Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake

One of the most popular videos ever made about data centers is a complete moment-by-moment disaster

There is a fast-spreading new idea that data centers cause a unique harm: “infrasound.” Environmentalists may remember this as a pseudoscientific idea promoted by some fossil fuel interests to scare people about wind turbines in the 2010s. Infrasound is now the topic of what looks like the single most popular piece of media made about data centers in 2026 so far: the video Datacenters Behaving Like Accoustic Weapons by the popular YouTuber Benn Jordan. This video is a complete moment-to-moment disaster, and has received no meaningful pushback, so I will be the first. Even if you have no interest in either data centers or infrasound, I think this video is an amazing sociological example of how highbrow misinformation is developed and rapidly spread. I found the experience of unpacking it jaw-dropping.

This threatens to become yet another bizarre folk theory about data centers that educated people believe and give you funny looks if you say it’s fake, like that they heat the areas around them by huge amounts, they use a whole bottle of water per prompt, they seriously harm water supplies, or they have an outsized effect on national electricity prices.

I’ll argue here that all our best current evidence about the harms of inaudible infrasound implies that they’re fake, including recent popular claims about data centers. To be clear, data center noise pollution issues are very real. But “infrasound” is something very different, and is being smuggled into the real noise issues by pseudoscience enthusiasts to attribute almost mystical powers to data centers: inaudible sounds they give off that you can’t even hear can physically harm you and make you sick and mentally unwell.

Jordan’s video is a perfect case study of highbrow misinformation. The host is cool. He opens with the nuance that his video is hosted in a data center, and then immediately jumps into a pretty extreme claim:

1:28 - To put it simply, regardless of where your ethical, environmental, political, or economic interests are, if a data center is being built nearby your home, you’re generally kind of f*****.

Some wild claims have already been smuggled in, but by adding some points about how he’s also using a data center to host the video, they also seem like well-considered takes by a guy who’s willing to acknowledge trade-offs and nuance.

The video looks rigorous and technical, and is presented with the professionalism and chill vibes of the kind of explainer you might see from Hank Green and other trustworthy sources. He surrounds himself with equipment and images that look scientific. He talks to poor and vulnerable people who have been harmed, and shares their stories. A lot of legit-seeming studies are flashed on the screen. A big powerful bad guy is being taken down by a chill local dude. Why think about the individual claims too much?

Despite all this, the video is actually promoting a completely unfounded conspiracy theory, and every single study he uses to justify his conclusions either explicitly says the opposite of what he claims or has such terrible methodology that it’s useless. This is effectively a high-status Alex Jones video, it’s really uniquely terrible, but it’s also flying under the radar of most educated people because it looks and feels reasonable.

I'll show thoroughly and conclusively that the video’s wrong. Before I do that, I need to explain what infrasound is and the state of the science.

Contents

• What is infrasound?

• What the science says about infrasound harms

  • The history of infrasound science

  • The consensus

• Benn Jordan’s infrasound videos are a complete disaster

  • First video - Infrasound: What You Can’t Hear CAN Hurt You

  • Second video - Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons

• There’s a lot of social permission to treat data centers as boogeymen right now

What is infrasound?

Sound is vibrating air particles. A sound’s frequency is how frequently the air particles move back and forth. A frequency of 3 Hertz (Hz) means the air particles move back and forth 3 times per second. The particles in this gif complete 1/2 of a full back-and-forth oscillation per second, so their frequency is 0.5 Hz.

The higher the frequency of a sound wave, the shorter its wavelength. We hear higher frequency sounds as higher-pitched. For more on the basic physics of waves you can watch my old physics videos.

Frequency alone doesn’t tell you how much energy a sound wave carries. The energy of sound in air, which we experience as volume, depends mainly on the pressure amplitude of the sound wave. Pressure amplitude is like the physical height of a wave in the ocean. If you were standing in the ocean, waves hitting you very frequently could cause you to tip over, but they would have less impact if each were small, and way more if they were really large, so their height matters a lot too. Sound works similarly: frequency and amplitude are different variables, and the volume we hear is determined by the combination of the two.

Infrasound is sound at very low frequency, below about 20 Hz. Human hearing sensitivity drops sharply in that range, so very low-frequency sounds usually have to be very loud before we can hear or otherwise perceive them. Infrasound is not all sound that isn’t loud enough to regularly hear. There are also sounds with frequencies too high for us to hear: ultrasounds. The prefix infra means “below” (“infrastructure” is structure metaphorically or literally below society) and ultra means “beyond” or “above.” This is loosely like the light spectrum: infrared light is below the lowest frequencies we can see (red), and ultraviolet light is above the highest (violet).

Source

Source

Ultraviolet light is dangerous because it carries more energy than visible light, high enough for electrons in atoms in our DNA to absorb and get knocked loose, which is why UV from the sun can cause cancer.

Infrared light carries less energy per photon than visible light, not enough to eject electrons from our DNA the way UV can. But infrared light can still transfer heat. The warmth you feel standing near a fire is from infrared light, and too much can burn you.

Low-frequency infrasound generally diffracts around or passes through obstacles more easily than higher-frequency sound, which can make it harder to block completely. It can travel much farther and through much more material than normal sound.

At high enough intensity, we may detect infrasound in ways other than hearing it. It can create pressure, fullness in the ears, or a pulsing or rumbling sensation. Infrared at high intensity can create warmth. There isn’t a crisp moment where it suddenly becomes detectable. The boundaries are fuzzy. The lower the frequency, the louder the infrasound needs to be before we can detect it.

For ordinary environmental infrasound, current evidence does not support major direct health effects below where we can hear and perceive it.

Sound pressure levels are measured in decibels, or dB, which is a logarithmic scale. Every 10 dB increase represents a 10x increase in sound intensity, every 20 dB increase is a 100x increase, a 60 dB increase is a million, and so on. The gap between 50 dB and 60 dB is a factor of ten in intensity. The gap between 50 dB and 100 dB is a factor of a hundred thousand.

Sound is measured this way because the range of real-world sound intensities is so huge that a linear scale wouldn’t work. A jet engine at takeoff is a trillion times more intense than the quietest sound a human can detect. To avoid having to write huge numbers out every time we want to measure sound, we just use a log scale. This is important for understanding infrasound because differences in dB can seem small, but actually represent huge orders of magnitudes in difference. The difference between a loud data center and enough infrasound to physical hear (maybe 60 dB vs 110 dB) may not seem like that much. On the scale it’s just a doubling. But in reality every 10 additional dB multiplies the power required to produce the sound by 10. So a difference of 50 multiplies the power required by 10x10x10x10x10, = 100,000 times as much power. People sometimes try to imply that infrasound could be dangerous if it just got a little higher on the decibel scale, ignoring that this would require it to get at least thousands of times as much power from its source.

Infrasound at 20 Hz needs to be at roughly 79 dB for us to detect it, about the level of a vacuum cleaner running a few feet away. A frequency of 10 Hz needs to be at about 97 dB, like a motorcycle at close range or a subway passing on the platform. A frequency of 5 Hz needs to be at about 107 dB, like a chainsaw at arm’s length.

Given the logarithmic scale, these thresholds are nearly three orders of magnitude apart. 5 Hz sound needs about 600 times as much power as 20 Hz sound to become audible to us.

It’s important to not confuse the effects of infrasound with ultrasound. Sometimes people talk as if the harms of all inaudible sound are interchangeable, but this blurs two opposite ends of the audible spectrum. It’s as confused as mixing up infrared light with ultraviolet light. The first can heat you up near a fire, the second can knock out atoms from DNA and give you cancer.

What are the ways infrasound could plausibly harm us? There are at least three:

1. Direct mechanical damage at very high intensities. Extremely intense low-frequency sound can cause discomfort, and injury at high enough levels. A sense of pressure in the middle ear starts showing up at roughly 127 dB of infrasound, like a jackhammer at arm’s length. Chest wall vibration, a gagging sensation, and visual field vibration occur at 145 dB, approaching the sound of a shotgun fired a few feet from your head. Abdominal wall vibration happens at 150 dB, which is the sound of a jet taking off at 25 meters away. This is loud enough to rupture an eardrum. These are not levels that occur in any normal residential environment. And infrasound is not “invisible” at these extremes. In any study, participants can tell when infrasound at this volume is turned on and off. They can either hear it, or feel these physical effects in the pressure of the air around them and know that something’s wrong.

2. Low-frequency rumbles that we can physically feel causing annoyance and sleep disruption. When infrasound is loud enough to detect, or when the thing producing it is also producing audible sound, it can affect us in the same way ordinary noise pollution affects us. It can mess with our sleep and stress response. In this case, infrasound is not really “invisible” anymore.

3. Vestibular or chochlear detection The inner ear contains structures involved in hearing, motion, and orientation. Research suggests that while inner hair cells don’t respond to infrasound, outer hair cells of the cochlea can respond to very low-frequency sound at levels below what we consciously detect, and some studies have reported cochlear or brain responses under near-threshold or below-threshold conditions. But no one has shown this mechanism produces the long list of real-world symptoms people often blame on environmental infrasound.

One last thing to note is that many things in our lives generate infrasound, and infrasound can travel so far that our environment contains sound created by things far away. Refrigerators, HVAC systems, distant highway traffic, wind blowing past a building, ocean waves, thunderstorms, washing machines, trains, airplanes, and even the swaying of tall buildings can generate them. Cities are constantly full of low-frequency sound energy. But the levels vary enormously by source, distance, frequency, and how you measure them. Nature contains a lot of infrasound as well. It would be a little strange if we evolved to feel bad when infrasound is present, because the Earth has always had a lot of it, in the same way Earth has a lot of sources of infrared light.

What the science says about infrasound harms

The history of infrasound science

People have been interested in infrasound for a very long time, but the first really rigorous work by modern scientific standards came out of NASA and the Air Force in the 60s. They were trying to simulate rocket launch conditions, and exposed volunteers to very loud infrasound at around 140 dB. At this extreme volume, the participants experienced ear pain, headaches, and nausea.

Geoff Leventhall is one of the most-cited researchers in the field. He’s spent a lot of time correcting public misunderstandings. A big complaint of his is people often read the NASA-style high-exposure studies as if they applied to ordinary environmental levels of infrasound, but in reality the bad symptoms from this study only show up at extreme volumes around 140 dB. The level of infrasound in people’s homes, even in pretty loud areas, is about a million times less powerful than the rocket launch levels these studies measured.

There’s a huge literature of good studies and reviews on infrasound since then, continuing into the present.

Marshall et al. 2023 is one of the most important. They took 37 noise-sensitive adults and had them spend three 72-hour periods in a sleep lab set up like a studio apartment. They were exposed to simulated wind turbine infrasound, sham infrasound, or traffic noise. Researchers monitored sleep physiology like brain activity, breathing, heart rate, muscle movement, as well as a lot of psychological, cognitive, cardiovascular, and self-report measures. Infrasound did not change the physiological or psychological outcomes tested, while traffic noise in comparison disrupted sleep.

The role of expectation itself, the “nocebo effect,” has also been tested directly. The most famous work is by Fiona Crichton and Keith Petrie at the University of Auckland in the early 2010s. They showed one group a video emphasizing harm from wind-turbine infrasound and showed another group a neutral or reassuring video. Then they exposed participants to both real and sham infrasound. The high-expectancy group reported larger symptom increases, including during sham exposure. The lower-expectancy group reported fewer changes. Most studies on this seem to imply that infrasound effects are nocebos.

Lots of public health bodies have done their own reviews, including the Australian NHMRC, Health Canada, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Netherlands’ RIVM, and others. They’ve all concluded there’s no convincing evidence for a distinct health problem caused by ordinary environmental infrasound near or below the perception threshold.

