Sound Firsts: Landmark recordings in history

This episode was written & produced by Kevin Edds.

What is the oldest recorded sound in history? For over 100 years researchers thought they knew until a mind-blowing discovery by historians found something new - and technological advances allowed it to be played back for the first time in history. What is the oldest recording of a musical performance, president, battlefield, television broadcast, cell phone call, and more? Featuring Patrick Feaster, co-founder of FirstSounds.org, three-time Grammy nominee, and Ph.D. in Musicology as well as Lynn Novick, award-winning filmmaker, and co-directing partner of Ken Burns.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Home - Chris Coleman
Bodum - Steven Gutheinz
Man on Wire - Steven Gutheinz
Mystique - Sun Village
Gift of Life - Tony Anderson
Isle - Steven Gutheinz
People of the Future - UTAH
Becoming Human - Ryan Taubert
Summit - Dexter Britain
Summit - One Hundred Years
Washedway - evolv

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Music start]

From Defacto Sound, you're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. In this episode, we’ll be going back in time to discover sound firsts.

[oldest known recording of cell phone call]

You’re listening to what might be the oldest known recording of a cell phone conversation, all the way back in 1948.

[continue cell phone clip]

It’s hard to believe how much technology has changed in the past century, especially for our listeners born in the first half of the 1900s.

[continue cell phone clip]

While this is the oldest known recording of a mobile phone call, according to AT&T, the first call took place in St. Louis two years earlier in 1946.

That got me wondering, what are the oldest sound recordings in existence today? And, not just recordings, but what are some of the first sounds, voices, songs, events, and audio technologies, in human history? Strap in and hold on, we’re going back in time, through the history of sound.

Patrick: My name is Patrick Feaster, I’m a co-founder of the first Sounds initiative, three-time Grammy nominee, and received my PhD in folk and riff musicology. When I was a graduate student, I wrote a dissertation on how people adapted to the phonograph when it was very, very new. This possibility of speaking or performing for people who are in different times and places was radically new at the time.

Nobody really would’ve had any sense for how to proceed. How do you talk to someone who’s not there next to you? How do you talk to someone who’s going to be listening to you at some other time? When is now? Is it when I’m speaking? Is it when you’re listening to me? Where is here? Is it where I am, is it where you are? Things like that.

So, to figure this out, to figure out how people were trying to make sense of this way back at the beginning, I needed to find some of the very earliest recordings so that I could eavesdrop on their dilemmas. To do that, I found I had to learn a lot more about the very earliest recordings to figure out which they were, how to play them, how to identify them.

For over a hundred years researchers would point at Thomas Edison as the inventor of recorded sound. [Edison recording] An 1888 Edison recording of “Israel in Egypt at London’s Crystal Palace was thought to be the oldest playable recording in existence. Edison’s revolutionary invention, the phonograph, was the first of it’s kind to both record, and playback, sound.

[Edison recording clip]

But historians knew about even older archival recordings. And the key word is “recordings” because these earlier attempts at capturing sound could not be played back.

Patrick: The very earliest experiments with something resembling sound recording as we know it today, involved recording the vibrations of vibrating objects themselves. For example, you’d pluck a string [string pluck SFX] and it would vibrate. You'd tap a metal rod [metal rod tap SFX] and it would vibrate. You’d sound a tuning fork [tuning fork SFX], and it would vibrate. The idea was you’d attach something to that object that could leave a trace. A pen, a pencil, a stylus is what we usually call this. Then move a surface along rapidly underneath it [pen drawing SFX]. If everything worked right, you’d either get a row of dots, or a wavy line that would tell you how that object had moved over time.

Styluses of all types would scratch these waveforms into materials as varied as tin foil, soot-covered paper, paraffin wax, and even… wood.

Patrick: The earliest recordings of sounds passing through the air were made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He was impressed by a discussion of how the human ear works. He had the idea of trying to build an artificial ear, where instead of passing the vibrations along to our brains, they’d write them down on a sheet of paper.

So in 2008 historian David Giovannoni, Patrick, and their colleagues rewrote history and unveiled the oldest known audio recording of a human voice ever made, by Leon Scott, 17 years before Edison patented the phonograph.

[Leon Scott recording]

Patrick: Right now the earliest really intelligible recording we have is Au clair de la lune from April 9 of 1860. That’s because we can correct the speed, it’s a recognizable tune, you can listen to someone singing across the ages, and really get a sense for what things actually sounded like in the room where he was.

[Au Clair de la Lune recording]

Leon Scott’s ear-shaped device was designed to only look at sound. He was a stenographer and wanted to invent a way to record the wave patterns of conversations, testimony, or speeches. While he had no way to playback these wave patterns, he hoped he could learn to read them like a language, thus avoiding potential errors in transcription.

Patrick: The earliest ambient noises that we could have recordings of are probably the sounds of the Metropolitan elevated railway New York City.

[NYC railway SFX]

The problem is that they don’t really sound like a whole lot. The vibration of girders that were holding up the railway. It could be that we’re hearing those. In terms of sounds from the environment, there’s a recording from 1890 of the chiming of big Ben in London.

[Big Ben reocrding]

Another favorite early recording of just noises in the background is a home recording on a wax cylinder where someone had just taken a phonograph out to a barnyard some time, probably in the late 1890’s.

[home farm recording]

But let’s go back further, even before Leon Scott’s 1860 recording. Are there other recordings out there?

Patrick: In 1857 every recording Scott made has all of these pitch fluctuations burned into it. We can try to get rid of these through guesswork. For example, in the case of a recording of the cornet made sometime in late 1857 [cornet recording], we know that cornets play continuous notes, they don’t wobble around the way the human voice could. My colleague, David Giovannoni and I have tried to speed correct one of these very early recordings of the cornet using educated guesses.

[restored cornet recording]

How about even earlier?

Patrick: Scott’s very first experiments were carried out sometime in 1853 or 1854. One of them is a plate of speech [speech clip], and the other one is a plate of guitar sounds [guitar clip]. They’re pretty messed up. We can get some sort of sounds out of them, but I doubt these sounds have much resemblance to anything that was actually heard back in 1853 or 1854.

While it’s tough to make anything of those sounds, it’s unbelievable that they still exist. That someone took sound out of the air, and made a physical record of it, and were able to even remotely reproduce it.

How about any sound from earlier than that. Is there a sound that was recorded in any fashion earlier than 1853?

Patrick: We have records of tuning forks going back to 1850 or so. You can play them back [tuning fork recording], but these aren’t sounds passing through the air. They’re sounds that were picked up at their source. Some people might say that’s not really a sound recording. If we think of recordings of electric guitars picked up electrically as sound recordings, then these tuning fork traces ought to be considered sound recordings too.

These tuning fork recordings from 1850 are currently the oldest known audio recordings of any kind. But might we one day find something even older, perhaps one that used a different recording technology or medium to capture it?

Patrick: People like to speculate about sounds somehow being recovered from the even more distant past. For example, people speculate about sounds picked up on pottery. If someone was holding a chisel or something just right up against the edge of a pot as it was spinning on a potter’s wheel, could it have picked up sounds out of the air?

Or brushstrokes on paintings. Could the paintbrush that a painter was holding have vibrated in response to sounds passing through the air? Could we recover sounds from old paintings? I have a scenario of my own in mind where dinosaurs dragging their tails in the mud could have picked up sounds. Maybe of the dinosaurs voices, or things like that.

It’s very fun to speculate about all of this, but I don’t think we’ll ever run into any experiments at recording sounds passing through the air from before the work of Leon Scott.

Now that we’ve gone as far back as possible in the history of recorded sound, let’s uncover some other sound firsts.

Patrick: For a long time, people were eager to try to find a recording of the voice of somebody born in the eighteenth century. Just a few years ago, I was going through, trying to identify a group of cylinders at Thomas Edison National historical Park, and found a recording thereof the voice of Helmuth Von Moltke. The military leader in the Prussian wars of German unification.

[Helmuth Von Moltke recording]

He was born in 1800, so the last year of the eighteenth century, making him the only person from that century whose voice survives in a recording. Which is really ironic, because his nickname was Das große Stille, or The Great Silent One because he didn’t talk very much. The earliest born woman whose voice survives on record, as far as I know, is a woman named Rachel See-wom-bwa [Rachel's voice recording] who was born in 1815.

Let’s move on to some other firsts, like those from the battlefield.

Patrick: The earliest recording of authentic noises of war dates from World War I [WWI recording]. You’ll find a lot of different statements about who the first president of the United States was to make a sound recording, or who has a sound recording that survives today. The earliest really confirmed example is going to be Teddy Roosevelt.

[Teddy Roosevelt recording]

We’re only half-way through our list of sound firsts, with more examples coming up from the worlds of radio, television, film, and even outer space. And we’re also going to speak with Lynn Novick, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker who’s worked with Ken Burns for almost 30 years as she gives her take on discovering previously unheard sounds and their importance.

We’ll get to all of that in just a moment.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Listening to the earliest recorded sounds and other “Sound Firsts” is fascinating because it takes us back in time, to a place where the people making these sounds had no idea that what they were doing at that moment was going to be preserved and shared with future generations.

But many of these sounds had not been collected and preserved in a way where they could get their just due and be shared with society. They were hidden away in library vaults or personal collections and no one knew what secrets they held.

We spoke with Lynn Novick, the award-winning filmmaker and co-directing partner of Ken Burns. I wondered what it must feel like to discover an unknown sound, or photograph, or personal story, and share it with the world for this first time.

Lynn: That sort of thing happens on every project that we've collaborated on. It's hard to even have words around how you feel when you hear something for the first time yourself, and you imagine what it would have been like for the people who heard that originally. Then you try to figure out how it fits into the story you're trying to tell. It sort of collapses time between the present and the past, and in a very visceral and immediate way, and I think in a way that only sound actually can do.

My parents used to talk to me about how they grew up listening to the radio, and how they would listen to the serials. They would be transported into a place, a magic place from these stories on the radio. I always was fascinated by that because I think your brain fills in the pictures when you have the sound. That's an exercise in collaboration with the oral experience and the past that's profound.

I asked Lynn if she and her production team had ever come across any “Sound Firsts” of their own.

Lynn: Certainly we've come across sounds that have never been heard by a mass television audiences on every project. Our jazz series. We realized during the course of the production that during the war, the only recordings that were made were made for the government for something called v disks. So all the great artists of that time recorded songs to be sent out to the armed forced. V for victory, v disks. Sometimes they would record not just the performance, but the artist might say something before they started singing or playing.

There's a beautiful recording that I think evokes the time so perfectly, which is Frank Sinatra. He's going to perform Long Ago and Far Away. I think it's a 1943 [Frank Sinatra recording]. It's very personal. It's very direct. It feels very real. You don't hear him talk that way that much. It's like he's speaking to you personally. That's a really resonant moment for me.

Ken Burns’ most famous film is The Civil War and Lynn was an associate producer on it. While no actual sound recordings were made during this period of American history, some of the people who lived through it were recorded afterwards.

Lynn: Ken and his brother Rick made use of some really remarkable audio recordings that had been done, I believe in the 1920s or '30s. They're recordings of oral history by people who had been enslaved [oral history recording clip]. These are real people telling you what it was really like to be enslaved. All of a sudden it doesn't seem like it's something that happened 200 years ago. It happened yesterday when you hear those recordings.

There’s even a fantastic rumor that Leon Scott actually visited the White House in 1863 and made a recording of Abraham Lincoln. Although, there’s no evidence for this. What it would mean to Lynn to actually hear Lincoln’s voice.

Lynn: Well, first of all, hearing any representation of the voice of Abraham Lincoln would be a transcendent experience because he is so much larger than life, that it's hard to think of him as a real person. There's a grandiosity and an intimacy to what he writes and how he framed up the issues of the day. Ken and I were recently at the Lincoln Memorial, and we were standing there looking at this monumental statue. Hearing his voice would be a way to get reintroduced to him as a person and not as this unknowable leader.

Lynn’s latest collaboration with Ken Burns is their new film “The Vietnam War.” In producing this film I wondered if they discovered any sound firsts.

Lynn: One thing that we came across, was a recording that Ho Chi Minh made reading a poem that was broadcast in January of 1968 and the poem was supposed to be a signal to the Communist forces to launch the Tet Offensive [Ho Chi Minh recording]. He recorded this poem and they put it on the air and we were able to get a recording of it and put it in the film and subtitle it so that you hear what he’s saying.

He’s saying, "Forward, victory will be ours," but it's actually coded message. And I don't think any Americans, or very few, would have heard that before our film comes out.

These are powerful men making enormously important and influential decisions. It's really important to listen to them.

[Continue Ho Chi Minh recording]

The films that Lynn has worked on through the years get a pretty wide audience. But a few other sound firsts did not. One of those is a recording of the first commercial radio broadcast in history. Dr. Frank Conrad was a ham radio tinkerer in Pittsburgh. He played records over the airwaves for his friends. So when Westinghouse Electric Corporation asked him to set up a regular transmission on station KDKA in November of 1920, here’s what it sounded like.

[Dr. Frank Conrad recording]

The first sounds that came from a television broadcast were by the BBC in England in March of 1930 in a theatrical performance of the play “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth.”

[The Man with the Flower in His Mouth recording]

Unfortunately, only four households in the area had televisions to tune in.

