Boots ’n Cats: The scientific secrets of beatboxing

This episode was written and produced by Rob Sachs.

Beatboxing began as an imitation of a drum machine, but over the decades it has evolved as a means to emulate any number of percussive sounds. Now beatboxing is being studied by scientists who are fascinated by the vocal dexterity of artists. By examining beatboxing scientists are hoping to unlock mysteries behind language formation, brain function, and the capacity of humans to recreate sound. Featuring Hip Hop Artist and Beat Boxer, Baba Israel and USC Engineering Professor, Shri Narayanan.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Change (Instrumental) by Ruslan
Lucida by Soular Order
Flip and Beatbox by Tom Salta
Bird by Laxcity
Good Morning by Laxcity
The Disconnect by Watermark High
People of the Future by Utah
Ovals & Circles by Virgil Arles

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View Transcript ▶︎

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

[SFX: beatboxing]

Hip hop has arguably been the most influential music genre of our generation.

[SFX: beatboxing continued]

And beatboxing has played a critical role. It’s an artform that’s allowed people to create and express themselves anywhere. In a party, on the street, at school. Beatboxing is free and without it, we might not have some of the music we have today.

[music in]

The Beatboxer you just heard is Baba Israel.

Baba: I'm a hip-hop artist. I'm a beatboxer, an MC, Spoken word artist; I'm a theater maker, educator. I do a lot of different stuff.

Baba grew up in New York City in the 80s during the rise of hip-hop.

Baba: I have a very clear memory of listening to the radio, I remember Doug E. Fresh; his song The Show came on…

[music out]

[SFX:The Show clip]

Baba: It was the first time I'd heard recorded beatboxing [SFX:The Show clip continued] and it just blew me away. I was so fascinated by it. It just had this different quality. It was so live and percussive, and it really made an impression on me.

Baba: And then soon after that, I started to encounter beatboxing in my school, in my elementary school and there was a kid in my class who claimed to be Doug E. Fresh's cousin. This was never confirmed, but he could do the clicks like Doug E. Fresh so I hung out with him and he started to teach me a little bit about beatboxing.

Beatboxing in the way we think about it didn’t really appear out of nowhere. It was really a mimicking of a famous drum machine.

Baba: With the development of the TR-808 and the 909 and these drum machines, which were the slang term at that time was beatbox.

[SFX: TR-808 Clip]

The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer came out in 1980. And it’s become incredibly iconic.

Baba: So in that song where they say "Flash is on the beatbox"...

[SFX: Grandmaster Flash Clip]

Baba: It's not actually talking about beatboxing, he's talking about the drum machine. That kind of shifted things. It allowed people to produce and create their own music without a full recording studio or without a full band.

The original 808 was discontinued in 1983, but revolutionized the sound of Hip Hop.

Baba: I think in hip-hop, it became center stage. It was really about beats and rhymes. There really wasn't the same emphasis on melody as hip-hop began to progress.

The beat was the driving force, the 808 had a lot of tone to it, particularly the bass drum, which is endured today.

[SFX: 808 Clip]

For example, here’s Afrika Bambaata’s song “Planet Rock”

[SFX: Planet Rock Clip, “Rock Rock Planet Rock, don’t stop.”]

Baba: You hear so much bass and there's less focus on chords or on melodic lines.

[Planet Rock Clip, “Everybody say Rock it don’t stop it, Rock it don’t stop it.”]

Baba: It was about creating a foundation for a rapper to tell their story or brag or in the message, give a break down about what's going on in the neighborhood, in the Bronx or wherever it might be.

The 808 drum machine became a huge influence on the sound of Hip Hop and this led to people trying to recreate the rhythms and sounds of the machine with their voices.

[SFX: 808 drum beat]

Baba: I always think that's one of the most fascinating things about beatboxing is it's one of the first times that drum machines were imitating drums and human beings were imitating machines, imitating drums. How can I make myself sound like a machine? How can I become a beatbox?" And that's evolved the term "human beatboxing," which was the original term.

But why bother imitating a machine? A drum machine in theory should always stay in exact tempo. Baba says while drum machines were great - they also had limitations.

Baba: Well I think the thing about hip-hop is it's a culture that doesn't just exist in studios and nightclubs. It's a street culture, it's a public culture. Like a lot of my early experience with beatboxing was not doing shows, it was in ciphers.

[SFX: Baba Beatboxing]

A cypher is a usually a circle or informal gathering of beatboxers, rappers, dancers and other various artists. It allows people to freestyle and express themselves artistically in some form.

[SFX: Baba Beatboxing continued]

Baba: After the show finished 10, 15 people would gather up in a circle outside of the club, and a cipher would jump off. The drum machines didn't have portable speakers. You didn't always necessarily always have access to electricity. Part of I think why beatboxing was important was that it allowed hip-hop to manifest outside of space that required technology, electronics. It allowed that sort of street culture to come to life.

Baba: I'm sure there was also an economic element. I think there is something that's very universal and accessible about beatboxing. There's no economic barrier to it.

Even professional artists who could afford the technology and a recording studio still found value in beatboxing.

Baba: It's always like a plan B. I've been in so many situations where something goes wrong with the DJ equipment. There was a show many, many years ago where Afrika Bambaata was DJing

[SFX: Afrika Bambaataa - Zulu Nation]

Baba: And all of a sudden his turntable stopped working,

Baba: I knew some of the folks who were promoting the night and said, "Look, I'll jump up there." I bought them time [SFX: beatboxing]. I did a beatbox set and kept the energy going, and then the DJ said it kicked in again. So, I think there's a lot of stories of beatboxers saving the day because stuff happens. Turntables go wrong, computers crash, and beatboxing is always there.

As the artform grew, beatboxing became more than just a backup or a replacement for drum machines. Innovations pushed it to become a performance art in its own right. Baba points to beatboxing pioneers such as Biz Markie.

[SFX: Biz Markie Clip]

Or the Fat Boys.

[SFX: Fat Boys Clip]

Baba: Beatboxing was like this specialized flavor. It made a record stand out. It made your live show more interesting.

Rahzel from The Roots was another huge innovator for beatboxing.

Baba: He was one of the first beatboxers that I saw really interact with a live band when he started doing shows with The Roots, and they developed all kinds of great routines together.

[SFX: Rahzel Clip]

Baba: When I saw him I realized that things had moved to a new level because his drums sounded different, they didn't just sound like a drum machine, they sounded like a live drum kit. He sounded like a funk drummer; he was making baselines, adding baselines to the beats, he was adding melodies, he was adding vocal scratches, he was adding sound effects. He was combining popping movement and beatboxing and turning into a robot voice.

Baba: He was a total entertainer.

[SFX: Rahzel Beatboxing Clip]

The influence of artists like Rahzel has evolved beatboxing and allowed it thrive to this day. We are now living in a time where it has even expanded way beyond Hip Hop.

One of the biggest forum for beatboxing is overseas.

Baba: I think, probably the largest battle in the world, it takes place in Berlin.

It’s called the Beatbox World Championship and it takes place every three years. Here’s French Beatboxer known has Alexinho won the male competition.

[SFX: Alexinho beatboxing Clip]

Alexinho’s style of beatboxing is a great example of how the art form has branched out into other genres.

Baba: Because of the way electronic music manifests in Europe and the UK, beatboxers started moving out of the traditional hip-hop realm, and started moving into creating drum and bass and dub-step and techno [SFX: dub-step beatboxing] and now a lot of the beatboxers in Europe, sound very different.

[SFX: Codfish Vs D-Low Clip]

Baba: Some of them have a connection to a hip-hop sound, but a lot of them sound more in the electronic-dance-music kind of realm. So, it continues to evolve.

Baba has even combined beatboxing with the didgeridoo.

Baba: I lived in Australia for a while, my mother's from there, and so it's an instrument that I learned about there. And I don't have my favorite didge here, but I got one here so I'mma mess around a little bit and give you a little didge beatbox.

[SFX: Baba didgeridoo beatboxing]

For Baba, those who try to strictly define beatboxing as one thing or another are missing the point. While it’s important to know its roots, he says he’s constantly amazed not just by how universal beatboxing can be but how people can react to it in various parts of the world.

[Music in]

Baba: I remember one time I beatboxed in a village in Cambodia for five thousand villagers, the whole village showed up. I started beatboxing and people just were flipping out because they had never seen it. There was such a response and such energy, and as a rapper I think it would have been hard for me to spit a rhyme that would have gotten that response. I definitely found that it's a way that I can communicate just immediately and with immediacy and have an impact and whether people understand my words or not.

[music out]

This ability for beatboxing to cut across language barriers is something Baba encounters all the time.

Baba: When I taught my workshop the other day I was asking whose multi-lingual because I was working in Queens which has so many different languages and everyone was pretty much multi-lingual in the class. And I said, "Well, I speak English, but I don't really speak any other languages except, I speak this one other language, and it's the language of beatbox." And then I started going, [SFX: beatboxing] and I started having a conversation with a couple of students, and they started spontaneously responding to me with rhythm, and we had these rhythm conversations. Call and response, improvisation, the oral tradition. Rhythm is a form of communication. For me, that's what excites me about beatboxing, it's not just the solo performer having the perfect sound, but it's can you interact?

[music out]

Baba might be onto something when he says Beatboxing is a new language. What does it share with other languages from around the world? And how does it differ? Is this a brand new form of communication? More on that after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

Beatboxing has been a fundamental part of the Hip Hop culture since the 80s and since then has also expanded to other genres. It’s become an art form that can stand all on its own. Its evolved so much that some have begun studying it as if it were its own language.

[music out]

Shri: Usually most song forms are in some language. You have Italian opera [SFX], and Bollywood music in Hindi [SFX], and so on. But beatboxing is has its own language of percussive sounds that they've evolved and developed.

That’s Shri Narayanan. He is an engineering professor at the University of Southern California. He works on a project called SPAN.

SPAN stands for Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge Group. It focuses on questions of speech - like why do we talk the way we do? How does speech connect to what’s happening in the brain? And what happens when something goes wrong?

[music in]

Shri: One of the research groups is focused on this understanding human vocal production. How we produce speech, other sounds like non verbal sounds like how we produce laughter and cries, but also how we use this vocal instrument to modulate and convey emotions, produce song, etc. So that's what all this group is about. And then it's one of the, I'm very proud to say, leading groups in the world that does this study of the human vocal instrument with a very disciplinary angle.

[music out]

As part of his research Shri started using an MRI machine to see what’s happening when people are singing. But Shri and his colleagues made an important modification to this particular machine.

Shri: What we've done is added audio recording capabilities there. If listeners are not familiar with MR scanners, they are very noisy.

For those who don’t know, this is what an MRI machine sounds like.

[SFX: MRI machine]

Shri: And so if you want to study sounds, how do you do that? So we have developed engineering methodologies to use optical microphones and new ways of audio processing to clean up this data so that we can actually listen to what people are saying, and singing, and so on.

Originally, Shri hadn’t even considered studying beatboxing. He wasn’t even aware of what a beatboxer was until he was in college.

Shri: My personal music inclinations and tendencies are more into the classical, particularly of the Indian kind, which have a lot of these kinds of common features.

[SFX: Indian Music Clip]

Shri: But not the 80s sort of beatboxing tradition that was happening here.

[SFX: beatboxing]

A variety of singers were studied using the MRI but a beatboxer ended up being of particular interest to Shri and his team.

Shri: We looked at it and we were blown away by the amazing choreography and the intricate coordination of these various vocal organs that were in play in creating these sounds which are sort of novel.

One of the topics Shri and his team were studying was to see if beatboxing shared any commonalities with other languages around the world?

So Shri and his team began recording beatboxers doing their various beats and clicks in the MRI.

[SFX: beatboxing in the MRI machine]

And what they found amazed them. Beatboxers were doing things not seen anywhere else.

Shri: We're finding things that they're producing that are not in any recorded world languages. We've seen some click rolls, and tongue doing some amazing gyrations and circus actually I didn't even know that was possible that people have somehow been able to acquire and consistently produce.

Shri and his team have carefully catalogued over 30 unique sounds with names like a closed tongue bass [SFX], a Lip bass [SFX], and an inward click roll [SFX].

Shri: The inward click roll, the tongue looks the trunk of an elephant that is curly it backwards. you're rolling your tongue backward, and it just seems amazing. I don't know how people do it.

[music in]

While innovative, these sounds aren’t completely alien. Shri notes some African languages and some from South East Asia have percussive elements to them.

Shri: I speak a language called Tamil, which is a Dravidian language. We have a lot of retroflex sounds, meaning turning your tongue to back, and making sounds like “uurl”or “uur” [SFX: Tamilnadu Tourist Awards 2018] , and that's pretty complex.

Shri: But when I look at these, these completely beat all those, blow it out of the water the way the beatboxers doing.

As an example Shri points to a variation on the inward click roll, one that adds a whistle.

[SFX: Beatboxing - inward click roll with whistle]

Shri: And that's amazing, actually because you not only have to do the shaping of this tongue and so on, but you also have to create the appropriate aerodynamics to create this whistling sound right. The narrow open through which you push air with a certain velocity.

[music in]

Beatboxers continue to create increasingly complex sounds. This evolution is helping Shri and his team to unlock some of the fundamental mysteries of how we communicate.

Shri: So to me, beatboxing, it's a newly acquired art form, tries to sort of emulate, or be inspired by sounds, percussive sounds particularly in the world, a lot of mechanical sounds. And people are trying to imitate and produce this. The ability to be able to translate that into action, may shed light on some novel things that may not be already present in what we have developed and evolved in producing other sounds like the ones that are found in world's languages, or other sounds that we produce for communicating other things like crying [SFX] or sighing [SFX], and so on.

Shri: And since beatboxing has a structured form to it that's evolved, it provides us a very nice framing, and potentially can give us insights into not just the physical use of this instrument, but also the underlying aspects of how we are putting this together in the brain and creating this communication ability.

[music out]

Shri says beatboxing may actually have therapeutic uses for correcting speech disorders or helping someone recover after a brain injury.

Shri: Using beatboxing itself as a therapeutic means, that's actually exciting. By exercising the ability to speak well improves in Parkinson's patients. What it underscores is that they say a lot of the various movement systems that we have as humans right like movement of our limbs for mobility, movement of these tongue and other things to speak, they all have some underlying interconnections, and while training one can impact the others.

[music in]

In a broader sense, because beatboxing is so unique, it’s given researchers a new window into who we are as a species.

Shri: When I see the ability of humans to tune, adapt, and innovate and improvise. That always, and continues to fascinate me from day one. what is also humbling is that still are knowledge gaps, and knowing about many of these underlying set of scientific principles and how to generalize this, so many open questions and that also continues to fascinate me. Can we make progress and advances using thoughtful science to understand humans, and hopefully support their experiences?

Even if those bigger questions are never fully answered, beatboxing has helped shape both the culture of Hip Hop as well as music around the world. It’s evolved into an art form that can’t be contained to a single genre.

Baba: It's something that's, for me, it's a daily part of my life. Whether I'm performing or not, I always beatbox. It's something that it just helps me with stress; it helps me just feel good, it's something that's inspiring for me.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. A sound design team that makes advertising, trailers, documentaries, games… and all kinds of stuff sound incredible. Find out more at defactosound dot com.

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

Thanks to our guest, Baba Israel. Baba conducts a workshop throughout the year teaching people how to beatbox. Find out more about Baba’s workshops and to listen to his music, check out his website baba israel dot com.

Thanks also to Shri Narayanan. Shri runs the SPAN team at the University of Southern California and you should really check out the MRI videos they’ve made of beatboxers. You can find that link in the show description.

The music in this episode is from our friends at Musicbed. Be sure to check them out at Musicbed dot com.

Finally, you can engage with me and the rest of the 20 kay team through our website, facebook, twitter or by writing hi at 20 kay dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

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Being George Clooney: Dubbing Hollywood celebrities

This episode was adapted from the documentary Being George Clooney.

Hollywood films are huge internationally. But how are these films adapted for foreign languages? We delve into the not so talked about process of dubbing. Featuring the world's most popular voice actors, directors, and producers.

Featuring: Andre Sogliuzzo, John Ptak, Shaktee Singh, Debra Chinn, Martin Umbach, Tamer Karadagli, Francesco Pannofino, Detlef Bierstedt, Marco Antonio Costa, Paul Dergarabedian, Rajesh Khattar, Christian Brückner, Emanuela Rossi, Chiara Barzini, Irene Ranzato, Claudia Urbschat-Mingues, Alexandre Gillet, Ezra Weisz, Vanessa Beltran, Samuel Labarthe, Ashwin Mushran, Chuck Mitchell, Christoph Bregler, Gabrielle Pietermann, Luise Helm, Claudia Gvirtzman Dichter, Guilherme Briggs, Samuel Labarthe, Hester Wilcox, Malavika Shivpuri, Viraj Adhav, Mona Shetty, Sheila Dorfman

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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A huge thanks to Director Paul Mariano for allowing us to create this adaptation of documentary!

Thanks to APM Music for all of the music in this episode. Find out more at apmmusic.com.

If you enjoyed this episode, you’ll love the full documentary. You can find it on iTunes or on Amazon.

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

View Transcript ▶︎

Andre Sogliuzzo: Being George Clooney is not just a voice; it's a state of mind. Right now I may not look like George Clooney, and a lot of people would argue that I don't particularly sound exactly like George Clooney, but right now, by golly, I feel like George Clooney, and that's 50% of the battle right there.

[music in]

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

[SFX: Jimmy Kimmel: "He's a multi-talented actor, director, movie star. Please welcome, George Clooney!" clip]

Andre Sogliuzzo: It's a kind of controlled, genuine handsomeness, with just a suppressed amount of glee that says, "I can't believe I'm George Clooney."

John Ptak: What is a star? When they come on the screen, it doesn't matter who else is on that screen, your eye looks over. George Clooney has it.

Shaktee Singh: George Clooney is the name of a person who's so handsome, such a great actor. I love him, love him, love him.

George Clooney is one of the most recognizable stars in Hollywood. He’s known for iconic roles like Dr. Doug Ross in ER. [SFX: ER Clip] He’s also Danny Ocean in Ocean’s Eleven… [SFX:[Ocean’s Eleven Clip]

He’s also known for his immediately recognizable voice. But George Clooney… Isn’t the only one known for George Clooney’s voice.

[music out]

Debra Chinn: They are what we refer to in the dubbing community as designated voice, so they are the designated voice of George Clooney.

Martin Umbach: I am George Clooney.

Shaktee Singh: I am George Clooney.

Tamer Karadagli: I am George Clooney.

Francesco Pannofino: George Clooney.

Detlef Bierstedt:George Clooney.

Marco Antonio Costa: George Clooney.

Those are the voices of George Clooney from around the world. They’re what’s known as dubbing actors, and they play a huge, often hidden role in the film industry. Like, for example, here’s a clip from Ocean’s Eleven.

[SFX: Oceans 11 clip foreign dubs montage]

This episode is an adaptation of the fantastic documentary “Being George Clooney”. The documentary features tons of talented dubbing artists, directors, writers, and all sorts of people from the dubbing community. We couldn’t credit every single one, but you’ll find a full list of the credits in the show description.

