This is the story of Lavender Town's missing frequencies that is about friends Anthony and Intrawl who enjoyed Pokémon dearly..

The Story

{C}I met my best friend in elementary school. We had both brought our Gameboys to school one day and sat together at lunch once we realized what we had in common. I had Blue version and a Venausaur, he had Red version and a Charizard. He and I battled whenever we could and became great pals. As the years went on, we continued playing Pokémon, even through high school. Throughout all of the Pokémon generations and versions we went though, the battles never became dull.

As we approached college, we had to go separate ways. We didn't speak much after that; we had such busy lives to follow in college. I didn't think we would ever regain the friendship we once had. Then, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl were released in 2007 and we once again enjoyed our common interest in the series. We battled and talked over Wi-Fi nearly every day for a few weeks after its release. My friend told me that he planned to play through his old Red version again. Since it had been about three months after the release of Diamond and Pearl, we didn't play them as much as before. I asked him why he wanted to play that dusty old cartridge, and he responded, "I don't know, maybe I'll find something that no one has found before."

Despite my unwillingness to run through my Blue version with him, he played his Red version anyway. After he started his journey, I never talked to him again. About three weeks later, I received a call from my friend's parents.

Even though he never had any similar problems before, he died from what was speculated to be an intense seizure. He was alone in his dorm room until a roommate, who was unfortunately too late, found him lying on the ground, lifeless, and strangely wearing his favorite headphones. I flew out as soon as I could to attend his funeral. His roommate, who was going to attend as well, informed me that just days before the incident my friend was becoming obsessed with Lavender Town and its music. My friend had aspired to become a sound engineer after graduating and had a wide range of audio skills at his disposal. He could always hear quiet sounds vividly while I failed to even recognize them at all.

As soon as he rediscovered Lavender Town, he ripped its audio to his computer and began experimenting with it. Interestingly, he bragged about finding a rare rip of the music from the first distributed batch of the Japanese-exclusive Green version. Not specifically referring to the special Japanese version, he had told the roommate that, "The frequencies in this song are different; they blend together in a special way. But there's something missing. I think something was meant to be mixed in, but it never could have worked on the Gameboy. It was so limited in terms of sound bandwidth." I had the chance to go through his laptop one last time, so I visited his Recent Items list. At the very top read "lavender.wav".

Along with a few photos of us together, I copied this to my flash drive. Caught in my sadness over my best friend's death, I ignored the audio file until a few weeks before writing this. I somehow recently decided that I needed to retrace what had happened. Driven by my desire to know what caused his untimely death, I opened the properties dialog box for the audio file, without opening the file to listen to it. Within the comments section of the metadata, he had written, "binaural tones, i added the necessary frequencies, i know why lavender town sounds so sad, and i know the part that was missing". Even eerier, I looked in his default audio program (still without listening to the file) and found the playcount for this file. One. I chatted with a sound enthusiast online in hope to decipher these cryptic comments. He gave me some special software which would analyze the audio in real time and said that was the most that could be done. This video is a screen recording of me running the aforementioned software with the original audio file. To this day I have not listened to the actual audio, as I am too emotionally disturbed by my best friend, Anthony's, death.

Lavender Town's Missing Frequencies Music

Lavender Town 2(10:58)
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The Logical but Impossible to Prove

"so i downloaded this audio from the link on youtube and downloaded a spectrogram which is a visual audio analyzer like the one in the video. you can get it yourself by googling "electronics lab spectrogram". when analyzed, the ghosts/unown at 3:03 and at 8:53 do indeed appear on the spectrogram. now, this spectrogram is pretty cheap (by cheap i mean free and not as cool as the one on the video) so you can only see the ghost and "leave" spelt by unowns and the rest is cut off but that's proof enough for me at least that the images are indeed in the audio file given on YouTube.

you must understand that this is not the original lavender town audio released by Pokémon. it is an altered version.

anthony hacked his game and ripped the original lavender town audio onto his computer. this is the "rare rip of the music from the first distributed batch."