The first feature-length movie with lip-synched audio was The Jazz Singer in 1927.

[The Jazz Singer clip]

The first stereo sound recording for a commercial film was made in 1938 for the Judy Garland movie, Listen, Darling.

[Listen, Darling clip]

In 2016 researchers restored the first recording of computer-generated music that was programmed by the British computer scientist Alan Turing in 1951.

[Alan Turing's music recording]

At this point you may think we’ve reached our limit, but this is just audio from Earth. The first sounds broadcast from the moon were from Soviet engineers in 1966 [moon recording]. The Luna-10 entered orbit around the Moon and began to broadcast the song “The Internationale.”

And we even have the first sounds from Mars. In 2012 the Curiosity team broadcast an audio message delivered by NASA administrator Charles Bolden.

[Charles Bolden recording]

But just wait, we’ll hear real ambient sound from the surface of Mars in 2021 when a new rover will land on the red planet with a microphone for the first time.

It’s interesting to think that just over 10 years ago our concept of the oldest recorded sounds in history were from the late 1870s. But discoveries by researchers and advancements in technology pushed that back to the 1850s. I wondered what new technology might do for some of the unintelligible Leon Scott recordings prior to 1860.

Patrick: I do believe that over time we’ll be able to develop techniques for making better educated guesses about the earlier recordings. I’ve been doing some experiments myself lately aimed at trying to find patterns in the irregularities.

Lots of possibilities here. Lots of room for very creative experimentation. But, I’m pretty sure that before too much longer, we’ll be able to listen with a lot more confidence.

The search for the oldest, and the first, types of sounds in history has made me reflect on the importance of sound in our lives. A photograph is a literal snapshot. It’s a singular moment in time. But sound that can last for seconds, even minutes, helps us feel in an almost indescribable way what it may have been like to live in earlier times and to almost know another human from a bygone era.

[Alexander Graham Bell recording from 1885]

Lynn: In a way, there's something that happens where you read something in a book or you imagine it, but when a person who was there tells you something that confirms what you've already think happened, it kind of cements it and makes it real.

Patrick: It’s crucial that we preserve these earliest traces of our audible past. Imagine what it would be like if we didn’t have any photographs of what the world looked like more than 50 years ago. What would we lose by not knowing what a city street looked like in the year 1900? Or what the faces of the presidents of the United States really looked like? Not the idealized pictures we get in paintings, but what these people really looked like. If we lost the earlier sound recordings that we possess, the loss would be similar. Sound matters.

It’s interesting to think that Leon Scott was the first person to record the human voice, and as my words are being recorded now, at this instant, it’s the very last recorded voice in human history… if only… for a fleeting moment.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound. A sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at Defacto Sound dot com.

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

Many thanks to Patrick Feaster and his colleagues at FirstSounds.org, who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time. And thanks to Lynn Novick whose new film “The Vietnam War” premieres September 17th on PBS.

Like the music you hear on this episode of 20 Thousand Hertz? Each song is provided by our friends at Musicbed! You can listen to all of them, including this one, “Summit” by One Hundred Years, on our exclusive playlist. Start listening now at music.20k.org

If you’d like to get in touch, reach out at hi @ 20k dot org, or through our website, 20k dot org. You can also connect with us on Facebook and Twitter with the handle 20korg. Also, please go to the podcast app of your choice and give us a quick rating a review. It helps a ton.

You’ll find all of the links I mentioned in the show description.

Thanks for listening.

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Noise Pollution: The hidden costs

This episode was written & produced by Dave Parsons.

Noise pollution is something we’ve all experienced. Road construction, motorcycles, passing aircraft - the list goes on and on. Other than being just plain annoying, what effect does noise pollution have on our lives? In this episode we take a look at the physical and psychological effects of noise pollution on humans, as well as the wider and equally devastating environmental repercussions. Featuring Les Blomberg, executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, and Rachel Buxton, acoustic ecologist, conservation biologist, and postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University.
 

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Gliding Through - Steven Gutheinz
Charge Into 2017 - Dexter Britain
Wanderer - Steven Gutheinz
Sierra - Steven Gutheinz
Thought in a Thought - Steven Gutheinz
Safely Home - AJ Hochhalter
Sleepless - One Hundred Years
Mimic - One Hundred Years
Balboa - Steven Gutheinz
Somebody’s Everything - Volunteer
Washedway - evolv

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Music start]

From Defacto Sound, you're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story of Noise Pollution - how it affects your health, and so much more.

[Calming Nature SFX]

Imagine you’re hiking through Yellowstone National Park. You’ve spent the better part of a day traversing steep inclines, boulders and streams. You find a remote location just off of a major trail, and decide to rest. As you begin to relax, you become overwhelmed by the majestic soundscape of this unadulterated wilderness. You close your eyes, listening to the beauty of the birdsong overhead, the steady babble of a nearby stream [stream SFX], the sound of the wind blowing softly through the trees [wind blowing through trees SFX]. Just as you’ve settled into a deep relaxation…

[Jet passing loudly overhead SFX]

There’s no getting around it - there are certain sounds that when we hear them, we simply don’t like it. But does this qualify them as noise pollution? What is noise? To get a better idea, I spoke with Les Blomberg, the executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse.

Les: The most common definition out there is, "Noise is unwanted sound," and it's really the most unsatisfactory definition at the same time. It really doesn't describe what noise is. It paints noise only in terms of whether it's wanted or not. It makes it totally subjective. The way I like to define noise is, "Noise is a sound that harms the wellbeing of people or animals, or interferes with activities." There's also another definition of noise, which is, "Noise is a sound that is out of place or inharmonious."

So, the loud clicking and clattering of a coffee shop [coffee shop sounds], I’d say that’s noise. The sounds from the apartment above that can best be described as bowling balls rolling around on the hardwood floor [bowling bowls rolling SFX] – that’s probably noise as well. That annoying beeping sound the debit card reader makes when it’s done reading your chip [chip reader SFX] - that’s definitely noise.

But what are the major offenders? What sounds are so intrusive, so audibly aggressive that we collectively consider them a kind of pollution? For that, we have to go back to when it all started.

Les: It all began right at the turn of the century. In 1903, we have the founding of the Ford Motor Company [old car honk SXF]. We have the founding of Harley-Davidson Motorcycles [harley motorcycle SFX]. We have the Kitty Hawk flight [small plane SFX]. We have just this explosion of internal combustion engines that are making noise across the country.

Then around the 1950s we have the addition of the jet engine [jet engine SFX], the gas mower [mower SFX]. The snowmobile [snowmobile SFX], the Jet Ski [jet ski SFX], the leaf blower [leaf blower SFX].

We see an invention of a noise, the growth of that noise source. And then probably the most important thing, is the spreading of this noise from our urban areas to our suburban and our rural areas. And that's really the most striking thing in the last century, is that what we've lost is opportunities for peace and quiet.

For over a century we’ve been dealing with a massive rise in noise pollution across the country, but recognizing the sources of noise pollution is only the first step. Measuring it is another matter altogether.

Rachel: Our measure of noise pollution we define as the number of decibels above natural.

That’s Rachel Buxton, an acoustic ecologist and Conservation Biologist at Colorado State University. She’s been working with her colleagues at CSU, along with the National Parks Service, to predict levels of noise pollution across the United States.

Rachel: When we're talking about anthropogenic noise pollution or human-caused noise pollution, this is something that's human like traffic, either from aircraft, vehicles, industrial noise, that sort of thing...

We can't really think of it in the conventional way of 35 decibels is really quiet and 80 decibels is really loud.

Decibels give a measurement of the pressure variations in the air. When measuring noise pollution, the important thing is to find the difference in noise - how much noise has crept in through pollution.

Rachel: A 3 decibel increase in sound energy above natural would be a doubling of sound energy. Another way of thinking about this is your listening area so how far you can hear things. So if a human was walking in the woods and used to be able to hear some kind of sound, maybe a bird singing [bird song SFX] or a friend calling [friend call SFX] from a 100 feet away, if anthropogenic noise raises sound energy by three decibels, instead of now hearing that sound at a 100 feet, you can only hear it from 50 feet away.

While the decibel may be an effective way to measure the intensity of a sound, it’s important to note that noise pollution can be caused by many additional factors. Take a car alarm - for instance [car alarm SFX]. Its high-pitched frequency, its alternating between different jarring tones, its repetitive nature. The decibel fails to account for all these other acoustic features. For example - Consider waking up in the middle of the night to a persistent drip from a faucet [faucet drip SFX]. It isn’t loud at all - a decibel measurement would read fairly low - but that doesn’t keep it from disturbing your sleep.

Les: The best measure of noise is our ears. We get to hear the frequency, the content, the tones, all aspects of the noise, and not just one number that represents kind of but not exactly the loudness of that noise, which is the decibel level.

The term “noise pollution” can at first seem kind of alarmist. Hearing the word pollution probably makes you think of air pollution, or possibly water or soil pollution – all of which infer some dire circumstance, a poisoning of the basic resources we all need to survive. But noise pollution? How can excess noise be a threat to our very survival?

Les: If you were to ask people 50 years ago, what's the problem with noise? Noise is an annoyance, that would be the problem with noise. Really in the last 10 to 15 years, scientists have studied noise and looked at it in terms of the cardiovascular effects, and have found that noise is actually killing us. Researchers now are finding out that people who live near airports, two to four percent of the heart attacks that occur near that airport are related to the noise. Same with highways. Every month there's a new study on the health effects of noise, and we're beginning to understand now that noise is much more than just an annoyance. That it actually has a measurable effect on our health.

Studies have linked noise pollution with hearing impairment, hypertension, elevated blood pressure, heart disease, changes in the immune system and even birth defects. Exposure to high noise levels have also been linked to an increased frequency of headaches, fatigue, stomach ulcers, and vertigo.

Les: Noise triggers our fight or flight response, it does this whether or not we are "habituated" to the noise. People say, "Oh, I get used to the noise." What they're saying is that it's not on a conscious level a distraction to me. But our biology, we've been hardwired for thousands and thousands of years to respond to noise. It triggers our fight or flight response. Either we're going to get a little amped up so we can deal with this problem or run away from the problem. That still happens, whether or not we're aware of it or not at a conscious level. Scientists think that that is the underlying cause of our cardiovascular effects that we are suffering.

So even when it’s not annoying us, noise pollution can still be taking its toll on our bodies. And it’s not just our bodies being affected. The fight or flight response isn’t an exclusively human trait - what happens when the noise we generate begins disturbing the rest of the ecosystem? Find out after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We’ve heard about different sources of noise pollution and the negative effects it can have on our health - but what about the rest of the planet? As some of our most primal instincts can be triggered by noise, it’s not hard to believe that humans aren’t the only ones affected.

Rachel: Noise pollution can mask natural sounds or cover up those natural sounds. And those natural sounds are even more important for wildlife. They can actually be the difference between life and death. So if you think about a prey that's listening for a predator in the bushes, if an anthropogenic noise covers up that sound, it could mean that that prey is going to end up being eaten. Also, noise pollution is known to just scare away animals. So, an animal may perceive noise pollution as a threat and in that case, that would initiate a fight or flight response and the animal would flee an area. Causing sort of changes in distribution of animals.

Unfortunately, the negative effects of noise pollution aren’t confined to the animal kingdom alone. Some studies suggest that even plant life can be affected.

Rachel: Plants grow in response to the vibrations from water sound. So, underground water actually vibrates the soil and plants orient themselves towards those vibrations. They can sense the vibrations from the water sound and grow their roots towards that water source. If we start messing with these fine-tune mechanisms that different species have in place to orient towards sound to perform really basic life functions, we could be messing with things that are a much larger scale than we think.

You don’t often think about excess noise having a direct effect on an entire ecosystem. What’s equally surprising, though, is what happens when noise pollution begins to affect the way we act.

Les: Back in the '70s there was this whole host of experiments around civility, like there is today around cardiovascular effects of noise.

[experiment exmaple clip played in background] They had a guy in a cast drop some packages in a noisy environment and in a quiet environment. The noise was, I believe, provided by a lawnmower right nearby, and the quiet was the same exact location without the lawnmower. And they looked at how many people were willing to help this guy pick up his packages, and in the noisy environment the helping behavior was reduced. They've done this experiment many different ways. They've done it in noisy offices. You got the same office building [office SFX], the same people. You take somebody through the office building, you ask them, "How much do you think this person is worth? He works here, he answers the phones, he does this, he does that. She does that." And the subject would say how much they thought the person should get paid. And then they controlled the noise level in the environment, and when it was noisier, people recommended lower values.

So, next time you ask for a raise, make sure you do it in a great sounding space.

Les: As our communities become noisier, we are more likely to be less civil and less generous to others. And I think that's really a problem as we try to live together in an increasingly smaller world.

If learning of all these negative effects of noise pollution has your head spinning, you’re not alone. But don’t go plugging your ears just yet - there’s a chance that the future may be just a bit quieter.

Les: The same technology that makes the noise can be used to reduce the noise.

For example, electric lawn equipment, electric vehicles, electric buses, electric cars. All of these are much, much quieter than internal combustion engine vehicles and devices. So there's this real potential that the 21st century will not be as loud...

For now, though, the best way to combat noise pollution is to raise awareness. And the best way to do that? Encourage others to listen.