[SFX: Ocean 11 clip continues]

Paul Dergarabedian: Dubbers are like the back-up singers of the movie world. They're so vitally important, yet they don't get the credit they deserve, they don't often get the money they deserve.

Dubbing teams take a film or a television show and replace all of the dialogue with a different language. It’s a really important job.

Rajesh Khattar: When you adapt a movie in a local language you have widened the audience space.

Paul Dergarabedian: The box office internationally has gone up exponentially over the past 10 years, some of these movies are making 50, 60, 70% of their box office internationally, and who you cast in a particular role to dub a movie, that's a not a throwaway anymore, that can be as important to that movie as the original casting of the actor.

Christian Brückner: The dubbing business in my understanding is an art form, absolutely.

[music in]

Dubbing was originally something done in musicals. If an actor’s voice wasn’t quite up to par, another offstage singer might perform the piece to the actor’s lips. Today, dubbing has many purposes. It plays an important role not only in simply adapting film and television shows to other countries, but it’s also critical to help bridge cultural nuances around the world.

Interviewer: Which country has the best dubbers?

Emanuela Rossi: Italy. Italy.

Francesco Pannofino: Of course, Italy.

[music out]

Chiara Barzini: The real reason why Italy has such an intense dubbing tradition, is because we were forced into it.

[music in]

Debra Chinn: Really, if you look in retrospect, in Europe dubbing started as far back as the 19 … late-'20s and '30s, and a lot of that was brought on because of political reasons, it was all about propaganda.

In Italy, dubbing started out as a form of control. In the 1930’s, all foreign words were banned in the country by the dictator, Mussolini. Films had all the spoken parts removed and were replaced with inaccurate, often ridiculous subtitles. But, there was one big problem.

Irene Ranzato: The Italian population at the time was one-fifth illiterate;

Chiara Barzini: They didn’t even know what was going on because they couldn’t actually read the subtitles, so the idea of being able to dub a film was conceived.

After World War II, dubbing spread to many different countries, each for its own reasons.

Claudia Urbschat-Mingues: After the World War the Americans and the French, British, wanted to show their movies in Germany, and this was only possible if they dubbed the movies.

Alexandre Gillet: In France we have a very long history of dubbing after World War II it was a way for us to protect our culture and our language.

Debra Chinn: Latin America is a little different, they started dubbing in the '40s, during that time the American movie business they were really popular with westerns, and cowboys, and they had a lot of Latin characters in that [SFX: western shooting clip]. They started to bring Latin actors into the U.S., and then all of a sudden they realized they had a Latin audience, but the audience didn’t speak English. Then they moved the dubbing studios out to Latin America, and that's how Latin America got their start.

[music out]

Chiara Barzini: The people who were called in to do the dubbing were theater actors, because they were like, well, we might as well have actors do the dubbing. That's how it all started.

On its surface, dubbing might seem like a relatively straightforward process. You hire some actors, they stand around a microphone, and read the lines in front of them. But dubbing is actually a lot more complicated than that.

[music in]

Ezra Weisz: The process usually is multi-tiered. The script is given to a translator, and then when you read the translated script it makes very little sense.

Irene Ranzato: All translations need a certain amount of change and manipulation in order to accommodate the target culture.

Ezra Weisz: Then that script once it's translated, it's handed over to an adaptor, that adaptor has the most tedious job in the history of the world.

Vanessa Beltran: Who spends hours and hours working on the text that the actors will say.

Ezra Weisz: Taking all the lines that have been translated and now making them fit within the mouth movements of the actors.

[music out]

This is the french dub from the film Up in the Air.

[SFX: French “Up in the Air” clip]

Vanessa Beltran: This is why dubbing is the art of illusion. We have to create the illusion that the film was shot in French.

This is from The Ides of March.

[SFX: French “Ides of March” clip]

Translating a film takes a lot of finesse. English is a very precise language. You can say a lot in very few words, and that’s not the case with every language.

Samuel Labarthe: For one English word we need three French words, and they’ve got to be … to keep it synced with the mouth, with the lips.

[Clip from French The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring]

This is from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

[SFX: Clip from French The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring continued]

There’s also the unique challenge of translating local sayings to another culture.

Ashwin Mushran: You’ve got to wrack your brains, what is the closest thing you put, because there's nothing in this particular language that matches this in English.

Alexandre Gillet: We don't have the same expressions, and this is very difficult to translate.

Rajesh Khattar: I was dubbing for Gerard Butler, Angelina Jolie says that, "Did you arrange for a car?" He says, "Piece of cake." [SFX: “Piece of cake” clip]. She's asking that, "Did you arrange for a car. Why is he saying … he's talking about cake?"

Chuck Mitchell: In Poland when we worked Shrek, Donkey keeps being annoying, Shrek says, "You're going the right way for a smack bottom." Well, in Poland the dub said, "If you keep that up, I'm going to take you to the slaughterhouse." To me, I thought, "That's a little gruesome for a children's film. Don't you think?" They explained that, "Oh, in Poland it's always funny that when donkeys get too annoying we would take them to the slaughterhouse.”

[SFX: Polish Shrek clip]

[music in]

Completing a properly translated script is a ton of work. When it’s finished, it’s finally time for the voice actors to step into the recording studio.

Christoph Bregler: When you have big budgets to do a movie dub, what happens usually is you get your voice talents into the studio, and the film is cut up into small snippets, like maybe just a sentence.

[SFX Dubbing session - Oceans 11 scene]

Christoph Bregler: It's looped again, and again, and again.

[SFX Dubbing session - Oceans 11 scene]

Christoph Bregler: Loop, loop, loop.

Claudia Urbschat-Mingues: It's not easy, but it's still a lot of fun, a lot of fun for me.

[music out]

There are a lot of unique challenges dubbing actors face during the recording process, both technical and artistic.

[music in]

Gabrielle Pietermann: There are skills involved in doing our job. We know nothing about the dialogues until we enter the studio. We just have seconds to learn all the words, and all the emotions, and the rhythm that happen on screen. That's not that easy.

That’s Gabrielle Pietermann. She’s the German voice of Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films.

[music out]

[SFX: German Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone clip]

There was one particularly challenging aspect of recreating Emma Watson’s voice though. Watson’s original performance of the role has a lot of breaths, which is really challenging for a voice actor to perform.

[SFX: German clip from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire]

Martin Umbach: All the sighs, all the sobs, all the breaths, everything, everything that comes out of the mouth is being dubbed, not only the words.

[SFX: Hermione mouth sounds]

[music in]

The challenges don’t stop there though. Piracy is an increasing concern throughout the film industry. Studios are putting more and more security measures into place to avoid any leaks, and it’s having an interesting effect on the way dubbing is done.

Claudia Urbschat-Mingues: They were asking me to do a movie, and I said, "Okay, no problem, I can do it." " Yeah, but this is a little bit different because you're not to know anything about the movie, you're not supposed to talk about, you're not even supposed to see anything." I said, "Okay." I came into the studio and everything was dark, and even on the screen it was dark, and then at one point, whoops, there was a little, little hole where you could peek in and you see a mouth, and that was supposed to be my mouth, and even the script, all names are changed, and everything is top secret. I did the movie, and I really didn’t even know what I was doing.

[music out]

[SFX: German The Matrix: Reloaded clip]

This is from The Matrix Reloaded.

[SFX: German The Matrix: Reloaded clip continues]

Luise Helm: With Megan Fox, with Transformers, we hadn't seen anything of the footage.

[SFX: Clip from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen]

Claudia Gvirtzman Dichter: They said they were going to just give me the mouths, because that's all we dub, which is a total misunderstanding of what we do. You need the eyes, you need the expression, you need the movement, there's a subtext which is much more important. The dialogue is the dialogue, but then there's this subtext. What are they really saying? That's what you have to capture.

Guilherme Briggs: I have directed Transformers 1, 2 and 3, I’m Optimus Prime too [SFX: Optimus Prime Brazilian clip]. Transformers had that closure, and the mouth you cannot see. I don't understand the scene. I have to ask Mr. Bay. They told me at the production of Michael Bay, "Please, are you going to talk with Mr. Bay?" No explosion jokes, no boom jokes, he doesn’t like that." "Oh, okay, I'm not going to do any boom jokes." Because Michael Bay likes to, blah, explode things [SFX: explosions]" You're joking." "No, no, it's serious. Please, no boom jokes, no explosion jokes. Okay?" "Okay."

[music in]

There’s a pattern of misunderstanding and underappreciation throughout dubbing’s history. Voice actors put the same sort of physical emotion into their work as the actors on camera. Like with any acting, it’s about creating a powerful, believable performance.

Luise Helm: What I do is, I stand up when the actress stands, I will sit down when the actress sits down, because that kind of changes your voice as well. When she's running, I'll probably stand there and do like awkward little movements, and when you're kissing you're obviously kissing your hand, which always looks so ridiculous, especially when your partner is standing next to you, and you're like, "Hmm-hmm."

Claudia Urbschat-Mingues: What you see on screen is what counts, and the rest, how you get there, nobody asks.

[music out]

Samuel Labarthe: I think we should know how to act before dubbing.

[SFX: Clip of Samuel in La Conquete in France]

Samuel Labarthe: When you're dubbing, it's hard work, it's a job, really.

[SFX: Clip of Samuel in dubbing session]

Samuel Labarthe: If we stick correctly to the actors, it's just magic, because he expressed, and we speak.

[SFX: French The Descendants clip]

This is from The Descendants.

[SFX: French The Descendants clip continued]

[music out]

Hester Wilcox: I have evolved into being a voice artist. I don't think I ever really decided to be one. I didn’t actually know that existed, and most people don't. Do they? It's a sort of an obscure job.

[music in]

Claudia Urbschat-Mingues: People look at you when you're from the dubbing industry, and you're in a movie they say like, "I'm sorry, but you're a dubbing person."

Luise Helm:"Oh, you're more the dubbing kind of actor. Are you?" Alexandre Gillet: To be a good dubbing actor you have to be a real actor.

French Male: Because it's not about the good voice or perfect diction, it's about acting. It is about becoming the particular character at a particular moment.

Claudia Gvirtzman Dichter: I personally like to cast theater actors because it's not dubbing, it's acting with a technical expertise. Malavika Shivpuri: I completely get into the character. I can feel if the character is crying, I feel it and I have tears in my eyes. This is the Portuguese dub of Interstellar.

[SFX: Portuguese Interstellar clip]

Malavika Shivpuri: People think that, do you know what, it's just a dub that you're performing.

[SFX: Portuguese Interstellar clip continued]

Malavika Shivpuri: I do feel we are not appreciated as much as we should be.

Dubbing actors are artists, but they’re craft is often overlooked. In countries around the world though, dubbing actors are beloved for bringing life to iconic roles. Their impact even goes far beyond just entertainment. We’ll hear how they’ve changed cultures around the world, and even saved some films from financial failure, in just a minute.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

When a movie is dubbed to a local language, it’s not just about bringing it to another country. It’s also a cultural exchange. Styles, attitudes, and beliefs from one culture are communicated to another through that film.

Malavika Shivpuri: There's a huge audience for these American movies which are dubbed in Hindi.

[SFC: Hindi Fast and Furious 6 clip]

Viraj Adhav: A lot of people know a lot of American culture I should say. Thanks to these, all the Hollywood films that are dubbed in Hindi.

Malavika Shivpuri: Clothes and food, and everything, lots of things you get to see in the films.

Viraj Adhav: Everyone knows a lot about American culture, this happens. In America, it doesn’t here, oh, this is cool, the American way is cool.

[music out]

Tamer Karadagli: If people are wearing jeans today in Turkey, that's because of the American movies, people are eating hamburgers, people are going to Starbucks. They're sitting with the laptops and everything, that's what they saw in the movies.

Mona Shetty: Definitely America is exporting its culture to other countries. I think in some countries that's very welcome, perhaps in some countries it isn't.

[SFX: French Transformers clip]

Samuel Labarthe: I ask myself, "Is it good? Is it bad?" It's your way of living, is your way of thinking, it's your way to behave, and we have to keep our specificities, and our tradition, our culture, but it's very difficult.

[music in]

One of the ways a country can put their own mark on foreign films is through their dubbing artists. Audiences have strong connections with their local actors, to the point that many roles are inseparable from the performer that dubbed them.

Luise Helm: I grew up with watching Robert De Niro movies with the voice of Christian Brückner.

This is a clip from Meet the Parents.

[SFX: German Meet the Parents Clip]

Christian Brückner: In the case of De Niro, I'm connected with him, and that of course is because of the long, long time I gave him voice here in Germany.

This is Taxi Driver.

[SFX: German Taxi Driver clip]

Luise Helm: I remember the first time I watched a film with Robert De Niro in the original language, and I have to admit, I was actually maybe a little bit disappointed.

[music out]

[SFX: Taxi Driver clip]

German/American Male: Well, when I grew up in Germany my favorite filmmaker was Woody Allen.

This is from Annie Hall.

[SFX: German Annie Hall]

German/American Male: I was surprised when I came to the U.S. and finally saw the original Woody Allen movies, the title changed from Der Stadtneurotiker to Annie Hall, and Woody Allen was speaking with a different pitch, like sort of dub-like or how queaky his voice is.

[SFX: Annie Hall clip]

Martin Umbach: Fans and moviegoers in general, I think, do associate stars, movie stars with certain voices.

The most successful dubbing artists are so ingrained in a culture that they can become the designated voice for a Hollywood actor.

Debra Chinn: For as long as an actor is popular in Hollywood, and they're releasing films, and then getting dubbed, and then getting released, they're going to go ahead and hire the designated artist. John Ptak: There are a number of careers where people have played the role of that actor, all the way through the entire career of the actor. That tells you the importance of that person, because the voice is part of that hero or character.

This clip is from O Brother Where Art Thou.

[SFX: German “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” clip]

[music in]

Designated artists establish a deeply intimate relationship with the original actor’s voice. They may even know that voice better than the actors themselves.

Luise Helm: When I'm dubbing, let's say, Scarlett Johansson, you notice so many little details, it's like you're breathing through that person.

Claudia Urbschat-Mingues : Angelina Jolie only does a movie like every other year, and I like to do her because she's very … in my opinion she's very near to me. I did "Girl, Interrupted" and I thought that's it, that's me. I want to play this role.

Alexandre Gillet: I like Elijah Wood because he's Elijah Wood, he's a very nice actor, and very sensitive.

Sheila Dorfman: Sandra Bullock, because I dubbed all of her movies, and I know her, I know the way she breathes, the way she talks, everything about her.

Marco Antonio Costa: We have this feeling. I have this feeling of the friendship, like we are friends.

[music out]

Today, dubbing has a bigger impact on the film industry than ever before. Markets around the world are growing, offering new opportunities for film distribution. These markets can even save a film that might otherwise have struggled financially.

Paul Dergarabedian: The people who are dubbing these roles, they're on a bigger stage than ever before, being heard by more people than ever before; in a marketplace that values what they do. If they don't, they should, because they're a big part of the success of these movies. It's the international that brings in two-thirds of the worldwide box office.

[SFX: German “After Earth” clip]

Paul Dergarabedian: We take a movie like "After Earth" with Will Smith, it didn’t do that well in North America, huge business overseas. Often that international box office can save the day.

[SFX: German Battleship clip]

Paul Dergarabedian: Battleship, John Carter, these are movies that if you just took their North America box office, would be totally money losers, but become money winners, because of the international marketplace.

But dubbing teams hardly ever get recognition for the massive role they play in a film’s success.

[SFX: French Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring]

Alexandre Gillet: Very often people ask me, "Oh, you did Frodo, because they recognize the main voice character, Elijah Wood. Even if they like your voice… Even if they like how you act, if they like your personality… The hero is the one you see, not really is the one you hear.

[music in]

Luise Helm: People combine my voice with a different face, and that's interesting, but it's like they see the face, that's what they see, and you kind of … Yeah, sometimes maybe just want to have the whole package.

Chiara Brazini: It's kind of frustrating living your life in the shadow. Even just the idea of being in a dark room for six to eight hours, and you're just sitting in the studios, on the ground sometimes, and no one knows your face, and you feel like you're a part of this production, but you're not really in the picture.

Rajesh Khattar: The voice artist definitely needs to be recognized for their work, and which is unfortunately not happening.

It’s often worse than an artist not receiving as much recognition as they should. Most of the time, dubbing teams don’t receive any recognition at all.

Malavika Shivpuri: I mean, if your voice for a movie is released in the theater in Hindi, we don't even have our names in the credit, you don't get the credit that this character has been voiced by this character.

Rajesh Khattar: In the dubbed version the dubbing artist is never mentioned, the dubbing studio is never mentioned, the credit is never there.

[music out]

Chuck Mitchell: Voice actors have it tough, they are OS, they're off screen, and because they're off screen, you think, "Oh, I can easily replace this person, because all I need is a new voice, I don't need a new face, I don't need a new anything." Well, let's just cast another, and there's lots of people who'd love to do this.

[SFX: French Star Wars Phantom Menace clip]

Samuel Labarthe: Once, I had to dub Liam Neeson in Star Wars. When first being asked to do this they proposed me the minimal fee, the minimal fee for Star Wars. They said, "Well, there's many actors who will be thrilled to do your job." They count on, we were so enthusiastic to dub Star Wars, it was like, the first Star Wars I saw I was 12 of 13 years old, so it was a dream.

[SFX: French Stars War Phantom Menace clip]

Samuel Labarthe: Okay, it was good, but it was the minimal fee.
Martin Umbach: Dubbing is an absolute necessity to market movies in this country, millions and millions and millions are being made, at least with the Blockbuster movies, but the big studios who put out the movies, they buy their entrance ticket to the German market with small change from their pocket, comparatively. It is totally ridiculous.

Rajesh Khattar: They are making the kind of money which probably they would not have been if the language of the movie was restricted to being in English.

In general, dubbing studios and artists have not earned the artistic or financial recognition they deserve. But things are starting to change. The dubbing community is slowly earning more credit for their critical role in the film industry.

[music in]

Debra Chinn: I think it was true that dubbing was looked down upon, but I think it's changing. I think it's changing because the film and the entertainment world is changing, and we're becoming more international, and we're becoming more global.

Paul Dergarabedian: On a big-budget movie, every component of that movie is vitally important, and now dubbing has become a really important part of that, because that's the voice of the movie internationally.

John Ptak: These movies in the English language, they are dubbed, they are shipped out everywhere in the world, and they resonate in each one of those countries, there has to be a reason.

[SFX: Montage of dubbing sessions]

[music out]

Dubbing artists are the some of unsung heroes of the film industry. Their work spreads cultural ideas, brings new life to old films, and, most importantly, they entertain audiences around the world.

[music in]

Claudia Razzi: I love my job, it's a beautiful job. I've been doing it for 40 years now and I keep on loving it, and always I find it fantastic.

Gabrielle Pietermann: The job never gets boring. You get to dive into new roles every day, and you never know what to expect.

Martin Umbach: The most joyful thing in dubbing is the feeling that you are part of the big filmmaking family of the world.

Shaktee Singh: I'll keep on seeing film, I live with the film, I'll die with the film. I mean, a great art.

