314-914-6093: When Michelle Obama tweets your phone number

This episode was written & produced by Jim McNulty.

A mysterious Tweet from one of the most famous people on Earth: A single phone number, zero context. What does it mean? Why was it posted? Would you call it to find out? For commercial director Duncan Wolfe, this hypothetical became a very real social experiment when his cell phone number was accidentally posted on a very public Twitter account—Former First Lady Michelle Obama!

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Been There - Steven Gutheinz
This Place - Steven Gutheinz
Last Waltz - Tolo
A Long Way Out - Tony Anderson
Months Without Outlet November 2016 - Dexter Britain
Fragmentation - Tony Anderson
Power of Love - Tony Anderson
Country Trouble - Dexter Britain
Silver - Eric Kinny
Unboxed - Steven Gutheinz
Luna - Steven Gutheinz


Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[PAT VOICEMAIL] Dunc, this is Pat. I’m sure you’re not answering your phone right now. I read online that Michelle Obama goofed and gave out your phone number inadvertently. I’m so sorry to hear that. I can’t imagine what kind of a mess it’s going to make for you, but I wanted to offer you my sympathy and wish there was something I could do to help, but obviously there’s not. I don’t even know what you’re doing now that you’re out of the White House, but I’ll try to talk to your mom and dad and they’ll fill me in, but I just wish you my condolences and I hope this thing passes over and doesn’t create a big fiasco for you. Love you Dunc, talk to you later.

[Duncan interview clip]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, I’m Dallas Taylor. This is the story of what the internet sounds like when it comes to life.

[Duncan interview continues: “I’m in the booth and we are recording so...”]

That’s my friend, Duncan. He’s a commercial film director. He and I randomly met through a mutual friend in the industry. Side note, this might be a good time to mention that I’m a sound designer, but you might’ve already picked that up on that. Anyway, Duncan took a year and a half off from directing to work at the White House.

[music in]

Duncan: That building has something special. With things like Veep and House of Cards and even just watching the news all day you see images of this place almost every day, right? To be there in person, it’s kind of uncanny.

Duncan was tasked with documenting the last year and a half of the Obama Administration through film. In a nutshell, he followed around the President and Vice President with a camera.

Duncan: I had been working as a freelancer and then all of a sudden I’m wearing a wool suit and a tie, black polished shoes, and I have a desk. And so there was sort of the formalities of having a government desk job even though mine was probably the least desk-y of all the jobs you could have at the White House.

You’re walking down the west colonnade in the West Wing. These are images from history. You know, JFK walking down the west colonnade. You see world leaders walking down these hallways in photos in the Oval Office or in the West Wing... I’m here now. How did this happen?

[music out]

So how does a commercial director end up in the White House? Well, Duncan originally got involved in politics by volunteering for the Iowa Caucus back in 2008. This later led him into an internship with the photography department under Pete Souza, who was the Chief White House Photographer for both Reagan and Obama. After the internship, he went back to commercial directing, but the thought of public service kept nagging at him, so he eventually found himself back on staff under the video department. While it’s easy to imagine being in awe of the history and importance of the White House, it’s harder to imagine actually working there.

[music in]

Duncan: The name of the game when you’re working in a place like the White House, everybody knows that it’s an incredibly interesting and special experience, especially since it is one that’s finite. Everybody knows it’s gonna end at some point.

You’re soaking it in but at the same time there is so much important work to do that you can’t really get caught up in thinking about “Oh my god I’m here right now.” And so that starts to fade in the name of just doing your job.

The beginning of me working at the White House, there was this duality of boring bureaucracy onboarding process, but the second week of work I was flying on Air Force Two across the Atlantic to Ukraine with the Vice President. My boss, I think he knew it was going to be like sink or swim, “let’s throw you in real fast and see how you do.”

[music out]

Working at the White House can be an amazing opportunity and experience. Duncan was working around some of the most influential people in the world on a daily basis, but it was only temporary.

Duncan: There’s this adrenaline high that you have when you’re there, and all of a sudden it’s done and gone.

[Clip of Trump’s inauguration clip]

After inauguration, we all left the government and I moved to Los Angeles. I was back working in my commercial directing career space. It was May and it had been a couple months since I had left government, and I got this opportunity to fly to New York and help Michelle Obama and her team out for an event for College Signing Day.

But it’s while Duncan was working on that project for the former First Lady that something strange started to happen.

[music in]

Duncan: My phone’s buzzing and I look up at it and it’s some unknown phone number from Nebraska or something and I’m having a conversation with somebody, unknown phone number, it’s like “press decline.” And as soon as I press decline there was another phone call, then it’s like as soon as you press decline another call’s there. Florida, decline. Montana, decline. Illinois, California, Nevada, Maine, South Dakota, Ohio, Florida again, Russia, Iran, the UK, Jamaica, Croatia.

[ringing/buzzing SFX]

[music out]

As a preoccupied Duncan struggled to to figure out why his phone was blowing up, one of his colleagues tries to get his attention.

Duncan: “Hey dude, uhhh, we’re talking!” cause I was staring at my phone baffled and I’m just like tapping like “tap tap tap tap.” Immediately I just try to get my phone on airplane mode because it is like every second there’s twelve calls coming in [phone buzzing and texting SFX]. Your voice mailbox immediately fills up. All of a sudden you look at your text messages and it’s all of these people sending messages that sometimes don’t even make sense.

Duncan had no clue what was happening. Did his phone get hacked? Why is he getting calls from all over the world? All he knows is it’s probably not good.

Duncan: I’m trying to be calm and I’m also there to do a job, but this is probably really serious.

[music in]

Duncan: So at some point somebody says “oh god,” Duncan’s number just got tweeted out on Michelle’s account with 7.6 million followers. And then everything clicked... I didn’t get hacked, I don’t have a virus. Just one of the most visible public figures in the world tweeted my phone number with zero context. I better brace myself.

So just how did Duncan’s number get tweeted out on Michelle Obama’s account?

[music out]

Duncan: Sometimes the First Lady and President Obama do write their own tweets and Facebook messages and usually when they do that they sign off “M.O.” or “B.O.” In this case, running the Twitter was just a part of the general staff operation. We were all there to support the First Lady in what she was doing that day and we’re exchanging photos and Snapchats and boomerangs and phone numbers and in that process my phone number ended up accidentally tweeted on Michelle Obama’s account. She didn’t do it, it was just sort of a part of this process and so she was unaware in the moment that all of this happened.

[music in]

With a single tweet, Duncan’s cell phone number was shared with MILLIONS of users throughout the Twitterverse. Imagine your phone number appearing on the social media account of one of the most public figures in the world, even for just a few minutes. What would that be like?

Duncan: people are curious. They want to know what that is. People make goofs on the internet all day, especially people that are high profile. Things happen. It’s like Sean Spicer tweeting out what was maybe his Twitter password. Or Covfefe that’s a whole other thing.

All of a sudden you look, and there’s just a phone number. That’s it. Is it a code to something, what is this? What are people gonna do? They’re gonna call it. If you looked at Twitter on that day, there was so many crazy thoughts and ideas and conspiracies about what this was.

[music out]

The internet LOVES a good mystery. And without any context surrounding the number, curious first lady fans and Trolls alike could hardly resist. Of course, Twitter trolls are usually constrained to a set number of characters on a single platform. But this was Duncan’s real cell phone number—providing a portal beyond Twitter and the Internet. As you can probably imagine, the texts and voicemails Duncan received were overwhelming. There were of course prank callers, as well as curious and nasty messages, and nonsensical texts, but Duncan also received legitimate inquiries from national news organizations.

Duncan: When you have news stories being written about you and there’s New York Times reporters calling you and texting you, it’s a crazy thing because I’m not a person that’s in the public eye really ever. To all of a sudden have your entire life thrust upon this global, internet stage… it’s a complete loss of control.

Reading a news article about yourself on the New York Times on a day when you did not expect anything even remotely like that ever happening. It’s a jarring experience.

New York Times headline, May 5th, “Michelle Obama tweets phone number of former White House staff member. Any White House employee would likely appreciate a public shout out from the former First Lady, but this probably wasn’t what Duncan Wolfe had in mind.” Yeah, that’s for sure.

[music in]

At first glance, this might just seem like a humorous accident, but for Duncan it became much more than that. It was an invasion of privacy and a shocking loss of control.

Duncan: That day I basically just threw my phone into airplane mode and do not disturb. That night I went out with my friends. I tried to have a drink and calm down but, I remember getting up into my hotel room and the door shutting and feeling isolated in a way that I had never felt before. The control that was just stolen from my life for a moment and in such an aggressive and big way. This is the kind of thing that nobody else in my life has experienced this and so there’s almost no touch point for anybody to say “Hey man, I get it. I’ve been there.”

A lot of my friends thought it was funny and I get why they thought it was funny because they just didn’t quite realize the impact that something like this could have on your psyche. And meanwhile, I realized that my mailbox is full. What if I leaned in a little bit and just listened to what some of these people had to say, read some of these text messages…

And we’re going to play some of those voicemails and text messages, in just a minute.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

It’s hard to imagine that life outside the White House could be even more stressful than life inside. But for Duncan, the fallout from an inadvertent Tweet from Michelle Obama’s Twitter account was just beginning. The day after it happened, Duncan went to do the one thing everyone was telling him to do - change his phone number. So he called up his service provider.

Duncan: You want to explain yourself to them, but they don’t really care. They’re just like, “okay you want a new phone number? Okay.” You don’t get to pick your phone number. They offer you up three phone numbers, and then presented with a choice of a new phone number… It’s like that’s the only phone number I’ve ever had since when I got a cell phone in highschool when I got a car so that I could keep in touch with my parents. I never thought I’d have an attachment to my phone number, but presented with these options I sort of balked and I was like “oh man, I’m not sure I’m ready to do this.”

In a way, our cell phone numbers have become part of our identity, much like a social security number. So if Duncan decided to keep his cell number, he was going to have to come to terms with his newfound cellular celebrity.

[music out]

Duncan: I was starting to come over the hump about realizing that it was maybe really interesting to have all these voicemails and text messages. This is such a weird thing that happened to me. What if I leaned in a little bit and just listened to what some of these people had to say, read some of these text messages, because it says something really interesting and unique about the time we’re living in and maybe I could make some interesting art project with all of this material or maybe I can talk about it on a podcast about sound.

Duncan tried to make the best of a bad situation by approaching it with a sense of curiosity. Who were these people calling him, what were they saying, and why did they want to contact a number randomly tweeted out on the internet?

Duncan: So many different kinds of people called me. Certainly I had folks that were not politically aligned with me.

[Play hateful voice messages]

But also weird stuff too, there’s one of the guy… it’s almost like he has a little soundboard of Obama reading the narration for one of his books but cut up in a way that makes the president sound stupid or weird or something.

[Play soundboard voice message]

Some people took it really seriously, some of them were funny.

[Play funny voice messages]

And then sometimes it’s some kids at what seems to be a slumber party and they’re prank calling me.

[Play prank call]

Duncan receives so many calls from unknown numbers that one literally came in while I was interviewing him… five months after the tweet.

Duncan: I don’t know if you can hear it, I’m getting a phone call from Hackensack, New Jersey. Alright, hold on, here I’ll call you right back, one second.

[Play call]

Uhh so, it was guy that was like, “hello, hello?” and then he just goes, “Arrr matey” like a pirate, and then hung up. Y’know what I mean, so like… Oh he’s calling back again right now. See this is the thing it’s like... You do want to engage with people but I don’t really want to be fueling a bunch of trolls by picking up and letting them know that like, I am available to be harassed. That’s what happens when you pick up the phone and you do engage.

[music in]

Even after Duncan started listening to the voice messages, it still didn’t answer all of his questions. Why would someone be motivated to call a random number tweeted out by a celebrity? He dove in a bit deeper to find out.

Duncan: This is when I was starting to become interested in who these people are, why are they calling, what’s their motivation, like what is this really. And so this guy called me, and I didn’t pick up. Well, let’s call this guy back.

[Play some of this call]

He was playing as if he doesn’t know that I have thousands of calls coming in and it’s like it’s so obvious why he called me. Then I got to sort of interrogate him for a second in a casual way.

[Play interrogation part of clip.]

It takes like ten minutes, but then he caves and he reveals it all to me.

[Play admission part of clip]

The more and more we talked about it the more and more he started to realize that “oh me, Duncan, like I’m a human. This caused a lot of stress” and he started to feel bad and, at the end of it he was apologetic and he was even offering to buy me dinner.

[Play apology part of clip]

It was nice it was like we actually ended up having this real conversation.

[music in]

In addition to the countless calls and voice messages Duncan received, he also got a huge amount of texts.

[text message SFX]

Duncan: Two days ago, just a text message from 980 area code. “Michelle, comma, baby, comma, is this you?” And a lot of them don’t make sense like, “hi”, next message, “hi”, next message, “you obama?”, next message “you obama?” 585 area code, “are you friends with michelle obama?”

206 area code, “Hi I hate your husband obama,” Obama spelled O-B-O-M-A.

571 area code, “You’re cool AF, exclamation point, I wish former First Lady gave my number away.”

“Can’t wait for prom see you there”, smiley face, “jk that was stupid, if so, sorry.”

“Will you please send me photos of the Obama’s, specifically Barrack”, from 408 area code.

Here’s the one from my local news station growing up, “Hey there I work at KACK channel 5 in St. Louis. We saw Michelle Obama tweeted just your phone number out a little bit ago. We want to see what your day has been like since then.”

Also delightful text messages like this one from 619 area code that says, “I’m taking a poop like you.” Uhh, okay.

[music out]

Despite the curious content of some of these messages that people were sending to Duncan’s phone, the sheer volume makes it clear that lots of people were fascinated by the tweet. What is it about events like this that inspire people to reach out?

Duncan: It all depends on how people viewed the number and what they thought that number was and it almost has nothing to do with me, it has more to do with people wanting to feel like they’re a part of something. All of a sudden through this tweet and my phone number it allows people to feel like they have a connection to this celebrity figure, even though most of them probably do know that voicemail is not going to be listened to by the First Lady. It still lets them participate in this cultural internet process.

Duncan’s experience speaks to the awesome power and challenges that come from the internet age. One tweet, nothing more than a quick accident, was enough to set off thousands of calls and texts from strangers around the world. It also inspired news organizations to dig into every detail of Duncan’s life. Unfortunately, Duncan’s story also illustrates the darker sides that are revealed from the anonymous nature of the internet.

Duncan: I feel like I received the full force of 2017 internet shaming culture, but I didn’t do anything wrong or bad. I just was this phone number. It was received in ultimately a fairly benign way. This whole thing has been this really crazy and unrepeatable social experiment.

