Let It Beep: The rise and fall of the Mac startup chime

This episode was produced by Mark Bramhill for the podcast Welcome to Macintosh.

For over two decades, every time you turned on a Mac, you were greeted by a familiar sound. It’s appeared as a punchline in The Simpsons, in movies like WALL•E. It’s a sound some of us tried to hide from our parents as we turned on the computer in the middle of the night. It’s a sound that’s transcended technology; the sound that makes a Mac feel like a Mac. But no longer; the iconic Mac startup chime is going away.

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Mac SFX montage]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor. This is the story of a rogue sound designer at Apple who created three of the most iconic sounds in computer history.

For those of us who use and love Macs — and I’ll pause here to say that I am one of those people — it’s about the little things: the sound it makes when it turns on[start up SFX], the way the keyboard clicks[keyboard sfx], the sound of taking a screenshot[screen shot sfx], or the satisfying magnetic snap[Macbook closing sfx]when you close a MacBook.

These sounds are engineered and designed with purpose...and that’s why I love them. However, as clean and friendly as they sound, there’s a darker backstory. One that takes us through legal hurdles and an impressive level of passive aggressiveness.

Mark Bramhill, host of the incredible podcast Welcome to Macintosh, tells us the story behind three of Apple's most famous sounds, and the sound designer who snuck them into existence.

The devices we use everyday make all kinds of sounds. You may not think about them much...maybe you’ve never even thought about them at all. But we have deep ingrained associations with each of them. They tell us something is wrong...

[alter beep SFX]

Or give us good news...

[finished chime SFX]

Or fill us with anxiety…

[new email SFX]

These sounds are so recognizable, widely known on a scale usually reserved for pop music. But these sounds, the sound we associate as being a part of our technology, they were designed by people. And unlike with a pop song, we almost never know who those people are.

Today, I want to change that. To pull back the curtain on the creator of some of the most iconic sounds in our digital landscape.

Jim: My name is Jim Reekes. I decided to study music and then realized I needed to make money and taught myself software engineering and that eventually led to getting hired by Apple in 1988.

And, at Apple, Jim applied his musical abilities to help shape the sonic character of the Mac, and give it the personality we know today.

I want to start with a story that tell you a lot about Jim. A story about a sound he made early on during his time at Apple. And it begins with a court case. The case of Apple vs Apple.

Jim: Apple Inc vs Apple Corps, the record label set up by The Beatles.

See, back when Apple computer was founded and went public, they has to make a deal with The Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps, saying that they wouldn’t do anything with music. Doing so might confuse consumers, which would violate their trademaker. But back in the late 80’s Apple added MIDI support to the Apple II, MIDI being what allow you to plug your computer into a musical keyboard and use it as an instrument, and Apple Corps saw this as a step too far.

Jim: And then at the point I had become responsible for the sound manager on the Mac, so I became the target for the horse haired barristers suing on behalf of The Beatles because, apparently The Beatles needed more money.

And these big wig-barring barristers wanted there to be nothing musical about the Mac. They even went so far as to check language used in the code...things that no end user would ever see.

Jim: It was called the note command and they said that was too musical so I had to rename it from note to Freq Command. And that cause everybody that was ever using the sound manager’s code to break. So yeah, that was like one example of just really mundane trivial little things. And I just got so fed up with it, it was so annoying. So I kept thinking about how I could just mess with them.

So Apple’s lawyers were extra careful with any names that consumers would see. Like the names of sounds, all the swooshes, and bleeps and bloops. Including one alert beep in particular, called “chimes”. [sosumi SFX]

Jim: This bleep sound, was something that sounded “too musical”. So, I had to rename that. And I just got so fed up with it, it was so annoying. So, that's why I kept thinkng about how I could just mess with them.

And so Jim found himself at Apple late at night, talking over this problem with friends.

Jim: I thought I could rename it to “Let it Beep”.

Let It Beep...after that classic Beatles song, Let It Be.

Jim: It would be impossible to get that one through, but I just thought that would be the best.

Jim’s friends tell him, no, no way you can use this! That’s insane!

Jim: And I said “Yeah, so what? So sue me.” And as soon as I said that I realized no wait that’s the perfect name...I just need to spell it funny.

So sue me. Except, spelled S-O-S-U-M-I, as though it were a Japanese word. In fact, when they submitted the name they said the word litterslly meant “nothing musical” in Japanese. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

Jim: And the lawyers approved it.

And to this day, on a Mac you can choose the alert tone “Sosumi”. [sosumi SFX]

A giant screw you to all the lawyers.

Jim: No that’s literally what it was. For me it was just me being ornery and getting back at them for all this mundane nonsensical bullshit.

I just have to say...I love this about Jim. His rascally hijinks, thumbing his nose at power. Battling bureaucracy with these little subversive acts. But, while Jim is often rather curmudgeonly and cynical, he also truly wanted to improve our sonic landscape.

Jim takes his vigilante sound-designing even further as he attempts to eradicate one of the most annoying sounds in Macintosh history [sfx] Stick around.

We’ve been hearing about Jim Reekes, the sound designer at Apple who took matters into his own hands and created some of the most recognizably Mac sounds we have today. Here’s Mark again...

Now, you might have noticed that Jim Reekes is a man with strong opinions. When he comes across something he doesn’t like, say, lawyers, he does something about it. And, though it’s hard to find something Jim has more distaste for than lawyers, this sound is one of them: [tri-tone SFX]

The startup chime of the Mac II.

Jim: That startup sound which was intentionally the hardest thing they could have made.

Every time you turned on a Mac, you were greeted with the tri-tone. [tri-tone SFX]

Jim: It was just horrible, I could not stand it.

Not only was this sound incredible harsh and grating, but it played when you were already in a bad mood. I mean, picture this:

Jim: You’re going to mostly be hearing the sound because you were doing some work on your computer that just crashed and you’ve lost all your work. And so you were already annoyed at that moment.

And back then, your Mac was probably crashing all the time. So you’d hear this again… [tri-tone SFX]

And again… [tri-tone SFX]

And again… [tri-tone SFX]

Why, why do you think they went with that?

Jim: They thought it was clever.

And you’re not in agreement with that.

Jim: It sounded horrible. There’s nothing clever about sounding horrible.

Nobody told Jim to change this. In fact, nobody even approved the project. Jim took it on in secret, like a God-given mission to fix this travesty of a sound.

Jim: And so I thought what sound could I use to unannoy you. So that’s kind of where the Zen calming gong like thing came up, to sort of freshen the palate.

Then he had to decide: What would the notes be?

Jim: Couldn’t be minor because that’s so sad so it has to be major. But that’s a little too contrived too little too trite. So I started thinking a little bit more about it and I played an overtone series.

An overtone series: The basis of all western music. The most “right” sounding thing possible. And so, after weeks of thinking about it, Jim sits down at his Mac, and records. [newer Mac start up SFX]

Jim told me he drew inspiration from a numbers of course... some classical, some more popular music. But he also confirmed that there was a very specific reference in there…

Jim: The Beatles believe it or not at the end of the song a day in a life. There’s a big cacophony of the orchestra [Day in a Life clip] at the end of that song.

And then this big chord that just hangs out on a tape loop. It just kind of goes for a while at the end.

Now that Jim had the sound, he had to get it onto new Macs.

Jim: I had to basically not ask for permission, but ask for forgiveness. So, I put in another ROM and we put it in really late when no one was really paying attention except for my buddies.

So the sound sneaks out into the world and, within Apple, the response was mixed.

Jim: Some people flipped out. Somehow they got really attached to the horrible sound and were objecting that I was ruining it by getting rid of the horrible sound.

But, before long, people came around and the sound became beloved.

It’s appeared as a punchline in The Simpsons, in movies like WALL-E. It’s a sound some of us tried to hide from our parents as we turned on the computer in the middle of the night. It’s a sound that’s transcended technology; the sound that makes a Mac feel like a Mac. The sound is so iconic, in fact, that it has one of the very few audio trademarks, along with fewer than two hundred others like, the MGM Lion and the NBC Chimes. Kind of ironic turn, for lawyer-hating Reekes.

But, while it’s become iconic, people don’t know about Jim. He hears the sound all the time, in offices or coffee shops. And the people using their Macs? They have no ideas they’re in the presence of the artist.

Jim: Sometimes I want to run up to them and say “Hey, I made that”. And most of them just think I’m an idiot. Sometimes they’re like yeah, whatever. And then sometimes they’re like well my God that’s totally amazing.

But, no longer. Last October, Apple introduced a new model of Macbook Pro, and as reviewers got their hands of it, they realized that the startup chime was gone. Now, Macs boot in silence.

Jim: Yeah, what’s the metaphor, it’s definitely the end of an era. The closing of a chapter. It’s losing a friend. It’s moving out of the house that you grew up in. Yeah, it’s just the end of something. So it definitely makes me sad. It’s just no longer the Mac.

Recently, I got one of these new Macbook Pros, and each time I turn it on, I find myself taken aback by the startup chime's absence. Every time you used to turn on a Mac, this device of the future, it would greet you with a reminder of its past. But now? It’s like that history no longer matters. And that makes me really sad.

But, there is one more thing. One other sound Jim made that’s still with us. A sound that isn’t as iconic as the startup chime, or as subversive as the “Sosumi” beep. Bit it’s a sound that’s far more ubiquitous. A sound that many of us invoke daily, or even multiple times a day. A sound we might associate with special occasions or some of the most memorable moments of our lives. [camera sound]

Jim: The camera sound. So originally it was on the Mac as a screen capture sound. Then when the iPhone came out and the iPad. So they moved that camera around over there. So you don’t really hear my startup sound in the wild all that much but you hear my camera all the time.

This sound we hear everything? It’s Jim’s camera.

So this is the sound? [camera SFX]

Jim: Yep, that’s my Canon AE1. That camera stuck with me for decades. And I used it to learn photography. So yeah, it became a very familiar sound to me and then it just felt like an obvious thing to put it on the Mac at the time.