Sheila Dorfman: We love to do it. This is the point, we love what we do.

Christian Brückner: It was a good life I had in this business. I really liked what I did.

Debra Chinn: We're becoming a very, very small place, and we all are different tribes with different languages, and different histories, so I really, really, really believe dubbing is a good way to bridge the communication.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

This episode was an audio adaptation of the documentary, Being George Clooney. If you enjoyed this episode, you’ll love the full documentary. You can find it on iTunes or on Amazon.

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

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

A huge thanks to Director Paul Mariano for allowing us to create this adaptation of his wonderful documentary, “Being George Clooney”. This episode featured many talented voice actors, writers, directors, and all sorts of people from the dubbing community. A special thanks to each and every one of them for the important work they do. You can find the complete credits in the show description and on our website.

Finally, you can reach out to me and the rest of the 20 kay team through our website, facebook, twitter or by writing hi at 20 kay dot org. We love hearing from our listeners, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

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The Xbox Startup Sound: Crafting a console classic

This episode was written & produced by Rob Sachs.

The Xbox startup sound is an audio logo that’s become synonymous with the game console. But its origins are rooted in solving a logistical problem; how to entertain gamers while they wait for their machines to finish booting up. Featuring Sound Designer and Composer Brian Schmidt and Sound Designer, Composer and Berklee Professor, Michael Sweet.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Magic (Instrumental) by Icelandia
Cities by Utah
Silver by Eric Kinny
Minack by Echelon Effect
Higher by Chad Lawson
Back Against the Wall (Instrumental) by Ruslan
Blueprint by Eric Kinny
Thirty Thousandairs by Rad Wolf
Ringing through the night by Benjamin James
Reaching Out by Steven Gutheinz
Look Up by Watermark High

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Xbox One X Start Up]

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

[SFX : Halo 5 Sounds on Xbox One]

Video games have been leading the charge of what’s possible when it comes to sound. Let’s just a take a second to marvel at just how gorgeous this scene from Halo 5 sounds. Even if you’re not into games, it is an industry filled with inspiring stories of overcoming incredible technical hurdles… all while pushing the boundaries of creativity.

Microsoft has been a huge part of gaming. We all know about the Xbox, but might not remember that it didn’t even exist until 2001, waaay after all of the others major players.

[SFX: Old console montage]

So, how did the Xbox gain such a strong identity so quickly. I mean, tons of consoles have come and gone. [SFX: Montage of failed console commercials] How was Microsoft able to gain so much traction so quickly? Well, they did it, in part, with its iconic startup sequence.

[SFX: Xbox One X Startup]

[music in]

That was the Xbox one X startup sound... But turning on an Xbox didn’t always sound like this. The startup sequence slowly evolved from its early days with the original Xbox, into the Xbox 360, the Xbox One and now the Xbox One X. How has the sonic landscape changed with each new generation of the console? In order to find out, lets first rewind to 2001, with the launch of the original Xbox.

[music out]

[SFX: Halo:Combat Evolved Main Menu Theme]

The original Xbox had incredible graphics and sound. Halo was an impressive demonstration of what this new console could bring to the table.

[SFX: Halo 1]

However, the Xbox was the new console on the scene and there was major competition. Microsoft needed to establish their identity from the moment the player pushed the on button.

[SFX: Xbox Original Boot Up]

That’s the sound the original Xbox made when you first powered it on. The creator of this sound is Brian Schmidt. Brian is a legendary sound designer and composer who got his start all the way back in 1987.

[music in]

Brian: I have two or three basic things that I do. I write music and I do sound design. In addition, I also am really involved in game audio education.

Brian always had two passions in his life, the first being music.

Brian: So music has always been a part of my life, growing up playing. Whether it's in a rock band or playing in baroque trio sonatas with my parents.

But during college a new interest sparked.

Brian: I went to school as a music major and while I was in school I discovered music technology which was pretty unusual back then, back in 1980 when I was at Northwestern and thought it was so cool I decided to actually get two undergraduate degrees. One in music and one in computer science

Turns out those were just the right credentials for a company that was trying to add in some high tech glitz to a relatively low tech game.

[music out]

Brian: A friend of mine that I had met through the computer music studio at NorthWestern there said, "Hey, we have a job opening at this game company. We need somebody who can write an assembly language and also write music and do sound effects for this pinball company. And I was very excited because I had spent my entire life playing pinball. My mom used to get mad at me for spending all my time playing pinball. So I was really thrilled and really excited.

[SFX: Music from Black Knight 2000]

Eventually, Brian moved on to even more challenging projects.

Brian: I did Madden [SFX] on Nintendo for a number of years and things like that and games like that are Strike and Jungle Strike for Sega Genesis [SFX], Super Nintendo, ultimately the Sony PlayStation [SFX].

Around that time Microsoft started calling me and said, "Hey, we know you have a big audio technology background. We're looking for somebody to head up our game technology division at Microsoft."

[music in]

At the time, Microsoft had developed a number of advances in gaming software which they called Direct-X. This software allowed for a more interactive gaming experience. It did things like - heighten the functionality of controllers and speakers. Now, Microsoft was looking to leverage all these new features into a new product.

Brian: Their idea was, essentially let's take these Direct X technologies that we have, put them into something that looks like game console or make it a game console and call it the Direct Xbox. That's where the Xbox comes from, was the internal code name Direct X, Xbox. And so that was really the genesis of where Microsoft soiree into the hardware business for games came from.

[music out]

The two heads at Microsoft were Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer... and they loved this idea - but they didn’t want to wait very long to see it come to market.

Brian: Literally from the day that Bill and Steve gave the green light to do the Xbox, to hitting the store shelves was only 18 months. So everything had to be done just lightening fast and really, really quickly. Decisions were fast.

The tight deadline was just one of many challenges for Brian and actually not even the most pressing.

Brian: So we really wanted this to be just like any other piece of consumer electronics equipment. You push the button and it turns on instantly. Well it turns on instantly is not really instantly. It does take some time for a hard drive to go from not moving to spinning to where you can actually read data off of them.

This is a big problem. A boot up screen gives the player feedback that the console is working properly. However, they needed the hard drive already fully spinning before they could even start the boot up sequence.

Brian: You can't access a hard drive that's not spinning at it's full speed. You literally can't read data off of it. So that means during that boot sequence the hard drive doesn't exist.

The eureka moment came when he realized he didn’t have to even bother with the hard drive at all.

Brian: So like, "Well what about some memory chips on the board itself?" And it's like, "Yes, there's a memory chip on the board." There's one memory chip which is a total of 256 kilobytes in size.

[music in]

One measly 256 kilobyte memory chip. To put this into perspective one megabyte is equal to 1000 kilobytes. There was 128 megabytes of memory in the first generation iphone. So, we’re talking tiny tiny bits of memory by today’s standard. And he didn’t even get to use all 256 kilobytes in the memory.

Brian: The operating system of the Xbox was about 150 or 160k. Well they had to add the art animations to that. After they did that, it turned out that there was about 28 kilobytes left for sound. So the entire Xbox boot sound, somehow had to be done with 28 kilobytes.

So now we’re talking about a really, really tiny amount of memory.

[music out]

Brian: So, what sounds can I make easily? And let me see how I can use those." So I'll give a great example, the very opening of that Xbox sound there's this fade in and the Xbox sound starts with a "wah!" [SFX]. What that sound is, is literally a low pitched sawtooth wave where I could programmatically start the filter cut off very, very low.

Like 20 Hertz, something like that and then over the course of about a three quarters of a second, I could open it all the way.

[SFX: Sawtooth wave sound]

Not only was the sound easy to produce - it fit perfectly into the mood he was trying to achieve.

Brian: "WAH!" [SFX]. It's literally putting more energy into the sound because as your no longer filtering off the highs, you're adding more energy. So that met the aesthetic of this breathing forth of energy from nothingness that wants to burst into your living room and the cool thing about it was that I can calculate a saw tooth wave really cheaply in code and I don't have to store a sawtooth wave. So I wrote a little bit of C code to generate a sawtooth wave [SFX]. I generated a triangle wave [SFX], I generated a big long list of random numbers that I used as white noise [SFX].

And there was juuuust enough space to put in some more organic sounds.

Brian: I have the very, very beginning about a quarter of a second or a half a second of a thunder clap. So, "Pew!" [SFX].

So now I've got my power. I've got sawtooth [SFX], I've got triangle [SFX], I've got white noise [SFX], I've got a thunder sound [SFX], I actually wrote a little bit of code to reverse it so now I have a reversed thunder sound, "Pew!"[SFX]. And I have my glockenspiel [SFX].

All that was left was to sync it with the visuals. So, Brian took out a camcorder, taped the sequence, and began taking notes.

Brian: At this many seconds in the X appears, at this many seconds the whoosh happens, at this many seconds the blob expands or whatever it was and then I wrote this sequence of notes and synthesis control parameters like filter controls that use this sawtooth [SFX] wave and explosion and so on. I wrote thunder clap [SFX] in a way that matched the visuals. So those early wob wob wob wob wob [SFX], that’s actually a triangle wave [SFX] with a fairly high frequency LFO on both pitch and volume [SFX] and that gives it this wob wob pew pew pew kind of sound [SFX].

And in the end it all just kind of worked...The original Xbox debuted on November 15th, 2001 and went on to sell more than 24 million units.

But just a few years later, advances in technology made all that work on the startup sound kind of …obsolete.

[music in]

Brian: There was actually a Titanic shift in game audio that occurred with the PlayStation two and the original Xbox and that was when games started shipping on DVDs. That was really the point where the technique of having to use little synthesizers inside the game consoles, that really went away 'cause with DVD's there was plenty of room on the disc where you could go record 90 minutes of original score with Chicago symphony...

[music out]

[SFX: Chicago Symphony]

and have 5000 lines of dialogue...

[SFX: Mass Effect 2 Dialogue]

and lots of high fidelity affects.

[SFX: Sci Fi Cinematic Charge Up]

Memory no longer became an issue.

[music in]

But there was a new problem to solve. How could Microsoft widen the appeal of the Xbox for its next console? And what did this mean for its start up sound?

We’ll find out, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[SFX: Xbox Original Startup]

Brian Schmidt created one of the most iconic sounds in gaming. It was the start up sound for the original Xbox. But, it sounded very sci-fi and futuristic. So, when it was time to develop the next generation of the Xbox. Microsoft was ready for a new direction.

Michael: They wanted to change from a branding perspective and how they wanted to change their audience from being, say, the 14-year-old boy to more inclusive of gender, less sort of sci-fi.

That's Michael Sweet, a sound designer and composer who also teaches film scoring at Berklee in Boston. He was tasked to creating the startup sound for the Xbox 360.

[SFX: Xbox 360 Boot Up]

Microsoft had a new challenge. It was to grow the gamer base ...and they couldn't do that by only focusing on one niche demographic. They also knew that they wanted this startup sound to be used as a marketing tool.

Michael: So they wanted this detachable sound logo that they could put across all their branding. We tried to create a detachable two-second logo at the end which they could then take and move to any piece of their branding. So the end of a commercial, if they were advertising a Madden game at the very end, you'd hear a two-second logo.

[SFX: EA Sports audio logo]

Michael: And obviously Play Station was a big competitor of theirs, and Sega to some extent. Both had logos, detachable little second, two-second logos that they would play at the end of their commercials.

[SFX: Final Fantasy Playstation Logo]

[SFX: Sonic the Hedgehog Sega Logo]

Michael: Xbox really didn't have anything like that at the time. So this was going to be their sound to sort of market their products and be the defining thing that really helped brand the experience of playing on the Xbox.

Michael was told that not only did this audio logo have to be iconic, but it also had to be inclusive.

Michael: They wanted to bring in these other demographics, and make it much more open, a much more open space to play in.

[SFX: Xbox 360 Kinect Commercial]

So going sort of from dark to light was one of the things that they talked a lot about.

They also wanted to get across this idea of sort of powered by human energy, so that the box was kind of living on its own.

So what does something powered by human energy sound like? Michael and his team started experimenting.

Michael: There was a direction called symphony, The way people play together in a symphony, and strangely symphony has become part of other logos. But we didn't eventually go into the sort of symphonic direction, although you can hear some strings in the launch. Like strings tuning up. There's some brands out there that kind of use that as their logo.

[SFX: Orchestra strings tuning up]

Michael: We kind of explored a little bit in that direction and didn't think it was quite right. We explored voices. We spent a lot of time trying different logos out that used vocal elements, whether they were sung vocals or just saying "Xbox 360" in different languages, to kind of pull together different culturally regions from around the world and things like that.

We explored kind of an architecture direction and a nature direction.

For weeks they’d demo ideas to figure out what worked.

Michael: We'd move it closer to one thing or another. One thing that ended up being very important was the breath at the end.

[SFX: Xbox startup sound breath]

[music in]

Michael: And the breath signifies a couple different things. It talks about how this box is sort of powered by human energy, so when you get to the end of the logo, and on top of the sort of tonal stuff that you hear, you actually hear an inhale [SFX], right? The box itself looks like it's inhaling, right? You have this concave shape.

It was also important to create a sense of movement within the sound.

Michael: This spinning ball logo that kind of moved in 3-D toward you and moved from this place of darkness to lightness. And so we tried to start, obviously, maybe with lower pitches moving up to this sonic ending to kind of create the illusion of going from, say, dark to light.

[music out]

[SFX: Xbox startup sound]

That startup sound had a good 5 year run, however the influence of Michaels original design can still be heard in future Xbox startup sequences. There was a revision to the Xbox 360 startup in 2010 [SFX: 2010 Xbox 360 Start Up] and then the startup for the Xbox One in 2013 [SFX: Xbox One Startup].

Fast forward to November 2017 and the Xbox One X is released.

[SFX: Xbox One X Startup]

Michael: The logo's gotten way more electronic over the years. They've taken those sort of initial things, and it's become much more electronic, you know wherever a brand is at a specific moment in time is different than how it might be two years later or three years later.

[music in]

Microsoft continues to evolve the visuals and sound of their brand. Michael says the startup sounds from each new generation of XBOX are a reflection of where Microsoft is at the moment.

He says nowadays we may have even gotten to the point where the entire startup sound itself has become obsolete.

Michael: Who turns their game consoles on and off anymore? They're always on, and so you rarely hear kind of a startup sound in the way that you used to on devices.

[music out]

[music in]

Although technological advancements have created less restrictions, that’s not to say video game sound designers have it easy these days. With each new advancement in technology comes new problems...and the possibilities for both success and failure are infinite.

Brian: I just enjoy this fact that I feel like we're in film in the 20s where we just don't know what we're doing and we're making it up as we go along. Discovering things that are great and discovering things that, "Oh, man. I wish that I hadn't tried that. I'm embarrassed that game shipped."

Brian says just as games consoles evolve, so should the craft of game sound design. His dream is a future where new composers and new sound designers don’t have to start from scratch like he did.

Brian: Were tripping over the same kinds of issues. There's a lot of technology involved with games. It's much, much better now than it was back in the Xbox days but even now, there's a lot of technology that goes into making game music and lots of technical constraints that you have particularly, for example a sound designer, challenges that we don't have if we're doing traditional linear media.

[music out]

[music in]

In the end, whether it’s about solving a technical problem or creating something iconic and marketable, Brian says there’s a higher purpose to what game sound design does.

Brian: If you look at the neurophysiology of sound and the neurobiology of sound there are fewer neuro processing paths between your nerve cells in your ear and your frontal cortex than there are, for example, in the visual system. There's more processing that goes on and so music and sound, I think, have this ability to sort of tweak you emotionally in a way that visualists can't. You know they say "a pictures worth a thousand words." I would say "a sound is worth a thousand pictures." At the end of the day it's really about moving people with sound.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defactosound dot com.

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

Thanks to our guest, Brian Schmidt. Brian puts on a conference every year called Game Sound Con, which brings 350 composers, musicians, and game sound designers to LA to learn about the intersection of music and tech. Find out the details at game sound con dot com.

Thanks also to Michael Sweet. Michael teaches film scoring at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and he’s also a full time composer.

The music in this episode is from of our friends at Musicbed. ...and now you can also use their music! For the first time ever they now have membership plans. Check it out and sign up at music.20k.org.

Finally, you can engage with me and the rest of the 20 kay team through our website, facebook, twitter or by writing hi at 20 kay dot org. Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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Theater for the Mind: The Golden Age of radio dramas

This episode originally aired on Imaginary Worlds. Go subscribe!

The "golden age of radio drama" may have been a stellar period for storytelling -- but the stories weren't all golden bright. Sci-fi and horror radio dramas explored deep anxieties people felt from the Depression through the Cold War, and set the stage for later stories that couldn't be told yet without special effects. Eric Molinsky of the podcast Imaginary Worlds co-hosts this episode as we hear from historians like Neil Verma and Richard J. Hand, and radio drama veterans like Dirk Maggs and Richard Toscan. Plus Emory Braswell recalls the day he thought Martians invaded New Jersey. 

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: radio drama starts playing for a few seconds, cues up a transmission from outer space. Effect intro line of the show to fit in the old radio drama...]

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

[music start]

The first radio broadcasts began about a hundred years ago. At the time, some people thought that radio technology was a novelty. They believed it was too complicated to be useful. But over time, radio technology became smaller, cheaper, and easier to operate. Eventually there was a radio in every household and every car.

And it wasn’t just music or news like today, there were full fledged dramatic stories on the radio. When you listen to drama instead of watching it, it forces you to dive headfirst into your imagination.

In this episode, we’re going to take a trip back in time to when radio dramas were king.

[music out]

We made this episode with our friend Eric Molinsky of Imaginary Worlds, which is an amazing podcast about the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Here’s Eric.

[bring in the SFX from the show….]

When Emory Braswell was growing up in the 1930’s, he used to love listening to radio drama serials.

Emory: I listened to The Shadow [SFX] and The Lone Ranger [SFX], Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy [SFX].

But Emory’s parents restricted the amount of radio he could listen to – especially at night -- although, they always made exceptions if Joe Louis was boxing, or if the President was addressing the nation.

And then one night [SFX: crickles cirp as call pulls up] in October 1938, Emory heard his father’s Model-A Ford pull up to the house, and he thought he heard the Franklin Roosevelt on the radio.

[SFX: War of the Worlds Clip]

Emory: So I ran down and got in the car and my mother was sitting there too. I said, "What's happening?" He said, "Well, there's some kind of story going on about an invasion. We're being invaded by Mars or something." My father sounded skeptical [SFX: clip continues]. So I listened to it, and sure enough there was somebody supposedly from either the state department or the “gub-mint”, as my family would say, talking about a meteor that had crashed in New Jersey and there were beings coming out of it and they were destroying all the local militia and stuff [SFX: clip continues]. One of the fascinating parts about the program was it was a music program and they would interrupt the music for many bulletins coming from Jersey.

[SFX: War of the Worlds bulletins]

I was just wide eyed listening to it, trying to decide, is this all happening or not? My father was kind of skeptical because when it was over with, he says, "I think it's a hoax." As I said, the business about the music going on and bulletins coming made it seem much more real [SFX: Bulletin clip]. Then when the program was over, it seemed to go back to regular programming, and we could understand, and we listened for further announcements and nothing came. So my father said, "That proves it's a hoax." I took it seriously.

