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Muzak: How background music took over the world

Muzak Pic.png

This episode was written and produced by Carolyn McCulley.

“Elevator music” was once the sound of restaurants, offices, and elevators in mid-20th century America. But ironically these bland, string-driven instrumental tracks are never heard in elevators anymore. In this episode, we speak with Joseph Lanza, the author of “Elevator Music,” and Julian Treasure, chairman of The Sound Agency, about the sound of Muzak -- the company that changed the way we think public spaces should sound. 

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: elevator button press, elevator door opening, pressing floor button, elevator door closing, muzak playing in background]

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

What came to be called “elevator music” is almost never heard in elevators today. So how did it earn the name “elevator music”? This is the story of Muzak—a company that changed the way public spaces sound.

[music in]

Joseph: I like the term "Elevator Music.” I don't think there's anything inherently pejorative about it, because it's music that's supposed to elevate people's moods.

That’s Joseph Lanza. He is the author of the book, “Elevator Music.” His book explores the history of the Muzak company and the genre of music it promoted—called Easy Listening. You’re hearing one of those tracks right now. It’s from one of their “Stimulus Progression” albums. ...but, I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to Joseph.

[music out]

Joseph: It was a musical currency that started in the ‘40s and but it went on through the ‘50s. And then when music changed a bit – when you had more electric guitars and drums—then Easy Listening adapted to it, as well.

One of the major Pioneers of the easy listening genre was composer Percy Faith, here is a snippet from one of his most iconic compositions “Theme from a Summer Place” recorded in 1959.

[music in]

Joseph: Usually it was strings. A lot of strings were supplying the top melody, the vocal melody. I don’t think many people disliked it as much as people want to believe today. It was just very sweet, pretty music and you would often hear it in actual pop songs.

But this sweet, pretty music actually had a grim origin [music stop suddenly/record scratch]—the Muzak company got its start on the battlefield.

[Troops marching music SFX]

Major General George Squier served as the U.S. Army’s Chief Signal Officer during World War One. That wartime work later on led him to develop a way to transmit music across electrical wires. So General Squier founded a company to send businesses and residences music via a wired system. It was a great idea. But—like many business owners discover the hard way—it rolled out a bit too late. When Squier was ready to launch his company in the mid 30’s, wireless radio was already dominating the market. So, he had to pivot.

[marching music out]

[music from beginning + add Restaurant SFX :10 later]

His new business plan was to deliver background music to restaurants, stores, office buildings and yes, [elevator ding – SFX] to elevators. The idea was that this music would calm the nerves of jittery riders in modern high-rise elevators.

Joseph: When the electronic elevator first came about, some people were afraid to enter it. Especially in the New York area where you had these skyscrapers coming up in the ‘30s. So, they called it elevator music—maybe because they could hear it more, because they were in this confined space. So, from the ceiling you would probably hear this melody. But those melodies were in hotel lobbies, restaurants, supermarkets, doctor's offices, all sorts of places.

The music that seems so bland to us now was the stuff of the future in the 1920s. In fact, General Squier named the new company Muzak—as a hat tip to the innovative film company he admired, Kodak.

[music out]

Joseph: One of the inspirations for that was a novel by Edward Bellamy called Looking Backward. It was a science fiction vision of a wonderful future where technology does wonderful things. And one of the features was every room will be fashioned with a little dial where you can just turn on music of various moods. So, that's what got it going. What we know as elevator music today—which is primarily these instrumental versions of pop tunes—that science really started coming about more in the ‘40s.

[Music in/nat sound :00 to :08 of patriotic music and the announcer’s voice in a World War 2 news reel: “America Goes to War!”]

Muzak was an idea borne out of World War 1. But the company saw a new opportunity during the manufacturing boom of World War 2. Muzak wanted to use music to motivate workers.

[music out]

Joseph: There was a guy who was a Muzak programmer who was also a very famous big band musician named Ben Selvin. He gave a paper to the Acoustical Society of America, and he was talking about what the ideal industry and workplace music would be. And that's where he said that instrumental only would be the best thing and not overly arranged.