This ubiquitous “digital: sound is a recording of a film camera from the 90's. But, even this sound was meticulously designed by Jim. He messed with microphone placement and the camera’s shutter speed , adjusting everything until it sounded just right.

[Let It Beep music in]

Today, photography is a big part of Jim’s life. It’s taken over music and sound become his passion. So it’s kind of fitting that the sound of his camera would gain this second life.

Does it bring you back at all when you hear people taking those photos?

Jim: I hear that sound and...there is almost an instinctual reaction sometimes that I turn to see who took my camera.

Jim’s startup chime is gone. It won’t disappear overnight, but in the coming years, you’ll hear it less and less and less. But it’s nice to know that, as we all snap photos, whether they’re of sunsets or well-plated brunches, a family member pretending to hold up the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids, or a child gleefully devouring chocolate cake, one of Jim’s sounds lives on.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was produced by Mark Bramhill for his podcast, Welcome to Macintosh, which is an incredible show about Apple and the community around it. To hear more fascinating stories, visit Macintosh.FM or find the show, “Welcome to Macintosh,” wherever you get your podcasts.

The music scoring in this episode is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Mark Bramhill. This episode was edited by Rob McGinley Myers, Lacy Johnson, and Tish Stringer. Special thanks to John Lagomarsino(lego-mar-see-no).

You can find Twenty Thousand Hertz at 20k.org. There, you can send us show suggestions, feedback, or reach out about advertising on the show. You can find us on Facebook or Twitter at the handle 20korg or by searching Twenty Thousand Hertz all spelled out. Finally, I need your help on one tiny thing… and that’s to tell at least one person you know directly to subscribe to the show. This show is for everyone, young people, adults, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, so if there’s someone you’d love to introduce to podcasting, borrow their phone and show them how to subscribe to Twenty Thousand Hertz. For everyone who already knows how to podcast, just make sure they tick the subscribe button.

Thanks again for listening.

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Disney Parks: How Imagineers use sound to enchant visitors

This episode was written & produced by Dave Parsons.

Theme parks have a way of transporting us to magical places, and sound is crucial in maintaining the illusion. From the most action-packed attractions to the background music playing between park areas, theme park sound designers have thought of it all. In this episode, we speak to Joe Herrington and Mike Fracassi, two Disney Imagineers who work to maintain the magic for guests of Disney Parks.

Music used in this episode

Reflection on a Ballroom Floor - One Hundred Years
Watchers (Solo Piano Version) - Steven Gutheinz
To Me You Are - Nick Box
Fibonacci - Adrian Disch
Heron's Path - Steven Gutheinz
Sailboat - One Hundread Years

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Theme Park Ambience]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. This is the story of how theme park designers use sound to shape our experience.

The modern theme park owes much of its origin to the world’s fairs of the late 1800s. They were designed to celebrate the successes of industrial innovations by mixing entertainment, engineering, and education. In 1895, Sea Lion Park - one of the first fixed-location amusement parks - opened its doors at Coney Island in Brooklyn, and shortly after, hundreds of amusement parks were up and running across the country.

[wooden roller-coaster SFX]

In the 1950s, the concept of “theming” was introduced to enhance the “amusement park” experience. The aptly-named theme parks began weaving the art of storytelling into the visitor experience. They did this through elaborate landscaping, architecture and a whimsical cast of characters. While the rides, games and attractions of ordinary amusement parks certainly maintained their allure, the immersive quality of theme parks produced an added layer of wonder.

In these wondrous places, sound plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion designed for the guest. Often overlooked, the music and sound design of park areas and attractions work endlessly to help tell the story by setting the mood, weaving together plot points, and seamlessly transitioning the guest from one story to the next. And when it comes to designing the soundscape of a theme park, it’s hard to top the work being done by the Imagineers at Disney.

Joe: We set out to control what you see and what you hear and what you smell. And what you feel emotionally.

That’s Joe Herrington a Walt Disney imaginary media designer. Joe has been working with Disney since 1981, and has worked on almost all of the major park attractions since then.

Joe: We put you in our fantasy place. To do that, we have to understand the powerful influence that sound has on people. Sound can make you relax, they can make you sweat, they can make you get chills. Feel calm or terrified. We want to be a part of controlling those emotions. The soundscape that we create is a very vital part of doing that. It sets the stage and then it takes you by the ear and leads you right through the story, and that's our objective.

To maintain the illusion of the story, the audio imagineers at Disney split their park soundscapes into different zones. This is so they can achieve a more complete immersive experience for their guests.

Joe: When you go into a zone of a park, we are trying to tell a particular story in that part of the park. In Adventure Aisle, as you approach the village, you began to hear little musical pieces [Adventure Aisle music]. So in the next zone, you had a little bit more music [Adventure Aisle added music]. You went from total jungle to I'm not sure what that is, is that rhythmic? Yeah it is, is that an instrument? Yeah, it is. And then suddenly, when you transition into the village, you've made a real nice smooth transition from no music to full on music [continue Adventure Aisle music]. That created this very rich, very real fantasy place.

While getting the music and background ambiance just right for a specific park zone is vital, designing what a guest hears as they’re traveling between park zones can be just as important.

Joe: As you go from land to land, and attraction to attraction, you pass through decompression zones, transition zones, buffer zones, those transitions tell you things like, "Okay, you can relax here and decompress, and you're not gonna miss anything." They hand you from one story to the next story. Without letting the two stories intrude on each other. And that's what makes it a magical place. Because once you get into our story, you never leave it until you walk out the door.

The story always comes first with theme park soundscaping. And proper music selection and arrangement of that music is key to maintaining the fantasy experience.

Mike: I'm Mike Fracassi, music production supervisor for the Walt Disney Imagineering music studio.

When we first learn of a new ride experience, we always start with story. What is our creative intent, what is the guest experience going to feel like, what's our adventure we're going on? And from there, we start to put together just some music style guide ideas. If it's a roller coaster, that's probably gonna be a faster paced feeling. So we'll pull music style guide ideas, whether it be songs or score material for many thing just to get a flavor of what we think it's gonna to feel like. And then we work with the rest of the team throughout the process to just allow the music selection to evolve.

In addition to a captivating music track, how the music plays and where it’s specifically coming from is a unique challenge for every attraction.

Mike: First thing you need to do to make sure the music works from scene to scene is look at the reality of the environmental space you're working within. You can't ignore acoustics, and you can't ignore the spatial relationships of the different scenes. Look at small world for instance.

[It’s A Small World song]

It’s A Small World was originally created for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and has been an iconic Disney attraction ever since.

Mike: It's essentially one big open building, it does have some walls between scenes, but there is a lot going on in each scene, there's a lot of different arrangements within each scene, but they're all playing the same song. So we take a bass liner track that is the primary arrangement, and that plays through most of the building, but then you have all of these other unique arrangements for each ethnic music style. But they're also playing the same song [continue It’s A Small World song, different styles added]. So it's really in the arrangement of orchestration that you can make an attraction like that work because there is no separation, or not much separation between the scenes, and you can get a lot of nice ear candy as you float through all the different vignettes you hear ethnic versions of the song, and it becomes a very playful and fun audio experience.

[end It’s A Small A World song]

For more complex attractions, simply choosing the right sized speakers - and getting them in the right place - becomes a kind of artform in and of itself.

Joe: You have to understand the physics of nature, the physics of sound, and why things are the way that they are. And you use those things to your advantage. If you go into a scene, and all of the music, and all of the dialogue, and all of the effects are playing from one or two speakers, there's a level of fake-ness that comes out of that. And you immediately pick it up on a subconscious level. And your brain says, "This isn't real." The minute you take that and break that out into a number of speakers and play it back in a more realistic way, it's a lot more interesting to the brain, your brain, now, can do some work, it can begin to pick these things apart.

For example, if I'm in a conference room, and there are 10 people around the table, and everybody's being picked up on one microphone [conference room SFX] and people start talking over each other, you, as a listener on the other end, can't pick out anything. You don't know who's talking, you don't know what's being said. But the minute you do that with multiple channels, like stereo, then your own brain can get engaged in picking these things out and making the difference and deciding what it wants to listen to.

[stereo conference room SFX]

The same thing happens in an attraction. If I'm in a scene, and I've pulled the sound around in a number of different channels, my brain can decide to pick out things it wants to focus on. Just like it does in nature. You have what you might call the tiki bird effect.

[Tiki Room song]

The term “Tiki Bird Effect” refers to The Enchanted Tiki Room attraction, created for Disneyland in 1963.

Joe: When you go into the tiki room and you play dozens and dozens of birds on discrete channels [continue Tiki Room song], you hear that one over there, and you hear this one over here, and you decide to focus on this one, or that one. And the clarity, and the dimension, really come way up. And so we use that technique as much as possible in our attractions. The more speakers, the more reality, that you can get in a particular area.

Creating and maintaining realism is crucial, and some attractions pose a greater challenge than others.

Joe: Let's take a character in an attraction, like in the old bear jamboree [Old Bear Jamboree clip]. If the bear is gonna sing, you want the sound to come from the bear, and there's a lot of problems associated with that, because there may not be a place to put a speaker that's gonna play the sound pressure level back at a level that is believable for a bear to play, and be the size that he is.

[Old Bear Jamboree song]

So you have to find other places to put the speakers. Well now, a human being, up and down, they can discern 7-10 degrees of accuracy. So you could go above or below that creature in a straight line and be pretty much on line and make them believe that it's coming from his mouth [Old Bear Jamboree clip centered]. But if you start putting the speaker off to the side [Old Bear Jamboree clip off to the side], a human being can discern two degrees. So the minute you put a speaker off in a tree stump or something beside the bear, everybody knows that's not coming from the bear. You create problems on a subconscious level for your guests. They don't come through and they say, "That sound's not coming from that bear." They just perceive it on a subconscious level as bad show.

For audio-animatronics characters, the size of a character’s speaker is just as important as its position.