[music start]

Eventually learned that they were listening to War of the Worlds, adapted by Orson Welles.

Neil Verma teaches radio history at Northwestern University. He says there’s a reason why young Emory Braswell thought he heard FDR during the show.

Neil: There's a moment in the War of the World's broadcast where the Secretary of the Interior comes on the microphone on the world of the fiction and originally, that piece was written to be not the Secretary of the Interior, but President Roosevelt. The CBS Network said, "No, no, no, you can't have President Roosevelt's voice if it's not actually President Roosevelt. People will get confused; we'll get in trouble. We can't do it." Orson Welles says, "Okay, well, we'll change it to the Secretary of the Interior." Then, the actor who portrayed the role goes up to Welles, according to legend and says, "Well, I don't know how the Secretary of the Interior sounds." Welles says, "Don't worry. He sounds just like Roosevelt."

Richard: I mean that's the achievement of War of the Worlds, it sounds like the weather forecast, it sounds like a radio show playing music and then gradually it shifts.

Thats Richard J. Hand. He teaches radio drama at The University of East Anglia in the UK.

Richard: And I think that's one reason it had such impact, is that understanding, we can take a genre and jump a form, and use the structures, and formula, and conventions of another form in order to tell a story.

When we think about pop culture in the 20th century, we tend to focus on movies, TV or pop music. It’s easy to forget that radio was the dominant form of entertainment for decades. There were hit shows in every genre, but science fiction in particular kept pushing the boundaries of what the medium could do.

And these radio dramas laid the groundwork for stories that couldn’t be done on film for decades because special effects weren’t good enough. In some ways, they’re like the missing cultural link between genre fiction, and the movies and shows we watch today. But they’re also stand-alone works of audio art that could play with our imagination in ways that the printed word and the visual image never could.

There is such a rich history of sound in radio dramas. They capture your imagination in a special way. It’s really a unique experience compared to watching a movie. So, let’s starting by zooming out and looking at the big picture. When did the golden age of radio dramas really start?

They really seem to have tanek off in 1934 when the FCC was created.Which is The Federal Communications Commission – which is still around today. That’s around the time when the big networks starting forming like CBS and NBC.

Which are also still around today, but mostly in the form of Television.

Yeah. Neil Verma says when the networks got into the business of making highly produced radio dramas, they were not motivated by noble reasons.

Neil: If they couldn't demonstrate a level of public service that they were giving to the listeners out there, then they ran the risk of further government regulation and intrusion, so all of the money they were making out of selling all the bootblack and soup and yeast and tea, they would be taken away. So they enshrined in their mandate the idea to create high culture content, and for a lot of them that meant radio drama.

[music start]

If we look at the big picture, each decade of radio drama had its own style. The radio dramas in the ‘30s were ambitious. They grappled with big nationalistic ideas because it was the Depression. Then in the ‘40s, anxiety around the war got channeled into radio dramas that were like film noirs, or I guess you could call them “radio noirs.” Neil Verma actually had a good way of putting it.

Neil: In the 1930s, radio is kind of a theater in the mind, so it's a big kind of theatrical space that you're supposed to imagine in your mind. In the 1940s, it becomes really a theater about the mind.

And then in the ‘50s, radio dramas are very influenced by the Cold War - with aliens standing in for the Soviets. There’s a really famous radio drama called Zero Hour from 1955, which was written by Ray Bradbury. Actually, a lot of famous Sci-fi writers got their start in radio. And the alien invasion is told from the point of view of a woman who discovers the kids in her neighborhood, including her daughter, have been co-opted by these inner-dimensional beings. The parents think the kids are playing a game, but slowly this one woman begins to realize the truth.

[SFX: Clip 1: Zero Hour]

Neil: The main character, played by Esa Ashdown, is immobile. Almost all of this play takes place in her kitchen or living room. Most of the interplay between her and her daughter the ones where she comes to suspect the daughter is collaborating with this evil alien happen at just outside the edge of our earshot.

[SFX: Clip 2: Zero Hour]

God, that’s so erie. I love it. I think a lot of people have a misconception that radio dramas from this era were goofy or naïve.

Yeah, I used to think it was just two guys banging coconuts together in front of a microphone being like “look the horse is coming”. That was true for some radio serials, especially the ones aimed at kids. But when I listened to these shows, I couldn’t believe how dark and weird they were.

Well for the era, how exactly was the FCC was okay with that?

Well, it’s funny because the FCC was more concerned with obscenity, or overt political messages, or as you heard early, you couldn’t have someone impersonate Franklin Roosevelt. But radio wasn’t under the same kind of moralistic code that Hollywood was back then, where they were really restricted by what kind of stories they could tell or couldn’t tell. Neil Verma thinks the censors feared the power of visual images, but they underestimated the power of audio to create images in our mind.

Neil: Almost everyone talks about radio as a blind medium, which is a particular way of talking about a medium, no one talks about sculpture as a deaf medium, but whenever you hear anything about radio, the first thing people say is it's blind. It's strange to characterize or essentialize a medium by something it can't provide.

People who are kind of boosters for the medium would say, “don’t talk about what radio doesn’t have, an image, and talk about how its images can be more malleable than images that take on some kind of physical visual form.

So now, I’m really intrigued. Eric, give me some more examples of this really dark stuff?

Well, thrillers were the dominant format, especially in the 40’s. But they weren’t just spy thrillers or detective shows. A lot of these radio drama’s are what we categorize as “horror” today.

Richard: Some things that we might think of post George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, this kind of unhappy ending, you're getting it in the '30s and '40s.

Again, that’s Richard Hand.

Richard: And one great example of that was Arch Oboler's play, Burial Services, which is about a young woman being buried alive in a coffin, and we hear the inside of her head, a kind of stream of consciousness because she's not dead, she's in a catatonic fit or whatever it might be. But no one rescues her. Unfortunately there's no recording of that particular piece, but the response was phenomenal. And there was lots of letters of complaints, and shock and disgust. And Arch Oboler thought he'd get sacked, but actually the station were happy saying, "Wow, if there's this many people complaining, how many people are listening? This is fantastic."

A lot of these shows, especially in the 30’s and 40’s were live, and listeners really were disgusted. If the FCC clamped down, the networks would simply promise not to do it again. And they couldn’t, because it was live.

The most famous horror story from this era was The Thing On Fourble Board from a spooky anthology series called Quiet, Please.

This was around 1948.

It’s mostly a monologue from an oil field worker, and he’s telling the story about he and his friend found this alien creature on a fourble board - which is like a catwalk on an oilrig. And he describes this creature as having the head and torso of a girl, but the body of a giant spider.

Ew.

[SFX: Clip 1 - Fourble Board]

And as the character is talking, he’s waiting for his “wife” to come out, and eventually we realize his “wife” is the creature. And we’re not a passive listener. We’re her next meal.

[SFX: Clip 2 - Fourble Board]

Oh my goodness. So...It’s like the difference between reading a book and watching a movie. There’s always something that’s lost because these words are being tapped into a different part of your brain, that are triggering this kind of deeper intelect . This whole clip is like the perfect example of how, I don’t want to see any of this stuff. And even if it was visual, you’d lose a lot of this deep inner thought. So this whole audio only communicating, I don’t think could be done the same way visually. Because it’s hitting me in a totally different place in my brain than if I was absorbing that through my eyes.

Yea, when I was listening to this as well, I started to imagine ok if this were live action in the ‘70s or ‘80s, they would’ve used stop motion creature.

Yea.

Which may have seen scary, or a puppet, but it would have gotten dated. Today the creature would be CG. Which I have a big issue against, a lot of CG stuff I think looks so fake.

Yea

Either way something would’ve been lost.

Horror films in the 1940’s we’re nothing like this. When this episode came out in 1948, the big kind of quote, “horror” movie that year was Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein.

[music in]

In the 1950’s, the television became more accessible. Because of this, radio dramas began to slowly decline in popularity. But in the 1970’s, and even today, radio dramas have made surprising comeback. More after the break.

[music out]

[MID ROLL]

[music in]

Radio dramas create some of the most vivid and exciting listening experiences. But, one of the things that fascinated me in researching the history of radio dramas was just how people listened to them.

Typically we imagine entire families sitting around staring at the radio, waiting for it to evolve and eventually become a television set.

Which is true to some extent, but in this era, people were used to listening to the radio in the car. And there were these little devices called crystal sets. They were crude pieces of technology with a copper wire that acted as an earbud. So these people were listening on these portable devices just like we do.

Richard: And that makes it such a unique experience. It’s no cinema is it? It’s not these other cultural forms. It’s something that’s invading your domestic space and I think that’s why science fiction and horror understood that on radio.

It’s also fascinating how they used sound effects to stimulate the listener’s imagination. Neil Verma talked about a pioneer in the field named Ora Nichols. She worked with Orson Welles for years.

[music out]

Neil: In the War of the Worlds there's this famous scene where you can hear the Martian vessel cooling and she did that by taking a cast iron pot and rubbing its two sides together to make that really specific, grindy voice.

[SFX: Clip - War of the Worlds, vessel cooling sound]

Neil: She also built machines and there were companies that would put together what would we think of as sound effects libraries on transcription discs.

And Richard Hand says audio engineers had all sorts of short cuts ready to go like that. If you wanted to simulate a gunshot...

Richard: Sometimes they'd use a metal rod and hit a leather seat, and you get that crisp bang sound, and that would work really well [SFX]. And this is one of my favorite things I demonstrate with while doing a practical session of radio, where you can take a cork and wet it, and squeak it against the side of a bottle or a saucer. And that was effect they would use for the sound of rats, because you get this squeaky, squeaky sound [SFX].

[music in]

But none of this mattered if the mic wasn’t placed properly. That may sound like a minor detail but Neil Verma says mic placement was crucial – not only with props but with actors too.

Neil: The world that is the off-mic environment, that's where radio drama happens. And that's how you create really important relations, like what character are you close to? What character do you listen to?

In the ‘30s and ‘40s, radio dramas were performed live, so there was a limit to how many of tricks you could do. But in the 1950s, they moved over to pre-recorded magnetic tape, which gave the audio engineers a lot more creative freedom. And radios themselves became more sophisticated, so listeners could hear this subtler sound design.

[music out]

Speaking of advances in technology, the conventional wisdom of the time is that radio dramas went out of fashion in because TV came along.

That’s true to some extent. The networks moved a ton of money and talent to Television. But something else pushed radio dramas off the air: It was rock n’ roll. Remember, these were commercial radio stations. They catered to the marketplace.

But radio dramas kept going in the UK.

Well, that’s because the BBC is government funded and that’s not something that happens in the States as much. They also have multiple outlets so they could play rock on one channel, and radio dramas on another, and on top of all of that they could create a television network and multiple television networks.

It wasn’t a zero sum game.

Not at all. And you talked with someone who’s worked with the BBC at that time?

Yeah, Dirk Maggs. He’s been directing radio dramas for decades.

Dirk: I try and think through the sequence of events of even the shortest, quickest sound.

He’s mostly worked with BBC, but he’s been working with Audible lately. He did this adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, this big flat world on the back of a group of elephants that are on the back of a giant turtle -- that’s swimming through space.

Dirk: You know, you're thinking, "How the hell'd you do that?" But, you take it sequentially. Describe the turtle, describe the elephants, describe the world that's on there, and then go into the world. That would be my way of going at it.

But, when Dirk got to the BBC in the ‘70s, he says radio dramas were still going, but they were feeling a little stale creatively. There were a lot of legacy shows that had been around for years. Then in 1978, Douglas Adams – who was a writer on Doctor Who – created this really unusual radio drama called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In fact it wasn’t even a drama. It was an epic sci-fi comedy, which had never been done before at least on the radio.

Dirk: They really didn't think it was gonna get much of a listenership, so they put it on at half past 10 at night. It was not expected to do much business. And by the third week the listening figures they were getting back were through the roof. For myself, going into the BBC as a technician, it was the only thing everybody was talking about.

[SFX: Clip 1 - HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE]

The radio show was such a hit; Douglas Adams adapted it into a best selling novel – actually a series of novels. And the BBC adapted those novels back into radio. And eventually, Douglas Adams chose Dirk Maggs to work on the later radio shows.

Dirk: I think Hitchhiker’s worked as a radio drama for the reasons that it really didn’t quite come off as a television series or as a movie. If you have a story, that the very beginnings of it, is the end of everything. That’s the conceit. The first episode of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy destroys the Earth and everybody on it and it leaves just two humans, actually only one human in the first episode alive. That is so vast and so ambitious an idea that, for a start, you're gonna listen to the next week's episode to know where does this go from there. But secondly, the enormity of it -- if you are in that imaginative state where all these images are coming to you and you combine that with writing, which says, the Vogan ships hung in the air and in precisely the way that bricks don't. You know, it could only be born in an audio medium. It's too big, in a way, to combine those elements, and that was Douglas' achievement.

[music start]

Eventually radio drama got a second life in the U.S. too.

Thanks again to science fiction again. This was around the same time, late ‘70s. NPR was struggling – which is hard to imagine because NPR is a powerhouse today but it was pretty new back then. The president of NPR, Frank Mankiewicz, thought that a radio drama event could bring in new listeners. So he asked John Houseman for advice.

John Houseman was an actor and one of the founders of Juliard. He also worked with Orson Welles back on War of the Worlds. Houseman recommended that they hire an audio engineer named Richard Toscan to create this big radio drama event.

Richard T.: Having been handed this hot potato, I went back to John Housman, and I said, "Okay, you got me this job, how do you think I could develop an audience for public radio in America?" "How would you do that?" And in his Professor Kingsford voice he, after thinking a moment, he said, "create a scandal."

[music out]

This was the late 1970s, I mean at that point what is still shocking? And a friend of Richard said, sort of jokingly, why don’t you do Star Wars on the radio? And he thought, huh.

[start music]

Richard T.: Here was, at the time, the most visual film Hollywood had ever made, and to say you were going to turn that into radio just sounded so outlandish that it had to be possible. And I think the other thing that was feeding into that is everybody at NPR, or anybody under Frank Mankiewicz, that is anybody below Frank, was scandalized by the idea. This was seen as, you know, the most lowbrow, boring kind of thing. The result, of course, was that after the 13 episodes aired, despite all the sniping, and whatever, of NPR, the measurements that then came in showed, according to NPR, that it had raised the audience of NPR by 40%.

[music out]

NPR’s Star Wars was groundbreaking in other ways. It was also in stereo – which was not common back then. They got LucasFilm to lend them Ben Burtt’s sound effects, and the John Williams score. They had to recast most of the actors, except Mark Hamill. But Richard Toscan says the recasting worked in their favor.

Richard T.: Part of the idea is that we didn't want the series, or at least I didn't want the series to be a clone of the film. I didn’t want people to sit down in front of their radio and say oh, I remember this from three years ago or whatever.

Remember, Star Wars was a 2-hour movie. This was a 6-hour, 13-part radio drama. So they got the late writer Brian Daley – who had written Star War spin-off novels – to add additional scenes that were not in the movie [SFX]. So we got to hear Leia’s relationship with her father on Alderaan.

[SFX: Clip 1 - NPR STAR WARS]

And, we got to hear Luke’s training with Obi-Wan Kenobi:

[SFX: Clip 2 - NPR STAR WARS]

And Neil Verma says that NPR’s Star Wars had a huge influence on the generation coming of age in the 70’s and 80’s, that may have seen radio dramas as passe.

[music in]

Neil: You know a lot of people who make audio dramas today look back at this as the gold standard. But I think it's not just the gold standard because of the great score or the great sound effects or any of those sorts of things. I think because it really creates these deep senses of character out of what had been relatively two-dimensional characters and that's something that a lot of audio dramas these days like to explore. It's become a much more writerly medium.

Most of those old radio dramas are available for free online… so it’s a hidden treasure trove to discover. I find it amazing that these shows were built for the analog world, but they’re also perfect for the digital age. Today thanks to podcasting, audio dramas are making a huge comeback. ...and not only that, they’re becoming so popular that there are major television networks are starting to notice. We’re now seeing television adaptations of audio shows. Look at Homecoming, Lore, Startup and others. I believe audio dramas are going to continue to grow in popularity. And who knows, maybe we’ll make one. In the meantime, if there are any big shot studio executives looking for a television series about sound, wink wink nudge nudge.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defactosound dot com.

This episode was was written by Eric Molinsky with help from assistant producer Stephanie Billman. You should take a moment to immediately go subscribe to Eric’s podcast, Imaginary Worlds. I have no doubt you’ll love it. Just search Imaginary Worlds in any podcast player.

Over on the 20k side, thanks to Sam Schneble who helped produce this episode, along with Nick Spradlin who mixed and adapted the episode. Thanks also to our guests - Emory Braswell, Richard J. Hand, Richard Toscan, Dirk Maggs, and Neil Verma.

The music in this episode is from of our friends at Musicbed. ...and now you can also use their music too! For the first time ever they now have membership plans. Check it out and sign up at music.20k.org. Finally, you can engage with me and the rest of the Twenty Thousand Hertz team through our website, facebook, twitter or by writing hi at 20 kay dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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Theremin: The instrument that defined classic sci-fi & horror

This episode was written & produced by Colby Hartburg.

If you've ever watched an old sci-fi or horror film, you've probably heard the hair-tingling, alien sounds of the Theremin. It's a spooky, strange instrument that's played without being touched, and has become a staple for classic horror movies. This is the story of the Theremin's mysterious journey. Featuring Thereminist Rob Schwimmer, Michelle Moog-Koussa, daughter of Bob Moog and Executive Director of the Bob Moog Foundation, and Albert Glinsky, courtesy of Moog Music.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Optimistic Robot by Eric Kinny
Valentine by Makeup and Vanity Set
Potential Energy by Cultus
Spiral Dynamics by Cultus
Ceto by A.M. Architect
Aurora by Tony Anderson
Station Twelve by Steven Gutheinz
Unlimited by Dario Lupo
Waltz in A Minor-Op. 34, No. 2 (Variation) by Chad Lawson

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Leon Theremin playing his own instrument]

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

[SFX:Continue Leon Theremin music]

What scares you? What makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up? There are plenty of haunting sounds out there, but perhaps the most strange, the most alien, and the most mysterious one comes from an instrument you may never have heard of. The Theremin.

[SFX: Theremin, Leon’s musical performance continued]

Sound familiar? If so, it’s probably because it’s commonly tied to old sci-fi and horror films from the 1950’s and 60’s, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still.

[SFX: Clip from The Day the Earth Stood Still]

But there’s more to the Theremin than just eerie sounds. Its story actually starts…and ends with a mystery. And there’s a whole lot in between.

[music in]

The most intriguing part of the Theremin is that you play it without ever touching it. Take that in for a moment. It’s like playing a ghost instrument.

Rob: Imagine your eyes are closed and you're hearing this sound that's maybe like a voice or a violin. You're in the same room and you're hearing that sound. When you open your eyes, you will see somebody moving around who is actually not touching anything, and yet is controlling this sound by where their hands are. You watch this person moving the one hand and the other hand. You're looking at something that is impossible and is magic.

