This episode was written & produced by Jill Bauerle.

For over a century, humans have been using technology to shape our sonic environment. White noise machines, nature recordings, noise canceling headphones and high-tech hearables all allow us to create an auditory safe space we can escape into. But is it possible to have too much control over what you hear? Featuring media studies professor Mack Hagood.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

A Little Higher (Instrumental Version) by Sture Zetterberg
Bus Stop by Red Licorice
Silent Night by Chad Lawson
Intergalactic Warfare by Edgar Hopp
Chai Belltini by Vermouth
Snap Happy by Ritchie Everett
Dark Tavern by Walt Adams
Ancient Druidic Spells (of Power) by Bitwraith
Trumpet Voluntary by Traditional
Blue Lantern by Yi Nantiro
Guru Meditation by Bitwraith
We Lift This by Imprismd

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

[SFX Clip: “This is your boy right? The one who they say listens to music all the time?”]

This is from the movie Baby Driver. It’s kind of an action comedy about a group of bank robbers and criminals. The main character is a young getaway driver whose nickname is Baby. And the thing about Baby is that he’s always wearing earbuds.

[SFX Clip: “So um, what are you listening to?” “Uh music.” “That’s right, you tell him, Baby.”]

Baby has tinnitus, which is a condition where his ears are constantly ringing [sfx]. To cope with it, he listens to music pretty much non-stop.

But Baby’s music does more than just drown out the ringing in his ears. It also helps him focus while he’s pulling off mindblowing car stunts, and speeding away from the scene of a crime.

[SFX Clip: Car tires & sirens]

Like Baby, I’ve also got a few go-to playlists that I turn on when I need to escape. If I’m feeling distracted, and I need to focus, I might put on some lo-fi hip hop. [music in: lo-fi hip hop] If I’m frazzled after a long day, I’ll put on some jazz [music in: jazz]. But it goes beyond just music. I also use a white noise machine to help me fall asleep at night. [sfx: white noise machine] And when I’m traveling, and the noise around me is just too much, [sfx: crowd chatter] I’ll put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones [sfx: noise cancel switch].

Technologies like these help us create our own personal sonic bubble.

Mack: They all offer self-control through sound control. They help us control our own attention, and the way we feel, by controlling what we hear.

Mack Hagood teaches media studies at Miami University, in Ohio. He’s also the host of another podcast about sound called Phantom Power. Mack recently released a book called Hush: Media and Sonic Self Control. It explores the way we use technology to control our sonic environment.

Mack: My book is about what I call Orphic media. Orphic media are technologies that generate a safe space through sound.

Mack: I named them after Orpheus, who in Greek mythology was the first poet, he was the first musician, the first teller of tales about the gods. And he also was on that famous trip to get the golden fleece with Jason and the Argonauts [sfx: ship crew rowing and yelling].

In the story, Jason and the Argonauts are sailing to the edge of the world…

[music in]

Mack: Jason and the Argonauts encountered the sirens who were these bird-like women [sfx: wings flapping] with these amazing voices, hypnotizing voices that would lure people [sfx: siren singing] into danger and death. And so, when they encountered the sirens, Orpheus protected himself and his fellow Argonauts by singing his own counter song [sfx].

Orpheus created a kind of sonic shield. He drowned out the song of the sirens, which allowed his fellow Argonauts to safely pass by.

[music out]

Orpheus used one sound to fight against another one. He relied on his voice, but in the real world, we use technology to do this for us. And we’ve been doing that for at least a century.

[music in: Chai Beltini]

Back in the nineteen twenties, there was a science fiction writer named Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback kept getting distracted while he was trying to work. So he invented a device that he called The Isolator. It was this huge rounded helmet that completely covered your head. It had black eyes, and honestly looked like something out of a horror movie.

[sfx: sound is muffled/condensed, breathing oxygen from inside diving helmet, sound of compressor on outside.]

Mack: It looked like an old-fashioned diving helmet. It had a little slit for eyes so that you could only see the line of text that you were trying to write, and it blocked out external sound. In fact, it covered your head so completely that you needed to use an oxygen tank in order to wear this thing.

Fortunately for everyone at the time, The Isolator never caught on. But the noise that Gernsback was trying to get away from wasn't going anywhere. This was at a time when our cities were getting filled with factories and industrial plants [sfx: 1920s industrial noises, gears grinding, hissing steam, metallic machinery] and cars [sfx: 1920’s loud car exhaust] and new construction. And all of that machinery made noise.

