Art by Jon McCormack.
This episode was written & produced by the listeners of Twenty Thousand Hertz.
Presenting the second short story collection from our Sound Off competition, featuring five pieces written and produced entirely by our listeners. From the sonic evolution of pinball to reused classical melodies to the battle against airport noise, this Silver Collection is a diverse and enlightening set of snackable stories.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Still Sleeping by Wesley Slover
Sandra Robot by Wesley Slover
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View Transcript ▶︎
[20K Sonic Logo]
[music in: Wesley Slover - Still Sleeping]
I always love hearing new voices on Twenty Thousand Hertz. So last spring, we held a competition called Sound Off, where listeners could submit their own fully produced story about sound. Basically, it was their chance to craft a mini Twenty Thousand Hertz episode that’s five minutes or less.
The results were incredible. We ended up with so many great stories that we needed three whole episodes to collect our favorites. This one is the second episode. We’ll call it the silver collection. The gold collection will follow later this summer.
Enjoy.
[music out]
Story One: Primary Sense
Steve: Good day. I'm Steve Ransley Richardson, and I live in Hobart, Tasmania, a state of Australia with my wife Ness.
Other Voices: Hi!
Steve: And our two cats, Banjo, and Hugo. I have a deep love and appreciation for sound. I would even go so far as to call it a fascination with all aspects of sound, not just music, although I am a musician, but from the natural sounds such as waves crashing on the beach... the awesome sound of a thrashing locomotive... or even something as gentle as a clock chime...
Steve: But my relationship with sound goes a lot deeper, and that's what I want to share with you.
Steve: I was born and raised in and around Brisbane, in southeast Queensland. Some of you may know Brisbane as the home of Bluey. I have a condition called Osteoporosis-pseudoglioma, which is a genetic condition that affects my eyesight, and my skeletal structure, which is very porous.
Steve: So sound emerged very early in my life as a primary sense. Now, that's not to say that other senses didn't also take up, like smell, taste, and touch. But I think sound took precedence over everything else.
Steve: As far as the music was concerned, I took piano and drum lessons as a kid, picked up the guitar as an adult, and for a time I was even a trumpeter in my high school band.
Steve: Sound would also form the backdrop for a lot of my imaginary worlds. I imagine some people with vision may have done the same thing as kids. They might use an image or scenery to form part of their play. Usually it was just the sounds around me. For example, I'd always hear the washing machine on Spin Dry and pretend that I was on a ferry boat coming across the river. Variable speed fans also made good boat motors.
Steve: And usually all of these sounds and play were recorded. I was fascinated with the recording process, so I'd use one ratty old tape recorder after another to capture the sounds and play going on around me. And as the years progressed, the fascination only deepened. I ended up training as an audio engineer, and I've spent the last 30 years in the community radio industry working for a station that turns printed word into sound.
Steve: On Reading Radio, this is Oz's Tactical Talks. News, views, and analysis from the nation's armed forces, whether it's Air Force, Army, or Navy, we've got you covered with a variety of resources, including publications from Australia's defense forces and online platforms. We'll keep you up to date with the latest happenings in the defense forces community.
Steve: And I'm pleased to say the equipment I use today is much better than that of my childhood.
Steve: Upon reaching adulthood, I had to learn to get around independently. Using public transport like everybody else was really important to me. With the use of a white cane, I learned to walk to my local bus stop and navigate my way to the nearest train station. Trains were a good way to get around because of all the audible announcements.
Other Voices: Activation manly
Steve: And equally important was the audible traffic lights that let me know when it was safe to cross the street. One of the little tricks that a lot of blind people use is a thing called echo location. We can make various sounds or clicks to let us know whether we're under an awning, or near a building, or near a particular type of fence.
Steve: I'm also a bit of a fan of modern technology. However, with most of it being electronic, you need adaptive software to use it. For example, I love my iPhone, but I wouldn't be anywhere without voiceover telling me what's on the screen.
Other Voices: 10:50 AM. Four notifications. Doc messages, phone six to five. Search.