There was also one huge Health Canada study of 1,238 households living near roughly 400 wind turbines in southern Ontario and Prince Edward Island, which found no relationship between wind turbine noise exposure (including infrasound) and hypertension, migraines, tinnitus, sleep disorders, or chronic disease. People who could physically hear the turbines at audible levels were annoyed.

One influential mechanistic paper often cited by people who think infrasound causes harm is “Responses of the ear to low frequency sounds, infrasound and wind turbines.” The cochlea is the organ in your inner ear that detects sound. It has two types of hair cells: inner and outer. Inner hair cells detect most of what we hear, and they turn out to be pretty insensitive to infrasound. Outer hair cells have a more complicated job, mainly amplifying certain sounds. A review by Salt and Hullar argued that these outer cells can respond to infrasound at levels below where a person would consciously register the sound. So it looks like there’s a possible pathway for infrasound to influence us, but no one’s produced any convincing evidence that it actually causes physiological or psychological effects outside the nocebo effect.

One other key fact: a lot of the good scientific studies of infrasound were specifically designed to look at wind turbines. In the 2010s there was a panic about “Wind Turbine Syndrome,” a long list of symptoms purportedly caused by wind turbine noise, pushed by an unholy alliance of international cranks, local NIMBYs, and some fossil-fuel interests. The whole thing originated in a single incredibly stupid book, written and published by an anti-wind couple who among other things compared wind turbines to Jim Crow. A lot of scientists knew this was pseudoscience and wanted to formally debunk it. Simon Chapman is the great public debunker of Wind Turbine Syndrome, so I refer you to his free book if you’d like the full history.

The consensus

Contrary to Benn Jordan’s video, where he claims infrasound is “grossly understudied,” infrasound and low-frequency noise have been studied for decades by a ton of reputable scientists and major health organizations. Controlled studies and public health reviews haven’t found a real, distinct health condition caused by ordinary environmental infrasound at the levels we actually experience, even in noise polluted areas. When low-frequency sound becomes strong enough to be heard or otherwise felt, it can cause annoyance, discomfort, and sleep disruption like any other normal noise pollution. At extremely high levels, it can physically harm us in the way other sound can. We can always detect it when it’s at this level.

The reported symptoms appear to be largely a nocebo. If you tell people infrasound is going to harm them but don’t actually expose them to any, they develop symptoms. If you don’t tell them, and play infrasound without telling them, they don’t develop any measurable symptoms.

Benn Jordan’s infrasound videos are a complete disaster

Benn Jordan has made 3 videos on infrasound:

The top one is his most viewed video of all time. I’m going to skip this one, because its topic is a little different: audible low-frequency sounds (sometimes called “the hum”) that some people can hear and find disturbing in the way other unpleasant sounds are disturbing. That falls under traditional noise pollution. And while I seriously doubt these sounds cause “psychosis” or “death,” the effects of traditional noise pollution are outside the scope of this post.

I’ll first unpack his original video on infrasound that’s inaudible to everyone, and then talk about the data center video. I’ll use quotes and timestamps for both.

First video - Infrasound: What You Can’t Hear CAN Hurt You

I would recommend watching a bit of this video before we dive in. It’s very easy to watch without noticing anything wrong. It’s very well-produced, and I think if you have the experience of watching it before reading what follows, this post will be much more jarring in a fun way.

0:00-1:40 - Intro

The intro to this video is already silly. He records infrasound in his home and then compresses and speeds it up until he can hear it.

0:24 - Whoa. I’ve done a whole lot of investigating and I still have absolutely no idea what’s causing that sound and it’s still going on right now as I’m recording this.

Lots of things in our lives make infrasound. It’s easy to record any of it, compress it, speed it up until it’s audible, and it always sounds alien and weird when you do. You can do this with infrasound from a fridge or HVAC or distant traffic. If you compress a whole day of it into something that’s audible, you’re going to get eerie sounds from far away. This tells you nothing on its own.

There’s a lot of infrared light everywhere too. I could aim an infrared camera at a dog, and then say “Whoa… something’s wrong with my dog. He looks Evil”

and this would tell us about as much as making infrasound audible.

0:32 - And if you’re in a city or suburb, chances are that similar sounds are emanating just below your hearing range.

Yes, most things we do and use create infrasound. This is like starting a video with a scary infrared image and then saying “And if you’re in a city or suburb, chances are that similar light is emanating just below the range you can see it.”

0:39 - And I have some bad news for you. A meta-analysis suggests that it can actually be pretty harmful to your health.

He flashes three papers on the screen here. He doesn’t link any of them in the video description. None of them support what he’s saying at all, they all go completely against it.

The first is an occupational measurement paper that implies infrasound is safe at levels hundreds of thousands of times more intense than anything people regularly experience in their homes, even in loud places. The second is part of a 3-part research project where the final report is called “Infrasound Does Not Explain Symptoms Related to Wind Turbines.” The third is a NIOSH workplace report that explicitly concludes the sound levels it measured are not known to cause negative health effects.

The first paper paper is “Exposure to infrasonic noise in agriculture.”

It’s an occupational exposure assessment for Polish farm workers. The author took a sound meter to 118 pieces of farm machinery in Poland and measured the infrasound levels they produce. And that’s all.

It’s not a meta-analysis. The abstract has some speculative language about infrasound having “possible ergonomic and health consequences,” and this is probably what Jordan is pointing at when he flashes the cover. The paper also asserts that “a very important harmful factor is infrasound exposure for pregnant women and adolescents at workplaces in agriculture.” That claim cites older Eastern European occupational health literature that’s never been replicated in modern studies. That older literature comes up over and over in infrasound harm claims. It’s almost all small studies with bad controls, often decades old, that don’t replicate. Most of the serious modern work on infrasound, and the major public health reviews from the last fifteen years, doesn’t find its evidence compelling.

Geoff Leventhall has flagged this pattern in his reviews of the infrasound literature. Governments set a regulatory threshold for infrasound exposure based on cautious extrapolation from very limited data, and then new papers cite that threshold as if it were evidence of harm at that level. Later papers cite those papers. The chain of legit-seeming papers starts with original evidence that either doesn’t exist or doesn’t replicate. This paper is part of that pattern.

The paper measures infrasound an operator would receive directly on a tractor or combine, with the engine and mechanical systems inches away. The measured infrasound levels here are really high. This doesn’t tell us anything about what everyday people experience in their homes. No source of infrasound (just like no source of regular sound) is nearly as loud as sitting on a tractor.

Worse for Jordan’s later video, the paper compares its measurements to the existing Polish occupational exposure limit of 102 dBG for an 8-hour workday. Data center and wind turbine infrasound at residential distances is typically in the 50 to 75 dBG range. That might sound like a small gap, but remember that decibels are logarithmic. Every 10 dB increase represents a 10x increase in sound intensity, and every 20 dB increase represents a 100x increase.

So this is telling us that even the loudest data centers near people’s homes are several hundred to over a hundred thousand times quieter than what the occupational standard the Bilski paper is using considers safe for a full 8-hour workday of direct exposure. The paper Jordan is flashing as evidence of infrasound harm is, if you actually read it, implying that our regular daily infrasound exposure could be multiplied by 1000 and still be totally safe.

The second paper is “Symptoms intuitively associated with wind turbine infrasound” published in Environmental Research.

The paper concludes that infrasound had no detectable effect.

The paper is one of the main outputs of a single research project commissioned by the Finnish Government and conducted by the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, the University of Helsinki, and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare from 2018 to 2020. Its goal was to figure out if wind turbine infrasound actually causes the symptoms some residents attribute to it.

The three outputs of the project are:

1. The paper that Jordan shows. This is only the questionnaire study. Within 2.5 km of a wind turbine, 15% of Finnish respondents said they associated various symptoms with wind turbine infrasound, and the symptoms spanned multiple organ systems. The paper documents what people report and what they believe is causing harm, not whether infrasound actually harmed people.

2. “Annoyance, perception, and physiological effects of wind turbine infrasound.” Here participants were divided into two groups: people who reported the types of symptoms they attributed to wind turbine infrasound, and people who didn’t. Both groups were exposed to real wind turbine sound recordings, with and without the infrasonic components. Neither group could reliably detect when the infrasound was present. It had no effect on reported annoyance, or measurable effect on people’s nervous system responses. There were no differences between the symptomatic and non-symptomatic groups.

3. The full final report of the project, published by the Finnish Government under the title “Infrasound Does Not Explain Symptoms Related to Wind Turbines.” Jordan conveniently does not mention this title.

The project found exactly what every other serious investigation of this question has found. Some residents report symptoms, they intuitively attribute those symptoms to infrasound. When you actually expose them to infrasound in controlled conditions, they can’t detect it, it doesn’t produce the symptoms, and it doesn’t produce any measurable physiological response. Looks like a nocebo.

Jordan only shows the first paper where people claim that infrasound caused their symptoms, and never clarifies that the conclusion of this study was that infrasound wasn’t to blame for whatever was happening.

The third paper is “Evaluation of Low-Frequency Noise, Infrasound, and Health Symptoms at an Administrative Building and Men’s Shelter: A Case Study.”

In 2019, a nonprofit serving homeless people had two incidents of loud noise and strong vibrations coming from an adjacent landfill. Employees reported feeling unwell during and after. The buildings were evacuated. NIOSH was called in to conduct a Health Hazard Evaluation. This is the paper documenting that investigation.

The paper is clear that HHEs are workplace investigations to help employers recognize and control hazards. They are not research studies. This one is a descriptive report published after the fact. Its findings don’t support what Jordan is implying at all.

NIOSH arrived four months after the incidents and took sound measurements during normal flare operation. The overall measured sound levels across frequencies up to 100 Hz were 64 to 73 dB. The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists threshold limit values for occupational exposure to infrasound and low-frequency noise are 145 dB at specific frequencies and 150 dB overall. The measured levels were roughly 77 to 86 dB below the threshold at which harm is known to occur, at least tens of millions of times less intense, and possibly hundreds of millions of times less intense at the quieter end.

The paper explicitly says “The frequency-specific or overall sound levels we measured are not known to cause adverse health effects.”

The paper proposes explanations for the symptoms employees reported, and none of them involves infrasound damaging the body:

1. People audibly heard and felt two specific bad events and felt bad.

2. The routine sound at the site had an unbalanced frequency profile: more energy at low frequencies than at higher ones. This kind of imbalance is known to cause annoyance complaints even when the overall sound level is low. The paper cites a 2021 review by van Kamp and van den Berg that found, where health effects are observed near low-frequency audible (not infrasound) noise sources, those effects track with how annoyed people are, not with direct exposure to the low-frequency sound itself.

3. A lot of the symptoms people reported (headaches, fatigue, trouble sleeping) are common and nonspecific. When NIOSH looked at the employees’ medical records, a meaningful fraction had plausible alternative explanations for their symptoms that had nothing to do with the flare.

4. Employees felt the organization and the county had mishandled the incidents. The paper frames this as a breach of “psychological contract,” the sense that your workplace has not kept faith with you. That breakdown, the paper argues, shaped both how employees experienced their symptoms and their unwillingness to return to the building.

The paper’s Limitations section acknowledges that no definitive conclusions about the cause of the symptoms can be drawn.

And in a final twist, the main wind turbine study this paper cites is Michaud et al. 2016, the Health Canada study, and summarizes its conclusion: the study authors did not find a relationship between wind turbine noise and reported health effects such as headaches, dizziness, sleep problems, and stress.

So just to wrap, Jordan’s third piece of evidence here is a paper that:

• Measured sound levels well below any known harm threshold.

• Explicitly states those levels are not known to cause adverse health effects.

• Attributes the reported symptoms to annoyance and a breach of psychological contract rather than direct infrasound harm.

• Explicitly refuses to draw causal conclusions.

• Cites Health Canada to say wind turbine noise doesn’t cause the symptoms people attribute to it.