if you don't already know, this version of lavender town was edited for the American re-release. this is because when the first batch was distributed in Japan, the song in lavender town had super high frequencies or notes, inaudible to adults, that gave the kids headaches that led to 200+ suicides. anthony did not know this.

being an aspiring audio engineer, i'm sure he had a copy of some sort of spectrogram program to throw his copy of the original lavender town tune on for analysis.

now the way the spectrogram works is it's a multi-line chart of frequencies or notes over time. it's like garageband, with horizontal lines marking the notes on a blank background. imagine making a filled in circle with parallel horizontal lines only. now imagine each line as a note on the piano, the higher the line, the higher the note. now somewhere in the middle of the circle, cut the necessary notes to make a happy face.

it is very easy to make simple pictures in the spectrogram, even though the result would be a bunch of cluttered notes at the same time. this is why the sound he used is sort of a whisper or a static so the different frequencies aren't as distinguishable and doesn't get too distorted.

but it is these images you are seeing in this video. anthony made these pictures that you see within the song by adding sounds to the song. ghosts and unown are remarkable pieces. these extra sounds are extremely easy to detect, if you have any kind of decent speakers/headset.

most of the song, a loud low note bellows in the background. this is called a binaural tone, and this is what anthony added to the song. the tone is not in the original lavender town audio. when the ghost appears, you hear the ghost's notes in the song come as a bunch of nonsense noise. that's all those frequencies mashing up so close together. why did he do this? to scare us all? to make us believe in some Pokémon conspiracy? perhaps it may have amounted to that eventually but that was not his initial intention.

you see, the spectrogram can be viewed in many different ways. the song can be seen 1 second at a time, or 1 minute at a time. you may watch the bass or the treble, or all of the song at one time.

i believe at some unique setting while listening to the original on the spectrogram, anthony had seen an unfinished picture of that ghost. i saw a vague representation of this same ghost, at the same exact point he appears in the video, on the spectrogram of the original song. this is what he saw. i am guaranteeing it.

he said "the frequencies in this song blend in a special way." he said that "it could have never worked on the gameboy" because of its speaker limitations. the gameboy color is not exactly a bass bomber, which is what it needed to be to complete the image of the ghost he saw. so he found out how to and created the audio pictures and completed the vision he may or may not have thought to be intended by the creator(s) of the song. he probably added the rest for fun, if he didn't see them in the spectogram notes as well.

if you ask me, anthony had probably had a wickedly creative perspective, at least visually. probably just as creative when it comes to audio as well, i mean look at the fuckin art he's created. it's genius and beautiful... anthony was experimenting with binaural tones, which is the extra bass sound you hear in this song and not in the original. this my friends is the catch. the missing factor in every theory so far. the unconsidered catalyst.

binaural tones are known to change the mental performance and mood of humans when listened to, especially on headphones.

if you check out I-Doser online, you will see that there are many different types of binaural tones that inspire many different types of feelings and that simulate various drugs. no formal studies have been documented as to its validity, so it receives skepticism. However, I have tried binaural tones for myself and can vouch that it can alter your mind, if you let it. this is more so the cause of your "headache" or ringing in your ears or perhaps feeling a bit high, than the original high pitched tones.

in fact the original high pitched tones cannot even be heard on YouTube after it got diluted by the mp3. download the wav and maybe you'll hear it. at one part the music producer is just transposing octaves higher and higher until you can't hear it anymore. honest mistake.

the wav is what anthony was listening to. whoever posted the video converted it into mp3. good thing, too or else people might just be dropping like flies from curiosity.

it is my deduction that since anthony could supposedly hear better than the average person, he could hear the high frequencies, and that the mixture of the high frequency tones (that keep in mind led to 200+ deaths already) and the binaural tones (known to alter the mind) playing in his headphones induced a fatal seizure.

i'm taking this logically, and i don't see any other way it could have gone down. unlesssss... it's a troll. which i admit is entirely possible. somebody had to make those pictures though which is still awesome either way."