Steve: For the PC, I use a screen reader called JAWS for Windows. In the kitchen, both my wife and I use a set of talking scales and a talking microwave.
Other Voices: Door open. Door closed.
Steve: People often ask me whether, because I'm blind, I have better hearing. My response to that is pretty universal. I never say my hearing's better than anyone else's, but I just use it differently.
Steve: I guess one of the things that I fear most is one day not being able to hear. But every morning is a blessing to me when I wake up and I hear the sounds around me. The chirping of birds in the trees outside, the sound of my clocks chiming the hour, the sound of a train whistle if I'm close enough, the meow of the cats, and the voice of my wife.
Steve: This story was written and produced by Steve Ransey Richardson, Freelance Audio Producer in Hobart, Tasmania. Contact me at steve rick at my yahoo dot com. That’s S-T-E-V-E R-I-C-K at M double Y A-H double O dot com.
Story Two: The Quiet Airport
Wesley: My fellow Twenty Thousand Hertz listeners are surely no strangers to the concept of noise pollution, that unwanted sound can have a negative impact on an environment. Now, one of the places where noise pollution really drives me nuts is in airports.
Wesley: I wanted to better understand this, so I reached out to Christopher Birch. He's the Guest Experience Director at San Francisco's airport. Starting in 2016, Christopher spearheaded an initiative called The Quiet Airport. The Quiet Airport started because he had received complaints and surveys about noise, in particular noise from announcements.
Christopher: For a very long time, we considered that type of noise to just be part of the airport landscape. So we convened a small group to take a look at that. We chipped away, and in 2020, so as the pandemic was really setting in, we executed the first initiative, which was to basically ban the airlines from making airport-wide announcements when they were really more relevant to one area. We basically said, "If you want to communicate with your customers over a PA system, it needs to be in the very local area, just at your gate, and the adjacent gate." We weren't banning announcements, we were just sort of trimming the area where they would occur and trying to make that a better experience.
Wesley: To continue expanding the Quiet Airport initiative, Christopher needed to get people on board. No pun intended. So he and his group started small. Rather than imposing a complex system, they cast a vision.
Christopher: We came with a problem statement that nobody disagreed with. Everyone that we brought into the fold and asked to participate on this project, agreed with the fact that it's too dang loud, and there must be some things that we can do about that.
Christopher: Our next phase of that was to eliminate what we call "Canned announcements," things that happen on a regular schedule that are recorded. We really started to enjoy our quieter environment, so we started to look at our concessionaires and our tenants in terms of the type of noise that was emanating from their spaces.
Christopher: That's a tough situation because customers can't move away from those areas. They're stuck there, right? They're waiting for a flight or, or, dining or what have you. And there's really nowhere to go. So we wanted to be mindful of those locations. Christopher: We moved on again to another element, and this is actually where we got, I would say, 75% of what we were looking for in terms of quieting the airport down and being more intentional and mindful about the sound coming out of speakers we got from reconfiguring our paging zones.
Wesley: By reconfiguring paging zones, they could make announcements only in places where they're relevant. For example, a final boarding call would only be in that terminal. Since that information isn't relevant anywhere else. They were effective in removing announcements, but I wondered if this created a problem. Are they sure people aren't missing important information?
Wesley: The cool thing is, they could pretty much instantly measure the efficacy of their announcements. So one example Christopher gave is with "No Smoking" announcements. They removed them, and there wasn't an uptick in smoking in the airport. So they knew they could safely get rid of 'em.
Wesley: We might assume that more information is better, but attention is a limited resource.
Christopher: Yeah, I think that the amount of announcements that we did as a default was inhibiting communications rather than enhancing them. The fewer announcements, the better. The fewer announcements that occur, the more likely the customers are going to listen to them. And we just figured the trade off was worth that.
Wesley: Now that there's significantly less noise pollution, it provides Chris an opportunity to use sound to make a better experience for his customers. All of this really gets to the core of what makes someone like Christopher successful as a guest experience director.
