“Intel Inside” and other sonic branding brilliance

This episode was written & produced by Kevin Edds.

We are constantly exposed to sonic branding in television, radio, and web commercials. We deconstruct some of the most impactful audio logos in history and explain how the brain interprets them. Featuring Scott Simonelli, CEO of  Veritonic and Walter Werzowa, founder of Musikvergnuegen.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Fury (Instrumental) - Prague
Unlimited - Dario Lupo
Endless Wild Perfect (Instrumental) - Le Voyager
Stunner - Airplanes
See - Roary
Plan B (no oohs ahhs) - Watermark High
Luminary (instrumental) - Benjamin James
Spacca - Steven Gutheinz
Spheres - Steven Gutheinz
Lost in the Mist - David a Molina
Time Carver - Steven Gutheinz
Faces (no oohs ahhs) - Roary
Finally the Sun - Dustin Lau
Her Dress - The Light The Heat

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View Transcript ▶︎

SFX: SPORTSCENTER PROMO

ESPN Anchor: So many people wonder where the theme music from SportsCenter came from. David St. Hubbins from Spinal Tap, you gotta tell me where this came from.

St. Hubbins: I don’t really know, it’s a mystery. It kind of sprang from my forehead. I was just sitting there watching SportsCenter and I went [plays SportsCenter audio logo].

[SFX: Sportcenter theme]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story… of Sonic Branding.

[music in]

The commercial you heard at the top of the show was from the classic “This Is SportsCenter” advertising campaign by ESPN. The ending of SportCenter’s iconic theme song became ubiquitous with the ESPN brand. Fans of the network were humming their new “audio logo” to themselves, so their marketing team knew they were onto something.

[music Out]

Last year advertising spending in the US was estimated to be over two-hundred-billion dollars. Not on product development, or manufacturing, or distribution. But on advertising alone. [sfx montage under rest of paragraph: Duracell,Nokia, NBC, LG, Playstation, T. Mobile, Nintendo Switch,] And while much of advertising includes commercials, signage, print & digital ads, a key part of any marketing that utilizes sound is an audio logo.

An audio logo, or a sonic brand if you will [sfx under VO: aflac duck, Nintendo Gamecube] , is a short distinctive melody or other sequence of sound. [sfx: McDonalds] It’s usually positioned at the beginning or ending of a commercial.[sfx: Old Spice Whistle] It can be considered as the acoustic equivalent of a visual logo.

[music in]

Almost every time you listen to a TV or radio commercial for a big brand, there’s an audio logo to punctuate the message. According to the Harvard Business Review, “sound can play an important role in positively differentiating a product or service. It can also enhance recall, create preference, build trust, and even increase sales.”

Scott: An audio logo is the audio identity of a brand in the way that you have the Golden Arches, or any visual logo, and that audio logo can be something that is present across a whole bunch of different advertising mediums. It can be a tag at the end of every ad, it can be the focal point of an ad, but, ultimately it should be present every time your brand is being heard.

[music out]

That’s Scott Simonelli, the founder and CEO of Veritonic, a marketing intelligence platform for sound. They measure audio effectiveness in advertising.

Scott: I think the Nationwide example is very top of mind, [SFX: Nationwide is on Your Side] it just works so well, and now it's at the core of their campaigns. [SFX: Nationwide campaign example, carry under dialog] You see them using it, and thinking about ways to base a campaign around the audio logo.

[SFX: bump out Nationwide campaign clip]

Scott: The way we're wired, and the ways our bodies are built. Sound is a very big part of the equation and it's very innate. You internalize sound really quickly, and we're very sensitive to what we hear, because, just evolutionary. Usually hear something coming [SFX: bear roar, running up to listener] when trouble's about to happen. It's also you're hearing for a whole bunch of months before you're born, all you do is hear. [SFX: muffled sounds of talking and heartbeat, as if from the womb] It's definitely something that's a big part of it, and I think in children you sort of see that.

I think children are always a good litmus test of what's innate, because they're much more unfiltered than adults.

Sound is also very different from sight. Audio logos and video logos are are interpreted by the brain in two totally different ways. Yet they can both be representations of the same brand. Advertisers work extremely hard creating them to try to evoke those same feelings in consumers.

Scott: The big benefit of an audio logo versus a visual logo, is that it stays with you after you've experienced it. [SFX: washed out ‘memories’ of audio logos under dialog...] With a visual logo, you might remember what it looks like, but not in the way that you would remember an audio logo, and certainly nobody's humming or singing a visual logo. As soon as you hear that three- note, or four-note sequence, you know exactly where you've heard it before, that longevity, that memorability, and that recall is so powerful.

[SFX: SEGA audio logo]

Memorability in audio logos is key. And it’s not always because the product is so amazing. Sometimes the audio logo is something we might call an earworm - something that just gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out. Mennen After Shave had a great example of this in the 80s [SFX: "By Mennen"] It was so popular that it became the basis of a storyline in an episode of Seinfeld. Here George Costanza tries to make himself more memorable to a woman that he was dating.

[sfx: Seinfeld clip… George Costanza: I’m like a commercial Jingle, at first it’s a little irritating, then you hear it a few times and you’re humming it in the shower. By the 3rd date it’s “By Mennen”

Female speaker: Alright George, the first time we went out….I found you very irritating, but after seeing you a couple of times you sorta got stuck in my head. “Cosss-tanza”]

But setting out to make an audio logo memorable is not easy. It takes skill, creativity, research, and sometimes luck.

Scott: For a composer, or for a firm trying to create an audio logo, it is ridiculously hard to try to figure out how to tell a story in three seconds, or with five notes. And you know there's only so many frequencies of sound out there, and there's only 12 notes in western music [SFX: 12 notes], so to try to figure that out and find a way to make it work is hard.

[music in]

When a marketing department or advertising agency is given the task to create an audio logo, what happens? How do they do it? Typically they go to experts in the field. They’re a hybrid of an audio engineer, sound designer, and composer. But the process in which they learn about the brand and what the client wants can vary.

[music out]

Walter: Too much freedom is not really the best choice, and if you don't have any freedom, then it doesn't work out that well. That’s Walter Werzowa founder of Musikvergnuegen - a company which specializes in audio branding.

Just coming from Austria, speaking German, I only came up with a German name Musikvergnuegen, which translates into the enjoyment of music.

[music in]

Walter was on the short list to create the new audio logo for Delta Airlines. But, Delta’s agency wanted 5 companies to compete to come up with the best idea.

Walter: It suddenly turned into a cattle call. Delta needed an audio branding, and their agency called out, and we were one of them, and I mentioned to them, I think probably all of the companies will do an amazing job but it does not help a big, global corporation to call five different companies to come up with audio ideas.

[music out]

I can tell you from experience. [SFX: funny transition to a barrage of rejected Audio Logos] Listening to 150 - 2 second audio logos can be totally mind-numbing. There’s no way to have a clear head.

[SFX: bump out]

Walter: So I suggested just decide on one company. I didn't hear back from them for three or four month, and then they called again and said they apologized, and they would like to work with us.

[music in]

While some projects are started with an email, a couple phone calls, and maybe a proposal, Walter prefers a more personal connection, so he asked Delta for face-to-face a meeting at their headquarters.

Walter: So, we’re sitting in the boardroom, and they talked about their headaches going through bankruptcy, and the sound is awful up there if you're on a plane. It's not the best experience, how it can be brand that?

[music out]

It was very inspiring. I came up with the idea right there, let's just put an orchestra on the plane [SFX: plane in-flight sound gradually fade in] and tune the orchestra to the sound of the airplane, of that noise, and make something beautiful with it. [SFX: Delta]

They totally loved the idea, and that was it. So the creative process was extremely short in a sense. It was one hour of the board meeting.

But what happens when you don't have that creative epiphany and you go back to the office trying to figure it out? Almost any artist, in any medium, needs to put themselves into a creative mindset.

[music in]

Walter: The creative mind works differently on each project. The most important part is to really understand the client and the client needs because that is the story. It's not so much my creativity. It is my understanding of a problem. Some composers on my team don't like when I say this, but I don't think writing a mnemonic is composing. Writing a mnemonic is inventing audio which works for a very specific task.

In 1994, Walter created what has become arguably the most recognizable audio logo in existence. It’s said to be broadcast somewhere in the world every five minutes. We’ll get the story on that in a moment.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

In 1994 Walter Werzowa was contacted by Intel and asked to come up with a three-second audio logo that would be used at the end of every commercial. This wasn’t a common thing at the time. In 1994 there just weren’t very many products or services other than TV and radio stations that were branding themselves with a mnemonic.

[music out]

Walter: The way Intel was created was quite a journey. It started at RJLA where Kyle Cooper, he was junior creative, called me and said he has a very interesting project for me, and he was laughing on the phone. I asked him why he was laughing, and he said, "Oh, you will see."

[music in]

So we met. Those were the days where everything was personal. I could drive my car to the office and he would show me a board. The board was six pictures of that Intel spiral video. He said if I want to do music to it, it's Intel. It's this great technology company. And then he told me it's three seconds. I was laughing saying, "You're joking."

[music out]

Obviously this was a new task for Walter. Most of the music he had composed was at least 10 seconds long. So, how could he tell a whole musical story, in just three seconds?

Walter: I realized this is a very strange task. You can barely say a meaningful sentence in three seconds.

First I thought it's easy. I tried a couple of things, and everything felt incomplete or naïve or absolutely out of place.

Then I opened the books to get inspired like a scores, and went to the Mozarts and Beatles and whatever there was available.

And it never felt good because it came too much from a musical standpoint and not from what is needed. Writing a mnemonic is not like writing a symphony. I have done that, and it's a totally different center in your brain, and in the emotion, in your heart than doing audio branding.

Then Walter had an epiphany.

[music in]

He thought, “If this was a song, the tagline was Intel Inside.” It would have four accents or four notes to mimic that phrase. Now Walter was getting somewhere.

Walter: Since I heard about Intel, the engineers and it's super precise, and in a sense there's some coldness behind that and precision, four straight eight notes would resemble that best. It's a very pum-pum-pum-pum for the rhythm, and that felt good and mathematical. Then I went to the next, what could be the melody. Since they asked for something which doesn't have any cultural connotation, it has to sound and feel the same in an arabic place than in Asia or in Europe or in Africa, I thought that there's two intervals, which are very powerful but open and don't have any zooming into just one culture, and it's the fourth and the fifth.

[music out]

He also added a single note at the beginning. [SFX: single chord] Walter called it a “Palate Cleanser” - it’s a sound helps to get your ears ready for the rest of the logo.

Walter: So basically, I constructed it. It's not even composing. I was thinking, "What works best," and that became my methodology and I explained that to Intel. Everybody said, "Well, yeah. That concept works, so how does it sound?"

And then Walter played his new audio logo for the Intel executives. [SFX: Intel] And it was a huge hit.

Walter: We all have some kind of synesthesia going on when we hear sounds and we associate colors with it, [SFX: musical sound design through this section, matching what Walter is saying] so that sound seems to be blue and has a little of electricity in there, power in there, and it's positive and inviting. There's some wooden, organic instruments in there which help to connect to the human basically being in charge of the power and technology, so it really tells a nice story.

[SFX: seamless transition into...]

[music in]

For some artists, when they’re working on a painting, sculpture, a novel, or a song - sometimes they have that Eureka moment where they realize their work is complete.

Walter: I had a couple of other versions in my sleeve if that wouldn't work, but it was clear this is it. If we present the client a great strong concept, then it's very clear this is the sound which will and can reflect your whole brand experience.

Audio logos can communicate so much in a short amount of time. In a way, it’s their simplicity that makes them effective - there is no time for your mind to wander. They create a vibe for the brand, but they can also bring back memories.

[music out]

Walter: I could play you .5 seconds of Tainted Love, [SFX: Tainted Love] of that one sound and you recognize it, or Beat It. [SFX: Beat It] So many of those sounds, you just need a split second and you know the sound. It creates all the emotion of it.

[music in]

Music brings back memories of where and when you heard a song. Audio logos bring back memories too, but they bring back memories of a brand. This happens on a subconscious level. It’s clever psychology used by advertisers.

Walter: Our research is that if a mnemonic is longer than three seconds, it works differently because we shift from hearing to listening, and if it's three seconds, it really touches our subconscious more so than anything else. If you have now an 11 second mnemonic that tells a different story, it is absolutely more conscious. People start interacting with it. They see more content, they hear more content, and that is definitely more music than a mnemonic.

[music out]

An audio logo can shape the perception of a product. Once you hear an audio logo a few times, your memory of that brand becomes deeper. And some brands even try to include familiar sounds in there audio logos, so that you think about their brand even when you’re not hearing an ad.

Walter: I always thought that Southwest, that fasten your seatbelt, clink [SFX: Southwest] is just so right on. It’s just, that is just perfect. If you fly any other airline, you hear that Southwest tone, which is so wicked that, they brand themselves on any other flight in the world, which is genius. And probably drove some of the other airlines nuts.

[music in]

Walter has created audio logos for products like Intel, Delta, Samsung, LG, Nextel, and Red Bull. He has also created the audio logo for the TBS network. [SFX: TBS Logo] And writing an audio logo for a TV network is very different, and comes with its own challenges.

Walter: Working on networks is, a different beast because it has much more variety. It could be a dynamic show before something slower and more intimate, so we have to be even more respectful to the flexibility.

[music out]

In a sense, it's easier to write for a specific company, where it's pretty clear where they're going. Programming shifts. There's different morning programming than lunch and evening and night programming.

But as traditional television changed and streaming video came into play the idea of a daytime vs primetime schedule goes away. Services like Hulu [SFX: hulu], Amazon Prime [SFX: Amazon], and Netflix [SFX: Netflix audio logo] all have audio logos.

Walter: If you would just see the animation by itself, it wouldn't be that powerful. A couple of seconds, you tell the Netflix story and people recognize it and have all the cessation. And that makes Netflix even more special.

[music in]

When you compare audio logos to visual logos, there’s a stark contrast. Nike has the iconic Swoosh that you see on every shoe and piece of apparel. The designer wants you to think and feel something, but you have to see that logo over and over - it takes repetition. It could also be easy to miss, like if you’re skimming the pages of a magazine.

But, audio logos can reach you whether you’re looking at them or not. And the best ones are catchy so you only have to hear them once. You can walk away humming them, and in a sense, you can take it with you.

[music out]

Scott: For every Nike Swoosh, there's probably 10 audio logos that are way more powerful.

I bet you a very small percentage of the population could tell you what the Nationwide visual logo looks like, that it's blue and has an eagle on it, whereas, everyone knows, [SFX: Nationwide audio logo/tagline]

Could you tell me what the State Farm logo looks like? I'm sure you know, [SFX: State Farm audio logo/tagline]

When you have a whole orchestra at your fingertips,[sfx: orchestra tuning up]and all these different sounds, it's a much richer experience than anything visual can do.

[music in]

In the film and television industry a lot of money is spent on the visuals. From incredible locations and sets, to live-action chase and fight scenes, to the CGI movie magic. It’s a common generalization that audio is an afterthought. Well, that may have been true in the past, but people are consuming entertainment in new ways. And sound is becoming more important than ever.

Scott: When you look at the actual response, whether it's film or TV, or the ad, the audio has much more of an impact on the emotion than I think budgets dictate.

I think we're seeing that pendulum swing a little bit now, because a lot less people have their eyes on the screen. There's data now that says 40% of the time, people, when they're watching television, are on a second screen, or they're not looking at the TV, they're doing something else.

So, if you're running ads on television, how effective is the audio, if 40% of the audience isn't looking?

Audio logos aren’t particularly new, but they’ve seen an explosion over the past two decades. Advertising styles and technology have advanced. And the science behind what makes sonic branding effective is more intricate than ever. It’s amazing how five notes, in three seconds, make you feel that a product is sleek, powerful, trustworthy, cutting edge, and unforgettable.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. To hear Defacto’s audio branding work, visit defactosound.com/work.

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

Many thanks to Scott Simonelli, founder of Veritonic. If you'd like to learn more about how audio can impact your marketing campaign check ‘em out at Veritonic.com.

And sincere thanks to Walter Werzowa from Musikvergnuegen. You can check out his work at Musikvergnuegen.com. We’ll drop a link to both companies in our description.