The actual meta-analyses and review papers on infrasound are overwhelmingly consistent: there are no health effects unless the sound is loud enough to be perceived, and at that point it behaves like regular noise pollution. There’s no serious meta-analysis that reaches the conclusion Jordan’s implying.

Why did he just flash three papers that obviously don’t conclude what he says? It’s such a bizarre move that my trust in him as a narrator cratered.

0:46 - Have you ever been to a particular place or maybe walked into a building and immediately felt like something was wrong? Like a rather noticeable and intense feeling of discomfort or maybe even fear despite there not being anything notably wrong with the environment. And then the moment you leave that place, you start feeling better.

Your bullshit detectors should be going off. This is a very common part of the human experience. A lot of places just look ominous, and a lot of people have anxiety.

Look at the images he chooses as examples here:

It’s obvious that these are just generally ominous places! The second is a famous image from /r/liminalspaces, which collects pictures of places that feel impermanent, and where you feel transient and possibly uneasy.

0:59 - Well, it turns out that there’s a chance that it wasn’t all in your imagination or anything paranormal. It could have just been infrasound.

All the thorough research that’s been done strongly implies that infrasound doesn’t cause this at all.

1:25 - We’re going to take a close look at the infrasonic research and see how how some types of these sounds can make people enjoy music less or feel incredibly ill.

He flashes this on the screen as he says this:

This is Chapter 11 of the WHO’s “Compendium of WHO and other UN guidance on health and environment” with the WHO, UN Environment, and UNICEF logos displayed. Flashing this implies WHO-endorsed evidence that infrasound makes people enjoy music less or get incredibly ill.

The document says nothing like this.

This is a policy guidance document compiling recommendations across environmental health topics. Chapter 11 is a WHO environmental-noise guidance chapter listing recommended levels for road, rail, aircraft, wind-turbine, and leisure noise. It does not discuss infrasound as a distinct health harm.

There is no overlap at all between what Jordan is narrating and what the document on the screen actually contains. He’s just showing a completely unrelated government document with health agencies his viewers trust, while saying completely different false stuff about what the infrasound research implies.

1:31 - And according to one famous study, even see ghostly figures near them who aren’t actually there.

He’s referring to Vic Tandy’s “The Ghost in the Machine” article, which he’ll discuss more later. He shows images from various press articles summarizing Tandy’s work, which tend to describe it as more legitimate than it was.

I’ll save the full overview of this article for when he goes into more detail, but for now just be aware that this “famous study” is not a study at all. It’s a personal anecdote from a single guy who felt uneasy after being told the place he was working was haunted, took a single measurement, decided infrasound was the cause, and published the story in a parapsychology journal founded to investigate ghosts. The study never replicated, and was specifically tested and failed when a proper experiment was finally run. Jordan has once again misrepresented his source.

1:40–3:48 - Philosophy of time

This section has nothing to do with infrasound. It’s about Greek concepts of time, water clocks, and objective versus subjective perception.

I normally give YouTube essayists slack here. They’re making videos for people with short attention spans, and tangents are fine. But this video’s already been so deceptive that I can’t help thinking this section exists to prop up the others. It makes Jordan look worldly and well-rounded, and lends credibility to everything else he’s saying. Showing himself making a DIY sun clock is neat, but I’m worried this is a move to look scientific, like a more hip internet-intellectual way of wearing a lab coat in the video.

There’s another really bad move he’s making here. He’s implying our capitalist western culture has trained us to focus on easy-to-measure effects and to ignore our felt subjective sense of what’s going on. He seems to be using this to open the door to wild claims about things that are invisible to our daily experience but can still harm us. The things he’s about to talk about aren’t actually invisible to the measurement tools of science, just to our senses. His next move is to use this setup for a wild connection between two different invisible things: UV light and infrasound.

3:48–4:34 - UV and infrasound

4:02 - Only when the wavelength of light enters the human visible spectrum do we call it a color. We can’t observe higher wavelengths like ultraviolet, but we can observe the effects of it when it burns our skin or causes cancer. And if you keep cranking up the frequency of invisible light to X-ray and gamma, even lower levels of light can eject electrons from atoms... And for you or I, that means death. A lot of death. It goes without saying that when waves of pressure happen between 20 and 20,000 times per second and become audible to us, do we call it a sound. And while pressure waves above our range of hearing can give us headaches and hearing damage, it fortunately doesn’t do anything as dramatic as rearranging atoms. But medical research is starting to trickle out data about the sounds that are happening below our range of hearing. And things are looking quite a bit more sinister.

As a former physics teacher, this section was torture.

He’s setting up this framing about how things that are invisible to us can still harm us, and then very quickly moves from ‘ultraviolet light can obviously kill us’ to ‘and there’s new disturbing evidence that infrasound can harm us’ without acknowledging the obvious problem that infrared light does not really harm us at all unless it’s so powerful that it heats up our bodies in the way other normal heat sources do. This is the correct analogy to infrasound, not UV light. Just like infrared light can only harm us if it’s powerful enough that we physically feel it in the way we do other heat sources, infrasound can only harm us if it’s so powerful that it causes us to physically feel its presence in the way we do other very loud sources of sound. He’s not so subtly reaching way across this spectrum to say that because something that’s so high energy that we can’t see it can cause damage, maybe something that’s so low energy that we can’t hear it can cause damage too.

In your everyday life you probably don’t spend much time thinking about prices measured in fractions of a cent, or in tens of millions of dollars. Both amounts are “invisible” to your daily experience, but for opposite reasons. What Jordan’s doing is kind of like saying “Because you never think about tens of millions of dollars, other money amounts you don’t think about might also damage your wallet if you spend them, and there’s new evidence that fractions of a cent can harm your wallet too.”

“Things are looking quite a bit more sinister” is doing a lot of work. The medical research is not “trickling out” and is not at all sinister. As covered above, we’ve had decades of solid research, and the conclusion of all serious scientific work on this is incredibly consistent.

4:50–5:21 - The symptom list

4:50 - For example, research has strongly suggested that infrasound can cause headaches, fatigue, loss of concentration, mood changes, depression, sleeping disorders, panic disorders, nausea, dizziness.

The research he cites doesn’t say this at all, but first I need to note that a long list of basically anything and everything bad you might experience in your everyday life is a common signature of a nocebo. Think about how infrasound compares to any other exposure to something bad for us. Carbon monoxide or lead poisoning produces very specific symptoms. Even normal noise pollution has very specific symptoms like hearing loss and cardiovascular effects of chronic sleep disruption. They don’t have these incredibly general long lists of symptoms.

What are the studies he’s flashing on the screen here to support this?

Well, first he puts this map of infrasound science up on the screen:

This looks authoritative and implies a century-long scientific history of studying the harms he’s discussing.

The image is from the 2020 paper “Low-Frequency Noise and Its Main Effects on Human Health — A Review of the Literature between 2016 and 2019,” published in Applied Sciences by four researchers at the University of Minho in Portugal. The timeline is a history of the general low-frequency-noise research field.

But he’s tricked his viewers again. The paper is about low-frequency noise, not infrasound. Those are not the same thing here. Low-frequency noise typically refers to the audible range roughly between 20 and 200 Hz, infrasound is below about 20 Hz and is generally inaudible. The paper uses “low-frequency noise” throughout and only occasionally touches infrasound specifically. So the timeline isn’t even a history of the field Jordan is claiming support from.

The paper doesn’t conclude what he’s implying at all. It’s mainly analyzing audible noise, not infrasound. He’s mixing up audible low-frequency noise (roughly 20–200 Hz, which you can hear) with inaudible infrasound (below about 20 Hz, which you generally can’t). The paper finds plenty of health effects from regular audible noise pollution, like annoyance and sleep disorders, mostly from things like road traffic, railways, the audible part of wind turbine noise, oil and gas drilling, and compressor stations. The paper explicitly excludes inaudible infrasound from its in-depth analysis: in the methodology, “low-frequency sound/infrasound” is listed as one of nine categories in the 142-paper database, but it’s deliberately not among the three categories selected for the 39-paper in-depth review. The paper doesn’t comment on whether infrasound is harmful or not.

The next section is even worse. He flashes and says a ton of individual symptoms described by the paper:

Not one of them is attributed to infrasound by the paper he’s citing, they are literally all caused by audible noise:

• Headaches and nausea come from Blair’s study of oil and gas well construction and drilling in a residential area. The paper is explicit that this was from continuous noise measured at 51.5 to 80.0 dBC, with headaches and nausea reported when levels exceeded 60 dBC. The “C” in dBC refers to C-weighting, a measurement scale for audible sound that captures low-frequency components. 60 dBC is roughly the loudness of normal conversation. The study wasn’t measuring inaudible infrasound, it was measuring the audible din of heavy industrial drilling next to people’s homes.

• Fatigue, lack of concentration, negative mood, and dizziness all come from the same sentence in the Pohl, Gabriel, and Hübner wind turbine study. And here Jordan is doing something more deceptive. These aren’t the results of a study, they’re options from a survey checklist, the list of 12 symptoms the researchers asked residents about. Quoting the paper: “ascertaining the physical and psychological symptoms referenced by residents that participated in the study (general mental indisposition, performance and reduced work capacity, lack of concentration, fatigue, tension, nervousness, negative mood, dizziness, irritability, indisposition, reduced sleep quality, and annoyance).” This is just the questionnaire the surveyors handed out.
  And what did the study actually find when residents were asked? The exact opposite of the picture Jordan is painting. Pohl concluded “the annoyance experienced was very low.” Only 8.5% of residents in 2012 reported any feelings of pressure related to the wind farm, dropping to 6.8% by 2014. Only 6.1% reported felt vibrations in their body, dropping to 3.8%. Symptoms of dizziness, one of the words Jordan highlighted, “were not observed in this study.”

• Anxiety and depression come from Abbasi’s study of wind turbine maintenance workers, who stand on and close to them. The study’s exposure levels were 60, 66, and 83 dBA. This is clearly audible, occupational noise. The paper’s own summary of the findings emphasizes that “the worst health status is due to working conditions and chronic exposure to occupational risk factors, such as noise” and that the harmful effects were concentrated in the maintenance team who were “in the vicinity of wind turbines, due to the reception of very intense noise.” In other words, the study’s own framing is that these effects track with exposure to loud audible noise, not infrasound.

• Sleep disturbance is discussed across several studies the paper reviews, and again the attribution is to audible noise. The paper says directly: “Long-term exposure to low-frequency noise from wind energy is a major factor in sleep disturbances in residents who live near wind farms.” Note the framing: low-frequency noise, not infrasound.

When the study did look at infrasound specifically, it noted that “the noise level of the wind turbine measured in the lower frequency range is below the human sensory threshold” and the paper reports this without treating it as evidence of an inaudible-harm mechanism. The paper does not argue that inaudible infrasound causes the sleep disturbances. It consistently attributes them to audible low-frequency components.

Jordan has now completely misrepresented all 11 studies he’s mentioned in the first five minutes of the video. 7 imply the exact opposite of what he’s claiming they do, 3 are completely unrelated to what he’s saying, and the only one that agrees with him isn’t a study at all, it’s a one-off anecdote written in a publication that mainly studies ghosts. From what I can tell his follow-up to this video is the most popular new piece of media made about data centers so far this year.

5:04 - I am very aware of the placebo effect and of course disclude my personal experiences with generated infrasound here in my lab when making this video. But I can tell you subjectively that it very much sucked. And even after turning the infrasound off, it took a while for things like intense nausea and dizziness to subside.

He’s confusing the placebo with nocebo effect here, but either way this is silly. He put himself in a position to experience the nocebo effect, and then he experienced it, and said “but it very much sucked.” I’d like a little acknowledgement that literally all good science points to this being a nocebo.