Joe: We just have to treat it like what it really is. If it's a bird, then he gets his little speaker that is sized appropriately [bird chirping SFX], and positioned where it belongs. But if it is a humongous crocosaurus like in the river ride in Shanghai, this thing is monstrosity - he hovers over the raft and he's supposed to scare people to death [monster SFX]. And so you've got to create a sound pressure level that is believable for a creature of that size. So what we might do in a situation like that is to create that particular creature, the sound of that creature, with a number of speakers.

[monster SFX]

In creating an entertainment show with life-like characters, the physical restraints of technology is another challenge.

Mike: Often, our animatronics are singing or dancing, and we have to be aware of tempo. So if we have a song that's moving at a pretty quick clip, we might have a figure that doesn't quite move that fast. Our figures are built to a very tight specification of operation so that they can last a long time. So if our BPM is very high, we might have to create an arrangement that has a perceived lower tempo for that specific character.

Joe: That goes with any kind of technology. A lot of the things just physically will not move as fast as we’d like them to move.

Making an attraction sound realistic is tough - but in some cases, masking unwanted sounds like hydraulic pumps or the snapping of actuators can be even trickier. Theme park rides create a lot of noise just to be able to operate, so how do they mitigate that? Also, what are the nuances of taking a film and turning it into a physical experience? All this and more, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

The amount of thought and care given to the sound design of an attraction is incredible, but, ironically, a lot of the magic actually comes from what you don’t hear.

Joe: Many sounds cannot be masked - things like hydraulic pumps [hydraulic pump SFX], the snapping of actuators [actuators snapping SFX] - and so what you got to do is work with them. In the case of Tower of Terror, we had a situation where when the guest dropped in the vehicle, they would scream. And it was coming through the sound barrier door.

[Tower of Terror scream]

So we went in we found out, after some study, that everybody screamed in the very same place. We recorded guests doing that, then our sound designers got together and started creating the soundscape, utilizing those screams at that particular place in the track, and you couldn’t tell that the people were screaming right behind your back.

You do the same kind of thing where you have hydraulic pump noise, or air noise, or actuator noise. If you possibly can, you try to mask it, but if you can't mask it, you try to find things that you can do in the soundtrack that utilize those sounds to our advantage.

Another thing they use to their advantage is access to popular Disney movies and their characters.

Mike: When we start up a new attraction that's based on a film, we look at what the creative needs are for the project and look at how the film music can apply. In most cases, we always want to re-record, re-arrange, and re-orchestrate the film music to meet the exact needs of our storytelling. Sometimes we'll take a story from a film and take a little bit of a turn, another fork of that storyline and create something unique for the park. One example would be a newer attraction we have in Hong Kong called the Iron Man experience.

[Iron Man clip]

We wanted to create something unique to the audience in Hong Kong. We really wanted our music to be unique to that experience. So we had the composer take the idea of what the Iron Man us and represents [Iron Man music], and then create something new for the attraction [new Iron Man attraction music]. Most guests really wouldn't even know that it's not from the film, but it feels very much from the film.

Joe: The same thing is true with the soundscapes and the sound effects - I'll give you an example, the Tron experience we did in Shanghai. The initial concept was, we would just use everything right out of the film [Tron clip]. We started going through the sound effects, and we just found out we couldn't use any of them. We could use them as templates, we could use them as examples, but we needed to redesign everything around it.

These were two completely different mediums. One is two dimensional, and one, you're immersed in it, you're walking through it, and that requires a different set of rules to play with. And so, very often, what is created for the silver screen just does not work in a three dimensional environment, and so we end up re-creating it for our needs, but following as much as possible, the creative intent that it had for the film.

To succeed in the field of theme park sound design, it clearly takes creativity, innovation, and a willingness to push the envelope. And with a group of audio Imagineers so dedicated to their craft, it’s exciting to think what new surprises may be in store for Disney parks in the future.

Mike: We've been a company where we create these very controlled environments, very controlled experiences. Even though on the guest experience it might feel out of control, very much controlled audio and dynamic experiences. The way we consume media these days, I think there's more demand for customized, unique user experiences. And I think that's where we're gonna be challenged in the future is allowing that to happen and how to roll that up into our storytelling for everybody at the park. I think that's one area where we're gonna see a lot of development work in the years to come.

Thankfully for theme park soundscape designers, wherever technology might take us, the art of storytelling will stay the same.

Mike: Our primary goal for the audio soundtracks is to really support the story that we’re trying to tell in each environment. That is our first and primary goal that we always start with, and it’s the one we hope to end up with. As soon as we start creating soundtracks that call too much attention to themselves beyond what the environmental story is, then we’re not really supporting the story, we’re reaching a little too far.

Joe: Story. First. So many people see a piece of technology and they say, "Oh, let's wrap a show around that." And you got to go back to the basics, you got to be true to the story. Because if you do that right, they will remember that for the rest of their life.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

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

Thank you to our guests: Media Designer Joe Herrington, and Music Production Supervisor Mike Fracassi - both of Disney Imagineering.

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

Also, we’re proud to announce that we now have full transcripts available for every one of our episodes on our newly revamped website, which you can find at 20k dot org.

As always, thanks for listening.

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Spooky Sounds: The secrets of horror sound design

This episode was written & produced by James Introcaso.

Halloween is a time for fright delights! Every television channel, streaming service, and movie theater is showing films that terrify audiences, and sound plays a huge role in every scare. In this episode, we uncover how Hollywood crafts those sound terrors and the evolutionary part of our being that those noises tap into to create fear. Featuring Formosa Group Senior Sound Editor/Sound Designer Trevor Gates and Dan Blumstein, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA.

Music used in this episode

Umbrellas - Steven Gutheinz
Day by Day - Watermark High
Unraveled - Luke Atencio
Unrequited - Steven Gutheinz
Nomad - Steven Gutheinz
Younger - Steven Gutheinz
Sense of an End - Steven Gutheinz

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[effecting on Dallas' voice to make it spooky]

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

When I saw we had an episode coming out around Halloween, I took to Facebook and Twitter and asked you what the world’s scariest sounds are. Some were expected, like a knife sharpening [knife SFX].

Or an unsettling laugh [creepy laugh SFX].

Other sounds you suggested were more esoteric, like the electronic musical instrument called a theremin [thermin clip].

Others were flat out surprises. I had no idea a screaming rabbit, that isn’t being harmed in any way, sounds like this [screaming rabbit clip].

Many of you called out specific sounds in horror movies. Like the chainsaw in Texas Chainsaw Massacre… [chain saw clip].

The television static in The Ring… [TV static clip].

And of course… [Halloween theme].

The theme from John Carpenter's Halloween…

It got me thinking… it would be a lot of fun to deconstruct how the sounds in Hollywood’s scariest movies are made and find out who is responsible for these effects that make our skin crawl?

Trevor: My name is Trevor Gates. I'm a supervising sound editor and sound designer, and I primarily work on feature films, currently employed by Formosa Group.

Just what makes Trevor a master of scary soundscapes?

Trevor: I did Get Out, which was an amazing, fun process. I did Ouija: Origin of Evil, and The Belko Experiment. I've also worked on the Evil Dead reboot a couple of years ago. I worked on Don't Breathe, one called Happy Death Day, and one called Polaroid.

If you’re a fan of scary movies, odds are Trevor already terrified you with some sounds he’s created. Just how does Trevor craft a horror soundscape?

Trevor: It's our job, as sound designers, to be imaginative, and so sometimes there are things that inherently don't work because they don't have sounds, and there are some things that already work, they just need to be enhanced. It's really interesting when you get a turnover of a new picture that does not have final sound. Every film is different, but when I watch something, I'm hearing the composition of what I need to do as I'm watching it. It's my job to realize what I'm hearing in my head, for the audience.

Making scary sounds is all about context and juxtaposition. It’s about making choices of where you want the audience to focus while you’re setting up the turn. It’s kinda like sleight of hand magic trick.

Trevor: When you're watching a movie, what's really scary is when something is very quiet, and the audience is drawn into the scary movie, and then all of a sudden there's a big bang, and we do a jump scare [audience scream SFX], and it puts people back in their seats. What's important is the juxtaposition of the quiet to the loudness.

You're giving the audience something to focus on and creating a base of that quietness, and then once you've settled in and allowed them to connect with that foundation of the quietness, you can hit them over the head with a jump scare.

A jump scare is a common, but very effective horror trope. Perhaps the most common occurs in slasher films when a killer suddenly jumps out of nowhere to attack a hapless victim. Like this scene from the shark movie Deep Blue Sea where Samuel L Jackson is giving a rousing speech, only for a shark to jump out of a tank and eat him.

[Deep Blue Sea Clip]

But not every jump scare involves a killer monster. Just listen to Trevor’s favorite from Get Out. Also I’ll give you a quick heads up - it includes a very minor spoiler from the film.

Trevor: Jump scares... can be effective by creating a juxtaposition of silence before loudness, another way that you can create a jump scare... is something that just seems normal, and something that seems constant, and isn't out of any ordinary context…

The jump scare that's in Get Out that is pretty effective is early in the movie… it’s when Chris and Rose are headed to her parents' house, and they're driving in a car...

They're having a conversation and laughing…

Then all of a sudden a deer hits the front of the car [Get Out driving scene], and you never saw it coming. I've seen producers on playbacks jump out of their seat and curse from watching this jump scare.

Sound is used to draw us in and focus our attention right before something terrifying happens. Jump scares are misdirects and the moment we realize we’ve been duped is the moment of terror. But horror movies aren’t all jumpscares. Some scenes are prolonged scares that make us squirm in our seats. How are those crafted?

Trevor: Sustained, scary sounds… are as equally important as the jump scares... everything can't be the same all the time.

On Ouija: Origin of Evil, directed by Mike Flanagan, most of the film happens in a house, in a front room. When I was building a soundscape for Mike, I sat him down and said, "Hey, Mike. I never see a clock in this room, but I built a clock for you, and I want you to listen to it, and I want you to see how it makes you feel."

[clock scene clip]

There was something special about this clock. I recorded a clock, and then manipulated it to be just ever slightly slower than one second a tick, so it... makes you lean into the ticks, into the sound of the clock. The clock was always prominent in this room, so I played the scene, and Mike Flanagan looked at me... and says, "Well, I guess I have to shoot an insert of a clock."