The music in this episode is from our friends at Musicbed. Musicbed is a full-service music licensing company making better music accessible to everyone. To listen to the music we use, visit music.20k.org.

You can find us at 20 k dot org. There, you can catch up on past episodes, read transcripts, or buy a t-shirt! If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, be sure to follow us at the username 20k org. I love hearing from you, and I read all the comments. I know, it’s insane, but I love talking about sound.

And lastly, I have one favor to ask. If you love this show and want to hear more and more episodes I challenge you to get just one friend to subscribe to twenty thousand hertz. Seriously, that’s all it will take. One extra person. So contact your mom, your best friend from college, your 4th grade science teacher, or anyone you think will love the show. Text them, call them, write on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or wherever.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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Loop Groups: The art of movie background chatter

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

Invisible actors create worlds of sound in everything you watch - from Jaws to The Wire. With special guests, Carl Gottlieb, screenwriter and author of "The Jaws Log"; Dann Fink, loop group director and co-owner of Loopers Unlimited; Stuart Stanley, Sound Supervisor; loop group members Eboni Booth, Dennis Carnegie, Axel Avin, Jr., Shannon Burkett, Daphne Gaines, and Rashad Edwards; and Will Ralston, supervising sound editor for The Wire, The Deuce, and Treme.

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View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. [SFX: NYC ambience, walla is present and upfront, occasional phrases and laughs poke out above the bed of noise]

Imagine you’re watching a movie. It’s a busy scene in some major downtown city, but there’s people in the background walking, talking, laughing, and generally going about their normal day. The city is alive with sound. However, on the film set, the background actors are actually completely silent.

[SFX: Ambiences bump out]

That’s right, none of those background sounds are actually happening. The actors in the background are told to to appear like they’re talking, laughing, and yelling, but not to actually make any noise while doing it. The film set is kept as quiet as possible to get a clean recording of the lead actors’ performances. This also goes for scenes in loud places like concerts or a club.

[SFX: Club atmosphere and music sneak in]

The actors may be yelling, but on set, there’s nothing else being heard.

[SFX: Quick bump out]

So, eventually all of that background chatter has to be recreated.

Recently, Flora Lichtman from the fantastic podcast Every Little Thing talked with some of the talented people who make those voices. And if you like Twenty Thousand Hertz, I think you’ll really like Every Little Thing. It’s about the small stuff that makes a big difference. Here’s their report.

Carl Gottlieb: Yeah, so do a bed of just people in the police station. One, two, three.

[SFX: Background chatter “I've got the plate and VIN numbers.”]

Looper: I had no idea that this type of work even existed.

[SFX: Background chatter “Get out of my neighborhood. We don't need you here. We don't need you in our neighborhood.”]

People in this industry don't know.

Looper: I didn't know until I got a call from Dan.

But it's in everything.

Looper: It is in everything.

[SFX: Background chatter “Okay, we'll just do a bottle, we'll just do another bottle then.”]

Looper: So, we just kind of have to come in and be a chameleon and do whatever they want. Now, when I watch a film or television show, I can't even watch it in the same way.

[SFX: Background chatter]

Carl Gottlieb: You shouldn't know that we're there. But once you do, you will always hear us.

Today, the actors you always hear, but never see. Their story starts 40 years ago, on the movie Jaws. Crew members from around the country had gathered on a beach in Cape Cod to make cinema history. It was magical. Carl Gottlieb: Ugh. This may be disappointing to you, but it was a movie, it was a difficult location, the crew was tired and angry and overworked and underpaid. It was a job.

Meet Carl Gottlieb.

Carl Gottlieb: We worked under difficult conditions. The mechanical shark had issues. And we had to work around all those things.

Carl co-wrote Jaws.

Carl Gottlieb: Screen credit it "Screenplay by Peter Benchley," who wrote the novel, "and Carl Gottlieb," who did the rewrite on location.

So, why did you have to do the rewrite on location? What was the problem with the script?

Carl Gottlieb: It was awful. It just wasn't good. And I shared with Steven, and he had sent me a copy of the proposed shooting script, with a note on the cover saying, "Eviscerate it."

So, Carl did eviscerate, and eventually the mechanical shark came to life, Steven Spielberg shot the film, and Verna Fields edited it.

Carl Gottlieb: We were in Verna Fields' home, where she was cutting in her garage, cutting the film. And there's a point in every film where the film is spotted for music and effects. In other words, the director says, "Oh, can we add some music under here?" And, "Oh, look. I see a lot of people in the shot. We're gonna need some crowd sounds there." Whenever there is a crowd scene being filmed, the extras were always instructed, "Don't say anything. Just move your lips, and we'll put in the sound later."

Can we just take a minute? Yes, the extras that you see in movies are often miming. And there are a couple reasons for this. First, putting in the background sound later allows you to get clear recordings of the primary actors. And it's also cheaper because of the way that actor pay scales work.

Carl Gottlieb: And then they would put in a crowd sound, either from a film library of other crowds, and sometimes if it was a small group or a group that had to express a particular emotion or something, the sound editors would grab a bunch of colleagues from the editorial department, they'd stand in the hall with a tape recorder, and they'd go, "Rhubarb, rhubarb, sassafras, sassafras, sera babachaba."

Wait, wait, wait- first of all...

Carl Gottlieb: And that would sound like a crowd. That would sound like a crowd.

Why were people saying, "Sassafras, sassafras, sassafras?" Why not just talk regularly?

Carl Gottlieb: If you get a room full of people and tell them to say, "Rhubarb, sassafras, sassafras, rhubarb," there are no specific words that emerge from the crowd. It becomes noise, rather than discernible dialogue, and for the purposes of filmmaking those days, that's basically all you needed was crowd noise, crowd background.

This is actually how it was done, but back in Verna's garage, the team had this offhand idea.

Carl Gottlieb: I don't know whether it was Verna or Steven, basically said, "Wouldn't it be great if we wanted to dial up, turn up the crowd sound, we could actually hear voices talking in New England accents and really nail down where we are?"

So, the idea is that even the background sound would be authentic. Carl Gottlieb: Exactly. People who were familiar with New England accents would talk like they were from Bar Harbor, Maine, or Boston, and all those voices had to be kind of appropriate.

So, is this insight into what Steven is like as a director? It sounds very meticulous.

Carl Gottlieb: It is very meticulous, and Steven is an extremely meticulous director. He wanted the background sound to be right.

We're talking about being obsessed with background noise.

Carl Gottlieb: Yep. Yes. Yes, you want it to be all right. Just like when you're looking at a crowd of extras in a Roman chariot spectacle, you don't want to see any of them wearing a wristwatch. So that's the same eye for detail.

Okay, so Carl and his then-partner Allison Caine cast the background sound of Jaws. They hired improv actors, who could do New England accents, and for three days, they transformed themselves into Massachusetts beach bums.

Like here, in this scene, early in the movie.

[SFX: beach scene plays in background]

Carl Gottlieb: I love that scene. First of all, it's a perfect short film in itself.

And if, for whatever reason, you haven't seen Jaws, this scene is a study in how to build tension. Things start out great. The crowd is having a lovely day at the beach.

Carl Gottlieb: There's a kid. There's people running into the water. You hear a radio announcer. It sounds like a transistor radio is playing on the beach.

[SFX: Radio Announcer Speaking]

Listen to that extremely appropriate ferry information.

Carl Gottlieb: So you hear some of that. You hear people laughing. You hear the guy calling to his dog.

[SFX: “Pippin! Pippin!”]

Carl Gottlieb: And you're building suspense because we, the audience, know that there's a shark out there.

[SFX: Jaw music]

And then you hear the scream. The individual voices start expressing curiosity, then shock. "Oh my God, look! Oh, oh God, look, look. Help, help somebody do something."

[SFX: Beach scene continues]

We hear it even in the tension of the voices of the background actors. And then, you realize the kid's dead. So it's all of a piece.

In this scene, Carl and Allison invented a new profession: human background sound acting. That offhand idea, born in Verna's garage, to make Jaws just a little more authentic, it was the start of something much bigger. 40 years later, these background sound actors are everywhere.

[Background sound actor montage]

Carl Gottlieb: So, it slowly became an industry standard.

Now, it's the industry standard for films and TV shows. And this is how the magic happens.

Dann Fink: Everybody up on the small lane. And this is-

We're on a background sound session for the CBS cop show Blue Bloods. It's a padded room, couches in the back, mics in the front.

[Background actor noise]

Dann Fink: Let's try one with a different tone, which is still the anger and whatnot, but the context of the argument is "get out of our neighborhood, this doesn't belong here." Like, it's you guys rising above his bad actions, instead of just going back at an attack towards him.

This is a what's-my-motivation conversation about background noise. This is rhubarb sassafras two-point-oh. In this session, the actors are watching tiny snippets of the show on loop. They call themselves "loopers." And for you sound nerds, looping is a totally separate process from Foley sound effects. It's just for human background sound.

Stuart Stanley: You wanna hit right onto look-who specials and get those going?

That's Stuart Stanley, the sound supervisor.

Dann Fink: Super. And you guys, like, to get actor-y-

That's Dan Fink, he's the head of this loop group. And you've heard Dan's noises in hundreds of movies and shows.

Dann Fink: Gravity, Arrival, Beauty and the Beast-

He's working with a group of loopers, and for a lot of these actors, looping is a well-paid side hustle.

Daphne Gaines:Hi, I'm Daphne Gaines.

Axel Avenjuliar: I am Axel Avenjuliar.

Ebony Booth: I'm Ebony Booth.

Shannon B.: I'm Shannon Burquette.

Dennis Carnegie: I'm Dennis Carnegie. I'm an actor.

Daphne Gaines: We have many roles on Blue Bloods, and so, from scene to scene, we change characters according to what's needed in the scene. What about today? What are the specific roles that you're playing today?

Axel Avenjuliar: Police officers.

[Background Police Officer chatter]

Axel Avenjuliar: Folks, please stand back. Ma'am, please step back. Everything's gonna be okay. We can give you no information right now.

Axel Avenjuliar: People working the mayor's office. Forensics, heavy forensics.

They're playing the ancillary characters, the faces out of focus, the specs on the horizon, the random elbow that pops into frame. And today, they're also doing the paramedics behind the detectives.

Axel Avenjuliar: They're hard at work trying to keep him alive.

Ebony Booth: That's an ambu bag.

Axel Avenjuliar: Ambu bag?

Ebony Booth: Yeah.

And they've gotta know paramedic speak, 'cause they're improving everything.

Looper: Pressure's dropping.

Looper: I've got the ambu bag.

Looper: Okay, BP.

Looper: He's losing a lot. Yep, BP's racing. You got him?

Looper: No, not good.

Dann Fink: Let's play it back.

[Blue Bloods scene plays]

Dann Fink: Good. I'll place it around where we need it. Good.

Do you have to do research?

Loopers: Yes, Yes.

Well, what does the research look like?

Axel Avenjuliar: I'm sure I'm on FBI and CIA lists, because I'm looking up "FBI glossary," "FBI language." I'm sure they're like, "Follow this guy."

Daphne Gaines: Because when you go up there, and those beeps go off, you have to have the information and you have to have it at the tip of your tongue.

I used to have it all written, and I had a book. I'm not kidding, a couple inches thick, of everything. And-

Like of all the kinds of roles you might play?

Daphne Gaines: Hospital, forensics.

Axel Avenjuliar: There is a white supremacist element in this episode

Axel Avenjuliar: We're just trying to secure the permits for the rally.

Axel Avenjuliar: So, we're playing white supremacists, and I'm African American. You can't see me, but yeah, that's kind of fun. Different perspective.

Is it fun?

Axel Avenjuliar: Yeah. It's a lot of fun. It's surprisingly fun.

Axel Avenjuliar: For me, as an African American actor, it's liberating in voice because I can be white, black, Italian, Spanish, British. You don't know what I am. But when I go on camera, for television, I'm limited by certain roles. So I'm not a stereotype. I'm a voice. 'Cause you don't know who or what I am.

Can you show ... Can you do some of your-

Axel Avenjuliar: Well, if I just sort of talked like I'm from England, you wouldn't know particularly if I was black or white or what. I'm just there.

Axel Avenjuliar: Or I can be a cop. What are you doing over here? Get up against the wall. What are you doing?

Axel Avenjuliar: But then I'm like, yeah man, I ain't do nothing. Why you putting me up against the wall, brother?

Axel Avenjuliar: So I can be all of those people, and Dan is wonderful at that. He doesn't put us in a box. 'Cause I have a million voices. A million voices.

Besides doing a million voices, a good looper also has to master the microest of non-verbal performances. Grunts, yells, sniffles, snorts.

[SFX: Grunting]

Dann Fink: Or in this case, it was somebody falling off a skateboard. Getting clotheslined and falling off a skateboard.

Can you just give me a "watch it, watch it, watch it"?

Axel Avenjuliar: Watch it! Oh, God. [SFX: Grunting]

Dann Fink: Damn, that was good. I like that better.

It's always kind of a very delicate situation to get the exact right sound for what you're seeing.

What are the smallest types of sounds that you add to a scene?

Ebony Booth: We do sighs. We do simple breaths sometimes. And it's amazing when you go back and see a film that you've worked on, and you hear how a simple breath has changed the magnitude of that scene.

[SFX: Breathing]

Dann Fink: There's a million ways to exhale.

[SFX: Exhales]

So, little tiny things like that can really, really help storytell, and it all depends what mood you want to create.

Can you mess up the mood? What's the biggest faux-pas of looping?

Dann Fink: Oh, boy. The biggest challenge is because we're not front-and-center, we have to be uninteresting.

Axel Avenjuliar: Actors look for drama or conflict. But in this, we have to be nondescript. Interesting, but not interesting enough. So, we don't want to pull focus from what ... So it's difficult finding that medium line.

I wanna hear all about this because this seems like the opposite of every other kind of acting.

Dann Fink: We're the sizing on the canvas. We're not the painting. So, we have to be there as the foundation, so that everybody can become compelled and captivated by the foreground.

What are the traps that people fall into, where they make things too interesting?

Dann Fink: Oh, boy. It's ... And every single person has done it. Everybody, you get a gut instinct, and you're gonna go with it. Going negative is never really a productive way to go, but that's all improv. That's not just who ... That's just not us.

Ebony Booth: All of a sudden, talking about something ... like, "Oh, when my grandmother was shot in the head, by my brother who was".

Shannon B.: There's nowhere to go from there. It's horrible.

Ebony Booth: You start talking like that, and people are gonna be like ... If it's just loud enough, people are gonna be like, "What is going on over there?" So believe it or not, the tone is gonna come through.

If I were to listen for the best looping, are there go-to scenes in your ... Like, they crushed it in this movie or in this scene?

Ebony Booth: The good moments are the ones that I watch a film or show and I hear the people that I've worked with, or I know them and-

Axel Avenjuliar: I heard you the other night, in a bummy hotel, seedy as hell, having an argument through a door. And it was futsed. So you couldn't even really hear her voice, but it sounded so authentic. You could smell the urine in the staircases. It was just the voice was perfect. You couldn't hear it, but just this muffled argument. It was perfect.

[music in]

40 years after Jaws, human background sound has become integral in films, TV shows, and more. It’s an art form all it’s own. And with every art form, there are perfectionists.

Ebony Booth: I mean, there are certain shows that the director slash creator writes almost all of the dialogue. He is creating an orchestra piece, and he wants ... he hears it all.

Axel Avenjuliar: Every single instrument, he has mapped in his mind, and he wants to hear it. It's incredible.

Ebony Booth: It is. And it shows. I mean, I think his pieces are-

Axel Avenjuliar: Stellar.

Ebony Booth: Stellar.

We’ll find out who they are talking about, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

40 years ago, the profession of background sound acting was invented in a garage. Since then, actors and directors have elevated the practice into an art form. While Flora was reporting on this story, one name was brought up over and over again. It was the name of a master in the art of looping.

[music out]

Here’s Flora.

You know, when we were on this ... When we were meeting with this loop group in New York, just naturally in conversation, the loopers we were talking to started sort of talking in these hushed, reverent tones. You know where I'm going with this. About one director, one creator who is so meticulous that he scripts the looping.

Will Ralston: Yeah. David Simon.

So it's not apocryphal?