[music in]

Despite being harrassed and loss of privacy, Duncan still remains fascinated by the whole experience, and while the amount of calls and texts he receives have slowed down pretty significantly, he still receives them every single day.

Duncan: My number’s like out there in this thing and you’d think five months later people would stop calling and stop texting and certainly they’ve slowed down. It’s maybe a call or two a day but sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less but it’s still happening. So it seems like this plateau that I’ve hit, it’s kind of just my new normal and I just need to get used to it.

And while Duncan had no control over his situation in the beginning, the decision on how long this social experiment continues is completely up to him.

Duncan: Something about this whole process has been immensely interesting for me. What happened to me hasn’t really happened to anybody else in this kind of way before and so I’m feeling like, as much as it really was terrible for me it’s also a privilege to be this vessel through which this weird experiment can happen and I’m yet unwilling to just stop it. So as soon as it becomes unbearable, it’s as easy as changing my phone number.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by Jim McNulty...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

Huge thanks to Duncan Wolfe for sharing his story… and thanks to his phone number for making it all possible. Also, Duncan is an incredible commercial director and you should definitely take a moment to check out his work. You can find that at Duncan Wolfe (that Wolf with an e) dot com. Also, after hearing this story, if you decide to call or text Duncan - at least make it entertaining. Oh, and be nice.

The incredible music in this episode is from our friends at Musicbed. They represent more than 650 great artists, ranging from indie rock and hip-hop to classical and electronic. You can also head over to music.20k.org to hear our exclusive playlist.

You can find us all over the internet by searching Twenty Thousand Hertz. That’s Twenty Thousand Hertz all spelled out. We’d also love to hear from you, email us at hi@20k.org to say hi, give us a show idea or share your thoughts.

Thanks for listening.

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VIEW ARCHIVE

The Gift: Dr. Amar Bose’s audio legacy

This episode was written & produced by Kevin Edds.

The science behind sound reproduction has been studied for centuries. But what will research uncover in the centuries to come? One man made it his life’s mission to find out, and a gift he made to the world will continue that mission for the foreseeable future. Explore the extraordinary life of Dr. Amar Bose in this special holiday episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz. Featuring Ken Jacob from Bose.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Sometimes - Steven Gutheinz
Embrace - Roary
Starless Night - Dexter Britain
Convoy - Roary
Animal (Instrumental) - The Seige
First Light - One Hundred Years
Imagine - Steven Gutheinz
On the Way - Steven Gutheinz
Ascension - Jordan Critz
The Time to Run - Dexter Britain
Beethoven’s Symphony no. 10

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see our video series.

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Check out Bose at bose.com/20k.

Follow Bose on Twitter & Facebook.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Zzzzz….. phhhhhhhttt….. chhhhhhhhhhcckk…. "Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat" Chhhhhhccccck…

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor.

[SFX: Zzzzz….. phhhhhhhttt….. chhhhhhhhhhcckk…. "The horse eats no cucumber salad". Chhhhhhccccck…]

[music in]

According to many accounts, “The horse eats no cucumber salad” were the first words transmitted through electronic reproduction. This was way way back in 1861 by Johann Philipp Reis (Yo-hahn Phillip rice). He was developing an early version of the telephone. Before then, sound could only travel long distances in the most pristine environmental conditions—like in the Grand Canyon [echo SFX]. Or by using a horn or megaphone which didn’t amplify the sound, but really just forced it all in the same direction allowing it to travel longer distances [mega phone SFX].

In the years to come, with advances in electronic audio transmission and amplification, the world would slowly be introduced to the joys of reproduced sound. And like Johann Reis, one of the icons in the field of audio reproduction - that not many people know about - is Dr. Amar Bose (ah-mar).

[music out]

Full disclosure here, Twenty Thousand Hertz is sponsored by Bose. Earlier this year I went to their corporate headquarters to meet with their team and to see all of the new products. But what I didn’t know much about going in to the meeting was the history of their founder and his impact on the sound industry.

After speaking with many people at the company I was so moved by one particular story, that I wanted to make a special episode out of it. To be clear, this was not proposed by Bose, they are not writing the episode, and this is not an ad. This is just a truly great story about the contributions one person made to sound. Even more importantly though is the story of a gift he made that I think is really profound and somehow had never heard of. I’ll leave it at that, because I don’t want to give it away.

So, with these caveats in mind, sit back and enjoy this holiday edition of Twenty Thousand Hertz with our special presentation of… “The Gift.”

[SFX: Beeeeeep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beeeeep. Beeeeeep, beep, beep. Beep.]

While Johann Reis was able to transmit his voice electronically, and wirelessly, the technology did not advance much over the next half century. In 1906 Morse code was the only reliable way to communicate [morse code SFX] over long distances without wires.

But that Christmas Eve, a mysterious morse code transmission was received by ships off the coast of New England. It alerted them to pay close attention to an important message to follow.

The Morse operators on ships readied their pencils to take down the communication and then quickly share it with their captains, when suddenly, out of their headsets, they heard something that might have sounded like this…

[old radio broadcast of a woman singing “O Holy Night”]

It was no doubt a mind-blowing experience. These men had been trained to listen for the dots and dashes of Morse code [morse code SFX] and then translate that into words and sentences. But now, a live voice was speaking to them. And not just over a wired connection like a telephone, but across many miles of ocean and through the power of radio technology.

[“This is the voice of Reginald Fessenden speaking to you from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Merry Christmas” clip]

It had been 45 years since Johann Reis’ first attempts at transmitting a voice electronically without wires. Fessenden’s broad-cast was the first attempt at instant, mass communication. Songs, news, politics, and sporting events could all be transmitted in real time to large audiences.

But again, there would be another long wait before the next big advancements in the technology of reproduced sound. It wouldn’t be until World War I when developments of radio for military communications began to be considered for consumer use.

[1937 World Series broadcast clip]

Tabletop radio development took off, and eventually headsets were replaced with speakers. All of America was crazy about the radio.

[continue 1937 World Series broadcast clip]

Fast-forward to the tumultuous times of World War II, and it was radio broadcasts that gave the latest updates on the fight abroad. Millions of Americans were glued to their one instant source of news. Reis’ creation and Fessenden’s advancements had come a long way.

And it was then that an industrious and inquisitive boy in Philadelphia decided to start repairing radios as a way to earn extra money for his family. His name was Amar Bose.

[Busy Calcutta street, arguing from a crowd of protestors SFX]

A century ago if you were Indian and living on the Indian Subcontinent under British rule life was difficult. Amar Bose’s father, Noni (no-nee), was a student at the University of Calcutta and a freedom fighter against the Crown’s Rule. And in 1920 Noni was forced to flee the country or face execution. Noni made his way to the United States and tried to immigrate through Ellis Island. The only reason he was allowed in to the country was due to the help of an Irish-American immigration guard who shared Noni’s anti-British sentiments.

After settling in Philadelphia Noni met Charlotte, a first grade teacher of French and German ancestry. They were soon married and began to start a family. In 1929 Amar (ah-mar) Gopal (go-pul, no emphasis on either syllable) Bose was born.

[music in]

Ken: Dr. Bose grows up in a struggling middle class family.

That’s Ken Jacob, a former student at MIT and colleague of Dr. Bose.

Ken: With a white mother and an immigrant father from India. And you think about what was going on in the mid-century in the United States at that time, you can imagine not necessarily having an easy childhood. Bi-racial marriages, even in the North, were very, very much frowned upon.

Growing up Amar experienced racial prejudice and had to endure bullying. Instead of getting angry about it, he chose to ignore it. He found that differences in people, didn’t matter to him. He only cared about what people were capable of, what talents they held.

[music out]

[toy train SFX]

As a young boy, Amar loved toy trains, but with money tight, his family could only afford to buy used ones, many of them broken. So Amar learned how to repair them. And when his father’s import business was struggling due to the war overseas, 13-year-old Amar shifted his attention to repairing radios to help make ends meet.

[Walter Winchell radio broadcast clip: "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea.”]

This fascination with radios enabled him to run a business out of his family’s home. Amar’s entrepreneurial skills helped him as he built one of the largest radio repair shops in Philadelphia.

[music in]

Ken: These were radios that people were enjoying for the same reasons, for the most part, that people enjoy your podcast or music today. And so, I think that's an obvious path. Electronics, tubes, and speakers, that's a radio.

Bose’s talents in radio repair even led him to construct an early version of a television set, years before they were ever available to consumers.

Ken: By the time it came to looking for colleges, his skill and enthusiasm and excitement about electronics had gained some attention. His family couldn't afford to send him to MIT and his grades weren't of a nature that you might get in under just simply because of your academic record. But there were enough people that had observed his brilliance and his energy that I think some recommendations were made that got him into MIT, but did not get him a scholarship.

[music out]

After being accepted to MIT Amar was determined to not let any more opportunities pass him by due to lack of focus on his academics.

Ken: The way he describes it is that he just went bananas studying at MIT. That he basically had no friends, no life, that he put all of his energy into studying so that his grades would be in that first semester sufficient to get him a scholarship, which is what happened.

[music in]

After receiving a scholarship, Amar’s love for MIT began to grow and grow.

Ken: He did his undergraduate, Master's, and his PhD, all in sequence at MIT. And as he started to turn from taking classes to more of a research focus, which is typical as you start to pursue a doctorate, and just fell in love with doing technical research.

[music out]

To reward himself for earning his Ph.D. Bose bought himself the newest and best loudspeaker system on the market. His love of radio as a young boy had never left him. He invited a friend who was a musician over to his home to hear his new speaker system. But the results were a disaster [distorted violin SFX]. The violin sounded nothing like it should in real life. So Dr. Bose secretly used the acoustics lab at MIT to conduct some research for fun.

Ken: So, in addition to some of the power electronics research work that they were doing that had led to these quite fundamental patents, he had carried through this interest in radio to MIT, where there was other people that were interested in high fidelity, which at the time was just kind of getting started.

[music in]

In the 1950s the dominant mode of listening to the radio was a tabletop system that didn't sound all that great. It produced very mid-range, middle frequency sounds. Not deep bass, and not the kind of great high frequency sounds that together make something sound high fidelity.

Ken: And so, they were kind of sneaking around at night working on some ideas or pursuing some interest in high fidelity.

After receiving his PhD from MIT Dr. Bose was approached to teach. This was not something he planned on doing, but he fell in love with it and it allowed him to continue his research at the school. Dr. Bose would soon develop and receive key patents in the field of electronics. And those patents could be sold or licensed to make him some extra money. But the companies that wanted to buy these patents would not necessarily put them to work. Sometimes they were bought just to make sure a competitor wouldn’t use them. So Dr. Bose came to the only logical conclusion that made sense to him: start a business. And in 1964 the Bose Corporation was born.

During the day Dr. Bose and his staff would do contract work for NASA and the US government developing power-processing systems. But at night they’d work on another one of their true passions: audio.

[music out]

[Music: Violins]

Psychoacoustics, the scientific study of sound perception, fascinated Bose. As a boy he had learned to play the violin, but he knew that loudspeakers of the era could not accurately reproduce the sound of stringed instruments very naturally. [SFX: violin(s) solo dissolves into mono playback] So he visited the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

[SFX: Orchestral Music]

Dr. Bose and his team decided to conduct research in the field. They recorded the orchestra with microphones placed on either side of the head of a mannequin sitting in the audience. This is what’s called a binaural recording. When playing the recording back for the conductor he listened to the binaural playback on a pair of headphones and was amazed. He was hearing his own orchestra for the first time the same way his audience would hear it. When Bose switched the recording to mono [mono orchestral music SFX] the conductor gasped—it sounded like a regular old set of speakers from that era.

Ken: So, they were just doing this all out of excitement and curiosity and wanting to know, is there something fundamental that we could discover about sound reproduction? That would lead to a device that behaved very differently in order to try to come close to the natural sound of a real musical instrument.

[music out]

Over the next several decades the Bose Corporation developed speakers that changed the landscape of audio reproduction and made the company into a success. But their dedication to research never changed. To Dr. Bose, research and finding where that path takes you was more important than earning a quick buck.

In his early years on the MIT faculty Dr. Bose had consulted for several publicly held companies. And he saw how the need to maximize company stock value led to short-term thinking. He didn’t want his company to work that way.

[music in]

Ken: If you want to have the freedom to invest in expensive long term research, and Dr. Bose's definition of research was quite clear, which is research is when you don't know if it's possible. Development is when you know that it's possible and you need to do the engineering work to try to make it into a device or an invention.

And so, research by its very nature, a lot of it ends up in the trash bin. If you are trying to satisfy public stockholders one of the first things to go is research. He was unwilling to sacrifice that essential element of the company. And it’s how he fundamentally saw new and better things coming to be.

To do that, it means that you have to earn enough to self-fund. Bose has always been a self-funding company.

There were times in our history when we had hit products, where we could have taken out a couple hundred million dollar loan in order to quickly build a new plant. We didn't allow ourselves to do that.

[music out]

As the Bose Corporation grew over the years Dr. Bose began to think about the legacy of the company and what he hoped for its future. In fact, others asked him the same thing. But Dr. Bose would not state what his vision for the company was. He didn’t want to, in essence, create robots to carry out his plan. Instead, when speaking about his employees, he said, “If they work creatively and in cooperation they can create much better things in the future than I can envision today.”

But how could he set things up in a way where guarantee his company would continue on this path and not one day turn into a profit-maximizing entity? Every time Dr. Bose thought he had a solution, he would find a problem. Finally, after more than 15 years of thought, and research, he solved the problem. And it was beautiful. He would give ownership of the company, but not control, to MIT. The institution where he not only received his education, but had also been teaching at for 45 years, all while running The Bose Corporation.

Ken: Bose could continue, as a company, to be privately held and in control of its destiny, able to invest in the long haul, including expensive and speculative technical research, including pursuing things that are unconventional.

When Dr. Bose made his donation former MIT President Susan Hockfield put it best: “Dr. Bose has always been more concerned about the next two decades than about the next two quarters.”

[music out]

[clock ticking SFX]

Dr. Bose loved metaphors, and one of his favorites, from the book Built to Last, was about the concept of time telling versus clock building. Someone can be great at telling time and as long as they’re still alive and always around. But if you could build a clock that future generations could use to tell time, that’s long lasting. What Dr. Bose wanted to do was to turn his own company into a clock.

And only two years after making this announcement, Dr. Amar Gopal Bose, the boy wonder who built Philadelphia’s largest radio repair shop, and industry-leading engineer who created the world’s most research-obsessed audio corporation, passed away… no longer around to tell the time. But in his place he engineered the best clock he could imagine.