5:21–5:51 - The heart-contraction study

5:21 - A few years ago, a large published and peer-reviewed medical study showed that 100 dB of infrasound, primarily around 10 hertz, caused a very negative effect on the heart’s ability to contract with a 9% decrease in contraction force for every 10 dB above that. Your heart, an organ that some people would argue is necessary for survival, has to work quite a bit harder when you’re exposed to high levels of infrasound. And this is on top of quite a bit of animal research suggesting negative effects on heart, liver, nervous system, and lungs.

Jordan flashes “Negative Effect of High-Level Infrasound on Human Myocardial Contractility: In-Vitro Controlled Experiment” as he’s saying this.

You might be surprised to learn the full context of this paper implies something different.

Researchers at the University Hospital of Mainz took small samples of heart muscle tissue from patients having cardiac surgery, mounted them on tweezers in a laboratory apparatus, stimulated them electrically to contract, and exposed them to infrasound at 100 to 120 dB at 16 Hz for an hour. They measured a decrease in contraction force. That is the entire study.

Jordan gets the decibels slightly wrong. He says “100 dB.” The actual experiment tested three levels, 100, 110, and 120 dB, and most of the dramatic contraction-force decrease happens at 120 dB. Because decibels are logarithmic, that 20 dB gap between what Jordan said and what the experiment actually tested is a factor of 100 in sound intensity. But that’s a tiny problem compared to his weirder move here. In the same journal, two peer-reviewed critical responses of this paper were published and linked directly from the top of the PubMed Central page he’s screenshotting. They completely demolish the original paper. He either didn’t click them or hoped the viewer wouldn’t.

Here are the links:

• Comments on the Article “Negative Effect of High-Level Infrasound on Human Myocardial Contractility: In-Vitro Controlled Experiment”

• Can Infrasound from Wind Turbines Affect Myocardial Contractility? A critical Review

Three big fatal problems with this paper:

1. The critical reviewers found that Chaban’s apparatus produced excessive air movement, which caused the tips of the tweezers holding the muscle samples to vibrate. The muscle samples weren’t behaving differently due to the infrasound. They were being mechanically shaken by vibrating tweezer tips in the near field of the sound source. The critical review concluded: “The results of the paper of Chaban et al. are invalidated by a physically inappropriate setup that produces excessive air movement, not present in a regular sound wave of the same sound pressure in the far field.” Their overall conclusion: “Chaban et al. identified an artificial problem that doesn’t exist in reality.”

2. The reviewers pointed out that the total acoustic dose, the amount of pressure energy delivered over time, that caused an 18% decrease in contraction force in Chaban’s experiment (one hour at 120 dB) is matched by a single cycle of a swimmer doing the breaststroke. Every time a swimmer pushes their arms forward and back, the pressure their chest experiences from pushing through water equals or exceeds the total acoustic energy Chaban’s lab spent an hour blasting at dead tissue samples. If Chaban’s finding mapped onto anything biologically real, competitive swimming would be incredibly dangerous.

3. Infrasound never reaches anywhere near Chaban’s experimental volume in people’s homes. Wind turbine infrasound at typical residential distance from large modern turbines is about 65 dB, measured in high wind conditions at 200 m distance. Data center infrasound at residential distances is in a similar range. That’s 55 to 65 dB below what Chaban tested, a factor of hundreds of thousands in acoustic intensity.

I’m starting to think Jordan isn’t the most reliable narrator.

He pairs this paper with a vague appeal to “quite a bit of animal research suggesting negative effects on heart, liver, nervous system, and lungs.” He does not name the research. What he is gesturing at is the body of work around “vibroacoustic disease” or VAD, a hypothetical condition developed in Portugal starting in the late 1980s by a surgical pathologist named Nuno Castelo Branco and an engineer named Mariana Alves-Pereira.

Their central claim is that long-term exposure to low-frequency noise causes a “whole-body systemic pathology.” Symptoms include thickening of heart tissue, respiratory damage, cognitive decline, epilepsy, increased rates of tumors, depression, and eventually death. It’s a lot of responsibility for a single environmental mechanism! And this is the basic source of every claim about animal research and infrasound damaging organs.

VAD has never been accepted by any mainstream medical body. It has never been independently replicated in nearly forty years since it was proposed. The UK Health Protection Agency reviewed the evidence in 2010 and concluded that the disease “has not gained clinical recognition” and that there is no evidence infrasound at levels normally encountered in the environment causes it. A 2013 analysis of the VAD literature in the journal Noise & Health found that Castelo Branco’s self-citation rate across the body of VAD papers is 69%, and Alves-Pereira’s is 36%, meaning the “field” is mainly two authors citing themselves to build the appearance of a body of evidence. Leventhall, reviewing the literature, quoted Henning von Gierke, former chief of the USAF biodynamics laboratory, calling VAD “an unproven theory belonging to a small group of authors.”

Their animal studies use exposure levels way above anything found in residential environments, the kind of occupational exposure you’d get next to a jet engine. None of those studies have been replicated by independent researchers outside the Portuguese group.

When Jordan says “animal research shows effects on heart, liver, nervous system, and lungs” this is what he means. One research group, publishing on itself, at exposure levels nobody and no animals ever encounter, with a disease category no medical authority recognizes, that has failed to replicate for four decades.

5:51–6:37 - ‘It’s hard to study’

5:51 - Another pretty scary thing is that this list is likely very incomplete due to the difficulty and lack of research on infrasound. It turns out that not many people want to volunteer to feel super uncomfortable while their organs may get damaged for some reason.

Infrasound is one of the most thoroughly studied topics in noise research. We have decades of papers, dozens of controlled trials, multiple large epidemiological studies, and national health body reviews from multiple continents. The Marshall et al. 2023 study alone had 37 participants doing 72-hour laboratory stays with tons of equipment measuring basically all possible physiological effects. The Health Canada study covered 1,238 households. People absolutely do volunteer for these studies, they’ve been done.

“We just don’t have enough research” is a standard move in pseudoscience. It lets you dismiss the actual negative findings in the literature by asserting the literature is thin. But the literature is not thin, and its findings are not ambiguous. The reason he can’t cite studies showing what he wants them to show is not that the studies haven’t been done. It’s that the studies have been done and they’ve implied he’s wrong.

6:07 - If you look into this, a lot of the research that goes into the health effects of infrasound is overwhelmingly concentrated on infrasound caused by wind turbines. And yes, wind farms do generate infrasonic noise pollution. And it turns out that a lot of this research is either partially or completely funded by the fossil fuel industry to try and find something nefarious or wrong with wind energy.

This is an incredibly weird way to frame the actual research. Most of the infrasound research has been done in response to fossil fuel industry claims that wind farms cause harm, and the good studies have all shown they don’t. What Jordan is not-so-subtly implying is that the infrasound research is invalid because fossil fuel money touched it. In reality, basically every good study on infrasound cuts against the fossil fuel industry’s claims.

He does to his credit at least flash the Wind Turbine Syndrome Wikipedia page, which is a good debunking.

6:31 - And this situation is a major problem in science and research. I did a video covering some of this here

The phrasing implies that Jordan has a separate video laying out how the fossil fuel industry has distorted infrasound or wind turbine research, and that the curious viewer can go watch it. The viewer is meant to register “okay, there’s a deeper argument here and he’s made it elsewhere” and move on.

I watched the video he flashed on the screen. It’s where he’s growing wheatgrass and chia seeds in his home. He plays a 4,000 Hz tone at 72 dB at his seedlings for twelve days, observes that the sound-exposed plants grew about 28% more biomass, and speculates about the mechanism. The video is threaded with reflections on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, the replication crisis, and his own decision not to go to college.

In this video Jordan doesn’t just misunderstand the replication crisis, he inverts it. He says:

The replication crisis is more about researchers not being funded to reproduce their own or other studies and some of that is probably because of capitalism.

This is not what the replication crisis is. The replication crisis is the finding that when researchers do try to reproduce published studies, a huge fraction of them fail. The Open Science Collaboration’s 2015 project tried to replicate 100 psychology studies and got statistically significant results in only 36% of the replications. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology tried to replicate 193 experiments and found that positive findings replicated only 40% of the time. Similar patterns have shown up across economics and other fields. The crisis is about the validity of the underlying literature, not the funding pipeline for replication.

Jordan has the direction reversed. He’s framing the crisis as “we haven’t run enough replications yet,” when the actual crisis is “we ran replications and a lot of published findings didn’t survive.” The first framing implies scientific consensus should be trusted pending more work. The second implies scientific consensus has already been partially invalidated, and we need to figure out which findings still hold.

This matters because the whole video is a manifesto arguing that institutional science is credentialist, capitalist-corrupted, and not to be trusted, while independent researchers with their own setups are the real source of knowledge. Jordan explicitly tells viewers “there’s a major war on truth and objectivity happening right now” (I definitely agree with him that in the exact moment I’m watching this video, a major war on truth and objectivity is occurring) and that the replication crisis has been weaponized “to discredit the effectiveness of research and scientific method.” He then dismisses the reputation of credentialed scientists as “the battlecry of a really poor or weak scientific argument” describes institutional gatekeeping as “probably a much larger threat to science than the replication crisis,” and presents his own n=1 unreplicated wheatgrass result as meaningful.

This is what Jordan tells viewers he’s “covered some of” in that link at 6:37. It’s not an argument that the fossil fuel industry distorted infrasound research. It’s a much broader argument that mainstream scientific consensus should be treated as corrupt and that viewers should trust independent YouTubers running personal experiments instead. Once you understand that, the infrasound video makes more sense. He’s not trying to engage with the decades of controlled studies, epidemiology, and public health reviews that all point the other way. He’s pre-emptively dismissing them. The Marshall studies, the Health Canada survey, the Finnish project, the NHMRC review, these aren’t findings to be grappled with. They’re products of the institutional capitalist machine, and the institutional machine has been compromised. What you should trust instead is a guy with a hydroponic chamber and a sine wave generator.

His own n=1 wheatgrass experiment is exactly the kind of unreplicated finding the replication crisis is about. If the crisis teaches us anything, it’s that results like this should be held lightly until independent labs try to reproduce them.

6:37 - So, yes, wind farms do cause infrasonic noise pollution, while fracking in Texas, Oklahoma, British Columbia is literally causing record-breaking earthquakes. And how does the infrasound from all this fracking affect people? We don’t really know ‘cause we haven’t studied it nearly as much as wind farms.

The fracking point is wrong. The infrasound research on ambient industrial sources is directly applicable to fracking infrasound. There doesn’t need to be a fracking-specific study for the same reason there doesn’t need to be a study on the effects of infrared light from each different very specific industry. We know the general effects of infrared light, and the general effects of infrasound. The framing that every new industrial source needs its own full-scale research paper before we can conclude anything is a way of creating permanent scientific uncertainty and dismissing all the actual research. He’s also trying to separate himself from the main way infrasound pseudoscience has been badly used: by attacking wind turbines. I don’t think he gets to have it both ways here. If infrasound is actually harmful, wind farms at close range to homes do also create meaningful amounts, and he’d have to at least acknowledge the trade-off that infrasound harms are real but worth it for building out wind power. Instead he wants to have it both ways.

Also, on the earthquake point, USGS says felt earthquakes directly caused by hydraulic fracturing are extremely rare, and the big rise in places like Oklahoma is primarily tied to wastewater disposal. Fracking-induced felt events have occurred in some regions.

6:52–8:10 - The Vic Tandy ghost story

6:52 - In the late 1990s, Vic Tandy, a respected lecturer and engineer, was working in a laboratory in Warwick, England that had a long reputation of being haunted. He felt a cold sweat and an intense feeling of depression. And out of the corner of his eye, he saw a blurry gray figure.