Will Ralston: No, unfortunately it's true.

This is Will Ralston. Will has been the supervising sound editor for many of David Simon's projects.

Will Ralston: We started this process on The Wire. That was the first show that I was involved with, that David worked on.

Just like with Steven Spielberg, Will says that David Simon's attention to looping is about this obsession with authenticity. He writes all the loopers' lines, and on The Wire, he hired non-actors for the loopers' parts, people from the neighborhoods where the story was set.

Will Ralston: I think all of this is really ultimately born of his lack of embrace of score. He doesn't like to hear music in his storytelling.

Oh, that's interesting.

Will Ralston: Which I think is ... It just kind of comes from his journalistic background. He's not ... none of us are harboring the illusion that we're creating a documentary per se, but there's something about a score that says, "We're trying to manipulate you now, and this is how you should feel, and this the energy we're going for." And he'd rather kind of build that world with off-screen sound.

Can looping act like a score?

Will Ralston: Totally. I mean, not just looping, but all of sound can really do that. I mean, going back to The Wire, especially like the Hamsterdam stuff, I mean creating that whole world like an open-air drug market ...

[SFX: market scene]

Everybody's talking at once, but you have to find a way to make them all kind of breathe and have their moment. They're all like instruments, and you're just trying to build this symphony that's really a cacophony of the open-air drug market.

Are there particular sounds or ways that you can make me feel something with looping, or with background sound?

Will Ralston: Yeah. I mean, just for an example, if you're watching a character walk down a street and it's dark, if you want that person to feel lonely, put some people in the background somewhere off camera having a good time. 'Cause they're having a good time without our character. You know? He's been separated from it.

Oh wow.

Will Ralston: If you want that person to feel danger, put a distant siren. Or somebody ... A couple of people having an argument just around the corner, so that there's this sense of tension, and that there's something going wrong in the world. We don't have to see it. If we can hear it, we're gonna kind of attribute the emotion that we're feeling to the person we're looking at on camera.

This seems like subliminal storytelling.

Will Ralston: Oh, totally. Totally. The thing is, with sound, you're only doing a good job if nobody notices that you've done anything.

[music in]

Well, we spoiled that. After listening to this, you'll always notice. If you want to.

Carl Gottlieb: It's kind of like the old adage about sausage, you know? You like sausage, but you don't want to see it made. Like every magic trick, you don't want to know exactly how it's done. So, you immerse, you surrender to the experience. And people who don't surrender to the experience, I think, our word for them is "nerds." Or "obsessives." Because they're looking at the elements of the piece, not the whole piece.

Well, I wonder if we could be both. Maybe you can be both a nerd and then surrender, if you want.

Carl Gottlieb: Yeah, exactly.

For everyday life, what are tips that people can take away from looping?

All Loopers: Listening.

Axel Avenjuliar: I think one thing we learn is to not talk wall-to-wall. Just ad nauseum, like constant, with no breaks. So take breaks. Listen. Have some air, you know? And I think... Listen, like when you're in a conversation, don't feel the need to drive it all the time. Sit back, listen for a second, intake that information, and then give it back. You know? Take your time.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that makes television, film, and games sound amazing. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

Announcer: Every Little Thing was produced by Phoebe Flanigan, with Flora Lichtman, Catherine Wells, Christine Driscoll, and Devan Taylor. Production help from Nicole Pasulka and Doug Baron. Dara Hirsch mixed this episode.

Announcer: If you want to look for loopers in credits, the official credit is "ADR Voice Casting," for "automated dialogue replacement."

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 even buy a Twenty Thousand Hertz t-shirt. You can also get looped in to all things Twenty Thousand Hertz by signing up for our superfan newsletter at newsletter dot twenty-kay dot org. Finally if you want to share the show with your friends, we would be eternally grateful. Please do that.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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Slot Machines: The addictive power of sound

This episode was written & produced by Colby Hartburg.

What do you hear when you walk into a Casino? It can feel like chaos, but each sound is carefully curated to draw you in and make you stay. One collection of sounds are scientifically and artistically designed to keep the gambler, gambling. Slot machines. This episode features interviews with Willie Wilcox, Chief Sound Designer at Scientific Games in Las Vegas, Laura Taylor, composer and sound designer for a number of slot machines across the US, and Karen Collins, who has led extensive research into the sound and music behind these games. Is it addiction or entertainment? Maybe it's both. Pull the lever and listen for yourself.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

The Habit (Instrumental) by Reagan James
Glass House by Utah
Nonchalant by Watermark High
Punk Drop by Zi
Sofia by AM Architect
Whats In Front Of Me (Instrumental) by Lael
Love With Your Life (Capital Kings Remix - Instrumental) by Hollyn

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Casino Ambience]

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

The sound you just heard…is what casinos use to lure people in…and keep them there. There’s the sound of the cards [SFX: Cards shuffling], the chips [SFX: Chips], the craps table [SFX Craps table], but there’s one game that is particularly effective at keeping people playing. The slot machines.

[SFX: Slot machines]

[music in]

Modern Casinos earn over 70 percent of their revenue off of slots. That’s a dramatic increase from the 1970’s, when it was less than 50 percent in most casinos. A lot of that has to do with the advancements in gaming technology. Slot machines today are very different than their predecessors.

[SFX: Old slot machine]

They’re now more like video games…

[music out]

[SFX: Newer slot machine]

And there’s plenty of science and sound design that go into their creation.

Laura: There are different styles of slot machines. Obviously when you go into a casino you have a smorgasbord of slots to choose from.

This is Laura Taylor, she’s a sound designer for slot machines.

Laura: You go into the Vegas casinos, or in a smaller casino, there'll be a little corner, you'll have that gigantic Britney Spears machine with the huge curved screen.

[SFX: Music Britney Spears “Hit me Baby One More Time”]

Or you can play a Batman game, or you can play a Godzilla game, or Kiss…[SFX: Kiss “Are you ready to rock”]

It's another way to make revenue for a licensed property.

We’re probably all familiar to the traditional slots with the three wheels. You pull the handle, you wait for the cherries to line up, you win [SFX: ding ding ding!] or…you try again.

[music in]

Those are called “Stepper Machines”. But today, there’s a massive variety in slot machines. Willie Wilcox, who’s Chief Sound Designer for Scientific Games out of Las Vegas, helps break it down.

Willie: So the other kinds of slot machines, other than like a traditional stepper machine, you start getting into the new video machines, which can be stereo machines and you can also get into video versions of surround sound games.

Today’s slot machines are all about themes. As Laura mentioned, popular music is a big trend, but also movies, such as James Bond, Rocky, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And all of them require sound and music.

[music out]

Willie: In order for somebody to be able to sit there and play for a long time, you don't want them to get sonically fatigued. We're generating music that is engaging, that is anticipatory, that enables somebody to sit there for a long period of time without being bored, without being irritated and feeling like somebody is taking their index finger and tapping you on the forehead and making you not want to be there.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on these sound designers. The sounds need to draw in players, but also be comfortable to listen to for long periods of time. The last thing casinos want is for you to leave due to listener fatigue. Not only that, but they’re also competing against all of the other sounds in the casino. The popular music, [SFX: Casino w/pop music] the chatter, [SFX: chatter/laughing], and the other slots [SFX: slot machines].

Willie: You're looking for music that's going to keep the player engaged [SFX: engaging music], but not detract from what they're doing. The real attraction is always the chase, always chasing what it is that you're looking to win, and making identifying sounds that help you realize that.

So if you had your eyes closed and you weren't watching, you would know from the sounds that you're hearing what's happening in the game. It should be that simple and that conclusive.

Laura: The number one rule is don't be annoying. That's always in the forefront of my mind, because somebody's going to sit down at one of these machines, and hopefully they're going to play it for a very, very long time, and they're going to hear the same sounds over and over, and so I don't want anything high-pitched. I don't want anything shrill, and I don't want anything boring.

[SFX: Slot machine music]

Laura: There has to be a lot of motion to it. It's not going to 80 beats per minute. It's going to be 130 or 140, something that moves, something that drives. Maybe if they wait long enough, you start getting little audio hints. A ding [SFX: ding], a whoosh [SFX: whoosh], just something to draw the player's attention back to the machine.

Another question slot designers have to ask themselves is how many speakers there should be and where to put them.

Willie: It's extremely important to pay attention while you're designing these slot machines, that when a player sits in a chair, and the two sets of stereo speakers, your left and right speakers that are facing the player, are positioned in a good listening position, which is just pro-audio 101.

If you have speakers that are shooting out into space, that means that the player next to you that's playing is going to hear all your speakers. [SFX: slot machines in background] Do you really want to hear what the player next to you is doing or do you want to hear what you're doing?

So speaker placement is extremely important, so is speaker type. If you have too small of speakers, then you've got a lot of super high end frequency responses, and not a lot of mid-range and lower frequency responses, which make the sound much more fatiguing to the ear, especially at the louder levels.

Designers can add additional speakers to create an even more immersive experience for players. Here’s Laura.

Laura: There are surround sound chairs where you have speakers mounted behind your head, built into the chair, and they also put a subwoofer into the seat...

[SFX: Slot machine with a punchy kick layered in]

Laura: So that's really going to give you a punch.

Laura also addressed a conspiracy theory that’s circulated through the slot machine world. This theory suggests that all slot machine music is actually composed in the same key.

Laura: No, it's not. I get asked that question a lot.

It's something that gets repeated because it's easy to understand. It's easy for media to say, "All slot machine music is in the key of C," without really explaining the history of whether that's true or not, and whether that's true today. It is most definitely, 100% not true today, because you've got your Kiss games, you've got your Michael Jackson games. You've got an entire James Bond series of games. Not all of that music is in the key of C.

The idea behind this theory is that music in the key of C evokes happy, upbeat feelings. And if you’re happy, you gamble more.

Laura: In the old days they were done in the key of C, as slot games have evolved, so has the music, so have the needs of the music.

[music in]

From the sound design, to the music, and even the placement of the speakers, its clear a lot of thought goes into creating the slot machine experience.

Laura: You're spending money to do this, so we want you to have a good time while you're spending your money. It's not because we're vultures and we want to take all your money. We're like anybody who sells something for entertainment purposes. We want you to have fun, because then you'll come back.

The sounds of slot machines are meant to get players excited and… hopefully come back for more. But what’s the science behind these sounds that keep us playing? We’ll get to that after the break.

[music out]

[Midroll]

[music in]

A lot of artistry goes into designing slot machines… and also a lot of science. What is it about casino sound design that gets people hooked?

Karen: One of the first things you notice as you walk into a casino is just how much winning sounds are being played.

That’s Karen Collins. She’s an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. For the past 15 years her work has focused on sound and music in interactive media, and more recently, slot machines.

[music out]

Karen: Of course, they never have losing sounds [SFX: whomp whomp sound], so as soon as you walk in, you just hear the sound of people winning all the time, and it's, of course, very exciting, and it helps to draw your attraction to the machines thinking, "All of these people are winning. I can win too."

But of course, that’s not always the case. The idea isn’t just to keep the current player playing. It’s to attract others to play too.

Karen: "Wow, that person won a lot of money," but one of the tricky things we found with the machines is that it would play that winning sound even when you're not winning. So, if you placed a bet for, say, 50 cents, and you won 25 cents, well, you've actually lost 25 cents, but it would still play the music as if you had won. It makes you feel as if you're winning. So, even though you've lost, the machine's telling you that you've won.

But what does winning…or losing sound like?

Karen: They're using lots of bright, positive sounds. Lots of high frequency sounds. What we think of as sparkly or tinkly sounds. Lots of, we call it, audio bling.

[SFX: tinkly sound and sparkly sound]

But there’s more to it than whooshes and sparkle. Karen’s research found that cadence plays an important role as well.

Karen: Let's say we're having a conversation and I stop in the middle of a ... Right? You really want me to finish that phrase or that sentence. It feels unresolved, and the same thing happens musically in chord progressions.

[SFX: simple chord progression on piano, with resolution]

It generally moves towards what we call a resolution. What they do in slot machines is as you're building up ... Let's say you had five cherries that you had to line up, and it might go up in notes. "Doo doo doo doo doo." Then it would resolve. "Doo," and it feels good, but what they're doing in the slot machines is leaving it unresolved if you don't win.

[SFX: sample progression on piano, without final resolution chord]

So, that's why you want to bet again, you want to put some more money in, and then when you do win, you'll have that resolution and it's the sense of relief that comes along with it.

[SFX: final resolving chord from before]

It's playing on that part of our brain. "Hey, that feels good," and maybe we can't explain why it feels good, but it's all done in the music and sound effects there to trick you.

This concept isn’t anything new. In fact, music acting as a sort of trick goes all the way back to the original slot machines. They popped up around the 1890’s. At that time though, gambling machines were generally illegal.

[SFX: Old timey music]

Karen: So, what they would do in some of these machines would be they would add a musical component and call it a music box instead of a slot machine. So, the very first slot machines to have music actually were just ...It was just there so that they could get around the gambling laws.

Remember, this was a time before people had radios or even gramophones in their homes. It wasn’t that far fetched to go out to penny arcades and play these machines just to listen to music.

Karen: It wasn't out of place, but the idea was that you would put your nickel in and you would pull the lever to see if you won or not and it would play a little song [SFX: Old timey music]. But, because they weren’t really interested in actually playing music, sometimes the song would start halfway through the song or it would finish halfway into the song.

What started as a legal loophole became an important part of the slot machine experience. But today, slot machine music can still be viewed as more of a trick than innocent entertainment. It’s intentionally designed to draw you in and keep you in. And for some, it can be a truly addictive experience.

This idea is presented in a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s called The Fever. In it, a character named Franklin goes to a casino and becomes obsessed with a slot machine.

[SFX: Clip from Twilight Zone: The Fever “She’s bound to… to turn up in a little while, you…”]

Karen: As he's playing, he talks about how the machine keeps calling out to him and mocking him and teasing him and beckoning him, and he talks about this idea of the losses disguised as wins and how it keeps luring you in through these little tricks.

[Clip from Twilight Zone: The Fever “Woman: Franklin Franklin: Eh?... What time is it Flora? Woman: It’s 8 o’clock…in the morning Franklin Franklin: I swear to you Flora, this machine mocks me, it teases, beckons. Put in 5, get back 4. Put in 6 get back 5. But, it’s got to pay off. Sooner or later it’s just got to I tell ya.”]

[music in]

Whether you think slot machines are a trick or entertainment depends largely on how you approach them. To Laura and Willie, the truth lies somewhere in between.

Willie: Personally, for me I can say, putting money into a slot machine, I want to win. I hope that I do win. But if I don't win, I also would love to have a great entertainment experience. That's what we're trying to bring to the new genre of slot machines, is the merging of the entertainment experience and the gambling experience.

Laura: If you think about Las Vegas and the strip in particular, you've got Caesar's Palace, and Treasure Island, and the Mirage, and New York, New York, all these themes, right? When you walk in there, they want you to walk into that world. They want to keep you engaged and happy so you don't go anywhere else. It's entertainment. It's, "Come to our place and have fun, and yes, we want you to spend your money here." Is that so bad? I think it's not.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of Defacto Sound. If you do creative work that also uses sound, head to defactosound dot com and reach out! We’d love to hear from you.

This episode was written and produced by Colby Hartburg… and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Colin DeVarney. Thanks to our guests Laura Taylor, Willie Wilcox and Karen Collins.

The music in this episode is from our friends at Musicbed. And Musicbed wants to make sure you find the perfect song for your project. Not only do they have incredible browse and search tools, but they also have people on staff who are dedicated to helping you find the perfect song. At no extra charge they’ll send you suggestions based on what you’re looking for. Consider them another member of your team. Check it out a musicbed dot com.

I love hearing from our listeners. If you have a great show idea or want to give general feedback, head to 20k.org. There you can also read episode transcripts or buy a t-shirt or a stickers. Last, but certainly not least, we are a totally independent podcast and we have zero network support. So, our survival is completely in your hands. I know you love the show, if you didn’t there’s no way you’d be hearing my voice this late in the episode. Seriously, I see the stats, and not many people make it all the way here. So, it’s just you and me… and I need your help. I’m just asking for 15 to 20 seconds of your time. Please take that time right now to help spread the word.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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Misophonia: Why we can't stand certain sounds

This episode was written & produced by Carolyn McCulley.

