This episode was written & produced by Nikolas Harter and Casey Emmerling.

Behind every incredible sound in a movie or TV show is a creative person with a unique story. In this episode, Dallas heads to the legendary Sony Pictures lot during Mix Magazine’s “Sound for Film & TV” event, and invites Hollywood’s sound pros to share their wildest, weirdest, and most heartfelt sonic stories. The result is a grab bag of eye opening tales that span a World War II reverb, otherworldly insects, famous fart sounds, and an awkward encounter with a famous director. Featuring Jesse Herrera, Daniel Colman, Steve Bucino, Jeremy Siegel, Alan Meyerson, and Nathaniel Smith.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Wesley Slover - Chill Pelican
Wesley Slover - Ambivalent Thinking
Wesley Slover - Prism
Wesley Slover - Fruity Riff
Stationary Sign - Excuse the Dog
Wesley Slover - Lies and How to Survive Them
Stationary Sign - Ghost Mission
Wesley Slover - Atomic Signals
Wesley Slover - Not Quite Summer

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Twenty Thousand Hertz sonic logo]

[music in: Wesley Slover - Chill Pelican]

Last fall, I went to a really cool sound conference put on by Mix Magazine called Sound for Film & TV. It’s held every year on the Sony Pictures lot in Los Angeles. This lot is legendary and goes all the way back to The Wizard of Oz. This particular gathering is filled with some of the most respected names in the movie sound business, as well as up-and-coming talent. And amongst all of those sound designers, editors, and mixers, I knew there would be some good sound stories.

So I packed my gear and headed out to Sony. Once I got there, producer Nikolas Harter and I set up a recording booth in the producers room of one of Sony's legendary mix stages. We invited people to drop by and tell us their favorite stories. Here are the 6 stories that jumped out. Enjoy.

[music out]

[MicroHertz bumper 5]

Story One: The Spruce Goose Juice

Jesse My name is Jesse Herrera. I am a sound designer and mix engineer for TV and film and ads. And occasionally I get to do a fun recording project.

[music in: Wesley Slover - Ambivalent Thinking]

Jesse This is sort of earlier in my career. I was living and working in Los Angeles in Playa Vista. There's a famous airplane that came out of that area called the Spruce Goose. That's like the nickname for it. It's the biggest airplane in the world. And it's made out of wood composite, and that was like a World War II project.

[old TV switches on]

News Broadcast: The Howard Hughes Flying Boat has a wing spread of 320 feet, and that gives you some idea of its size. It’s a 200 ton machine, laid out something like a ship inside, with two decks, and accommodations for 700 people.

[radio switches off]

Jesse It never actually saw service, but it was built in Playa Vista in a building that is now inhabited by Google. So right before Google moved in. I got the opportunity to see that building as it was when it was being used to build airplanes. It had just been vacant for a long, long, long time.

[music out]

Jesse The entire structure is wood. And it's massive. I mean, it's an ungodly amount of space, it's just so huge.

Jesse Recording: Hello!

Jesse For an entire structure like that to be wood, it had a really interesting acoustic.

Jesse Recording: Woo!

Jesse So I got a hold of four Neumann U87 AI microphones…

Jesse Recording: Woowoo!

Jesse Put them in figure eight pattern, and set up what's called a Hamasaki square. So it's a pretty large square of microphones. They're spaced like over ten feet apart.

Jesse Recording: Hey!

Jesse So I set this up. I set up my recorder to capture what are called impulse responses.

An impulse response is like a snapshot of the way a space responds to sound. It's what allows a digital reverb to emulate a real physical space.

[Jesse - Frequency Sweep sneaks in]

Jesse And the way you capture that impulse response is by running a sweep from the lowest point of human hearing to the highest.

Jesse I had built a 500 foot XLR cable, and I walked 500 feet down and set up a speaker, plugged that in and then walked 500 feet all the way back to my recorder and hit play on that speaker and recorded this incredible sweep in that like main, hanger space where the spruce goose was built. The sound of it is incredible. It's a really interesting reverb.

[frequency sweep under]

Jesse In addition to that one, I also captured a lot of other reverbs. Not all of them were from that same space. They were like adjoining spaces to that main area. For the sound source on those, instead of carrying around my speaker, I used balloons.

Jesse So I'd filled up balloons and popped them at different locations. [balloon pop long]

Jesse's recordings were used to create a reverb profile, so that any creator can access the sound of this historic, empty hangar.