[music in]

Ben not only suggested the type of music to be played, but he also suggested how this music should be programmed throughout the day. Muzak called it Stimulus Progression, a concept they patented. The music you’re hearing right now is one of those tracks. Stimulus Progression was a block of instrumental background music that gradually increased in pace and gave workers a sense of forward movement. Muzak claimed that when workers listened to the music, they got more work done. This block of music was then followed by a period of silence. Company-funded research showed that alternating music with silence reduced listener fatigue. And that, they claimed, made the "stimulus" part of Stimulus Progression more effective. Now, let’s fast forward the track we’ve been listening to so we can hear how the pace as picked up a bit.

Joseph: It was the only company at the time, I believe, that was involved in the commercial world that was really thinking about ecology of music. In 1967, they had a scientific board of advisors and there was this doctor who put forward this paper called The Ecologic of Muzak saying that there's certain types of music that are more beneficial for the workaday world.

So, there's public music and there's private music, and I think Muzak was trying to fill that void of what public music would sound like.

Unfortunately, I think in public spaces today, people don't take those concerns into account.

[music in]

The founder of Muzak was inspired by Edward Bellamy. Bellamy was a 19th century author and visionary who dreamed of how we would use music in the year 2000. He also wasn’t far off from modern debit cards and online shopping, too. And oddly, those things are entwined more than ever in a post-Muzak world. More on that in a moment.

[music out]

[MID ROLL]

[music in]

The Sound of Muzak—it was the easy-listening sound of mid-20th century America. During the lunar launch of Apollo 11, the astronauts listened to Muzak to calm themselves. President Kennedy even played Muzak on Air Force One and in the White House. Muzak was everywhere then. As a Muzak slogan claimed: “Muzak fills the deadly silences.”

Julian: If it's intelligent and appropriately done, music can be massively powerful, and it can have very, very strong positive effects on people. If, on the other hand, we treat it like a veneer, and mindlessly cover the world with it, I think that's a problem.

That’s Julian Treasure, founder of The Sound Agency, and an international expert on communication and sound.

Julian: It's all about making the world sound better. I care about that because I listen all the time. And I try not to spend too much of my time going around being grumpy, but there's a lot of bad sound around us, which is just the kind of by-product of stuff happening. You know, it's like the exhaust gas of living.

[City crowd with car horns SFX]

We've become an immensely ocular culture. Everything is designed for the eyes [tech SFX montage]. And the way it sounds is way down the list, if it exists at all.

[music in]

That’s the impact of Muzak’s legacy on us today. Muzak gave us a lot more than just the genre of Easy Listening. Muzak introduced the idea that music was to occupy and influence public spaces.

Julian: There's a lot of frankly spurious research which purports to show that we all love music, everywhere. We don't. [music out] There are many people who find it deeply offensive or upsetting. And music in public places can be, and often is, extremely inappropriate. Music is quite a dense sound, so we identify certain aspects of sounds. There's the pitch, or tone [music building over examples], or the melodies or harmonies of music, if it is music. There's the pace, the tempo, or meter, or rhythm, or whatever else a sound might have. There's the density, which is how much attention is this sound calling for? Some sounds are very sparse, that you don't pay much attention to them, like the background noise of traffic [traffic SFX], anything that's constant or doesn't change much. On the other had bebop jazz [trumpet jazz horn SFX], or a ringing telephone [phone SFX], or a baby crying [baby crying SFX], are very dense sounds, indeed, and they call a lot of attention. Then you've got the variability of the sound [music example]. How much does it change? And the intensity of the sound—how loud is it? We need to pay attention to all these things.

[shopping mall SFX]

Then there may be brands that can express themselves very powerfully through a musical environment. In retail, people always ask me about Hollister or Abercrombie and Fitch, and I think it's entirely appropriate what they do. They use fragrance, they use design, visual design, texture, touch, feel as well, and they use sound, particular musical programming to filter the people who go in there. I don't particularly enjoy that environment. I'm not supposed to. I'm not their target audience. My deal with them is, I don't go in. My children go in, choose the clothes, I dive in at the last minute [loud retail music environment SFX], pay and get out of there. That's how it's supposed to be. They don't want their store to be full of people of my age.

[music in]

When stuff can be delivered directly to your door, retailers and restaurants today have to create a curated experience to survive. They have to create a space where discovery and connection are the powerful draws to make you leave your couch. And how a space sounds is a big part of that experience.