The way our brains process sound affects the way we respond to sound. This episode is about why that happens in those who suffer from misophonia, the hatred of certain sounds. Featuring researcher Dr. Phillip Gander, psychologist Dr. Ali Mattu, and misophonics Meredith Rosol and Josh Furnas.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Traction by Meaning Machine
Hold on Me (instrumental) by Lael
Fury (instrumental) by Prague
Wait for It by Dustin Lau
Wake Up by Lael (Instrumental)
Every Season by Hidden Tapes
Red Dot by Watermark High

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I’m Dallas Taylor.

This is an episode may never be heard by one of the guests we tried to record an audio interview with. Josh Furnas can’t tolerate the sound of someone speaking into a studio microphone. He feels threatened, like someone is literally talking right next to his ear. Even normal mouth noises can trigger a traumatic reaction.

Josh has a condition called misophonia, which means the hatred of sound. Not all sound, though--just certain sounds that trigger a sense of alarm. What does it feel like? And how is it that two people’s brains can have such a drastically different response to the same sound? In order to figure this out we'll be using sound examples throughout this episode. This may cause discomfort for someone with triggers, but I think it’s important to attempt to recreate the sensation for those without misophonia. I’m hoping that those who don’t suffer from it to have more sympathy for those who do.

So, If you have Misophonia, proceed with caution. We’ll be playing possible trigger sounds for the rest of the episode.

[music out]

Meredith: It feels like a bear is chasing you [SFX: Bear chase]. You freeze. Whatever you're doing, you're not able to focus on anymore. Your heart races, [SFX: heartbeat] you feel tense, you feel irritable, I just freeze and close my eyes or cover my ears until it stops.

That’s Meredith Rosol. Her misophonia started at age six.

Meredith: I was sitting on the couch in the living room with my mom, and I could see and hear her shaking her foot. It gave me this feeling of panic.

[SFX: foot shaking]

Meredith: The hardest part was listening to my parents chew, [SFX: food chewing] so at the dinner table I would cry, and my mom would not know what was wrong. I remember she would teach my sister and I table manners, so she said, "You have to keep your hands in your lap," but I would just want to cover my ear with it. That would frustrate her, so at dinner time was the hardest.

[music in]

It might be hard to understand the distress of listening to someone chew. But Dr. Ali Mattu, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, describes it this way.

Ali: you're experiencing it as if someone is chewing [SFX: loud chewing] right in your face to the point where maybe there's spit or some of their food are just flying all over you. So maybe it is tapping into this basic aversion that we all have.

As a cognitive behavioral therapist, Dr. Mattu says misophonia is a new term, one without a clear psychiatric definition.

[music out]

Ali: It's a part of a set of sensory experiences we're beginning to better understand like ASMR, like synesthesia. We're beginning to understand that our senses are more complicated and there's more diversity to how we experience our senses than we knew before. And I think part of the reason we're beginning to understand this is the Internet. We've heard from communities that weren't really formed before about how people were sharing a similar type of experience and now researchers are beginning to catch up and we're seeing this more in clinical environments

Meredith: My triggers are eating [sfx], gum popping [sfx], slurping [sfx], feet shuffling [sfx], the sight of leg shaking and also the sound if it makes a sound [sfx], bass coming from cars and apartments [sfx], keyboard typing [sfx]. Newer ones are whistling [sfx], and humming [sfx].

Ali: There's a lot of unique ones that people have. One of my roommates in grad school hated it when I was eating ice cream and I would get to the very bottom of my bowl and try to scrape [SFX: spoon scraping] the last little bits of melted ice cream out of my bowl using my spoon. Just that scraping sound of the spoon on the bowl infuriated him. Did he have misophonia? I don't know but that was a really unique sound that bothered him and doesn't bother me.

Over email Josh Furnas said that he’s tried a bunch of different things to try and reduce his reaction to triggers. A newly sick or allergic [SFX: coughing] colleague can flatline him. And anyone eating in a meeting can render him useless. And even Mac laptop keyboards [SFX: keyboard typing] are unbearable.

Ali: Some of the things that people tend to share with me are anger at hearing everyday sounds. Sometimes anxiety related to those sounds, and sometimes disgust. But it sometimes can be heightened with close loved ones.

[music in]

Phil: We think that what's going on, is that the brain is monitoring these sounds, or having a disorder in the way that it's monitoring these sounds, and interpreting them.

That’s Phillip Gander, an assistant research scientist from the University of Iowa.

Phil: I work in the departments of neurosurgery and otolaryngology and I work as an auditory neuroscientist researching questions on auditory cognition, on how we interpret and understand sound.

Normally what we do is we study perception; our experience of the external world, but interoception is just the opposite, it's our experience of our internal world. There are increasing number of studies in which people are pointing out that we can modulate our cognitive responses, or performance on tasks, based on our heartbeat [SFX: heartbeat], and our heartbeat based on our breathing pattern [SFX: heart beating and breathing].

[music out]

Phil: In the case of misophonia, what we think is going on is this is a disorder that really gets at people’s experiences of their internal world are severely disturbed, When they hear a regular sound, like someone eating some food, then they have an interpretation of that sound that leads them to have a really extreme response. Either they need to get out of the space where that sound is occurring, or they need to stop that sound from occurring.

Phillip was part of an international team of researchers that studied misophonia. Using MRI scans and physiological measurements, they showed that misophonic subjects legitimately have a strong reaction in both the brain and body.

Phil: we found evidence for changes in the brain response. in the group suffering from misophonia, to the misophonic sound, or trigger sounds specifically. Not to the control sounds, and not to other unpleasant sounds. What we found was an overreaction, in areas of the brain that are involved in interpreting sound.

Phillip Gander’s study shows that there is clear evidence that the brains of misophonia sufferers respond very differently to certain sounds.

Phil: That's extremely clear in the case of misophonia, in which we have people who hear the exact same sound, and have a regular, what we'll call, a regular response. In which, it doesn't bother them, it doesn't make them want to get away from that sound, and stop it. Whereas other people are having an extreme reaction, [SFX: water dripping] in which they want to do exactly that. This clearly has to do with something related to their response to the sound, their reaction to the sound. That's information that's being fed up from the auditory system, to our perceptual systems, and our emotional systems that are interpreting and putting meaning to the sound.

[music in]

But for those who suffer from misophonia, identifying the cause is not as important as finding a treatment. Navigating a world where ordinary sounds can be distressing is exhausting and sometimes isolating. It also has an impact on close relationships. While the research is developing, is there anything that can be done now? More on that in a moment.

[music out]

[MID ROLL]

[music in]

Over email, Josh Furnas said that he’s tried a bunch of different things to try and reduce his reaction to triggers. One study he participated in was a disaster. He said it was so traumatic that it made a few of his triggers even worse. However, another technique--called mindfulness based stress reduction--seems to reduce the effect of his triggers by about 20 percent.

Meredith Rosol has her own techniques as well.

[music out]

Meredith: I've seen a psychologist for cognitive behavioral therapy for certain situational anxiety, like medical situation anxiety separate from this, so I think I unknowingly adopted the CBT techniques towards misophonia. I wasn't very cognizant of it, but if I'm sitting there experiencing a trigger, I'll know that that person's not doing it to harm me. They're not doing it deliberately. If it's a friend that I told to stop and they're doing it again, they simply forgot. I know that, okay I have options I can get out of this.

[SFX: bus breaking, foot taping]

Meredith: If I'm sitting on the bus and someone is tapping their foot next I'm sitting on the bus and someone is tapping their foot next to me. When I was younger I'd be nervous to move because I was paranoid of what people would think of me. But now that I'm an adult, I don't care. I could move to three different seats on the bus as long as I'm comfortable. No one's watching me. No one cares.

Dr. Ali Mattu says a lot of people who experience misophonia don’t always have other types of impairments, so they’ll still go through their day like everyone else.

Ali: They might still go to school. They might still go to work, but they all tend to have a high degree of distress. Inside they are so strongly reacting to these sounds. I'm looking at those two things, how impairing is it? And how distressing is it? That's where I usually find people who are really having a hard time is internally it is so turbulent. It is so difficult. [SFX: Storm] It is like a storm inside that no one on the outside can see. So the first thing I tell people is it's okay to avoid sounds that trigger you and that might not be a message they've received before.

[music in]

Meredith: I usually get myself out of the situation or mask it. No, there's probably been two times I've asked somebody to stop, which sounds terrible because you think I would be so, "Oh, I'm going to advocate for myself," but I always think, "Well, what if that person has to do it to focus?" It's very difficult to ask a stranger.

It’s funny, I'll meet up with a friend who also has misophonia and we'll go to a bar [SFX: restaurant ambience] or a restaurant. Before we sit down, we say, "Okay, wait. Where do you want to sit? Okay, wait. Is there any leg-shaking over there? No. Okay. What do you want to eat? No don't ... No one will get the chips." It's so funny to talk to someone and negotiate, and make sure we don't trigger each other. Also some people are triggered by silverware too, so in that case you're like, "Okay, I'm going to ...Now, wait. Cover your ears. I'm going to cut this. Okay, I'm done."

[music out]

[music in]

Ali: The main thing I want to help people to do is learn how to tolerate that distress. How to manage that emotion in a better way.

Finding activities that distract you from sounds. Contributing to other people to distract. Contributing to other people to get you focused on someone else instead of what's going on in your mind. Making a comparison to a different time. Making a comparison to yourself in a different time when you were coping better with the situation or comparing yourself to someone else who might be struggling more. Creating emotions that undo anger. Temporarily pushing yourself away from the situation that is difficult for you.

Meredith is grateful that her reactions are more moderate.

Meredith: A lot of people have aggressive reactions, so their gut instinct will be to punch the wall or break something. It puts a lot of strain on relationships. Plenty of people have had divorces. I never want it to prohibit me from doing what I like to do in my life I'll just try to set myself up for success, and do what I can.

It’s mind blowing how little we know about how our brains interpret sound, and misophonia yet another example of how the same sounds can produce totally different results in people. Sound can soothe us or sound can disturb us… and there’s an infinite number of possibilities in between Eventually we will gain a greater scientific understanding. but, for now, the current research validates that those with misophonia. They truly do respond differently and that alone is a relief to those who suffer from it. For the rest of us, it’s important to be empathetic and patient. All in all this is yet another reason why it’s so important to make our world a better sounding place.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is lovingly crafted out of the studios at Defacto Sound, a sound team that supports advertising agencies, television networks, filmmakers, and really, anyone who needs amazing sound design for anything visual. Check out our recent work at defactosound dot com.

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–Dr. Phillip Gander, Dr. Ali Mattu, Meredith Rosol and Josh Furnas.

You can read more about Dr. Gander’s research by searching online for The Brain Basis for Misophonia. You check out Dr. Ali Mattu’s YouTube channel, The Psych Show. ...and you can tweet at Josh Furnas @j-o-s-h-f-u-r-n-a-s.

The music in this episode is from our friends at Musicbed. Musicbed wants to make sure you find the perfect song for your project. Not only do they have incredible browse and search tools, but they also have people on staff who are dedicated to helping you find the perfect song. At no extra charge they’ll send you suggestions based on what you’re looking for. Consider them another member of your team. Find them at musicbed.com.

Visit our website to read transcripts, buy a sticker, see my face… whatever. You can find all of that at twenty kay dot org. You can also send us feedback or let us know about a topic we should cover. You can do that through facebook, twitter, or at hi at twenty kay dot org.

Finally, I was looking through the podcast charts and it’s legitimately shocking how few totally independent podcasts exist at the top of the charts. Now, we’re nowhere near the top, but it’s impressive how far we are. Especially with absolutely no network support. If you want to support independent podcasting, I seriously need your help. There’s no way I can do it on my own. I need you to text your friends and family. And remember, our show is totally clean. Tell parents they can listen with their kids. I also need for you to tell your social groups, and tell people in real life. If you have to borrow someone’s phone to show them how to listen to a podcast, then do that. The bottom line is that there is no way we’ll survive for the long haul without your support and help.

Thanks for listening.

[Music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

THX Deep Note Part 2: How a lost file shaped movie history

This episode was written & produced by Kevin Edds.

Whether you're 6 years old, or 96 years old, one of the most memorable parts of going to the movies for the last three decades has been the THX "Deep Note" trailer. Unfortunately, they lost the original sound file. What happened? Also, what do sound designers & musicians think about it? Featuring Andy Moorer, creator of “The Deep Note” and global director of marketing for THX, Rob Cowles. The episode also features Musician, Producer and Professor Thomas Dolby, and Scott  Simonelli, the founder of Veritonic.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Red Dot - Watermark High
INY (instrumental) - Night Fevers
Poetics - Steven Gutheinz
Fear (instrumental) - Andrew Judah
Test Flight - Blake Ewing
Open Eyes (instrumental) - Cello
Across the Sea - Blake Ewing
Glory - Chris Coleman
Pure Air - Dexter Britain
Paper Planes - Steven Gutheinz
Steady - Roary
You Will Find Me (instrumental) - CHPTRS
Keep (instrumental) - Night Fevers

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: THE THX DEEP NOTE]

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 the THX Deep Note… Part Two.

[music in]

That somewhat ominous sound you just heard is the THX audio logo known as The Deep Note. At first it seems to go everywhere, and nowhere, and then comes together at the end for a larger-than-life resolution. The Deep Note is an announcement that’s been played during the trailers in movie theaters for decades. It started way back in 1983. It let audiences know they were in a THX-certified theater and that their audio experience would be phenomenal. THX certification was pioneered by George Lucas. It made sure that Return of the Jedi would be experienced with the best sound theaters could provide.

In the last episode we explored how Andy Moorer used cutting edge computer technology to make it. We also found out that everyone at Lucas Film loved it… but, before it could be used in theaters, they lost the only recording of it. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s hear what sound people think when they hear the THX Deep Note. Our producer Kevin Edds took a stroll around our studios here at Defacto Sound to hear what our staff thinks.

[music out]

Jai: I think at some point in my life it did feel uncomfortable. And actually like, the thing it reminds me the most of is [SFX 2001 a Space Odyssey crossfade to THX slowly underneath this section] at the very, very beginning of the 2001 Space Odyssey where it's just black and there's just this very dissonant, creeping score. And there's just no visual with it at all. And it kind of reminds me of that. That it's interesting feeling, why does this make me uncomfortable and then so quickly it changes from that to just feeling like this big, epic thing.

Nick: It's awesome. It makes me really excited for the movies...and just gives you chills...and, it's a sound I always have a physical reaction to. The hair on my arm always raises up. It sounds like some chord, it sounds like some alien thing...something like an orchestra tuning up but like so other-worldly, and so out-there. I guess whenever I hear that and I feel the power of the system - because they only play that on systems that are rated for it - you know the power of that system, you know you're in for something good.

Colin: I can imagine seeing this for the first time and you hear these weird sounds. You're like, "What in the world is happening?" This THX logo comes on and you're like “huhh”, there it is, this full frequency range spectrum, like, ta da moment comes in. Yeah, I can imagine at first it definitely is really funky and weird, you know. It's not like if I was designing a sound like this and trying to show off my sound, I wouldn't necessarily go for creepy. But now it's so iconic and the way it comes altogether is really impactful, I think.

Sam: Oh I loved it. It's more of just this, Dah sound effect and you're like, oh my God, this is so cool. This is about to happen. Man, it sounds so 80s.

[music in]

While our staff has a keen an ear for sound, what do musicians think?

Thomas: It emerges from the ether, you know? It starts off almost in a sort of distant white noise and then has some actual note content to it. Those elements slew around and come together.

That’s Thomas Dolby. No relation to Dolby Labs. He’s an electronic music pioneer, early MTV icon, and acclaimed music producer. He also wrote this song:

[music out]

[Play “She Blinded Me With Science!”]

Thomas: It's sort of like a sound emerging from the primordial soup of molecules of carbon and water vapor and ether. By alchemy, these are brought together into this sort of pillar of the final chord. It's like building structure from chaos.