Rachel: If you think of Yellowstone, you've got those bubbling mud pools [bubbling pool SFX] from geothermal activity. You've got packs of wolves which howl [wolf howling SFX]. You've got valleys filled with bird song [bird song SFX].

We go to these beautiful national parks in our country and we're in awe of these beautiful vistas like the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park, but something we want to try and encourage people to do is take some time to appreciate those acoustic resources as really magnificent, and adding to the Park’s character. And worthy of our protection.

Noise creates a kind of acoustic competition for our attention. We’re not always annoyed by the sound of road traffic or an aircraft in the distance - but we can all agree - it’s nice to be able to get away from it all, even if just for a little while. And when we do finally get away - the sound we hear then - those sounds are worth saving.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound, a sound team dedicated to making the world sound better. Whether it’s a video, film, or game, Defacto makes it sound insanely cool. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

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

Thanks to our guest Les Blomberg from the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse. The Noise Pollution Clearinghouse is a national non-profit organization with extensive online noise related resources. Find out more at nonoise dot org. Thanks also to our guest Rachel Buxton from Colorado State University. This episode would not have been possible without the amazing work she and her group at CSU are doing alongside the National Parks Service.

All of the music in this episode is from Musicbed. Musicbed has a curated catalog of over 650 great indie bands and composers, all available for licensing. Check out a playlist of all of the incredible tracks we’ve used at music.20k.org.

You can say hello, submit a show idea, or give general feedback through Facebook, Twitter, or over email. I particularly love hearing your voice, so if you have something you’d like to share, send a voice memo to hi at 20k dot org.

If you’re a little shy about recording your voice, that’s ok, you can also send a normal email too. You can do that through the website or hi @ 20k dot org.

You’ll find all of the links I mentioned in the show description.

Thanks for listening.

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Silent Sea: Whalesong & Undersea Noise Pollution

Our collaboration with Vox. 

This episode was written and produced by Kevin Edds.

71% of the Earth is covered by water. And most of us imagine it to be a serene, almost silent world. But why should we have all the fun up here? Discover what sound is like just below the surface and all the way down to the ocean's depths. And see how mankind might be making it unpleasant for everyone and everything that calls the oceans home.Featuring underwater acoustician Al Jones, Professor John Hildebrand from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Christophe Haubursin from Vox.com on special assignment.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Stories by Steven Gutheinz
Lucid by Mode
Before Dawn by On Earth
This Love by Tyler Williams
Vision by Steven Gutheinz
From This Day On by Tim Halperin
Thin Place (Abbreviated) by Tony Anderson

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Music start]

From Defacto Sound, you're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story of what sound is like under water.

[clip: The Bloop sound]

The sound you just heard is one of the most mysterious underwater sounds we know of. It’s called “The Bloop”. It was recorded in 1997… and it’s unbelievably loud. The sound was roughly triangulated to be coming from a remote region of the southern Pacific Ocean, just west of the tip of South America. The microphones that captured this sound were over 3,000 miles away.

[Bloop sound again]

Could it be a massive, undiscovered monster from the deep? Researchers are still discovering new aquatic life every year. But this sound was several times greater than even the loudest animal in the world, the blue whale. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now believes it was an icequake, or an iceberg scraping the ocean floor. Or was it?

The world’s oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface. And while there are a few areas of land that have yet to be explored by mankind, that’s nothing. Almost 95% of the oceans have never been seen by human eyes. It’s like an alien planet, but it’s Earth.

“The Bloop” is only one of the many mysterious, possibly unexplainable, underwater sounds.

Another, is the Western Pacific Biotwang heard in the Mariana Trench.

[Western Pacific Biotwang clip]

Experts think that it’s a new type of dwarf mean ki whale call we’ve never heard before.

[dwarf mean ki whale call]

There’s also a weird beeping sound coming from the ocean floor off the coast of Northern Canada. [beeping clip] It’s so bad that Inuits can hear it on land and it’s driving away animals. The Canadian military even investigated it and can’t figure it out.

There are other unexplained sounds with interesting names like “The Upsweep”… [clip] “The Slow Down”… [clip] and“Julia”… [clip]. As we uncover more of the ocean’s sonic mysteries, maybe one day we’ll learn the truth.

Underwater sound has always been interesting to me. As a kid, I loved to stick my head underwater with a friend and try to talk… [underwater talking SFX] then we would try to see if we could understand what the other was saying. [talking underwater, mildly understandable] It was a fun game, but I always wondered why I’m able to hear anything underwater. There’s no air, so how could sound travel?

Al: There are physical properties of the water that make sound behave in very different ways.

That’s Al Jones, he’s an underwater acoustician, and a former Navy sonar technician. He’s spent years listening to and analyzing water as a medium for sound.

Al: For starters, sound travels about 11… 1200 feet per second in air. Multiply that times four and that's the speed of sound that you get in the water. It's faster in water because of the properties of the medium itself. For instance, sound travels in pure steel, about 14 times fast as it does in the air, so the denser the medium becomes, the more molecules that the sound wave gets to interact with, and it proceeds down its path inherently faster that way.

As a sonar technician on a submarine Al’s role was vital to the safety of the vessel. How important is sound to the operation of a sub?

Al: Sound is crucial, just in the same way that your eyes are, you're navigating around in a thing that does not have windows, does not have outside cameras, you're just driving, essentially by sound.

After a while it becomes very intuitive for you to be able to listen in one direction, notice, that there is something that way. Hearing those things drives us to either analyze what that thing is, or to think, "Danger, danger, we need to drive away from that, because we might hit something.”

Since I don’t have a submarine or sonar equipment, what might it sound like if I tried to listen to the underwater sounds of the ocean?

Al: The first thing that you'll recognize when you're trying to listen underwater is all of the competing activity that you're trying to listen through, in order to find something interesting. Some of the organic things that you hear when you are recording underwater, the motion of the water is very loud, and it's ever-present as you're listening.

Hearing the motors of other ships, like a cruise liner, or even a trawler motor.

The way sound behaves underwater is pretty fascinating. How does sound affect marine life? To answer that question, I spoke with John Hildebrand, who is a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He’s an expert in the field of underwater sound.

John: It turns out that the light does not propagate very far into the ocean. If you're at the surface of the ocean, there's light and then maybe the first 100 meters or so in the upper part of the ocean, it's not a very good media to sense your surroundings. We are very visual animals, the sight is our primary way of sensing things and we use sound as a secondary sense but in the ocean, it's exactly flipped because light doesn't propagate very well but sound propagates very efficiently.

I wondered, how were we even able to record these sounds.

John: It's basically underwater microphones, they’re called hydrophones. Once we started to have this technology, then we became aware of this whole universe of sounds that are underwater both from natural phenomena, the sound of bubbles that are created near the surface [bubbles SFX] or the wind blowing across the surface [wind SFX] and waves breaking [waves breaking SFX], but there’s also this entire universe of sound that's made by marine organisms even small creatures that make quite intense sounds.

Al: You'll hear invertebrates more than just about anything else, and they make a lot of noise. Shrimp [Shrimp SFX], crabs [crabs SFX], jellyfish [jellyfish SFX], even starfish make sound [starfish SFX]. When you have a lot of shrimp together, that tends to sound like bacon grease frying in a pan [shrimp SFX]. The snapping of their claws is a manner of communicating or a manner of drawing prey toward one another. If you have a lot of shrimp you’re going to hear a lot of activity.

John: People described some of the sounds of whales as a song [whale song]. It's song because it's repetitive, it's melodic in some way.

Al: If you've been out on a whale watching cruise, you can sometimes hear them so loud, you can hear them out in the air, because they are so loud underwater.

[whale song out of water]

When you're listening underwater, to whales, that can be incredibly cathartic. It's such a pure sound, the way that those sounds manifest themselves underwater [whale song]. Hearing them underwater, in person, is quite an experience.

John: Baleen whales, the large whales are a little different. They do have songs where the males will just broadcast the same thing [Baleem whale song]. Songs have meaning and from even hearing a very small piece of the song, you can relate the whole meaning.

You know there's this game that's called name that tune. If you just hear a few notes, then I can name the rest of the tune. I can do this with you if I say, "Jingle." right?

You know the rest and you're thinking about Santa right and the presents under the tree. There's a whole complex of things that go along with that. A song is a very efficient way if there's 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 [whale song]. "I am the one that you would like to breed with. I am the most fit male that you will encounter. Come on over."

So basically, whales have their own version of a love song.

John: The blue whales or large whales are specialized for broadcasting these sounds a long way so that if your girl is 20 miles away, she'll still hear you. The Baleen whales when they sing, the big ones that are singing very intensely. Those are very intense sounds. If you position your body near a Baleen whale where they're making these sounds, your whole body would be vibrating. Now, how far does it go? At low frequency, there's essentially no absorption of sound at all. Water is like a window for sound. So that's why these intense songs of the large whales like a blue whale, you could have a whale off of California and you could probably hear it in Hawaii.

The vocalizations of whales are some of the most beautiful sounds in nature. But unfortunately we’re in danger of losing them. Or at least, driving them away. Underwater noise pollution is on the rise. It’s a big problem that we’re just now discovering. We’ll talk about that, and how we can fix this problem, in a moment.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

The underwater world of the ocean is sound rich, just as much as it is here on land. Our ears are the perfect tool for our atmosphere, but not so much for underwater. However, on the flip side, the hearing instruments of marine life are perfect for their environment.

Unfortunately, marine life doesn’t have the ability to protect their own hearing, so we have to do it for them. Underwater noise pollution is a big problem, and we’re just now barely scratching the surface of it’s affects the underwater ecosystem. I wanted to know more about this phenomenon so I reached out to Christophe Haubursin at Vox.com. He’s done some great field research on underwater noise pollution so I'm going to have Christophe take over for a bit...

Christophe: I recently went scuba diving for the first time ever. And I went in expecting muffled peace and quiet, but as soon as I got down a few yards, I couldn't help but notice that there was sound all around me [motor boat SFX]. And it was coming from boats. As far as I can tell, the Earth's water is not silent.

So I did a little digging and according to the Scripps whale acoustic lab, man made or anthropogenic noise in oceans has doubled every decade for the last 50 years. And that is a really big problem for animals that use sound as their primary sense of communication. Just listen to this audio of how noise from a passing boat totally drowns out dolphin communication. [dolphin clip]

But arguably, the worst culprit of underwater sound is a process that sounds like this [underwater explosion SFX]. That is seismic surveying. It's a process that allows companies to essentially locate spots on the ocean floor where they can drill for fossil fuels. So you'll have boats with about 30 or 40 air guns that'll all go off at once [seismic surveying clip], and those will move back and forth over large parts of the ocean. And bubbles from the horns expand and contract about every ten seconds, typically, and that creates a huge amount of acoustic energy, and that helps them map geological structures very deep into the ocean floor. And that process is about as loud as a jet at takeoff. And this can go on for weeks at a time.

A study of seismic survey noise between 1999 and 2009 found that air gun sounds were recorded almost 2,500 miles away from the survey ship itself. And at some locations, they were recorded on 80% of days for over a year. And that changes how animals behave. For animals like whales who rely on complex sound communication systems to socialize and find food and mate, that poses a huge problem.

John: In many parts of the ocean we've raised the ambient noise level by 30 dBs. Now I'm going to say, "I'm going to move into your office and I'm going to increase that noise level by 30 dBs. A, I believe it would be very annoying but B, I think there's long-term damage. You're needing to wear ear plugs just to go to work.

A study by Susan Parks at Syracuse University compared recordings of North Atlantic right whale calls from the 2000s [2000’s whale calls] to those recorded in the 1950s. [1950’s whale calls] It seemed like the older recordings had been slowed down, [1950’s whale call] until she realized something amazing. The whales were calling in a different pitch. Again, here’s what the whale calls sounded like in the 50’s [1950’s whale call]. And here’s what it sounded like in the 2000’s [2000's whale call] She found that these whales are actually changing their frequency over decades. Why? Because the higher pitched calls can be heard more clearly amongst all of the noise from ships. This is the same concept as when you’re at a noisy party, you raise the pitch of your voice to project over the noise.

John: The Gulf of Mexico where the noise levels are so high. The whales that depend on low frequency sounds like blue whales or humpbacks they're all gone. They're not there.

There's only one Baleen whale that's left in the Gulf of Mexico and it confines itself to a little corner where the sound levels are not quite so bad. It's called the Bryde's whale and surprise there are only a couple dozen of them left.

The most pristine place where we've recorded right now is in the Arctic and it's that way because when the ice comes in, there are no ships and also, the ice keeps the surface of the ocean calm. Those are the lowest levels we've recorded anywhere.

Research suggests that human-made noise can damage marine mammals hearing organs, sometimes causing death. All of this sounds pretty foreboding, but John thinks a solution may not be too far off.

John: The first step is we got to care. We got to realize, "Yes there's a problem" and then we have to care. The quality of the ocean is based on the sound level just as much as it is on things like pollution from plastic and overfishing and all these kind of things.

If you go on a cruise ship, big nice awesome cruise ship, it's quiet and it's quiet because they want the people on that ship to have a good experience. They've done a lot of tricks to insulate all of the cabins and parts of the ship where people are from the noise of the propulsion and generators and all this thing so there are things you can do.