Jesse If anybody has used Altiverb or Convolution Reverb plugin, what's happening is they are emulating a real space from surround recordings. And so it's nice that, now that I have these sweeps, anyone that has AltaVerb can just drop them in and access that.

[Jesse - Auld Lang Syne in]

Dallas: Wow. I think about capturing these types of spaces visually, but why do you feel it's important to capture these spaces sonically?

Jesse I think the magic of sound in a film or in a song or whatever is it points to how you feel in a space. When you add sound to a film, you steer the audience to feel something.

Jesse And so when I walk into a space like that, the first time I walked into that building, it was almost like I was in a vacuum. It was just so big that nothing was reflected back that quickly.

Jesse But then when you made a really loud noise...

[singing up]

Jesse …it kind of woke up. The walls woke up and it started speaking back.

Jesse It feels like a preservation of how a space felt.

[Auld Lang Syne out]

[MicroHertz bumper 5]

Story Two: Cut the Cue

Daniel: My name is Daniel Colman. I'm a supervising sound editor and sound designer at NBC Universal.

[Battlestar Galactica - Title Theme in]

Daniel: Way back when, I was the Supervising Sound Editor, and sound designer on, Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorite TV shows and in it humanity is at war with a race of robots called Cylons, who often disguise themselves as humans. One of the main human characters is named Anders, who flies a spaceship called a Viper.

[Battlestar Galactica theme under]

Daniel: And there is an episode in the last season where we're in the middle of a big space battle, and one of the Cylon ships comes up right in front of Anders' Viper and scans his eyes. And it's the moment where we realize as the audience that he's one of the Cylons. And then, instead of firing, the Cylon ship goes away.

Daniel: And I had this great sound for that scanning moment…

[sfx: Cylon scan]

Daniel: …but Bear McCreary's beautiful music was just training through all of this.

[clip: Bear McCreary - The Signal]

Daniel: We were still both fairly young in our careers at this time. As a much more experienced sound designer, if I think the music needs to come out, I'll say something. Back then, it was, like, “Music is king! I'm, blasphemous by even suggesting this!"

Daniel: Especially, Bear wasn't on the stage. So Mike Baber, the music editor, was there, and I just went to Mike and said, “Can you please just try this? Give me a second and a half, where you just hit a beat strong, drop out everything, come back in, just two, two beats later.”

[Battlestar Galactica Anders scan scene sneaks in]

Daniel: And it completely goes away…

Daniel: The scan happens…

Daniel: Then the music happens when the Cylon ship takes off and goes in the other direction.

[Battlestar Galactica scene up, then under]

Daniel: And it was such the perfect moment. And I got to hear this in a huge theater. I think we played it back at the Cinerama Dome, and hearing the entire audience gasp at that moment was like, "I know I nailed that by taking the music out."

[music in: Wesley Slover - Prism]

Daniel: I've had this conversation with a few composers, where in order to sell their score to the studio, because of course they don't have final sound in there, they've just got the temp stuff, that they feel like they need to cover everything in order to get the studio to feel like there's enough action and emotion in there. And it's very much a challenge because then when we put in the sound effects, it just becomes a mush.

Daniel remembered an interview he heard with Oscar winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla.

Daniel: He was talking specifically about not scoring the action, not scoring the drama, scoring the aftermath, and that that's where the interesting thing is, is after the crux of the scene, that's where you come in with music, which I thought was a beautiful idea, because then there's the tension release.

[music out]

[MicroHertz bumper 5]

Story Three: Pass It On

Steve: I'm Steve Bucino. I'm a re-recording mixer and a supervising sound editor.

Dalllas: What do you think about environments? I hear something done by someone's not as experienced, if I hear like a reel or something, backgrounds tend to sound like variations of noise. So it'll be like [imitates noises].

Steve: Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Steve: Right. Air.

Dallas: So what makes great environments?

Steve: So it's fine to have a stereo sound straight up front, left and right, and that does give you a sense of width.

[Normal stereo background of birds chirping]

Steve: But I tend to get more of a realistic and more satisfying sense of depth when I have a lot of different background sounds that I can place in their own very specific spot. So a stereo background sound, whether it be air or birds or leaves swaying...

[stereo background up]

Steve: Sometimes I'll just take one channel of that and put it over here.

[One channel out, the other pans to specific spot]

Steve: …and take something else and put it over on the other side or behind me.

