural, seeing Castiel's true face (and presumably the true faces of all other angels) causes one's eyes to burn out of their sockets, as seen in the fourth season premiere, and his true voice causes windows to shatter and ears to bleed. In vessel form, however, they can be heard and seen normally.
• In the French series Syndrome E (adapted from a Franck Thilliez novel) a movie made back in the 1960's causes those who watch it to commit bizarre and dangerous acts.
• Taken: In "Jacob and Jesse", it becomes clear that prolonged exposure to the aliens' technology is harmful to humans in the same way as exposure to the aliens themselves. Owen Crawford tells Dr. Kreutz that he will begin to experience a strange aching feeling in his head after six minutes in the alien ship and that he will die of a cerebral hemorrhage if he does not leave it within 20 minutes. This is demonstrated when the psychic identical twins Gladys and Mavis Erenberg die after a failed attempt to use their abilities to power the ship.
• The Green Clarinet sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look ends with a put-upon waiter countering the Clarinet's forced-truth effect with a literal Brown Note from a red tuba. The clarinet itself may not be a literal example, but it does have the effect of compelling the listener to reveal "an embarrassing truth... that they'll be unable to deny." Call it emotional harm if you must.
• The short-lived show Threshold has this as the central plot, with an alien audio signal rewriting the DNA of people encountering it. In most cases it lead to those people dying horribly, but others became stronger and tougher, and most of all homicidal.
• Humorously parodied in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! with the "iJammer", which in-universe MegaCorp Cinco markets as "the first digital music box with two revolutionary dance tones!" Anyone who listens to either of the frequencies from the box — either "iJammer" or "e-Bumper" — suffers from seizures, wildly aggressive behavior, widened eyes, and general addiction. The box also produces an "OOPY DOOPY!" protein paste called "Oh Hungee", which seems designed to hook listeners even more, as they don't need to stop to eat. The kicker: the iJammer is manufactured by Cinco Toys — meaning it's aimed at children.
• In Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, Hiromu's Weaksauce Weakness is chickens. Seeing one, or even a picture of one, causes him to stop dead in his tracks, and even hearing the word "chicken" causes his movement to become stunted.
• The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon did a sketch, "Joking Bad", which parodied Breaking Bad. In it, Jimmy Fallon ends up trading "the purest joke he ever wrote — it'll make you laugh your ass off" — in order to get all of his other jokes back. The guy he gives it to reads it and starts laughing. The camera pans away and the sound of an explosion is heard. The man walks out of the room and turns around to reveal that he has a hole in his pants and no ass.
• In Torchwood: Children of Earth, when the frequency emitted from Jack's grandson makes the 456 explode in a shower of blood (and then somehow teleport away in their flaming pillar) and also kills Stephen.
• In the first season of True Detective, the 'King in Yellow' is a recurring reference point (The King in Yellow is a short story about a play that drives anyone reading it insane — see on the Literature page), invoking this trope as the heroes encounter a series of witnesses who have been driven mad by their encounter with the central mystery of the season. Towards the finale, the protagonists finally view a videotape that induces violent reactions in anyone who views it and argue over whether they should even watch it. Because True Detective exists in a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane setting, we get the showrunner's literal interpretation of a tape that can drive people mad: a record of horrible abuse against a child.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby", the sound of Somerset Frisby's harmonica paralyzes the aliens with extreme pain, and he manages to escape.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Need to Know", anyone who hears a short phrase that reveals the meaning of life goes insane.
• Twin Peaks features the aptly named "Woodsmen", who are frightening-as-hell monochromatic lumberjack and vagabond-looking guys who simply pop in and out of thin air and cause all sorts of mischief and mayhem when they appear. In Part 8, one of them breaks into a radio station in the 1950's, proceeds to kill everyone there, and then broadcasts himself repeating the phase "This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within." Anyone who hears it immediately falls unconscious.
• Two Sentence Horror Stories: In "Elliot" Elliot is given the Dolor Ocarina, an instrument which can make people experience the pain he feels from what they did to him when it's blown.
• Unhappily Ever After: In "Tiffany's Rival", it's revealed that Tiffany was potty-trained to "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", and now she has to go to the bathroom whenever she hears it. Guess what the Alpha Bitch does to her own advantage the next day in the lunchroom?
• The comedy series Upright Citizens Brigade featured sketches involving the "Bucket of Truth", a plastic bucket which would supposedly force anyone who looked into it to face some undefined, horrifying truth, driving them to the Despair Event Horizon (and thus lowering the price of a home that included it); the only one immune to its insanity-creating effect was a detective who was already far past the horizon, and his reaction was "Don't you think I know that!?!"
• Warehouse 13 contains tons of objects that are capable of this, without even going into the really dangerous things in The Dark Vault, like Sylvia Plath's typewriter, which sucks the will to live out of a person just by looking at it. In fact, all of the artifacts in the Dark Vault are activated by some human sense. Other artifacts include a song that causes a state of euphoric bliss in anyone who hears it, leaving them helpless, a bell that makes people laugh until they asphyxiate, another bell (owned by Ivan Pavlov) that makes a person drool excessively for 24 hours, and Lizzy Borden's Compact, causing whoever looks into the mirror to want to kill the person they love.
• An episode of The X-Files titled "Drive" involves a secret Navy communication device which generates radio waves that supposedly vibrate at a frequency matching that of a human skull, filling listeners' head with increasing pressure that will blow out of their ears fatally unless the pressure is relieved surgically.

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