[music out]

That’s Rob Schwimmer. He’s a renowned musician and Thereminist.

Rob: When you can just hear it, maybe you're thinking of old sci-fi movies or older scary movies where the person is cowering as the flying saucer comes down and some high, wavery, scary sound is happening. Sometimes that's a Theremin that they would use in the movies.

[SFX: Theremin – Sci Fi movie]

Rob: It's a freaky thing to see, it's a freaky thing to hear, and it's really fun to play.

And its origin is almost as freaky.

[music in]

Around 1920, a Russian scientist named Leon Theremin, stumbled across a bizarre confluence of electromagnetic waves that created… sounds. He was working on a device to measure the density of gasses. Instead of just having a normal meter, he also decided to add a kind of whistling device. This whistling device [SFX: theremin] would change the pitch depending on the density of the gas. When he moved his hands around the device, he noticed a shift in pitch and volume. Eventually he was able to manipulate it into a melody. It caught on and became a sensation across Russia, Europe and eventually the United States.

[music out]

Oh, and he was also allegedly a KGB spy, but more on that later.

Rob: He was not looking to do this when he came across the phenomenon of being able to hear something that was influenced by his physical position. He was doing another experiment.

Now I think most inventors, when they would come across such a thing, would discard it as an unwanted byproduct of what they were trying to do. With him, the light bulb went on over his head and he realized, "This is not what I'm looking for, but I have something here." That to me is the genius moment, is that he actually recognized that moment is there's something here.

And that something wasn’t anything tangible.

Rob: You actually don't touch anything when you're playing the Theremin [SFX: theremin]. You just move your hands in the air. Now when you look at that, that looks really weird and you go, "Well, how is that possible? This person isn't touching anything."

The basic design looks like a thin, rectangular box with one rod sticking straight up - that controls the pitch [SFX: Theremin pitch going up] - and there’s a horseshoe-shaped rod attached to the left side – that controls the volume [SFX: Theremin volume going up and down] . There are some knobs that adjust the overall pitch, but the basic design has remained the same since its invention.

Rob: There are two electromagnetic fields, one around each side, that you cannot see, of course. Your right hand, when it enters the electromagnetic field, that changes the pitch that you hear.

[SFX Theremin pitch and volume adjusting]

Rob: The left hand controls the volume, which is weird because it gets louder as you lift up. We're used to gas pedals, volume pedals. We typically think more is down, downward motion, gas pedal. But in this case, it gets louder when you lift up. It's a little strange to get used to at first.

That’s putting it mildly. Learning to play the Theremin takes a lot of practice and a good ear. Albert Glinsky, an American composer and author, wrote the book on Leon Theremin’s life and career. He explains the basics of the instrument here.

[SFX: Albert Glinsky Clip “So you have this basic siren sound like this [pause] and then we want to chop that up into individual parts using the volume antenna, so that we can create individual notes like this [pause] that kind of idea.”]

Rob: Theremin's have sounded different over the years. Actually, from Theremin to Theremin, they sound different, they feel different.

But what it is, is really that they actually have different sounds and different characters for each of them, and some of them are good for, oh ... You know how a guitar player will have a bunch of guitars and he goes, "Oh, this guitar isn't right for this song." Well, Theremins, it's the same way. Why? It's magic. I don't know.

Rob actually had the opportunity to play one of Leon Theremin’s last known instruments before he…well, disappeared. It’s called the November Theremin.

[SFX Rob playing November Theremin]

Rob: For me, when I first turned the thing on, when I said it was a masculine sound, I'm used to my Theremins at home. They're a little more gentle. I turn this on, it's like playing a rhinoceros. I mean it's like taming the wild beast.

The story of the Theremin doesn’t stop with it’s inventor, in fact it saw a resurgence in popularity around the mid 20th century. This was mainly due to the help of film, most notably, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound in 1945.

Rob: It was a big year for Theremin up because it wasn't the very first movie that it appeared in, but it was the first big movie that Theremin played a big part in the soundtrack, which also won the Academy Award for Best Soundtrack that year. The Theremin was a huge part of that.

[SFX: Spellbound music]

Rob: That brought it to everybody's attention. Right around the same time, it was used in another movie called Lost Weekend.

[SFX: Lost Weekend clip]

Rob: Two big movies right around 1945, 46 that brought it to Hollywood.

The artist behind these early Theremin sounds was a man by the name of Dr. Samuel J Hoffman… Pretty much any early Hollywood movie with a Theremin? There’s a good chance it’s him.

[SFX: Hoffman music]

Rob: He had this fast, kind of psychotic vibrato that he used in everything, which is part of why the Theremin got to be known as the scary instrument or the sci-fi instrument, is just because of the way his vibrato was. That's just the way he played, and it was just perfect for his scary, psychotic stuff.

Immediately that became the go-to for ensuing sci-fi movies in various states of cheesiness or whatever, none of them were as good as The Day the Earth Stood Still.

[SFX: Clip from Day the Earth Stood Still]

But somewhere during this period, the Theremin changed course and worked its way into popular music. Songs you know but may not recognize the instrument in.

Rob: There were a couple of bands that started using it. There was one called Lothar and the Hand People. Then the sound of the Theremin in The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations was another big thing that brought that sound back into the popular eye/ear.

[SFX: Good Vibrations clip]

Rob: Then Jimmy Page used it in Whole Lotta Love, during that psychedelic part.

[SFX: Clip from Whole Lotta Love]

Rob: Now there were a lot of players that used it strictly as kind of an effects thing rather than melodic playing. There was two schools of that. Jimmy Page was never a melodic player of the Theremin. He just used it as a very cool sound effect.

[SFX: Clara Rockmore song]

So from a lab in Russia to Rock Legends, the Theremin has seen a wide spectrum of experimentation.

Rob: Over time, people started hearing Clara Rockmore, she had a record, of her playing classic stuff, which was just spectacular. People started hearing it. It came back out on a CD, and people started going, "Oh, you can actually use it. It doesn't have to be scary, it doesn't have to be psychotic, it could also be a beautiful thing."

[SFX: Continue Clara’s song]

Rob: People started getting into the idea of playing it melodically.

They're popping up in all sorts of bands for all sorts of reasons. They're everywhere. I mean they're not like electric guitars yet, but there's a lot of them out there, a whole lot of them doing all sorts of music, like everything. Everything.

Rob has played the Theremin with a number of well-known musicians, including Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, The Boston Pops, Queen Latifah, Josh Groban, Bela Fleck, and he even went on tour with Simon and Garfunkel in 2004.

Rob: That part in the middle of The Boxer, there's an instrumental that goes “Da, da, da, da, da”. They let me play it on Theremin. It was a fantastic honor and a lot of fun to do it in such a setting.

[SFX: Clip from Rob playing The Boxer live]

[music in]

Rob: I think Theremins are really popular at this point because there is nothing that really replaces an amazing magic trick, when you can look at something and go, "How is that happening? How is this possible?" And still, to this day, people react in that way when they get that visual of actually seeing somebody play it. There's nothing like it.

The Theremin has left its mark throughout pop culture. But it’s impact actually reaches far beyond what you might think. How did this strange instrument inspire electronic music as we know it today? And what secrets did it’s creator hide? We’ll get to that, in a minute.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

The Theremin’s chilling sound is synonymous with classic sci fi and horror films, and it even found its way into rock music. But its story didn’t stop there. It found new popularity around the 1950’s, thanks to one particularly curious prodigy named Bob Moog.

[music out]

The inventor of the Moog Synthesizer was also an early enthusiast and manufacturer of the Theremin. ...and even to this day, Moog Music is the largest producer of Theremins. Early on, Bob Moog was obsessed with this weird instrument. He was also really fascinated by the man behind it’s creation.

[music in]

Michelle: My name is Michelle Moog-Koussa. I am the executive director of the Bob Moog Foundation here in Asheville, North Carolina.

Michelle is one of Bob’s daughters and heads up the foundation to carry on the legacy of her father and his instruments.

Michelle: He was introduced to electronics by his father, my grandfather, who was an electrical engineer himself, and they started off just making small hobbyist projects, like three note organs and Geiger counters, and they were HAM radio operators together so they were definitely two geeks in a pod, if you will, down in the basement of their house.

[SFX: HAM radio]

Michelle: That really sparked my father's love of discovery through electronics. He did do a lot of reading at a very early age, and he came upon an article that kind of introduced how a Theremin is made, and he thought he would take it on. That basically began a lifelong love affair with that instrument. He really was very taken with the elegance of the design and the expressivity of the instrument. That was around the time that he was 15 years old.

[music out]

Bob Moog was brilliant. Even in his teens became so proficient at making Theremins, that he made one for a Science Fair at his high school. At 19, he wrote an article for Radio and Television News magazine, an electronic hobbyist publication.

Michelle: That article was so popular that people began writing him, saying, "I would like to build my own Theremin based on your article but I can't find the parts." He then launched his company, R.A. Moog Co with his father to provide both Theremins and Theremin parts.

That was in 1954 when Bob was a freshman in college. It was very much a small, homerun operation. He had no idea how much it would grow in popularity.

Michelle: The way it would work is that my father would build the circuitry and wind the copper coils. At that time, of course, everything was analog parts and they were very large copper coils that needed to be wound very precisely and very tightly for the instrument to work correctly, and my father had quite a knack for that and for building the circuitry itself.

My grandfather was an accomplished woodworker. So he would build all the cabinetry, so the two of them had a nice partnership.

[music in]

Bob and his father continued to build these homemade Theremins throughout his time in college. When he attended Grad school at Cornell, he and his wife moved the operation to Ithaca, New York.

Michelle: There was a pivoting point in 1961 because my mother became pregnant with my oldest sister, Laura, and she said to my father, "What are we going to do for money now because I'm going to have to stop working," and my father said, "Well, you know, I've been wanting to write this article about how to build a new transistorized Theremin."

So hid did, and with it he changed the course of the Theremin and its impact on modern electronic sound.

[music out]

Michelle: He wrote an article, how to build your own Theremin with transistors, and that again kind of re-launched his business because he wound up selling Theremin kits to build something called the melodia theremin, and he sold a thousand of those kits for $50 a piece within about a years’ time.

His exact words are, "That was a huge cachet of wealth for a graduate student at that time," which it was. $50,000 then would've probably been like a quarter million dollars now.

I remember my mom telling me that at that time when she was quite pregnant, she was putting together Theremin kits on the kitchen table.

[music in]

Bob Moog’s fascination with the Theremin was deeper than just its design; he had a great appreciation for its creator.

Michelle: He felt a really deep connection to Leon Theremin as well his entire life, and he talks about him. He refers to him as his virtual mentor. He really felt that he had Theremin's guiding hand almost his entire career. A lot of his ethic, both the visual ethic of his instruments and the design ethic of his circuitry, can be traced back to Leon Theremin's ethic.

Moog met his idol, a few times. This is , something Michelle says were the highlights of his life.

[music out]

Of course Bob Moog went on to eventually create the Moog Synthesizer, expanding the realm of electronic music. It exploded in the infamous Summer of Love, 1967.

[SFX: Music , Buffalo Springfield]

Michelle: It began being incorporated into pop music, and that's when we see The Byrds, The Doors, The Beatles using it. That all came out of one my father's reps, Paul B from Bernie Krause, bringing the Moog modular to the Monterey Pop Festival, and after that is when all of the bands started integrating it.

[SFX: Pop music]

Michelle: He was constantly seeking the feedback of these musicians, especially as you can imagine in those early years there was still a lot under evolution, these as a very evolutionary stage, and he was listening to what the musicians needed and he was creating it for them. The needs of the musicians was very much his creative beacon.

A similar dedication to the craftsmanship he admired in his idol, Leon Theremin. Not a musician…but still an artist.

Michelle: People would ask him if he was a musician and he would say, "No, I'm a toolmaker. I make tools for musicians,"That was really his calling. He did have a very high standard for his work, that, combined with the growing needs of musicians as the instrument and technology grew, really propelled him on this path, where he was constantly trying to think of new ways to put expanded sonic expression into the hands of musicians in the most accessible way.

[music in]

While the Moog Synthesizer took off, Bob never forgot his original passion and fascination with the Theremin. He started Big Briar Incorporated and refocused his energy on making Theremins again. He developed a small Theremin called the ether wave which went on to sell more than 10,000 units. This prompted yet another resurgence of the instrument, thanks in large part to the Internet.

Michelle: People have a lot more exposure to how the Theremin is being used and they have been inspired by it, and the number of Thereminists, has grown quite a bit and so have the offerings of different kinds of Theremins made by Big Briar, and now by Moog Music, but also by other companies all around the world.

[music out]

Bob Moog was also in the record business. In the late 70’s he and his wife produced, an album featuring Clara Rockmore. She was a child prodigy on the violin. But, when she injured her wrist at the age of four, she turned her talents to the Theremin.

[SFX: Clip from Clara Rockmore]

Michelle: She really had an astounding technique, and she devoted her life to the Theremin and played it her entire life. That's one more step in my father trying to gain a wider appreciation for this instrument, he believed so deeply in its importance that he passionately promoted it in one way or another almost his entire adult life.

Moog had enormous respect for Rockmore, who had a deep connection with Leon Theremin herself. She was even featured in the documentary,Theremin, An Electronic Odyssey, directed by actor and musician Steve Martin.

Michelle: He told me that when they went to film Clara for the documentary, and she was playing. Steve said, "I looked over at your father and his jaw had dropped to the floor, and when she finished playing he just looked at me and said, 'You know what she was just playing? That was technically impossible.'" So he really felt like she was able to achieve things on that instrument that nobody else could.

[SFX: Clip from Clara Rockmore]

[music in]

From a lab in Russia, to Hollywood movies, to all sorts of musical genres this instrument continues to inspire intrigue. But maybe the most fascinating story, comes from its own creator.

Rob: Regarding the disappearance of Theremin from the New York area in 1928, there have been two theories: the one that he was kidnapped by the KGB to work for them because he was an electronic genius, the other was that he was a Russian operative the whole time doing, what, industrial espionage or whatever, and that he was called back. I cannot definitively tell you what happened, but I can tell you that he did wind up working for the KGB and making all sorts of electronic inventions for them.

[music out]

[SFX: Clara Rockmore song]

The Theremin’s mysterious sound is a reflection of it’s story. It’s an instrument so strange that it astounds people nearly a hundred years after its creation. But at the same time, it can be hauntingly beautiful.

Rob: It's like magic. It's just magic, and everybody loves a good magic trick.

You look at this history of Leon Theremin, the spy and all the crazy things that happened to him, you look at the instrument that's played without being touched, you look at the movies, it's been in all these crazy movies as an iconic sound. You look at that, it's being used everywhere now, and people are still drawn to that singular magical trick. When it's combined with really cool music, it's just a winning combination.

It's just nothing like it.

[SFX: Clara Rockmore song]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. A sound design studio for television, film, and games. Learn more at defacto sound dot com.

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 Rob Schwimmer, Albert Glinsky courtesy of Moog Music and Michelle Moog-Koussa of the Bob Moog Foundation and soon to be Moogseum in Asheville, North Carolina.

The music in this episode is from of our friends at Musicbed. ...and now you can also use their music! For the first time ever they now have membership plans. Check it out and sign up at music.20k.org.

A special thanks goes out to Delos Music for letting us use Clara Rockmore’s hauntingly beautiful recordings. Her album, “The Art of the Theremin”, is available from Delos at delosmusic.com.

You find find us on Facebook, Twitter, and twenty kay dot org. You can drop us a line anytime at hi at 20k dot org. Lastly, if you enjoyed the show, please tell someone about it.

Thanks for listening.

[Music out]

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Cartoon Sound Effects: From Steamboat Willie to The Jetsons

This episode was written & produced by James Introcaso.

Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from decades ago. How were these legendary sounds made and how have they stood the test of time? Featuring Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini of the Formosa Group, and Advantage Audio’s Heather Olsen.


MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Still Good - UTAH
Wait and Without - Steven Gutheinz
On Paper - Steven Gutheinz
Allen Street - Steven Gutheinz
Younger - Tony Anderson
The Story Never Ends - Chad Lawson

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Wile E Coyote clip with fall whistle]

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

[SFX: Crash from fall]

If you watched cartoons as a kid, you probably knew instantly that the sound you just heard was from Looney Tunes. You probably also know that sound meant Wile E Coyote failed to catch the Road Runner...again. It’s pretty crazy how we can fill in the whole scene based solely on the sound effects. Even without a single “Meep Meep” from the Road Runner.

[SFX: Meep meep]

Wile E Coyote started falling off cliffs in 1949. Yet we still hear that falling sound effect in modern cartoons like Teen Titans [SFX], here it is in Justice League Action [SFX], and here it is even in Family Guy [SFX]. It’s been almost seventy years since the first Wile E Coyote cartoon - and that sound, along with many other cartoon sounds remains constant.

[music in]

Mark: The beauty and the joy of cartoon animation is that the characters do not have to obey the laws of physics. They also don't have to obey the laws of logic. Therefore, sound doesn't have to obey those laws either.

That’s Mark Mangini, an oscar winning sound designer who works with the Formosa Group.

Mark: I don't very often get to talk about my early days… and cartoons.

Mark doesn’t get a lot of question about cartoons, because he has an impressive resume designing sound for Hollywood blockbusters.

Mark: I've worked on 142 live-action films. Most recently Blade Runner 2049, Mad Max: Fury Road, which I won an Oscar for and I'm very proud of. Warrior, Gremlins, four Star Treks, a Die Hard, a Lethal Weapon, the Green Mile...

[music out]

But before Mark did sound for films, he worked for one of the most famous cartoon studios in the world.

Mark: My first job in sound was at Hanna-Barbera studios in their sound department. I started as a track reader, which is a subset of sound editing where you're charged with transcribing the recordings of the voices, so that the animators know when to open and close the mouths of the characters [SFX: cartoon dialogue]. That led to subsequent promotions to becoming a sound effects editor in that department at Hanna-Barbera, and an apprenticeship with a number of really amazingly gifted sound editors. Back then, this was 1976. I didn't know anyone who was called a sound designer, but I would argue that everything that we were doing at Hanna-Barbera was every bit as designed as maybe something more profound that was being heard in a motion picture.

Mark worked on some of Hanna-Barbera’s most famous cartoons.

Mark: … the Flintstones...

[SFX: “C’mon Barney. Let’s go” and crash]

… some Huckleberry Hounds...

[SFX: Ringing phone and “Fireman Huckleberry Speaking”]

... a whole raft of Scooby-Doos...

[SFX: Running feet and “Scooby Doo! Where are you?”]

... the Super Friends…

[SFX: “Their mission, to fight injustice! To right that which is wrong! And to serve all mankind”]

... and my personal favorite because it starred Mel Blanc, Captain Caveman.

[SFX: The BOING followed by “Captain Caveman!”]

Long before Mark worked for Hana-Barbera - and even before Wile E Coyote was falling off cliffs - [SFX: Steamboat Willie] Walt Disney made history with Steamboat Willie in 1928.

This was the first cartoon with synchronized picture and sound.

Mark: Walt and Roy and Ub Iwerks themselves would be the sound effects guy in their live orchestral recording sessions for those early Steamboat Willies.