In the middle of the movie, there is a scene where a little girl gets possessed by a demon. There's a six-minute stretch of basically all that you're hearing are the clock [clock SFX], footsteps [footsteps SFX], and breaths of the little girl [breathing SFX]. She's downstairs and kind of walking around. She's thinking something is weird and wrong. She's just played with a Ouija board, and this clock creates an unsettling pace for about five or six minutes… It was so effective.

Mike Flanagan originally wanted to have music or score over this scene, and I built the scene sonically to work without music. When we were mixing the film, we played it with the music, and Mike said “Great, that was scary. Let me hear it without music.” Then we played it without music, only with the clock, with the footsteps, with the breaths of the little girl and after the scene was done playing he said, "...That's the way it's going to be. No music."

There’s one other sound technique designers use to make us squirm in the theater. That’s gore-y body horror effects like stabs [stabbing SFX], breaking bones [bones breaking SFX], and, of course, blood splatters [blood splatter SFX].

Trevor: One of the key components of a slasher film is actually the visceralness of the sounds that you use. In The Belko Experiment, the characters have a small charge explosive unknowingly deposited in their neck, and the antagonist at any point in time can flip a switch and blow up their head. What does this sound like? The main components of this sound… a ball bearing ricochet off of a hard wall [exmaple], the loud pop, and an apple bite [example]. Also ripping paper [exmaple].

The end result sounded like this.

[explosion clip]

Horror movies are meant to entertain us through shocks and thrills, but the disturbing sounds Trevor designs would never work without the right visuals and context.

Trevor: These sounds are not scary by themselves. I do movies that are not horror movies, and I use the exact same sounds that are not in horror movies, and they're not scary, because contextually it's different. There was a basement creak that we used in Evil Dead [creak SFX] that I've used in a biopic… of an admiral in the 1800s in the Netherlands, for a ship creak [creak SFX] as it's going over big waves. The exact same sound that was scary in Evil Dead was not scary at all in this movie.

The perfect marriage of visuals and sounds beget the best audience reactions.

Trevor: As a supervising sound editor we get invited to the preview. It is so gratifying to have people jump out of their seats on jump scares, or creepy moments to hear people audibly having reactions in the theater. It feels great, because you know it's working. It's very rewarding, and I feel honored to be part of that process.

Screaming audience members are the greatest reward a horror sound designer gets, but why do we react with fear to sound waves to begin with? What is it about screams, creaky floors, wind, and other scary sounds that makes them more terrifying than other sounds? We know it’s a movie. We know it’s not real, and yet our brains still react in fear. Why is that? The answer after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We heard how scary sounds are created for horror movies. What I want to know now is why do we react to certain sounds with fear? What’s going on in our brain?

Dan: My research really tries to look for generalizations, by identifying generalizations on how we respond or how animals respond to certain sounds, we can gain insights into why we respond the way we do.

That’s Dan Blumstein, a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. Among other things, he studies how and why humans and other animals react to sounds with fear, and it all started when he got a scare himself… while working with marmots.

Dan: I spent years studying marmot alarm communication. I now run a long-term study in Colorado that began in 1962 when my friend and colleague, Ken Armitage, who's now an Emeritus Professor at University of Kansas began the study. We follow individually marked marmots and we trap them and mark them and follow them throughout their lives and we’ve learned a lot from this. One day I was out there trapping baby marmots when they come out of their burrow.

I'm holding one and it screamed in my hands.

[marmot scream SFX]

I almost dropped it. I wondered why am I having an emotional response to this little rodent screaming in my hands? I don't have emotional responses when they emit normal alarm calls. This was something different. This was something that led to a visceral feeling, and a visceral response in me.

I started studying the screams. The screams it turns out are calls that are emitted when animals are in dire straits, they're emitted from highly aroused animals. The screams when you start listening to them across different species sound remarkably similar. They have elements that go rapidly up and down in frequency or pitch. They have noisy type components. They sound different.

When I refer to noise, I'm referring to broadband sound, staticky sound. Specifically when vocal production systems are overblown... Noise sounds raspy. Noise sounds rough.

You know when your dog is barking. It may sound different when it's happy [happy bark] versus when it's sad [sad bark], when it's bossy [bossy bark], when it's terrified [scared bark].

When animals are scared they make noise that varies in pitch, which is then also scary to us. Turns out that pitch variation triggers fear… and it’s all over horror films as Dan found out in another study.

Dan: We got lists of the best films, the best horror, the best adventure, the best sad dramatic films. We made voice prints of these films which are called audio spectrograms.

What we found was statistically that particularly noise was overrepresented in horror films.

What Dan found makes perfect sense, since we now know many horror movie jump scares play with volume and pitch to make us jump. Especially in one of the genre’s most iconic sequences… The shower scene from the original Psycho.

Dan: If you listen to Janet Leigh's first scream in Psycho.

[Psycho's shower scream]

It's really noisy. If you listen to her subsequent screams, they're more dramatic tonal screams.

The rumors going around, I can't evaluate these that Alfred Hitchcock turned off the hot water to get that first scream... You know, Internet, trust what you want to trust.

But at the end of the day, that first scream that she gave in the Psycho shower scene was a real scream, was a chock full of nonlinearities, was noisy.

And when we add that iconic music to Psycho’s shower scene...

We get a very noisy, very scary classic.

[Pyscho's shower scene with music]

Noisy screams - the marmot, Janet Leigh, or otherwise, terrify us… and the reason for that has to do with survival.

Dan: Why I think noise is so evocative is that it's an honest signal that someone else out there is terrified, and if you hear an honest signal that someone else out there is terrified, you should probably look around and figure out what's going on and maybe you should heighten your threat level if you will and realize that there may be something bad around.

It’s not just screams. Any loud, dissonant noise can alert us to danger and activate fear in our brains. That’s why jump scares are often paired with a jarring sound - like the car screeching to a halt as it hits a deer in Get Out or the whistle we hear when Arthur Dallas stumbles upon the title monster in Alien.

I know. We have the same name. The big difference is that I’m alive and the guy from Alien isn’t Ripley, so you know how he ended up.

[Alien clip]

Responding to loud, dissonant noise with fear is built into our dna. Our ancestors who didn’t respond to another animal’s terror with caution, likely got eaten up by predators.

Of course there’s subtler noises used in films that are creepy. Remember that creaky floor?

[creaky floor SFX]

Well there’s a reason that iconic horror sound produces fear, and that too, has to do with survival.

Dan: Animals are really sensitive to other sounds in their environment... The sound of a broken stick [breaking stick SFX] means that something is walking towards you. A creaking floor is like a broken stick. It's a cue that someone else is out there, and if someone else is out there, you're going to look around and pay attention to that.

Subtle sounds, like a raptor jiggling a door handle in Jurassic Park [door handle jiggle SFX], trigger something primal in our brains that give us a jolt of fear so we take action and become aware of our surroundings.

Because hearing those subtle sounds is part of our survival, a sustained, loud sound that drowns them out, like howling wind, is also creepy...and it’s not just humans.

[wind SFX]

Dan: What's really interesting is lots of species get nervous and shut down when it gets windy…. it's harder to hear those broken sticks.

There’s one other aspect of sound that generates fear for our survival. Sounds with lower frequencies tend to be scarier to all animals, humans included. There’s good reason for that.

Dan: The biggest animals can produce the lowest frequencies and if you're really small, the lowest frequency you can produce is much higher than if you're really big, and this goes across species and this is also within species. We also know that body size is both within species and across species highly associated with dominance. Your likelihood of getting beaten up, or threatened, or killed by something.

If you're small, you have a greater risk by bigger things. So I think animals are likely very sensitive to these cues of body size and that when you begin listening to horror films or films where they're trying to create tension, often there's this low frequency that's brought in, this low baseline, these low frequencies that begin creating a sense of unease. I think that too is tapping into our biological roots.

Low frequencies are all over scary movies. Think about the alien tripods from War of the Worlds.

[Alien tripods SFX]

And the distinctive sound of the monster from Predator.

[Predator SFX]

And, of course, the theme from Jaws.

[Jaws theme]

All of these terrifying film sounds and many more use lower frequencies.

There’s another low frequency technique film sound designers use to direct our emotions. Infrasound is playing a frequency less than 20 hertz, so low it can’t be heard by the human ear. Though we can’t hear infrasound, one study in the UK showed it can induce anxiety, sorrow, heart palpitations, and shivering in some people. The 2007 box office smash Paranormal Activity reportedly used this technique to terrify audiences.

We’ve actually been playing a 19 hertz tone for the past 30 seconds or so… Earbuds and headphones can’t produce this frequency, so you probably haven’t noticed a difference, but if you’re listening on larger speakers, you can probably see your speakers vibrating a little more aggressively than normal. And you might be feeling a little uneasy.

Horror movies use sound to manipulate our instincts. They trigger the same fear that helps us survive. On a conscious level, we understand that we’re sitting on a couch or in a theater watching a film, but the sounds and sights of that movie activate an unconscious survival instinct that makes us feel fear. It’s why you hear people who love horror movies sometimes say that it is fun to be scared. They get all the thrills and adrenaline rush of a life-threatening situation without the actual threat to life.

Dan: Successful organisms have been able to respond appropriately to fearful situations, to assess the risk of predation. The risk of predation is one of these ubiquitous things that all species at some point in their lives must deal with an encounter. Even predators have to worry about predators when they're small for example.

All species have to respond to predators and to respond to predators, you want to be able to assess the risk of predation and animals are using all sorts of cues to do so.

Trevor used all of Dan’s survival sound cues to create one of Get Out’s scariest sequences. Here he is again.

Trevor: There was one very specific moment of Get Out that required some very surreal and subjective design, and that was when Chris was hypnotized for the first time, and he fell into his mind, this thing that they called the sunken place. Jordan Peele and I sat down and I said, "Jordan, what do you want this place to sound like?" He kind of turned his head to the side and said, "What does it sound like when your head is underwater in the bathtub?"