Julian: When you're designing an office or a restaurant or anything like that, you have to balance privacy against noise. And I don't want to hear what somebody across the office is saying on the phone, because, in the office I'm trying to concentrate. At dinner I want some privacy for my conversation, so if I can hear them they can hear me and that’s kind of intimidating and uncomfortable. [restaurant background noise] You need some background noise in a restaurant in order to mask other peoples' conversations. We can manipulate sound in amazing ways, now, with DSP, digital signal processing, to cloud or blur conversations from other tables, so that you can't understand what people are saying, by feeding back in, slightly out of phase, the signal that's coming from them, and just distorting it enough, whilst you can hear yourself absolutely clearly.

[music out]

Unlike the easy listening of Muzak’s heyday, music in public spaces today is often faster and louder [music in]. Restaurant reviewers who measure noise in their reviews are reporting levels above 70 and even 80 decibels Those levels can cause hearing loss over time. Things like open kitchen floor plans, hard surfaces, and uptempo music all contribute to these noise levels.

Julian: There's a phenomenon called entrainment, where if you're surrounded by fast-paced sound, you tend to move faster, and do things faster. You can get more stressed, as well, by the way. Which, again, makes it surprising to us that so many stores play jolly pop music fast-paced. Because all they're doing is speeding people up. Retailers know that dwell time, the amount of time we stay in the store, is directly related to sales and how much we spend. In other words, if they speed us up, we spend less money. They lose. Yet, so many stores are doing exactly that.

[music speeds up]

If you're a fast food restaurant, I totally get it. The research shows that if we play fast-paced music and people are dining, they chew faster, they finish faster, they leave faster. Well, if you're a fine dining establishment, that's insane. If you're a burger bar and you want tables to turn over every 20 minutes or something, it makes all the sense in the world to do that to people.

[music out]

So, right about now you might notice your heart rate has increased. Maybe you’re feeling a little stressed or jittery or anxious. We chose the last track of music for that specific reason. We’ve also been slowly speeding it up. So, memorise this feeling because it’s happening to you ALL THE TIME and you don’t even know it.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sound in stores are thoughtfully designed to get you to buy stuff. While the sound in fast food restaurants are designed to get you in and out quickly. But there’s also another place where sound and music might be influencing you. ...and that’s at work.

Julian: I talk about the four effects of sound on human beings: physiological, the effect on our body. Psychological, the effect on our feelings. Cognitive, the effect on our ability to process, where that kind of office environment can cut our productivity down to a third of its potential. And finally, behavioral, the effect on our behavior, which is really significant

I'm not saying all silent. You know, going to see a football match in a silent stadium [silent football stadium SFX] would be a very spooky experience. On the other hand, we know that in a library, the rule is, shh, no talking, and we need to have more spaces like that, where people can actually work in peace.

There have been plenty of studies of noise in offices [office SFX] to show that noise creates a release of cortisol and noradrenaline--our fight or flight hormones, makes people more stressed. It increases blood pressure. That's clear, and that's been shown many, many times in studies. And, of course, chronic exposure to noise and it doesn't have to be that loud, we're talking about anything over about 65 decibels,chronic exposure to that kind of level of noise increases your risk of heart attack and stroke because of this increase in blood pressure and stress levels over a long period of time. That's clearly been indicated by a lot of research now, and unfortunately many people are working in environments where it is exactly that loud.

[phone ringing SFX, with abrupt stop]

[music in]

Maybe Muzak was onto something when it created elevator music. Or, maybe it just contributed to how noisy our world is now. Either way, we know that Muzak’s intent was to create an appealing “soundscape” for the ears - kinda like what a beautiful “landscape” does for the eyes. If nothing else, it taught us that sound has an enormous physical and emotional impact on all of us… and if used consciously, you can even affect your mood pretty drastically. It can help you study, give you energy, wake you up, or just make you happy. AND, you can use it as much (or as little) as you want.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design and mix team that supports ad agencies, filmmakers, television networks and video game publishers. If you work in these fields, be sure to drop us a note at hi@defactosound.com. We’d love to hear from you.

This episode was written and produced by Carolyn McCulley. And me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Jai Berger. Thanks to our guests – Joseph Lanza, the author of “Elevator Music,” and Julian Treasure, chairman of The Sound Agency.

While you’re online, be sure to visit 20k dot org. There you’ll find the transcripts to every single episode, as well as links to all of the music we’ve used and the guests we’ve had on the show.