[music in]

Ken: There's books written on what are now called elegant solutions. I'm not trying to compare in a precise way. Einstein reducing the universe to E=mc2 certainly qualifies.

So, allowing the company to continue operating by its timeless beliefs and principles and at the same time helping MIT to me qualifies as an extraordinarily elegant solution. It's mind-blowing.

This is a pay-it-forward gift. If we continue in the way that Dr. Bose set us up in terms of principles, beliefs, values, this gift will go down in history as one of the largest ever in education. But if we screw it up, there's nothing.

[music out]

[clock ticking SFX]

Unlike other philanthropic endeavors, Dr. Bose’s gift isn’t a simple monetary transaction. It’s in itself an invention. A self-perpetuating mechanism, a beautiful solution from an engineering mind.

[music in]

Ken: This is a mechanism that compels both institutions to try to keep doing what they've done, but in a constantly changing, incredibly dynamic and challenging, competitive world. It's unbelievable!

But as the saying goes, with great gifts come great responsibilities (or is it responsibility?).

Ken: It's also at times daunting because the responsibility weighs on us to make that gift pay out so that it does become one of the greatest, most generous gifts in the history of education.

[music out]

[music in]

From horses eating no cucumber salad, to Christmas carols broadcast to ships in the North Atlantic, to surround-sound speaker systems that truly represent what violins really sound like, audio reproduction has advanced far beyond what Johann Reis and Reginald Fessenden could ever have imagined.

That’s what made Dr. Amar Bose like us. He loved sound. He knew sound was special. Whether to educate, facilitate, or just entertain, sound matters. And he wanted to reproduce it for everyone, better than ever before.

Ken: I went to MIT. I was a student of Dr. Bose's. I knew instantaneously that it was somebody I wanted to work for. One thing that motivates me is trying to take the things that he's set up, this pay-it-forward gift. I think I worked with him for 30 years, and all of that pales in comparison to the gift. Really. The future.

20K Hz is produced out of the studios of DeFacto Sound. A sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at DefactoSound.com.

This episode was written, produced, and edited by Kevin Edds… and me, Dallas Taylor… with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

Many thanks to Ken Jacob, of the Bose Corporation.

The music in this episode is from Musicbed. They represent more than 650 great artists, ranging from indie rock and hip-hop to classical and electronic. Head over to music.20k.org to hear our exclusive playlist.

Connect with us on Facebook and Twitter at the handle 20korg. You can find our website at 20k dot org. There you can send us feedback, suggestions for future episodes, or just generally say hey.

Thanks for listening.

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Facebook & Google Pixel: Designing the perfect alert sound

This episode was written & produced by James Introcaso.

There are sounds we interact with every single day and never give a second thought. Our phones, computers, cars, and other devices are constantly communicating with us through user interface sounds and it’s their job to be heard, but not distracting. In this episode, we speak with Will Littlejohn, Facebook’s Director of Sound Design, and Conor O’Sullivan, Sound Design Lead at Google, about the sounds they create that help connect families, friends, and communities.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Columbus - Steven Gutheinz
Inside Outside - Nick Box
Blue - Eric Kinny
Yellow - Eric Kinny
Arriving Light (No Oohs & Ahhs) - Meaning Machine
The Middle - Steven Gutheinz
Curious Robot - Eric Kinny
Your First Light My Eventide - The Echelon Effect

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see our video series.

If you know what this week's mystery sound is, tell us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠mystery.20k.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Support the show and get ad-free episodes at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠20k.org/plus⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

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Join our community on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Reddit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[AOL sign on SFX, ICQ uh-oh SFX, Facebook messenger typing montage]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor.

[Facebook new message SFX]

[music in]

You probably don’t think a lot about user interface, or UI, sounds. These are the noises made by devices, applications, and software we interact with.

Everything from our iPhones…

[iPhone message alert SFX]

… to our airplanes…

[airplane seatbelt SFX]

… all are user interfaces, and have UI sounds. We hear them all day, everyday but many of us never think twice about them. Why is that?

Will: We're in service of the experience, and to the people who use our products. We're not in service of being noticed, in any particular experience not being noticed is the right move.

That’s Will Littlejohn.

Will: I'm the first person to pull sounds out of an experience if they don't really serve a purpose.

He’s the Director of Sound Design at Facebook. His team is responsible for the social media platform’s UI sounds.

Will: All the sounds in Messenger [Facebook messenger SFX]… all the sounds in Facebook.

[Facebook notification SFX]

If anyone knows about UI sound design, it’s Will.

[music out]

Will: I personally have been working in this space since the early 2000s. Most people aren't… even aware that they're intimately interacting with sounds on a daily basis, in a way that's very, very personal to them and personal to their quality of life.

We process so much sound that our minds don't bring a lot of that to the forefront, in terms of our consciousness. But it's so powerful in how it guides and influences our daily lives, that I've always felt that this was one of most important types of work that I do, is to really bring thoughtful [old Facebook notification SFX] and positive UI experiences to people through whatever products we're working on [new Facebook notification SFX]. If we're interacting with something in the real world, that's quite a different relationship than leaning back and watching a film or TV, and you're processing it in a different way.

[music in]

Will, like many UI sound designers, believes that most of his team’s work should go unnoticed by consumers, because when a sound does stand out, it’s a problem.

Will: They notice when things aren't right or aren't really authentic in sound, but they don't really notice when they take things to another level. That's just part of how we process sound and I've learned over the years to not take it personally.

You can create a very negative experience for the entire product purely through one sound [Samsung Galaxy water droplet SFX]. I know a lot of people that really, really hate particular products because of one sound [awful alarming SFX].

[music out]

It might seem odd that there are UI designers out there working hard to make sure their sounds aren’t noticed, but that’s the goal for most. They want their content to blend seamlessly with the visuals provided by their application. It’s not just about finding a sound that works. It’s about finding the perfect sound through a process that can take a group of people months, like when Will’s team created the Messenger notification.

Will: We call it Pop ding.

[pop ding SFX]

The first question I have is, what are our objectives? What are we trying to do with this sound? What are we trying to say? What are we trying to achieve technically? When are we going to hear this sound? How often? In what environments? That's one slice.

Another slice is, is this the voice of the product? Is there speed involved in the sound itself? Because Messenger's a very fast product. Denoting speed, embodying that in the sound itself was, in this case, a consideration.

All of these things we think about pretty deeply before we ever start to make anything at all. That, to me, is probably the most important part of the process, that informs the design from the very beginning.

Before Will’s team sits down to design, there’s one other consideration: sonic branding.

[music in]

Facebook is one of the world’s most recognizable brands and its sounds are no exception. It’s Will’s job to make sure when they create a new sound like the Pop ding…

[pop ding SFX]

… that it belongs with the rest of the sounds in the Messenger family, like the thumbs up that expands as you hold down the LIKE icon in the app.

[thumbs up SFX]

Will: You can make some really interesting sounds that may work individually in what they're trying to achieve, but if they're just kind of random in their design, there's kind of a lack of connectivity amongst them, and amongst the product. It becomes a bit disjointed in terms of the overall experience and the design.

When you approach it more from a family or a palette, it's really like painting a painting and using the same style throughout the painting, rather than going cubist in one corner and impressionist in the other. Painting a scene that's somewhat consistent in terms of the palette really applies sonically, as well.

[music out]

If you listen to the Messenger sounds [Facebook messenger SFX], you'll notice that they all have a kind of a similar sonic characteristic, in terms of their timber [Facebook messenger SFX] and frequency content [Facebook messenger SFX].

A sound family’s brand is important, but so is its utility. Individually, each sound directs the user from one point of the interface to the next. Together the sounds form a sonic roadmap that the user can interact with to get what they need out of the device or application.

Will: In Messenger there are sounds that have various levels of utility value. In this I mean they're useful, they do things for you, rather than just being a sound, they actually help the product and the overall experience to be more useful for people. That's one of our main objectives.

One of those sounds is what we call the typing sound. This is the sound that plays when somebody's typing a message to you, the little three dots are kind of galloping along and the sound kind of gallops along, too.

[typing sound SFX]

If you hear that sound, and you hear what we call the send and sent sounds, those are the, when you touch the button and when the sound is actually sent, these very simple little UI,tones. They're little, single little, small, little tiny pops...

[send and sent sounds SFX]

If you listen to those three together, they sonically have the same characteristics. They move in different ways, they're built in different ways, but if you play them all together, you can feel that they feel like they're coming from the same place.

[typing sound SFX]

[send and sent sounds SFX]

While the planning phase for UI sounds is the most important, the creative phase is the most fun. That’s when designers get to dream up new sounds, as long as they’re useful.

[music in]

Conor: You never want to play a sound just to play a sound. The sound should really only play when it has a good reason to play.

That’s Conor O’Sullivan. He’s the lead for sound design at Google.

[music out]

Conor: I have been involved with sound design on Pixel, Pixel 2, some of our other products as well, even on TV, we hear some sounds that come from our products like there's a Google brand sound that plays at the start of commercials.

[Google Mini commercial intro piano sound SFX]

That piano sound carries throughout all Google products. It’s a signal to the user that they’re about to interact with the Google brand and there’s slight variations in the sound for each product.

This is what the startup sound for the Pixel sounds like...

[Pixel startup SFX]

Conor: When you first power up the phone, you hear you see a little boot animation. You hear a short piano sound. It's actually based around the note and chord of G. The reason why we do that is because the visuals are resolving to a visual G on the screen.

Every sound Conor has created for the Pixel is just as thoughtful. He’s thinking about the Google brand, the utility of the sound he’s making, and the limitations of the hardware itself.

Conor: The phone has a smaller speaker. It has its own unique resonances that you need to work with and work around.

A lot of times, composers, sound designers, people will work with sounds that have big bassy elements or complex timbers. Really for the pixel, we try to steer away from that a little bit. It was fun to work in parts of the frequency spectrum that are sometimes neglected. Also, from a user experience perspective too, when you're out and about with your device, you're using a phone say in a noisy environment or restaurant or street, sounds that are heavier get lost.

The Pixel’s small speakers make it perfect for Google’s higher pitched UI sounds, which can be heard in many of its ringtones...

[Zen Pixel ringtone SFX]

… and alarms….

[Flow Pixel alarm SFX]

But way more thought goes into ringtones and alarms than just what sounds good coming through the device’s speakers. Conor balances each sound’s ability to grab attention without it becoming overbearing or annoying.

Conor: There's different techniques for getting the user's attention but also doing it in a respectful way. Obviously, one of them is the design choice of the style of sound hopefully couldn't be considered offensive, but also the behavior of the sound. So how for example a sound might ramp in whether it'd be a ringtone or an alarm; ramp in both in terms of actual volume, so maybe starting out a bit lower gradually increasing or in terms of complexity, so what the sound is actually doing.

[Lollipop Pixel ringtone SFX]

That's called Lollipop and that's on the Pixel 2. That's one that starts out as more of a regular ring-type persistent sound, but then increases in terms of complexity, rhythmically and also in the frequency spectrum. So it goes a little bit higher up and gets your attention. Potentially if you're in a noisy environment, you'll hear the later part of the ringtone probably a bit better.

[music in]

When it comes to ringtones, alarms, and notifications on a phone, nothing optimizes the UI experience like the ability to customize.

Conor: Everyone is different in terms of their preferences and that's something that we do, try and provide a range of styles. People like different things. Some people would really want the loudest ringtone. They're going to be in noisy environments they want to be alerted at all possible cost. Other people prefer a lot more subtlety in their experience. So they want either a gentle introduction that may increase in complexity or just a more subtle sound overall.

[music out]

There’s one other aspect of design to consider when creating UI sounds. How do designers create sounds that don’t make the user want to rip out their hair the one-thousandth time they’ve heard it? Here’s Will again.

Will: If you have a sound that has a lot of things going on inside of it, both over duration and harmonic content, and you play that sound over and over and over again, it will become tiresome over time.

We've found that the simpler, harmonically, things are, the higher their repetitive tolerance. That makes a more usable and more delightful experience and a better overall experience in the product over time, which is really one variable that you have when you're making sounds for products that you interact with in the real world, versus watching on a screen, because you can watch this really crazy UI stuff in some kind of film or in an experience in a game, but you're not going to be watching that 5,000 times in a row.

It’s true. Imagine how much you’d hate your computer if every error message came with an alert that sounded like this…

[2001 Space Odyssey Quote: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” clip]

[music in]

Now that you know how UI sounds are crafted, you might asking yourself just how important are they really? We’ll get to that and talk about a legendary messaging application that shaped the future of UI sound after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

So we know user interface sounds are painstakingly crafted by designers to the point of perfection, but you might be wondering, “Are UI sounds really worth the thankless work designers put into them?” Conor and Will both agree that the less people actually notice an interface’s sounds, the better, so is there any point to them at all? Will obviously thinks so.

[music out]

Will: What I do is important because my job is really to think about how to activate the sense of sound and bring more resonant connections to people through the sense of sound. What we do here is connect people and connect communities. My perspective is that we have these vast opportunities to do that through the sense of sound. It's such an unexplored and underutilized sense. How do we activate and create these communities through sound?

The buzzes, beeps, and notifications of UI are all about communication. Though we may not think about them, UI sounds do everything from letting us know when our microwave popcorn is done…

[microwave done SFX]

… to letting us know when our boss is calling with a custom ringtone.

[Starwars Imperial March ringtone SFX]

UI sounds are even more important in developing countries, which is a revelation Will had while visiting Africa on vacation.

[music in]

Will: Just hanging out on this dirt road in this open air jeep, sitting next to these elephants that are chewing on some trees and I've got my phone out and my camera ready, in case something happens, on video. Just out of the blue, this huge bull elephant just gets, for some reason, really angry and just starts crashing through the trees and charging the jeeps.

[Elephant video clip]

And it's terrifying. I caught this elephant just looking right at me as it's charging these jeeps, and they're trying to turn the jeeps on to move and it's pretty dramatic. We got out of the way and I was kind of shaken and just like, wow, this is amazing, I can't wait to post this for my friends to see. I get it all ready to post and this was my ... I like to say, hey, I'm from the land of free Wifi and 4G. I hit post, and this was my first experience with 2G, so it was going to take 90 minutes for this little 10, 15 second video to upload.

It was a really singular moment for me, where I realized how much of the world experiences the internet.

I can see this little tiny progress bar, just starting. I realized, at that moment, I could just turn my sound on and just stick that phone in my pocket and not even think about it.

[music out]

The post sound in Facebook, this sound is a really delightful little sound...