The specific sound composition... was a combination of underwater sounds [underwater SFX], some weird water bugs that created some movement on the high frequency spectrum [water bug SFX]. It was a low pulse that was built from a low frequency tone [low pulse ton SFX], and modulated through a tool that I use. Then Chris' screams, and we recorded screams for him, and then I processed them to make them feel like they were distant, and that you could barely hear them. When we played it all together, Jordan said he was terrified, and that was a win at that point.

[Get Out clip]

The sound in that scene plays on all our survival instincts. Dissonance, screams, low frequencies, surprising sounds - even simulated drowning. That’s what makes it so creepy to listen to.

Sounds are a big part of what make horror movies scary. By playing on our instincts and using proper context, a great soundscape tells a story that chills us to the core. Our fearful reactions to sound are tied to something so primal, that even when we know why a certain noise scares us, we still have a hard time stopping it from doing so… which is part of the fun.

[The Shinning, "here's Johnny" clip]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that supports ad agencies, filmmakers, and video game developers. Checkout recent work at defacto sound dot com.

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

Thanks to our guest Trevor Gates for sharing his amazing stories. He designs audio magic with Formosa Group, a talent-based company that does pretty amazing stuff. They've worked on Blade Runner 2049, Molly's Game, and Game of Thrones and are staffed with Oscar-winning talent. You can find out more about their work across the film industry at FormosaGroup.com.

Thanks also to Dan Blumstein. Dan is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA where he also co-directs the Evolutionary Medicine Program. You can find out more about his amazing work with animals on the Blumstein Lab’s website, which can be found at blumstein lab dot E E B dot UCLA dot EDU.

All of the music in this episode is provided by our friends at Musicbed. You can listen to these tracks, including this one Sense of an End by Steven Gutheinz on our exclusive playlist which you can find at music dot 20k dot org.

You can say hello, submit a show idea, or give general feedback through Facebook, Twitter, or over email. Our email address is hi at 20k dot org.

The most important thing you can do for us is recommend the show to a friend. Say it in person, send a text message, or shout us out on social media. Word of mouth is critical for our podcast survival.

Thanks for listening.

Recent Episodes

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Acoustical Umbilical Cord: Why crying makes us human

This episode was written & produced by Katy Daily.

Many animals, humans included, are natural-born criers. It’s the most basic form of communication from right when we come into the world. But us humans are unique: we keep on crying until the day we die. What was born as a survival mechanism, develops a deeper fundamental need as we grow older. In this episode, we discover the hard-wiring in our brains that reach across species, and how our tears into adulthood make us distinctively human. Featuring Dr. Susan Lingle, Behavioral Ecologist at the University of Winnipeg, and Dr. Ad Vingerhoets, Research Psychologist at the University of Tilburg.

Music used in this episode

Timing is Everything - Blake Ewing
Missing Pictures - Steven Gutheinz
Finally, The Sun - Dustin Lau
Surface - Blake Ewing
Lie Cheat Steal (Instrumental) - Andrew Judah
Building Thoughts - Dexter Britain
Sleeper - Riley 1964
Unremarkable - Dexter Britain

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[sniffling winds up, like a child is about to burst into tears]

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

[baby shrieks and heaves]

We’re all natural-born criers. It’s the most basic form of communication... from right when we come into the world.

That’s producer Katy Daily.

When we’re babies… we cry when we’re hungry… [baby wail, sound of sucking on bottle] and when we’re in pain… [toddler shriek]. It’s the easiest way to communicate that something’s wrong, and to get the help we need.

For many animals... it’s actually built into the parents’ brains to react immediately to the sound of their infant’s cries. The parent might even see or smell the infant in distress, but it’s that sound that kicks them into gear.

Crying has to be loud enough to attract the parent, which unfortunately means that it’s loud enough to attract predators as well. So most animals, when they’re old enough to fend for themselves, have evolved to grow out of crying entirely.

Not humans. We keep on crying for the rest of our lives. Now, it’s more likely to be because of a bad break-up than an empty stomach, as we go from crying for necessity to crying emotionally. But if we don’t need to signal for that critical help anymore, what’s the purpose of crying when we’re emotional?

First, let’s talk about our wiring.

Susan: An infant's cry triggers an immediate response by caregivers.

That’s Dr. Susan Lingle, a behavioural ecologist who has studied animal cries in the wild.

Susan: So this might mean moving to the infant to hold it, to feed it, or to rescue it from a predator.

Not only does this increase the chance of survival for the infant, but it also ensures the caregiver’s genetic fitness. Meaning: the ability to successfully pass on its genes to the next generation.

Lingle attributes this to a special caregiver sensitivity. If the caregiver hears what sounds like their offspring crying, they will be biologically driven to respond to it.

But this isn’t just limited to parents. The same might happen to someone who doesn’t even have a child.

Susan: Cries made by newborns of different species are remarkably similar. We tend to hear this slight plaintive "Rear rear" for many species.

I've heard a few people give me anecdote about how they were camping, they woke up at 2:00 in the morning and heard a baby, a human baby crying. They left their tent to track down the sound, only to find a beaver baby… so these sounds are remarkably similar.

But we recognize more than just the cries that sound like ours. We know when our cat wants to be let out [meow], and when our dog is hungry [dog whimper].

And sometimes, our pets understand us too.

Susan: The brain of a domestic dog responds to human vocalizations very much the same way as the dog brain responds to dog vocalizations.

Most of us would recognize this: a dog might perk up and come on over when they hear their owner crying.

Susan: We tend to view the animals having learned to respond to our vocalizations because of our close association with dogs. We have a shared history that seems to be over 30,000 years. Some biologists suggest that this mutual understanding is due to an ability that evolved over the shared history of domestication.

Maybe our dogs can only understand us this way because they’ve developed an almost human-like empathy. So does this mean that only our pets can understand when we cry?

Susan: Most of my lab's work has been with the behavior of two species of deer, which are white-tailed deer and mule deer. We started to work with distress vocalizations or cries made by deer fawns when coyotes attack them [fawn cry SFX]. We started to notice that the acoustic structure of the cries made by newborns of different species were remarkably similar.

So, we returned to the field to conduct what I called "cross-species playbacks."

[researcher over radio – fur seal cry]

What you’re hearing is a recording of a fur seal pup crying. It’s playing over a big speaker in the middle of a field. There’s a female deer nearby.

Susan: She immediately lifts her head. And she starts running at a full gallop [gallop SFX] until she gets to the speaker.

When we did these playback experiments, we found that deer mothers approached a speaker playing newborn cries from these different species as if they were approaching the speaker to rescue their own fawns.

[human baby cry is heard, deer gallops towards speaker]

And there she goes again, this time for a human baby.

[kitten cry is heard, deer gallops towards speaker]

And again.

Susan: It is not as though she really wants to be defending a kitten. But the sounds is so similar that she can mistake it for the cry of a fawn.

There's such survival value for to respond when she hears the sound that it probably outweighs the cost of responding to cries when it's not your own infant.

What Lingle’s team found was that if another mammal’s cry fell within a certain frequency range, the mother deer would respond as if it were her own fawn. So if her fawn’s cry is roughly 900 hertz [example], then the mother might recognize another animal’s cry anywhere from around 400 hertz [example] to around 1,300 hertz [example].

Even animals that sound way different to our ears, might sound close enough to a mother deer.

Susan: Where many species have a frequency modulation, that rises and falls, "Rare Rare." The bat that we used had simple descending frequency sound "Eer Eer" [example] and it sounded quite odd to our ear.

So in these cross-species experiments, we predicted that the female would approach the speaker only when the pitch of the cry fell within that same frequency range.

The cries of many species, naturally fall into the range in which a deer mother will respond. But some species have a cry with a very low pitch and other species have a cry with a very high pitch.

Lingle’s team took the cry of a newborn eland, which is an antelope found in Africa. The eland’s cry naturally falls lower than this frequency range for the mother deer.

Susan: So we ran a series of playback trials using the original eland calls [eland call SFX]. Females alerted to these calls but turning their head toward the speaker but they did not approach and they did even always stand up, if they had been sitting down. We ran a second series with the same calls but in this case, we manipulated the pitch so that it fell in the range to which deer typically respond to cries. So we raised the pitch from 170 hertz [example] up to an average of about 900 hertz [example]. We were able to use software to increase the frequency of the pitch without changing any other acoustic traits in the call.

[higher frequency eland call]

When the deer heard these sounds, they immediately lifted their heads and took off at full speed [galloping SFX] toward the speaker. So this result told us that the pitch of the call is very important and it must fall within a certain frequency range for females to respond. But perhaps more importantly, this result told us that cries made by newborns of different species are very similar except for the difference in the frequency of the pitch.

Now, this is just mind-blowing for me. This mother deer is hearing the sound of a human baby cry, or a bat cry, and just takes off running towards the sound. It’s like she’s thinking “this might be my baby, so I have to save it.”

So far, we can’t look into the brain of this wild deer to see why she responds like this. So it’s still hard to know for sure if our pet dog understands our cries because she’s developed some human-like empathy, or if it’s actually been hard-wired into her long before domestication.

But it does make you wonder: If we hear a kitten cry, do we respond out of empathy or instinct?

Susan: I would probably say that in humans, rather than suggesting that it's our empathy that makes us responsive to these sounds, instead, the response of humans and deer to newborn cries of different species may reflect a shared sensitivity that has been conserved across mammals and perhaps even across other species that have well-developed parental care.

So crying triggers this caregiver instinct, and is incredibly essential to our survival. But once we’ve grown up and can survive on our own, why do we still cry?

More on that in a moment.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We’re learning that crying is essential to our survival as a species from the very day we were born.

Ad: One needs to be aware that the human infant is among the most helpless creatures that exist.

My name is Ad Vingerhoets and I'm a psychology professor of Tilburg University in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

You can compare it with the offspring of other primates, which all can cling to the fur of their mothers, or for example, to ducklings, who can immediately follow their mother when they are out of the egg.

One may consider infant crying as a kind of acoustical umbilical cord. Meaning that it helps to maintain or to re-establish the contact with the mother.