Yes, in the late 1990s, Vic Tandy was a lecturer working in a medical equipment lab. The lab had a local reputation for being haunted. People working there had reported feeling uneasy, seeing things out of the corners of their eyes, etc. Tandy himself had an experience like this. He suddenly felt cold and anxious and saw a blurry gray figure in his peripheral vision that vanished when he turned to look at it.

The next day, Tandy was clamping a fencing foil in a vice when he noticed the blade vibrating on its own. He realized a large fan in the lab was producing low-frequency infrasound around 18.9 Hz, and he hypothesized that this infrasound might be what was making people in the lab feel uneasy and see peripheral figures. He published this idea as a short article titled “The Ghost in the Machine” in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, a parapsychology journal, in 1998. This wasn’t “a study” the way Jordan describes it. It was a short article speculating about a possible mechanism. Just one guy’s anecdote, no experiment, no controls, nothing.

When someone eventually did try to test Tandy’s hypothesis rigorously (the Goldsmiths Haunt Project, which will be discussed more below when Jordan brings it up) the infrasound had no effect on reported experiences. Participants’ prior suggestibility was the sole thing that predicted whether they felt uneasy. This paper reinforced the idea that infrasound effects are a nocebo.

In both cases, Tandy visited places with strong local reputations for being haunted, where the people he interviewed had already been primed by each other to feel uneasy. It’s very likely this was a nocebo.

7:33 - A large fan was causing infrasonic vibrations around 18.9 hertz. You know what else resonates around 18 hertz? The human eye.

The eyeball resonance thing sounds scientific but isn’t at all. The original NASA work it traces back to was about mechanical vibration transmitted through the body at very high energy, not infrasound at normal environmental levels. It’s like seeing the frequency you need to push a kid on a swing to make them swing higher and higher, and concluding that very lightly poking their back at the same frequency would also work. Nobody standing next to a fan in a British laboratory was experiencing the kind of vibration those studies used that would actually harm your eye.

7:49 - This would later be published in a rather famous paper titled The Ghost in the Machine.

It’s famous in pop-science and paranormal-adjacent writing. It is not famous in the acoustics or medical literature in the sense of being a foundational finding. Serious infrasound researchers treat it as an interesting anecdote that has never been replicated under controlled conditions.

7:54 - Soon after this Vic visited another famously haunted place, a cellar in Coventry.

A few years later, Tandy wrote a follow-up article called “Something in the Cellar,” also in the same parapsychology journal. He visited a 14th-century cellar in Coventry that visitors had reported feeling uneasy in, put a microphone in the room for 20 seconds, found a 19 Hz peak in the ambient sound, and declared this confirmed his earlier hypothesis. The measured sound level was 38 dB at 19 Hz, which as Tandy himself acknowledges is 50 dB below the human perception level for that frequency. His explanation for why inaudible infrasound at 38 dB might still cause uneasiness was to speculate about “hypersensitive” individuals and to cite a New Scientist article about hypothetical military infrasound weapons. Again, this wasn’t a “study,” it was a guy going around with anecdotes and random hypotheses.

The methodology is not an experiment. Tandy did not expose anyone to the infrasound. He did not remove the infrasound and see if the apparitions stopped. He did not compare the cellar to other cellars. He did not blind anyone, recruit a control group, or do anything that would count as a test of the hypothesis. He collected stories from tour guides about visitors who had felt weird in a cellar that was already advertised as haunted, then measured the ambient sound in the room afterwards. This is not science.

The anecdotes themselves are also pretty bad evidence. Tandy notes in his own paper that the cellar has “a growing reputation” meaning visitors were arriving primed. Two of the “witnesses” Tandy relies on were self-identified witches who visited the cellar specifically to commune with the spirit world. A third witch was “frightened to death” and left. One key informant is the tour guide herself, who, on her own account, “found herself talking to” the presence during tours. These are self-selected paranormal enthusiasts reporting paranormal experiences, and their testimony is being used to support the causal claim that inaudible infrasound at 38 dB produces supernatural perception.

Another obvious problem is low-frequency resonances are a feature of almost every partially enclosed space. A cellar’s dimensions and an entry corridor will produce standing waves in the infrasound range by basic acoustics.

So the “Cellar in Coventry” paper is a ghost-hunter-reviewed anecdote-plus-ambient-sound-measurement, at sound levels the author admits are below any established threshold for perception, reported in a parapsychology journal, using informants who included self-described witches, in a cellar already known as haunted, and detected normal infrasound levels for cellars. And when it was tested rigorously later, it failed. This is the second piece of Tandy’s case, and it is, if anything, weaker than the first.

8:00 - It’s not the most conclusive study in the world, but pretty damn interesting

This is definitely the pattern yes.

8:10–10:09: Backyard recording

This section’s framing, that he can’t identify the infrasound source and therefore it’s mysterious and maybe significant, is silly. Any outdoor microphone capable of picking up infrasound is going to record a continuous soup of low-frequency energy from a ton of sources at once. Distant traffic on highways miles away. HVAC systems in nearby buildings. Wind pressure on the microphone itself, even with a windscreen. Ocean waves if you’re within a hundred miles of a coast. Thunderstorms hundreds of miles away. Trains. Aircraft. He does at least clarify at the end of this section that infrasound can travel far.

The fact that he can’t identify specific sources for specific rumbles is because infrasound propagates extremely well over long distances (which he acknowledges later) and that there are innumerable sources creating it constantly.

When he says “Wow, I am not jealous of the people who live nearby” he’s blurring the line between commenting on noise pollution vs. infrasound harms. The first one’s real, second one’s fake.

He throws in a wind turbine and makes what I think is a pretty obvious point that the wind turbine isn’t as loud as a train starting up at close range or the world’s busiest airport. He’s doing this in part to distance himself from the anti-wind activists on his side of the infrasound debate. I don’t think he should get to have it both ways here. If he thinks infrasound is a problem, he needs to acknowledge that wind farms create it, and that living near a wind farm exposes you to new levels of infrasound. He can say “that’s bad, but worth it to have the wind farm” or agree with me instead and say “that’s fake, build the wind farm, don’t listen to the cranks” but he shouldn’t get to imply that wind farm infrasound is fine because it’s not as bad as a train at close range. Throughout the rest of the video he’s implied over and over that similar levels of infrasound as wind turbines create are bad for you.

10:25–12:00 - The South Dakota detour

10:25 - But I really wanted to hear clear infrasound far away from any form of human infrastructure. And to do that, we had to drive over 1,500 miles to a particular spot south of Badlands National Park in South Dakota on the Oglala reservation.

10:55 - From where I’m recording, the nearest paved road and infrastructure of any type is about 11 miles away, and it looks like this. So not exactly a teeming metropolis. The sound up here is remarkably quiet.

He drives 1,500 miles across the country, sets up on a remote spot on the Oglala reservation, records almost nothing, and concludes that rural places don’t have much infrasound while cities and suburbs do. He’s implying infrastructure is polluting the world with invisible infrasound, and only in the most remote places can you escape it.

But he’s actually done nothing to legitimately establish that infrasound in cities is causing the symptoms he’s been implying throughout. The contrast he’s trying to draw, rural silence versus urban infrasound poisoning, is not supported either by the scientific consensus or even the consensus of the articles he himself has flashed on the screen so far in this video.

Also, a little petty, but he drives 1,500 miles specifically to make a pseudoscientific point that he could have read about instead. A 1,500-mile drive in an average US passenger vehicle emits roughly 600 kg of CO2. Using middle-of-the-road current estimates for AI energy use, that’s the equivalent emissions of over half a million ChatGPT prompts. I know he’s not talking about environmental impacts of data centers in this video, but given that his data center video leans heavily on climate impact as part of the moral case against them, three or four ChatGPT prompts would have told him rural South Dakota doesn’t have much infrasound.

11:38 - But this does not mean that nature is infrasonically quiet. The earth can produce infrasound that humans can’t even begin to compete with. This distant thunderstorm, for example, made a symphony of various rumbles.

This is an important admission that he glides past. Large-scale natural phenomena like thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes, ocean waves, and wind blowing over terrain, produce infrasound at levels that dwarf anything humans have built. The Earth is and has always been an infrasound-noisy place. Humans evolved and thrived in this environment. It doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective that these sounds would be harmful to us. If ambient infrasound at ordinary levels caused the broad symptom list Jordan describes, every coastal population on Earth would be chronically ill.

12:00 - And there’s some early research and testing on the accuracy of infrasound to detect and predict tornadoes.

This part is actually real, phew! Infrasound can be used to detect and predict tornadoes.

12:08–14:32 - The Yellowstone segment

He then drives to Yellowstone and records infrasound from geysers, hot springs, and the volcanic caldera. This section is pretty, and there’s nothing wrong with it scientifically. These are real sources of real infrasound, and recording them is neat.

14:24–14:49 - The inescapability frame

14:24 - But aside from these extreme places or unusual events, the vast majority of infrasound that the average person is exposed to is caused by infrastructure. And unless you want to live here, there’s little chance that you’ll ever be able to escape it or even significantly reduce it.

This is the rhetorical goal of the road trip. He’s pushing that he went to the most remote place he could find, and only there was it quiet. He’s trying to imply that infrastructure is saturating the world with infrasound you can’t escape, and that’s harming you.

The claim that “the vast majority of infrasound the average person is exposed to is caused by infrastructure” is also just wrong if you include natural sources honestly. Wind, weather, ocean activity (detectable far inland as microbaroms), atmospheric turbulence, and thunderstorms produce enormous amounts of infrasound that propagates long distances. A person in a quiet rural area in the Midwest is constantly bathed in infrasound from distant weather systems, microbaroms from the oceans, and atmospheric gravity waves. The infrastructure-produced component is not clearly dominant in most settings, and it’s a strange claim to make unsupported.

Jordan has already walked viewers through fake papers, a nocebo symptom list, and the Tandy ghost story, so “infrasound is harmful” feels established, and now he can compare the infrasonic silence of nature to big evil loud society. He’s sticking the landing for the basic idea that viewers are being poisoned by something invisible and inescapable. But if we got all the authors of the studies Jordan has cited, they would all agree (except for Vic) that infrasound doesn’t seem to be a problem.

14:49–18:00 - The physics detour and SpaceX launch

Here Jordan gives a physics tutorial on why low-frequency sound propagates farther than high-frequency sound, followed by a demonstration where he uses open seismograph data to track a SpaceX satellite launch across southern California. He shows the launch detected at 3 miles, 6 miles, 27 miles, 60 miles, and eventually over 140 miles away.

The physics is correct, low-frequency sound does travel way farther than high-frequency sound, which is why you can hear distant thunder as a low rumble even when the higher-frequency crack is gone. It’s similar to electromagnetic radio waves, which have a way lower frequency than visible light, and can travel way farther. And a SpaceX rocket launch is, unsurprisingly, a loud infrasound event that can be detected far away.

But it’s doing the same rhetorical work as the tornado and Yellowstone segments. Here is a dramatic infrasound event propagating very long distances, done by Elon, an obvious bad guy (who to be clear I agree is bad). The implication is that this tells us something about how dangerous infrasound propagates through your neighborhood. But SpaceX infrasound doesn’t harm people for the same reason ordinary traffic, weather, and HVAC infrasound doesn’t harm people: even very loud sources, by the time they reach residential distances, are well below any level scientifically shown to cause health effects, and Jordan has produced literally zero evidence to contradict this.

17:18–18:00 - Helmholtz resonance

17:18 - it’s worth pointing out that in many cases, infrasound is actually louder indoors than outdoors, even if the source is coming from outdoors. And this is due to a phenomenon called Helmholtz resonance.

Helmholtz resonance is real, but jumping from “open car windows can throb” to “your house amplifies residential infrasound into something harmful” is a big leap. The phenomenon exists. The idea that Helmholtz resonance in residential buildings makes infrasound loud enough to be harmful is, once again, not supported by any evidence.