Mack: Noise, which was sort of this industrial by-product, it was something you didn't want, right? As the years went by, these noises kept piling up.

Mack: We get these innovations like the jet airplane [sfx], the interstate highway system [sfx], the open plan office [sfx], all of these things amplify and proliferate noise.

But there weren’t just new sounds to avoid. There were also new sounds to enjoy.

Mack: We got used to mediated sound like [sfx: needle drop, record effect on voice] listening to records or talking on the telephone [sfx: phone EQ] or listening to the radio [sfx: radio distortion] As a result, people's relationship to sound changes and we become these kind of sonic consumers.

As sound became more important to our culture, we started coming up with creative ways to use it.

Mack: Scientists started thinking in terms of using it productively, using it with a purpose. One of these innovations was the harnessing of white noise [sfx]. White noise is made up of all of the possible frequencies that we humans can hear, at equal loudness, which is roughly twenty hertz to twenty thousand hertz [sfx: frequency Sweep up into white noise].

Mack: So, just like white is all of the different colors combined, white noise is sort of like all of these different frequencies combined.

[sfx: frequency sweep back down to do white noise out]

The first white noise machine was invented out of necessity. It was the early sixties, and a traveling salesman named Jim Buckwalter was on the road with his wife Trudy.

Mack: They were traveling, they were at a roadside motel and the air conditioning was broken [sfx: air condition rattle and break], and they were having trouble sleeping. Not because they were too hot, but rather because there was a poker game going on in the next room and they couldn’t sleep because of the noise.

[SFX: poker game in next room with music: Snap Happy]

Mack: The wife, she turned to her husband and said, “If that air conditioner was working, we'd be asleep right now. I bet you could invent something like that, to make that sound."

When they got back home, Jim went out to their garage and started working on a prototype. His goal was to replicate the hum of an air conditioner, but without the air part. In other words, it would be a sound conditioner. The device he came up with looked like a white plastic dome with a small fan inside.

Mack: They plugged that thing in and it made this pleasant whooshing sound.

[SFX Clip: Original Sleepmate]

Buckwalter called his invention the Sleep-Mate. And it was an overnight success.

Mack: All their friends wanted one and they wound up starting a business making these things.

Dallas: Well, this is really fascinating, because this is something that I struggle with myself too. But what is happening in my brain that wants this so badly when I sleep? Because I can't sleep at all without some sort of consistent broadband noise.

Mack: I'm very similar, and I think people like us who are pretty tuned into sound, many of us experience this. We use our ears all day long, and then it's time to turn your ears off and go to sleep, and your ears maybe don't comply, right?

Dallas: Yeah.

Mack: The reason that this white noise is useful in that circumstance is that white noise is basically sound that's covering all the possible sounds that your ears could hear.

Dallas: Why do I have such a hard time with random noises in general? Like just hearing a creek in a house can put me in a weird, almost adrenaline state. Why is that?

Mack: Our auditory systems have evolved over time to aid us and to protect us, and to be alert and ready for things. It was probably pretty useful when we were sleeping outdoors on the Savannah [sfx: Savannah environment noises] to be a light sleeper and be tuned into sounds that are happening out there. So, just because our physical circumstance has changed and we sleep in these quite safe houses [sfx: calm HVAC sounds with house creaking] that doesn't mean that our auditory systems have completely changed in that way.

The SleepMate was inspired by a sound that was relatively new at the time: the air conditioner. But seven years later, an inventor named Irv Teibel took this idea even further, using sounds that were much older.

[sfx: nature sounds at dawn]

Mack: So Teibel was the very first person to record the sounds of nature, and actually market them as a relaxation tool.

Teibel was a true Renaissance Man of the sixties. At different times in his life, he was a musician, an engineer, a photographer, an advertiser, and a sound recordist.

Mack: And he kind of put a lot of these different skills together in this project called Environments. And so these were records, there were 22 of them in total. One side of the record would be one sonic environment, and you would flip the record over, and it would be a different sonic environment.

To make his first record, Teibel recorded beaches around the world. But when he got home and listened to the tape, it sounded flat, and uninspiring.

[sfx: uninspiring ocean sounds]

So… he took the tape to a friend who worked at Bell Telephone Labs. At the time, this was one of the few places where you could find an actual computer. Teibel and his friend used this early computer to edit and manipulate the recordings. They kept working until they felt like it captured the majestic sound and feel of the ocean. Tiebel called this track “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore.”

[SFX clip: “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore” real version]

The album was a hit. One critic wrote, “Waves come splashing out of the speakers.”