Also, be sure to connect with us on Twitter and Facebook. I love hearing from you on social, so don’t be shy about reaching out.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Six O'Clock Soundtrack: The art of TV news music

TV New Music.png

This episode originally aired on Every Little Thing. Go subscribe!

Ever wonder how the music on your favorite news stations is created? Dive in with news music appreciator + journalist Victor Vlam; Composer Matthew Kajcienski, Composer Irad Eshel, Composer Adarsh Thottetodi, Composer David Lowe, Musicologist James Deaville, Film and TV studies Professor Deborah Jaramillo to find out.

20K is made out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by Dallas Taylor.

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

Consider supporting the show at donate.20k.org.

To get your 20K referral link and earn rewards, visit 20k.org/refer.

Check out Bose at bose.com/20k.

Follow Bose on Twitter & Facebook.

View Transcript ▶︎

[Cheesy newsy music in]

[Dallas reading like a stereotypical newscaster]

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 news music.

[Cheesy newsy music out]

[music in]

You don’t have to watch news all the time to know how news sounds. And I can tell you, just from doing that cheesy newscaster voice a second ago… getting it right is not easy. The sound of news has been established and refined over more than half a century. It goes all the way back to TV’s first anchorman, Douglas Edwards [play Douglas Edwards clip]

… it became a household staple with Walter Cronkite [play Cronkite]

… and ultimately, it got to be so recognizable…it was just ripe for parody [Anchorman clip]

[music out]

But the sound of news goes way beyond the voices of the anchors. [bump out music] Recently, Flora Lichtman from the fantastic podcast Every Little Thing did a report about a man she met who is obsessed with news music. And if you like Twenty Thousand Hertz, I think you'll like Every Little Thing. It's about small stuff that makes a big difference. Flora takes it from here.

Hey so I want you to meet somebody, his name is Victor Vlam.

Victor: Hey Flora, it's Victor.

So Victor is a dutch journalist covering US politics. But he also has a side hobby that he’s just straightforwardly super proud of...

Victor: I first did it anonymously because I was sort of ashamed for it. But after a while I just said to myself, "Why in heaven's name should I be ashamed of this?"

The interest ...that Victor should absolutely not be ashamed of ... is …television news music - like the themes that TV news station play.

Victor: I've been recording television music from when I was like four or five years old. I remember my parents giving me a recording device, one of those red recording machines just made for kids, and I think most people record probably themselves singing or whatever, but I actually used it to record television theme songs at the time.

What did your parents think?

Victor: I think they probably thought it was incredibly weird, but they certainly did not say so. They were actually very supportive.

Ok so that childhood interest turned into a blog -- that he has run for the last 15 years. It tracks the latest fashions in news music...drawing from this library he has been collecting since age 4.

Victor: And I literally have like 50,000 hours of news music on a hard drive stored in my house.

50 thousand hours?

Victor: Yes it’s an incredible amount, and I put a lot of that stuff on my iPhone for example and when I go out for a run I listen to some news theme music.

Ok I need to know more about this. Do you have a running playlist?

Victor: I do actually, yeah.

Do you have your phone? Can you go to it and read me of the songs?

Victor: Yeah, sure. When I ran a marathon a couple of years ago, I just actually thought of a good playlist, I'm actually searching for it now.

Yeah. It actually starts with the World News Tonight theme from 2012, which is by Hans Zimmer, and I thought it was a very dramatic theme.

The first song on your playlist for your marathon run was the 2012 World News Tonight theme song?

Victor: Yes. Exactly. Yeah.

[music in World News Tonight 2012 theme song]

Okay. What came next?

Victor: There's some local news themes came next...

[Local theme songs]

and then at the point at which I plan to be at around quarter of the way through, I have The Mission, which is the NBC News theme.

[The Mission NBC theme]

So I have actually a couple of NBC News themes up there from Nightly News, from Meet the Press, and let's see, there's some CBS stuff as well. Some local stuff. Oh, and there's a...

Wait ...

Victor: Yes? Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Victor, this is amazing.

[News music in]

This is really surprising. You are the only person I would venture in the world to run a marathon to news music.

Victor: [laughs] Yes, I would bet that that's probably true, yes. [News music out]

All right. So here's the thing Victor, your love for news music makes me think I'm really not getting it. Like, there's something to news music that I am not seeing.