Then, we grow up. After all of the dirty diapers [baby cry SFX], and bumped foreheads [baby squeal SFX], we eventually cut that acoustical umbilical cord. Back to Katy.

It’s not that we stop vocally crying entirely, it’s that we do it way less often, and much more quietly. It’s almost like our bodies are trying to keep us from making a sound.

Listen, for example, to this iconic scene from Interstellar. In it, Matthew McConaughey breaks down into tears while watching videos from his family back home.

[Interstellar cry scene]

If you can’t hear him crying, it’s because he’s barely making a sound. Tears are rolling down his face. There’s just almost no noise. That’s because, as you become an adult, you don’t need to make that sound anymore. It sounds like he is trying to keep the sound in, and hold the tears back.

And this trait is uniquely human.

While we have observed crying in some animals like camels and elephants, humans are the only species who we know for sure produce emotional tears.

But if we’ve grown out of the need to cry for survival, then what’s the point of weeping when we’re emotional?

As it turns out, we don’t 100% know. There are a lot of theories out there, ranging from reasonable to downright outrageous. The most popular theory is that crying removes some kind of toxins that build up when you’re stressed. And it does sound convincing. I mean, sometimes, after a good cry, people just feel better.

Ad: One could also argue that if such a mechanism would be responsible for feeling better, that raises the question whether an act as peeling onions and the associated shedding of tears [onion chopping, nose sniffles SFX] may also help us to feel better when we are feeling blue.

So, tears do form to protect our eyes when they’re irritated, but this still doesn’t explain why they appear when we’re upset.

If it’s not purely physical, then what is it?

Ad: Tearful crying was just a much safer way of communication, and it can also be directed rather exclusively to specific persons, of whom one might expect to receive consolation.

When we are exposed to crying individuals, we often tend to react with all kinds of positive reactions. We feel more connected with them, we feel more empathy, and we tend to react with providing help, support, and so on.

The general idea about the function of tears is that tears connect. They help us to connect with others.

So even as adults, crying’s purpose is still a form of communication. Instead of wailing for survival, we weep… to tell others we need their support.

This doesn’t mean that we have control over our tears. Convincing tears are notoriously hard for actors. But then we might spontaneously cry in front of our boss despite our best efforts to keep them in.

This might even explain why we cry when we’re alone.

Ad: If we experience an emotion with a certain intensity, then it might be that this emotion becomes connected with the production of tears.

We might just be so used to this that we let the tears out, even when no one’s around to see.

If we could turn our tears on and off with a switch, most of us probably would. In some cases, crying makes us feel vulnerable in ways that we’re not always OK with. It might make us feel embarrassed. Or uneasy. Like others will judge us. And that might even condition us to get tearful less often.

Ad: How others react to an individual's crying depends, on the display rules of a certain culture.

For example, crying when one has lost a significant other, it's a universally accepted reason to cry. However, the situation is very different when one has the feeling that the crier can be blamed him or herself for the situation he is in.

[A League of Their Own clip – “there’s no crying in baseball!”]

That could explain why we sometimes feel better when we cry, and sometimes we feel worse. It might depend on how others react to us that determines how we feel afterwards.

So Vinger-oots and his team tried to compare normal criers and a group of people who had stopped crying. Did the criers get some kind of release that the non-criers didn’t? Or did the non-criers feel more secure, and less judged by others?

Ad: They did demonstrate some remarkable differences, especially in their social functioning.

More precisely, the criers reported more empathy, and they felt stronger connected with others. They reportedly also received more emotional support.

This doesn’t just go for when we’re sad, or angry, or frustrated.

Ad: Humans also start to cry more when we are being moved. For example, when we see that bonds become closer. Witnessing acts of altruism, acts of self-sacrifice.

[CNN clip – woman talks about her rescuer]

It's okay to cry with this kind of situation, because it's a strong signal to others that we are good people. They can connect with us and they can collaborate with us.

Humans are not just described as social beings, but even as ultra-social beings. We experience empathy, so we have the capacity to understand how others feel.

[deaf woman hears for the first time]

What is very helpful to trust each other is if you have the feeling that you understand each other, and not just understand in a cognitive sense, but you know what others value.

[dog reunites with owner]

I think that crying is very important, because crying in some way might have stimulated the development of our empathic skills.

[proposal]

When we cry, we share our values and our vulnerability. It brings us closer to together. It allows us to understand more about each other and develop a deeper feeling of trust and responsibility. And to connect in a way that’s uniquely human.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

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

Thank you to our guests, Dr. Susan Lingle and Dr. Ad Vinger-oots. They are both digging deeper into the mysteries of human and cross-species crying, with new details emerging as we speak. Special thanks to CKXU 88.3FM Radio in Lethbridge Alberta, Canada for their help, and to Drs. Isabelle Charrier, Radim Kotrba, and Paul Faure for their recordings of fur seals, elands, and silver-haired bats.

The music in this episode was provided by Musicbed and we have an exclusive playlist you can check out at music dot 20k dot org. That playlist also includes the track you’re hearing right now “Unremarkable” by Dexter Britain.

As always, thanks for listening.

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Level Up: How video games tell an immersive story through sound

This episode was written & produced by James Introcaso.

Video games are a growing industry and every play-controlled experience is defined by its harmony of music, sound effects, and voice acting. In this episode, we reveal how these elements of a video game's soundscape are crafted and come together to tell an interactive story. The most sophisticated sound design in video games allows those without the ability to see a chance to engage with some of our greatest modern entertainment. Featuring Microsoft Sound Designer, Zachary Quarles, and ArenaNet Technical Sound Designer, Damian Kastbauer.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Yearn - Chris Coleman
Cotton Float - Luke Atencio
Seafoam29 - Tangerine
Change the Game - AJ Hochhalter
White11 - Tangerine
Clear Glass - Steven Gutheinz
Though Clouds - Steven Gutheinz

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[video Game Montage]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. I’m Dallas Taylor. This is the story of how video game sound designers create new worlds, tell stories, and bring imaginary characters to life.

[continue video game montage]

As the first generations raised with video games, a lot of us Gen Xers and Millennials continue to play as adults. In fact, more people than ever are playing, even if they don’t consider themselves a “gamer”. With the rise of mobile and social gaming, last year the industry took in over 30 billion dollars in the United States alone. That’s more than movies and music - combined.

Games are often defined by their visuals. Back in the 80’s it was all some commercials could talk about.

[80's Nintendo commerical]

So, if games are such a visual-focused medium… why is sound important?

Damien: Sound in games really comes down to communicating a sense of place and a sense of emotion.

That’s Damien Kastbauer, a leading technical sound designer.

Damien: It is an unseen art. As someone who plays games, I know when it's not right and I understand how that can blow the whole mood. Sound is about engagement and communicating this game's intention.

In other words, sound in games is all about immersion. The right sounds are critical for the player in order to authentically slip into a game’s story and become the character they control. Consider what Mario’s cultural impact would be if instead of this [Mario intro SFX], it sounded like this *[crappy, rush job in the same 8-bit style]. *Giving sound designers and composers the appropriate time, resources, and direction can take a game from passable to iconic.

[Mario theme music]

Fast forward 30 years to where we are today. It’s unbelievable the level of engagement sound brings to games. Take, for example, Bethesda Softworks’ smash-hit Fallout 4. Even if you’re not a gamer, you can appreciate the level of detail that goes into the sound. Let’s deconstruct the soundtrack and explain these audio layers. First up, the ambience, which are sometimes called the backgrounds.

[Fallout Ambient Noise]

Ambience can be anything that ties the player to the location. These are typically sounds like rain, wind, forest rustling, room tone, or anything that establishes the environment.

Another layer is foley. These are sounds that come from the character’s body, hands, feet, and clothing movement.

[Fallout Foley]

Hard effects - like machines, sirens, explosions, and other objects not attached to the character - make up another layer.

[Fallout Weapons, explosions]

And those are all just in the Sound Effects layer. You also have the voice layer...

[Array of Fallout Dialogue]

This can be anything from narration, to character dialogue, to coms and radios.

And finally… the music layer...

[Add Fallout Music]

The music layer alone might have multiple sublayers like drums, high pitched instruments, low pitched instruments, and strings.

In this respect, the audio layers in games are a lot like the audio layers in movies, however, with games, everything is variable based off of the player, so instead of mixing all of the sounds together into a single soundtrack like what would be done in a movie, you have to program thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of individual sounds that all have to work together in real time.

Damien: In a movie, As the person stepped across the room [footsteps SFX], you would place a footstep sound at each location in time. You would know every time that that scene played back [rewind SFX] that the footstep [footsteps SFX] would always be in the same place because as a viewer you don't have control over how fast that character is walking.

Games have a infinite possibility of playback. One time you could walk over to the kitchen [walking SFX], pick up a cup of coffee [coffee cup SFX] , take a drink [drinking coffee SFX] and step out the back door [door open SFX] and hear the crickets chirping [crickets SFX] in the distance. Another time in the same game, you could instead choose to sit down in a chair [sitting SFX] and listen to the rumble of the refrigerator [refrigerator SFX].

In order to achieve these infinite possibilities in playback, every game is built on top of what is called, and engine. This engine is the software skeleton that controls the physics and mechanics of a game. Sound designers load in all of the sound effects, voice, and music into this engine, then have to fine tune the programming parameters so that all of these sounds can smoothly playback together at any time and at any place in the game.

Damien: Yeah, it's a lot of math. Every sound in a space has to reflect reality as closely as possible, where it's at, what it's next to, how loud it is, these are all things that very simply add up to communicate a sense of reality for the player.

But how do those sounds get made? What’s the process for creating sounds that are intended to sound real, like the sound of a car in Need for Speed.

[Need for Speed clip]

And imaginary, like Pikachu in Super Smash Brothers.

[Pikachu clip]

And who gets to make these sound effects?

Zach: I feel most comfortable and most productive whenever I'm creating worlds. Whether that be a realistic sound design or completely stylized, as long as it's all rooted in that game's reality.

That’s Zachary Quarles. He’s an Audio Director and Sound Designer for Microsoft Game Studios.