[Facebook Post SFX]

The great utility that is brought forth by this sound is the fact that we attached it to the completion of the post and not the action of touching the post. This allows you to rely on the sound itself to tell you when the post is done, and not stare at your progress bar for one minute or an hour.

If we had not implemented that sound in that way, I would have been staring at that progress bar for 90 minutes, while I'm in this amazing environment that I flew 17 hours to go experience.

Because of that, that one little decision and how we implemented the sound, I now was able to offload. That, to me, shows the true power of really, really thoughtful sound design and UI design.

Turns out UI sounds are so helpful because we don’t have to think about them. This is even true for those of us who leave our phones on vibrate all the time. Think about your phone sitting on your desk or coffee table with nothing to notify you except vibrations. There’s a difference in sound of your phone vibrating when you get a call…

[phone call vibration SFX]

… Versus getting a text message.

[text message vibration SFX]

The differences in these two sounds goes beyond just the length of time of the vibration. If we played both for the same amount of time, I bet you can still tell a difference between the call…

[phone call vibration SFX]

… and the text message…

[text message vibration SFX]

UI sound designers also have a hand in device’s haptics, or interactions involving touch. Here’s Conor again.

Conor: I focus on non-visual design. I think about haptics and sound in the same way. Sound is caused by vibration. So you really think about them together. I've done a lot of work on haptics., I've worked with some of the researchers and designers here that focus on haptics. It's important to think about all these things together.

[music in]

When it comes to UI sound design, there’s one application that should be top of mind for most Gen Xers and Millennials: the America Online Instant Messenger, or AIM as we called it in high school. This messaging application was one of the firsts of its kind and and it was full of UI sounds.

[AIM message received and sent SFX]

Everyone from middle schoolers to business executives used AIM every single day [AIM message SFX]… and it had a big impact on the way we create UI sounds today.

[music out]

Conor: It was probably one of the first early mass market adoption of web communication technology. So as a sound designer today I think that was important for opening up audiences to the idea that sound and web could go together [AIM message SFX]. And also that sound could play a role that was both functional [AIM sign on SFX] heavy users got to understand exactly, which sound meant what. Also sound became part of their brand, part of the digital experience [AIM cash register SFX]. That's super important from my perspective today.

One of the great things about AIM was that it allowed you to customize sounds. You could have the application play a custom noise to alert you that a specific friend signed on. You might use the telephone for your bestie...

[AIM telephone SFX]

And the arrow thwack [AIM arrow thwack SFX] for your crush…

Ask anyone who was around in the late 90’s and early 2000’s about AIM and - most likely -they’ll still be able to tell you their favorite sound from the application.

Will: The cow sound [AIM cowSFX] was really a fun one. I always thought that was such a random sound and so hysterical every time I heard it, that it always brought a smile to my face.

For me, the doors opening [AIM doors open SFX] and doors closing [AIM doors close SFX] are, by far, the most meaningful for me and mean a lot of things. The thing that always comes to mind is if I'd forgotten and left my computer on and the doors keep opening [AIM doors open SFX] and closing [AIM doors close SFX] all night long. I still can remember doing that and experiencing that.

The AIM door sound effects were the default signals that friends were signing on and off in the application. They’re a skeuomorphic sound. I’ll let Will explain.

Will: Skeuomorphism is basically creating a design that looks exactly like something in the real world. Audio skeuomorphism is basically using a recording of the same thing that's happening in the real world. How the AOL sounds influence UI design today is this kind of skeuomorphic approach to audio design for UI is something that we use as a team, but we don't do it literally. We don't actually record an action and then play that back, but what we do do is we use the patterns that are established by those types of sounds. The movement, the action, the frequency sweeps. All those patterns, you can use as inspiration to design sounds that can have meaning embedded in them.

[music in]

So AIM has had a huge influence on UI sound design. We’re paying our respects because AOL Instant Messenger is shutting down. This likely isn’t a surprise to most of you, or if it is, it might be because you didn’t know AIM had lasted this long, but it’s impact on sound design is just as important as the influence it had on our work and social lives. It has a revolutionary place in the history of UI sound design.

Now you know the work that goes into creating UI sounds and just how important these little blips and beeps are to everyday life. So, next time you wake up to a happy alarm [iPhone Constellation ringtone] or get notified about a message from someone you love [iPhone text sent SFX], take a moment to remember that there’s a sound designer out there who created it. Actually… scratch that… don’t think about them at all… and just go about your day.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that supports ad agencies, filmmakers, and video game developers. Checkout recent work at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso… and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

Thanks to our guests Will Littlejohn, director of sound design at Facebook and Conor O’Sullivan, sound design lead at Google. Without their work, we literally would be less connected to our friends, families, and the world.

All of the music in this episode is provided by our friends at Musicbed. You can listen to these tracks, including this one “Your First Light My Eventide” by The Echelon Effect on our exclusive playlist which you can find at music dot 20k dot org.

You can say hello, submit a show idea, or give general feedback through Facebook, Twitter, or over email. Our email address is hi at 20k dot org.

Finally, the most important thing you can do for us is recommend the show to a friend. Say it in person, send a text, or give us a shout on social media.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

[AOL “Goodbye” SFX]

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Let It Beep: The rise and fall of the Mac startup chime

This episode was produced by Mark Bramhill for the podcast Welcome to Macintosh.

For over two decades, every time you turned on a Mac, you were greeted by a familiar sound. It’s appeared as a punchline in The Simpsons, in movies like WALL•E. It’s a sound some of us tried to hide from our parents as we turned on the computer in the middle of the night. It’s a sound that’s transcended technology; the sound that makes a Mac feel like a Mac. But no longer; the iconic Mac startup chime is going away.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see our video series.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Mac SFX montage]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor. This is the story of a rogue sound designer at Apple who created three of the most iconic sounds in computer history.

For those of us who use and love Macs — and I’ll pause here to say that I am one of those people — it’s about the little things: the sound it makes when it turns on[start up SFX], the way the keyboard clicks[keyboard sfx], the sound of taking a screenshot[screen shot sfx], or the satisfying magnetic snap[Macbook closing sfx]when you close a MacBook.

These sounds are engineered and designed with purpose...and that’s why I love them. However, as clean and friendly as they sound, there’s a darker backstory. One that takes us through legal hurdles and an impressive level of passive aggressiveness.

Mark Bramhill, host of the incredible podcast Welcome to Macintosh, tells us the story behind three of Apple's most famous sounds, and the sound designer who snuck them into existence.

The devices we use everyday make all kinds of sounds. You may not think about them much...maybe you’ve never even thought about them at all. But we have deep ingrained associations with each of them. They tell us something is wrong...

[alter beep SFX]

Or give us good news...

[finished chime SFX]

Or fill us with anxiety…

[new email SFX]

These sounds are so recognizable, widely known on a scale usually reserved for pop music. But these sounds, the sound we associate as being a part of our technology, they were designed by people. And unlike with a pop song, we almost never know who those people are.

Today, I want to change that. To pull back the curtain on the creator of some of the most iconic sounds in our digital landscape.

Jim: My name is Jim Reekes. I decided to study music and then realized I needed to make money and taught myself software engineering and that eventually led to getting hired by Apple in 1988.

And, at Apple, Jim applied his musical abilities to help shape the sonic character of the Mac, and give it the personality we know today.

I want to start with a story that tell you a lot about Jim. A story about a sound he made early on during his time at Apple. And it begins with a court case. The case of Apple vs Apple.

Jim: Apple Inc vs Apple Corps, the record label set up by The Beatles.

See, back when Apple computer was founded and went public, they has to make a deal with The Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps, saying that they wouldn’t do anything with music. Doing so might confuse consumers, which would violate their trademaker. But back in the late 80’s Apple added MIDI support to the Apple II, MIDI being what allow you to plug your computer into a musical keyboard and use it as an instrument, and Apple Corps saw this as a step too far.

Jim: And then at the point I had become responsible for the sound manager on the Mac, so I became the target for the horse haired barristers suing on behalf of The Beatles because, apparently The Beatles needed more money.

And these big wig-barring barristers wanted there to be nothing musical about the Mac. They even went so far as to check language used in the code...things that no end user would ever see.

Jim: It was called the note command and they said that was too musical so I had to rename it from note to Freq Command. And that cause everybody that was ever using the sound manager’s code to break. So yeah, that was like one example of just really mundane trivial little things. And I just got so fed up with it, it was so annoying. So I kept thinking about how I could just mess with them.

So Apple’s lawyers were extra careful with any names that consumers would see. Like the names of sounds, all the swooshes, and bleeps and bloops. Including one alert beep in particular, called “chimes”. [sosumi SFX]

Jim: This bleep sound, was something that sounded “too musical”. So, I had to rename that. And I just got so fed up with it, it was so annoying. So, that's why I kept thinkng about how I could just mess with them.

And so Jim found himself at Apple late at night, talking over this problem with friends.

Jim: I thought I could rename it to “Let it Beep”.

Let It Beep...after that classic Beatles song, Let It Be.

Jim: It would be impossible to get that one through, but I just thought that would be the best.

Jim’s friends tell him, no, no way you can use this! That’s insane!

Jim: And I said “Yeah, so what? So sue me.” And as soon as I said that I realized no wait that’s the perfect name...I just need to spell it funny.

So sue me. Except, spelled S-O-S-U-M-I, as though it were a Japanese word. In fact, when they submitted the name they said the word litterslly meant “nothing musical” in Japanese. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

Jim: And the lawyers approved it.

And to this day, on a Mac you can choose the alert tone “Sosumi”. [sosumi SFX]

A giant screw you to all the lawyers.

Jim: No that’s literally what it was. For me it was just me being ornery and getting back at them for all this mundane nonsensical bullshit.

I just have to say...I love this about Jim. His rascally hijinks, thumbing his nose at power. Battling bureaucracy with these little subversive acts. But, while Jim is often rather curmudgeonly and cynical, he also truly wanted to improve our sonic landscape.

Jim takes his vigilante sound-designing even further as he attempts to eradicate one of the most annoying sounds in Macintosh history [sfx] Stick around.

We’ve been hearing about Jim Reekes, the sound designer at Apple who took matters into his own hands and created some of the most recognizably Mac sounds we have today. Here’s Mark again...

Now, you might have noticed that Jim Reekes is a man with strong opinions. When he comes across something he doesn’t like, say, lawyers, he does something about it. And, though it’s hard to find something Jim has more distaste for than lawyers, this sound is one of them: [tri-tone SFX]

The startup chime of the Mac II.

Jim: That startup sound which was intentionally the hardest thing they could have made.

Every time you turned on a Mac, you were greeted with the tri-tone. [tri-tone SFX]

Jim: It was just horrible, I could not stand it.

Not only was this sound incredible harsh and grating, but it played when you were already in a bad mood. I mean, picture this:

Jim: You’re going to mostly be hearing the sound because you were doing some work on your computer that just crashed and you’ve lost all your work. And so you were already annoyed at that moment.

And back then, your Mac was probably crashing all the time. So you’d hear this again… [tri-tone SFX]

And again… [tri-tone SFX]

And again… [tri-tone SFX]

Why, why do you think they went with that?

Jim: They thought it was clever.

And you’re not in agreement with that.

Jim: It sounded horrible. There’s nothing clever about sounding horrible.

Nobody told Jim to change this. In fact, nobody even approved the project. Jim took it on in secret, like a God-given mission to fix this travesty of a sound.

Jim: And so I thought what sound could I use to unannoy you. So that’s kind of where the Zen calming gong like thing came up, to sort of freshen the palate.

Then he had to decide: What would the notes be?

Jim: Couldn’t be minor because that’s so sad so it has to be major. But that’s a little too contrived too little too trite. So I started thinking a little bit more about it and I played an overtone series.

An overtone series: The basis of all western music. The most “right” sounding thing possible. And so, after weeks of thinking about it, Jim sits down at his Mac, and records. [newer Mac start up SFX]

Jim told me he drew inspiration from a numbers of course... some classical, some more popular music. But he also confirmed that there was a very specific reference in there…

Jim: The Beatles believe it or not at the end of the song a day in a life. There’s a big cacophony of the orchestra [Day in a Life clip] at the end of that song.

And then this big chord that just hangs out on a tape loop. It just kind of goes for a while at the end.

Now that Jim had the sound, he had to get it onto new Macs.

Jim: I had to basically not ask for permission, but ask for forgiveness. So, I put in another ROM and we put it in really late when no one was really paying attention except for my buddies.

So the sound sneaks out into the world and, within Apple, the response was mixed.

Jim: Some people flipped out. Somehow they got really attached to the horrible sound and were objecting that I was ruining it by getting rid of the horrible sound.

But, before long, people came around and the sound became beloved.

It’s appeared as a punchline in The Simpsons, in movies like WALL-E. It’s a sound some of us tried to hide from our parents as we turned on the computer in the middle of the night. It’s a sound that’s transcended technology; the sound that makes a Mac feel like a Mac. The sound is so iconic, in fact, that it has one of the very few audio trademarks, along with fewer than two hundred others like, the MGM Lion and the NBC Chimes. Kind of ironic turn, for lawyer-hating Reekes.

But, while it’s become iconic, people don’t know about Jim. He hears the sound all the time, in offices or coffee shops. And the people using their Macs? They have no ideas they’re in the presence of the artist.

Jim: Sometimes I want to run up to them and say “Hey, I made that”. And most of them just think I’m an idiot. Sometimes they’re like yeah, whatever. And then sometimes they’re like well my God that’s totally amazing.

But, no longer. Last October, Apple introduced a new model of Macbook Pro, and as reviewers got their hands of it, they realized that the startup chime was gone. Now, Macs boot in silence.

Jim: Yeah, what’s the metaphor, it’s definitely the end of an era. The closing of a chapter. It’s losing a friend. It’s moving out of the house that you grew up in. Yeah, it’s just the end of something. So it definitely makes me sad. It’s just no longer the Mac.

Recently, I got one of these new Macbook Pros, and each time I turn it on, I find myself taken aback by the startup chime's absence. Every time you used to turn on a Mac, this device of the future, it would greet you with a reminder of its past. But now? It’s like that history no longer matters. And that makes me really sad.

But, there is one more thing. One other sound Jim made that’s still with us. A sound that isn’t as iconic as the startup chime, or as subversive as the “Sosumi” beep. Bit it’s a sound that’s far more ubiquitous. A sound that many of us invoke daily, or even multiple times a day. A sound we might associate with special occasions or some of the most memorable moments of our lives. [camera sound]

Jim: The camera sound. So originally it was on the Mac as a screen capture sound. Then when the iPhone came out and the iPad. So they moved that camera around over there. So you don’t really hear my startup sound in the wild all that much but you hear my camera all the time.