Victor: You know I think it’s sort of interesting, sometimes people ask me what do you think is interesting about that and to be honest I have no idea what I think is interesting about it.

Victor may not know what makes it interesting to him, but he does know how it makes him feel.

Victor: I think also because the events of the news are so incredibly important, and they shape our lives. For example, the Berlin Wall coming down. That was a very vivid memory I have in my childhood. I think some of the news music from that time that I listen to today, it sort of brings you back to a safe comfortable childhood when things were feeling much more innocent than they are today. That's sort of the feeling that I think it gives you.

I mean, that’s kind of amazing. Because think about what news music has to overcome to create any positive feelings at all right now.

[News clip montage]

But despite so much, so much bad news, news music is giving Victor a feeling of safety, and on top of that, it like propelled him through 26 grueling miles. How is it doing that?

Ngofeen: I can help you answer that question.

I’ve got producer Ngofeen Mputebwele with me. Ngofeen is a music nerd, and introduced me to Victor.

Ngofeen: Yeah, so to figure out the answer to this question, I called up a bunch of composers from all over the world - cause news music is a global genre. And let me introduce you to them. We have Irad Eschel.

Irad: I live in Tel Aviv Israel.

Ngofeen: And Adarsh Thottetodi

Adarsh: I’m a music producer with New Delhi Television in India.

Ngofeen: We’ve got David Lowe...

David: I put the news theme together for the BBC.

Ngofeen: And Matt Kocinski, who composed Good Morning America’s theme.

Matt: Hi how are you doing?

Ngofeen: Here are three things these composers try to do with their news themes. So first, news themes often start with a bang.

Matt: With all my news themes, I try to grab on to the viewer right out of the gate.

[Play news theme opening]

Really pull them in from passive listening to active listening through some sort of quick intense build marking the show open and ID.

Ngofeen: And you can hear it in Irad’s theme for News 10 in Israel as well.

[News 10’s theme music]

So that’s a way of grabbing people, right? The second thing the composers pointed out is this steady beat.

Adarsh: If you see any news music, the rhythm, the groove section is very constant...

[Adarsh music]

Ngofeen: One beat you’ll hear a lot is called four on the floor.

Irad: That is like boom boom boom boom.

Ngofeen: Four on the floor is in a ton of music, but in news music it gives you this feeling of reliability and stability.

Irad: It never stops. It's like a grid that you can't run away from.

Ngofeen: Ok last thing, and this is actually pretty subtle, but composers also want to convey that even if the news is tense and urgent, things are also under control. So, listen for the how david uses chords to do this in the BBC theme...

[BBC THEME]

David’s moving from a minor chord to a major chord which feels a lot more settled.

David: What it sort of says the news is coming in it’s all a bit uncertain, it’s all a bit unstable, it’s making us a bit worried, but then we’re processing it and we’re bringing it to you in a very safe authoritative way.

So let me see if I got this: news music kickstarts you with a big build; it has a driving beat that creates this feeling of steadiness; and it makes you feel like even in tense, hard moments, things will be fine.

Ngofeen: Yup.

Got it. Thanks Ngofeen.

[music in]

So it makes total sense that Victor would both be propelled by news music and get a feeling of safety from it, because it’s designed to do exactly those things!

But here’s the deal, Victor appreciates news music on this higher level too.

Victor: It's one of the most difficult pieces of music to create.

Just think about this for a sec, so news themes have to work with every headline - from cat video memes to disasters.

[music out]

Victor: The news is literally different every single night. And it's played multiple times a day for sometimes many, many years. It needs to hold up very well.

Do you think it's the most heard music in the world?

Victor: I would actually not be surprised if that were the case.

The most heard music in the world, that we also may think about the least.

[music in]

After the break, Flora explores how news music can be used in ways that are…not exactly wholesome.

James: You can't see it. You can't touch it. And yet it's there working. And it’s working with the images to convince us of something.

Deborah: Those images and sounds would sell not only the war coverage that you were watching, but also in a particularly insidious way sell the war.

And…find out which super-famous composer is responsible for one of the most iconic pieces of news music. Stick around.

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

News music has not only defined the way we think about The News, but the way we think about world events. And the way we think about these things has rarely been more important than it is now. Here’s Flora.

[music out]

I think it’s safe to say that it’s a weird time for news.