In the early days before there was multi-track recording or mixing, you had to perform the sound effects live with the orchestra in one straight pass. So, these sound effects guys had to assemble props, put them in front of microphones and perform anything that they could acoustically, live and in sync with the orchestra.

[SFX : bump out]

Music and sound effects had to be performed at the same time in the same space. Musical instruments were used to make the effects because they were easy to find, and easy to manipulate. In this Tom and Jerry clip, the sound of a frying pan hitting Tom’s face is played by a cymbal crash.

[SFX: Tom and Jerry hit]

And that falling whistle from the beginning of the episode? That’s played on a slide whistle.

Mark: The percussionist would probably have it as part of their kit, and it was just natural to convey going up [SFX] or down [SFX]. You could manipulate them in any one of a number of ways, very quickly [SFX] or very slowly [SFX].

Sound effects played by musical instruments became an iconic part of all cartoons.

Then, new audio technology in the 1930’s allowed sound editors to add sound effects after recording the orchestra. They could use any prop to make a sound, but often still chose musical instruments.

And because sound effects and music were tightly linked, they worked together to create unique soundscapes. Listen to this audio clip from the very first Bugs Bunny cartoon called, “Porky’s Hare Hunt,” In it, you can get an idea of how effects and music can come together.

[SFX: Porky’s Hare Hunt]

The sounds for “Porky’s Hare Hunt” were created by an editor named Treg Brown. Treg worked on Looney Tunes for decades and created many of the iconic cartoon sounds we still know today.

Mark: Once we divorced ourselves from the need to record live to picture, Treg had this fundamental understanding of how to de-contextualize a sound, how to take the sound of your finger in a coke bottle and make that the sound of the Road Runner tongue flip.

[SFX: Road Runner Tongue Flip]

Mark: Or, why the sound of an inertia starter, the sound of this motor that makes a biplane engine start, why that's the sound of a spinning Tasmanian Devil.

[SFX: Tasmanian Devil] [Alt sound]

[music in]

Mark: He learned to be a genius at taking sounds out of one context and placing them in another context. That's what made him so amazing, and when you listen to those Looney Tunes shorts, there isn't a lot of cartoon sound in those. There isn't a lot of comedic sound. It was in his ability to take a sound from somewhere else and put it where it didn't belong, creating this bizarre juxtaposition that made it funny. I don't think there was anybody better than he was at that.

Around the same time Treg was working at Warner Brothers, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were creating the Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM. Mark’s mentor Greg Watson was a sound editor on those early Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Mark: When I met him, he was in his 60's, late in his career but immensely proud to be still working in cartoons. He still saw it as an art form, something he was very proud of.

He would never take credit for anything unless I asked him, "Hey, Greg. Where did this come from?" And he said, "Oh, I remember back in '51 when Bill did this one funny scene with Jerry and we needed a funny sound, and we thought it would be good to do this." He was a man that was just thrilled to be a part of the process.

[music out]

Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbara eventually created their own studio. ...and during their 30 years of making cartoons they created a massive library of totally classic sounds.

Mark: I think they're unique, at least because of their own merit they're just silly. So many of them even out of the context of the cartoon just sound like that's the silliest thing I've ever heard. But then, within the context of the cartoons and the way that they were used and the life that they brought to those cartoons, they just get better basking in the limelight of the animation.

For instance, this sound is pretty silly on its own.

[SFX: Pluck]

Now imagine Tom hanging from his whiskers, and the unavoidable fall as each one is plucked from his cheeks.

[SFX: Pluck]

There were hundreds of familiar sounds like this created at Hanna-Barbera studios.

Mark: They had such a signature quality to themselves that it made them stand out as a unique piece of quality artwork, or sonic artwork.

In the 1960s, Hanna-Barbera started selling their sound library. Other production companies, like Warner Brothers, use these sounds to this day. The popularity of the Hanna-Barbera sound library has given cartoons an almost universal sound-language. But, Mark feels some sounds are overused.

Mark: I was on a one-man campaign to eradicate head take.

[SFX: Head Take]

Mark: It was this inane noise that, again, I think was a recording accident that you would use whenever a character all of a sudden caught themselves in the midst of thinking or experiencing something bizarre, and it was way overused.

And did you ever notice how it sounds when a cartoon character runs??

[SFX: Blop Gallop]

Mark’s not a fan of that one either.

Mark: That running sound was called 'blop gallop.' And again a sound that was I felt overused and I tried to not use it as often as I could. That's illogical, but I tried not to use it as often as possible.

It's a testament to its effectiveness. But even in 1976, I was turning into an elitist, I suppose. How embarrassing.

Of course there are plenty of sounds that Mark loves. Like a tip-toeing xylophone.

[SFX: Xylophone Tip Toes]

Mark: Oh, that's a classic sound. I have actually used that sound. I did the two Flintstone live action movies, and I did use that in that because that was a sound that Brian Levant, the director and I just loved. We just couldn't avoid using that.

[SFX: Xylophone Tip Toes]

Mark: My favorite was The Jetsons's spaceships, and I never found out what those were made from, I tried to deconstruct them, I asked around the studio if they know who made them and nobody knew, but that sound always brings a smile to my face.

[SFX: Jetsons sound]

[music in]

Sadly, some of the old techniques have been lost. But remember, this was a busy studio, and everyone was focused on getting the work done on time, and getting cartoons on air.

Mark: It was a real machine. It always started with track reading [SFX: track reading], which is to say the voices would be assembled in a studio with a script and storyboards. The director of that show would walk the talent through the recording session so that you captured all the voices, speaking all the lines that you needed for that particular episode.

Then, the animators would go off and then draw the characters doing these things, and then a month later, all the animation would come back in short rolls of completed scenes, then we and the editorial department would assemble them in their storyboard order, and then cut them down to show length.

There wasn't like animatics in between like we have in live-action. We'd assemble a show, then cut sound to it.

[music out]

When Mark was working with Hanna-Barbera, they didn’t have a department dedicated to creating new sounds. If he wanted an effect that wasn’t in the library, he had to find it himself.

Mark: You were just kind of on your own. I was the most adventurous, especially for the Super Friends I would go across the hall to talk to the two composers Paul Decort and Hoyt Curtin and I'd ask them for musical sounds, and especially synthesizer sounds, so they would give me long recorded stretches of just weird noises they'd make with their synthesizers. And they would always be used as the science fiction components, if I had a spaceship or a flying saucer in an episode that's what I'd use the electronic sounds for, because that felt futuristic to me.

[SFX: Space noises]

And if Mark couldn’t find a sound he wanted, he had to create it, even if he had to use his own voice.

Mark: If you can't find it, you do it with your voice. It's the easiest tool to manipulate, you have total control over it.

I use it for creatures and animals and funny noises. I did a lot of gremlins voices for the Gremlins movies.

[SFX: Gremlins]

It's just something where you feel the character inside of yourself and you think, "I can do this better," and you just do it.

Mark also went on to work on some of the most classic animated films.

Mark: I did Beauty and the Beast…

[SFX: Opening line of Be Our Guest]

… Aladdin…

[SFX: Opening line of A Whole New World]

… and the Lion King.

[SFX: Opening line of Circle of Life]

Mark’s experiences with animated films were different from the grind of televised cartoons.

Mark: If nothing else, you get much better schedules. You usually get the time to design and create something that no one's ever heard before. Another sort of unique distinction is that you have the option to create sound first, and then have animation be done to what you did. It's not that often that we get to actually drive the image, and on the Disney animated films and the Pixar films and the Dreamworks films and others, they're smart enough to know the value of sound and how it can be the inspiration to the artist to draw something that they might not otherwise have drawn.

For example, in Beauty and the Beast Belle's dad was this inventor and he had built that funny ax chopping machine. That was a sound that we made before animation.

[SFX: Maurice’s Invention]

Mark: That's just pure design. That's when you get to let your imagination run wild. You can see a picture from a storyboard, and then you just get to dream up what it might sound like. That's just gold for a sound designer, when you're sort of allowed to design unfettered.

[music in]

With all of the cable channels and streaming services available today, there’s more animation than ever before. So how does sound design work in modern cartoons? ...and which iconic sounds are still used today? We’ll get to that, in a minute.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[SFX: Quick montage of SFX we haven’t heard]

If you haven’t watched a cartoon in years, it might surprise you that sounds from decades ago are still being used today.

Heather: I use the older sound effects quite a bit still working in cartoons. The Hanna-Barbera library, the Warner Brothers library, it's still the go to for certain gags, and certain shows.

That’s Heather Olsen, an Emmy-nominated sound designer for animation. She works at Advantage Audio.

Heather: I'm working on Star vs. the Forces of Evil for Disney XD...

[SFX: “Rainbow fist punch!” and SFX]

… Trolls: The Beat Goes On…

[SFX: “DJ the party” and SFX]

… and Spirit Riding Free for Netflix.

[SFX: Horses SFX]

I worked on a lot of Butch Hartman shows, The Fairly Odd Parents [SFX], Tough Puppy [SFX], Bunsen is a Beast [SFX], Pig Goat Banana Cricket for Nickelodeon [SFX]. I also worked on The Adventures of Puss in Boots for Netflix [SFX], Gravity Falls for Disney XD [SFX], and The Boondocks for Sony [SFX].

Heather is an expert in modern cartoon sound design.

Heather: Cartoon sound effects are different from live action sound effects because with live action you start with production sound. You're recording a picture and they're recording the audio at the same time wherever the actors are. So if they're on a street you have cars going by. Whereas in a cartoon if you're doing a street scene, all I get is dialogue. It's just the actors who are recorded, and I get to start with a blank slate. I don't have to try to hide production backgrounds. I get to get the dialogue, and I get to create a world around it.

It's kind of the best thing and the worst thing at the same time to work on a cartoon, because you're not trying to hide anything, but you have nothing to start with, so in your head you have to think, what would this sound like?

Much like Mark’s time at Hanna-Barbera, Heather gets a fully animated show and often adds sound effects from a ready-made library of sounds. This includes many from the Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers’ libraries. Here are some of her favorites.

Heather: It's called the tube thunk sound effect.

[SFX: Tube thunk]

I think everybody knows what this sounds like, maybe not what it's called, but it's that sound when a character gets their head stuck in a jar, you hear that thunk [SFX]. I love that old sound. It just so clearly conveys my head is stuck in this jar, and it's not coming out again.

And I also love all the old running sounds.

[SFX: Run]

Heather: And I'm using the xylophone blink in Trolls all the time.

[SFX: Xylophone Blinks]

Heather: Those sounds I think have just persisted in everybody's mind and every show because that's a language that we've started to understand. So instead of blinks, you kind of expect to hear that xylophone at this point.

And of course, Heather uses the falling whistle.

[SFX: Falling whistle]

Heather: I think in our sound effects library it's called Bomb Drop, but it's the same thing. I mean it's another piece of the language that everybody knows.

Since some of the shows she works on are more realistic, Heather wants us to hear the sounds of the characters moving around and interacting with their world. Kinda like a live action movie.

Heather: The foley department really brings the show to life. They record footsteps [SFX], things characters touch [SFX], which we call props. They do more of the smaller sounds, and it's great to have foley doing that instead of a library, because then you're not hearing the same footsteps over and over. They really make it sound more real.

And just like in the past - if you can’t find a sound, you have to make it.

Heather: One of the stranger things I've actually recorded and done myself for a sound effect is we had a bit in Robot and Monster where everyone was in a crowded restaurant. So it was supposed to be this crowd of people gagging and grossed out by something, and that's not exactly an effect I had sitting around in my library. So I grabbed a bunch of people around the office, and we recorded ourselves gagging in lots of different ways...

[SFX: individual people gagging]

...and then I pieced it all together into a crowd.

[SFX: crowd of people gagging in a restaurant]

Sometimes layering multiple sounds together is the best way to create something new.

Heather: An odd combination that you might not expect and I did not invent this… animals and engines is a really great one. You put animal roars under engines, growls, it really kinda of brings a vehicle to life.

[SFX: TIE fighter]

A lot of shows do it, but Star Wars definitely the TIE fighters, there's some growls under there as they go by.

It's fantastic. Inspiration.

Another option Heather has, is to take a classic library sound and change its pitch to make a new effect. Take this cartoon boing sound effect.

[SFX: Boing]

she can pitch the sound up.

[SFX: Boing] (pitched up)

Or down.

[SFX: Boing] (pitched down)

Heather uses a lot of classic - non literal - sounds while working on cartoons. But some modern cartoons are more realistic than slap-stick, her choices really depend on the show.

Heather: When we get a new show, we'll do what we call spotting the show, where the clients come in and we watch it together, and we talk about what they'd like where, and just the overall feel of the show. Is going to be a realistic show like Spirit, or is it going to be really cartoony like Fairly Odd Parents?

[SFX: Fairly Odd Clip about coming into room with crash]

Fairly Odd Parents taught me how to speak cartoon.

It's just not stop cartoon, cartoon, cartoon, whereas something like Spirit it feels more like you're making a movie with horses out in the fields with the girls…

[SFX: From “What’s the matter boy…” to horse’s snort reaction]

Because Spirit Riding Free has more natural sounds than a cartoon like Fairly Odd Parents, Heather needed some new sounds.

Heather: We got a whole new horse library, because in that show there's three characters who are horses. So, there are no actors voicing them and the each have a different personality. So, we had to find different vocals for each of the horses.

[SFX: Horse 1]

[SFX: Horse 2]

But even Spirit Riding Free still sometimes needs a dose of the vintage cartoon sounds.

[SFX: Ball scene]

Heather: A lot of times people will come in with their show and say, "I don't want to use those old Hanna Barbera sounds, I want to do something completely different." But they've kind of animated it the traditional way. So when you put new sounds to that, it feels wrong, and a lot of times they eventually go back to using the older sound effects.

[music in]

When it comes to cartoon sound design, Mark and Heather both agree that the medium pushes the boundaries of creativity.

Mark: Characters stretch unnaturally out of their body shapes. Those are just of the simplest examples of visually what's happening with these characters. So, in a way it gives you permission to break the laws of what sound you should hear when you see something.

Heather: I really like working for animation because I like to build a world with sound from the ground up, because in animation the best part is you're designing a world from nothing, a world that no one's ever heard before. And sound design I think is a huge part of the process for animation because there's no sound except the talking, so you get to do that backgrounds and the sound effects, and the foley, and I think it all combines to really bring the animation to life.

Mark: So now, there's so many tools that anyone can get their hands on. You're really free to design sound in any way your imagination desires. It's important for us to follow our hearts. When we follow our heart and then we make a career out of that, we make a day-to-day avocation to something, that gives all of us purpose and it allows us to make a contribution to the world.

[music out]

[music in]

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.

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

Thanks to our guest, Mark Mangini for sharing his stories. He designs audio magic with Formosa Group, a talent-based company that does amazing movies. Formosa created the soundtracks for Blade Runner 2049, Molly's Game, and Game of Thrones. And are staffed with Oscar-winning talent just like Mark. You can find out more about their work across the film industry at FormosaGroup.com.

Thanks also to Heather Olsen. Heather’s been designing sound for animation for more than 10 years at Advantage Audio where she has earned multiple Emmy nominations. You can learn more at advantageaudio.com.

All of the music in this episode is from our friends at Musicbed, and for the first time ever, they just announced a new subscription plan. So whether you’re Youtuber, a production company, a freelancer or even a podcaster, Musicbed has a plan waiting for you. Sign up at music dot twenty kay dot org and we’ll get a little finder’s fee. Again, that’s music dot twenty kay dot org.

You can sign up for our superfan newsletter at newsletter dot twenty-kay dot org. Also, we make this show for you, so don’t ever hesitate to drop us a note. And if you were as inspired by Mark and Heather as we were, be sure to share this episode with your friends.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

[SFX: That’s All Folks]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Behind the Mic: The making of Twenty Thousand Hertz

50 episodes! When we launched this podcast two years ago, we never imagined our passion project would come this far. To mark the occasion, we’re taking a peek behind the scenes of the show. Join the Defacto Sound team as they take you into the inspiration, creation, and people behind Twenty Thousand Hertz.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Sasask by Uncle Skeleton
Density by Steven Gutheinz
White11 by Tangerine
We Never Left by Stray Theories
Igloo by Steven Gutheinz
Open Waters - Instrumental by Lael
That Trap, Part II by COSSY
Switchovers (Part 2) by Dario Lupo
Cities by UTAH
Fields by SisterBrother
Mirrors (No Sample) by UTAH

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see our video series.

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

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

Follow Dallas on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠Facebook⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

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If you're looking for another great podcast, check out Moonshot.

View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

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

This is our 50th episode! Seriously, I never could’ve imagined getting this far. We’ve now produced over 1,000 minutes of ultra-highly-polished, sugary sugary audio candy. The amount of work behind those 1000 minutes though, is crazy. It’s been a huge adventure and we couldn’t have done it without all of you. So, because of this occasion we’re going to do something we don’t usually do. We’re going to talk about ourselves. This is the story… of Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music out]

Jai: My name is Jai Berger and I’m a sound designer.

Colin: My name is Colin DeVarney. I’m a sound designer.

Nick: My name is Nick Spradlin. I’m a sound designer.

Sam: I’m Sam Schneble and I am the producer at Defacto Sound.

If you listen to the credits of our show, which you should… you probably recognize these names. Together, we all make up Defacto Sound, which is the sound design studio where Twenty Thousand Hertz was born. I started Defacto Sound in 2009, after working as a sound designer and mixer in LA for NBC, and Fox, and G4, then later on the east coast for The Discovery Channel. Defacto essentially just started as me, but has grown into the incredible sound team we have now.

[music in]

Jai: Defacto Sound does sound design and mixing for post production. Basically we try to help tell someone’s narrative through sound.

Colin: We work for video game companies, we work for different TV networks, we work for lots of independent filmmakers.

Nick: I guess the simplest way to say that is that we create and finish the soundtrack.

Sam: So we make all of your awesome film and TV shows sound really freaking cool… Basically without us, they would be really boring…. [laughs], that’s what I think.

[music out]

Audio post production might be a familiar industry to some of our listeners. But for those who’ve never heard about it, it can be difficult to explain exactly what we do.

Colin: Usually, by the time I come into the process we have a video that the editor has put together. They’ll send us over some raw dialogue which is just the recording that was done, and they’ll have some music they’ve picked out and that’s all been edited in there.

So when I receive it, we have all this raw audio and I’ll take dialogue and that music and I’ll make it sound as nice as possible and I’ll mix those so that you can comfortably hear the dialogue but the music is pushing through. And then what I do is I look at the cut and see what we can enhance with some sound design.

Sam: Sound design is basically adding sound effects to picture or even radio. For example say you are seeing on-screen someone running through the woods and they tripped over a log.

[sfx: someone running, tripping, shuffling on leaves to get back up]

Without sound design you wouldn’t hear the crunching of the leaves under someone’s shoes and the hitting the log… thumping to the ground, trying to shuffle to get back up. And you hear the leaves and even maybe the birds being disturbed in the background… That is all added through sound design.

Nick: I mean you can think of it like mixing paint. Every different piece of sound is a different color, and if you just don’t pay attention it just becomes brown [SFX: white noise] . But if you are really careful about it, it becomes this pretty painting.