[add mono layer of kids paying, panned to another spot]

Steve: Because that's kind of what I hear outside. I feel like I'm hearing the wind go through that flagpole…

[add mono layer of wind through flagpole panned to another spot]

Steve: …or I'm hearing the cars over on that street…

[add mono layer of heavy traffic panned to one side]

Steve: …‘cause that street's busier than that street.

[add mono layer light traffic panned to other side]

Steve: I often feel more immersed in the sounds when everything is a little more discreet.

[soundscape up, then under]

Steve: I'm a relatively new parent. I have a three year old girl and a one year old boy. So, something that I've learned to do over the course of my career is listen to my environment.

Steve: And one thing I did with my daughter, which I'm, I just started doing a few days ago with my son, is pointing out things in our environment. So I took my son in my arms and walked to our driveway. And I would just point things out to him like, “Hey Sky, look, big airplane! ‘zzzzzzzzzzzz.’"

[sfx: commercial plane]

Steve: Or “Small airplane, ‘bggggg’.”

[sfx: small prop plane]

Steve: And just doing that with helicopters… [sfx: helicopter] with birds and making chirping sounds… [sfx: birds] or at night with my daughter, I used to point out the crickets.

[crickets up then under]

[music in: Wesley Slover - Fruity Riff]

Steve: One thing I used to do with her when we would go in, a concrete parking garage is I started to teach her about echo and reverb and that kind of stuff. So I would say something really loud, like, "Hey!" [heavy reverb]

Steve: And I would say, "Do you hear that? You hear how, after I stop, you still hear the sounds?" And, now when we're in a parking garage, she'll say, "Dad, do you think I could hear my echo? And I'm like, "Yeah, give it a shot!" And she'll, "Hey!" [heavy reverb again]

Steve: And she's like, "I heard it! I heard it!" [beat]

Steve: I'm learning how to be a parent. So I am just trying to find the things that I can pass on. When I'm outside, I'm listening, like, “What kind of whoosh do those cars make from two blocks away? What does that sound like to me for my own knowledge, and my own craft?" And just saying that kind of stuff out loud has been a really cool sonic connection to my kids.

[music out]

After the break: famous fart sounds, the music of broken cars, and a faux pas with very a famous director.

MIDROLL

[Microhertz Bumper 5]

Story Four: The Dumbest Farts

Jeremy: So I am Jeremy Siegel and I'm the Director of strategic Partnerships at Pro Sound Effects.

A quick warning, this story contains a lot of fart sounds. So if that kind of thing isn't for you, then skip ahead by about three minutes.

[music in: Stationary Sign - Excuse the Dog]

Jeremy: When I was a wee intern back when lots of albums of sound effects would be recorded on CD this guy, Tom Clack, who's, he's passed away a few years ago.

Jeremy: He was a great, and very prolific sound recordist, field recordist, very kooky guy, and he had an album, if you will, on CD called The World's Biggest Bowel Movement, Bar None.

Jeremy: It was one long file, [sfx: fart 1] probably 12 minutes long, [sfx: fart 2] and the job was to load it up onto a computer, [sfx: fart 3] cut it up some tracks, add metadata, et cetera, basically digitize it. [sfx: fart 4]

Jeremy: I was listening and it sounds like somebody's like literally pouring cement into a swimming pool. [sfx: fart 5] It's like so, so over the top. [sfx: fart 6] But really, really funny stuff.

[music stop with groan fart]

Jeremy: It was a fun way to spend an afternoon cutting up these sounds. [sfx: sigh fart]

Jeremy: Where this got really funny and interesting is, I end up talking to Tom Clack on the phone, and I mention, like, "Oh hey, it’s nice to meet you. I just worked on this project. What can you tell me about The World's Biggest Bowel Movement, Bar None?"

Jeremy: He's like, "Oh, that one." And he tells me, "Have you ever seen the movie Dumb and Dumber?"

Dumb and Dumber: You know why I like ya, Harry? ‘Cause you’re a regular guy. Yep. That’s why I want you to stay regular.

Jeremy: And he's like, "Well, the scene where, where Jeff Daniels emphatically and uncontrollably has to relieve himself because he's been drugged by his good buddy…"

Dumb and Dumber: One half teaspoon, for fast effective relief.

Jeremy: He didn't even work on the film. He said those recordings were stolen from him by the sound designer for that film and used to create that sound of Jeff Daniels absolutely losing it in the bathroom.

[clip: Dumb and Dumber toilet scene]

[music resumes: Stationary Sign - Excuse the Dog]

Jeremy: Anytime you're recording sound effects, there's a suspension of disbelief that has to happen. And that's part of the art of sound design, you know, portraying something on screen like a bowel movement, but you might not actually be recording the sound of somebody's bowels moving, if you will. So they were staged, kind of like Foley type recordings.

