NOISE

To avoid attracting the undead to your location you should make as little noise as possible – of course, we all know that.

You will also have to rely more heavily on your senses during the apocalypse. For instance, being able to recognise particular noises will be a skill that will be invaluable to you when attempting to survive.

A zombie’s guttural moan is quite distinctive. It is not known whether the noise is made on purpose or whether it is merely caused by the air passing through its slowly rotting vocal chords. But a zombie does make this noise and if you hear it, you will know that a member of the undead is nearby.

You may think it will be easy to recognise this particular sound and you’re probably right. When you’re in the middle of a deserted city and you hear a moan,ou can pretty much guarantee that it will be a zombie heading in your direction… Or will it? Could it be another wounded survivor moaning in pain? You wouldn’t want to call off a scavenging mission to collect food that could save your team from death just because you heard an old man groaning about a cramped leg.

It is true that the groans of the undead will sound very similar to the groans of a human being – but if we listen very carefully to the two you will notice a distinct difference.

Tests have been carried out on how the vocal chords operate and once they begin to degrade they operate in a different way. Now, I’m not exactly sure how this is going to translate to the written word, but believe me, when you listen to the examples it’s quite obvious to hear the tonal differences between healthy vocal chords operating and dead ones.

A healthy human moaning in pain would sound like this: Ooooooh. Whereas a zombie would sound like this: Oooooourgh.

…this isn’t really working, is it? Perhaps if you tried to emulate the sounds as they’re written… No…no, that’s no good. Look, I’m just going to have to finish this segment here. What started off as quite a serious point has just been turned into a complete mockery. Maybe if you did your own tests on degraded vocal chords that might help. Just go down the hospital and see if you can borrow a cadaver. Hey! Look! I’m just trying to salvage my point here! Don’t look at me like that! Fine, we’ll just skip it – zombie noises aren’t that important anyway.