18:00–18:56 - The Liverpool Cathedral study

18:00 - In 2003, a group of scientists from the UK National Physical Laboratory held a live musical performance at the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and then took a survey from the audience on how they felt during the music. In some of those music performances, they had a gigantic 23 ft infrasonic cannon tuned to 17.5 hertz, a frequency that didn’t resonate the building in a way where it would shake things or create audible overtones. and they played that tone at 90 dB while some of the music was played to people who were completely oblivious to what was actually going on. It turns out that people were quite a bit more likely to have felt uncomfortable during the performance when the infrasonic tone was playing. And 22% of the audience said that they felt some type of strange or unexplainable effect such as sadness, chills, or even feelings of fear and anxiety.

This is the “Soundless Music” or “Infrasonic” experiment, a 2003 concert at London’s Purcell Room (not Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Jordan has the wrong venue). It drew about 700 attendees and collected 522 questionnaires. This study is often misunderstood as implying that the infrasound caused 22% of people to experience something strange.

The core problems with this result have been covered by infrasound researchers repeatedly. First, no peer-reviewed paper with the underlying data was ever published and there was no control group. Second, the 22% figure reflects the baseline rate of people reporting something strange during evocative music in a dramatic venue. People at concerts report feeling moved, weird, uncomfortable, or spiritually affected all the time, regardless of whether there’s infrasound present. The “22% reported unexplainable effects” statistic reads as impressive out of context but less so when you realize it’s approximately the rate at which people report unusual feelings during evocative music without any infrasound at all. Third, the Goldsmiths Haunt Project (which will be covered next) tested the same hypothesis properly under controlled conditions and found that infrasound exposure did not predict reported experiences, suggestibility did.

18:56–20:16 - The Goldsmiths Haunt Project

18:56 - In yet another study from Goldsmith’s College, four researchers attempted to make a haunted room by filling it with various infrasonic frequencies and EMF or electromagnetic frequencies.

The researchers built a “haunted room” at Goldsmiths College and ran 79 participants through it. Each participant sat alone in the room for 50 minutes. The room had two manipulations they could turn on and off independently: infrasound at 18.9 Hz (the Vic Tandy frequency), and complex electromagnetic fields of the kind that have been proposed as a cause of anomalous experiences. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: infrasound only, EMF only, both, or neither. Everyone was told the room might produce unusual sensations.

After the session, participants filled out a questionnaire about what they’d experienced: feelings of presence, unusual body sensations, dizziness, emotion, anything out of the ordinary. They also completed a standard psychological measure of suggestibility beforehand.

Jordan narrates the study setup accurately, but then he misrepresents what it found.

19:23 - Out of these groups, an average of 3.7 participants in the control group, those sitting in the empty room with nothing unusual happening, had some type of haunted experience. When infrasound was present, this number grew to an average of 5.2 people having a haunted experience.

What Jordan leaves out is the actual finding of the paper. The number of reported experiences was not statistically different across conditions. The authors explicitly concluded that the number of reports was unrelated to experimental condition, and that suggestibility was the most parsimonious explanation for the experiences participants reported. Jordan cites the 5.2 vs 3.7 numbers as if they supported an infrasound effect, but the paper they come from concluded that the effect was not present and that the reports reflected participants’ prior suggestibility, not the physical conditions they were exposed to.

19:48 - Now, in my opinion, the study is fun, but not very well organized and definitely not conclusive.

He hedges on the study’s conclusiveness only after having cited its numbers in a way that implies the opposite of what it found. The hedge is positioned so the viewer walks away with the 5.2 vs 3.7 number in their head and a vague sense that “the science isn’t settled but it’s suggestive” when the actual published conclusion was that infrasound did not explain the reports.

This is yet another massive misrepresentation of a scientific paper in the video. The paper’s authors specifically tested Jordan’s hypothesis, found it was not supported, concluded suggestibility was the explanation, and published this. Jordan presents the paper as if it found the opposite.

20:16–End - The gear section

The final third of the video is a discussion of his microphone setups, the Raspberry Shake seismograph, accelerometers, and a mention of his “hum” video. This section doesn’t make any big new scientific claims about infrasound harming humans. I’m mainly worried this is yet another way to look more scientific and legitimate.

Conclusion

In a single 25-minute video about how infrasound is bad, Benn Jordan cited as evidence:

• A survey of farm equipment that noted infrasound is safe at levels 100,000x what we experience even in noise polluted areas.

• A WHO document about noise pollution that doesn’t mention infrasound.

• A Finnish government project whose final report is titled Infrasound Does Not Explain Symptoms Related to Wind Turbines.

• A NIOSH workplace report that explicitly says the sound levels it measured aren’t known to cause harm and attributes the workers’ symptoms to annoyance and a psychological contract breach.

• A literature review exclusively about the bad effects of audible low-frequency noise.

• A survey checklist of symptoms as if it were the symptoms subjects actually reported having.

• A study of wind turbine maintenance workers at 60 to 83 dBA of audible occupational noise.

• A study of people living near oil and gas drilling and getting mad at the 80 dBC audible noise.

• A heart-muscle paper demolished by two peer-reviewed responses linked from the top of the page he screenshotted, which found the results were caused by vibrating tweezers, that the acoustic dose was matched by a single breaststroke, and that the intensity used was hundreds of thousands of times above anything in a home.

• “Animal research” that turns out to be vibroacoustic disease, a hypothetical condition published almost entirely by two authors citing each other for forty years and rejected by every mainstream medical body.

• A parapsychology essay written as a personal anecdote by a guy primed by ghost stories, and its sequel, which mainly interviewed self-described witches in a cellar already advertised as haunted at sound levels 50 dB below the perception threshold, and found that they felt somewhat uneasy.

• An experiment that found no effect, but Jordan presents it as having an effect.

• A study that found 22% of people at a concert with evocative music had strange experiences.

• NASA work on eyeball resonance frequencies without mentioning that these harms only appear when you are literally inside a rocket.

The running theme across every study that actually addresses it is that the symptoms people report are real but not caused by infrasound. They’re driven by expectation, annoyance, context, and suggestibility, which is the signature of a nocebo.

He implicitly analogized infrasound to UV light instead of the obviously more comparable infrared light. He used Helmholtz resonance to imply buildings amplify residential infrasound until its harmful without giving any actual evidence of harm. He called infrasound “grossly understudied” when it’s one of the most thoroughly studied topics in noise research. He implied the fossil fuel industry suppressed infrasound research when the fossil fuel industry is in fact the main funder of the pseudoscience he’s promoting. He claimed fracking infrasound needs its own dedicated research before we can conclude anything, despite fracking causing the same levels of infrasound as a ton of other sources.

He told viewers he had a separate video explaining the politics of all this. In that video he inverts the replication crisis, dismisses relying on credentialed scientists as “a really poor or weak scientific argument,” calls institutional gatekeeping a bigger threat to science than replication failures, and presents his own n=1 wheatgrass result as meaningful.

He drove 1,500 miles, emitting the CO₂ equivalent of half a million ChatGPT queries, to record silence in rural South Dakota and make a point he could have established with a Wikipedia search. He acknowledged on camera that the Earth produces infrasound that dwarfs anything humans have built, and then concluded that human infrastructure is saturating the world with harmful infrasound we cannot escape.

And this is, from what I can tell, the lead-in to what I think is the most popular piece of media made about data centers in 2026 so far.

Which brings us to the second video.

Second video - Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons

Well now we can finally talk about data centers I guess.

I’m going to work through this in roughly the order of the video, but it’ll be useful to separate three things that Jordan deliberately runs together:

1. Audible noise pollution from data centers, which is real and harmful.

2. Ambient infrasound from data centers, which his own data shows is unremarkable. This is a fake problem.

3. The symptoms residents are reporting, which are real, but whose cause is the audible noise plus stress, not the infrasound.

The video’s central move is to associate 3 with 2, whereas in fact it’s all caused by 1

0:00–1:29 - Intro

0:00 - If you’re in the demographic of people who generally get recommended my videos, then chances are that you are not a fan of data centers.

As I said at the start of this post, he’s using this nuance as a credibility shield. It works on viewers because it reads as a signal that he’s willing to acknowledge nuance, but it’s really a way of pre-buying permission to make crazy uncharitable claims about an industry the audience already dislikes.

1:04 - Spoiler alert, the results are terrifying.

Spoiler alert, they reduce to random statistical noise in a terribly designed study by Jordan

1:36 - regardless of where your ethical, environmental, political, or economic interests are, if a data center is being built nearby your home, you’re generally kind of f*****.

Obviously I disagree. Data centers (with a few exceptions, like xAI, which comes up later in this video) mostly don’t seem to have harmed people. I don’t think the citizens of Loudoun County, one of the top 5 wealthiest counties in the country and home to the most data center capacity in the world, are “generally kind of fucked.”

1:56 - Last year I started hearing about some mysterious and troubling symptoms from people who live nearby newly constructed data centers

Jordan seems somewhat addicted to flashing completely unrelated studies on the screen.

This time he flashes a Dutch survey of 190 people who self-identify as experiencing a perceptible low-frequency hum in their environment, compared to 371 people who don’t. The researchers didn’t measure any sound in anyone’s home. They didn’t establish that the complainants were even actually being exposed to what they thought they were perceiving. They didn’t test causation.

Most importantly, they didn’t mention data centers once.

What the paper does document is that the complainants are disproportionately older and introverted, which is the exact demographic signature of other “environmental sensitivity” syndromes where the attributed cause has repeatedly failed controlled testing. The paper’s own authors explicitly acknowledge that “non-acoustic factors including sociodemographic and individual characteristics or personality constitute substantial predictors for reactions to noise.” This is likely a nocebo, and Jordan once again takes a paper that documents self-reports and presents it as a paper that proves causation.

He then flashes the symptoms list on the screen as he says this. You would think that if someone is saying “symptoms from people who live nearby newly constructed data centers” and is flashing a list of symptoms on the screen, those people would live near data centers, or the study would focus on this in some way. But you’d be wrong!

2:07 - I started looking into seismograph readings from around the country, and there was enough correlation for me to dig pretty deep into an area of research I already had some experience in

Consider what that first video was like, this is the “experience” he’s referring to.

It’s true that data centers register on seismographs. So do rail lines, highways, hospitals, college campuses, shopping malls, factories, power stations, and large intersections. I suspect he’s going to draw some bad inferences.

2:24–3:22 - The symptom list, round two

2:24 - Being in the presence of elevated levels of infrasound has been shown to show spikes in cortisol levels... It can cause vestibular issues leading to loss of balance, vertigo and nausea. Then there’s something called vibroacoustic disease which suggests that infrasound can cause abnormal growth of extracellular matrices... It’s been shown to cause high frequency hearing loss, shortness of breath, anxiety, depression, and it even makes your heart have to work harder to pump blood.

He’s flashing the same study from last time that only measured audible low-frequency sound, not infrasound. Great! He’s doing the same trick of flashing a bunch of highlighted words without making it clear these are all about audible sounds. He seems more confident than last time. He also references the disproved heart study.

“Has been shown” is carrying most of the weight. Every one of these claims is either true only at audible levels orders of magnitude above ambient, drawn from the VAD literature that no medical body accepts, or flat-out contradicted by the controlled studies he himself flashed on screen in the first video. Literally everything he cited last time either contradicted these claims, didn’t address them at all, or was published in a journal about ghosts.

In the last video Jordan didn’t explicitly mention VAD pseudoscience, he just vaguely referenced it as animal studies, so he’s escalated in mentioning it directly here. Again, VAD is the pet theory of a small Portuguese research group whose work has not been replicated and which the peer-reviewed acoustics literature has specifically assessed as unproven.