A big part of the Deep Note’s allure is the different reactions you get from listeners. Some people absolutely love it, others dislike it, and some even have a case of “THX Phobia”—a true fear of the Deep Note. A YouTuber named Sean Leary put it this way:

[Sean Leary Clip “The THX logo is the single-most terrifying thing, ever. Like it just starts up like, waaaaaaa-aaaaaaaa. The THX logo makes me so, like, uneasy. I’m like ugh, no, I don’t want this…THX scarred me, for life. And that’s real. It scares me. It really does.”]

[music in]

Andy Moorer, the sound designer who made the Deep Note, even has his own personal opinion.

Andy: Well, in the beginning, the cluster is very, very thick. I find it reminiscent of a piece by Olivier Messiaen, where he has the entire orchestra do bird calls. But not one at a time, all at once, and of course the thing is just mess. It's just a cacophony, you can't hear anything.

It sounds a bit like that to me, and what I like to do during that part is listen to the various voices as they rise up and just see how long I can grab hold of one of the voices and hear it fade into the cluster. And then of course as soon as everything starts rising up, you get this feeling of anticipation. Something changed. Something is going to happen. Something's happening. And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and louder and louder and louder and then finally clicks into focus when that last tone reaches its target.

[music out]

The Deep Note elicits many different emotions. But the emotion George Lucas felt when he first heard it was positive. He wanted it to play in theaters right away to announce that his movies required a great sound system. But there was only one issue.

[music in]

Andy: The problem was, about a week later they came back to me and said that they had lost the master, and could I please make another one.

When Andy submitted the original Deep Note track, that was the only copy. There were no backups.

Andy: So I said, "Okay, that's fine." So I go up and I hit return. And they say, "Well that one's nice, but it's not like the original."

I said, "Um, okay. What's different?" He said, "Well the original one had this big tone, really loud tone, that goes right down to the bass note." And, you know, I groaned and thought to myself, "Well, gee. Well that's pure randomness, right? That the tone that went down, happened to be the one that was louder than all the others."

So I had to run off several different ones until I got one that the kind of thick, mysterious texture [SFX: Bass tone] at the beginning that I liked.

So we sat there for about ten minutes, running off different versions of it until we got one that they liked, that sounded sort of like the original that had that big tone going straight down [SFX: Big tone], and didn't do anything screwy during the beginning, or the cluster. And so the one you hear of the original, was a re-take of it.

[music out]

Imagine if the Mona Lisa was actually Da Vinci’s seventh attempt. How much different would versions one through six have been? Was Mona Lisa smiling too much in #2? Or frowning too much in #4? Was she wearing a pink dress in #5?

Thomas: The extraordinary thing is that faced with so much choice you could ever make a single selection of something and you say, "This is it. This is going to be our audio logo." That's a tremendous responsibility.

Of all of the thousands of possibilities they get gradually eradicated one by one until you end up with the solution.

Until you hit on the single one that just pops a light bulb with a flash of inspiration.

I always worry with those things that years later Moorer will look back and go, "It sort of haunts me that number 143 was really the one and we went with number 283." You know? Because it's just very hard to stay objective when you're so deeply entrenched in possibilities.

At the time, for Andy, this was just another work project. Something he was asked to do by his employers. He had developed sound effects for movies for years, but with little fanfare. However, the Deep Note was something very different.

[music in]

Andy: It was the staff screening of Return of the Jedi. George Lucas would take over a big downtown movie theater and the entire staff would go to it. And they were dead quiet for not only the logo theme, but for the entire movie, because the whole staff wanted to hear every word and every shuffle and every squeak. And then they went crazy over the credits of course. Everyone seeing their name up there.

The first couple of times I tried to hear it in a movie theater, the audience was clapping so much at the opening of Return of the Jedi that you couldn't hear it. I mean, the audience was going crazy, it was going absolutely nuts over the release of the final piece of the trilogy. So I actually didn't hear it until somewhat later.

[music out]

I've enjoyed it thoroughly and I've also enjoyed the send offs on it, of which I think The Simpson's one is the best. [SFX: Simpson’s clip] But the Tiny Toon's one was good, too. [SFX: Tiny Tune’s clip start at :15]. The Wayne's World version of it was entertaining as well. [SFX: Wayne’s World example]. In fact, I will make a boast that it’s the most widely recognized piece of purely computer composed synthesized music ever.

After a few years THX decided to make alternative versions of the Deep Note [SFX: THX Cimarron version] [SFX: Grand version] However, these versions didn’t seem to have any staying power.

[music in]

Andy: The other versions got panned apparently. Nobody liked them, nobody remembered them. And everybody remembers the THX logo theme.

In 2015 THX decided to remake the Deep Note using modern technology and updated surround sound capabilities. We’ll hear how they did it. After the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

In 2015 THX decided to remake it’s iconic Deep Note. ...and, they brought in Andy Moorer to do it.

[music out]

Andy: Since I didn't have the audio signal processor, that was long gone, I had to reprogram it entirely in C to run on a desktop machine.

I don’t want you to miss that. Andy reprogrammed the entire Deep Note software from the ground up.

Andy: That took one week to get an audio synthesizer working that was capable of synthesizing it. And then one more week to put it together, musically, and tune it.

Between 1983 and 2015, computer technology advanced so much that Andy was able to use a home computer to create the new Deep Note. Thanks to these advances, Andy had many more voices to work with. Voices are basically how many things can play at once. So this time around, the challenges were more creative than technical.

Andy: I found that if you use too many of them, it made it very muddled and you couldn't hear the individual voices, so I ended up making a different one for each format. The stereo one is the original 30 voices. Then when we go to five-one, it's more like 40 voices. And the seven-one is more like 60 and then the nine-one is more like 80. So I used different number of voices for different formats.

The people at THX also wanted more radical spatial effects. In the original Deep Note there's very little. [SFX: Original Deep Note] The sound comes up in one speaker and then slowly spreads to the others. But this time they wanted the sound to move all over the room, [SFX: binaural mix of New Deep Note with nine channels]

Andy: Gary Rydstrom was in when we recorded the new one and he loved it. And Ben Burtt just happened to be there so we heard it in the mixing theater at Skywalker Sound, and he loved it. I think people really liked it.

[music in]

It's really challenging to gauge the Deep Note's impact on the movie industry. But, it's something Rob Cowles thinks about a lot.

Rob: Since 1983 we have actually certified over 5000 cinemas and studios.

Rob is the Global Director of Marketing for THX. He’s in charge of how consumers are embracing the THX brand.

Rob: And so if you imagine the average cinema probably has three or four shows a day... probably has ten theaters, that trailer was being played, in just one cinema, at least 30 times a day. So then do the math and say there's 5000 worldwide, you can sort of get to a number. What's really interesting, particularly now after the company's been around for 35 years…

When I took this job telling people "Hey I work for THX," all I would have to do is go to YouTube and play the deep note trailer and immediately everyone recognized it. So I think we were just really fortunate that Andy Moorer created a sound that is completely associated with cinematic experiences.

[music out]

Thomas Dolby: I think that when you sit in a comfortable cinema seat and the lights go down and the commercials are over and you know that you're about to be hit with the main feature, it's like a focusing of the brain. It's like a sort of collective experience of an om chant, [SFX: om chant played under dialog] you know, to get us all focused on the immersive environment that we're now sitting in for the next couple of hours. And it's sort of a collective agreement to surrender our senses to the immersion of the movie we're about to see, and I think that's really why it's so powerful.

[music in]

In marketing terms the THX “Deep Note” is what you’d call an “Audio Logo.” It’s a sound mnemonic that’s played in conjunction with the visual logo of the brand.

Scott: A great audio logo isn't just memorable, it's really good at evoking a certain emotion, or kind of creating an instant paradigm in three seconds, and the best ones do that.

That’s Scott Simonelli, the founder of Veritonic, a marketing intelligence platform for sound. Veritonic is used by brands, agencies and publishers to to measure audio effectiveness in their marketing.

Scott: Clearly, there's a dramatic nature to the THX one I think that is really unique, because it kind of created that experience of theater, and drama, and "I'm at the movies," and to do that with just that noise, is amazing.

You know you'd hear that and it would kind of go around the speakers, and there was surround sound, and there was this immersive experience, and it just, you know, it upped the game.

It kind of just sets the tone that, "Get ready, because there's gonna be sound all around you." It's a very dramatic moment, for sure. It speaks to the power of audio, but it also speaks to how potentially strong that is as an audio logo.

[music out]

But, unlike a lot of audio logos, which only appear at the end of the advertisement, THX Deep Note, it's also the message itself. It's different than say, a McDonald's commercial, where you're seeing people eating, and having a good time, and then at the end you hear [SFX: Ba-da, ba-pa, da!] With THX, the Deep Note is not only the logo, it’s the message. It’s almost as if it’s challenging the audio capabilities of the theater it’s playing in.

[music in]

Marketing is very audience-focused. The goal is to match your product or service to the exact demographic who needs it. But some of the most effective brands can target everyone, of every age.

Scott: I put it on, on my laptop just to refresh my memory, and my 11-year-old son whose maybe been to the movies twice, because different generation, immediately goes, "I know that sound! That's from the movies." I was stunned that he had the recall on that. I can't think he's been to the movies more than two or three times in his entire life, and he knew it instantly. I was floored, really, it was amazing, and granted, that's an anecdote of one, but it's a very ... very good example of somebody whose maybe heard it once or twice, and knew instantly, and associated it.

[music out]

Some people have a sense of fear when they hear the THX Deep Note. Some feel like the beginning sounds like a plane in a nosedive. [SFX: plane diving] Or a siren alerting [SFX: siren wailing] people of danger.

Scott: That's one of the things we analyze, so my curiosity. Now that I'm hearing more, and learning more about the details, I'm getting more, and more curious. So, yeah, I think fear could be the kind of thing, and we see it with certain clients, especially, pharmaceutical clients, where they want to create tension early in a spot, and then resolve that tension later. Like, you've got this probably, or this pain point, and we're gonna help you feel better about it. Also, it does you know, fear, and kind of just like a general call to be alert, maybe in a more benign way you kind of want that, you want to grab people's attention.

[music in]

Andy Moorer created one of the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. But why was the creation of the THX company so important to the movie industry? Andy explains.

Andy: Well, George Lucas said that sound is half the movie. Now, having said that, it doesn't get near as much money as the picture does of course. The one data point I have is Empire Strikes Back where the movie itself cost $34 million and the sound budget was $2 million and that's a pretty common ratio, that 16:1 or so.

But the thing about sound ... look, you carry a device in your pocket every day, most of whose purpose is to convey sound. If you get on a subway or a bus, everybody is plugged in. They're not all listening to music, they're maybe listening to NPR, or to a podcast or some such. But sound is considered so important that we want to carry it with us everywhere and we want to carry our favorite sounds with us everywhere. And we want to be able to listen to them anytime, or something like them.

Sound is just such an integral part to our being and to our way of life.

[music out]

So, my feeling is that the picture is nice and all that, but what really moves us to our core is the sound. And the sound has ways of influencing us. That is, making us cry or making us rejoice. That's hard to do just using the image.

[music in]

The THX Deep Note is a fascinating piece of music. Or should I say technology? Or marketing element? In fact, it’s all three. Maybe that’s why we are so subconsciously fascinated by it.

Thomas: It arrived at a time where movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars and so on had really captured the public's imagination, and the fact that THX came out of Lucas Film, it came from one of the premier filmmakers of the day rather than from a random engineer, I think had a lot of significance for the audience.

Rob: I'd actually like to do some research, where you literally have two side by side theaters and people go in and watch the exact same movie and the only variable is that one group actually hears the deep note and one group does not, because I really think that subconsciously people got more excited about movies when they heard the deep note.

Scott: What’s cool about I think the THX logo with an anecdote from my son, is it's not a generational thing if you've been exposed to it. It has the same effect on somebody who has a whole different set of experiences, and is obviously a lot younger than me. Does that translate to an 11-year-old child? Sound design is a very interesting and complex art.

[music out]

[music in]

There are so many ways to dissect the THX Deep Note, to unwrap it layer by layer. But the truth is, no one had ever heard anything like it before. Andy Moorer may have been inspired by Bach… or maybe the Beatles. But he looked at music in a way that a few pioneering artists did at that time. Not bound by the limits of acoustic instruments, or analog recording systems. He created a sound that the world will always remember. Whether you’re 85 years old or 6 years old.

Andy: The way I look at it is that a piece of music is a story. Tell me a story. As long as there's been people, there have been stories.

Stories have form. That is, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Pieces of music are stories, too. That is, if you hear a Mozart Sonata, you hear the theme at the beginning, the development, and the recapitulation of the theme. It comes back.

Storytelling is so deeply ingrained in human beings that it becomes the most important thing in the world.

THX logo theme is a story It has a beginning, which is unsettling. Then it has an anticipation, a sudden reversal - a change - an evolution. You could make a relation between the THX logo theme and the Hero's Journey. Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. That is, the hero starts out an unformed being, or starts out with a conflict, goes on a journey, and then achieves the godhead. That is, either meets a god or undergoes some mystical experience and then comes back from that transformed, never to be the same again.

Well, the THX logo theme is a microcosm of that whole experience.That was deliberate on my part. I wanted to give it a story arc. I wanted to tell a story starting from nothing and then building up to some big shining bold conclusion.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

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 defactosound.com.

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

Many thanks to Andy Moorer, a software engineer, musician, and sound designer of the THX Deep Note. ...and thanks to acclaimed musician and producer, Thomas Dolby. Thomas is currently professor of a brand new degree course called “Music for the New Media” at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. And thank you to Scott Simonelli from Veritonic. Learn more at veritonic.com. Finally, a special thanks to Rob Cowles, Global Director of marketing for THX. To learn more visit THX.com.

The music in this episode is courtesy of our friends at Musicbed. Having great music should be an asset to your project, not a roadblock. Musicbed is dedicated to making that a reality. That’s why they’ve completely rebuilt their platform of world-class artists and composers with brand-new features and advanced filters to make finding the perfect song easier and faster. Learn more at musicbed.com/new.

And if you like the show, please help us to make it grow. Tell your friends, family, and colleagues about us so they can hear what they’re missing.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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VIEW ARCHIVE

The THX Deep Note: From chaos to cinematic legend

This episode was written & produced by Kevin Edds.

Since 1983 one of the most memorable parts of going to the movies has been the THX certification played during the previews. The accompanying sound logo called “The Deep Note” has fascinated, terrified, and mystified audiences for over three decades. What is THX really?  How was “The Deep Note” created?  And why does it elicit such a reaction from those who hear it?  Featuring Andy Moorer, creator of “The Deep Note” and global director of marketing for THX, Rob Cowles. 
 

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Time (Instrumental) - Joy Like
Flicker (No Oohs & Ahhs) - Airplanes
Drift - Tony Anderson
Southern Queen (Instrumental) - Lost Terra
Light Bridges - Dexter Britain
Wide Eyed Wonder - Dustin Lau
Hydrogen Sulfide - Steven Gutheinz
The Weight of it All (Instrumental) - Kaleigh Baker
Nothing Ever Happens - Lost Terra

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Popcorn popping, little chatter]

Imagine yourself in a movie theater. You’re settling into your seat - it's one of the nice ones with a headrest, and it leans back - you’ve managed to balance your popcorn on the arm rest.

[SFX - fade in subtle atmosphere and context]

The lights dim. [SFX: Movie Previews] Soon the previews are over, and the lights fade out completely.

[SFX: THX Deep Note]

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 the THX Deep Note.

[SFX: Deep Note finishes and rings out]

[music in]

If you’ve been to the movies any time since 1983 it’s likely that you’ve encountered the announcement that your theater is THX certified. The visual is mainly a three-letter logo. But the sound is unforgettable.

Still, before we dive into what’s behind that sound, let’s imagine what movies might sound like without THX...

[music out]

Darth Vader:[in static and muffled Vader speak] If you only knew the power of the dark side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.

Luke:[in static and muffled speak] He told me you killed him.

Darth Vader: [in static and muffled Vader speak] No, I am your father.

In 1980, that type of bad theater sound might have been what you experienced as Darth Vader revealed that he was Luke Skywalker’s father. If It wasn’t for George Lucas.

[Continue Star Wars clip]

[music in]

Andy: For Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas also hired an audio engineer, besides myself, Tom Holman. They were scouting theaters in San Francisco for the debut of Empire Strikes Back and they went to a well-known theater, one of the old majestic theaters, to make sure that the sound system was okay.