Christopher: There's a very specific tie-in to revenue. Airports are mostly nonprofits. The more revenue the airport brings in from things like concessions, the cheaper it is for airlines to operate. And the cheaper it is for airlines to operate, the more service they offer.
Christopher: This was one of the most impactful things that we've done, and it was extremely cheap, because it did not really cost us anything. We didn't need a consultant. We didn't have to install or purchase new equipment. We did this by reducing what we could to the point that we got to our goal.
Wesley: This piece was adapted from an episode of the Collab Collection, a podcast where I collect stories and useful insights about creative collaboration. I make it for creative professionals who are interested in the ways people work together to make stuff happen. This was written in, produced by me, Wesley Slover, and thanks to Christopher Birch for speaking with me.
Story Three: Borrowed Notes
Andrew: I am Andrew Meredith.
Andrew: I've always been fascinated by comments about modern composers quote, "stealing" music from the past. The reason is because that's just what composers have always done. They take inspiration from the past, but add their own twist to it.
Andrew: Sometimes, the similarities are just random and not planned. Like this tune, "Old Tom Bombadil" from Rings of Power by Bear McCreary, compared to this song "Centerfold" by The J. Geils Band from decades before.
Andrew: And other times, it was an intentional start to their new tune, like "Gruntilda's Lair" from Banjo-Kazooie by Grant Kirkhope being based on "The Teddy Bear's Picnic" by John Walter Bratton.
Andrew: So let's work our way backwards and see how far this trend can go. For film music, directors will sometimes add temp tracks to their scenes to give the composers an idea of what kind of music they're looking for. Many of these, for composers like John Williams or James Horner, are very well documented. But one I haven't seen much was for Danny Elfman's First score, Pee-wee's Big Adventure. A few notable examples include the stolen bike scene compared to the Psycho shower scene composed by Bernard Herman...
Andrew: ...the studio chase compared to the "Wicked Witch of the West theme" from The Wizard of Oz, scored by Herbert Stothart...
Andrew: ...and the scene telling the tale of Large Marge being the DSCH Motif from Shastakovich, the example here from his "String Quartet Number 8."
Andrew: Going back a little further, we find many composers giving inspirational nods to Beethoven. Like Brahms in his first symphony compared to the last movement of Beethoven 9.
Andrew: Beethoven wasn't completely original either, as this famous "Ode to Joy" theme appears in Mozart's "Misericordias Domini."
Andrew: The further back we go, we start hearing a lot more repeated ideas rather than melodies. Like this, from Monteverdi's "Vespers for the Blessed Virgin" and Gabrieli's "Canzon No. 7"
Andrew: At this point, the majority of music composed was for the church, and the amount of reuse of Gregorian chants were numerous. For one prominent example, check out Twenty Thousand Hertz' episode on the “Dies Irae.”
For hundreds of years, composers and songwriters have been using this melody to evoke feelings of dread and despair. It's called the Dies Irae.
Andrew: I truly find it fascinating to learn where composers were influenced from, and how they took something from the past to bring it into the present in a new way.
[music in: WA Mozart - No 19 In Cmajor KV 465 IV Allegro Molto]
Andrew: This is only a small portion of a script I'm currently working on with this topic that will be uploaded to my YouTube channel under my name Andrew Meredith, where you'll find film score analysis as well as some music educational topics.
Andrew: Sadly, that's all the time I have for this Sound Off, but of course, a massive thanks to Dallas Taylor and everyone at Twenty Thousand Hertz.
After the break, the pings and plunks of pinball, and the irresistible pull of very loud music.
[music out]
MIDROLL
Story Four: Bumpers and Bells
Eric: I'm in Alameda, California, just a couple minutes outside of Oakland. And here between a Cambodian restaurant and a store that sells tarot cards is a very special museum.
Eric: Meet Evan Phillippe.
Evan: Thanks for coming today. This is Evan Phillippe. I am the current Executive Director for the Pacific Pinball Museum here in Alameda.