The Navy cares about this deeply because they don't want their ships to be detected. So what they found is you can design more complicated propellers, you can insulate all the machinery. You put the machinery on shock mounts. If you said, "Here's a commercial ship, we're going to have a sound criteria, if you output sound above this level, you cannot come into port," then the industry cares and they design ships that are quiet and then over the span of maybe a decade or two, we could I think get it down maybe 10 dBs or more. It would be a help.

Sight is our primary sense. But for marine life, sound is the way they communicate, breed, feed, and literally find their place in this world. The ocean makes up about 70% of the Earth, and we’ve only explored roughly 5 percent of it. It’s truly an alien environment, one that we still don’t completely understand. And in order to preserve it, we need to be aware of how we affect it. Just like cutting down the rain forests, the sound humans make could have just as devastating of an affect on the planet. But all is not lost.

John: I’m hopefully that there's some future technology that we haven't even thought of that can maybe do the same job without generating so much noise, but this is something that we have to pay attention to first.

In 2015 the Navy agreed to limit sonar testing in critical ocean habitats near Southern California and Hawaii. In 2016 NOAA unveiled a plan to assess the human impact on underwater environments and to use quieter research vessels. And in 2014 the International Maritime Organization adopted guidelines for lowering noise from commercial ships with noise-dampening techniques. Unfortunately these guidelines are not yet mandatory. But some experts believe, if instituted, it could lower ship noise by up to 99 percent. Now that sounds great.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound. A sound team dedicated to making the world sound better. Find out more, and get it touch at Defacto Sound dot com.

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

Thanks to underwater acoustician, Al Jones, who provided a great first hand experience about life on a submarine and sounds he’s recorded from the ocean. As well as John Hildebrand from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His passion for reducing sound pollution in our waters is only rivaled by his knowledge on the subject.

We’re also thankful to have been joined by Christophe Haubursin from “Vox dot com”. We live in a world of too much information and too little context. Vox cuts through the clutter. I’ve been a subscriber for years. Be sure to go over to Youtube and subscribe. You can find their channel at youtube dot com slash V-O-X.

Like the music you hear on this episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz? Each song is provided by our friends at Musicbed. You can listen to all of them on our exclusive playlist. Start listening now at music.20k.org.

Also, please go to the podcast app of your choice and give us a quick rating and review. It helps a ton.

You'll find all of the links I mentioned in the show description.

Thanks for listening.

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Evolution of Accents: From Shakespeare to Valley Girl

This episode was written and produced by Kevin Edds.

When you describe yourself to others you might mention your height, hairstyle, or maybe your build. But one of the most telling things about you is something you can’t even see, yet it defines you more than you realize. Your accent tells others where you’re from, who you identify with, and maybe even where you’re going. How did accents evolve and why are American accents so different from British accents? Featuring Hollywood Dialect Coach Erik Singer and Linguistics Professor Dr. Walt Wolfram.

Music featured in this episode

Norwich by Steven Gutheinz
Figma by Steven Gutheinz
Erste by Steven Gutheinz
Moments by Steven Gutheinz
Lives Are Threads by Salomon Ligthelm
What We Used to Be by Matthew D. Morgan
We As One by Phillip Cuccias
Chateau by Steven Gutheinz
Redrawn by Steven Gutheinz
Heo by Kino

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Music start]

From Defacto Sound, you're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story… of accents.

[Montage of various accents in movies]

I love accents. Every time I hear someone who sounds different from the way I speak [Borat clip] I take notice and wonder where they were born, who influenced their upbringing, and sometimes whether or not I could speak like that.

Quick note: any accents you hear in this episode are not necessarily “the best.” I know that people are fiercely proud of their accents and have strong opinions about what constitutes an accurate depiction. So for better… *[Capote Clip] or worse… [Austin Powers Clip] w*e’re just gonna have fun with this.

[Dallas starts off in British accent] **For all English-speaking people, our language started somewhere—ok that’s terrible, but it’s the best I can do. While the evolution of our language took many centuries, Early Modern English, the version used by Shakespeare, dates from around 1500. And modern English, pretty close to how we speak now, came along about a hundred years later, right about the time the British began colonizing North America.

So I’m curious, did the American colonists from England originally have a British accent? But first, I wanted to speak with someone who’s an expert on accents.

Erik: I'm Erik Singer and I'm a dialect coach.

An accent is just the sounds of a particular variety of speech. The sound system, the pattern, the pronunciation. A dialect is the larger category. A dialect basically includes things like syntax and word order and even lexis, kind of those individual items, different ways of saying things, different ways of referring to something whether you call it pop or soda or coke, that's a dialect feature.

Simply put, dialect is more what you say, accent is how you say it. Erik has worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. He helps them fine tune the speaking portion of their performances when they take on the role of either a real-life or fictional character with an accent. He’s studied and trained for years to be able to both do accents, and also teach them. I asked him what some of his favorite accents are to perform.

Erik: Depends on the day, depends on when I'm coaching how I feel because there's a big part of that. Let's see, just to sort of pick a few that I definitely have an affinity for. My mother is Swedish. [in Swedish accent] One of things I love about Sweden is the food and the culture, it's something I have a great affinity for. So I make my own herring and aquavit. [in a Southeast London accent] I have great affinity for southeast London. [in a Xhosa accent] I like doing Xhosa even if you can't get the clicks in there when you're just speaking English.

[in a Xhosa accent] Xhosa is an indigenous language to South Africa. Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa speaker and South Africa has 11 official languages and Xhosa is one of the biggest.

[in a French accent] If you think of very stereotypically French accent, the lip corners tend to be sort of pulling in towards the teeth, they're advancing a little bit. [in a 1950s RAF colonel accent] If you think of a sort of very stereotypical 1950s kind of RAF colonel sort of thing, it's the opposite. The jaw is very high and the lip corners tend to spread a bit.

Erik is pretty talented, but everyone has their kryptonite right? I wondered which accents are harder for him to perform.

Erik: Welsh accents tend to be tricky for American actors. We generally haven't heard a lot of Welsh. I just never had the opportunity to work on a Geordie accent, which is Newcastle.

[Billy Elliot clip]

The other thing that can make an accent difficult to acquire is just kind of psychological and identity stuff. It's an act of the imagination taking on an accent.

So there are these very, very technical aspects to what an accent is, how those sounds are formed. But you can't do it if you can't imagine yourself as somebody who speaks that way. It's your mind, it's your imagination, it's your heart. And so, if it's hard to imagine yourself as someone who speaks with a given accent, it's going to be a lot harder to get there.

Ok, so back to my initial question, what did British colonists sound like when settling in North America in the 1600s up to say 1776?

Erik: There wasn't only one English accent, there were many. There were three other big waves of migration. This is a little bit simplified, but we all think of the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, and so, whatever that accent was then, was surely what sort of predominated in those kind of Massachusetts colonies. Virginia, sort of Tidewater, Virginia was settled to a large extent by sons of well-off families and their servants. Then, there was the Quakers who came over into kind of Delaware, Maryland area and sort of spread west into Southern Pennsylvania, so there were lots and lots of accents.

I realized that it might be hard to pin Erik down on answer here, but in the most general terms I asked him what would most of those accents sound like in the colonies at that time?

Erik: It would have sounded quite strange to our ears but I would say definitely American just because this pronunciation or non-pronunciation of R sounds after vowels is such a major feature, it's a huge divide [The Patriot clip]. The different vowel sounds between things like hat and half, where for us, hat and half it's the same [The Patriot clip]. Those two huge things I think would probably give us the impression that all English speakers in England and in the States or the colonies sounded more like Americans do now than like Brits do now.

If many of these colonists more or less sounded American, then how did the accents back in Britain change to what we now know them as today?

Walt: We have a sort of preconceived notion of what British dialect should sound like, and it's typically without its Rs. You know, so it's not rhotic.

That’s Walt Wolfram. He’s a sociolinguist at North Carolina State University, specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English. In a 50 year career he’s written 20 books and over 300 articles on variation in American English.

Walt: The accents of American English pretty much reflected areas of England. For example, you get people who settled on the coast of Virginia and islands, for example, and in North Carolina on the islands there, and they were very rhotic. That is, they pronounce their Rs in "four," and in "war," and so forth. They were very rhotic, because they came from southwest England where people still pronounce their Rs. On the other hand, there were some areas of England which were becoming quite R-less, because that was becoming the standard in London in the 1600s and 1700s and so they were more R-less.

This new accent that today is called “Received Pronunction” or RP for short may have begun in the 1600s but it would take a while before it became so synonymous with Brits.

[Downton Abbey clip]

Walt: But basically, it's simply the standard of London, of southern England, because of the prestige and because of the social class. That became the acceptable sort of norm.

[Downton Abbey clip]

Basically, prestige in accents is in the ear of the beholder. So, speaking of prestige, with all of this r-full and r-less business, did Shakespeare’s plays around 1600 sound the way we imagine them today?

Walt: If you look at Shakespeare's background, to the extent that we know about him, he actually used Rs. He wouldn't sound like we imagine a British person to sound like at that time.

Erik: You go back to Shakespeare and the Rs were really hard. So this idea that some Americans have I think that a Shakespeare should always be pronounced in an RP accent is fine if that's your taste [Shakespeare excerpt] but it sounds absolutely nothing like what Shakespeare's actors would have sounded like. [Shakespeare excerpt], somthhing like that.

It was very R-full, really hard Rs, kind of almost a little bit piratical, sort of stereotypically piratical and it was very fluid and efficient. They left out a lot of sounds.

As accents in England began to change over the next few centuries so did American accents. But early in the 20th century an interesting phenomenon occurred as they came crashing back together in a brand new accent that didn’t evolve—it was created. We’ll get to that in just a minute.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

From colonial times to the early 1900s - accents continued to slowly evolve in America. But around the 1920s and 30s a new accent popped up… almost out of nowhere.

Erik: Well, it's got lots of names. Popularly known certainly as transatlantic, sometimes, Mid-Atlantic, which is weird. But either way, sort of like you were born on an island in the middle of the ocean between England and the US. It used to be called Good American Speech and before that it was called World English. It is, for the most part, kind of a hybrid accent.

Walt: For FDR, it was his natural dialect [FDR clip]. In a sense, while it had some characteristics that people think of as transatlantic, they were natural to him, which is quite different from an actor, for example, like Audrey Hepburn, who might want to appear to be transatlantic, and therefore be R-less, and pronounce her Ts as in "better,"[Audrey Hepburn clip] or "bettah," and so forth. They choose R-lessness. They choose a few vowels, like "bad" as "bad," and "ban" versus "ban,". They choose a half a dozen features and promote those, and they become sort of associated with this sort of transatlantic, which to a Britisher sounds, "Oh my gosh. That's a bad British accent." And to an American, they may not know the difference, and so it all sounds sophisticated to them.

[Friends clip]

Erik: Yeah, it conferred prestige. This is an idea that I think is not with the times now because this kind of idea of picking a certain group of people or way of speaking and saying everybody else speaks wrong or badly, we’re then telling people who speak non-standard dialect or a lower prestige dialect, you're bad and wrong or sloppy and that's just absurd on its face.

I assumed that the Transatlantic Accent was just a fad and died out completely. But then there was that little show on NBC called Frasier…

Erik: Yes, Niles Crane. So, David Hyde Pierce trained at Yale, and Yale Drama School, like pretty much every American Drama school of the time when he was training, that was sort of the bible. So this good American speech pattern was universally taught in actor training programs long after nobody spoke it naturally anymore, it still is taught in a lot of places.

It's still useful for period stuff certainly. If you're going to set a movie in the 1950s and the characters are actors, well, go for your good American speech absolutely.

[Aviator clip]

Speaking of Good American Speech, there’s a perception in America that some accents are less becoming or desirable to have than others. So a sort of “General American” accent has taken hold.

Erik: There's this mythical beast called general American, put the general in quotes. It's not one accent, it's more sort of the absence of certain things, which is it's the absence of particularly regionally identifiable features. So if I say Tom or coffee or hat, those are things that are going to stand out to anybody and kind of make them say, "Oh, I know where you're from." So if you don't have any of those, then, people might say you sound kind of general American. Of course, there's lots of variations still in there. Half of Americans rhyme the words COT and the words CAUGHT, right? So cot and caught, "I caught a on a cot." Canadians pretty much all do that.

This “lack of an accent” as you might describe it can be a bit… boring. I asked Erik if he could give me one of my favorites… an accent from Fargo.

Erik: So Minnesota, so that's very different and I know a lot of people from there are quite sensitive about kind of stereotypical or exaggerated version of that, and it's not to say that everyone from Minnesota might talk like that but there are people who do for sure.

[Fargo clip]

There are a whole range of regional American accents that have been around for hundreds of years. From New York, to Boston, to Chicago, to Cajun, to a whole variety of Southern accents. But what about newer ones like Valley Girl? Or the Kardashian-esque Vocal Fry?

Erik: I think it's a little hard to define. I think people mean different things by Valley Girl, although there are probably some common features like uptalk [SNL Californians clip] and definitely, like vocal fry is a part of that. That's when your vocal folds start kind of vibrating a little slower than they would for like all your voice [The Kardashians clip]. But both of those features actually are really widespread in American speech. Australian accents and Northern Irish accents and Scottish accents very often have a rise at the end of a phrase or a sentence.