[News clip montage]

Fake news, fake fake news, information overload, the false urgency of the 24 hour news cycle - there are a lot of threads to scrutinize about the media right now. And I know news music, isn’t usually at the top of that heap of concerns. But the story of how news music came to be tells us a lot about how the tv news industry as a whole developed.

James:Before the advent of television, people got their news in moving images through newsreels.

Musicologist James Deaville is gonna give us some high points of this history. Starting with a time when people would get their news in movie theatres!

James: Originally during the era of silent film they would have live music accompanying the newsreel that was shown in the theater.

So early news music was very classy. And by the way, just as a fun aside... there were actually newsreel theaters that looped the news constantly. You would just like go into a movie theater and watch the news. Ok Anyway… moving forward…

James: Television becomes a technology in the late 40s.

And with TV comes TV news.

James: Then comes Walter Cronkite and CBS and in September 1963 they move to a half hour format.

This is like a big moment. This is the birth of the evening news format as we know it. And around this time, you also start to hear the first TV news themes. CBS evening news has a theme, but they don’t go with music.

James: It was the teletype.

[CBS News theme]

It was no nonsense. There was no sense of entertainment.

[Continue CBS News theme]

NBC’s evening news show at the time, the Huntley Brinkley Report [Play Huntley Brinkley Report Intro]. It has theme too, for the credits - and they go with Beethoven

[Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony]

James: The Ninth Symphony which I think gives them a sense of authority. And so you'll begin to get them branding of the news product in the late 60s.

Are they trying to compete with Cronkite in some way or does anyone talk about this as explicitly as we need a sonic brand?

James:There is some documentation about that and I mean, let's face it, these networks are in competition with each other for audience as they are even today.

Throughout the 70s, networks continue to experiment with news music, and then in the 1980s, NBC takes it to the next level.

James: You find NBC commissioning John Williams to write music for its newscast.

[John Williams NBC News music]

Yes, the famous film composer John Williams. The person who did Star Wars, and Jaws, and ET, Big spielberg collaborator. And Victor says this is a masterpiece of news music.

Victor: It was recorded by a hundred piece orchestra. It has been used for 30 years.

[Continue John Williams NBC News music]

I truly think it's one of the best pieces of news music.

This is an inflection point. Now the news has a soundtrack…

James: We’re going into a high concept notion of the news like hollywood, like a hollywood film, I guess I would call it the and the rise of the infotainment industry.

And this John Williams theme - it’s just the beginning.

James: But really the thing that that catapulted the idea of the news as entertainment, I hate to say it, but was the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91 and the rise of CNN as the network.

So CNN is born in 1980, but James says that the network really comes into its own with its Persian Gulf war coverage.

[CNN commercial as the world watches CNN’s coverage of the gulf war]

And music is a part of that. With the war we have CNN using special music - not just for its shows or network, but to help brand this big story of the day.

[CNN News clip]

James: They simply showed you that tank and had a kettle drum roll and it was like the Beethoven fifth... bum bum bum bum [CNN kettle drum roll]. It's kinda the soundtrack of that war. I mean that was just one detail and the other networks found themselves with their news packages down.

Deborah: We forget that television news is still television, and their ratings go up substantially during moments of crisis and certainly international conflict when the U.S. is involved.

This is Deborah Jaramillo, who wrote a book the cable news coverage of the war in Iraq. And basically her argument is that by 2003 cable networks adopt lots of high concept filmmaking techniques - from music to packaging to graphics - we are now a long way from those Cronkite teletype days.

Deborah: Fox News commissioned a number of pieces of music that would accompany its various title sequences. The composer for that actually referred to it as Metallica rehearsing Wagner.

What?

Deborah: So that gives you a sense of the aggressiveness of the original package, and Fox News wound up kind of toning it down, so that it wasn't so rock and roll, but it was still pretty aggressive in terms of its excitement.

[Fox News war theme]

Other networks had special war themes too. Here’s CBS’s theme.

[CBS war theme]

Here’s MSNBC and NBC’s early war theme.

[MSNBC and NBC war themes]

Here’s CNN theme:

[CNN war theme]

Deborah: Certain sounds are being used for particular reasons. You hear a rapid snare drum, it communicates militarism, right? It's a march. It's a shortcut to communicating really complicated ideas. Nationalism? Nationalism is so loaded. If you have that musical shortcut, it can be communicated sonically.

