Title: Phonophobia - Sinfonie der Angst
Author: Kari Erlhoff
Show Premiere: March 8, 2014
Summary
Official Summary"The music attacked me!" claims director Albert Kappelhoff after attending a rehearsel of the Colorphonic Orchestra.
The Three Investigators are at odds: is this man crazy? Or is there really danger behind the sounds? Jupiter, Pete, and Bob set off to investigate immediately on sate and take a close look at the "Villa of the arts". Will this case make them lose their hearing and sight?
Tropes
- Action Prologue: The live show starts with Jupiter, Pete, and Bob on a runaway hot air balloon and crashing it.
- Adaptation Deviation: The novel is quite different from the live show, taking a course over a few days instead of just a single one.
- The entire hot air balloon intro had been cut and instead, Kappelhoff comes to the scrap yard to ask the Investigators directly for their help.
- Instead of Fran, Cloe's family member in the orchestra is her father. And unlike Fran, her father is completely benevolent.
- Pete's Synesthesia plays less of a role in the novel, though Pete still suffers through Phonophobia with his condition. Instead of a puzzle, the Investigators find out he has it when Pete casually mentions that he could do what Jupe and Bob were talking about. He also does not get tortured at the climax as Yamada plays the organ himself.
- Aunt Mathilda, Uncle Titus, and Morton show up in the climax whereas they don't in the Live Show. Mary Peterson, a woman from the FBI who is investigating Yamada, also didn't exist in the live show.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Kappelhoff is just an innocent, normal director who wanted to hire the Colorphonic orchestra for his film in the novel.
- Artificial Limbs: Yamada is missing a hand, to which he has a very high-tech prosthetic to use it.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Yamada inflicts this on Pete by hooking him up to a machine and torturing him by injecting his senses with fear, anxiety, and other painful sensations to increase his heartrate so his fear and pain would complete Phonophobia.
- Dark and Troubled Past: The main reason why Yamada wants to make Phonophobia in the first place. After losing his hand and getting disowned by his family, he wants to make a song so powerful that his father would be able to hear it even in death.
- Deadly Nosebleed: In the novel, victims of Phonophobia have pretty intense nosebleeds, as Cloe and Pete had found out.
- Evil Laugh: Yamada lets out a slew of these towards the end.
- Forced to Watch: Near the end of the story, Jupiter, Bob, and Cloe are forced to watch Yamada torture Pete to complete the Symphony of Fear, Phonophobia.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: In the end, Yamada's downfall was his own machine, and a little bit of poison ivy.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Colorphonic torture device ended up erasing Pete's memory of the whole ordeal. It's... probably better that he doesn't remember.
- Mind Rape: What the Colorphonic is supposed to do. Not only does it inflict sensations like hot or cold, but also emotions and sensations like fear, pain, panic, and anxiety. Pete unfortunately becomes the victim of it.
- Musical Assassin: Yamada uses the song Phonophobia as musical version of a gun, just hearing it will drive people insane and to death.
- Tastes Like Purple: The entire Colorphonic Orchestra only consists of people who have Synesthesia, a neurological condition that makes one perceive one sense as multiple senses. Pete turns out to have it as well, being able to perceive sound, words, and numbers with colors.
- Truth in Television: Synesthesia is a real condition that about four percent or more of the world has. Pete has what is known as 'Chromesthesia' (sound to color) and 'Grapheme-color' (letters, words and numbers to color).
- The Walls Are Closing In: Happens to the Investigators when Kappelhoff leads them into a into a trash compactor.