2:57 - So, it’s not like this anxiety-based or obsessive compulsive thing where an unpleasant feeling or an unusual situation makes you manifest symptoms. We know that infrasound can tangibly harm your health in a very real and measurable way.

As we saw in the last section, we don’t know this at all. Basically all the literature Jordan cited in the last video said the opposite of what he claims here. He just flashed all the same sources again that all show completely unrelated results to what he’s implying or aren’t respected in the broader literature at all and rely on circular citations.

Here he’s more directly rejecting the nocebo explanation, whereas in the last video he at least passively mentioned it. He’s now implying this is established science. He’s telling the viewer, in advance, that anyone who raises nocebo is essentially accusing people who were harmed of making things up. This is what you’d expect from someone who knows the nocebo explanation is the most supported one: shield the claim behind real victims.

4:06–9:10 - xAI’s Colossus

xAI’s Colossus is a massive outlier among data centers, and there are a lot of real, widely-covered problems with it. The biggest is that it ran up to 35 unpermitted methane gas turbines for roughly a year as primary power generation, behaving like an unregulated mid-sized gas power plant in an already heavily polluted poor neighborhood. The methane turbines, the local air quality impacts on Boxtown, the nitrogen oxide emissions, and the permitting problems are all real, well-documented problems.

As a quick aside he also cites xAI using a lot of water, but doesn’t give a frame of reference for how much it is and just zooms up on a depleted water source. In reality, Memphis has some of the lowest water bills in the world, their water bills haven’t risen as a result of xAI, and Memphis isn’t considered a water stressed-area.

But none of the problems with xAI are about infrasound, and lies about infrasound cheapen the real harm people experienced.

7:46 – The lowest of rumbles is peeking out at like -28. And then if we go down to infrasound, the infrasound that you can’t hear is like 10 dB louder than that.

He’s reporting levels in what looks like digital audio reference (dBFS) rather than sound pressure level in the environment. Without a way to understand how he’s measuring sound, you cannot convert arbitrary recording levels into absolute sound levels, and he isn’t showing his method anywhere. When he says “infrasound is 10 dB louder than [audible rumble],” we don’t know what absolute level that represents in the environment. The entire infrasound literature is about absolute exposure levels. Relative ones aren’t useful here, and 10 dB above an uncalibrated reference tells you nothing about whether the infrasound is near the threshold of where we can hear it.

Of course infrasound is louder than the audible component at distance. Low frequencies propagate better than high frequencies. The lower the frequency, the less it diminishes over distance and the better it passes through walls. The ratio of low-to-high energy always increases as you move away from any industrial source. He made this clear himself in the brief wave physics section of his last vide.

8:02 – This in particular is a great example of how higher frequency sounds are dampened by distance much more than lower frequency or infrasonic ones.

Yes, correct. But notice what he does next: uses this correct physics observation to imply that infrasound is doing something special and harmful at distance, when all the physics actually shows is that low frequencies dominate at distance. What matters for our health is exclusively audible sound. He has yet to actually demonstrate any harms from infrasounds, but this entire video will now just assume infrasounds are harmful, resting on the terrible edifice he constructed in the last video.

8:26 – This rumbling is no good and would make your life utterly miserable. And then this rumble down here is happening at an amplitude that’s loud enough to shake the frame of your house.

If infrasound were actually shaking the frame of a house, that would be an extraordinary claim and easily falsifiable. It would also be perceived as a rumbling vibration by residents. He provides no measurements to support the “shake the frame” claim, and none of the residents interviewed mention their homes shaking. There has never been any accusation at all that Colossus shakes nearby houses.

8:44 – Okay. So, I’m going to delete everything above 20 hertz here. So, all audible frequencies. And now we’re only left with the infrasound. Now, I’m going to interpret the sample rate four times faster. And I’m going to make it even four times faster than that.

Same trick as the beginning of the first video. If you speed up infrasound and make it audible, it sound ominous. Just like if you look at the infrared light coming from your dog, your dog looks evil. It’s not evidence that the specific source he’s recording near is producing unusual infrasound. It’s evidence that infrasound exists, which no one disputes.

The xAI section is him listing a bunch of real harms, water, and then doing a bunch of fancy tricks with fancy but inaccessible sound terminology and equipment to support his unrelated baseless conspiracy theory.

9:10–15:18 - MARA / Granbury

Noise pollution from the Marathon Digital / MARA Bitcoin mine in Hood County has caused well-documented harm to nearby residents. Cheryl Shadden’s experience is real. The family whose daughter had seizures and whose symptoms resolved after they moved is real, and I’m not going to second-guess what they went through.

What I am going to push back on is Jordan’s causal story. He’s going to take these people’s real terrible experience with noise pollution and imply it’s about his crazy conspiracy theory instead.

10:15 – While the noise pollution is described as a 70 to 90 decibel jet engine-like sound, a large number of reports site symptoms ranging from vertigo to pulmonary embolisms to heart palpitations.

70–90 dB sustained is awful. Chronic exposure at those levels sits above the threshold at which WHO guidelines associate environmental noise with cardiovascular disease, sleep disruption, and a range of stress-related outcomes. These effects are well-documented in the science of audible noise pollution and do not require any infrasound to explain. A family living across the street from a 70–90 dB jet-engine-like sound will absolutely experience vertigo, heart palpitations, anxiety, sleep disruption, and cascading health problems. The MARA case is an audible noise pollution disaster.

10:39 – Sustained audible noise pollution can be a blight on any living thing nearby. But a lot of these symptoms don’t line up with the symptoms of just noise pollution exposure.

This is just completely wrong. The symptoms he lists, like vertigo, heart palpitations, anxiety, sleep disruption, and nausea, are exactly the canonical symptoms of chronic environmental noise exposure. There is a massive literature on this going back to the 1970s. Every major environmental health textbook describe this symptom cluster as the expected health consequence of chronic exposure to 70–90 dB environmental noise. He’s just lying here.

At 11:39 he starts playing more scary clips of sped up infrasound, with no evidence this is harming anyone, after leading in about how the residents told him about the real effects of noise pollution. What a dumb way to hide a baseless conspiracy theory behind people’s real suffering.

The residents of Granbury are suffering from real terrible noise pollution. Infrasound adds nothing to the explanation, and Jordan’s last video gave us not a single reason to believe it’s real in the 25 minutes it runs.

13:08 – Like, what physical symptoms have you felt just from your property being directly across the street from the data center? Motion sickness, dizziness, nausea, GI side effects. My ears ring and buzz. I’ve got permanent conduction hearing loss now. Um, nervous, anxious, worried.

Every symptom Cheryl describes is well-documented as a consequence of chronic high-level environmental noise exposure. The conduction hearing loss in particular is a direct audible-noise injury. There’s no good evidence that infrasound causes hearing loss. Jordan presents these symptoms as mysterious that infrasound can explain, but they’re not mysterious at all.

13:24 - Cheryl thought that I was just doing a story on the noise pollution as I was keeping my infrasound research close to my sleeve.

Okay, so this guy nods along to this person who was harmed by very real noise pollution, and lists classic symptoms of real noise pollution, and then adds “Oh by the way, I didn’t tell her that I’m actually just interviewing her to promote my bullshit unrelated conspiracy theory that I’ve never found a single good source to justify, and I’m just nodding along and am going to lie about her symptoms actually being caused by this other thing.” This is terrible! He lied to this real victim of noise pollution.

13:32 - Yet, every single one of these symptoms is commonly associated with excessive infrasound exposure.

Here the sleight of hand becomes explicit. He’s asserting that because the symptoms overlap with the infrasound horoscope-list, they must be caused by infrasound. But the symptoms also overlap, far more completely and with actual mechanistic support, with chronic audible noise exposure, which is unambiguously what’s happening at Cheryl’s property. The correct inference from “Cheryl has symptoms X, Y, Z while living across from a 70–90 dB jet-engine-sound source” is “chronic audible noise exposure produces those symptoms,” not “there must be a hidden inaudible cause.”

14:03 – One family, their daughter was 6 years old. She started having seizures in the summer of 24... they basically walked away from their home here, took out a second mortgage, moved to Somerville County... If you know, has her symptoms kind of gotten better since she’s left? They went away.

The family’s experience is real and terrible. But did infrasound cause the seizures? Chronic sleep disruption from audible noise in a young child can trigger a wide range of neurological symptoms, including lowered seizure thresholds in predisposed children. Severe family stress from a noise-blighted home can too. Moving to a quiet environment resolves the audible noise exposure, the sleep disruption, the household stress, and any potential infrasound exposure all simultaneously. The case is entirely consistent with audible noise and stress being the cause. It provides no evidence for infrasound specifically. Jordan’s never produced any actually good evidence that infrasound causes seizures.

Presenting this family’s story as evidence of an infrasound mechanism is both scientifically unjustified and strategically unhelpful to families in their situation, because it directs the legal and regulatory conversation toward a fake mechanism rather than the obvious provable one: MARA is producing 70–90 dB of environmental noise pollution at residential property lines, and that alone is enough to make people sick.

I really don’t like that he flashed a quick out of context clip of this woman at the very beginning of the video to imply that infrasound caused her problems.

15:18–17:58 - The Permian Basin

This section accidentally undercuts the video’s central claim.

17:32 - But while the infrasound levels were nowhere close to ideal, they still weren’t as bad as they were near the data centers in Memphis or Granbury.

A region with thousands of earthquakes per year, massive industrial fracking operations, and oil and gas infrastructure as far as the eye can see produces less infrasound than two specific data centers? Come on.

Fracking, large pipelines, oil rig drilling, and induced seismicity all produce vastly more low-frequency energy than cooling fans and generators. If Jordan’s measurements show otherwise, the most likely explanations are measurement artifacts from uncalibrated or differently-positioned microphones across sites, wind loading differences on the recording equipment, or distance differences between measurement locations he isn’t controlling for. Ridiculous.

17:39 - The infrasound levels at these two data centers were so much higher than the ambient values that it doesn’t even make practical sense to use a linear scale like 25,000% higher.

“25,000% higher” is a red flag. In physical acoustics, a 25,000% increase in pressure amplitude is roughly 48 dB, which would put the data center sites far above any residential or rural baseline anywhere in the developed world, including large airports, freeway interchanges, and active industrial sites. This is not plausible for ordinary data center cooling or power delivery, the main way they make sound,. A much more likely explanation: his baseline (Death Valley, random indoor hotel rooms, etc.) is at or below the noise floor of his measurement equipment, while his site recordings are well above it. Dividing “real signal” by “noise floor” gives you any number you want.

This is a recurring issue with amateur infrasound measurements. The noise floor of affordable infrasound-capable equipment is not zero, and the apparent ratio of “loud site” to “quiet baseline” is dominated by the noise floor of the gear. Published peer-reviewed data center acoustic measurements do not find anything remotely like 48 dB elevations over ambient at residential distances.

He’s an audio engineer. He knows what he’s doing here.

17:58–23:15 - The experiment

This is the centerpiece of the video, and is a disastrously bad experiment. I’ll walk through the problems one at a time because each one independently invalidates the claimed findings, and the combination is devastating.

Problem 1: The “haunted painting” priming

19:17 - I improvised a new story of why the owl painting was known to be haunted... I told them that the audio recording that they would be listening to was known to be haunted. I had them sit in this enclosed room while studying the painting and listening to the music for 3 minutes while paying attention to how they felt physically and emotionally.

He has pre-primed every single participant to expect unusual sensory or emotional experiences. This is exactly the Crichton-Petrie nocebo-priming paradigm from the first-video writeup, and it’s been shown repeatedly to produce symptoms on its own, regardless of whether any stimulus is present. His rationale (that varying the story randomizes a bias variable) is wrong. Randomizing the specifics of the priming across groups does not eliminate the priming. I’m confused about why he’s doing this.