Nik: Do you have any sense for how they made those sounds?

That’s producer Nikolas Harter, who was with me at the Mix event.

Nik: You mentioned like wet cement into a swimming pool, but do you have any idea?

[background farts]

Jeremy: I don't. I mean, you know, objects of small to medium size being dumped into water and maybe mud and stuff like that.

Nik: Right.

Jeremy: That's the fun of listening to it as an album of wondering like, "Well, how, how is this actually happening?" Cause I know this is not a person.

[ music buttons into toilet flush]

[MicroHertz bumper 5]

Story Five: The Music of Destruction

Alan I'm Alan Meyerson. I am a music mixer who specializes in film scores, video games, and music for media. I'd been working with Hans for a while and still work with him.

Nik: That's Hans—Hans Zimmer?

Alan Yeah. And we were doing this movie, The Fan.

[clip: The Fan]

The Fan: I been watching you ever since you hit that grand slam in the 7th against South Bay in the ‘82 city championships, you remember that? That’s when I first saw you were somebody really…

Alan And this is long before the days of just easy sampling and stuff like that. So for Hans he wanted to have a lot of like heavily metal distortion sounds. So the music editor, Mark Streitenfeld, went to a car junkyard and got a bunch of pieces of car.

Alan And, well I knew it was gonna be some sort of sound design, but he told me to, "I want you to really crunch it up and make it nasty and everything.”

Alan So we're hitting it with different things… [sfx: bashing car with different objects]

Alan And creating big sweeps on the grille heads and everything. [sfx: grill head sweep]

Alan And I'm sticking them through guitar amps… [sfx: amplified sound]

Alan …because that was how you distorted things in those days. [sfx: another amplified sound]

Alan So we create all these just like crazy huge massive sounds, and I'm like, "What, I can't imagine what Hans is going to do with this," and I couldn't wait to hear it.

In the movie, Robert De Niro plays an unhinged baseball fan who becomes increasingly violent.

Alan It turned out that what he did with those sounds was he played them so quietly so that they became the noise inside of Robert De Niro's head. [clip: The Fan]

The Fan: Take it, take it, take it, take it. It’s for you. It’s a temporary restraining order. You have been served.

Alan It was just a brilliant way to use it. That's when I knew that this is my guy.

Nik: Have you worked with Hans on some other projects?

Alan Oh, I've done the majority of his movies for the last 30 years. So I did all the Pirates movies…

[clip: Hans Zimmer - Up is Down]

Alan All the Tony Scott and Ridley Scott movies, Gladiator…

[clip: Hans Zimmer - Barbarian]

Alan Crimson Tide and The Rock…

[clip: Hans Zimmer - Hummell Gets the Rockets]

Alan Did seven Chris Nolan movies with him.

[clip: Hans Zimmer - Mombosa]

Alan More recently, I did the Dunes…

[clip: Hans Zimmer - Worm Ride]

Alan Half of my major memories in my adult life have to do with him. Having that relationship for so long, so successfully, I have a lot of gratitude for it because most people don't get that opportunity.

[MicroHertz bumper 5]

Story Six: Remote Control Terrors

Nathaniel: I'm Nathaniel: Smith. I'm a freelance, independent sound designer, mixer, audio artist, creator, producer, sound guy.

[music in: Wesley Slover - Lies and How to Survive Them]

Nathaniel: When I landed in LA, with dreams of being a composer. I was fortunate enough to get my first gig working for one of Hans' guys out of Remote Control.

Remote Control Productions is Hans Zimmer's film score company. It's based out of a giant campus in Santa Monica, California.

Nathaniel: Especially when it's your first place, it's an intimidating, overwhelming, and somewhat terrifying environment when you first walk in.

Dallas: Why would that be an intimidating place?

Nathaniel: There are very high expectations. There's a line of people out the door and around the block waiting for your job, waiting for that internship. They're just waiting for you to make a mistake. And everybody was very aware of that fact.

[music out]

Nathaniel: And then also at the time, Hans was very security oriented. He had, I had been told had death threats and, there had been security concerns. And so security was super tight getting in and coming out of main building.

[music in: Stationary Sign - Ghost Mission]

Nathaniel: One day, I was just… I was a second assistant working on a show. And we were receiving a hard drive, and the courier came and dropped off the hard drive. So I went out the front door to receive the hard drive. And I took the hard drive, said, “Thank you very much.”