That’s Andy Moorer. In the early 80s he was the head of the Digital Audio Department in the Lucasfilm Computer Division.

Andy: When they got there, they were a bit horrified. The sound systems of the day consisted of left, center, right and surround. So there should be three speakers behind the big screen. Of the three speakers he found, one was disconnected, [SFX: wire short circuiting] one had fallen over [SFX: speaker falling thump], and the other one was turned around backwards [SFX: speaker turning around and changing tone]. They were completely horrified by that.

[music out]

So, Tom Holman said, "Heck with this. Look, let's invent something, or let's come up with a system ... A standard, by which we can measure the theaters and we can assure that the sound sounds the same in the theater as it does in the mixing theater when the artists were mixing it.

But this wasn’t the first time George Lucas had used his influence to change the cinematic experience. Before the release of the original Star Wars, it was still common for a lot of movie theaters to have a basic mono sound system. So he knew something had to change.

Andy: George Lucas liked to use his muscle if you will, when bringing out a new film.

That’s how Dolby Stereo came to be. George Lucas insisted that if you wanted the 70 millimeter first run of Star Wars, you had to put Dolby Stereo in your theater.

Andy: And that was exactly what happened. The first 160 or so theaters that played Star Wars, did so on Dolby Stereo.

By the time Return of the Jedi was in production, Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon and George Lucas was a filmmaking rock star. [SFX: Opening of John Williams’ Star Wars score] Because of this rock star status, Lucas was able to use his weight and influence again. This time insisting that, to be able to show his new film, theaters would have to go a step further - and become THX certified.

[SFX: Star Wars theme]

Andy: And that's where THX came from. The name was just made up. Taken loosely from George Lucas' student film, THX 1–138, [SFX: clip of THX 1-138] sometimes called, at least in house, it was called Tom Holman's experiment.

Tom Holman was the engineer in charge of research for this new endeavor. ...and to be clear THX is not a system for encoding or decoding audio. It has nothing to do with how sound is recorded. It’s all about how a movie is played back to an audience.

It encompases everything from the quality of the speakers, to the quality of the acoustics, to the quality of the picture - almost everything about the movie going experience.

George Lucas funded this research to guarantee that what you experience in your theater - is the exactly what the filmmakers intended.

Rob: Cinema technology has changed dramatically over the past 35 years.

That’s Rob Cowles, from THX.

Rob: Originally some of the challenges with cinemas were they weren't properly insulated, so the acoustic ability of the room was poor at best. A lot of times the acoustics of two theaters would actually compete with each other, [SFX: two movie tracks playing simultaneously] so you'd be sitting in one cinema and you could hear what was going on in the one next to you. And then there were a lot of other design elements, like doors to the theater used to let in the light, so that you'd be watching a movie and every time someone came in and out, [SFX: doors opening] it would be kind of washed out. Simple things like that. Also, a lot of cinemas didn't really have properly in store HVAC systems. [SFX: air conditioner turns on] So you'd have this kind of ambient noise in the background you wouldn't really understand, but it was actually inhibiting you from having a really good cinematic experience.

So LucasFilm’s new invention would be installed at a handful of theaters across the country. But this wasn’t a solo effort on the part of George Lucas, he hired a team of engineers to work out all of the details.

Andy: The story forms long before THX was a company. George Lucas decided to start a research institute. He really wanted to advance the state of the art in cinema, and entertainment in general.

[music in]

George didn't want to do the production, the post-production, in Hollywood anymore. So he built this building in San Rafael, California. And coincidentally it housed the computer division as well.

Today this building is known as Skywalker Sound. At the time Andy was working alongside legendary sound designers like Ben Burtt.

Andy: I asked them what they needed and he gave me a laundry list of things he needed. I had put together an audio processing system, that we call the ASP, audio signal processor, that Ben had been using.

He would come in in the mornings and he would use it up to noon. He used it on Indiana Jones. One of his requests, initially, was one for extending sounds. Like he had a sound of an arrow being shot.

[SFX: arrow shot]

It goes, "Shoop!" I mean it's gone instantly, and he wanted something that persisted. He wanted something the sound of an arrow that went on over 15, 20, 30 seconds.

[music out]

So he asked me if I could do that and I said, "Yeah, I know a way of doing that." [SFX: long arrow shoop] I gave him two minutes.

The Audio Signal Processor that Andy had invented made completely new sounds possible. From extending the sound of an arrow, or airplane in freefall [SFX: long airplane dive] to spatialization that made sounds in a theater progress from one side of the room to the other, [SFX: lightsaber from Ch. 1 to Ch. 2 in a crossfade] These tools have shaped the way movies are produced to this day. That’s part of why the THX Deep Note sounds so unique - no one else on the planet had technology like that in 1983.

Andy: George wanted some kind of video or some kind of logo that plays before the feature comes on, that says, "This is a THX certified movie theater.

[music in]

My suspicion, and I don't know that this is true, but my suspicion is that he spent all the money on the visuals and didn't have any money left for the audio, so he picked someone who was on salary, on staff and said, "Look we need some sound for the animation. It's 35 seconds long, and I want something that comes out of nowhere and gets really really big."

And I said, "Well, I think I know how to do that."

To create the soundtrack, Andy went to the Audio Signal Processor.

Andy: As soon as he mentioned it I knew exactly what I wanted to do. That is I wanted to start with something that would thoroughly bewilder everyone, they wouldn't even be sure that the sound was being played properly. That is to start with chaos and then evolve into the big chord, like a great organ chord.

[music out]

[SFX: big organ chord]

I had always been impressed by the big pipe organs and the sounds they could produce, so that was sort of the idea I had in the back of my mind.

The producer gave Andy the timing of the animation.

Andy: So I got a road map up of the intent of the animation. Of course when it showed up, all the timing was wrong.

Of course it was.

Andy: So this was one of those cases. I'm sitting in the mixing theater and they play the animation, and I sit there with my stop watch [SFX: of stop watch] and I notice that all the timing is wrong.

So while I'm sitting there, I typed in the new times [SFX: typing] into the computer and ran off a new copy of the logo theme [SFX: Long Deep Note, but fade it down after a few seconds] right then in there and we synced it up recorded it onto six track, and that was that.

That sounds straightforward, but it had taken Andy four days of work leading up to this session. Two days to get the basic sounds imported and modified, and another two days to tune it exactly how he wanted it. And remember, Andy had literally invented the technology that made this possible in the first place.

So how did he come up with this idea?

Andy: What do you say, "Steal from the best"? I remember the end of A Day in the Life from The Beatles, right, [SFX: a few seconds of “A Day in the Life”: ] with the big sweep and remember how much I liked that, and I remember [SFX: a few seconds of “D Minor Fugue”:] Bach's Fugue after noodling around a little builds this huge chord that resolves in just this massive, massive chord. So I combined those two ideas.

And then the cluster at the beginning. This is similar to stuff we did while I was at Stanford. We had done a lot of experimentation in music and one of the things that we fiddled with were clusters, because with a computer we could get immensely thick textures that would have been very, very difficult to do any other way. I mean, you couldn't buy enough synthesizers to make a sound that big or that massive, [SFX: beginning of deep note] but with a couple hours of computer time we could build sounds that had that kind of thickness or that kind of texture to it.

That was the idea for the cluster was just a dense cluster of instrumental tones that would rise and fall for which you wouldn't be able to track any one for any length of time. It would just sound like a mess, like chaos.

I had the idea for synthetic sound. I didn't envision flutes and oboes playing in it. I envisioned a completely synthetic sound because I don't know how you would do what I wanted to do with regular instruments.

I had some recordings of cello tones. I pulled one out that sounded rich and all 30 oscillators are using the same tone. It is a cello but you would never know it because one of the distinguishing things of a cello is the sound it makes when the bow hits the string. Since I eliminated that, it's a little hard to tell what's going on there. And that was the idea, except that I wanted it to be rich and natural sounding.

[music in]

With the advent of computer technology in the 70s and 80s, sound designers were able to create sounds that just weren’t possible a few decades earlier. Andy Moorer’s invention changed cinema sound forever. We’ll discover how Andy dreamed up this technology, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

In the early 80’s, there was no standard way of making any kind of sound on a computer. In fact you couldn’t even buy a computer built for audio - if you needed one, you had to build it yourself.

[music out]

Andy: Yeah, well see the big problem in computers at that time is that they weren't designed to do ... audio. Most of the audio like Apple IIe were squeaks and pops [sfx: Apple IIe squeaks and pops] and sort of Atari kinds of sounds, [sfx: Atari sounds] they weren't rich, and they weren't life-like, and they weren't natural sounding.

I knew that we could do all this on the computer, except that computers were just horribly, horribly slow in doing basic arithmetic. What we needed was a machine that doesn't do much else, but does basic arithmetic really, really fast.

[music in]

The machine I put together does arithmetic, it's called a DSP, a digital signal processor. There were a couple of other examples of this, special purpose devices that were built for the military. But for the most part they were designed to process images. They didn't have the full 24 bit sound that we like to hear in modern audio.

So I designed it from the scratch, starting from the converters and working back through the processing chain, to the point that I had a device. It was capable of 20 million computations per second, just raw arithmetic, multiply and add, to do audio at that kind of speed.

Even then at 20 million per second it was limited to 30 voices, that was as much as I could get out of the machine at that time.

[music out]

Building that computer took 2 years, and something like 200,000 lines of computer code. The Audio Signal Processor was used on many films produced at Skywalker Sound. So even though it was ground breaking, the technology was familiar to the mixers and sound designers there. So when the producer gave Andy the job of making the THX logo theme, it was almost a routine operation in their studio.

Andy: He said, "Andy we have to record it on Friday." So I said okay let’s do it. I came in, punched a button. He wasn't even there. Gary Rydstrom was, however.

Gary is an Oscar-winning sound designer.

Andy: He was there that day, almost coincidentally. I don't think anyone had told him to go in and QA it or listen to it or tell me if they had to hire somebody else real quick. But he just happened to be there and we were chatting. Well I ran the thing off, [sfx: 9-second Deep Note] and it was funny. He didn't say anything for quite a long time, except then finally said, "Can I hear that again?" and I said, "Sure."

So I punched the button, they recorded it, 15 minutes later I walked out.

[music in]

In 1983, THX was a brand new company and they had never done any marketing. Today most marketing campaigns go through a rigorous internal process. Ad agencies are brought in, different concepts are developed and pitched, focus group testing is commonplace, and many levels of management weigh in on the pros and cons of the advertising. The Deepnote had a much less formal process - The producer assigned to the job pretty much gave Andy free reign.

Andy: Subsequently I got a lot of questions about how it was done. But no, there was no ... I didn't pitch anything. But to tell you the truth, there wasn't really much quality control in the process. He literally gave me the task and then four days later I walked into the theater and mashed the button and that's what came out.

So, maybe that's good. If anyone had heard it, they might not have gone for it. I remember Tom Holman quipping that the part of the sound system that he was really the proudest of were the tinkly, crisp highs, but that's okay, this'll do.

[music out]

The reactions of Gary Rydstrom, Ben Burtt, and Tom Holman were positive, but the Deep Note had not yet been played for the big man… the head honcho… George Lucas himself.

Andy: I wasn't there when the VIPs were brought in, but what I do know is he started inviting people down to my studio. So, I played it for a number of people.

I played it right off the synthesizer, [sfx: 9-second Deep Note] just synthesize in real time right then and there, just mostly for effect, to show them what the capabilities of digital audio were.

I played it for Ray Dolby one time. I played it for ... actually, I played it for Michael Jackson. Oh, Michael Jackson enjoyed it, but when I played the Star Wars theme, he enjoyed that better. So yeah, I played the THX logo theme for a number of people. So I guess George liked it, because he was constantly bringing people down there to hear it.

I don't think they expected what I ended up with there. They kept bringing people. "Come in, come here, listen to this, listen to this!"

[music in]

Creating a score within a computer program today can look a lot like a conventional musical score. However Andy had programmed the Deep Note to playback randomly each time - so every guest heard a completely new Deep Note.

Andy: In the first couple of days I put the cello tone in and I wrote the program for generating the score. And the score was generated from a random number, since I didn't really care where the notes went in the cluster, as long as they were in a certain range. So I just wrote a program that went around all the instruments once a second and gave each one a new pitch. Each oscillator, or each cello, would receive a new pitch, it would slowly start winding towards the new pitch.

[music out]

That's what gives it that feeling of voices going up and going down. Once a second, each voice gets a new pitch.

Andy: And then I assign them the final pitches, which was the final chord. Now that one I did compose of the 30 voices. I said, "You know, we'll do three voices on this tone and two voices on that tone, and one voice on that tone, and so on." I gave them discreet pitches.

One of the first, "Oh, gee" or "Duh" moments was when I had collapsed all the oscillators to be exactly on the target pitch to three decimal places. [SFX : pitch examples softly underneath] Well then it collapsed into an electronic chord. It sounded, not like an organ, but like an electric organ. So I had to de-tune them slightly. And that's what makes the final chord shimmer, too, because they're still getting new pitches every second, they're just within a very tight range, going up and down within maybe 100 cents or so on each pitch.

What makes the Deep Note even more complex has to do with something called temperament. Most instruments today are tuned in what is known as “equal temperament”. The most basic way to think about it, is this [SFX : chromatic scale, played underneath VO]- we have 12 musical notes, and all of them are the same distance apart.

For the Deep Note Andy changed the tuning system so the ratios are actually perfect harmony, using a system known as “Pythagorean Tuning”.

Andy: This hasn't been used routinely since the middle ages, because it doesn't allow you to change keys.

Like when barber shop quartets sang, [sfx: Barber Shop quartet] they typically sang in a kind of a floating just temperament. That's what makes those chords so sharp and so crisp. They don't use vibrato and they sing in these exact pitches ... These are called Pythagorean relations.

And it's these crisp relations that make the sound of that chord sort of bigger than you would expect. It's actually bigger than an organ chord. Bigger than the [sfx: repeat Bach D-Minor chord softly under explanation] Bach chord, because he's playing it on an organ that's in equal temperament. So the pitches can't fuse as tightly.

So with Pythagorean Tuning, in very simple terms - those same 12 notes, might be tuned slightly differently depending on the key it’s in. It’s more of an absolute perfect tuning.

The truth is it’s very subtle and a lot of people can’t hear the difference. However, when you stack up almost 10 octaves of notes, the effect becomes MUCH more obvious. That’s another way Andy was able to give the THX Deep Note such a big sound.

Andy: I knew that that's what I wanted for the big chord because I knew what it was gonna sound like and that would be the formulation with the most impact. It would sound bigger than an organ chord or bigger than an orchestra chord.

[music in]

The computer program allowed Andy to create something he could never have done with a live orchestra, but there was also a problem. Since the program was random there was no real way to recreate the sound over again. He had to record the output from the computer and that would be the only record of it from that point forward. Even if he used the same program again the output would sound just slightly different than before because it was coded to be random. It wasn’t like a guitar lick that that a human performer could replicate, it was a computer that was programed to be different each and every time. He only had one recording of it.

So when Andy submitted the original Deep Note track, that was it. There were no backups. George Lucas and the team loved The Deep Note, but then something horrible happened—they lost it. Andy Moorer’s masterpiece was gone. [music out] And he wasn’t sure if he could get it back.

So how does the story end? We’ll find out, in our next episode.

[music in]

CREDITS

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 and produced by Kevin Edds… and me, Dallas Taylor with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Many thanks to Andy Moorer, who is a software engineer, musician, and sound designer of the THX Deep Note. And thanks also to Rob Cowles, Global Director of marketing for THX. To learn more about THX certification visit THX.com.

The music in this episode is courtesy of our friends at Musicbed. Having great music should be an asset to your project, not a roadblock. Musicbed is dedicated to making that a reality. That’s why they’ve completely rebuilt their platform of world-class artists and composers with brand-new features and advanced filters to make finding the perfect song easier and faster. Learn more at musicbed.com/new.

To see Andy Moorer’s sheet music for the deep note, visit our website, 20 k dot org. You can also catch up on past episodes, read transcripts, and buy a t-shirt!

If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, be sure to follow us at the username 20k org. I love hearing from you, and I read each and every comment.