Eric: There's more than a hundred pinball machines here, which are free to play with your admission.
Evan: Drop a marble in, shoot goes up into the play field. Oh, cool. Landed in one of the pockets. Let's try another one. Yes.
Eric: This one is Bagatelle. It's from the 1800s, and Evan calls it the Grandfather of Pinball. It's a pretty simple game. You launch a marble up a chute and around a wooden board and it bounces off of all these metal pins.
Evan: Yeah, we're just trying- This is where pinball gets its name.
Eric: Really?
Evan: 'Cause they were pins that were used to divert the ball.
Eric: I have never questioned that in my life.
Evan: Yeah, no. It surprises a lot of people when they come in.
Eric: Bagatelle is not “pinball” like we know it today. There's no flippers, no lights, and no sound effects. It's hard to believe, but bumpers and bells did not get popular until the late nineteen...
Evan: ...forties. And then really, especially in the 1950s, you start seeing games that have bells inside of them, they're larger, they've got a lot more room. And you have things like coin slots that are on the front, which are kind of fun.
Eric: This one is called Humpty Dumpty, and it's the first ever pinball game with flippers. It's from 1947.
Evan: When I think of my mind's eye and imagination, "What is a pinball machine? What does it look like? What does it sound like?" It's really that era.
Eric: Then in the ‘60s and ‘70s, something huge happened. Famous people started showing up on pinball machines.
Evan: Let's look at Captain Fantastic, which is a great game from 1976. So this is…
Eric: This is, oh my God, this is what Elton John...
Evan: Elton John game. It's based off of the movie Tommy, The Who fever dream of a movie, which is worth seeing once.
Eric: That song still slaps, but unfortunately, it's not what the Captain Fantastic game sounds like. So you would see celebrities like Kiss and Dolly Parton and Evil Knievel in the artwork of pinball machines around this time. But the machines were not sophisticated enough to play music or voices.
Evan: I think they absolutely would've if they had the technology at the time.
Eric: But in 1979, the world was introduced to Gorgar.
Other Voices: Me Gorgar. Me live.
Other Voices: Gorgar is the first and only talking pinball game given life and breath by Williams Electronics.
Eric: Thanks to a primitive voice chip, Gorgar could say eight different words.
Evan: It's doing one job, it's not doing anything else. It probably has 30K of memory on it with voice.
Eric: The technology got better over time, and that's when pinball met something mysterious and spooky, and altogether ooky. Intellectual property.
Eric: That's what I wanted to hear.
Eric: The Adams Family released in 1992 is one of the best selling pinball games of all time.
Other Voices: The stars of the Adams Family movie, Raul Julia and Angelica Houston, have provided speech for the game.
Other Voices: ‘Tish… Gomez…
Evan: And this is one of the first times something like that happened, and now it's so consistent. I mean, people make the movie, they make additional tracks, they read an audio book of that movie, they do a media tour, they do a song associated with the movie. It's ridiculous. And they've really done that ever since.
Eric: These days, just like in Hollywood, everyone wants to focus on well-known IP.
Evan: You still see original IP games, but very often now, it's based on a show, or a movie, or an event that's well known.
Eric: Yeah.
Eric: And if you're in the pinball IP game, there's one lucrative niche that you can always bank on.
Evan: We have games based on Kiss, Rush, Led Zeppelin. Some people think it's a bit of a cheap way to produce a game, because it's just themed off of band art, but they sell well. They sell to a crowd of people that will buy the game no matter what, and they've really let these companies survive.
Eric: No matter what it sounds like, every pinball game ends the same way. You lose your last ball, and it's game over… Oh, okay. One more round.
Eric: The Pacific Pinball Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday in Alameda, California. No quarters required. This story was reported, written and edited by me, Eric Johnson, and was produced out of Lightning Pod in San Francisco. If you or your business needs help starting a podcast, please get in touch at Lightning Pod dot fm.