[sfx: “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore” continues then fades out]

After the success of his first album, Teibel kept releasing more. The second record included a track called “Tintinnabulation” a word coined by Edgar Allen Poe that means the sound of ringing bells [sfx].

The third installment of Teibel’s Environments series featured a recording of a big hippie gathering in San Francisco called the “Human Be-In” [sfx].

Mack: Environments number four; side one was “The Ultimate Thunderstorm,” [sfx] and side two was “Gentle Rain in a Pine Forest” [sfx].

In total, Tiebel released 11 albums, with 22 different soundscapes. He pioneered the “nature sound” trend that’s still popular today. But as prolific as these albums were, the health claims that Tiebel made about them were definitely a little eccentric.

[music in]

Mack: He called his records, “Applied psychology devices in recorded form”, and said that they would counteract the damaging effects of noise pollution, and that they would help users achieve alpha brainwave states of consciousness. They would help you read faster.

Mack: He was talking about the idea of lying down on the floor with some friends and going on a mental trip just by listening to these sounds. And even communing with your plants and helping your plants grow faster.

This may sound pretty out there. But at the time, people ate it up.

Mack: You have to remember this was the early '70s and still an era where people were into gurus, and consciousness raising, and LSD, and so Teibel was really picking up on all of this stuff, and made a form of Orphic media that was for the hippie generation, but he wrapped all of this up in a little bit of pseudoscience.

Mack: So, it was a very '70s version of this kind of sonic practice.

[music out]

Teibel was clearly very passionate about the healing power of sound. And despite some of his more outlandish claims, some of what he said turned out to be true.

[sfx: sweet calm nature sounds fade in]

Many studies have shown that the sounds of nature can calm down our nervous system and lower our heart rate. These sounds can also help our brain turn from inward thinking—like worrying—to outward thinking—like planning.

[sfx: nature sounds out]

Today, Teibel’s records are still available on all of the main music streaming platforms. There’s even a dedicated smartphone app, just for these recordings. But nowadays, there are tons of apps that do this. And since the 70s, we’ve gotten a lot pickier about our nature sounds.

Mack: You might think, “Well, rain is rain.” But actually, people want the exact kind of rain that they have a really positive, emotional, psychological association with. These app developers get requests for every kind of rain you can imagine. People want rain on a tent, [sfx] rain on a tarp [sfx] rain on a tin roof [sfx] rain on a slate roof [sfx]. They want a big storm [sfx] or they want a light drizzle. [sfx] I had one guy tell me, “If I have to make another kind of rain, I'm going to lose my mind.”

[music in]

White noise machines and nature recordings set the foundation for many of our modern personal sonic bubbles. But since Teibel’s time, we’ve invented all kinds of new ways to fight sound with sound. And soon enough, we might be able to control exactly what we want to hear, every second of the day.

That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

In the twentieth century, as industry ramped up and our cities expanded, the world began to fill up with noise. To counteract this, we started coming up with new ways to create personal sonic bubbles to escape into. Early innovations like the white noise machine and recordings of nature helped us drown out the distractions of the modern world. But there was still much more to come.

[music out]

In the late 70s, we came up with an even more radical way to fight sound with sound.

Mack: Noise-cancelling headphones were invented in 1978 by Amar Bose of the famed Bose company. Bose actually was on an airplane when he came up with the idea.

[sfx: cabin noise]

The airline was offering headphones that people could plug into their armrest, and listen to music.

Mack: He’s really been looking forward to this, and so he puts on some classical music.

[sfx: quiet classical music: Trumpet Voluntary, playing underneath din of airplane cabin]

Mack: What he finds is that, in order to overcome the noise of the jet engine, he has to turn up the sound so loud that it distorts the classical music that he was hoping to enjoy. Then he said to himself, “There must be some way to separate things you want from things you don’t want… to separate the sound of the airplane from the sound of the classical music.”

[music out]

According to the story, Bose grabbed a cocktail napkin and started writing down equations for a noise-canceling system. His company invested lots of money and research into it, but for a long time, this technology was only available to pilots.

Mack: Then, of course, it just took many, many years of development for the product to finally come out as a commercial product in the year 2000.

Commercials for noise-canceling headphones often advertise your own sonic bubble to escape into. In one Bose commercial, a woman sits in a crowded café [sfx].

[SFX Clip: Bose commercial in]

But when she turns on the noise-canceling, [sfx: Bose ad, noise cancelling on] the people around her start to disappear. Soon, she’s completely alone, so she can focus on her work.