This sound we hear everything? It’s Jim’s camera.

So this is the sound? [camera SFX]

Jim: Yep, that’s my Canon AE1. That camera stuck with me for decades. And I used it to learn photography. So yeah, it became a very familiar sound to me and then it just felt like an obvious thing to put it on the Mac at the time.

This ubiquitous “digital: sound is a recording of a film camera from the 90's. But, even this sound was meticulously designed by Jim. He messed with microphone placement and the camera’s shutter speed , adjusting everything until it sounded just right.

[Let It Beep music in]

Today, photography is a big part of Jim’s life. It’s taken over music and sound become his passion. So it’s kind of fitting that the sound of his camera would gain this second life.

Does it bring you back at all when you hear people taking those photos?

Jim: I hear that sound and...there is almost an instinctual reaction sometimes that I turn to see who took my camera.

Jim’s startup chime is gone. It won’t disappear overnight, but in the coming years, you’ll hear it less and less and less. But it’s nice to know that, as we all snap photos, whether they’re of sunsets or well-plated brunches, a family member pretending to hold up the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids, or a child gleefully devouring chocolate cake, one of Jim’s sounds lives on.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was produced by Mark Bramhill for his podcast, Welcome to Macintosh, which is an incredible show about Apple and the community around it. To hear more fascinating stories, visit Macintosh.FM or find the show, “Welcome to Macintosh,” wherever you get your podcasts.

The music scoring in this episode is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Mark Bramhill. This episode was edited by Rob McGinley Myers, Lacy Johnson, and Tish Stringer. Special thanks to John Lagomarsino(lego-mar-see-no).

You can find Twenty Thousand Hertz at 20k.org. There, you can send us show suggestions, feedback, or reach out about advertising on the show. You can find us on Facebook or Twitter at the handle 20korg or by searching Twenty Thousand Hertz all spelled out. Finally, I need your help on one tiny thing… and that’s to tell at least one person you know directly to subscribe to the show. This show is for everyone, young people, adults, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, so if there’s someone you’d love to introduce to podcasting, borrow their phone and show them how to subscribe to Twenty Thousand Hertz. For everyone who already knows how to podcast, just make sure they tick the subscribe button.

Thanks again for listening.

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Disney Parks: How Imagineers use sound to enchant visitors

This episode was written & produced by Dave Parsons.

Theme parks have a way of transporting us to magical places, and sound is crucial in maintaining the illusion. From the most action-packed attractions to the background music playing between park areas, theme park sound designers have thought of it all. In this episode, we speak to Joe Herrington and Mike Fracassi, two Disney Imagineers who work to maintain the magic for guests of Disney Parks.

Music used in this episode

Reflection on a Ballroom Floor - One Hundred Years
Watchers (Solo Piano Version) - Steven Gutheinz
To Me You Are - Nick Box
Fibonacci - Adrian Disch
Heron's Path - Steven Gutheinz
Sailboat - One Hundread Years

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Theme Park Ambience]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story of how theme park designers use sound to shape our experience.

The modern theme park owes much of its origin to the world’s fairs of the late 1800s. They were designed to celebrate the successes of industrial innovations by mixing entertainment, engineering, and education. In 1895, Sea Lion Park - one of the first fixed-location amusement parks - opened its doors at Coney Island in Brooklyn, and shortly after, hundreds of amusement parks were up and running across the country.

[wooden roller-coaster SFX]

In the 1950s, the concept of “theming” was introduced to enhance the “amusement park” experience. The aptly-named theme parks began weaving the art of storytelling into the visitor experience. They did this through elaborate landscaping, architecture and a whimsical cast of characters. While the rides, games and attractions of ordinary amusement parks certainly maintained their allure, the immersive quality of theme parks produced an added layer of wonder.

In these wondrous places, sound plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion designed for the guest. Often overlooked, the music and sound design of park areas and attractions work endlessly to help tell the story by setting the mood, weaving together plot points, and seamlessly transitioning the guest from one story to the next. And when it comes to designing the soundscape of a theme park, it’s hard to top the work being done by the Imagineers at Disney.

Joe: We set out to control what you see and what you hear and what you smell. And what you feel emotionally.

That’s Joe Herrington a Walt Disney imaginary media designer. Joe has been working with Disney since 1981, and has worked on almost all of the major park attractions since then.

Joe: We put you in our fantasy place. To do that, we have to understand the powerful influence that sound has on people. Sound can make you relax, they can make you sweat, they can make you get chills. Feel calm or terrified. We want to be a part of controlling those emotions. The soundscape that we create is a very vital part of doing that. It sets the stage and then it takes you by the ear and leads you right through the story, and that's our objective.

To maintain the illusion of the story, the audio imagineers at Disney split their park soundscapes into different zones. This is so they can achieve a more complete immersive experience for their guests.

Joe: When you go into a zone of a park, we are trying to tell a particular story in that part of the park. In Adventure Aisle, as you approach the village, you began to hear little musical pieces [Adventure Aisle music]. So in the next zone, you had a little bit more music [Adventure Aisle added music]. You went from total jungle to I'm not sure what that is, is that rhythmic? Yeah it is, is that an instrument? Yeah, it is. And then suddenly, when you transition into the village, you've made a real nice smooth transition from no music to full on music [continue Adventure Aisle music]. That created this very rich, very real fantasy place.

While getting the music and background ambiance just right for a specific park zone is vital, designing what a guest hears as they’re traveling between park zones can be just as important.

Joe: As you go from land to land, and attraction to attraction, you pass through decompression zones, transition zones, buffer zones, those transitions tell you things like, "Okay, you can relax here and decompress, and you're not gonna miss anything." They hand you from one story to the next story. Without letting the two stories intrude on each other. And that's what makes it a magical place. Because once you get into our story, you never leave it until you walk out the door.

The story always comes first with theme park soundscaping. And proper music selection and arrangement of that music is key to maintaining the fantasy experience.

Mike: I'm Mike Fracassi, music production supervisor for the Walt Disney Imagineering music studio.

When we first learn of a new ride experience, we always start with story. What is our creative intent, what is the guest experience going to feel like, what's our adventure we're going on? And from there, we start to put together just some music style guide ideas. If it's a roller coaster, that's probably gonna be a faster paced feeling. So we'll pull music style guide ideas, whether it be songs or score material for many thing just to get a flavor of what we think it's gonna to feel like. And then we work with the rest of the team throughout the process to just allow the music selection to evolve.

In addition to a captivating music track, how the music plays and where it’s specifically coming from is a unique challenge for every attraction.

Mike: First thing you need to do to make sure the music works from scene to scene is look at the reality of the environmental space you're working within. You can't ignore acoustics, and you can't ignore the spatial relationships of the different scenes. Look at small world for instance.

[It’s A Small World song]

It’s A Small World was originally created for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and has been an iconic Disney attraction ever since.

Mike: It's essentially one big open building, it does have some walls between scenes, but there is a lot going on in each scene, there's a lot of different arrangements within each scene, but they're all playing the same song. So we take a bass liner track that is the primary arrangement, and that plays through most of the building, but then you have all of these other unique arrangements for each ethnic music style. But they're also playing the same song [continue It’s A Small World song, different styles added]. So it's really in the arrangement of orchestration that you can make an attraction like that work because there is no separation, or not much separation between the scenes, and you can get a lot of nice ear candy as you float through all the different vignettes you hear ethnic versions of the song, and it becomes a very playful and fun audio experience.

[end It’s A Small A World song]

For more complex attractions, simply choosing the right sized speakers - and getting them in the right place - becomes a kind of artform in and of itself.

Joe: You have to understand the physics of nature, the physics of sound, and why things are the way that they are. And you use those things to your advantage. If you go into a scene, and all of the music, and all of the dialogue, and all of the effects are playing from one or two speakers, there's a level of fake-ness that comes out of that. And you immediately pick it up on a subconscious level. And your brain says, "This isn't real." The minute you take that and break that out into a number of speakers and play it back in a more realistic way, it's a lot more interesting to the brain, your brain, now, can do some work, it can begin to pick these things apart.

For example, if I'm in a conference room, and there are 10 people around the table, and everybody's being picked up on one microphone [conference room SFX] and people start talking over each other, you, as a listener on the other end, can't pick out anything. You don't know who's talking, you don't know what's being said. But the minute you do that with multiple channels, like stereo, then your own brain can get engaged in picking these things out and making the difference and deciding what it wants to listen to.

[stereo conference room SFX]

The same thing happens in an attraction. If I'm in a scene, and I've pulled the sound around in a number of different channels, my brain can decide to pick out things it wants to focus on. Just like it does in nature. You have what you might call the tiki bird effect.

[Tiki Room song]

The term “Tiki Bird Effect” refers to The Enchanted Tiki Room attraction, created for Disneyland in 1963.

Joe: When you go into the tiki room and you play dozens and dozens of birds on discrete channels [continue Tiki Room song], you hear that one over there, and you hear this one over here, and you decide to focus on this one, or that one. And the clarity, and the dimension, really come way up. And so we use that technique as much as possible in our attractions. The more speakers, the more reality, that you can get in a particular area.

Creating and maintaining realism is crucial, and some attractions pose a greater challenge than others.

Joe: Let's take a character in an attraction, like in the old bear jamboree [Old Bear Jamboree clip]. If the bear is gonna sing, you want the sound to come from the bear, and there's a lot of problems associated with that, because there may not be a place to put a speaker that's gonna play the sound pressure level back at a level that is believable for a bear to play, and be the size that he is.

[Old Bear Jamboree song]

So you have to find other places to put the speakers. Well now, a human being, up and down, they can discern 7-10 degrees of accuracy. So you could go above or below that creature in a straight line and be pretty much on line and make them believe that it's coming from his mouth [Old Bear Jamboree clip centered]. But if you start putting the speaker off to the side [Old Bear Jamboree clip off to the side], a human being can discern two degrees. So the minute you put a speaker off in a tree stump or something beside the bear, everybody knows that's not coming from the bear. You create problems on a subconscious level for your guests. They don't come through and they say, "That sound's not coming from that bear." They just perceive it on a subconscious level as bad show.

For audio-animatronics characters, the size of a character’s speaker is just as important as its position.

Joe: We just have to treat it like what it really is. If it's a bird, then he gets his little speaker that is sized appropriately [bird chirping SFX], and positioned where it belongs. But if it is a humongous crocosaurus like in the river ride in Shanghai, this thing is monstrosity - he hovers over the raft and he's supposed to scare people to death [monster SFX]. And so you've got to create a sound pressure level that is believable for a creature of that size. So what we might do in a situation like that is to create that particular creature, the sound of that creature, with a number of speakers.

[monster SFX]

In creating an entertainment show with life-like characters, the physical restraints of technology is another challenge.

Mike: Often, our animatronics are singing or dancing, and we have to be aware of tempo. So if we have a song that's moving at a pretty quick clip, we might have a figure that doesn't quite move that fast. Our figures are built to a very tight specification of operation so that they can last a long time. So if our BPM is very high, we might have to create an arrangement that has a perceived lower tempo for that specific character.

Joe: That goes with any kind of technology. A lot of the things just physically will not move as fast as we’d like them to move.

Making an attraction sound realistic is tough - but in some cases, masking unwanted sounds like hydraulic pumps or the snapping of actuators can be even trickier. Theme park rides create a lot of noise just to be able to operate, so how do they mitigate that? Also, what are the nuances of taking a film and turning it into a physical experience? All this and more, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

The amount of thought and care given to the sound design of an attraction is incredible, but, ironically, a lot of the magic actually comes from what you don’t hear.

Joe: Many sounds cannot be masked - things like hydraulic pumps [hydraulic pump SFX], the snapping of actuators [actuators snapping SFX] - and so what you got to do is work with them. In the case of Tower of Terror, we had a situation where when the guest dropped in the vehicle, they would scream. And it was coming through the sound barrier door.

[Tower of Terror scream]

So we went in we found out, after some study, that everybody screamed in the very same place. We recorded guests doing that, then our sound designers got together and started creating the soundscape, utilizing those screams at that particular place in the track, and you couldn’t tell that the people were screaming right behind your back.

You do the same kind of thing where you have hydraulic pump noise, or air noise, or actuator noise. If you possibly can, you try to mask it, but if you can't mask it, you try to find things that you can do in the soundtrack that utilize those sounds to our advantage.

Another thing they use to their advantage is access to popular Disney movies and their characters.

Mike: When we start up a new attraction that's based on a film, we look at what the creative needs are for the project and look at how the film music can apply. In most cases, we always want to re-record, re-arrange, and re-orchestrate the film music to meet the exact needs of our storytelling. Sometimes we'll take a story from a film and take a little bit of a turn, another fork of that storyline and create something unique for the park. One example would be a newer attraction we have in Hong Kong called the Iron Man experience.

[Iron Man clip]

We wanted to create something unique to the audience in Hong Kong. We really wanted our music to be unique to that experience. So we had the composer take the idea of what the Iron Man us and represents [Iron Man music], and then create something new for the attraction [new Iron Man attraction music]. Most guests really wouldn't even know that it's not from the film, but it feels very much from the film.

Joe: The same thing is true with the soundscapes and the sound effects - I'll give you an example, the Tron experience we did in Shanghai. The initial concept was, we would just use everything right out of the film [Tron clip]. We started going through the sound effects, and we just found out we couldn't use any of them. We could use them as templates, we could use them as examples, but we needed to redesign everything around it.

These were two completely different mediums. One is two dimensional, and one, you're immersed in it, you're walking through it, and that requires a different set of rules to play with. And so, very often, what is created for the silver screen just does not work in a three dimensional environment, and so we end up re-creating it for our needs, but following as much as possible, the creative intent that it had for the film.

To succeed in the field of theme park sound design, it clearly takes creativity, innovation, and a willingness to push the envelope. And with a group of audio Imagineers so dedicated to their craft, it’s exciting to think what new surprises may be in store for Disney parks in the future.

Mike: We've been a company where we create these very controlled environments, very controlled experiences. Even though on the guest experience it might feel out of control, very much controlled audio and dynamic experiences. The way we consume media these days, I think there's more demand for customized, unique user experiences. And I think that's where we're gonna be challenged in the future is allowing that to happen and how to roll that up into our storytelling for everybody at the park. I think that's one area where we're gonna see a lot of development work in the years to come.

Thankfully for theme park soundscape designers, wherever technology might take us, the art of storytelling will stay the same.