Zach has a ton of experience in making sounds for games. He currently works on Killer Instinct, Microsoft’s big fighting game [Killer Instinct clip], but in the past he’s made sounds for Quake 4... [Quake 4 clip]

X-Men Legends... [X-Men Legends clip]

and ReCore [ReCore clip] .

For Zach and for sound designers everywhere, adding sound effects to a game is more than simply finding the most realistic sound and plugging it in. It’s about Crafting the right effect that gets the player invested in the story and the moment. That makes them feel something… even if that something is super gross.... Take this scene from another game Zach worked on called D4.

Zach: One of the sequences in D4 had to do with two characters eating different meals together and the meals are really weird. So there's a guy that has a stack of pieces of pizza that he just kind of smashes together and just kind of... piles them into his mouth [clip]. A guy rips open a lobster shell and sucks out all of the meat [clip].

I was taking stuff like crab shells and ripping those apart [shell ripping SFX], dumping cream of mushroom soup [thick soup pouring SFX] on top of that. I had a glass, like just a drinking glass, filled with raw chicken and I was just punching [punching SFX] inside of the glass, just making slucking gross splattery sounds [splatter SFX]. It was all for these meals that these characters were eating.

[D4 clip]

The foley room when I was recording this smelled so bad. We started to have people just show up in the engineering room as I was recording all this, and they're all holding their nose and just like shaking their head and cursing my name.

There was a moment I was surrounded by crab shell that was absolutely reeking with a bucket of cream of mushroom soup with my hand in a glass covered in raw chicken and I was like, I love my job.

And if you think Zach’s job sounds like fun, wait’ll you hear what else he does.

Zach: I'm actually several voices in Killer Instinct.

Not only does Zach make sound effects, but he’s also a voice actor and director. It’s up to him to bring the characters of a game to life… sometimes with a little help from man’s best friend.

Zach: Eyedol, who is this big ogre creature who has a head that's split in half and each head is a different personality. All the voice for him is designed by me, it's my voice mixed with my dogs growls.

Eyedol’s thing is: "I serve no one!"

I would take that recording and morph it with my dogs growls and a couple of other things to give it a lot more body, a lot more presence and this is what it sounds like.

[Eyedol clip]

When it comes to voices, it’s about making every character come to life. When Zach created Eyedol’s voice, he was thinking about more than just making a monster with a split head who is scary.

Zach: Before I really get started I like to see how the player moves and how the player carries their weight so I can get a sense of scale and sense of kind of, distribution of energy throughout. Where they hold their energy and everything. So Idol was hunched over, being held together by dark magic, so he wasn't very solid in terms of vocal cord structure.

That’s how sound effects and voices come together to immerse a player in a world and give them a sense of the characters, but what about music? How do games like Skyrim, that have over 200 hours of content, keep their music exciting and fresh?

And also - can a video game’s sound be so precise that people who are blind can play them? We’ll get to that after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We’ve heard how sound effects and voice come together in a game, but what about music? Video games have come a long way since the catchy tunes of Megaman.

[Megaman music]

We now have unbelievable orchestral scores, like those found in Blizzard’s Overwatch.

[Overwatch score]

Now that games have the ability to playback the highest level of orchestral recordings, the challenge becomes, how how do we keep that music fresh? Listening to a song over and over again becomes annoying over time, so how do game composers keep their music from becoming noticeably repetitive? Here’s Damien again.

Damien: Music in modern games has gained a complexity because of how variable the player's interaction can be. Music is composed in elements or little chunks or tiny little pieces or layers… that the game then controls the sequence of or the playback of based on what's happening. You almost end up with a tiny little composer in the box who is telling the violins [music starts] to start when the hero walks through the doorway or a tiny little composer that signals the trumpet fanfare [SFX - trumpet] as soon as the dragon burst out of the cave.

[music swells with dragon reveal]

Music for movies or albums can be written with full freedom, because every time it plays back in the future, it will be exactly the same. However, music for games have to be written in little pieces, modularly… and all of these little modules have to be able to work together. The most basic modular form of writing game music would be to create a music start [music start], a loopable main theme [music loop], and an ending [music ending]. Games that are longer and more complex might have 30 or 40 modules split up by themes and instrumentation. This is essentially how a 10 minute piece of linear music can transform into a 2 hour symphony during a game-play session.

Damien: It's this tiny virtual composer then that creates this musical soundscape out of these components and pieces of music that have been created for the game and really scores the experience for the player based on what's happening at that time. As a composer, you want to make sure that the music you're writing doesn't get old, doesn't get boring. You want to appropriately score that experience for the player, no matter how long it takes them to get through the forest. Then, when they get to that dragon, signal that in a way that brings the dramatic elements to the experience.

So music creates the atmosphere, sound effects create the world, voices create the characters, and together all three bring emotion to the video game’s story. Though it’s often overlooked in favor of graphics, sound is a key component to any game and has been since they first hit the scene. And for some players, sound is the only component. Here’s Zach again.

Zach: Killer Instinct is a game that is as much as it can be a controlled environment. It's not like an open world game that you're running anywhere and everywhere. You're on a 2-D plane with two people fighting each other.

A Blind Gamer by the name of Sightless Combat sent me a message on Twitter and was like, "Hey,[tweet SFX] I just wanted to let you know that me and several of the Blind Gamers that we play with, we really love Killer Instinct. It really gives us an understanding of what's going on on screen at any given type without seeing it, but we have some feedback for you."

Zach read their feedback… and put it in Killer Instinct’s next update.

Zach: A lot of it was mix changes of, "We need to be able to hear the players after they jump when they land a lot more cleanly." I was like, "Okay. That's something that's pretty easy to fix."

[Killer instinct jump clip]

When a new release would happen, I'd send him notes of things that I fixed or tried to fix and needed some feedback from him and his crew. He would play through it and he would shoot me some feedback, shoot me some additional feedback for the new character or for anything else that they came across. What they usually do is turn off music, and they just have sound design playing, so they can tell where they are in the play-space at any given time.

[Killer Instincts clip]

Then it was stuff like, "I feel like the looping sound on this projectile gets cut off too quickly. I can't tell where it is in the play space." It's like, "Okay. I will take a look at that." [Killer Instrincts clip] So, we get very, very minute with it. It's been really, really cool being able to just pick my own work apart and strip it down to brass tacks as much as I possibly can to say, "What's really important here?"

The rest of the stuff is color and it's awesome, but it's not nearly as important as these things, so I start bucketing things into accessibility versus flavor. I always make sure that accessibility bucket is very, very laser sharp in terms of player feedback and content.

Games are still continuing to evolve. In only a few decades, sound design has become so advanced that there’s a community of sightless gamers who can share in the experience. Sounds ability to draw everyone into a playable story is only going to increase. What’s in store for the future of sound in games. How will sound be used to suspend disbelief in Virtual Reality? ...and what sounds will kids now associate with their childhood?

For me back in the 80’s, it was the sound of Zelda [Zelda clip], Metroid [Metroid clip], and that super annoying, smug dog in Duck Hunt [Duck Hunt clip]. For kids today, maybe the sound a catapulting bird in Angry Birds [Angry Birds clip] or the sound of Minecraft [Minecraft clip], will be what triggers their nostalgia. No matter what it is, we can be certain that sound will continue to tap into the deepest parts of our emotions.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that supports ad agencies, filmmakers, and video game developers. Checkout recent work at defacto sound dot com.

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

Thanks to our guests Damien Kastbauer and Zachary Quarles for sharing their stories about how they use sound to build worlds. We couldn’t have crafted this episode without them.

All of the music in this episode is provided by our friends at Musicbed. You can listen to these tracks, including this one, “Through Clouds” by Steven Gutheinz on our exclusive playlist which you can find at music dot 20k dot org.

You can say hello, submit a show idea, or give general feedback through Facebook, Twitter, or over email. Our email address is hi at 20k dot org.

The most important thing you can do for us is recommend the show to a friend. Say it in person, send a text, or shout us out on social media. Word of mouth is critical for our podcast survival.

As always, thanks for listening.

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Watergate: How a tape recorder brought down a president

This episode was written & produced by Kevin Edds.

Watergate is one of the most widely-referenced scandals in our nation’s history. The actual word itself has been appropriated in order to name many later scandals. But for a new generation of Americans, Watergate is just a name, or an event that they speak about but may not know many details. What was the real scandal behind Watergate? Who was involved and why? How did an open reel tape recorder secretly planted in the White House basement lead to the demise of the 37th President of the United States? Featuring Luke Nichter, author of The Nixon Tapes, and founder of NixonTapes.org.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Long Weeks by Dexter Britain
Aurora by Blake Ewing
Render by Steven Gutheinz
Deep Night by Live Footage
Hollow by Alaskan Tapes
Song for Stone by Generdyn
Five Families by Ryan Taubert
Near by Steven Gutheinz
The Weight of It All (Instrumental) by Kaleigh Baker
Red4 by Tangerine
Can’t Stop (No Oohs Ahhs Instrumental) by Reagan James

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.

Check out Bose at bose.com/20k.

Follow Bose on Twitter & Facebook.

View Transcript ▶︎

SMOKING GUN TAPE, Pt 1 – Haldeman: Now, on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back to the-in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control…

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 Watergate Tapes.

SMOKING GUN TAPE, Pt 1 – Haldeman: …their investigation is now leading into some productive areas…

This is an excerpt of a secret recording in 1972 of President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, updating the President about the FBI’s continuing investigation into the Watergate scandal.

SMOKING GUN TAPE, Pt 2 – Haldeman: …also there have been some things like an informant who came in on the street to the FBI in Miami...

While it’s hard to hear, this is the infamous "Smoking Gun" tape, the recording of Nixon discussing the illegal Watergate break-in. This tape was like a smoking gun at a crime scene that had Nixon's fingerprints all over it.

Just over 40 years ago a startling series of events in our nation’s political history took place. Almost everyone has heard about the Watergate scandal, but many don’t know what really happened, why it’s called “Watergate,” and how our lives are different today because of it.

Here’s Nixon himself commenting on the break-in.