Sound Design one of those things that super difficult to get across in a few sentences. Even the entire sense of sound itself is something that most people don’t really consciously think about. I mean, we think about taste at least three times a day, we make sure everything around is comfortable to appease our sense of touch. We also make sure things smell nice, and literally everything around us is designed visually. Take a second to look around. Think about how many things have been visually designed by humans? Anyway, those other four senses are well covered in our conscious as well as in pop culture. Really, aside from music, people don’t actively engage with sound in their everyday lives.

Jai: A lot of the times when we talk about sound it feels very alien and technical.

Nick: The speakers and the cables and the oxygen-free copper headphone wires...

Those were the type of ideas I hoped to change with this show.

[music in]

Colin: The mission of Twenty Thousand Hertz is to get, basically, casual listeners - people who like podcasts - but people who don’t think about sound, to really think about their sense of sound in a much more deep and rich way.

[SFX: Clip for Disney Parks episode, “Sounds can make you relax, they can make you sweat, they can make you get chills, feel calm or terrified.”]

Jai: We’re trying to make it more exploratory, and more fun, and interesting.

[SFX: Clip from Level Up,“This is story of how video game sound designers create new worlds, tell stories, and bring imaginary characters to life”]

Sam: Kind of open people’s ears and have them listening more, because it’s just really fascinating once you start listening to your world more and recognizing things.

[SFX: Clip from Wilhelm Scream, “You may be thinking… What’s the Wilhelm Scream? If you think you’ve never heard it, it’s been used in movies such as Batman… Star Wars… Toy Story…”]

Nick: We don’t talk about audiophile stuff on purpose because we try to talk about the things that just happen out there that do affect you. They’re entering your world through your sense of sound and they’re affecting you. And you may or may not be thinking about it or realizing it but it’s still your sense of sound that’s the center of the conversation.

[music out]

We knew at some level what we wanted to achieve. But having an idea is one thing. Turning that idea into something tangible is an entirely different matter, and honestly, we had no idea what we were doing. The first two episodes took us nearly a year to do research, editing, and reworks before finally being released.

[SFX: clip of Siri, “I’m Siri, you’re personal assistant.”]

[SFX: clip of NBC Chimes, “This is the National Broadcasting Company”]

Sam: This was the very beginning of our podcast and we were still trying to get our feel for how we’re going to do this show and we didn’t really know what we were doing at that time. So it was just a huge experiment so there were a lot of hours spent on it.

You learn a lot about making podcasts after two years of producing one. The lessons we learned account for many of the differences you might notice between our first episodes and today’s shows. If you listen to some of our early work, the difference is pretty obvious. For one thing, I sounded like I just rolled out of bed.

[SFX: clip of NBC Chimes, “There are only about 100 sounds that have actually officially become US trademarks and most of them are incredibly iconic”]

Over time, the research became more streamlined, the number of rewrites went down, and the tone of the show became more defined. But we still spend upwards of 150 hours or more on each and every episode. So what exactly does that process look like?

[music in]

Colin: It all starts with an idea for a topic, and obviously early on that came from us. And then, it’s become largely from listeners as well. Now that we have a bit of a following, we take a lot of ideas from listeners and we’ll kind of rank the ones that we like.

Sam: We have a kickoff call with the writer, being like, this is kind of the angle we want to go down, these are the type of people we want to try to find to interview. Once the writer, producer does some research on the topic and finds the best people to interview, they’ll contact me to schedule a recording session. Basically I’ll find either a freelance recordist or a recording studio nearby for them to record the interview.

We put a ton of time and effort into capturing the highest quality recordings we can. This can be extremely challenging when we’re talking with experts in other countries or remote locations. So, why do we put so much time and money just into the recording of the guests?

Nick: Because we’re a sound podcast.

[SFX: Gradually filtering Nick’s voice as he describes the phone speaker sound here]

Nick: I mean, if I just talk into my phone then it’s going to sound like a tiny cheap microphone and it’s going to sound like a phone call, and other podcasts do that and there’s nothing wrong with it. It fits their style. But for us, we’re just a bit obsessive about audio and we just want it to sound as good as it can.

[music out]

When the interviews are done, we send them out to get transcribed. When we get these transcriptions back, it’s time for the writers to step in.

Colin: When we’re writing the episode, we never want somebody to be bogged down with details, or if there are a lot of details we want to make it as interesting as possible. If the guest is speaking about a topic but they take a long time to say what they’re trying to saw, we often will have that said in VO instead so that it gets right to the point and the listener can take in that information and move on and not have to wait for two minutes to get this idea across that they could have gotten in 15 seconds.

The writing is a balance between information and entertainment. This podcast is not designed to be comprehensive, or a one stop resource for these topics. In a perfect world, I want people to spend another 2 hours going down some obscure Wikipedia rabbit hole. This podcast’s only mission is to get people in tune with their sense of hearing. So, once we feel like we’ve reached that information/entertainment balance and the script is done, I’ll record my voice, like I’m doing right now, then it’s the sound designers’ turn.

[music in]

Jai: First thing we do is get all those bits and pieces from the interviews that we’re going to be using. We get all of Dallas’ VO laid out and then we just start editing all of that. Cutting out any breaths that feel a little awkward or uncomfortable [SFX: Dallas’ breaths], any stumbles [SFX: Dallas’ stumbles], a lot of umms [SFX: Dallas’ umms], a lot of likes, a lot of the little stuff that might be slowing down the pace a little too much. But at the same time there’s a balance with that because we really want to keep it feeling natural. We want people to feel like their best selves when they hear themselves talk on the show.

[music out]

One of the most common questions we get asked is how do we process the voiceover on our show? Without getting too too detailed, there are a few common audio processing tools we use to get the sound you’re hearing now.

[music in]

Nick: Our basic chain is an equalizer, a de-esser, a fader, and a compressor. So with the EQ, that’s the lingo term for an equalizer. Everybody's seen these, you have a bass knob and a treble knob on your stereo and that is an equalizer, just a very simple one. It’s not really meant to be creative, it’s meant to take things back to correct. Like if you take a photo and it’s too dark, you brighten it. You’re not really being creative, you’re just making the photo look right.

We use the fader and the compressor to keep the dynamics very level. I listen to a lot of shows and I’m in the car or something, I can hear one sentence perfectly. The next sentence is super soft so I turn the volume up [SFX: volume turns up] and then the next sentence is super loud again, I turn the volume back down [SFX: volume turns down]. And that’s really annoying. So in part of mixing the show, I’m always worried about the dynamics and the volume of everything that’s playing.

[music out]

Another vital element of our show is the music. We use music to help reinforce an idea, to mark a transition, and to help sell the emotional tone we’re hoping for. It’s hard to overstate how much thought goes into the music alone.

[music in]

Sam: We’re very particular about the type of music that we like on this show. It has to be the right the right feel for the episode. It can’t be overpowering, or have lyrics, or very intense instrumentation [SFX: music intensifies] when it’s covering up a very important interview where they’re trying to say something important and all of a sudden this music slams you in the face.

[SFX: music slams]

Sam: It matters a lot because it also plays into the tone of the interview and what’s going on, but if you have the wrong track it’s going to completely change what you’re listening to, so we’re very particular and careful about how to play up the exact emotion that we’re trying to go through.

[music out]

Last, but certainly not least, is the sound design. We realized early on that sound design for an audio-only medium like podcasts is really different than sound design for TV, film, or games.

Jai: It just needs to be very clean and concise. It needs to speak really really well because we don’t have that visual component.

[SFX: Clip from Movie Soundtrack]

Jai: When you’re just listening it needs to be really spot on with the sound choice, otherwise it can be interpreted a million different ways. The other thing that’s really cool is we can use it to reinforce an educational moment. When someone is talking about some sonic thing and we can kind of do a subtle example underneath to help reinforce and educate what they’re saying.

[SFX: Clip from Amen Break] - “You can choose between snares. You can start chopping up the Amen Break and rearranging the individual beats into other configurations”]

Colin: Once all the editing is done, and this is days of work at this point, then it comes down to the final mixing. Making sure everything’s fitting in the pockets. Then I’ll send it off to Dallas to review. He’ll give his notes, sometimes we will also decide that we need to rework the episode a bit at this point.

Nick: And usually, there begins a multiple week phase of adjusting and rewriting and refining.

This reworking period has become a regular part of the process. And almost without exception, every episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz has felt like a bit of a disaster a few weeks before they go live. In a nutshell, two weeks before we launch, we always feel like it’s the worst show we’ve ever made, then somehow it all gels together in the final 2-3 rounds of tweaking.

Nick: It’s really challenging to write something for radio without hearing it or speaking it. And you come up with an idea and you try it out and you find out if it works or not. And sometimes you think of a better idea, and sometimes you refocus the show because you realize one section is more powerful than the other. We have to edit it for the way that it sounds and flows when you listen to it, and that’s just different than it is on the page.

Jai: Getting that fresh pair of ears makes all the difference for fine tuning everything after that first version. It’s really a lot of pacing things that is the difference between the first version and the last version I think that really takes it from OK, to great.

Colin: So once it’s done, and everything’s approved.

[SFX: Ta-da]

Colin: Then we post it to our platform for sending the podcast out to everybody.

Nick: We schedule it in a calendar and it gets released automatically and it just sort of, I guess it’s sort of weird, it like evaporates, you’re like “well, I was just working on this nonstop for the last three months and now it’s just kind of gone, and people will hear it I guess, but the only thing we can see is a like a little number, a little graph just raising. “Oh, I guess people are listening to this.”

[music in]

So that’s how a show goes from being a simple idea to an mp3 in your podcasting app. The process can take hundreds of hours per show, and with 50 episodes under our belt, that’s a huge amount of time put into the podcast. It’s pretty amazing to look back at all the episodes we’ve produced over the past couple years.

Colin: I’ve worked on NBC Chimes, 8-Bit Sounds, Mystery Hum, Sound of Extinction, From Analog to Digital, Space, 20,000 DB’s Under the Sea, Sound Firsts, Watergate, Disney Parks, The Bleeps, The Sweeps, and the Creeps, The Gift, 3149146093, Hamilton, The Music in Speech, Amen Break, and Casinos.

Jai: Movie Soundtracks, Foley, Voice Acting, Evolution of Accents, Sonic Seasoning, Spooky Sounds, Musak, Live Theater, Misophonia, and Jingles, oh and ASMR. I forgot that one and that’s one of my favorites.

Nick: I worked on Audio Descriptions, Cars, The Good, The Bad, and the Irritating, Hearing Loss, The Wilhelm Scream - which is probably my favorite - Noise Pollution, Fight or Flight, Level Up, The Acoustical Umbilical Cord, The Emergency Alert System, Ultrasonic Tracking, THX Deepnote part 1 and 2, Sonic Branding.

So many of these episodes have had a profound impact on us and have even changed the way we think about sound. We’ll talk about the moments that were the most special to us, after this.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

With topics ranging from Siri’s voice, to mysterious hums, to people whispering in your ear, and even outer space, we’ve covered a lot of ground over the past 50 episodes. While we were putting this episode together, we all looked back through the archive and talked about some of our favorite moments from the show. Sometimes it’s the episode that sticks out, other times it’s the story behind the episode.

For me, the NBC Chimes show will always be special.

[SFX: Clip from NBC Chimes,“NBC hired an electronic organ pioneer, Captain Richard Ranger, to build more of an automated system for building chimes”]

This episode was the introduction of Twenty Thousand Hertz for many of our listeners. It was also great because the history is so cool and it embodies exactly what our show tries to do. The not so great part of that show was just how long it took us. Almost a year of frustration and discovery went into the episode. We were just trying to figure out how in the world to make this podcast. But ultimately, it was an amazing way to set the tone for our show.

[music out]

Sam: Rick’s entire story about how he was there when NBC was purchased and they had to stop playing the chimes and then he just had to rip the tape out of the machine and he just took it home with him because he was like “I don’t know what to do with this, they no longer want it to be played.” I think that’s hilarious cause that doesn’t happen nowadays.

[SFX: Clip from NBC Chimes,“The 9 o'clock hour comes we do the network newscast and at 9:05 - 30 the newscaster says, “Gary Nun, NBC News New York.” I played the chimes. I then pulled that tape cartridge out of the machine where I played it. Well, no sooner had I had gone that, general manager shows up. He just looked at me and he said, “Make sure no one else can do that.” I did that by taking the tape cartridge home. It’s sitting on my shelf.”]

[music out]

Many of our shows have a relatively clear structure. We talk about a particular sound, the history of it, the importance it holds, and we’ve got a show. Other episodes can be a much bigger exercise in experimentation.

[music in - from the Space episode]

Sam: I loved everything that happened with the Space episode, especially because Dallas got to go to NASA Goddard and interview people and when Dallas had asked, “If I was on Venus, like how would I sound?” And all of a sudden we morph his voice to make it sound like he’s actually on Venus. That is super cool to me.

[SFX: Clip from Space, “I wonder what other things, like my voice, might sound like? I’m on Venus, in this ethereal world that’s a mix between a gas-like atmosphere and water. I’m almost floating, yet it’s not as restricting as being submerged in water. My voice, the thunder, it’s all slightly muffled and distorted as it travels through the thick atmosphere.”]

[music out]

Sometimes we go into a topic with some prior knowledge on the subject. Other times, it’s a completely new idea to us. Those are often the most challenging and rewarding shows we work on.

Nick: Audio description still sticks with me. It was just something I had never heard of and it made me aware of this whole other side of the world that I never thought of. We used the Matrix in the show and so as part of my research for that episode I just listened to the entire audio described version of the Matrix.

[SFX: Clip from Audio Descriptions, Matrix description]

Nick: And it was unbelievably good. They’re not enjoyable for people with vision impairments. They’re enjoyable for anybody who just wants to listen and visually focus on something else, or, it’s just enjoyable for anybody.

[SFX: Matrix scene continues]

Jai: Spooky Sounds was probably my favorite episode in terms of sound design that I worked on. I mean the demon Dallas voice in the intro was a lot of fun to mess around with.

[SFX: Clip from Spooky Sounds, “You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor.”]

Jai: Basically what’s happening is we’re creating multiple versions of Dallas’ voice pitched lower and they’re kind of modulating in and out with each other so it’s like you get the normal Dallas voice, but then these multiple lower pitched versions of his voice [SFX: vocal effect] start sweeping in.

So that vocal effect was never in the original script, so when I first reviewed the episode and heard it, I burst out laughing. At first I was like, “I don’t if we should do this, it’s kind of weird”. But, it was just too much fun to pass up and I had too much of a reaction out of it. It’s awkward to hear your voice already, but to hear your voice pitched in a demonic way was just hilarious and it worked immediately. The line between sound design that sells and sound design that doesn’t can be razor thin, and in this case it worked perfectly.

Jai: One thing that has been great about working on the podcast so long is I think we’re all more willing to take risks. And, there’s things that we try now that I feel like we would not have the guts to do before. There’s… Oh! ASMR.

[SFX: Clip from ASMR, “To get everyone on the same page, we listened to some popular ASMR tracks all together… “This one’s close for me… it’s close. Okay Sam it sounds like you have something to say about this.” “I really don’t like it”... ]

Jai: That’s part of what I love about that episode is I feel like that episode is such a different vibe in some ways. I loved how kind of off the cuff that intro was.

[SFX: Clip from ASMR, previous clip can crossfade with this one under Jai] “Sam can describe what’s happening on screen right now?” “Well, she has these fluffy windscreens on each of the mics, and she is caressing them gently.” “Can you describe her facial expression?” “She’s really into it.” [laughs]

Each and every episode goes through a lot of revisions. Sometimes the reworks can be minor, and sometimes they can represent an entirely different way to tackle the subject. This is especially true when the episode is a potentially sensitive topic.

Misophonia was a challenging one for us. We debated how best to illustrate the struggle many people go through because of these intense, negative reactions to sounds. Ultimately we decided to design the episode with exaggerated examples of some common misophonia triggers.

[music in]

[SFX: Clip from Misophonia,“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.”]

Jai: Originally when we talked about this episode I was actually pretty concerned with the sounds moments that we chose because I wanted someone with Misophonia to hopefully be able to enjoy the episode without too many triggers.

But at the same time, we discussed it and we decided, maybe it’s more important in the grand scheme to go kind of the flip direction and help put someone in someone else’s shoes a little bit through the sound design in that.

[music out]

Jai: Either direction could have worked but I think going with something that we’re trying to make people more empathetic was a good choice in the long run.

It seems like it was well received from some of the people we talked to that we were working with, so that made me feel a lot better because I was a little concerned about that episode.

[music in]

Another goal we have is to provide moments of awe for our listeners. We want people to be amazed and inspired by the sounds around us. We’re always trying to create moments that give a sense of wonder.

[SFX: Clip - Play clip from 20,000 DBs Under the Sea with music playing underneath,“Songs have meaning… From even hearing a very small piece of a song you can kind of relate the whole meaning.”]

Colin: One moment that sticks out in my mind is when we’re talking about whale songs. Essentially we have John Hildebrand talking about how whales use their songs to communicate, and we have this music track going on under this explanation and all of a sudden we hear these whales coming in. And they’re basically in pitch or in harmony with the music track underneath.

[SFX: Clip from 20,000 DBs Under the Sea with music playing underneath, “A song is a very efficient way, if there is a standardized message you want to get across, it’s a very efficient way of doing that, because from tiny pieces of it you get the whole message.”]

Colin: The whole episode has a bit of a somber feel to it because we talk about some of the ways that there is noise pollution in the ocean and how that’s affecting some of these animals like whales. So it’s this really beautiful and almost haunting moment.

[music out]

Choosing just a handful of our favorite moments over the past two years was really challenging. There are so many fascinating stories, inspiring guests, and rewarding challenges that went into creating this show. One thing we discussed when putting this episode together is why do we think Twenty Thousand Hertz is important? What makes the show more than just some sound nerds geeking out about technology? Each of us had a slightly different answer.

[music in]

Jai: Sound is approached from such a technical mindset and I’ve grown to have an appreciation for that but also that wasn’t the driving force that got me interested in this stuff in the first place. I think a lot of people think that, “oh they just love working in Pro Tools, they just love their software and they just love their hardware, and that’s all they want to do all day is just push buttons and move faders. That’s more of a means to an end, and even if it’s not post-audio or something, it’s such a wide open field.

Colin: I’ve been into music my whole life. I was originally going to be a musician. Even when I was a musician, I didn’t think about sound as intimately as I do now. Being a sound designer, it really is amazing how much you can pick out in the world because you get so used to using your ears everyday and listening really intently. I think Twenty Thousand Hertz is a great avenue for getting other people to experience this without having to be a sound designer and it’s a really accessible way for people to experience sound in the way that we do.

Nick: At some point, audio reached me and it stuck, and that’s the path I went down and I became a sound designer and a mixer. And maybe somebody’s going to hear the Audio Descriptions show and it's going to change their path and it’s going to make sense for them and they’re gonna go down that road.

Sam: I feel like we’re answering the questions that people had in the back of their heads that they never had answered. But we’re like, “Oh, hey. We’re going to tell you how they did it!”