[Braveheart clip]

Walt: So what you have today are you have new dialect areas in northern California, in the northwest, so for example in Seattle and Portland, areas like this, are creating dialects that are regionally distinctive. The point is this: Everybody wants to be from somewhere. And our dialect indicates where we're from.

Isolation is one reason some accents have lasted for as long as they have. One popular theory is that Appalachian English is a preserved remnant of 16th century Elizabethan English.

[Inglorious Bastards clip]

Walt: Well, it's true and not true, okay? The true aspect of it is that there are certainly older retentions of the English language. For example, in Appalachian English, the prefix like, "He's a'huntin' and a'fishin'." That certainly is an older English phenomenon that has been preserved, as are pronunciations like, "twiced" and "onced" for "once" and "twice." There are certainly older pronunciations.

The problem is that at the same time, Appalachian English is changing and becoming a dialect unto itself, and so there are lots of things that are actually new in Appalachian English. It's sort of like, "Something old, something new, something borrowed, you know, something blue." A few years ago a crew from BBC came to visit the island of Ocracoke...

Ocracoke is an island off the coast of North Carolina.

Walt: Someone had said, "Well, that's where the really Elizabethan, Shakespearean English is found." It's true that they do have some older features that were around at the time of Shakespeare. They say "thar" for "there" and they also say for "high tide," they say "hoi toide," which is a little more British and older. They have some traits that certainly are remnants of former days.

Many people throughout their lives supposedly “lose their accents” or have them transform into a different one. When a southerner moves north they often start to lose that classic southern drawl. Could some accents be dying out?

Erik: there are some sounds and languages generally that are a little unstable, that are a little more likely to be changed or dropped into something else as language change goes on. And we have two of them in English, it's the two different TH sounds like in this and thin, one is a voiced, one is unvoiced, right? And every time we see those in languages, they eventually morph or change or get dropped over time. You can definitely hear that in what's called multicultural London English, which I love, kind of a V or an F sound instead.

A good example of this is the way some Londoners say Mother and Brother as muvah and bruvah.

Erik: I think I've come across predictions that by 2150, English won't have those sounds at all. So, that's always ongoing. New accents are always coming and going and merging and splitting and distinguishing themselves from each other.

Every time I hear someone who sounds different from the way I speak it reminds me that the world is vast and diverse. It’s a collection of people with different ideas, different cultures, and different identities. These identities began thousands of years ago, and they’re still with us.

Erik: Because we evolved in this social, communal small groups and so, you have to be able to recognize and distinguish your people from the other people. We've grown very, very attuned to these minute differences, even if we can't say technically what they are, we're like, "Oh, you're not one of me," or "You're my kind of guy."

Just coming back to the idea that accent is identity, it's a way of encoding and signaling almost completely at an unconscious level for most people, who they feel like they are, who they want to be seen as, what group they feel like they belong to. It's the richness and the variety that is so fascinating and so deeply human.

Walt: Dialects are identity. They index where we come from, who we are, where we're going, and so in a sense, to be without a dialect is to lose something of your personal character, your regional identity, and your sense of who you are, and the communities that you come from. They're about as critical as any other aspect of diversity. This would be a much less interesting place if everybody spoke the same way.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound. A sound design team working with production companies, advertising agencies, filmmakers, and game developers to make their projects sound incredible. Find out more and get in touch at defactosound.com.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Edds… and me, Dallas Taylor… with help from Sam Schneble. It was mixed by Jai Berger.

Many thanks to dialect coach Erik Singer for joining us. You can learn more about Erik’s accent coaching at ErikSinger.com -- that's Erik with a 'K"... If you search for him on youtube, you can find an incredible breakdown he did of 32 actors accents. Also, thanks to Linguistics Professor Dr. Walt Wolfram. You can check out his latest work in the new documentary, Talking Black in America: The Story of African-American Language. And thanks to youtube.com/socratic for use of their Shakespeare sonnet #94.

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

I’d love to hear your accent. Open up your voice memos app on your phone and record your thoughts about the show, your show ideas, or anything else you want to share. We might just post your thoughts to our social accounts which you can find on facebook and twitter at 20korg. You can send your voice memo to hi at 20k.org.

If you’re a little shy about recording your voice, don’t be. BUT if you’d rather pass and still have something you’d like to tell us - reach out through our website at 20k.org. One thing that would be really helpful is to let your friends in the press know about the show. It’s our mission to elevate the amazing sense of hearing through these little stories, and I’d love for more people to hear them. You can get in touch with me directly through our website or at hi at 20k.org.

You can find all of these links on our website or in the show description.

Thanks for listening.

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Forensic Audio: How sound solves crimes

This episode was written & produced by Miellyn Fitzwater Barrows.

You might not realize it, but audio can be just as crucial to solving a case than video or eyewitness testimony. But understanding how to interpret audio evidence, or having the ability to enhance it to a point of intelligibility, requires highly-specialized training and expensive software. Meet Kent Gibson, one of the country's leading forensic audio experts, who's done audio analysis for the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Department of Homeland Security, among many others, and get his take on audio evidence from the missing Malaysian Airlines flight, the Trayvon Martin case, and Mel Gibson's infamous domestic dispute.

Music featured in this episode

We All Speak in Poems by Alaskan Tapes
Washedway by Evolv
In Which Way by Aeuria
Light + Breath by Dustin Lau
Where I Last Saw You by Dustin Lau
Timeline by Blake Ewing
Carved In Mayhem by Luke Atencio
Islands by Blake Ewing
Brilliant by One Hundred Years

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Music start]

From Defacto Sound, you're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story of how audio can be a key to solving a crime.

[Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 clip]

Forensic audio is the use of audio evidence in the investigation of a crime or for use in a court of law...and the clip you just heard was from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The one that went missing in March 2014 somewhere near the southern Indian Ocean.

Investigators found some debris in January 2017 that they have identified as being part of the plane, but to this day, no one really knows what happened.

When these final recording between the pilots of the missing Malaysian jet and their air traffic controllers were released, and appeared to have been edited, NBC news turned to Kent Gibson for analysis.

Kent: I'm a forensic audio and video examiner. I’ve been in the business about 30 years. I do authentication, which is, is this recording edited or inauthentic in any way?

He determined that the audio had been edited in at least three places. Listen carefully to the following clips for words that have been cut off.

[Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 clip]

He was also convinced that this section has been recorded through a speaker or microphone.

[Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 clip]

The tape may have come from multiple sources. Listen to it back to back with another section of the tape…

[Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 clip]

And now the part that sounds like it was recorded through a speaker...

[Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 clip]

It’s entirely possible that this is either a case of the Malaysian authorities editing the tape because parts of it contained information that the government didn’t want shared with the world, or that the tape was poorly put together from multiple recordings of the same thing.

Regardless, maybe this evidence, along with other findings, will someday help add to the bigger picture of the case.

Kent does a lot of authentication cases like this one. Some of this work relies on tech and some on good old-fashioned listening.

Kent: There are ways to find out and there are a lot of software ways, there are a lot of critical listening for non sequiturs and split words.

There is some new issues with authentication in that there are some techniques and some editing systems where you can't really detect an edit. These days you can't really say, "I guarantee you there are no edits here." All you can say is, "I don't hear any edits there." If you can say, "There is an edit right here," then it's not authentic. Then you're clear on that issue. The opposite is not the case.

If you ever hear a half of word, it's pretty clear that's an edit because it's really hard for a human voice to make half a word.

Another important service Kent provides is enhancement.

Kent: Enhancement is probably 50% of what most forensic audio people do. Making things understandable, that are not understandable.

Like this recording of a bribery sting with a television blaring in the background.

[bribery clip]

He managed to get a copy of the television broadcast on its own and using that clean audio, he could then eliminate it from the recording.

[bribery clip cleaned up]

How exactly does he do that?

Kent: By now I have a whole array of software that treats, it filters, it's limiters, it's different kinds of filters that are very specific, and that try to remove background noise. You sample a recording and it learns the background noise and then you output it at the end and the output is theoretically the voice without the background noise.

Here are two of those clips back to back…

[bribery clips]

But this doesn’t work for everything so sometimes Kent and others who do this kind of work have to manage expectations.

Kent: Especially with digital distortion and digital corruption, my famous line is not every file can be enhanced.

But plenty of recordings can be enhanced...or with a little bit of pre-planning, investigators can set up their own recordings to catch conversations between people they’re holding in jail.

Kent: Well sometimes the CI, who's the confidential informant wears a wire, but in this case there was a grate, an air conditioning grate, in the cell. They put the recorder behind the grate and then put the two guys in there.

They talked to each other, and basically they were claiming they didn't even know each other and we got them saying, "Where'd you hide the gun?" Basically it was clear that they were both in cahoots.

A quick aside here about recording conversations, in California it’s legal to record someone without their knowledge it if could provide evidence of a crime.

Unless they are somewhere where it’s posted that they are being recorded, like in a jail or a prison. This law varies from state to state.

Back to Kent.

Kent: I've done a lot of those, basically you can whisper for only about 20 minutes. Then after you're whispering for 20 minutes, you start talking with tonality in it. No matter how hard you try, you start speaking in something that can be understandable.

Kent worked with one local jurisdiction to take this idea a step further in their holding room.

Kent: Every jail has a room where people are admitted. They're arrested and they're put in this holding room while other things happen. I had them install this fan in that room, which was very noisy but only in the low frequencies. It was like a rumble, rumble, rumble. So we could record people in there, and they hear this noise in the air, so they don't think they can be heard, but we would record the noise then take out the rumble and hear exactly what they were saying.

That take preparation, sometimes you can do that when there's a fan in there anyway, but we were pretty sharp and thought to install things to make it easier for me to do my work.

We don’t have the exact same hear that Kent does, but we are able to reduce a consistent noise, so we tried this in the studio.

Person 1 Exmaple: Here I am talking with a loud fan in the background. As you can tell, it’s a little hard to hear, but when we process out the sound of the fan you can now hear me a little better.

Now, let’s hear that again, with the sound of the fan reduced.

Person 1 Example: Here I am talking with a loud fan in the background. As you can tell, it’s a little hard to hear, but when we process out the sound of the fan you can now hear me a little better.

This can be done fairly easily if the sound is consistent because the software can identify just those frequencies and reduce them. It’s much more difficult to reduce sounds that change frequency like a car engine [car engine SFX] or other people talking [people talking SFX].

Part of what makes it difficult to remove voices, the individual and unpredictable movement of the sound, is what makes it possible to identify them. Everyone uses their voices in different ways and that, coupled with the actual vibrations of their vocal cords, can be really unique.

Kent: I do a lot of voice identification, which is this voice is the same as that voice. The person on this recording is the same as the one over there.

Kent used this analysis during the Trayvon Martin case in 2012.

Kent: I wasn't the head guy but I was one of them. It was voice identification and basically my findings were different from the one that they had.

Find out how and go behind the scenes of another famous case...next.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Kent Gibson analyzes audio for criminal and civil cases and when he was consulted by the media about a 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case, his opinion was different than the one presented by another expert in court.

And, a quick warning here. We’ll be playing a portion of that 911 call in a moment. It could be disturbing to some listeners. There’s not any gunshots, but there is a lot of yelling in the background. If you might be sensitive or triggered in any way, I suggest skipping ahead to the fifteen minute mark in the show.

Kent: I get a lot of calls from news and news will come in and say, "Well there's this case and is that true?" I will often give them an opinion, but it's not necessarily for the legal counsel for that particular person.

The man charged with Martin’s murder, George Zimmerman, claimed self defense and one piece of evidence was a 911 call placed by a concerned neighbor.

There was shouting in the background, but there was a debate over whether it was Martin or Zimmerman.

Kent: It used to be that it was done by spectrograms and formants. Basically if you record a voice and look at it on a spectrogram they're these bars, horizontal bars, in the spectrogram and they're called formants, and they represent the vocal folds, your voice will have a specific characteristic of its formants that no other voice will have in theory.

It used to be we had to have the exemplars, which is a recording of the person in question saying the same words. If the guy said a certain thing, you had to get a recording of the exemplar saying the exact same words, but now software's able to separate the vowels so we can do it with any words just using vowels.

That means that now they can use any sample of the suspect’s voice to see if it’s a match. This new technology is pretty amazing, but it still isn’t perfect.

Kent: You have to have 11 seconds at least of the test and then you get an exemplar, which is a recording of the person in question, and then you run it through this very expensive and highfalutin software that gives you a return on whether or not the program thinks it's the same person, and it's always in a percentage. In forensics and most things like that, it's never 100%.

It's often a much lower percentage and you have to know what the benchmarks are to be able to say, "This is this, or this is not that." It was a news source who wanted me to opine about whether or not the voice that was recorded was Trayvon's voice.

Kent: Some other forensic person had opined that it was his voice and my opinion was that there wasn't enough of the recording to make that determination. It wasn't that it was contrary, it was just it's not enough information.

Who was telling paints dramatically different pictures of what happened. If it was Zimmerman yelling, was it because he was in fear for his life? Or was it Martin yelling because he was being threatened by the strange man who had been following him with a gun?

All we know for sure is that Trayvon Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman and Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder after he claimed self defense.

Sometimes it’s more difficult to get at the truth...and others it’s a little easier.