Story Five: A Beautiful Destruction
Rob: It is the spring of 1988. I'm 11 years old as I sneak into my sister's bedroom. Nobody else is home, so I have a few minutes to linger over the stack of records in the glass stereo cabinet beside her bed. REM, The Water Boys, Camper Van Beethoven, and The Pogues. She has a decent vinyl collection, but I never actually hear her listen to these records.
Rob: In the kitchen, there's occasionally a staticky, thin AM radio station playing the likes of Neil Diamond or John Denver. But mostly, I come from a music free home. So it certainly isn't natural that I would become a musician.
Rob: After years of smuggling these records from my sister's bedroom to mine, I've realized that I really love music. But it's more than that. I slowly begin to discover that what I'm actually interested in is the powerful sensation of sound itself organized as music. The punchy rhythms tearing through the hand-me-down speakers is what captivates me the most. So it's probably inevitable that I'd soon find myself sitting behind a drum set.
Rob: I am 17 and standing in front of an Ampeg SVT bass amp with an eight 10 speaker cabinet in a musty, cramped rehearsal space. The bass player cranks the amp, plucks the A string, and the frequencies just explode, vibrating deep in my chest. That one note contains the physical force that I've been searching for.
Rob: I quickly move to the drum kit and pound out a driving beat, matching his chugging eighth note pattern. The atmosphere is on fire. My insides burn and pulse. This is it. I have learned how to generate the very sounds I've been pursuing all this time.
Rob: I meet other musicians who talk about why they love music, but their focus seems less primal than mine, and much more intellectual. They're enamored with theory and technical skill. When I try to explain my need to have the music rearrange my insides, they look at me like I'm a caveman chasing loudness for its own sake. That's when I can see it in their eyes. We’re not the same.
Rob: My problem is simple. I love music, but I need volume. It's the pairing of the two that really elevates me. Music contains the beauty I so deeply crave, but only volume contains the power to permeate my rough, thick skin, and vibrate those piano wires that reside so deep inside of me.
Rob: But ironically, the thing that I love most is destroying me physically. I've realized that volume is the key element in the magic I'm seeking, but my eardrums are paying the price. Earplugs are out of the question. That would be like eating cake without sugar, or watching a sunset with your eyes closed. I need to experience it raw, regardless of the consequences.
Rob: I'm 48 now. This morning over breakfast, I listened to my oldest daughter talk about her upcoming freshman year of college. But to be honest, I wasn't really listening. I was mostly lip reading. My family knows the drill by now. They know the price I've paid for my musical pursuits, but every time they need to repeat themselves, a little part of me dies inside.
Rob: Unfortunately, this story doesn't end with a neat moral. I know I've dug my own grave, and it makes me genuinely sad every time I ask my girls to repeat what they just said to me. But if I'm honest, I'm not sure I'd do things any differently. In the end, this isn't a story about someone who loves music, or about the psychology of sound.
Rob: I think the story of my life is about a basic human need to feel something so deeply that you'd sacrifice a part of yourself just to experience it. Even if my hearing eventually fades completely, music played at full volume will create a beautiful destruction deep inside me. And maybe that's all I was ever really chasing to begin with.
Rob: The story and music you just heard were lived, written, recorded, produced, and mixed by me, Rob Feature, here in my home studio. I don't have a podcast, band, or business to promote. I just hope it lets the world see me a little clearer than it did before. [music in: Wesley Slover - Sandra Robot]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of my sound agency, Defecto Sound. Hear more by following Defacto Sound on Instagram, or by visiting Defacto Sound dot com.
Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by the wonderful listeners of Twenty Thousand Hertz.
It was story edited by Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt.
A huge thanks to everyone who submitted a story for our Sound Off competition. Regardless of whether your story was chosen, we loved hearing every single one of them.
Take a moment to Subscribe to my Youtube channel Dallas Taylor dot mp3. Over there you’ll find video exclusives, including my behind the scenes trips to all kinds of incredible audio locations… like Jeopardy, Saturday Night Live, and Disneyland. You can also find these stories on Instagram and TikTok under that same name, Dallas Taylor dot mp3.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]