Nick: We want to make a show that’s engaging and educational, but it’s not forcing you into a certain opinion. We don’t want to preach at you. We don’t want to tell you how to think. You don’t have to take a massive stance on these issues. We just want to present part of the world.

Sam: We’re not just talking about music. We’re not just talking about film. We’re talking about literally every day sounds and things you interact with. And that is really special because a lot of people try to focus on the one thing that they love, but we’re trying to get everybody involved in this and not just one tiny group of sound.

Colin: Even if we can change the way a single person thinks about sound and how that not only affects themselves but also the world around them, in both positive and negative ways. I think that’s really, really amazing.

To me, Twenty Thousand Hertz is in many ways the world’s most obvious podcast. It’s a show about sound, that is told through a medium of sound. Twenty Thousand Hertz is important because sound is important. I think that over the next few decades, sound is going to come to the forefront of design and the way people interact with it. People will realize the ways sound helps us navigate our world, makes us feel certain ways, and how it can be an integral part of our experiences.

And if this show can help that process, we’ll have accomplished what we set out to do.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more, at Defacto Sound dot Com.

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

This episode featured the whole Defacto Sound team. Which is Sam Schneble, Jai Berger, Nick Spradlin, Colin DeVarney, and me. We all want to send a special thanks to you, our listeners, for sticking with us for 50 episodes. I never thought it would go past 10. But, you listened. So thank you.

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, or on twitter or facebook. Don’t ever hesitate to say hello.

And lastly, you have been so generous with your time. If you want to help us produce another 50 episodes, please tell someone about us. Word of mouth is so so important for keeping our show going. So tell your friends, your siblings, your online community, whoever. And if you’re financially able and believe that this show needs a place in the world for years to come, please consider setting up a recurring donation at 20.org/donate.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Jingles: How they hooked us and why they vanished

This episode was written & produced by James Introcaso.

Odds are if we asked you to sing your favorite advertising jingle from when you were a kid, you’d be able to recall every single lyric. Yet we don’t hear many advertising jingles these days. Why is that? This is the story of the rise, fall, and brain science of the jingle. In this episode, we talk to UCLA’s Timothy D. Taylor, author of The Sounds of Capitalism, and Durham University’s Kelly Jakubowski.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

6_6 by Uncle Skeleton
Faint by Steven Gutheinz
Float by Gentlemen Writers
Slowdance by Gentlemen Writers
0º by Eric Kinny
Midnight Ride by Gentlemen Writers

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: start Kars4Kids commercial]

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

[SFX: start Kars4Kids commercial continued]

I bet if you ask any adult what their favorite, or most hated advertising jingle is, they can give you an immediate response and.. probably... sing every word.

[SFX: start Kars4Kids commercial continued]

Jingles are part of our culture. They’ve sold everything from toys...

[SFX Music - My Buddy]

… to cleaning products.

[SFX: Music - Mr. Clean]

Jingles have been used in PSAs.

[SFX: Music - Don’t Cross the Street]

And they get made fun of by comedians.

[SFX: - Hot Pocket stand up clip]

[music in]

Our parents and grandparents may have been the first generation to hear modern jingles, but jingles go back all the way to the middle ages.

Tim: Music and lyrics have been used to sell something forever.

That’s Dr. Timothy D. Taylor. Dr. Taylor is an author and professor in UCLA’s ethnomusicology and musicology departments.

[music out]

Tim: There's a case of a medieval song writing in a jingle from a street vendor's cries. Street vendor was selling strawberries and raspberries…

[SFX: Music - On parole / A Paris / Frese nouvele]

What we think of as modern advertising jingles started around the 1920s. This was all because of the rising popularity of a brand new device called the radio. But, back then Advertisers were super skeptical that radio ads would even work. Because in those days, most advertisements were print advertisements.

Tim: At first, people didn't want to impose a lot of hard sell messages on the radio. Partly because of this print model, because they understood that, if you didn't like an ad in a newspaper or magazine, you could just turn the page. With radio, it's more like somebody coming to the door.

Broadcasters really wanted to avoid being too intrusive with advertising, but they also soon realized that they have bills to pay. So, in the early 20’s a few jingles started creeping onto the airwaves, but most of them were for local businesses. The first big-time jingle that aired nationally came in 1926… for Wheaties.

[SFX: Music - Wheaties]

Tim: Sort of a lugubrious barbershop quartet version of a chorus from a jazz song from 1919,sang the virtues of Wheaties. It didn't ignite a craze for jingles, either among advertising agency people or the public.

[SFX: Music - Wheaties continued]

While, it was the first nationally heard jingle, that Wheaties song doesn’t have the upbeat, catchy tune we expect from our commercial jingles. That was pioneered by Alan Bradley Kent and Austen Herbert Croom-Johnson in 1939, when they wrote this song for Pepsi.

[SFX: Music - Pepsi Cola]

Tim: They took this English folk song, they jazzed it up and wrote Pepsi lyrics, and they just walked into the office of the president of Pepsi, Walter Mack, they had a portable phonograph, and they played this song that they'd written that extolled the virtues of Pepsi, but also the price of Pepsi, because it was half the price of Coca-Cola. And that was 1939 during the Depression, so if you could buy the same amount of Pepsi for half the price of Coca-Cola that was a pretty good selling point.

And Walter Mack bought it on the spot.

Walter Mack probably didn’t know it then, but his decision would change the advertising industry forever.

Tim: In this era, you could not lease radio air time in increments less than five minutes.

If you have a jingle that's 60 seconds, what are you going to do with those four minutes? So, Walter Mack found a station that was down on its luck, and he made them an offer just to lease one minute of air time, so they could air the jingle, and they did. That really was the beginning of the short form commercial, which we're now inundated with, the 60-second or 30-second commercial.

Pepsi’s jingle exploded onto the radio with it’s bouncy melody and was played for years. The only reason it was pulled from the air was because eventually the company had to raise the price of their soft drink. But, that jingle started a craze. Suddenly jingles started advertising everything!

[Music - Brylcream]

[Music - Chiquita Banana]

[Music - See the USA in Chevrolet]

[Music - Pepsodent]

This new craze for jingles started a whole advertising music industry. Jingle houses, specializing in writing and producing commercial jingles, began to spring up all over the country and hired musicians to meet the demand.

[music in]

Tim: These musicians were trained composers. They would have to demo a jingle for their clients, the ad agency clients, and usually, some sort of brand manager, president in the room too. They show up and play the piano, which would be there in the room at the ad agency and sing the jingle, and try to sell it that way.

Back then being a jingle writer wasn’t very glamorous.

Tim: Most people didn't set out to be jingle composers. A lot of them wanted to be film music composers, or later television music composers. It wasn’t seen as prestigious and you didn't get paid very well.

However, composers did find a creative way to make their job a bit more lucrative.

Tim: A lot of composers would actually sing on their own commercials, because then they got paid through the actors' unions instead of the musicians' union, which paid much less well.

[music out]

But not just anyone could be a jingle singer.

Tim: Jingle singers could walk into a studio and sight sing without having seen it before they also had to have the incredible diction, so that these crafted lyrics that sang the virtues of the product would be clear

[SFX: Music - Valley of the Jolly Green Giant]

Some singers became famous for their diction, Linda November, who was really the queen of jingle singers, in the 60s and 70s, and into the 80s. She could walk in and sight sing anything.

[SFX: Music - Meow Mix]

And Tim really means anything. All these meows were all Linda.

[SFX: Music - Coke and a Smile]

...and here she is telling Mean Joe Greene to have a Coke and a smile during a 1979 Superbowl commercial.

[SFX: Music - Coke and a Smile continued]

Advertising music was now officially commanding big dollars. Because of this, it began to attract bigger and bigger talent to write and perform jingles. In 1964 even the Rolling Stones sold their soul to Rice Krispies for the big money of advertising.

[SFX: Music - Rice Krispies]

Another famous jingle back in the day was written by Randy Newman and Barry Manilow for Dr. Pepper.

[SFX: Music - Dr. Pepper]

In fact, no celebrity has more all-time jingle hits than Barry Manilow [SFX: Coco Cabana song]. Most famous people who worked on jingles try to keep their involvement as quiet as possible, but Manilow plays his on stage as part of what he calls his VSM.

[Music - VSM Barry Manilow at :12 “VSM stands for our very strange medley. And for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, is a medley of songs that you probably know, but you probably don’t know that I had something to do with it.”]

[SFX: “Get a bucket of chicken, fingering-licking good…”]

[SFX: “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.”]

[SFX: “Give your face something to smile about with Stridex. Doo doo doo.”]

[SFX: “I am stuck on the bandaid and bandaid’s stuck on me.”]

In the late 60’s jingles were becoming pretty popular. But, up until that point, they were still really practical and utilitarian. No one in ad music were really talking about their emotions or feelings. But, all that changed with this 1971 commercial for Coca Cola.

[SFX: Music - Hilltop Coke Ad]

This is one of the most famous commercials in the world. It features a diverse group of young people all singing together in a sun-kissed field, and, of course, they’re all holding bottles of Coke. It celebrated our common bond as humans… and…

[SFX: music sudden stop]

um… you know… spend your money on Coca Cola obviously.

Tim: Pepsi and Coke were in long running battles. Pepsi's strategy was to say, if you're cool, you'll drink Pepsi.

[SFX: Music - Pepsi “You’ve got a lot to live and Pepsi’s got a lot to give.”]

Pepsi and Cokes jingle war was so popular that it lit a fire for jingles in the advertising industry.

Tim: Things took off with respect to using emotion to sell throughout the 80s. A lot of them really attempted to speak directly to consumers, using the second person.

[SFX: Music - Reach Out and Touch Someone]

[SFX: Music - The Jordache Look.]

[SFX: Music - Be All that You Can Be ARMY]

The jingle war between two soft drink companies led to other jingle wars between toys, board games, and even chewing gum. The 80’s and 90’s were an absolute gold mine for over the top jingles trying to one up each other.

[SFX: Music - Crossfire]

[SFX: Music - Mouse Trap]

[SFX: Music - Connect Four]

[SFX: Music - Discovery Zone]

[SFX: Music - Dragon Flyz]

[SFX: Music - Perfection]

[SFX: Music - Juicy Fruit]

You get the idea. Jingles were everywhere. Until they weren’t.

[music in]

Starting in the late 90’s, jingles began disappearing from the airwaves. They were being replaced by popular music tracks. Ad executives now believed in the power of music. They also had plenty of money to throw around, which meant that pop songs were in and old-fashioned jingles were out.

Tim: The jingle fairly quickly fell into disuse. When baby boomers started to get into positions of power in the advertising industry, they just started to think all these jingles are really trite. They didn't have a problem of trying to use their own music from their youth in commercials. Sometimes it was expensive, but it didn't bother them. They wanted to try to do something more sophisticated or what they thought was more sophisticated.

[music out]

In a way, it strikes me as odd that licensing, the use of a popular song to use in a commercial, or a TV show, or a film, that that has become so dominant, because wouldn't it be better to have music composed especially for your commercial, or your TV show, or your film?

Even though there are way less jingles now then there were twenty years ago, it doesn’t mean the medium is totally extinct. We still hear some national jingles on air, but they’re usually just rehashes of the past jingles.

[SFX: Music - Empire Carpet]

...and sorry to burst your bubble, but that Empire Carpet ad is not a local ad. It plays everywhere. You just think it only plays in your town.

[music in]

Anyway, since jingles aren’t completely dead are they ever going to make a comeback?

Tim: I'm not in the business of predicting the future, so I don't know. It does seem reasonable that as they say a custom song made just for you is a pretty good ideal, so maybe it will come back.

It does seem reasonable that jingles would have a comeback, especially because so many effectively got stuck in our heads. But why are jingles so catchy in the first place? We’ll find out after this.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[Kars4Kids]

No! (deep breath)

Odds are after listening to this episode, you’ll have at least one of these jingles stuck in your head for days, or weeks, or months. Sorry about that.

So, what’s happening in our brain? For that, here’s Dr. Kelly Jakubowski, a music psychologist at Durham University. Among other things, she studies earworms.

Kelly: An earworm is a piece of music that comes to mind spontaneously. We don't make any sort of effort to recall music, it just pops into our mind [SFX: music loop], and plays incessantly on a loop. We can get earworms for just a few minutes, but some people might get a song stuck in their head for hours or even a day on end, for instance.

One large survey found that around 90% of people experience earworms at least once a week, and around a third of people experience them at least once per day.

Creating a jingle that can get stuck in someone’s head is a great way to make sure your brand sticks with them.

Kelly: So when we've recently heard a piece of music that can sort of activate it in our minds, and it can play back spontaneously over and over.

From the 50s well into the 90s, jingles were being played on every radio and television. If you were alive then, you heard the same songs over and over again, making it easier for them to recall spontaneously.

Kelly: Even songs that we haven't heard in years can be activated by a lot of different cues. For instance, like if you see a person that reminds you of a song. When Michael Jackson died we had quite a lot of people reporting Michael Jackson earworms, which were sometimes related to them listening back to the songs, but sometimes it was just them thinking about the news story, thinking about memories of Michael Jackson or going to concerts.

Another trigger than can cue an earworm is seeing or hearing some of the words in a song. For instance, when I say, “The best part of waking up,” you think of this:

[SFX: Music - Folgers]

And if I were to simply say, “Gimme a break,”

[SFX: Music - Kit Kat]

Most of us hear a lot of songs each day and we can’t recall each one at the drop of a hat. Earworms have some common qualities that make them easy for our brains to remember.

Kelly: In addition to being upbeat songs, we also found that earworm melodies tended comprise generic melodic contours. By the melodic contour I mean, the ups and downs in pitches in the melody. So they tended to be simple melodies in terms of the way the pitch goes up and down, which probably makes them fairly easy to remember spontaneously. You don't want to have a sort of overall too complex melody that is really hard for someone to remember [SFX: complex piano melody].

This description also fits commercial jingles. Most have melodies simple enough that kids can sing them without any trouble.

[SFX: Music - Oscar Mayer Bologna]

When it comes to earworms, jingles might even be catchier than pop songs.

Kelly: Pop songs can kind of unfold over two or three minutes, or even longer. Whereas, jingles really have to cut to your attention in a few seconds. That can also probably add to the ear-wormy nature of them.

Jingles can be very short. Many don’t even take up the entirety of a 30-second commercial.

[SFX: Music - Klondike Bar]

When a song is upbeat, simple, and quick, it’s almost guaranteed to get stuck in our heads, even if it’s annoying. In fact some of the same qualities that make earworms also have the potential to drive us mad.

[music in]

Kelly: A song might have these earworm qualities, the upbeatness or the easy to sing along melodies, and it can still be something that we don't like. And I think part of that might be the melody is too simple to us. It has to meet that sweet spot. If it's too simple or generic song it gets irritating more easily.

[music out]

The balance of complexity is important to a jingle and a jingle’s target audience. For example, this old Toys R’ Us jingle is great for kids, but most adults want to rip their ears off.

[SFX: Music - Toys R’ Us Kid]

...and here’s an example of a slightly more complex jingle that’s designed to appeal to adults.

[SFX: Music - Chili’s Baby Back Ribs]

Interestingly, the same techniques that are used to teach children about the the alphabet are also used to sell detergent…

[SFX: Music - Sesame Street Alphabet]

[SFX: Music - All Detergent]

This could also explain why so many kids toy commercials used jingles. Kids were already used to learning through song, so it was a good way to market to them.

[SFX: Music - Skip It]

Earworms aren’t just an American thing.

Kelly: One of the top songs that we had reported in that study was this Australian commercial that was made for the Metro Trains company in Melbourne, Australia, and it's called Dumb Ways To Die. It's basically teaching people about public safety on trains, but it's a really catchy, catchy little song and it has a little video to go along with it on Youtube.

[SFX: Music - Dumb Ways to Die]

[music in]

Earworms are powerful. As we get older, we can have trouble remembering important dates and details, but can often remember every single word to a jingle from our childhood.

Kelly: The way that we remember music. as an earworm, it's an involuntary retrieval process. The way that we retrieve the memory is different to when we're deliberately recalling information, like a fact, or someone's birthday.

We know that actually these involuntary retrieval processes tend to be sort of preserved longer as we age than deliberate retrieval processes, which can actually deteriorate as people get older. Their frontal lobes in their brain, and these areas that are implicated in deliberate retrieval can start to wear out.

[music out]

You now certainly have a few earworms stuck in your brain just by listening to this episode. So is there anything you can do to get these voices out of your head?

Kelly: One of the things that people can find annoying about the earworm is that you get this loop over and over, and you don't get the full song.

[SFX: Music - Kars 4 Kids, just the 1-8-7-7 Kars for Kids, K-A-R-S Kars 4 loop]

One of the most effective strategies was to actually engage with the earworm song itself. To look up a recording of the song and listen to the whole song all the way through to sort of get rid of the loop. Some people found that if they find out something about the song or get some sort of closure, that can sort of help them to get rid of the experience.

The other thing that people tend to do, is they tend to distract themselves with some sort of other auditory material, so that could be just thinking of a different song that they like better, playing some different music, listening to talk radio, and so on. So trying to engage their auditory cortex in a different way basically because you can't really have a song stuck in your head when you're listening to something else, or thinking of some sort of other song.

[music in]

Jingles seem so simple, but they’re tapping into the deepest parts of our psyche. Of course, some are super annoying, but others truly represent a product in a way that visuals just can’t. ...and I, for one, miss them. I think they need to make a comeback! So, to all you ad execs listening right now, it’s up to you to lead that charge.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. Go check out defactosound dot com. This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso… and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Jai Berger.

Thanks to our guest, Dr. Timothy D. Taylor. You can check out Tim’s book, The Sounds of Capitalism, about the history of music in the advertising industry at thesoundsofcapitalism.com. Tim also has lots of other books about music that you can find at timothydtaylor.com.

Thanks also to Kelly Jakubowski. Kelly is a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at Durham University in the Department of Music. You can find out more about Kelly’s work at dur.ac.uk/music.

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

You can engage with me and the rest of the 20 kay team through our website, facebook, twitter or by writing hi at 20 kay dot org. Finally, if you’d like to help us financially, I’d be extremely grateful. This show costs a lot of money to make and if you’d like to hear the show for years to come, consider setting up a recurring monthly donation at 20k.org/donate.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

When we sat down to make this show, we had a giant comprehensive list of jingles we had to share. This list got so long that even in this packed episode, we weren’t able to bring you all our favorites. So in the spirit of Barry Manilow, we bring you our own very strange medley.

[SFX: Music - Double Mint Gum]

[SFX: Music - Goldfish]

[SFX: Music - Free Credit Report.com]

[SFX: Music - Mentos]

[SFX: Music - JG Wentworth]

[SFX: Music - Mounds and Almond Joy]

[SFX: Music - Lite Brite]

[SFX: Music - Huggies]

[SFX: Music - Fanta]

[SFX: Music - Glade Plug ins]

[SFX: Music - Alka Seltzer]

[SFX: Music - Lifesavers]

[SFX: Music - Nestle]

[SFX: Music - Mattress Giant]

[SFX: Music - Zest]

[SFX: Kars4Kids]

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