Kent: I end up doing one that was for Osanka Grigorieva, who was the girlfriend of Mel Gibson.

As we've heard about Mr. Gibson, he was not good at controlling his anger. He was calling her to tell her to watch out that he was going to do her in. He would call and threaten her with a lot of different things.

She had recorded some of these phone calls and presented them along with voice messages as evidence of Mel Gibson’s physical and verbal abuse in criminal court.

Kent: I was hired on that case to show that A, it was Mel Gibson's voice and B, it was not edited. So that they did not make an inauthentic file putting together the threats.

I can’t play this example for you, even if it weren’t exclusively owned by Radar Online, the language is very offensive.

Kent: If we prove that it was him, and that it was not edited, then clearly he did it.

Once my testimony came out, he gave up. He said, "Okay. You can’t refute that."

Mel Gibson plead guilty to misdemeanor battery. He didn’t serve any jail time.

Kent: I get a lot of cases from famous celebrities and famous politicians where it's very classified and you can't tell who it was. The first time you leak something like that is going to be your last job. It's like being an accountant, you can't mess up.

Forensic audio is an imperfect science, but a necessary one. And people like Kent take that job very seriously as they lend their expertise and software to court cases around the world.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound, a sound team dedicated to making the world sound better. Whether it’s a commercial, television show, web video, trailer, video game, documentary, VR, or even physical products, Defacto makes it sound insanely cool. Check out prior work and get in touch at Defacto Sound dot com.

This episode was produced by Miellyn Fitzwater Barrows. ..and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was mixed by Jai Berger.

Thanks to Kent Gibson. Check out his website at forensicaudio dot org to find more incredible examples.

Our soundtrack is from our friends at Musicbed. Who offer a highly curated catalog from great indie artists and composers. Like what you hear? Listen to all of the songs from our show and even license them for your own projects at music.20k.org.

As soon as this podcast is over, go connect with us on Twitter or Facebook! If you have a few minutes, say hello. Also, while you’re at it, tell a friend about the show!

If you have any show suggestions, partnership opportunities, or if you’d like to advertise on the show, reach out through our website at 20k.org.

You can find all of these links on our website or in the show description.

Thanks for listening.

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The Wilhelm Scream: Hollywood’s most iconic sound effect

This episode was written & produced by Kevin Edds.

When it comes to movie screams, what’s the first one you think of? Is it a scream that evokes a sense of fear, pain, or maybe even… humor? Perhaps you immediately think about a famous “Scream Queen” or a specific scene from a movie. But you may not realize that the most famous scream in Hollywood has a name—and it’s been used over and over and over in countless films, television shows, and commercials. What makes it so good? And how did it become a filmmaker favorite? Featuring Steve Lee, sound designer, film historian, and creator of the Hollywood Sound Museum.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Saloma - Steven Gutheinz
Everest - Steven Gutheinz
Desert - Blake Ewing
Battle of Gaines’ Mill - Bradford Nyght
Traversing - Steven Gutheinz
Atlas - Steven Gutheinz
Pool - Steven Gutheinz
Now You Know - The TVC
Orange - Airplanes
Hail the Underdog - UTAH
Washedway - evolv

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Music start]

From Defacto Sound, you're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story of the Wilhelm Scream.

[scream montage]

The two screams you just heard were from Will Farrell in Anchorman and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. Movie screams seem like easy work, but they’re not. That’s why some of the best are so iconic.

You’ve got scary ones like Captain Quint from Jaws… [Captain Quint scream SFX] Janet Leigh from Psycho… [Janet Leigh scream SFX] and the original Scream Queen, Fay Wray, from King Kong way back in 1933… [Fay Wray scream SFX].

Then you’ve got non-horror screams, like Kevin from Home Alone feeling the burn of after shave… [Kevin scream SFX] and Marv the burglar from the same film when Kevin puts a tarantula on his face… [Marv SFX] .

But the most famous scream is one you’ve heard, but maybe… never heard of, the Wilhelm Scream.

Steve: Hi I'm Steve Lee, I'm a sound effects wrangler, a film historian, and I'm forming the Hollywood Sound Museum.

It's interesting how Wilhelm has sort of become this sort of, you know, go to sound effect that sort of represents a lot more than just the one sound. It's fascinating how many of these sounds are actually reused over and over and over.

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... [Wilhelm scream] Star Wars... [Wilhelm scream] Toy Story... [Wilhelm scream] Lord Of The Rings... [Wilhelm scream] Tropic Thunder... [Wilhelm scream] Beauty And The Beast... [Wilhelm scream] Team America... [Wilhelm scream] Spaceballs... [Wilhelm scream] Jurassic World... [Wilhelm scream] 300... [Wilhelm scream] Cars… [Wilhelm scream] Fight Club… [Wilhelm scream] Indiana Jones… [Wilhelm scream] and hundreds of other films. This barely scratches the surface.

Steve: When I was a kid growing up, I went to Disneyland. I lived in LA and I went to Disneyland, and I watched movies, and I recorded movies off the TV, and you know, studied the soundtrack. And I started to hear sound effects over and over. Wilhelm was one of them. But there are many other, too.

There was a dog bark, that is in The Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland...and, I remember hearing it again in Mary Poppins when I was watching that on TV once. And I'm going, "somebody must reuse these sound effects."

And that sort of was a very early realization. And that sort of lead the way for my research and fascination with how these sounds are collected, and reused, and cataloged.

The Wilhelm Scream has been used in tons of movies, but where did it come from?—what movie was it first heard in?

Steve: We've done some sort of back-tracking. Most of this done by Ben Burtt himself, who is the Star Wars sound effects designer who started using this as sort of a personal sound signature.

The name actually comes from what is probably the second film it was used in, which was Charge at Feather River, which was 1953 at Warner Brothers. Poor Private Wilhelm is at the end of this party going by on horses, and the leader yells back to him, to, you know, "Pick up your pace", and he says, "Oh I'm just filling my pipe" and in that moment he gets an arrow in the leg and lets out the scream.

[Charge at Feather River Clip]

They must have liked the Wilhelm Scream a lot because they ended up using it two more times in the film, once when a soldier is killed… [example] and another for an American Indian warrior in battle… [example].

The Charge at Feather River was the film that gave Wilhelm it’s name, but it was the second film it was used in, what was the first?

Steve: It started at Warner Brothers, and the first film it was in was a western called "Distant Drums," a Gary Cooper western.

Distant Drums was released two years before The Charge At Feather River, in 1951.

Steve: And it had a scene where a man is walking across the Florida Everglades with other soldiers, and he's bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator. And they needed a scream for that [movie scene clip]. Ben found a memo in the Warner Brothers archives that said that several people came in to do, sort of post vocals for the film. And we're pretty sure that the scream was recorded in that session.

And one of the gentlemen on the list of people, was a guy named Sheb Wooley, [Purple People Easter song] who is most famous for his pop song "Purple People Eater." But he was a character actor, and he was in a lot of these old westerns. We're pretty sure that he's responsible for the scream.

And many years later, I was able to put Ben Burtt in touch with Sheb's widow. And she was delighted. And she actually remembered that Sheb used to talk about going in to do sessions like that, and screams, and things like that.

So we're like, 99% sure it's Sheb Wooley.

Sheb Wooley sounds like a fascinating guy: a singer, and on-screen actor, and a voice actor. How was the Wilhelm Scream actually captured on tape.

Well, thanks to Steve, we’ve acquired the full length original recording of the session. It was recorded from a Warner Brothers soundstage in 1951 on the set of Distant Drums. Remember, Sheb is not actually in a river surrounded by alligators, he’s trying to create the sound of tremendous pain, agony, and fear, from the safe surroundings of a film lot. Steve Lee will talk us through this…

Steve: The session starts out, you hear several people on a stage, we believe it was actually recorded on a filming sound stage, and not a recording stage, because you hear several people milling about.

[recording playing in background]

And then you hear someone slate through, and he says, [example from recording] "Man getting bit by an alligator, and then he screams." And you hear a director like, shutting everyone up, and then he tells the guy, "Okay."

And he asks for the first scream [scream from recording]. And it's pretty good, it's like a quick scream, and he does another one… [scream from recording]. And then he asks for a little direction [example from recording]. You know, I share the frustration with the director, and say "No that's not what I want, I want a real scream." [scream from recording]

And he’s getting closer and it’s still not quite, and then the director gives him something that motivates him to do the classic scream that we all recognize [clip from recording]. And then the next two are very similar to that [screams from recording], and we've actually used these, all three of these last ones, as sort of the official Wilhelm.

If this obscure scream was first used back in 1951 how did it get so popular that it’s been used in so many movies since then? We’ll find out in a minute.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We’re now pretty sure that Sheb Wooley was the voice behind the Wilhelm Scream and know how it was recorded… but how did it spread like wildfire and become the most iconic movie scream in history?

Steve: Ben Burtt went to college with two guys, Rick Mitchell, and Richard Anderson, Richard and Ben won an Oscar for Raiders of the Lost Ark together, for sound effects.

[Raiders of the Lost Ark clip]

Yep, that was our friend Wilhem in Raiders.

Steve: And they were sort of doing this as a little joke in film school, at USC, using this scream, that they remembered from all these old westerns. And they started using it in their short films at USC, and when they went to pro, they started sneaking it into the films that they did for real. Real, feature films.

For decades, this was a below the radar thing that only sound designers knew about. Maybe someone in the industry who used the Wilhelm Scream themselves might recognize it in another film, but it wasn’t really a thing.

Steve: Warner Brothers used it quite a bit. It was in their library. And sound editors could just pull it and use it! Up until the early seventies it was still getting used out of Warner Brothers exclusively. And Ben tracked it down when he was doing research for Star Wars. He said, "Oh I gotta use this. This is a favorite of mine." He tracked down the master, and he started using it in all the Star Wars films, all the Indiana Jones films.

And that's when I started to really take notice and started maintaining a list of all, as best I could, I mean there are hundreds of films.

And like many things, when the internet came along, everything changed.

Steve: I started sort of pushing Wilhelm, and we used it in quite a few films. And, I think I sort of overdid it. Because, it really got noticed by a lot of people. And then when I published the list online, on a movie history website I run, I published this list and sort of the definitive history of Wilhelm. And that's pretty much when the dam broke.

Ben Burtt started this and Steve kind of took the baton and ran with it. I asked Steve, what are some of the best uses of the Wilhelm Scream? Or at least the most memorable?

Steve: He was doing it as a little in joke and then I sort of pushed the envelope a little in the late eighties and early nineties. We used it in everything. I even got it in a Goofy movie. I was the sound designer of a Goofy movie, and it has absolutely no business being in a Goofy movie.

[Goofy Movie use of Wilhelm Scream]

While Ben introduced the Wilhelm Scream to guys like George Lucas it sounds like Steve has done his fair share. I wondered if there’s a good story about any directors he brought into the Wilhelm Club.

Steve: We were very lucky at our sound shop. We worked with a lot of directors over and over, who kept coming back, and some first timers that went on to be really great and do some amazing things.

One of them is a guy, I'm sure you've heard of, named Quentin Tarantino. We did his first film, Reservoir Dogs, and there are a couple Wilhelms in that one.

[clip from Reservoir Dogs]

And I will never forget. We cut it in, and then when we were dubbing the film, we pointed it out to him and told him the history. We actually schooled him on it. And he loved it. Quentin's a huge movie fan, and just eats that stuff up.

And I had a little tiny black and white TV in my office, and I turned it on, and lo and behold Distant Drums is on the Saturday afternoon film…

So I ducked my head into the dub stage and said, "Hey guys, you remember I told you about that scream, well the movie's on right now, that it was recorded!" And Quentin went nuts. "Oh my God, really? Really? Do you know when it's coming up? Can you tell us when it's coming up?" …”Yeah, I could probably give you five minutes notice.”

..."Okay, do that, and we'll take a break!"

…and sure enough, I did, and I called them in, and there was like, ten guys in my little office. And as soon as it came on, Quentin was screaming, "That's in my movie!"

That’s pretty good. It’s gotta be hard to top Quentin Tarantino.

Steve: Peter Jackson was another one. When it was in The Two Towers, he apparently told the mixers to turn it up, make it louder!

Like many movie styles or special effects, they eventually fade out. Has interest in using the Wilhelm Scream started to die down?

Steve: It's still used all the time. It's in commercials. I'll turn on the TV and I'll hear it in an Exxon commercial or something, it's pretty crazy.

And you know, kids coming out of film school are eager to use it too, there's a scene in the Judy Garland "A Star is Born" where it's actually completely in the clear and you can notch out the classic, take number four, Wilhelm. And people are stealing it out of that to use in their student films, and things like that. It's pretty crazy.

So why does the movie industry continue to use the Wilhelm Scream? Is it cliché? Or cache?

Maybe it's a connector, a through-line, a way to be a link in the chain of movie history, from 1951 to today—to share a common bond with directors like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Quentin Tarrantino.

Steve: A week does not go by where I don't get an email, or a message from someone saying, "I heard it in such and such," or "Hey we're on a dub stage in Australia putting it in some little movie" or you know "Hey, it's gonna be in a Twix commercial! It's gonna start airing in December!" You know, that kind of thing! Ben accused me of starting a cult, and I'd have to agree with him.