Mike: Our primary goal for the audio soundtracks is to really support the story that we’re trying to tell in each environment. That is our first and primary goal that we always start with, and it’s the one we hope to end up with. As soon as we start creating soundtracks that call too much attention to themselves beyond what the environmental story is, then we’re not really supporting the story, we’re reaching a little too far.

Joe: Story. First. So many people see a piece of technology and they say, "Oh, let's wrap a show around that." And you got to go back to the basics, you got to be true to the story. Because if you do that right, they will remember that for the rest of their life.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by Dave Parsons...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

Thank you to our guests: Media Designer Joe Herrington, and Music Production Supervisor Mike Fracassi - both of Disney Imagineering.

The music in this episode is from Musicbed. They represent more than 650 great artists, ranging from indie rock and hip-hop to classical and electronic. Head over to music.20k.org to hear our exclusive playlist.

Also, we’re proud to announce that we now have full transcripts available for every one of our episodes on our newly revamped website, which you can find at 20k dot org.

As always, thanks for listening.

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Spooky Sounds: The secrets of horror sound design

This episode was written & produced by James Introcaso.

Halloween is a time for fright delights! Every television channel, streaming service, and movie theater is showing films that terrify audiences, and sound plays a huge role in every scare. In this episode, we uncover how Hollywood crafts those sound terrors and the evolutionary part of our being that those noises tap into to create fear. Featuring Formosa Group Senior Sound Editor/Sound Designer Trevor Gates and Dan Blumstein, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA.

Music used in this episode

Umbrellas - Steven Gutheinz
Day by Day - Watermark High
Unraveled - Luke Atencio
Unrequited - Steven Gutheinz
Nomad - Steven Gutheinz
Younger - Steven Gutheinz
Sense of an End - Steven Gutheinz

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by Dallas Taylor.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[effecting on Dallas' voice to make it spooky]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor.

When I saw we had an episode coming out around Halloween, I took to Facebook and Twitter and asked you what the world’s scariest sounds are. Some were expected, like a knife sharpening [knife SFX].

Or an unsettling laugh [creepy laugh SFX].

Other sounds you suggested were more esoteric, like the electronic musical instrument called a theremin [thermin clip].

Others were flat out surprises. I had no idea a screaming rabbit, that isn’t being harmed in any way, sounds like this [screaming rabbit clip].

Many of you called out specific sounds in horror movies. Like the chainsaw in Texas Chainsaw Massacre… [chain saw clip].

The television static in The Ring… [TV static clip].

And of course… [Halloween theme].

The theme from John Carpenter's Halloween…

It got me thinking… it would be a lot of fun to deconstruct how the sounds in Hollywood’s scariest movies are made and find out who is responsible for these effects that make our skin crawl?

Trevor: My name is Trevor Gates. I'm a supervising sound editor and sound designer, and I primarily work on feature films, currently employed by Formosa Group.

Just what makes Trevor a master of scary soundscapes?

Trevor: I did Get Out, which was an amazing, fun process. I did Ouija: Origin of Evil, and The Belko Experiment. I've also worked on the Evil Dead reboot a couple of years ago. I worked on Don't Breathe, one called Happy Death Day, and one called Polaroid.

If you’re a fan of scary movies, odds are Trevor already terrified you with some sounds he’s created. Just how does Trevor craft a horror soundscape?

Trevor: It's our job, as sound designers, to be imaginative, and so sometimes there are things that inherently don't work because they don't have sounds, and there are some things that already work, they just need to be enhanced. It's really interesting when you get a turnover of a new picture that does not have final sound. Every film is different, but when I watch something, I'm hearing the composition of what I need to do as I'm watching it. It's my job to realize what I'm hearing in my head, for the audience.

Making scary sounds is all about context and juxtaposition. It’s about making choices of where you want the audience to focus while you’re setting up the turn. It’s kinda like sleight of hand magic trick.

Trevor: When you're watching a movie, what's really scary is when something is very quiet, and the audience is drawn into the scary movie, and then all of a sudden there's a big bang, and we do a jump scare [audience scream SFX], and it puts people back in their seats. What's important is the juxtaposition of the quiet to the loudness.

You're giving the audience something to focus on and creating a base of that quietness, and then once you've settled in and allowed them to connect with that foundation of the quietness, you can hit them over the head with a jump scare.

A jump scare is a common, but very effective horror trope. Perhaps the most common occurs in slasher films when a killer suddenly jumps out of nowhere to attack a hapless victim. Like this scene from the shark movie Deep Blue Sea where Samuel L Jackson is giving a rousing speech, only for a shark to jump out of a tank and eat him.

[Deep Blue Sea Clip]

But not every jump scare involves a killer monster. Just listen to Trevor’s favorite from Get Out. Also I’ll give you a quick heads up - it includes a very minor spoiler from the film.

Trevor: Jump scares... can be effective by creating a juxtaposition of silence before loudness, another way that you can create a jump scare... is something that just seems normal, and something that seems constant, and isn't out of any ordinary context…

The jump scare that's in Get Out that is pretty effective is early in the movie… it’s when Chris and Rose are headed to her parents' house, and they're driving in a car...

They're having a conversation and laughing…

Then all of a sudden a deer hits the front of the car [Get Out driving scene], and you never saw it coming. I've seen producers on playbacks jump out of their seat and curse from watching this jump scare.

Sound is used to draw us in and focus our attention right before something terrifying happens. Jump scares are misdirects and the moment we realize we’ve been duped is the moment of terror. But horror movies aren’t all jumpscares. Some scenes are prolonged scares that make us squirm in our seats. How are those crafted?

Trevor: Sustained, scary sounds… are as equally important as the jump scares... everything can't be the same all the time.

On Ouija: Origin of Evil, directed by Mike Flanagan, most of the film happens in a house, in a front room. When I was building a soundscape for Mike, I sat him down and said, "Hey, Mike. I never see a clock in this room, but I built a clock for you, and I want you to listen to it, and I want you to see how it makes you feel."

[clock scene clip]

There was something special about this clock. I recorded a clock, and then manipulated it to be just ever slightly slower than one second a tick, so it... makes you lean into the ticks, into the sound of the clock. The clock was always prominent in this room, so I played the scene, and Mike Flanagan looked at me... and says, "Well, I guess I have to shoot an insert of a clock."

In the middle of the movie, there is a scene where a little girl gets possessed by a demon. There's a six-minute stretch of basically all that you're hearing are the clock [clock SFX], footsteps [footsteps SFX], and breaths of the little girl [breathing SFX]. She's downstairs and kind of walking around. She's thinking something is weird and wrong. She's just played with a Ouija board, and this clock creates an unsettling pace for about five or six minutes… It was so effective.

Mike Flanagan originally wanted to have music or score over this scene, and I built the scene sonically to work without music. When we were mixing the film, we played it with the music, and Mike said “Great, that was scary. Let me hear it without music.” Then we played it without music, only with the clock, with the footsteps, with the breaths of the little girl and after the scene was done playing he said, "...That's the way it's going to be. No music."

There’s one other sound technique designers use to make us squirm in the theater. That’s gore-y body horror effects like stabs [stabbing SFX], breaking bones [bones breaking SFX], and, of course, blood splatters [blood splatter SFX].

Trevor: One of the key components of a slasher film is actually the visceralness of the sounds that you use. In The Belko Experiment, the characters have a small charge explosive unknowingly deposited in their neck, and the antagonist at any point in time can flip a switch and blow up their head. What does this sound like? The main components of this sound… a ball bearing ricochet off of a hard wall [exmaple], the loud pop, and an apple bite [example]. Also ripping paper [exmaple].

The end result sounded like this.

[explosion clip]

Horror movies are meant to entertain us through shocks and thrills, but the disturbing sounds Trevor designs would never work without the right visuals and context.

Trevor: These sounds are not scary by themselves. I do movies that are not horror movies, and I use the exact same sounds that are not in horror movies, and they're not scary, because contextually it's different. There was a basement creak that we used in Evil Dead [creak SFX] that I've used in a biopic… of an admiral in the 1800s in the Netherlands, for a ship creak [creak SFX] as it's going over big waves. The exact same sound that was scary in Evil Dead was not scary at all in this movie.

The perfect marriage of visuals and sounds beget the best audience reactions.

Trevor: As a supervising sound editor we get invited to the preview. It is so gratifying to have people jump out of their seats on jump scares, or creepy moments to hear people audibly having reactions in the theater. It feels great, because you know it's working. It's very rewarding, and I feel honored to be part of that process.

Screaming audience members are the greatest reward a horror sound designer gets, but why do we react with fear to sound waves to begin with? What is it about screams, creaky floors, wind, and other scary sounds that makes them more terrifying than other sounds? We know it’s a movie. We know it’s not real, and yet our brains still react in fear. Why is that? The answer after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We heard how scary sounds are created for horror movies. What I want to know now is why do we react to certain sounds with fear? What’s going on in our brain?

Dan: My research really tries to look for generalizations, by identifying generalizations on how we respond or how animals respond to certain sounds, we can gain insights into why we respond the way we do.

That’s Dan Blumstein, a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. Among other things, he studies how and why humans and other animals react to sounds with fear, and it all started when he got a scare himself… while working with marmots.

Dan: I spent years studying marmot alarm communication. I now run a long-term study in Colorado that began in 1962 when my friend and colleague, Ken Armitage, who's now an Emeritus Professor at University of Kansas began the study. We follow individually marked marmots and we trap them and mark them and follow them throughout their lives and we’ve learned a lot from this. One day I was out there trapping baby marmots when they come out of their burrow.

I'm holding one and it screamed in my hands.

[marmot scream SFX]

I almost dropped it. I wondered why am I having an emotional response to this little rodent screaming in my hands? I don't have emotional responses when they emit normal alarm calls. This was something different. This was something that led to a visceral feeling, and a visceral response in me.

I started studying the screams. The screams it turns out are calls that are emitted when animals are in dire straits, they're emitted from highly aroused animals. The screams when you start listening to them across different species sound remarkably similar. They have elements that go rapidly up and down in frequency or pitch. They have noisy type components. They sound different.

When I refer to noise, I'm referring to broadband sound, staticky sound. Specifically when vocal production systems are overblown... Noise sounds raspy. Noise sounds rough.

You know when your dog is barking. It may sound different when it's happy [happy bark] versus when it's sad [sad bark], when it's bossy [bossy bark], when it's terrified [scared bark].

When animals are scared they make noise that varies in pitch, which is then also scary to us. Turns out that pitch variation triggers fear… and it’s all over horror films as Dan found out in another study.

Dan: We got lists of the best films, the best horror, the best adventure, the best sad dramatic films. We made voice prints of these films which are called audio spectrograms.

What we found was statistically that particularly noise was overrepresented in horror films.

What Dan found makes perfect sense, since we now know many horror movie jump scares play with volume and pitch to make us jump. Especially in one of the genre’s most iconic sequences… The shower scene from the original Psycho.

Dan: If you listen to Janet Leigh's first scream in Psycho.

[Psycho's shower scream]

It's really noisy. If you listen to her subsequent screams, they're more dramatic tonal screams.

The rumors going around, I can't evaluate these that Alfred Hitchcock turned off the hot water to get that first scream... You know, Internet, trust what you want to trust.

But at the end of the day, that first scream that she gave in the Psycho shower scene was a real scream, was a chock full of nonlinearities, was noisy.

And when we add that iconic music to Psycho’s shower scene...

We get a very noisy, very scary classic.

[Pyscho's shower scene with music]

Noisy screams - the marmot, Janet Leigh, or otherwise, terrify us… and the reason for that has to do with survival.

Dan: Why I think noise is so evocative is that it's an honest signal that someone else out there is terrified, and if you hear an honest signal that someone else out there is terrified, you should probably look around and figure out what's going on and maybe you should heighten your threat level if you will and realize that there may be something bad around.

It’s not just screams. Any loud, dissonant noise can alert us to danger and activate fear in our brains. That’s why jump scares are often paired with a jarring sound - like the car screeching to a halt as it hits a deer in Get Out or the whistle we hear when Arthur Dallas stumbles upon the title monster in Alien.

I know. We have the same name. The big difference is that I’m alive and the guy from Alien isn’t Ripley, so you know how he ended up.

[Alien clip]

Responding to loud, dissonant noise with fear is built into our dna. Our ancestors who didn’t respond to another animal’s terror with caution, likely got eaten up by predators.

Of course there’s subtler noises used in films that are creepy. Remember that creaky floor?

[creaky floor SFX]

Well there’s a reason that iconic horror sound produces fear, and that too, has to do with survival.

Dan: Animals are really sensitive to other sounds in their environment... The sound of a broken stick [breaking stick SFX] means that something is walking towards you. A creaking floor is like a broken stick. It's a cue that someone else is out there, and if someone else is out there, you're going to look around and pay attention to that.

Subtle sounds, like a raptor jiggling a door handle in Jurassic Park [door handle jiggle SFX], trigger something primal in our brains that give us a jolt of fear so we take action and become aware of our surroundings.

Because hearing those subtle sounds is part of our survival, a sustained, loud sound that drowns them out, like howling wind, is also creepy...and it’s not just humans.

[wind SFX]

Dan: What's really interesting is lots of species get nervous and shut down when it gets windy…. it's harder to hear those broken sticks.

There’s one other aspect of sound that generates fear for our survival. Sounds with lower frequencies tend to be scarier to all animals, humans included. There’s good reason for that.

Dan: The biggest animals can produce the lowest frequencies and if you're really small, the lowest frequency you can produce is much higher than if you're really big, and this goes across species and this is also within species. We also know that body size is both within species and across species highly associated with dominance. Your likelihood of getting beaten up, or threatened, or killed by something.

If you're small, you have a greater risk by bigger things. So I think animals are likely very sensitive to these cues of body size and that when you begin listening to horror films or films where they're trying to create tension, often there's this low frequency that's brought in, this low baseline, these low frequencies that begin creating a sense of unease. I think that too is tapping into our biological roots.

Low frequencies are all over scary movies. Think about the alien tripods from War of the Worlds.

[Alien tripods SFX]

And the distinctive sound of the monster from Predator.

[Predator SFX]

And, of course, the theme from Jaws.

[Jaws theme]

All of these terrifying film sounds and many more use lower frequencies.

There’s another low frequency technique film sound designers use to direct our emotions. Infrasound is playing a frequency less than 20 hertz, so low it can’t be heard by the human ear. Though we can’t hear infrasound, one study in the UK showed it can induce anxiety, sorrow, heart palpitations, and shivering in some people. The 2007 box office smash Paranormal Activity reportedly used this technique to terrify audiences.