This was all part of their kind of larger war branding strategy.

I mean, even just the idea that there's a war branding strategy makes me uncomfortable.

Deborah: As it should, those images and sounds would sell not only the war coverage that you were watching, but also in a particularly insidious way sell the war.

The composers we spoke with didn’t talk about their craft in this way. For them, the challenge of the theme is more about creating a clear sonic brand for the network.

And today, networks are using more music than ever - there are special cues opening credits, closing credits, getting in and out of commercials, special reports, election coverage. And all that music inevitably is shaping the way we interpret the information we’re getting.

[Ominous music start]

James: Music is the ultimate hidden persuader.

Like right now we’re trying to convince you that this is kinda ominous.

James: You can't see it. You can't touch it. And yet it's there working. And it’s working with the images to convince us of something.

Deborah: Unfortunately on any given day we have a disaster happening, so this is an important moment for comparative analysis of cable channels, and how they're responding to disasters using music.

It had it hadn't occurred to me that we could have news without news music it just felt like this inevitability until we started learning about it. So what does it mean that we do it this way?

[Ominous music out]

James: That's a very good question. I think it means that we've become to a certain extent divorced from reality if we were to see the bodies in Las Vegas or whatever it would overwhelm us without some kind of well, padding it kind of mediates reality.

It takes us out of the reality of the moment, it makes it seem like we're watching a film.

James: Very true.

Deborah: We're taught in this country not to think about television. We're taught in fact that television is where you go to turn off your brain. And some people say, "Well, just turn off the TV." No, don't just turn off the TV. Actively study the TV.

[music in]

So there are a lot of things to study about the TV and news in general right now. And in this context, news music might seem like a this little thing, but as you know, little things can tell you about big things. You know what I mean?

What’s your closer? What was your closer tunes for, you know, like mile, whatever, 25?

Victor: I actually had that planned out very well. It’s actually Wrecking Ball, Miley Cyrus.

Haha, good choice.

Victor: It is. Actually. It’s really a great song, just to close.

You can find Victor’s amazingly comprehensive blog at networknewsmusic.com

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.

(Every Little Thing Annoucer) Every Little Thing was made by Flora Lichtman, Katherine Wells, Ngofeen Mptubwele, Christine Driscoll, and Devon Taylor, with help from Nicole Pasulka, Annette Heist and Doug Barron. Dara Hirsch scored and mixed this episode.

You can hear more episodes of Every Little Thing by visiting their website: elt dot show. You can also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And hear more of our show at our website twenty k dot org, there you can stream our archives, send us suggestions, reach out about advertising, and do all sorts of other website-related things. Also, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter using our handle twenty k org or by searching for Twenty Thousand Hertz all spelled out. If you want to share the show with your friends, I will think very positive thoughts about you.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

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

Tweet Pic.png

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 out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by Dallas Taylor.

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

Consider supporting the show at donate.20k.org.

To get your 20K referral link and earn rewards, visit 20k.org/refer.

Thanks to Audioblocks for supporting this episode. Sign up at audioblocks.com/20k.

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.

Recent Episodes

The Gift: Dr. Amar Bose’s audio legacy

The Gift Pic.png

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

Check out Defacto Sound, the studios that produced Twenty Thousand Hertz, hosted by Dallas Taylor.

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

Consider supporting the show at donate.20k.org.

To get your 20K referral link and earn rewards, visit 20k.org/refer.

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.

Recent Episodes

Facebook & Google Pixel: Designing the perfect alert sound

UI Sounds Pic.png

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

20K is hosted by Dallas Taylor and made out of the studios of Defacto Sound.

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

Consider supporting the show at donate.20k.org.

To get your 20K referral link and earn rewards, visit 20k.org/refer.

Check out Bose at bose.com/20k.

Follow Bose on Twitter & Facebook.

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

Apple Comp.png

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 hosted by Dallas Taylor and produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound.

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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.

Recent Episodes

Disney Parks: How Imagineers use sound to enchant visitors

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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

20K is made out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by Dallas Taylor.

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

Consider supporting the show at donate.20k.org.

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Check out Bose at bose.com/20k.

Follow Bose on Twitter & Facebook.

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.

Recent Episodes

Spooky Sounds: The secrets of horror sound design

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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

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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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