Mack: That's how we get back to this Orphic media idea, just like Orpheus was able to use sound to create a safe space for himself. That's what Bose latched onto with these noise-canceling headphones. They allow us to control sound, so then we can be in control of our own feeling and our own environment.

[music in]

From Hugo Gernsback’s creepy isolator helmet, all the way to wellness apps and noise-canceling headphones, our ability to craft our own personal sonic bubble has come a long way. Today, we have so many options that go far beyond this. We can leave earbuds in all day that allow us to listen to music, talk on the phone, update our calendar, and even tell what weather looks like.

Mack: These new technologies called hearables, they utilize noise-cancellation. They can even amplify or process the external sounds around you.

As wearable technology continues to develop, these devices have the potential to totally reshape our relationship with the sonic world. Pretty soon, we could all be wearing a high-tech headset that filters out any noise we don’t want to hear.

It could translate a foreign language into one that we can understand, in real time. It could give us all kinds of dynamic information about our surroundings, like telling us the history of a particular building. Or, suggesting a nearby restaurant that it thinks we’ll probably like.

Mack: These are all things that are being developed. And so, the dream here is kind of a complete control of your hearing.

Mack: The cliche is that we have eyelids, but we don't have ear lids, but hearables are these in-ear computers that could really become like ear lids, and theoretically, you could never have to hear a crying baby on an airplane again. [sfx: Crying Baby into silence]

[music out]

[sfx: digital ambience]

Mack: My question is, do we really want that?

Mack: Do we always need to be in our own personalized sonic bubble, hearing precisely what we want?

Mack: Or, do we want to have space and openness for happy accidents to hear things that we don't even know we want?

When we close ourselves off to the real sonic world, it comes at a cost. For example, taking a walk while you listen to music can be amazing. But it also takes away the sound of the robin [sfx]… the neighbor’s dog [sfx]… and the community you live in [sfx]… On top of that, wearing headphones also signals to people that you don’t want to talk to them.

[music in]

Mack: I think it would be sad to be in a world where everyone just has their headphones on all the time, right? I've seen this happen in my own classes as a college professor. Not very long ago, my students would come into class, before class started, and they would be sitting around and they would talk to one another, you know? They would strike a conversation and that has really changed a lot over the past five years. Where now, it's almost the norm to just look at your phone and not talk to anyone, and have your headphones on. You're kind of the weirdo if you try to strike up a conversation, and I find that kind of sad.

When we take the time to really listen to the messy complicated world, it can be uncomfortable. But it can also be really good for us…

Just like Orpheus, sometimes we need a sonic bubble to shield ourselves from the chaos around us. But Orpheus did much more than that.

Mack: We should remember that there were two sides to Orpheus. He was this character in Greek mythology who blocked out the sounds of the siren and protected himself and protected the Argonauts, but he was also this kind of musician, priest figure who used sound to connect people.

Sound has the power to connect us in ways that almost nothing else can.

Mack: When people dance together at a nightclub, or sing together in church, we're really coming together through sound. Mack: These sonic moments where people vibrate together, and resonate together. That's what I love about sound, the way that it can do that. And that requires a certain kind of openness.   As a sound designer and general audio geek, I’m really excited to experience all of these new technologies. But, as a lover of sound in all of its forms, I also really hope that we can take it all in moderation. The REAL sonic world sounds amazing, and there’s nothing like feeling the physical vibrations of our environment with our eardrums.

[sfx: music glitch out into quiet road ambience]

Our brains need this, and I really don’t want people to further isolate themselves, and live their entire lives in a hyper-customized sonic bubble. So once this episode is over, take a few minutes to just listen to the world around you. Because whether it’s a quiet road out in the country, or a noisy street in the city, [sfx: city ambience] there is so much sonic beauty around us. And it’s worth hearing.

[sfx: city ambience continues then fades out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me—Dallas Taylor—and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. To get some tasty sonic inspiration, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram or on Youtube.

This episode was written and produced by Jill Bauerle, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Sam Rinebold. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin, and Jai Berger.

Thanks to our guest, Mack Hagood. You can find his book, Hush: Media and Sonic Self Control, wherever books are sold. And be sure to subscribe to Mack’s podcast Phantom Power, right here in your podcast player.

A special thanks goes out to Lindsay Kesselman, who sang the siren voice in this episode, and to everyone else who submitted their voice. Also, a big thanks to Matthew Ramsey, the voice of Orpheus. Matthew is a vocal coach, and he hosts a great Youtube channel called Ramsey Voice Studio. If you have any interest in singing, be sure to subscribe.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]