It's sort of a way of communicating with others in our craft, also. It's like a way of saying hi. One of my dear friends, another Oscar winner, Dave Stone, he equated it to dogs on a fire hydrant. And other dogs would come by and "Oh yeah, Sam's been here."

We put it in there to see if others of our kind get noticed. I for sure, if I hear it in a movie that I wasn't aware it was in, I'll wait and look at the credits more closely, and say, "Oh yeah, so and so did this!" Yeah, that dirty dog, he snuck it in!

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound, a sound team dedicated to making the world sound better. Whether it’s a commercial, television show, web video, trailer, video game, documentary, VR, or even physical products, Defacto makes it sound insanely cool. Get in touch at Defacto Sound dot com.

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

Huge thanks to film historian & sound effects archivist Steve Lee who is heading up the Hollywood Sound Museum project. The museum will be a destination for fans, students, scholars, and professionals - where you’ll be able to discover the art of creating sound for film, TV, and other media through exhibits and educational programs. Please help get this great cause off the ground by visiting hollywoodsoundmuseum.org. Let’s locate and preserve the rich history of sound design in Hollywood to share with future generations. Again, visit hollywoodsoundmuseum.org.

The music in this episode is from Musicbed. And we have an exclusive playlist you can check out at music.20k.org.

Have you connected with us on social? If so, thank you! If not, do it! Just spell out Twenty Thousand Hertz in Facebook and Twitter. When you connect, be sure to say hello. While you’re at it, tell a friend about the show!

If you have any show suggestions, partnership opportunities, or if you’d like to advertise on the show, reach out through our website at 20k.org.

You’ll find all of the links I mentioned in the show description.

Thanks for listening.

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The voices behind Dragon Ball Z & Firewatch

This episode was written & produced by Miellyn Fitzwater Barrows.

We hear disembodied voices all the time, in everything from cartoons and anime to commercials and trailers. It seems easy, but it's actually an intricate craft involving a great amount of training. What does it take to create multiple, unique personalities using only a voice? Featuring voice actors Christopher Sabat (Dragonball Z, One Piece) and Cissy Jones (Firewatch, The Walking Dead).

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Coding - Steven Gutheinz
Crutch - Instrumental - John Steen
Blame The Weather - Instrumental - Clubhouse
Better and Better Instrumental - Andrew Judah
Japan (no-oohs-ahhs) - Watermark High
Washedway by Evolv


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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Music start]

From Defacto Sound, you’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. The stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor.

This is a little glimpse of what it’s like to be a voice actor.

[Mickey Mouse clip]

Ever since Mickey Mouse whistled those first notes while steering this boat in Walt Disney’s 1928 short film Steamboat Willie, the public has been fascinated with animated characters who have funny voices.

Just two years later in 1930, Warner Brothers launches Looney Tunes to compete with Disney’s Mickey Mouse shorts. Originally designed to promote Warner Brothers’ music catalog, these cartoons became more famous for their characters. A majority of which were voiced by one man: Mel Blanc.

Mel Blanc brought to life enduring favorites; Bugs Bunny [Bug Bunny clip], Daffy Duck [Daffy Duck clip] and Porky Pig [Porky Pig clip]. Along with 397 more characters in his lifetime.

Christopher: He is the iconic voice guy. Anyone who grew up on any of the Bugs Bunny cartoons or anything like that, his voices just part of your subconscious. I am Christopher Sabat. I am a Voice Actor.

Even to this day anyone from any age you can use, "Yeah, can you make this sound a little bit more Yosemite Sam?" Everybody knows what you're talking about. He's just such an iconic voice.

Mel Blanc was soon followed by other iconic Voice Actors. There was also June Foray, best known as Rocky from Rocky and Bullwinkle [Rocky and Bullwinkle clip] , Don Messick, the original Scooby Doo [Scooby Doo clip], and Daws Butler, AKA Yogi Bear [Yogi bear clip].

These actors paved the way for contemporary favorites like Christopher Sabat of Dragon Ball Z Fame [Dragon Ball z clip] and Cissy Jones, the voice behind award-winning video games including The Walking Dead and Firewatch [Firewatch clip].

When asked to describe their own voices they has this to say:

Christopher: Man, what does my voice sound like?

Cissy: How would I describe my voice personally?

Christopher: My voice would be like if Don LaFontaine, the famous trailer guy was just your bro and you guys were totally tight.

Cissy: Maybe, if Charlize Theron were maybe an overtired mom?

Christopher: My voice is like a muscle car that has really nice interior. Now, that doesn't work either.

Cissy: Your best mom friend who changes your kid's diaper so you can have a margarita.

Christopher: My voice is like Nutella if you put on really good bread but it's also really warm too like you toasted the bread first. I don't know.

Cissy: Yeah, that about sums it up.

Both Christopher and Cissy have incredible ranges and I wanted to know what it takes to create so many different kinds of characters.

Christopher: I think it's different for each person. What I do think is very similar between a lot of different voice actors is that we become voice actors because we have an ability to quickly look at something and decide what kind of voice that thing needs. I look at people’s teeth and I look at their eyes. Does that person look up tight?"

The person has a really tight face [voice example] and so you kind of scrunch your face up a little bit. Does that person look really formal? They look [voice example] real loose, real jowely.

You have to imagine or ask where the person is from or what life they've had. There's just all these subtle factors that go into finding a voice. Then a lot of times you just look at that person, you go, "Oh, that looks like my uncle Johnny." You know what I mean? Sometimes you just draw voices from things in your life.

For Cissy Jones, character development starts with finding the answers for lots of questions.

Cissy: "Who is this person? What are their dreams? What are their fears? What is the first thing they think of in the morning, and the last thing they think of as they're going into sleep? What excites them? What terrifies them? In terms of scenes, who are they talking to? What are they talking about? Where are they? Is this a very intimate scene [voice example], or are they shouting across a field to one another [voice example]? Is this a battle scene, and I'm going to start screaming, and throwing blows?"

Really understanding who the person is in terms of what has gotten them to this scene, and then what the scene is. A lot of it is made up in my head. A lot of times, we don't get what the scene is. Sometimes we don't even get the actual name of the game, if it is a video game. We just have to make up whatever came before this line that I'm supposed to say, that makes absolutely no sense, but I have to make it make sense.

If I don't believe it, why should anybody else? You know, when I was working on "The Walking Dead," I used to come home and have nightmares about the zombie apocalypse.

I remember the last scene I did for Katjaa, and I had my, spoiler alert, death scene. I'm sitting in a booth in LA, and the directors are in San Francisco, and I gave my big emotional moving thing, and I just hear, [crying voice example] "Um, yeah, that was great. I think we can move on." I was like, "Okay, my job here is done."

Cissy actually played nine different characters in the video game series - The Walking Dead.

Cissy: I played Katjaa, Jolene, Brie, Dee, Shel, some randos, a couple guards, and most recently for "Michonne," I played the main bad guy, Norma, and another woman in a dream sequence named Vanessa.

[voice example] Jolene was just crazy. She was in the woods, and she'd been alone for a while. She was a crazy, you know. [voice example] And Brie was, she was suffering from cancer, and she was real angry about a lot of things. [voice example] Norma was just angry. She was running stuff, and she didn't like what she saw going on.

[voice example] Katjaa, she was a Belgian immigrant; she had been living in the United States for 14 years, but she was very sweet and matronly, and Katjaa gets very upset when she is panicked, and she cries a little bit, but she's not too crazy because her husband is usually the one who goes crazy. But she maintains decorum to a degree, unless she's getting run down by zombies, and then it hits the fan.

I developed the accent by following around a Belgian friend of mine with a tape recorder, for far too long, until it became awkward. Just played it back and listened to him before every time I had to record, before every session, before the auditions. I believe I had a weekend; I got the audition on a Friday, and it was due on a Monday, and I just followed him around like, "Talk more, talk more." He was like, "You're really getting on my nerves." But he loved the final performance.

It comes down to understanding who the characters are, and what makes them different, before picking a voice, if that makes sense. And that is true for any character in voice over; you never want to go for the voice first, because it's not believable.

Find out how Christopher keeps it believable, even with unbelievable characters and learn an industry secret about trailers from Cissy, next.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

It’s crucial to focus on believability, even when working with larger than life characters like Christopher does in anime, because if the audience doesn’t buy it, it can pull them right out of the story.

When he does the English versions for shows and films originally made in Japanese, he can look at the characters’ facial expressions and adjust his voice accordingly.

Christopher: I do a lot of voices for a show called Dragon Ball Z. Okay, so to go through, [Piccolo's voice] alright ah, we’ll start at the bottom. The lowest character I play is this guy named Piccolo. Piccolo has two emotions. He's either just cool and calm or he's like yawn at Gohan or something like that. On the other end of the spectrum, it's almost the same voice except where Piccolo is very low in my voice. Vegeta is very high [Vegeta voice], comes out of the nose and has this weird like British thing but if I take the scratch out of it and then make it not as British then I've got this guy named Yamcha [Yamcha's voice] who's like this totally dorky guy. Then if I put the scratch back into it and then I make it go like this I become this character named Burter [Burter's voice]. He's got this lispy weird thing going on. Then if I go back down to Piccolo again [Piccolo's voice], I then can open up the back of my throat and I can do this guy named Recoome [Recoome's voice] and believe it or not of all the voices I've ever done, that's the one that hurts the most because I have to tense up these muscles in the back of my throat and it hurts real bad sometimes.

Yeah, a lot of voices are just so close to one another but yet you can add like an accent or a lisp or that Burter voice [Burter's voice] have this lisp in it. Recoome, [Recoome's voice] I do this thing on my throat, with my mouth too.

And then right in the middle it's closer to my voice his name is Zarbon [Zarbon's voice]. He's just like a normal guy, he's close to my voice except with a slight British accent to him as well. There's where we're at, sometimes when I'm choosing a voice I do pick whether this is in my upper range and my lower range or I just try and find somewhere along my vocal chords to make a sound then I just try and keep it there.

But voice acting isn’t just about being able to do different character voices. Most voice actors, including Christopher and Cissy, do a lot of commercial work, too.

Cissy: Commercial is what you're going to book most often. Commercial is where you will make money.

Christopher: When you start getting into modern commercials where they are wanting really natural sounding voices. And that's where you're almost having to take out as much support of your voice as possible.

It's the sound you make when just like you're laying down next to somebody and you don't necessarily want to wake him up but you're having a conversation with them at the same time. When I'm having to read something realistic, sometimes the lower end of my voice sort of goes away and that just becomes really subtle because that’s what they’re looking for.

They are like, "Oh man, I want that everyday sounding guy” This is a true story too, "Could you say fresh pappardelle pasta like maybe ten times and we'll just pick the one we like?" Fresh pappardelle pasta. Fresh pappardelle pasta. Fresh pappardelle pasta. Fresh pappardelle pasta. I mean, it's over and over and over again and that's when being able to really play into your voice random generator that exist in any voice actor's head really comes in handy.

Cissy: I do ads for a grocery store in town every week, I do their weekly specials... you know, [voice example] "Stop by Ralph's this week for broccoli at $2 for whatever." You kind of have this range of emotion that you portray in your commercial reads.

You know, [voice example] bright and perky, and authoritative, and like a little bit sexy, and a little bit wry.

It’s her wry voice that’s really put Cissy on the map. She used it as the basis for her award-winning portrayal of Delilah in Firewatch, a first person mystery video game set in the Wyoming wilderness. As the player, you go to work as a Firespotter and Delilah is your boss. You never see her, so your entire relationship is over a two way radio.

Cissy: Well, Delilah's pretty much me. She's a little more flirty, she loves her puns, but you know, she's just kind of a wild card. You just never know what she's going to say.

She's funny, she's witty, she doesn't care what people think about her, which is what I loved about her so much. My favorite thing about the game is that you had to decide as a player how to feel about her, just based on her personality.

I also did a game right after "Firewatch" called "Adrift," so in "Firewatch," you pretty much have me talking non-stop for six hours, and in "Adrift," I'm an astronaut who wakes up in a space station that is destroyed, and I have to figure out what's happening and how to get home. It's basically me mouth breathing for six hours.

[Breathes] Yeah. I almost passed out during that session.

The amount of control a voice actor has to have over their face and body is pretty surprising. And doing what it takes to get the performance right can be...interesting.

Christopher: Some people will go, "I need that, I need a trailer voice done," a voice over thing, I have to go, let's see, [voice example] “Coming this Friday”, whenever I do the trailer voice type voice I always add a lot like this weird growl to my voice because one thing I noticed about the Don LaFontaine's voice.

Don LaFontaine is possibly the most famous voice in movie trailers. He’s the one known for the phrase...

[Don LaFontaine clip]

Christopher: It's not that it was like the deepest voice in the world. It's just he had this ability to send sound through his nose no matter what he was saying, [voice example] if it was a vowel or a consonant he always had something going through his nose. That was his signature, that's what made it so cool.

But the “voice of God” narration, as it’s referred to in the industry, isn’t the only thing voice actors get hired to do in trailers. There might be a line or two in a trailer that sounds like the star of the film, but it isn’t always that person.