Finally, I need your help. Seriously, don’t zone out right now. What I need for you to do is go to your phone and tell everyone you know to subscribe to twenty thousand hertz. This show cannot grow without you doing that. Text them, call them, write on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or wherever. Use the link 20k.org/subscribe. There it will give you a bunch of options of where to find the show.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Amen Break: The world’s most sampled drum beat

This show was written and produced by James Introcaso.

There’s a sample of music that’s been heard around the world in over 2,000 songs. Odds are you’ve heard it many times and didn’t even realize you were listening to the same breakbeat. The amen break might be the most sampled piece of music in history. Where did it come from? This episode features interviews with artist Nate Harrison and Grammy-winner Richard Louis Spencer.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Umber - Aether
All I Know - Stray Theories
Tell Me A Story - Chad Lawson
Smooth Talk - Phillip Cuccias

AMEN BREAK EXAMPLES

Straight Outta Compton - N.W.A.
I Desire - Salt-N-Pepa
Futurama Theme - Christopher Tyng
Can't Knock The Hustle (Desired State Remix) - Jay-Z feat. Mary J Blige
Eyeless - Slipknot
In for the Kill (Skream's Let's Get Ravey Remix) - La Roux
Pigs - Tyler, The Creator
King of the Beats - Mantronix
Tundra - Squarepusher
Fear - Amen Andrews
Feel Alright Y'all - 2 Live Crew
Compton - The Game feat. Will.i.am
Red Eye - Big K.R.I.T.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Amen break at normal speed]

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

[SFX: End Amen break]

What you just heard is called the amen break, or ah-men break depending on how you say it. Anyway, It’s likely the most sampled piece of music in the world. You’ve definitely heard it a million times, but you might have a hard time remembering from where. So, let’s hear those six-second again. This time, see if you can remember where you’ve heard it.

[SFX: Amen break at normal speed]

[SFX: Straight Outta Compton (radio edit)]

[SFX: I Desire]

[SFX: Streets on Fire]

[SFX: Futurama Theme]

The amen break has also been sped up.

[SFX: Can’t Knock the Hustle]

[SFX: Eyeless]

[SFX: Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites]

And it’s been slowed down.

[SFX: Minefiles]

[SFX: Pigs]

[SFX: King of Beats]

It’s been used in commercials.

[SFX: Jeep Commercial]

The amen break is sampled in over 2,000 songs and counting. If you search Amen Break you’ll find examples and curated playlists everywhere. But, where did this beat come from?

[Music in]

Nate: It is a about five or six second passage in the middle of a song called “Amen Brother” that was recorded by a band in the late 1960s called The Winstons.

That’s Nate Harrison, an artist and professor from Tufts University. Nate did extensive research on the break for an audio art project called, “Can I Get An Amen?”

Nate: In the middle of the song, there's a drum breakdown where all the other instruments drop out.

[Music drops out to amen break]

The drummer, GC Coleman, does his thing for like five or six seconds.

[Music out]

He syncopates them in this interesting, weird way.

Imagine like a… four to floor standard beat, like a one, two, three, four.

[SFX: Standard Beat]

A breakbeat, has a little bit more syncopation on it the down beats would happen on maybe in between sort of beats, and what not. It gives it a little bit of a funkier vibe to it.

A break is just short for a breakbeat. There's the tighten up break...

[SFX: Tighten up break]

… and there's the funky drummer break...

[SFX: Funky drummer break]

… and there's the apache break.

[SFX: Apache break]

All of these breaks were taken from old records, just like the amen break.

[SFX: bump out Apache break]

More than a decade passed after The Winston’s recorded “Amen Brother” before the break began to show up in hip hop tracks. That’s mainly because sampling music didn’t really come into vogue until the 80s.

Nate: Samplers were actual, physical boxes, machines. They were about the size of a DVD player. Nowadays It's all software on a computer.

Think of the golden era of hip hop music in the mid to late 80s and early 90s, that whole 10, 12 year period is predominantly a period in which hip hop music, particularly, is lifting samples, drum samples (SFX), guitar riffs (SFX), center horns (SFX), all that kind of stuff, from older records.

Samplers became popular around the same time musicians were starting to use drum machines and synthesizers. At first, it was kind of a novelty.

Nate: Sampling was new and interesting. It produced sounds again in contrast to the kind of synthesized, artificial sounds (SFX). Early electro music, early breakdance music, had a very robot kind of sound, futuristic kind of sound to it. To introduce sampling into it was to sort of recover the aesthetics of an earlier moment.

Sampling also had one other powerful element that made it desirable - nostalgia.

[Music in]

Nate: When producers get their hands on samplers they realize they can start borrowing the sounds of records that they had grown up listening to.

A record company called Street Beat Records put out a series of albums called Ultimate Beats and Breaks. These compilations included songs perfect for sampling.

Nate: That included a bunch of different breaks, including the amen.

[Music out]

The amen wasn’t the only breakbeat feature, but it did become the most sampled. In the US, it was big in hip hop, while in the UK it was used for jungle and drum and bass. But, of all the breakbeats to choose from, why did the amen become the most popular?

Nate: The first thing with that break is that it's really long. It's like a six second sample, so there's a lot of material to play with.

Six seconds might not seem like much, but in the early days of sampling, it was a ton of time.

Nate: People digging through the crates of vinyl records at used record stores looking for samples. If they come across one clean bar of a drum sample, they're happy. That's why the amen break is such a treasure.

In addition to its length, the amen break has variety.

Nate: In the course of those five or six seconds, there are a few different snare drum hits. Each one of those snare drum hits is slightly different than the others, because GC Coleman hit the drum a certain way, and slightly differently than he did the second before he did the previous hit.

You can choose between snares. You can start chopping up the amen break and rearranging the individual beats into other configurations. Pretty soon, you start getting into some really interesting patterns and textures.

[SFX: Cymbal crash from the amen break]

In addition to rearranging the break, a musician sampling it can speed it up...

[SFX: Fast amen break]

Slow it down…

[SFX: Slow amen break]

Or even play it backwards.

[SFX: Backwards amen break]

The amen break’s length and versatility made it so prolific among electronic musicians in the UK that finding new ways to use it became an intellectual pursuit.

Nate: It branched out even farther into so called IDM music, or intelligent dance music, which was kind of the response to the rave and dance culture in the UK. They would call it like electronic music dance music that you can't dance to a lot of that music also used the amen break. Tom Jenkinson, also known as Squarepusher, used it thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly.

Squarepusher’s indulgent use of the amen break can be heard in his track “Tundra.”

[SFX: Tundra from 6:00 to about 6:10]

Nate: Luke Vibert was one of the first people to do really beyond weird things with it. He recorded under the name Amen Andrews.

[SFX: Fear from 3:30 to about 3:40]

Obviously, this intellectual use of the amen isn’t limited to the UK. Tons of American artists have used it too.

[SFX: Feel Alright Y'all - 2 Live Crew]

[SFX: Compton - The Game feat. Will.i.am]

[SFX: Red Eye - Big K.R.I.T.]

When it comes to the amen break, and sampling in general, there’s a lot of legal and moral questions.

Nate: The entire aesthetic of the 'Amen Break,' and I would say breakbeat culture generally is an aesthetic of copying.

In some respects that goes against current copyright laws. It's kind of legally contentious practice.

That's definitely a strange, bittersweet part of sample-based music is on the one hand, it's kind of revivifying old forms and maybe generates some interest in those older forms. But, it's also a taking, too.

GC Coleman, the drummer, didn't make any money certainly not any royalties, or any residuals, or anything from all that sampling.

GC Coleman passed away in 2006, but a surviving member of The Winstons named Richard Louis Spencer wrote “Amen, Brother.” He still holds the copyright to the song. Like GC, Richard was never paid royalties from the massive sampling of the song. We’ll hear from him after this.

[Music out]

MIDROLL

[Music in]

“Amen, Brother,” the song from which the amen break is sampled, was recorded by The Winstons in 1969. They had no idea their song would make such a cultural impact.

Richard: It was just a throwaway piece.

[Music out]

That’s Richard Louis Spencer, a Grammy-winner and former member of the Winstons. He’s the one who wrote “Amen, Brother.”

Richard: We were a group of young men in Washington, D.C., during the club scene in the '60s.

We were a bar band. We played in places and played all the hits, and we were very good at it.

I was the tenor saxophone player in the group. I ended up writing and singing the song that became a hit for us, but I was a tenor player.

The Winstons performed as the backup band for Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.

[Music in]

Richard: We played with them for about six or seven months, and Curtis and I became very good friends. He was a very nice guy. He's probably one of the pure people I met.

He was a very, very straight up guy.

It was he who encouraged me to write, cause he always said oh, you got some good ideas.

[Music out]

After some encouragement and advice from Curtis, Richard composed a song that won him the Grammy Award for R&B Songwriter of the Year in the late 60’s. It wasn’t “Amen, Brother.” It was a song called “Color Him Father.”

[Music in]

Richard: When I wrote the words for “Color Him Father”. I tried to call my dad, my dad left us in 1958, my mom was having children, and I ran up on him in New York.

We began talking and stuff over the years and so then one morning, I tried to call him and his phone was disconnected and the first thing came to my mind, wow, this guy is gone again. I wrote this song, kind of this letter to him.

So I took it to rehearsal and recorded it and it became a hit.

[Music out]

When the Winstons recorded the single for “Color Him Father,” they needed a B side. As a band that played mostly covers and back up, they didn’t have a lot of options.

The only other original the Winstons had was a chaser - filler music that engages a live audience as the announcer introduces the band. You still hear chasers today, mostly in late night talk shows whenever a new guest is introduced.

Richard: You have some music to bring them on. It was very short and when they went off, [SFX: sings the instrumental] amen, brother.

The Winstons made their instrumental chaser their B side and called it, “Amen, Brother.”

[Music in]

Richard: During that time everybody had drum breaks and we had been doing songs where Greg would play these drum beats.

Richard asked his drummer, GC or Greg, to play a breakbeat during “Amen, Brother.”

Richard: I said that just sounds too much like so and so, so and so, because I was kind of the leader of the band at that time. I said why don't you take the piece from blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I told him two or three pieces he was going to put them together, and he did.

It was just another drum break, only this one was a composite of a couple that Greg played.

That became the Amen break.

It was a filler. A throwaway as they call.

[SFX: Amen Break]

[Music out]

With a hit single and a Grammy-winning frontman, the Winstons were about to make it big time.

[Music in]

Richard: The Winstons were flown in to New York, our manager had signed us and they had set up this big 38-week tour opening for Credence Clearwater, and it was just like the answer of prayer. We were going to make pretty big money.

Then we had this big meeting, I call a signing party, on the 126th floor over on Avenue of the Americas. It was a beautiful thing.

[Music out]

But what Richard didn’t know was that the rest of the Winstons weren’t in it for the long haul. They were planning on quitting the band.

Richard: They brought the contract around for us to sign and they took that contract and said well, we have to take them to our lawyers. I said well no, this is not a negotiation. And it was pretty obvious right then that they had intended to quit.

The guys said well, you can bring them back in the morning. These New Yorkers, they've been through this before. They knew the group was finished.

[Music in]

After the Winston’s broke up, Richard left the music industry and had an eclectic career.

Richard: I sat around for about two and a half years feeling sorry for myself.

I got a job working at a liquor store, delivering liquor in Georgetown. The same clubs I used to hang out and spend $200 and $300 a night on booze, here I was pushing liquor up in there.

Then I got the job at the transit system driving a bus, and I absolutely loved it.

It was such a great thing for me because it's a people thing. Then I went back and enrolled in a university, and so I was working and attended university at the same time.

I worked in the transit system for 28 years. I had done my BA and my master's and I came back and I was in town here where I am now, I was only 58 years old.

I wasn't ready to call it quits. Plus I had a son. I had an 11-year-old son I brought home with me, so I went to teaching. I taught from 2000 to 2008 and I loved it.

[Music out]

Richard was busy. He was working, going to college, and taking care of his son. This was all in the 80’s and 90’s before the internet. He had no idea that “Amen, Brother” was being sampled in all of these songs.

Richard: I had no idea about the whole Amen break thing until almost the early 2000s. I realized after I learned how to use the computer, it was one of the most sampled pieces of music in history.

I was just amazed NWA had used it...

[SFX: Straight Outta Compton (radio edit)]

and Futurama...

[SFX: Futurama Theme]

I just looked at the list, and it was just kind of heartbreaking because I realized my publisher had just really just robbed me. I spoke to it about a lawyer and he said well, it's been 10 years, and this, that, and another.

There's a wine in Australia called the Amen break, and here I was sitting around eating sardines and drinking sodas and feeling sorry for myself and somebody was getting paid.

Richard tried moved on with his life, but people kept bringing up the amen break.

[SFX: Phone vibrating]

Richard: I started getting calls from these young men from Great Britain and they almost worshiping that thing over there and it was into that whole jungle and drum and bass thing.

[SFX: Doorbell]

Some guy showed up with television cameras and they did an interview, they said it was for the BBC or something.

They start saying to me, man you should be worth about $30 million.

Nate agrees with that estimate.

Nate: He'd be certainly a millionaire if he would have gotten just a few pennies from every time somebody used the 'Amen Break.

But Richard wasn’t a millionaire. He hadn’t collected anything from the thousands of songs that sampled “Amen, Brother.” For years he was asked to speak about his influential break and acknowledge he was never paid. Then a few years ago, he got an email from a UK-based DJ named Martyn Webster.

Richard: It was seemed like he was suggesting that some of these people felt badly and they wanted to take up some money for me. I had never heard of a GoFund, to tell you the truth.

Martyn asked Richard if he could set up a GoFundMe page. The page allowed musicians around the world who sampled “Amen, Brother” to donate money as a thank you to Richard.

Richard: I said well fine, I had no idea what that meant. They started sending money around.

To date, the GoFundMe efforts have raised over thirty thousand dollars for Richard.

Richard: It was very nice of them, too, because these are young people who probably weren't even alive when “Color Him Father” and amen break and stuff came about.

[Music in]

Richard has never officially been paid royalties for the over two-thousand known samples of the amen break, but when he looks back on his dynamic life, he’s also got a lot to be proud of.

Richard: It was amazing even when I retired, there were people at Metro who never knew that I had a record out. Not that I was trying to hide it but it wasn't anything to talk about. It was great, I enjoyed it, move on.

I've been inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame and I'm also in the D.C. Legendary Musicians Hall of Fame

I published two books.

Mostly proud because I raised a young black down south by myself. He graduated from Pfeiffer University. I’m very proud of him and now he's coaching soccer at Georgetown Visitation in D.C., and he works with kids with special needs. And he also is the head coach varsity girls at Langley High School. Very proud of that.

I'm proud of that than anything.

It's been a good, good life, man.

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. If you do anything creative that also uses sound, go check out defactosound dot com. And don’t forget to reach out. We’d love to know who you are.

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 guest, Nate Harrison. You can checkout Nate’s project, “Can I Get An Amen?” and all his other work at nkhstudio.com.

Thanks also to Richard Louis Spencer. Please consider showing him some monetary love for his contributions to the music industry. You can do that at amen dot 20 kay dot org. That’s amen dot 20 kat dot org. We also put this link in the show description. Also, I hear there’s a few celebrities in the music business that listen to the show. If that’s you, show your respects by sending some money Richard’s way.

The music in this episode is from of our friends at Musicbed. Having great music should be an asset to your project, not a roadblock. Musicbed is dedicated to making that a reality. That’s why they’ve completely rebuilt their platform of world-class artists and composers with brand-new features and advanced filters to make finding the perfect song easier and faster. Learn more at musicbed.com/new.

You can say hello, submit a show idea, give general feedback, read transcripts, or buy a t-shirt at 20k.org. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter. You can also sign up for our superfan newsletter at newsletter dot twenty-kay dot org. Hearing from listeners is the most fun thing about making this podcast, so please don’t hesitate to drop us a note.

Finally, be sure to tell all your friends about the show.

Thanks for listening.

[Music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Ultrasonic Tracking: Are our phones really listening to us?

This show was written and produced by Leigh McDonald.