A correct design would have one group primed negatively and one group given neutral or no priming, the way Crichton and Petrie actually did it. His design has no unprimed group. Every subject walks in expecting something weird to happen.

Problem 2: He isn’t blind

20:10 - And unless I saw water vibrating in a bottle or something, I often didn’t know if the infrasound was on or off myself.

“Often didn’t know” is not good enough. A study is double-blind when the experimenter does not know the condition, full stop, not when they usually don’t. If the experimenter can sometimes tell what’s up, it’s possible that their behavior, facial expressions, tone, and subtle cueing can leak information. And Jordan explicitly says he can tell via the vibrations. A real study would have a separate operator running the stimulus, ideally out of the room, with the experimenter truly unaware of condition until after data collection.

Problem 3: The stimulus itself

18:04 - I needed to figure out a way to reproduce the infrasound waves at 25 to 30% of the volume or amplitude near the data centers.

He’s playing back infrasound through “a gigantic specialized subwoofer in the room.” Commercial subwoofers, even specialized ones, do not reproduce sub-20 Hz content cleanly. They produce substantial harmonic distortion, port noise, cabinet resonance, and mechanical rattle, all of which show up as audible artifacts above 20 Hz that subjects can hear and that will absolutely affect their reported experience. Without a measurement showing the actual acoustic output in the room across the full spectrum, you cannot claim that subjects were exposed to “infrasound” specifically rather than to audible distortion products from an overdriven subwoofer.

His own video gives this away:

20:23 - Just put my DJI gimbal on the ground here. And Jeez, it’s kind of scary.

This implies the room is shaking. If the room is shaking, subjects can detect when the infrasound is on or off, and are probably going to feel weirder when it’s on.

Problem 4: The self-selection filter

21:33 - The experiment had over a 100 participants, but I disqualified anyone who missed a survey question or someone who seemed suspicious or said that they felt a vibration or where I was privy to whether the infrasound was on or off.

He dropped subjects who “seemed suspicious” or who reported feeling a vibration, based on his own after-the-fact judgment. I’m worried that “Seemed suspicious” is way too much of a subjective call by Jordan, who seems to have a bias in wanting the experiment to show results. And removing subjects who reported feeling a vibration specifically removes the subjects who noticed the confound identified in Problem 3, which is exactly the wrong direction of exclusion. Those are the subjects whose data is the most informative about what’s actually happening in the room.

We also don’t know how many of the original 100+ were dropped, which groups they were in, or what the results look like with them included. A valid pilot reports intention-to-treat results. This one doesn’t.

Problem 5: The effect sizes are tiny and the framing is misleading

To his credit, Jordan half-acknowledges this:

23:58 - the 33% more likely to experience nausea metric, the viewer may imagine a room with 100 people in it and then 33 of them experiencing nausea, which is very much not the case. The average nausea feeling score from 0 to 10 that each user put in for infrasound is 1.2. For the control group, it’s 0.9.

This is “33% increase” from 0.9 to 1.2 on a 0-10 scale. This is an 0.3 difference, in a sample of 74 with no correction for multiple comparisons across what appears to be a dozen or more possible symptoms, in a room where people can probably feel the floor vibrating when the infrasound is on. This is noise. These are the results that caused him to say at the beginning that “the results are terrifying.” He’s even misrepresenting the results of his own study.

24:55 - the average score in the control group for discomfort was 1.2. The average score for discomfort in the infrasound group was 4.8.

A 1.2-to-4.8 shift on a 10-point scale is a large effect, if it’s real. But consider what “discomfort” means in a room where a subwoofer is physically shaking the floor hard enough to move a DJI gimbal, where subjects have been told the space is haunted, where they’ve been warned the audio is spooky, and where the experimenter may sometimes know the condition and cue accordingly. The combo of all of these seems like the clear cause of the “discomfort,” not inaudible infrasound.

The discomfort result is exactly what you’d predict based on the nocebo studies. Prime people negatively, then give half of them a perceptible physical stimulus like a vibration they can feel through the floor or audible subwoofer distortion and they will report more discomfort.

With a dozen comparisons in an n=74 study, you expect chance alone to produce several “significant” differences. There’s no correction, no pre-registration of primary outcomes, no null-hypothesis framing. Some of the results point the “wrong” direction for his hypothesis (infrasound subjects were less creeped out and less spiritual) and he offers a post-hoc story to explain those away while treating the ones that point his way as meaningful.

Problem 6: Multiple comparisons

He reports roughly a dozen outcome measures (tingling, pain, tiredness, nausea, dizziness, creeped-out, spiritual, chills, irritability, eye irritation, lethargy, anxiety, sadness, discomfort), finds a spread of increases and decreases, and presents the increases as findings. With a dozen comparisons in an n=74 study, you expect several “significant” differences by chance alone. There is no correction, no pre-registration of primary outcomes, no null-hypothesis framing. Some of the results point the “wrong” direction for his hypothesis. Infrasound subjects were less creeped out and less spiritual, and he offers a post-hoc story to explain those away while treating the ones that point his way as meaningful.

What the experiment actually shows

If you prime a group of synthesizer-convention attendees by telling them a painting is haunted and some audio is spooky, then expose half of them to a subwoofer producing enough mechanical vibration to visibly shake objects in the room, the exposed group will report more discomfort and dizziness on a survey. This doesn’t tell us anything about data center infrasound. Jordan is just accidentally reproducing the nocebo literature.

23:15–25:43 - YouTube data vs research data

I’ll give him credit for this section, which is better than I expected. The acknowledgment that “33% more likely” on small absolute numbers isn’t meaningful is the right methodological instinct. The nausea shift from 0.9 to 1.2 on a 0–10 scale is, as he notes, not a room with 33 of 100 people vomiting. The recognition that the eye-irritation result is underpowered is correct. If the rest of the video had been pitched at this level of honesty, it would be a very different artifact.

But notice the structure: he does the methodological self-criticism after spending most of the video making the strong version of the claim, and he still ends up leaning on discomfort and dizziness as “profound” findings without acknowledging that those are precisely the measures most likely to be contaminated by the priming and the vibration confound. The honesty is real but selective. He applies it where it protects him from the “33% nausea” line being read literally, but not to the deeper question of whether his protocol measures what he claims.

25:13 - When reviewing that data, it’s hard for even the most skeptical person to come to any other conclusion than the presence of elevated levels of infrasound is likely to lower your quality of life.

Very very very very easy for the skeptical person, actually. The skeptical person concludes: priming produces reported discomfort, perceptible subwoofer vibration produces reported dizziness, and an unblinded single-operator study with post-hoc subject exclusion at a synthesizer convention is not a basis for policy claims about data center health effects.

25:43–end - The call to action

27:12 - Prior to this experiment, I feel like we have seen more than enough data to make infrasound monitoring and regulation just as important as air or water quality.

NOOOOOOOOOO!

Outdoor air pollution kills 4 million people every year. This sentence is elevating a fringe belief with zero evidence to the same level as one of the single largest killers on the planet. Crazy. After 40+ minutes of this guy misrepresenting studies and concepts almost by the second, this moment really made me lose it.

27:21 - Especially when you look at the studies pertaining to the cardiovascular effects, it’s a very real environmental hazard that has been poorly understood and grossly understudied.

Another repeat of his false claim that infrasound is “grossly understudied.” There are no good studies that imply cardiovascular effects. It’s fake.

28:21 - Now would be a great time to set up something like a Raspberry Shake and start storing a daily log of seismic and infrasonic activity. Because the vast majority of the responses to complaints and lawsuits is that there is no way of proving whether the infrasound wasn’t already present before construction.

If communities want to collect baseline acoustic data in advance of data center construction, fine, go ahead. I agree with critics of data centers that they often haven’t been careful about audible noise pollution, that this has caused real quality-of-life harm, and that communities should be able to monitor it.

But communities shouldn’t monitor infrasound for the same reason they shouldn’t monitor wifi signals over fears about wifi-intolerance or cancer. There’s no evidence for either. Monitoring would just waste everyday people’s time and leave them more confused and paranoid when they realized how much infrasound is around normally. It’s like hyping people up about the dangers of infrared light and sending them out to test it themselves. They’ll find a lot!

Conclusion

I found this second video to be way more objectionable than the first. Even though the first had nonstop lies about what every study flashed on the screen said, at least it didn’t have interviews with victims of real noise pollution Jordan was trying to use as evidence of his unrelated baseless conspiracy theory instead without even telling them. I found that pretty gross. I was also repulsed by his comparison of infrasound to outdoor air pollution, one of the great global killers right now.

My claim remains strong. Infrasound harms are fake, data centers or otherwise. People should focus on the real problems of noise pollution and not give an inch to baseless conspiracy theories promoted by chill-seeming guys using fancy-sounding technical terms and unrelated studies flashed on the screen to trick millions of viewers. Infrasounds have been used by all kinds of bad actors to oppose things we should all agree are good, like wind farms. Let’s not give the crazies more power here.

Some stray thoughts

If infrasound exposure near data centers caused this much harm, wouldn’t the absolute worst off people be people working in data centers themselves? They’re in the belly of the beast of data center infrasound, many have been working in data centers for way longer than the current buildout’s been happening, and it’s very easy to identify who works in data centers. They seem like the ideal people to look at for data center infrasound effects, but never get a mention.

There’s a lot of social permission to treat data centers as boogeymen right now

Misinformation is not always easy to identify based on the speaker. If someone looks and acts like Alex Jones, my alarm bells go off, but if someone presents themselves as a well-rounded everyday person who just wants to criticize giant powerful corporations and does it in a chill way, it’s much easier to nod along and not be as alert to ways they might be wrong. More importantly, a lot of people don’t seem to think it’s even worth worrying about the specifics of how they might be wrong if they’re targeting bad people. Who cares about the specific ways data center critics are getting things wrong? Data centers are evil. Jordan is clearly taking full advantage of this and knows that this will get him lots of views.

I think wind farm misinformation is obviously way way worse than data center misinformation. I’d much rather build a wind farm than a data center. But there are two key points here:

• Promoting pseudoscience is like releasing a biological weapon. It’s going to have broad unexpected effects on everything, including things you might like and support. I do not want more infrasound pseudoscience in the world. It will make a lot of people a little more dumb and neurotic and unable to consider real trade-offs well, and cause them to oppose a lot of things I want to see built out, especially wind turbines.

• Decisions about the environment are incredibly complicated, and involve a huge amount of trade-offs. If a pharmaceutical plant or a car factory is proposed near you, it’s important seriously weigh both the real upsides and downsides of both. There are places where building either could help a local community, and places where it can harm it, and getting the real benefits and avoiding the real harms involves understanding very nuanced details of where specifically the harms and benefits are. Throwing pseudoscience into the conversation just incapacitates people from making good decisions. I don’t want people to think of data centers like wind turbines, but I do want them to think of them like they do pharma plants or car factories: things with upsides and downsides that might in specific places be good or bad for local communities.

I want to ask Jordan and his audience “Why do you feel the need to be a goofy goober about this? There’s plenty of trade-offs to worry about with data centers and AI. xAI’s Colossus is a great example of a way a data center harmed people with air pollution, a real and terrible general problem. Why not just make a video about that? Why flatly make things up? Don’t you want to empower your side to know where the actual problems are? Don’t you want to treat your audience like friends and adults, who you wouldn’t lie to and want to empower to think seriously about the world?”

I’d like more people to think of pseudoscience and misrepresenting studies the way Batman thinks about guns.

As data centers become boogeymen for more people, who start to see them as encapsulations of everything wrong in society more broadly, there’s going to be more and more incentive to add on more fake issues, and I think this is mostly just going to incapacitate people from thinking more seriously about the downsides and upsides of the largest industrial buildout of my lifetime and maybe the most consequential new technology.