We’ve actually been playing a 19 hertz tone for the past 30 seconds or so… Earbuds and headphones can’t produce this frequency, so you probably haven’t noticed a difference, but if you’re listening on larger speakers, you can probably see your speakers vibrating a little more aggressively than normal. And you might be feeling a little uneasy.

Horror movies use sound to manipulate our instincts. They trigger the same fear that helps us survive. On a conscious level, we understand that we’re sitting on a couch or in a theater watching a film, but the sounds and sights of that movie activate an unconscious survival instinct that makes us feel fear. It’s why you hear people who love horror movies sometimes say that it is fun to be scared. They get all the thrills and adrenaline rush of a life-threatening situation without the actual threat to life.

Dan: Successful organisms have been able to respond appropriately to fearful situations, to assess the risk of predation. The risk of predation is one of these ubiquitous things that all species at some point in their lives must deal with an encounter. Even predators have to worry about predators when they're small for example.

All species have to respond to predators and to respond to predators, you want to be able to assess the risk of predation and animals are using all sorts of cues to do so.

Trevor used all of Dan’s survival sound cues to create one of Get Out’s scariest sequences. Here he is again.

Trevor: There was one very specific moment of Get Out that required some very surreal and subjective design, and that was when Chris was hypnotized for the first time, and he fell into his mind, this thing that they called the sunken place. Jordan Peele and I sat down and I said, "Jordan, what do you want this place to sound like?" He kind of turned his head to the side and said, "What does it sound like when your head is underwater in the bathtub?"

The specific sound composition... was a combination of underwater sounds [underwater SFX], some weird water bugs that created some movement on the high frequency spectrum [water bug SFX]. It was a low pulse that was built from a low frequency tone [low pulse ton SFX], and modulated through a tool that I use. Then Chris' screams, and we recorded screams for him, and then I processed them to make them feel like they were distant, and that you could barely hear them. When we played it all together, Jordan said he was terrified, and that was a win at that point.

[Get Out clip]

The sound in that scene plays on all our survival instincts. Dissonance, screams, low frequencies, surprising sounds - even simulated drowning. That’s what makes it so creepy to listen to.

Sounds are a big part of what make horror movies scary. By playing on our instincts and using proper context, a great soundscape tells a story that chills us to the core. Our fearful reactions to sound are tied to something so primal, that even when we know why a certain noise scares us, we still have a hard time stopping it from doing so… which is part of the fun.

[The Shinning, "here's Johnny" clip]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that supports ad agencies, filmmakers, and video game developers. Checkout recent work at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso… and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Jai Berger.

Thanks to our guest Trevor Gates for sharing his amazing stories. He designs audio magic with Formosa Group, a talent-based company that does pretty amazing stuff. They've worked on Blade Runner 2049, Molly's Game, and Game of Thrones and are staffed with Oscar-winning talent. You can find out more about their work across the film industry at FormosaGroup.com.

Thanks also to Dan Blumstein. Dan is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA where he also co-directs the Evolutionary Medicine Program. You can find out more about his amazing work with animals on the Blumstein Lab’s website, which can be found at blumstein lab dot E E B dot UCLA dot EDU.

All of the music in this episode is provided by our friends at Musicbed. You can listen to these tracks, including this one Sense of an End by Steven Gutheinz on our exclusive playlist which you can find at music dot 20k dot org.

You can say hello, submit a show idea, or give general feedback through Facebook, Twitter, or over email. Our email address is hi at 20k dot org.

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Thanks for listening.

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Acoustical Umbilical Cord: Why crying makes us human

This episode was written & produced by Katy Daily.

Many animals, humans included, are natural-born criers. It’s the most basic form of communication from right when we come into the world. But us humans are unique: we keep on crying until the day we die. What was born as a survival mechanism, develops a deeper fundamental need as we grow older. In this episode, we discover the hard-wiring in our brains that reach across species, and how our tears into adulthood make us distinctively human. Featuring Dr. Susan Lingle, Behavioral Ecologist at the University of Winnipeg, and Dr. Ad Vingerhoets, Research Psychologist at the University of Tilburg.

Music used in this episode

Timing is Everything - Blake Ewing
Missing Pictures - Steven Gutheinz
Finally, The Sun - Dustin Lau
Surface - Blake Ewing
Lie Cheat Steal (Instrumental) - Andrew Judah
Building Thoughts - Dexter Britain
Sleeper - Riley 1964
Unremarkable - Dexter Britain

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View Transcript ▶︎

[sniffling winds up, like a child is about to burst into tears]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz...The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor.

[baby shrieks and heaves]

We’re all natural-born criers. It’s the most basic form of communication... from right when we come into the world.

That’s producer Katy Daily.

When we’re babies… we cry when we’re hungry… [baby wail, sound of sucking on bottle] and when we’re in pain… [toddler shriek]. It’s the easiest way to communicate that something’s wrong, and to get the help we need.

For many animals... it’s actually built into the parents’ brains to react immediately to the sound of their infant’s cries. The parent might even see or smell the infant in distress, but it’s that sound that kicks them into gear.

Crying has to be loud enough to attract the parent, which unfortunately means that it’s loud enough to attract predators as well. So most animals, when they’re old enough to fend for themselves, have evolved to grow out of crying entirely.

Not humans. We keep on crying for the rest of our lives. Now, it’s more likely to be because of a bad break-up than an empty stomach, as we go from crying for necessity to crying emotionally. But if we don’t need to signal for that critical help anymore, what’s the purpose of crying when we’re emotional?

First, let’s talk about our wiring.

Susan: An infant's cry triggers an immediate response by caregivers.

That’s Dr. Susan Lingle, a behavioural ecologist who has studied animal cries in the wild.

Susan: So this might mean moving to the infant to hold it, to feed it, or to rescue it from a predator.

Not only does this increase the chance of survival for the infant, but it also ensures the caregiver’s genetic fitness. Meaning: the ability to successfully pass on its genes to the next generation.

Lingle attributes this to a special caregiver sensitivity. If the caregiver hears what sounds like their offspring crying, they will be biologically driven to respond to it.

But this isn’t just limited to parents. The same might happen to someone who doesn’t even have a child.

Susan: Cries made by newborns of different species are remarkably similar. We tend to hear this slight plaintive "Rear rear" for many species.

I've heard a few people give me anecdote about how they were camping, they woke up at 2:00 in the morning and heard a baby, a human baby crying. They left their tent to track down the sound, only to find a beaver baby… so these sounds are remarkably similar.

But we recognize more than just the cries that sound like ours. We know when our cat wants to be let out [meow], and when our dog is hungry [dog whimper].

And sometimes, our pets understand us too.

Susan: The brain of a domestic dog responds to human vocalizations very much the same way as the dog brain responds to dog vocalizations.

Most of us would recognize this: a dog might perk up and come on over when they hear their owner crying.

Susan: We tend to view the animals having learned to respond to our vocalizations because of our close association with dogs. We have a shared history that seems to be over 30,000 years. Some biologists suggest that this mutual understanding is due to an ability that evolved over the shared history of domestication.

Maybe our dogs can only understand us this way because they’ve developed an almost human-like empathy. So does this mean that only our pets can understand when we cry?

Susan: Most of my lab's work has been with the behavior of two species of deer, which are white-tailed deer and mule deer. We started to work with distress vocalizations or cries made by deer fawns when coyotes attack them [fawn cry SFX]. We started to notice that the acoustic structure of the cries made by newborns of different species were remarkably similar.

So, we returned to the field to conduct what I called "cross-species playbacks."

[researcher over radio – fur seal cry]

What you’re hearing is a recording of a fur seal pup crying. It’s playing over a big speaker in the middle of a field. There’s a female deer nearby.

Susan: She immediately lifts her head. And she starts running at a full gallop [gallop SFX] until she gets to the speaker.

When we did these playback experiments, we found that deer mothers approached a speaker playing newborn cries from these different species as if they were approaching the speaker to rescue their own fawns.

[human baby cry is heard, deer gallops towards speaker]

And there she goes again, this time for a human baby.

[kitten cry is heard, deer gallops towards speaker]

And again.

Susan: It is not as though she really wants to be defending a kitten. But the sounds is so similar that she can mistake it for the cry of a fawn.

There's such survival value for to respond when she hears the sound that it probably outweighs the cost of responding to cries when it's not your own infant.

What Lingle’s team found was that if another mammal’s cry fell within a certain frequency range, the mother deer would respond as if it were her own fawn. So if her fawn’s cry is roughly 900 hertz [example], then the mother might recognize another animal’s cry anywhere from around 400 hertz [example] to around 1,300 hertz [example].

Even animals that sound way different to our ears, might sound close enough to a mother deer.

Susan: Where many species have a frequency modulation, that rises and falls, "Rare Rare." The bat that we used had simple descending frequency sound "Eer Eer" [example] and it sounded quite odd to our ear.

So in these cross-species experiments, we predicted that the female would approach the speaker only when the pitch of the cry fell within that same frequency range.

The cries of many species, naturally fall into the range in which a deer mother will respond. But some species have a cry with a very low pitch and other species have a cry with a very high pitch.

Lingle’s team took the cry of a newborn eland, which is an antelope found in Africa. The eland’s cry naturally falls lower than this frequency range for the mother deer.

Susan: So we ran a series of playback trials using the original eland calls [eland call SFX]. Females alerted to these calls but turning their head toward the speaker but they did not approach and they did even always stand up, if they had been sitting down. We ran a second series with the same calls but in this case, we manipulated the pitch so that it fell in the range to which deer typically respond to cries. So we raised the pitch from 170 hertz [example] up to an average of about 900 hertz [example]. We were able to use software to increase the frequency of the pitch without changing any other acoustic traits in the call.

[higher frequency eland call]

When the deer heard these sounds, they immediately lifted their heads and took off at full speed [galloping SFX] toward the speaker. So this result told us that the pitch of the call is very important and it must fall within a certain frequency range for females to respond. But perhaps more importantly, this result told us that cries made by newborns of different species are very similar except for the difference in the frequency of the pitch.

Now, this is just mind-blowing for me. This mother deer is hearing the sound of a human baby cry, or a bat cry, and just takes off running towards the sound. It’s like she’s thinking “this might be my baby, so I have to save it.”

So far, we can’t look into the brain of this wild deer to see why she responds like this. So it’s still hard to know for sure if our pet dog understands our cries because she’s developed some human-like empathy, or if it’s actually been hard-wired into her long before domestication.

But it does make you wonder: If we hear a kitten cry, do we respond out of empathy or instinct?

Susan: I would probably say that in humans, rather than suggesting that it's our empathy that makes us responsive to these sounds, instead, the response of humans and deer to newborn cries of different species may reflect a shared sensitivity that has been conserved across mammals and perhaps even across other species that have well-developed parental care.

So crying triggers this caregiver instinct, and is incredibly essential to our survival. But once we’ve grown up and can survive on our own, why do we still cry?

More on that in a moment.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We’re learning that crying is essential to our survival as a species from the very day we were born.

Ad: One needs to be aware that the human infant is among the most helpless creatures that exist.

My name is Ad Vingerhoets and I'm a psychology professor of Tilburg University in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

You can compare it with the offspring of other primates, which all can cling to the fur of their mothers, or for example, to ducklings, who can immediately follow their mother when they are out of the egg.

One may consider infant crying as a kind of acoustical umbilical cord. Meaning that it helps to maintain or to re-establish the contact with the mother.

Then, we grow up. After all of the dirty diapers [baby cry SFX], and bumped foreheads [baby squeal SFX], we eventually cut that acoustical umbilical cord. Back to Katy.

It’s not that we stop vocally crying entirely, it’s that we do it way less often, and much more quietly. It’s almost like our bodies are trying to keep us from making a sound.

Listen, for example, to this iconic scene from Interstellar. In it, Matthew McConaughey breaks down into tears while watching videos from his family back home.

[Interstellar cry scene]

If you can’t hear him crying, it’s because he’s barely making a sound. Tears are rolling down his face. There’s just almost no noise. That’s because, as you become an adult, you don’t need to make that sound anymore. It sounds like he is trying to keep the sound in, and hold the tears back.

And this trait is uniquely human.

While we have observed crying in some animals like camels and elephants, humans are the only species who we know for sure produce emotional tears.

But if we’ve grown out of the need to cry for survival, then what’s the point of weeping when we’re emotional?

As it turns out, we don’t 100% know. There are a lot of theories out there, ranging from reasonable to downright outrageous. The most popular theory is that crying removes some kind of toxins that build up when you’re stressed. And it does sound convincing. I mean, sometimes, after a good cry, people just feel better.

Ad: One could also argue that if such a mechanism would be responsible for feeling better, that raises the question whether an act as peeling onions and the associated shedding of tears [onion chopping, nose sniffles SFX] may also help us to feel better when we are feeling blue.

So, tears do form to protect our eyes when they’re irritated, but this still doesn’t explain why they appear when we’re upset.

If it’s not purely physical, then what is it?

Ad: Tearful crying was just a much safer way of communication, and it can also be directed rather exclusively to specific persons, of whom one might expect to receive consolation.

When we are exposed to crying individuals, we often tend to react with all kinds of positive reactions. We feel more connected with them, we feel more empathy, and we tend to react with providing help, support, and so on.

The general idea about the function of tears is that tears connect. They help us to connect with others.

So even as adults, crying’s purpose is still a form of communication. Instead of wailing for survival, we weep… to tell others we need their support.

This doesn’t mean that we have control over our tears. Convincing tears are notoriously hard for actors. But then we might spontaneously cry in front of our boss despite our best efforts to keep them in.

This might even explain why we cry when we’re alone.

Ad: If we experience an emotion with a certain intensity, then it might be that this emotion becomes connected with the production of tears.

We might just be so used to this that we let the tears out, even when no one’s around to see.

If we could turn our tears on and off with a switch, most of us probably would. In some cases, crying makes us feel vulnerable in ways that we’re not always OK with. It might make us feel embarrassed. Or uneasy. Like others will judge us. And that might even condition us to get tearful less often.

Ad: How others react to an individual's crying depends, on the display rules of a certain culture.

For example, crying when one has lost a significant other, it's a universally accepted reason to cry. However, the situation is very different when one has the feeling that the crier can be blamed him or herself for the situation he is in.

[A League of Their Own clip – “there’s no crying in baseball!”]

That could explain why we sometimes feel better when we cry, and sometimes we feel worse. It might depend on how others react to us that determines how we feel afterwards.

So Vinger-oots and his team tried to compare normal criers and a group of people who had stopped crying. Did the criers get some kind of release that the non-criers didn’t? Or did the non-criers feel more secure, and less judged by others?

Ad: They did demonstrate some remarkable differences, especially in their social functioning.