Nathaniel: He turns around to leave. And as he's walking away, a gentleman in a jean jacket and with like torn jeans and a graphic T-shirt, he comes walking up and he starts walking through the door...

Nathaniel: And because it had been so drilled into me that we are security minded, I was like, "Whoa, hey, wait! I can't just let you in. You have to sign in here at the… talk to them!"

Nathaniel: So then I turn and I walk away, very proud of myself. And I'm walking down the hallway and from right behind me, I hear, “Robert Rodriguez is here for Hans Zimmer.”

As in Robert Rodriguez, the director of From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, Spy Kids, Sin City, and many others.

Nathaniel: And I was like, "Oh, super good job! Well done, sir!"

Dallas: Oh gosh.

[music out]

Nathaniel: I just don't recognize people. My draw into this industry was never about celebrity. It's always been very much about the art side and the, the emotional side and the storytelling side I got to work across the hall from Alan Meyerson.

That's Alan Meyerson, from the last story.

So I got to learn a lot just through osmosis of the philosophy of the art making.

Nathaniel: But I'm working on a independent feature film. It's a super low budget horror thing. Maybe 10 minutes of the film is almost completely devoid of dialogue. It's all audio based. It's all audio storytelling.

Nathaniel: And so I needed to create this eerie atmosphere, but I wanted it to also be organic. It's disquieting, but it also needs to be familiar. Like you need to recognize it as nature sounds.

Nathaniel: So I took some jungle sounds that were recorded at 192 dots per second. It's just a higher resolution audio.

[Nathaniel’s original jungle recording in]

Nathaniel: But most of that resolution is in the upper ranges of our frequency. So it's beyond human hearing.

Nathaniel: But when you take that 192 recording of a jungle and you slow it down…

[slows down into jungle sounds - film version]

Nathaniel: …a lot of that high end information falls into the human hearing range.

Nathaniel: And you start to hear the upper frequencies of, let's say, crickets or frogs that is lost because it's beyond our hearing at normal speed.

Nathaniel: They are clearly organic sounds, but because it's so slow and because it's reversed and it's been treated in this way, it's still very otherworldly and a little wobbly.

[sound design up, then out]

Dallas: All right. One last question. Why does sound matter?

[music in: Wesley Slover - Atomic Signals]

Nathaniel: So we're telling stories. Whether it's marketing, or it's a movie, or if it's a TV show, it's a human story. Your audience, they're always going to feel your work. And they're judging it based on: "Do I believe it, or do I not believe it?"

Nathaniel: When you have great sound, when it's clear, when it's well balanced, when it's well created, it allows the audience to say, "Yes, this is real.” And then they accept the picture that they're given. Nathaniel: We have an audience that is really emotionally attached to a lot of the stuff that we do, and they find a lot of emotional catharsis through our artwork. And I see a lot of value in that. But then again, just to couch this, it is my job. This is what I do for a living.

Dallas: You're a little biased.

Nathaniel: So of course I think it's so important, you know? So I try to remember that we're not solving childhood leukemia here. We're, you know, selling hamburgers and telling stories about aliens.

Nathaniel: So important as it is, if we were all erased from the planet tomorrow, no great problems would go unsolved. You know, like, climate change and world hunger would continue on without any of our audio participation.

Nathaniel: So I always try to keep a little bit humble. And I think honestly, it goes back to that gratitude, because it's like, "We get to do this for a living. What a dream!" But also, “Yes, the stakes are pretty low.” If I really mess up, I might lose some money! And that hurts. But like nobody's dying on the operating table in my studio.

[music out into music in: Wesley Slover - Not Quite Summer]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by my sound agency, Defacto Sound. To hear more, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram, or visit defacto Sound dot com.

Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Nikolas Harter, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt, with original music by Wesley Slover.

Thanks to everyone who stopped in and shared a story with us. And a special thanks to Tom Kenny, the conference organizer, for inviting us to collect these stories. Finally, you can find a link to Jesse's "Spruce Goose" reverb in the show notes of this episode, which you can download to use in your own projects.

If you'd like to support our show and keep a spotlight on these amazing sound stories, the best way to do that is by joining our premium feed, Twenty Thousand Hertz Plus. With it, you’ll get our entire catalog: past, present and future; completely ad free. But you’ll still get the show announcements and the Mystery Sound. It helps us a ton. You can sign up at twenty K dot org slash plus, or by tapping Subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.

[music out]