Cissy: A lot of times when they’re writing a trailer, they need a single line of dialogue to make the trailer cohesive, but to bring in the celebrity is crazy expensive so they bring me in or someone like me. So I do [voice example] Penelope Cruz. I also do [voice example] Charlize Theron. When she's not available, I come in and do her; as a very British kind of sound. Or [voice example] Rebel Wilson. You know, it's just kind of all over the board. It's like whatever you can match, you get paid to do.

Most of us don’t think about our voices on a daily basis. What they can do and what we can do with them, but for some it’s their livelihood and they educate, inspire, and entertain us every day.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound a sound design team that makes sounds like this [sci-fi shooting SFX], this, [boxing SFX] and this [mnemonic SFX] for advertisements, trailers, TV Shows, games and tons of other things. Check out more and the videos associated with those sounds at defactosound.com. This episode was produced by Miellyn Fitzwater Barrows and me. With help from Sam Schneble. It was mixed by Jai Berger.

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

If you have not connected with us on Facebook or Twitter, go do it! I love hearing feedback and chatting about the show. Also, while you’re at it, please tell your friends. The only way someone will know about the show is if you tell them. We go to great lengths to keep this show clean, so feel free to tell your parents or people you’d like to introduce to podcasting. We’ve also made a little donation link at donate dot 20k dot org, if you’d like to contribute to the production costs of the show.

I'll put these links plus everything else in the show description. Which, if you're not in the habit of looking at, I highly recommend. We put tons of relevant and follow up information in there. Check it out. Thanks for listening.

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Hearing Loss: What causes it and how to prevent it

This episode was written & produced by Miellyn Fitzwater Barrows.

Our ears are sensitive, but we often don’t treat them that way. We are born with the ability to hear up to 20,000 Hz. As we age, our hearing range diminishes. On top of that, the more exposure we have to loud sounds, the greater the impact it has on our ability to hear. Find out what happens once we start to lose our hearing. Featuring Lindsay Prusick and Shaheem Sanchez (Instagram).

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

On the Mountain by The Sea by Utah
In Slow Motion by Utah
SFSG by Utah
0212 by Utah
One Million by Utah
Breaking the Bank Instrumental by Reagan James
Washedway by Evolv

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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

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And sign up for Skillshare and get a month free at skillshare.com/20k

View Transcript ▶︎

[Music start]

From Defacto Sound, you’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. The stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor.

This is the story behind our hearing and what happens when it goes away.

[club music fading to silence]

Even a small amount of hearing loss can significantly impact a person. Almost forty million American adults, that’s fifteen percent, have difficulty hearing. And it gets worse the older you get. And right now, the world is louder than it’s ever been before.

Lindsay: Hearing loss for the most part tends to be a gradual thing for people as they age.

That’s Audiologist, Lindsay Prusick.

Lindsay: When people have hearing loss, largely, it's an invisible thing. You don't see it, but it has such a profound impact on people's ability to connect, communicate, even ultimately their quality of life. There are a lot of people who are born with hearing loss and it can be as a result of genetics, syndromes, things acquired through when a mother gives birth to a baby, various viruses, that type of thing.

Because it is so invisible, many people don’t think about hearing loss very much at all.

Lindsay: Really, in general, for the majority of people with hearing loss, it's a very gradual thing. People start to notice over time, "Oh gosh, it's hard to understand speech. Things sound muffled. People sound like they're mumbling," or just the quality of sound begins to decrease. [music decrease SFX]

This is a good thing to remember when you’re talking to older people...or really anyone who asks you to repeat yourself. You yourself can work to prevent hearing loss or additional hearing loss. But, it’s harder today than ever before.

Lindsay: We're constantly putting things in our ears and listening to sound. We're walking around with our smart phones that have now become basically our television [HBO SFX], our podcast source…[20K theme song, record scratch]

Hey, don’t blame me, I’m not controlling your volume!

Lindsay: Our music source, [music start] and we're placing ear buds into our ears and maybe you're getting on the subway [subway SFX] or you're on an airplane [airplane cabin SFX] or you're just in a noisy environment. So what do you do? You crank up that volume. That can be a very dangerous thing.

A great rule of thumb is if somebody is three feet away from you, and they're talking to you, and you can't hear them, the sound is too loud. And you should turn the volume down.

There are all sorts of things in our environment that can threaten our ears.

Lindsay: Try to think about the last time you were in a noisy situation, so a concert [concert SFX], maybe you mowed your lawn [lawn mower SFX], maybe you even just blow dried your hair [hair dryer SFX]. It seemed really loud at first and it's not as loud and that's because people experience a temporary shift in their hearing. They’re not nearly as sensitive to those sounds anymore. Let's say you're at a concert and you run to the concession stands. [begin muffling Lindsey] The cashier begins to talk to you and you realize they sound muffled.

Then maybe you hear a slight buzz or hum [buzz SFX] in your ears. These are all things you can notice when you're in the moment, but most people notice it the next day. I always refer to it as a noise hangover. It's typically your hearing is muffled or it's not as sensitive. You could even feel fatigued. Literally, just more tired than usual and you could have a headache. And these symptoms can last a day, they can last a couple days depending on how often you’ve exposed yourself to extreme levels of noise, you can even find that some of the symptoms go away, but others persist.

Over time the ears can take a beating and they may go back to normal, but the reality of it is anytime you exposure yourself to dangerous levels of sound, it does do damage to the hearing system.

One clear symptom of hearing damage is a ringing in the ears called tinnitus.

Lindsay: Tinnitus is the perception of sound either in one ear, both ears, or just in your head, without an actual sound occurring in the environment. It can be described in many ways. I'd say one of the most common is people will say, "I have a high pitched ringing" [high pitched ringing SFX]. They can express it as sounding like crickets [crickets SFX], buzzing [buzzing SFX], a tea kettle going off [tea kettle SFX]. There's all sorts of descriptions for it. It can be intermittent, meaning it happens at different times of the day, or it can be constant [tea kettle and ringing SFX], it is literally always there. A majority of the population when they experience Tinnitus, they find that they'll hear it and it'll go away. There are a lot of people that are highly, highly impacted.

Do you have tinnitus or other signs of hearing damage? Even if you don’t, I want you to try something with me.

For this part of the show, if you can, find a quiet space where you can concentrate for a few minutes. If you’re driving or something, just carry on. You can come back to this later.

Okay, welcome back.

Now set the volume at a comfortable level [mic check]. All set? Okay. The healthy hearing critical range is between 500 Hertz and 4,000 Hertz.

A Hertz is a measure of frequency and vibration. Imagine a speaker cone: It starts in the resting position, pushes outward, pulls back inward and then goes back to the resting position. One Hertz means this cycle would happen over the course of exactly one second. But we as humans can’t start to detect that sound until the speak is going through that cycle around 20 times a second.

That’s 20 Hertz, and it’s extremely low...at a high volume you’d be more likely to feel it rather than hear it, but that’s the threshold of where hearing begins. As we speed that speaker up, the pitch raises. Humans can theoretically hear all the way up to around 20,000 Hertz, but, you probably haven’t hear that sound since you were a kid. More on that shortly.

Now I’m going to play sounds in the critical range.

Here’s 500Hz [example]

Here’s 1,000Hz [example]

Here’s 2,000 Hz [example]

And this is 4,000Hz [example]

Now, this is in no way scientific. Your results will vary based on what type of headphones or speakers you’re using, where you’re listening, and any EQ settings you might have changed on your device. Still for most devices in most places all of those tones should have been clearly audible. So, if you struggled to hear any of those tones or couldn’t hear them at all, please go to a professional to get your hearing checked.

Now, just for fun, we’re going to go a little further. Everyone with average hearing should be able to hear 8,000 Hertz.

[example]

But, as we get older, our hearing range naturally diminishes to where we lose sounds in the top of our range. There are particular ranges that people over a certain age are not likely to hear. We’re going to play some of those now.

The first one, 12,000 Hz, is usually only audible to people under the age of 50.

[example]

And here’s 15,000 Hz, for people under 30…

[example]

And then 17,000 Hz, which only people under 18 should be able to hear.

[example]

Then there’s 20,000 Hz, here this show gets its name, it’s the highest possible sound that any human can hear.

Check it out...if you can hear it.

[example]

And finally, we’ll play a full sweep of the entire range of human hearing which is 20 Hertz all the way up to 20,000 Hertz.

Again, take all of this with a grain a salt because all listening devices vary. For example, if you’re listening in earbuds, you’re not going to hear anything in the low frequency ranges, but if you have a subwoofer in your car you might.

Now...

This is 20 Hertz [example] ...here’s 100 [example] ...200… [example]

this is 500 [example] ...1,000 [example] ...2,000 [example] ...4,000 [example] ...8,000 [example] ...12,000 [example] ...15,000 [example]. ..18,000… [example]

[example] and that was 20,000.

Based on your age, it may have sounded like we just stopped the test at some point. We all hear differently, and in a minute I’ll explain how some businesses have taken advantage of this as well as speak with someone who has experienced extreme hearing loss.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

As you now know, young people can typically hear higher frequencies than older people...and businesses have actually taken advantage of this. For instance, it’s been reported that businesses have blasted 17,000 Hertz tones in front of stores to keep kids from loitering. Most adults can’t hear it, but kids, are repelled by it.

Then, of course, kids figured out a way to use this tone to their advantage and started setting it as a text notification on their phones. This way they can get messages in class without the teacher catching on.

Just because you can’t hear something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And nobody knows that better than Shaheem Sanchez.

Shaheem: I wasn’t born deaf. I lost my hearing when I was four.

Because of a bad nerve in his inner ears, now one ear is completely deaf. In the other, he uses a hearing aid.

Since he lost his hearing at age four, he has some foundation for hearing speech. This is part of why he’s able to speak as well as he can. The other part is that he can still hear some things.

Shaheem: I can hear with a hearing aid but not everything. I can hear a dog barking [dog bark]. A car sound [car SFX]. I can hear people talk [people talking SFX] but I don’t know what they’re saying. All I hear is mumbling like bu-bu-bu-bu-bu. That’s all I hear.

He can read lips, but he didn’t learn sign language until high school.

Shaheem: I grew up speaking. That’s why now, I speak clear.

But even though Shaheem’s able to voice for himself, he still endured bullying growing up.

Shaheem: People always used to judge me. Why you talk like that? You can’t hear yourself. They call me all kinds of names. But I feel comfortable now. I’m more comfortable.

But dancing was something that he always felt comfortable with.

Shaheem: I started dancing when I was 11. It’s what I love to do. I started dancing because my dad he also a dancer. He was killed before I was born so I never met him. So my family told me about him. I started to feel inspired. And then I started teaching myself how to dance.

But I didn’t hear so I only watched body language. Sign language is like body language, so that’s how I’m so good at that.

About ten years ago, when he was in high school, Shaheem was dancing on the street when he was approached by a dance instructor. That’s when he started taking formal lessons.

Shaheem: I have my own style but I’m learning different styles. Like ballet, jazz, hip hop, breakdancing, salsa, a lot of different styles.

But his favorite style?

Shaheem: I’m really into, like, R&B songs. I like dubstep. I also like hip hop, too. I feel the beat. The vibration. Most of the time.

He listens to songs by putting his hand on the speaker and feeling the beat. He also watches music videos with the captions on. It’s a painstaking process...

Shaheem: Study. Memorize. Listen to it over, over, over, and over. So I’m memorizing it. It’s not easy. Normally takes me, like, three weeks. I know a lot of songs. It’s crazy.

Shaheem’s the only one in his immediate family who’s deaf, but he isn’t the only dancer.

Shaheem: My brother, he looks up to me. I taught him how to dance. He picked up fast. I don’t know how he do it. He got better and better and better and better. Now, he better than me.

Shaheem’s brother, who goes by the name Lil Kida, got so good, he actually won a season of the TV show “So You Think You Can Dance.”

But Shaheem didn’t just teach his brother to dance…he taught him his drive too.

Shaheem: If you love to do it, put your heart into it. Never give up. No matter what. Deaf or not, you still can do it. Anything is possible.

A lot of hearing people just don’t know enough about what it’s like to be deaf. He knows visibility is crucial to understanding and has taken on raising awareness about the deaf community like it’s his job.

Shaheem: I want to show the world that deaf people can do anything equal to everyone. I want people to know that we may be different, but we do the things you can do. We can drive. We can read. We can learn. We can listen to music. We can do anything.

Our society is based around having all of your senses. And hearing is something a lot of us take for granted even though we shouldn't.

Hearing is fragile. Fleeting, even.

If you have it, protect it. And if you don’t, don’t apologize for it.

Whatever your situation, try to keep in mind that you’ll never know what other people’s experiences are unless you put in the work to find out.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound insanely cool. Find out more at defactosound.com.This episode was produced by Miellyn Fitzwater Barrows and me. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to audiologist Lindsay Prusick and to Shaheem Sanchez. You can see videos of Shaheem’s dancing on his instagram page at instagram.com/shaaheem. We will have a link to this and his Youtube page in the show notes.

We’d also like to thank Malonda Hutson and Susan Thompson-Gaines for their advice on the topic.

The music you’ve hearing is from Musicbed. They represent more than 650 great artists ranging from indie rock and hip hop to classical and electronic. Head over to music.20k.org to hear our exclusive playlist.

Finally, please tell your friends about the show, and connect with us on social!

You’ll find all of the links I’ve mentioned in the show description.

Thanks for listening.

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