More precisely, the criers reported more empathy, and they felt stronger connected with others. They reportedly also received more emotional support.

This doesn’t just go for when we’re sad, or angry, or frustrated.

Ad: Humans also start to cry more when we are being moved. For example, when we see that bonds become closer. Witnessing acts of altruism, acts of self-sacrifice.

[CNN clip – woman talks about her rescuer]

It's okay to cry with this kind of situation, because it's a strong signal to others that we are good people. They can connect with us and they can collaborate with us.

Humans are not just described as social beings, but even as ultra-social beings. We experience empathy, so we have the capacity to understand how others feel.

[deaf woman hears for the first time]

What is very helpful to trust each other is if you have the feeling that you understand each other, and not just understand in a cognitive sense, but you know what others value.

[dog reunites with owner]

I think that crying is very important, because crying in some way might have stimulated the development of our empathic skills.

[proposal]

When we cry, we share our values and our vulnerability. It brings us closer to together. It allows us to understand more about each other and develop a deeper feeling of trust and responsibility. And to connect in a way that’s uniquely human.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by Katy Daily...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Thank you to our guests, Dr. Susan Lingle and Dr. Ad Vinger-oots. They are both digging deeper into the mysteries of human and cross-species crying, with new details emerging as we speak. Special thanks to CKXU 88.3FM Radio in Lethbridge Alberta, Canada for their help, and to Drs. Isabelle Charrier, Radim Kotrba, and Paul Faure for their recordings of fur seals, elands, and silver-haired bats.

The music in this episode was provided by Musicbed and we have an exclusive playlist you can check out at music dot 20k dot org. That playlist also includes the track you’re hearing right now “Unremarkable” by Dexter Britain.

As always, thanks for listening.

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Level Up: How video games tell an immersive story through sound

This episode was written & produced by James Introcaso.

Video games are a growing industry and every play-controlled experience is defined by its harmony of music, sound effects, and voice acting. In this episode, we reveal how these elements of a video game's soundscape are crafted and come together to tell an interactive story. The most sophisticated sound design in video games allows those without the ability to see a chance to engage with some of our greatest modern entertainment. Featuring Microsoft Sound Designer, Zachary Quarles, and ArenaNet Technical Sound Designer, Damian Kastbauer.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Yearn - Chris Coleman
Cotton Float - Luke Atencio
Seafoam29 - Tangerine
Change the Game - AJ Hochhalter
White11 - Tangerine
Clear Glass - Steven Gutheinz
Though Clouds - Steven Gutheinz

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[video Game Montage]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor. This is the story of how video game sound designers create new worlds, tell stories, and bring imaginary characters to life.

[continue video game montage]

As the first generations raised with video games, a lot of us Gen Xers and Millennials continue to play as adults. In fact, more people than ever are playing, even if they don’t consider themselves a “gamer”. With the rise of mobile and social gaming, last year the industry took in over 30 billion dollars in the United States alone. That’s more than movies and music - combined.

Games are often defined by their visuals. Back in the 80’s it was all some commercials could talk about.

[80's Nintendo commerical]

So, if games are such a visual-focused medium… why is sound important?

Damien: Sound in games really comes down to communicating a sense of place and a sense of emotion.

That’s Damien Kastbauer, a leading technical sound designer.

Damien: It is an unseen art. As someone who plays games, I know when it's not right and I understand how that can blow the whole mood. Sound is about engagement and communicating this game's intention.

In other words, sound in games is all about immersion. The right sounds are critical for the player in order to authentically slip into a game’s story and become the character they control. Consider what Mario’s cultural impact would be if instead of this [Mario intro SFX], it sounded like this *[crappy, rush job in the same 8-bit style]. *Giving sound designers and composers the appropriate time, resources, and direction can take a game from passable to iconic.

[Mario theme music]

Fast forward 30 years to where we are today. It’s unbelievable the level of engagement sound brings to games. Take, for example, Bethesda Softworks’ smash-hit Fallout 4. Even if you’re not a gamer, you can appreciate the level of detail that goes into the sound. Let’s deconstruct the soundtrack and explain these audio layers. First up, the ambience, which are sometimes called the backgrounds.

[Fallout Ambient Noise]

Ambience can be anything that ties the player to the location. These are typically sounds like rain, wind, forest rustling, room tone, or anything that establishes the environment.

Another layer is foley. These are sounds that come from the character’s body, hands, feet, and clothing movement.

[Fallout Foley]

Hard effects - like machines, sirens, explosions, and other objects not attached to the character - make up another layer.

[Fallout Weapons, explosions]

And those are all just in the Sound Effects layer. You also have the voice layer...

[Array of Fallout Dialogue]

This can be anything from narration, to character dialogue, to coms and radios.

And finally… the music layer...

[Add Fallout Music]

The music layer alone might have multiple sublayers like drums, high pitched instruments, low pitched instruments, and strings.

In this respect, the audio layers in games are a lot like the audio layers in movies, however, with games, everything is variable based off of the player, so instead of mixing all of the sounds together into a single soundtrack like what would be done in a movie, you have to program thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of individual sounds that all have to work together in real time.

Damien: In a movie, As the person stepped across the room [footsteps SFX], you would place a footstep sound at each location in time. You would know every time that that scene played back [rewind SFX] that the footstep [footsteps SFX] would always be in the same place because as a viewer you don't have control over how fast that character is walking.

Games have a infinite possibility of playback. One time you could walk over to the kitchen [walking SFX], pick up a cup of coffee [coffee cup SFX] , take a drink [drinking coffee SFX] and step out the back door [door open SFX] and hear the crickets chirping [crickets SFX] in the distance. Another time in the same game, you could instead choose to sit down in a chair [sitting SFX] and listen to the rumble of the refrigerator [refrigerator SFX].

In order to achieve these infinite possibilities in playback, every game is built on top of what is called, and engine. This engine is the software skeleton that controls the physics and mechanics of a game. Sound designers load in all of the sound effects, voice, and music into this engine, then have to fine tune the programming parameters so that all of these sounds can smoothly playback together at any time and at any place in the game.

Damien: Yeah, it's a lot of math. Every sound in a space has to reflect reality as closely as possible, where it's at, what it's next to, how loud it is, these are all things that very simply add up to communicate a sense of reality for the player.

But how do those sounds get made? What’s the process for creating sounds that are intended to sound real, like the sound of a car in Need for Speed.

[Need for Speed clip]

And imaginary, like Pikachu in Super Smash Brothers.

[Pikachu clip]

And who gets to make these sound effects?

Zach: I feel most comfortable and most productive whenever I'm creating worlds. Whether that be a realistic sound design or completely stylized, as long as it's all rooted in that game's reality.

That’s Zachary Quarles. He’s an Audio Director and Sound Designer for Microsoft Game Studios.

Zach has a ton of experience in making sounds for games. He currently works on Killer Instinct, Microsoft’s big fighting game [Killer Instinct clip], but in the past he’s made sounds for Quake 4... [Quake 4 clip]

X-Men Legends... [X-Men Legends clip]

and ReCore [ReCore clip] .

For Zach and for sound designers everywhere, adding sound effects to a game is more than simply finding the most realistic sound and plugging it in. It’s about Crafting the right effect that gets the player invested in the story and the moment. That makes them feel something… even if that something is super gross.... Take this scene from another game Zach worked on called D4.

Zach: One of the sequences in D4 had to do with two characters eating different meals together and the meals are really weird. So there's a guy that has a stack of pieces of pizza that he just kind of smashes together and just kind of... piles them into his mouth [clip]. A guy rips open a lobster shell and sucks out all of the meat [clip].

I was taking stuff like crab shells and ripping those apart [shell ripping SFX], dumping cream of mushroom soup [thick soup pouring SFX] on top of that. I had a glass, like just a drinking glass, filled with raw chicken and I was just punching [punching SFX] inside of the glass, just making slucking gross splattery sounds [splatter SFX]. It was all for these meals that these characters were eating.

[D4 clip]

The foley room when I was recording this smelled so bad. We started to have people just show up in the engineering room as I was recording all this, and they're all holding their nose and just like shaking their head and cursing my name.

There was a moment I was surrounded by crab shell that was absolutely reeking with a bucket of cream of mushroom soup with my hand in a glass covered in raw chicken and I was like, I love my job.

And if you think Zach’s job sounds like fun, wait’ll you hear what else he does.

Zach: I'm actually several voices in Killer Instinct.

Not only does Zach make sound effects, but he’s also a voice actor and director. It’s up to him to bring the characters of a game to life… sometimes with a little help from man’s best friend.

Zach: Eyedol, who is this big ogre creature who has a head that's split in half and each head is a different personality. All the voice for him is designed by me, it's my voice mixed with my dogs growls.

Eyedol’s thing is: "I serve no one!"

I would take that recording and morph it with my dogs growls and a couple of other things to give it a lot more body, a lot more presence and this is what it sounds like.

[Eyedol clip]

When it comes to voices, it’s about making every character come to life. When Zach created Eyedol’s voice, he was thinking about more than just making a monster with a split head who is scary.

Zach: Before I really get started I like to see how the player moves and how the player carries their weight so I can get a sense of scale and sense of kind of, distribution of energy throughout. Where they hold their energy and everything. So Idol was hunched over, being held together by dark magic, so he wasn't very solid in terms of vocal cord structure.

That’s how sound effects and voices come together to immerse a player in a world and give them a sense of the characters, but what about music? How do games like Skyrim, that have over 200 hours of content, keep their music exciting and fresh?

And also - can a video game’s sound be so precise that people who are blind can play them? We’ll get to that after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We’ve heard how sound effects and voice come together in a game, but what about music? Video games have come a long way since the catchy tunes of Megaman.

[Megaman music]

We now have unbelievable orchestral scores, like those found in Blizzard’s Overwatch.

[Overwatch score]

Now that games have the ability to playback the highest level of orchestral recordings, the challenge becomes, how how do we keep that music fresh? Listening to a song over and over again becomes annoying over time, so how do game composers keep their music from becoming noticeably repetitive? Here’s Damien again.

Damien: Music in modern games has gained a complexity because of how variable the player's interaction can be. Music is composed in elements or little chunks or tiny little pieces or layers… that the game then controls the sequence of or the playback of based on what's happening. You almost end up with a tiny little composer in the box who is telling the violins [music starts] to start when the hero walks through the doorway or a tiny little composer that signals the trumpet fanfare [SFX - trumpet] as soon as the dragon burst out of the cave.

[music swells with dragon reveal]

Music for movies or albums can be written with full freedom, because every time it plays back in the future, it will be exactly the same. However, music for games have to be written in little pieces, modularly… and all of these little modules have to be able to work together. The most basic modular form of writing game music would be to create a music start [music start], a loopable main theme [music loop], and an ending [music ending]. Games that are longer and more complex might have 30 or 40 modules split up by themes and instrumentation. This is essentially how a 10 minute piece of linear music can transform into a 2 hour symphony during a game-play session.

Damien: It's this tiny virtual composer then that creates this musical soundscape out of these components and pieces of music that have been created for the game and really scores the experience for the player based on what's happening at that time. As a composer, you want to make sure that the music you're writing doesn't get old, doesn't get boring. You want to appropriately score that experience for the player, no matter how long it takes them to get through the forest. Then, when they get to that dragon, signal that in a way that brings the dramatic elements to the experience.

So music creates the atmosphere, sound effects create the world, voices create the characters, and together all three bring emotion to the video game’s story. Though it’s often overlooked in favor of graphics, sound is a key component to any game and has been since they first hit the scene. And for some players, sound is the only component. Here’s Zach again.

Zach: Killer Instinct is a game that is as much as it can be a controlled environment. It's not like an open world game that you're running anywhere and everywhere. You're on a 2-D plane with two people fighting each other.

A Blind Gamer by the name of Sightless Combat sent me a message on Twitter and was like, "Hey,[tweet SFX] I just wanted to let you know that me and several of the Blind Gamers that we play with, we really love Killer Instinct. It really gives us an understanding of what's going on on screen at any given type without seeing it, but we have some feedback for you."

Zach read their feedback… and put it in Killer Instinct’s next update.

Zach: A lot of it was mix changes of, "We need to be able to hear the players after they jump when they land a lot more cleanly." I was like, "Okay. That's something that's pretty easy to fix."

[Killer instinct jump clip]

When a new release would happen, I'd send him notes of things that I fixed or tried to fix and needed some feedback from him and his crew. He would play through it and he would shoot me some feedback, shoot me some additional feedback for the new character or for anything else that they came across. What they usually do is turn off music, and they just have sound design playing, so they can tell where they are in the play-space at any given time.

[Killer Instincts clip]

Then it was stuff like, "I feel like the looping sound on this projectile gets cut off too quickly. I can't tell where it is in the play space." It's like, "Okay. I will take a look at that." [Killer Instrincts clip] So, we get very, very minute with it. It's been really, really cool being able to just pick my own work apart and strip it down to brass tacks as much as I possibly can to say, "What's really important here?"

The rest of the stuff is color and it's awesome, but it's not nearly as important as these things, so I start bucketing things into accessibility versus flavor. I always make sure that accessibility bucket is very, very laser sharp in terms of player feedback and content.

Games are still continuing to evolve. In only a few decades, sound design has become so advanced that there’s a community of sightless gamers who can share in the experience. Sounds ability to draw everyone into a playable story is only going to increase. What’s in store for the future of sound in games. How will sound be used to suspend disbelief in Virtual Reality? ...and what sounds will kids now associate with their childhood?

For me back in the 80’s, it was the sound of Zelda [Zelda clip], Metroid [Metroid clip], and that super annoying, smug dog in Duck Hunt [Duck Hunt clip]. For kids today, maybe the sound a catapulting bird in Angry Birds [Angry Birds clip] or the sound of Minecraft [Minecraft clip], will be what triggers their nostalgia. No matter what it is, we can be certain that sound will continue to tap into the deepest parts of our emotions.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that supports ad agencies, filmmakers, and video game developers. Checkout recent work at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso… and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to our guests Damien Kastbauer and Zachary Quarles for sharing their stories about how they use sound to build worlds. We couldn’t have crafted this episode without them.

All of the music in this episode is provided by our friends at Musicbed. You can listen to these tracks, including this one, “Through Clouds” by Steven Gutheinz on our exclusive playlist which you can find at music dot 20k dot org.

You can say hello, submit a show idea, or give general feedback through Facebook, Twitter, or over email. Our email address is hi at 20k dot org.

The most important thing you can do for us is recommend the show to a friend. Say it in person, send a text, or shout us out on social media. Word of mouth is critical for our podcast survival.

As always, thanks for listening.

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