Did you know your phone is a really good listener? Apps on your phone might be sending and receiving data over ultrasound. Ultrasonic communication is used for everything from tracking your daily habits to enabling light shows at music festivals. We hear from Yale Privacy Lab's Sean O’Brien and Michael Kwet, and privacy and technology counsel Katie McInnis. We also discuss the more positive uses of data over sound with LISNR CEO and co-founder Rodney Williams.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Autumn Eyes by The light The Heat
The Fairest Things by Chad Lawson
Fore by Steven Gutheinz
We Need Each Other by Dexter Britain
Gentle Without by Steven Gutheinz
Chasing Time by David A Molina
Butterflies (Night Hawk Remix) by Tony Anderson
Miles (instrumental) by Sonjo
Finding Glass by Steven Gutheinz

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see our video series.

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

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Check out wetransfer.com for all of your file sending needs!

Go to forhims.com/20k for your $5 trial month.

View Transcript ▶︎

[Mall ambience at SFX]

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

[Music Start]

Put yourself in a shopping mall. What do you hear? Maybe the sound of clothes hangers sliding across a rack…

[Clothes hangers SFX]

… or a cash register ringing up a purchase…

[Cash register SFX]

...maybe it’s rustling shopping bags?

[Shopping bags SFX]

What you probably don’t hear is this?

[Macy’s signal SFX]

Just on the edge of human hearing, at around 18 thousand to 20 thousand hertz, data is being transmitted over sound. It’s called ultrasonic communication, even though it might be audible to a child or someone with excellent hearing. The sample you just heard has been pitched down so the rest of us can hear it.

[ Continue Macy’s single SFX]

<span data-preserve-html-node="true" style=“color:rgb(127,44,202)"> Sean: Ultrasonic tracking if sci-fi, right? It's the kind of thing that seems like it comes out of a comic book or a movie. And I think that gets under people's skin.

That’s Sean O’Brien, from Yale University’s Privacy Lab..

Sean: We do privacy and security work and we look at advertising trackers inside of mobile apps, such as the ultrasonic trackers.

Ultrasonic tracking is tracking that's done through your microphone.

<span data-preserve-html-node="true" style=“color:rgb(127,44,202)"> Sean: If you have an app on your phone that allows microphone permissions, permissions to record onto your device, it can eavesdrop on you in the room and light up that microphone when you don't know.

Providers can embed their ultrasonic tones, or beacons, as they call them, into television shows and advertisements.

Sean: Let's say for example you're playing a game...

[Tiny Wings SFX]

...and you have the television on…

[Jessica Jones SFX]

Sean: There could be a signal coming through that television that's ultrasonic or near ultrasonic in most cases, that you can't hear. That sound can be picked up by your microphone, processed by the app, and then communicate with a server on the internet so that advertisers can gain data about what you're watching and potentially where you are.

If you’re listening to this, you’re probably using your phone at this exact moment. You carry that little device with you everywhere. And it might be spying on you. It can listen to what’s around you, and give that information to advertisers so they can get you to buy stuff.

[Music Start]

Sean: Hopefully at this point people have at least heard of binary and understand that there is zeros and ones inside computers. Which still sounds pretty mystical. The ability to discern between different tones can be correlated to zeros and ones. Or to use a simplified example, which we wouldn't see in the wild, 26 letters of the alphabet. You could have 26 different ultrasonic frequencies that are slightly different, so we call it frequency shift keying, because there's shifts in the frequency, and they could do A through Z with these tones.

You can look at the wave form, so a microphone and devices that are specifically designed to look at sound, can look at these waveforms and get data from them in this way.

[Music out]

This technology is also being used outside the home. You can find it at sporting events, music festivals, and yes, even the mall.

Sean: They take a look at people in retail outlets and they try to do things like, for example if you're walking by a rack of clothing, they might send you an advertisement for some clothing on that rack. It might be a 50% off coupon, it might be some other kind of promotion, that's going to try to motivate you to buy that piece of clothing.

Remember that sound at the top of the show?

[Macy’s Signal SFX]

[Music start]

That was found at a Macy’s department store nearby. The provider responsible for the ultrasonic beacon is ShopKick. They’re exclusively in retail stores. Shopkick has an app that lets you earn points and gift cards for walking into stores like Lord & Taylor, Yankee Candle and American Eagle. When you walk in, your phone picks up this ultrasonic beacon from the store speakers, and let’s the app know that you’re there.

The thing is, Macy’s doesn’t advertise integration with the Shopkick app. Shoppers can’t earn points for visiting. So it’s unclear how they’re using Shopkick’s technology. We reached out to Macy’s and Shopkick for interviews, but they declined.

[Music out]

While earning points and gift cards for simply walking around the mall is enticing, there’s a bigger picture here. And in this case, the bigger picture is big data.

Michael: There is an incredible amount of things that can be learned about an individual based on a small amount of data.

That’s Michael Kwet. He works with Sean at Yale Privacy Lab.

Michael: Companies can infer quite a bit about you. They can infer what your sexuality is, what your politics are, and we're learning that they're able to infer things about potentially your mental health based on the frequency of words you use, how often you swear.

And it’s not just ultrasonic tracking. Yale Privacy Lab found that over 75% of Android apps have some kind of tracker. Apps can use WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS to track your behaviors. And these trackers can work together to collect even more data from you. Here’s Sean again.

Sean: The message we're trying to bring is that this tracking is layer after layer after layer, really interwoven, very difficult to untangle the business relationships between these different trackers.

It's not just that when I go get an Android device or get an Apple device that Google or Apple are looking at me. It's that there's this entire ecosystem of trackers that are doing all kinds of nuanced things to track me, sharing data with each other, building profiles of us that, can usually be used to identify us backwards because it is unique to us.

Sean and Michael are confident that these trackers are in iOS apps, too. But Apple has more restrictions on their devices and software, so it’s harder to research.

Sean: We know that these trackers are also in iOS apps. We want to be very careful, at Yale Privacy Lab we want to always say that this is not a Google versus Apple thing. There are very strict laws in the United States specifically about circumventing DRM. That's digital restrictions management, or digital rights management as they like to call it. Not being able to get around pieces of software that lock down an iPhone because you could go to a federal prison, is a big barrier for us as researchers.

[Music start]

While there are strict laws protecting proprietary information, there isn’t much protection for the consumer.

Katie: So to some extent, this is a little of a wild west, right? Like, this is kind of brand new technology.

That’s Katie McInnis. She’s a privacy and technology attorney. With Katie’s help, the Federal Trade Commission issued warnings to apps using ultrasonic trackers. The FTC is the government agency that protects consumers.

Katie: We wrote comments to the FTC about how users are tracked, and one of these methods was ultrasonic beacons, which we were highly concerned about, because it was really unclear to the user that their activities across devices were being correlated using an ultrasonic audio beacon. And we felt like, unlike other methods of tracking, this one had the least amount of consumer exposure.

[Music out]

The FTC warned apps against SilverPush, which provides ultrasonic tracking in retail stores. And, when they got the warning, SilverPush said they’d end their tracking program. But because of how the FTC works, they couldn’t have prevented SilverPush from the start.

Katie: Unfortunately, in the U.S., we have a very fragmented system of privacy enforcement. The FTC, doesn't really have rule-making authority, unlike most of their agencies. And so they can't create prospective rules, then regulate future actions. They can only look at something, let's say, retroactively that was unfair and deceptive to user.

[Music start]

The researchers at Yale Privacy Lab found eight android apps that still use SilverPush. Most of them are international, though, and outside the scope of US law.

One of the few laws that does protect consumers in the US is the FTC act, which established the Federal Trade Commission. This act protects consumers against “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” Basically, it protects consumers against the shady stuff business sometimes try to pull. This act was signed into law by President Wilson way back in 1914, so it’s pretty crazy it’s being used to regulate technology they never even dreamt of in the early 20th century.

[Music out]

In recent lawsuits against ultrasonic tracking providers, the Wiretap Act has been referenced.

[Music start]

This act not only protects our private conversations over the phone, but It also makes it illegal to spy on any kind of communication through a device. So it’s no surprise that this act has been brought up in lawsuits against ultrasonic communication providers.

We’ll hear from one of those providers after the break.

[Music out]

MIDROLL

[Music in]

Lawsuits against ultrasonic communication companies have been popping up lately. These apps use your phone’s microphone so it’s easy to see that this could be compared to wiretapping. But, not all ultrasonic communication companies are in the advertising or tracking business. There are genuinely useful ways to use this new technology to make people's lives easier - just like Wifi and Bluetooth has.

A company called LISNR describes their technology as “data-over-audio.”And like most of the providers in this field, they use these near-ultrasonic tones to transmit information.

[Music out]

Rodney: It's really a modulation across a frequency range.

That’s LISTNR’s CEO and Co-founder Rodney Williams.

Rodney: And we can push that frequency range up or we can push that frequency range down depending on the environment to ensure that it's gonna be reliable, but our core infrastructure is built between 18,000 and 20,000 kilohertz.

So, that frequency range is important, here’s why….

Rodney: the FCC says that all audio up to 21,000 kilohertz is safe audio - safe as in health, it’s not affecting your ear drum - We have competitors that actually use audio above 21,000 kilohertz. Technically that's not in the bandwidth of safe audio, and that's why really high frequency ranges outside of that bandwidth are regulated.

LISNR got their start as a marketing technology company, and they worked with some pretty big names.

For example, for Discovery Communication, as you watch MythBusters, little quiz overlays about the myth. Did they use water? And it would count down, and then your phone would start counting down, and vibrating, and then you had nine seconds to hurry up and answer it. One of my favorite, Budweiser Made in America music festival, What I loved was at the end of the night, if it recognized that you walked past a gate, it actually sent you a message to get a Uber, and it gave you a coupon offer on an Uber.

I thought it was perfect, right? I mean, it's a bunch of kids obviously at a festival. Obviously they just need a ride home, and I mean, I just think that's the power of understanding when a consumer's inside of an experience, and being able to help it.

In order for this experience to work, you had to download the festival’s app so it could listen for the ultrasonic signals.

[Play clip: Crazy in Love by Beyonce (Live at Made in America)]



Here’s an example of how it might work. But, in this example we’ve lowered the frequency of the signal by four octaves, to a range where you can hear it.

Rodney: Yeah, so it would be in the Budweiser Made in America app. What would technically be happening is that we would actually be playing our tones throughout the venue, and tones basically would have different location data so that if it heard a certain tone that mean you were in a certain area, and then it could understanding how long you were in that area, and if you went from area 45 to area 46, and then to 47, obviously you're walking, and then we just basically could trigger different messages based on where you are in relation to these tones.

[Music out]

Rodney: The magic behind it, which drove a lot of the engagement, is that this wasn't the battery drainage. It didn't use your cellular data, wifi data or GPS data to trigger you the message.

*[Music start]

Despite all their success, LISNR decided to end their marketing program and focus on other uses for the technology.

Rodney: All transparency, it was mainly because of a lawsuit that we got - that's actually just got dismissed, by the way, because our technology is fantastic and it does what we say it does - but it was a lawsuit that basically said that we were recording consumers' conversations for purpose of advertising, I can't say too much because I don't know what else has been released publicly, but I what I can say is our technology just doesn't do that, right? It doesn't interpret sound. It can't hear a voice. It's not voice recognition. It's true data over audio.

[Music out]

One of the concerns with ultrasonic communication today is that you have to let apps use your microphone. Sean from Yale Privacy Lab says it’s hard to know exactly what they are doing with your microphone, and it might be possible to collect more data than intended, like human voices, for example.

Sean: the processing is happening on a server somewhere. The app is not going to spend a lot of processing power or use the capabilities of your phone to make that waveform more privacy-respecting before it sends that audio to whatever server it's talking to.

But LISNR says they took their technology offline once they stopped using it to track.

Rodney: The moment we went offline, locally encoding and locally decoding, Lisnr has the inability to track. It’s a completely offline method of wireless transmission, so it does not connect to a wireless server. It does not connect to a cloud.

This is a complicated problem - “the cloud” wherever that may be, is actually the vulnerable part of the system. Ultrasonic communication is just a tool to collect information, which could be sent to “the cloud”.

If someone is going to try and steal information from you, they will most likely target a cloud server because they hold such massive amounts of information.

Back to Rodney.

Rodney: You can't hack the data transmission from a cloud server because we are no longer connected to a cloud, so the cloud does not initiate a transfer or decode the transfer, it's locally. Then you have to be locally there. You have to know the algorithm, you have to know the encryption, and you have to be able to understand the time token. And if you was to get all of that, then good for you. I think it should be that hard.



When this technology is offline and more secure, it’s better suited for things like authentication and payment purposes.

[Music Start]

Rodney: There's some unique advantages by using this as a authentication method, and that's probably the biggest area of interest and growth for us. Earlier last year we landed Ticketmaster, a consumer's mobile phone would actually broadcast real-time ticketing data, the same ticketing data that would be sitting in a barcode, and instead of walking up, and getting your screen brightness correct, and then getting the right angle, you would literally just have to place your phone within 12 inches of a scanning device, and your phone would immediately authenticate and turn green, and you are allowed in.

We want our data to be with the individuals that it's supposed to be with, not anyone else. In a perfect world, consumers locally have data, and when they want to transmit it, they control the transmission and they control who it's delivered to, it's not tracked by a third party like Amazon, Apple, anywhere, it's literally tracked by you.

When it comes to ultrasonic datate transmission, it’s up to each company to use their technology is ethical ways. For ultrasonic tracking companies like Silverpush or ShopKick, or really any company that tracks and collects data for advertising, transparency is especially important. And like everything else, transparency is on a spectrum, with open source code on one end, and a black box on the other.

[Music out]

Sean: A lot of this is black box, so we're making guesses from the outside, which is sort of the thing that's so scary. Inside the advertising industry, this kind of tracking is no secret to anyone. What the actual business practice are inside a specific business is the kind of thing that's hard for us to say.

We don’t really know what data ultrasonic tracking companies are collecting, or what they’re doing with it. And that means it’s hard to hold them responsible if they go too far.

Michael: What these advertisers want in this situation is of course to get people to buy their products.

But the degree of manipulation is pretty extensive and so I think as time marches on, the kinds of information and practices that we're seeing in the advertising industry are cause for alarm because nobody really wants to be manipulated in this way and a lot of this is being packaged into video games or into chat apps so in order for us just to carry out our day-to-day lives, we're all being subjected to a lot of surveillance that is very concerning for our rights and liberties.

And remember, 75% of android apps have some kind of tracker, whether it’s ultrasonic, Bluetooth, WiFi or GPS. And these apps are built around the trackers so that the apps won’t even function without them. And even if they could, the companies make it really hard to opt out.

Michael: it's extremely hard to opt out. For Tinder, if you want to use the app, you have to turn on the location tracking.

[Music start]

But, if you turn location tracking off, then you can't use your map service. So, the problem is these companies understand that instead of giving you a straightforward option to opt into these kinds of things, they construct their apps and their privacy policies to make it onerous and difficult for users to opt out, and when you have maybe 40 apps in your phone, the opt out process becomes overwhelming for an individual and their tactic in the industry is to overwhelm individuals so that they just throw in the towel and say, "I want to play games. I want to talk to my friends. I'm just going to install it and click-through."

What we need is stronger transparency from the industry and greater awareness from consumers. It’s easy to forget, but our phones are right there with us during the most intimate part of our lives. It’s worth keeping safe and trustworthy. So, if an app requests access to your microphone, but has no reason to do so - you should probably reconsider installing that app.

CREDITS

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 Leigh McDonald...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to Sean O’Brien and Michael Kwet from Yale Privacy Lab. Also thanks to privacy and technology counsel Katie McInnis and LISNR CEO and co-founder Rodney Williams.

The music in this episode is from of our friends at Musicbed. Having great music should be an asset to your project, not a roadblock. Musicbed is dedicated to making that a reality. That’s why they’ve completely rebuilt their platform of world-class artists and composers with brand-new features and advanced filters to make finding the perfect song easier and faster. Learn more at musicbed.com/new.

Did this episode change the way you think about your phone? Let us know on Twitter at 20k org. You can also give us feedback, submit a show idea, read episode transcripts, or buy a super cool 20k t-shirt through our website at 20k dot org.

Finally the first person to decode the ultrasonic message we embedded at the top of the show will win a t-shirt. Just hit us up through our website, twitter or facebook with the message. Thanks for listening.

[Music out]

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