SMOKING GUN TAPE, Pt 3 – Nixon: Well, I mean, ah, there’s no way… I’m just thinking if they don’t cooperate, what do they say? They they, they were approached by the Cubans. That’s what Dahlberg has to say, the Texans too. Is that the idea?

It’s this piece of audio that led to the downfall of the 37th President of the United States. Before we dive into the details of this tape, let’s rewind and find out how we got here.

Before this scandal, the law was completely different. Nixon personally owned these tapes, not the US government. Despite the fact that recording without consent or knowledge was illegal, it was still pretty common in the White House.

Luke: We now know that presidents back to FDR in 1940 taped, and so did Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon was actually continuing a long trend that had started over 30 years before.

That’s Luke Nichter, an Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M. He’s also a historian and has been listening to, transcribing, and digitizing the White House tapes of Richard Nixon.

Luke: What I've heard is that Nixon, after he was elected in November of '68, he had the typical meeting, the incoming president with the outgoing president. On the tour that Johnson gave Nixon of the White House, it included his taping system and, "You ought to have something like this for yourself to have your record," but Nixon obviously had the system torn out and didn't use it; I mean ultimately replaced with a far more sophisticated system.

Nixon had the US Secret Service install a state-of-the-art Sony tape recorder with microphones hidden in the oval office, cabinet room, and other places where he would have private conversations.

Luke: Unfortunately, the people running the system day-to-day and putting the new reels on didn't have the same understanding and weren't as sophisticated. They're basically going to Peoples Drug in Dupont Circle and buying the cheapest kinds of tapes you can use, a thin little tape. The result of having this thin little tape is not only has it not held up very well over the years, the originals are reportedly in pretty bad shape.

But also, the quality is terrible [tape clip], It's as little as putting a saucer or a teacup down on a desk where the microphones are embedded sounds like an earthquake.

Despite the low quality tapes the Secret Service chose to use, Nixon’s recording technology was different from Johnson’s in a very key way.

Luke: What Nixon did was also different in a couple respects, because Nixon's was the first one that was sound-activated.

Taping systems prior to Nixon, Kennedy's and Johnson's, had to be turned on and off for every conversation. Obviously, it was turned on when it suited the president's interest and it was turned off when it suited the president's interest.

Nixon, for all those other faults, was someone who loved history. I think he thought that it was unfair to history, that you needed to capture everything.

Nixon wore a device similar to a pager, that was issued to him by the Secret Service. If it came within range of one of the microphones, it would come on automatically.

Luke: Sometimes Nixon would leave his jacket in the oval office and he'd go out to the Rose Garden. Sometimes we'd get his dogs barking [barking dogs SFX], we'd get cleaning crews [vacuuming SFX], we'd get tour groups [crowd SFX], we'd get staffers setting up or tearing down a meeting [staffers prepping meeting], we'd get the whirring blades of Marine One [helicopter SFX], the presidential helicopter. You'd get all kinds of other things that aren't really historical, but will also tell you a lot about history.

Some of the most fascinating parts of the Nixon tapes are meetings that weren’t even political in nature. It was almost as if he was the host of his own private talk show.

Luke: The president talks to celebrities and musicians and pop culture figures, world leaders. The president talks to everybody. When someone's in there, who you think like, "I can't believe Nixon's talking to Ray Charles," and then tells the story that I'm not sure I've read anywhere else, and they're only there on the tapes.

Charles: I lived next door to a gentleman who was a pianist.

Nixon: Oh!

Charles: I loved to hear him play. He was my sole inspiration because he could have, you know, pushed me off the stool, I mean, you know, and told me to go play.

Nixon: Yeah.

Charles: But he didn’t. You know I guess he must have felt that any child that is willing to give up his playing time—

Nixon: Mm-hmm.

Charles: —to listen to music, he must have it in his bones.

Luke: Nixon always interrupts everybody he talks to. For several minutes, he didn't interrupt Charles. You can tell he liked the story. When Ray Charles got done telling the story, Nixon said, "Now that was a great story."

What the tapes are more than just politics or Nixon, they're a time capsule of Americana ... I mean you've got Johnny Cash talking about prison reform…

Nixon: Johnny, how are you? It’s going to see you again!

Cash: It’s my pleasure.

Nixon: Good to see you. You look good.

Cash: I’m doing alright.

Luke: You've got all these people who you would never think Nixon would be talking ... I mean Nixon, this cardboard cutout, stoic, the ultimate square in the 1960s, and the tapes reveal so many more dimensions about someone.

Another interesting visitor to the Nixon White House was Elvis Presley. Elvis wore a purple velvet suit with a large gold belt buckle along with his trademark sunglasses. He also brought along a gift—a Colt .45 pistol—but in a display case.

According to a Nixon aide’s notes of the meeting Elvis asked the president for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. And within the hour it was done.

But while Elvis was invited into the Oval Office, unfortunately his visit occurred two months before Nixon’s recording devices were installed.

Besides Nixon, the Secret Service, and a few White House aides, the recording system was entirely secret. Perhaps for Nixon the historical record was more important than the privacy rights of those being recorded.

Luke: If the president is meeting with somebody, usually the lowest ranking person is taking minutes or notes. If they're really skilled, it can look almost like a transcript, but ultimately edited out for political content, gossip, language.

Taping changed the way the White House worked. With the tapes rolling, Nixon changed the way you conducted business. He would say to say Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, "Come into the oval office. Let us talk candidly. No staff present, no notes. We'll just talk like old friends." He did this time and again.

Because of the recording system, these types of intimate conversations may have led to political progress between the two nations.

Nixon: If we decide to work together, we can change the world.

Luke: These, for the most part, have never been transcribed, never been published. Most people don't know where these are at on the tapes. These are incredible conversations because, in this case, the tapes aren't just supplementing the traditional record, they are the record.

Another interesting moment we have on tape is a conversation between Nixon and his wife Pat, in which they discuss a pair of pandas being brought from China to the National Zoo.

Nixon: We announced today that the pandas would go to the Washington -

Pat: Yeah, I got the word.

Nixon: And I think it’s fine, everybody as pleased with it and -

Pat: Yeah

Nixon: - the weather’s good here, it’s not quite as cold as it probably ought to - it could be [unclear] but they can live in this kind of weather. And so, it’s a good story and we said that you and I had both, that we had decided it should come here.

Nixon’s excitement to share the news about the pandas with his wife shows a different side to the president than most of us ever hear about, all thanks to the tapes.

Nixon: It’s gonna be a hell of a story.

In the two and a half years that the recordings took place a lot happened. Nixon was reelected in a landslide. The recorded conversations involving the campaign are some of the most authentic accounts of election politics we have on record. Other important events included the Vietnam War, huge domestic reforms like the first Earth Day, the creation of the EPA, the beginning of Amtrak, the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

Luke: People don't question the money we carry in our wallet. In August of 1971, the US dollar went off the gold standard, which many economic historians credit as the beginning of globalization.

Again, a tribute Nixon in taking us off the gold standard and all those conversations, how that happened, why, and when are all in the Nixon tapes.

Nixon became so comfortable with his recording system, that the few people that did know about it felt he almost forgot it was there. That allows us now to listen to a president unfiltered and unrestrained. But it also led to the most detrimental piece of audio in political history, the “Smoking Gun” tape.

This tape would mark the beginning of the end of the Watergate scandal, an event that started a two-year courtroom and political saga that not only changed history, but still impacts the way we discuss scandals today.

But what exactly was the Watergate scandal? We’ll get to that, in just a moment.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Despite his overwhelming electoral victory in 1972 and his numerous accomplishments in Office, to many people, Nixon’s ultimate legacy comes down to one word... Watergate.

Luke: Watergate is part of pop culture today everyone knows the term 'Watergate', but if you actually pin them down to say, "Well, what do you know about Watergate?" It's this scandal or scandal culture that was created in Washington. While every scandal, it seems like, since Watergate has this suffix -gate appended to it, very few people can actually tell you much about the original 'gate', Watergate.

In its most basic element, Watergate was a break-in that took place in the early morning hours of June 17th, 1972 in the Watergate office complex which housed the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Five burglars, some whom were former CIA agents, were found to have ties to President Richard Nixon's Committee to Reelect the President.
The break-in involved the installation and maintenance of wiretapping devices that could listen in on the affairs of the Democratic National Committee.

Luke: What we then learned later was there already had been prior break-ins. The speculation is what they were doing on the 17th was they weren't planting bugs, they were fixing bugs that had been planted on a previous break-in.

What we learned was there had been other break-ins, and including this exact location, this exact team of burglars. During the campaign of '72, breaking and entering was a political device.

To this day, we still don't have definitive answers in terms of who ordered the break-in, why they broke in when they did, or what they were looking for.

In hindsight, we look back, and anybody who can use Wikipedia says, "Didn't Nixon win in a landslide in '72? Why did his people need to be doing this silly thing?”

The Watergate break-in spurred numerous investigations into the Nixon Administration’s involvement with the event. Senator Howard Baker is famously quoted as saying…

[Senator Baker Recording - “What did the president know and when did he know it?”]

It was all hearsay and conflicting testimony… until the discovery of Nixon’s White House recordings.

Over a two-year period, investigations into the Watergate scandal uncovered Nixon’s secret taping system. In 1974 the Supreme Court ruled Nixon must release the tapes to a special prosecutor, leading to the discovery of some very important recordings.

Luke: Anybody who Googles 'smoking gun' and 'Watergate' or 'the Nixon tapes', there is a recording that's called the smoking gun tape. Ultimately, this and a handful of other tapes were the most damaging to Nixon.

[SMOKING GUN TAPE: Pt 4 – Nixon: How do you call him in, I mean you just, well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things. Haldeman: That’s what Ehrlichman says.]

[Nixon: Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will-that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.]

Luke: What the tape reveals was that Nixon was aware of a cover-up of the Watergate break-in. In other words, that he and that his White House staff had knowledge of a break-in and that they were actively doing things to conceal the purpose much earlier than he said in public statements. And beyond that, that he was willing to use the CIA to possibly block the FBI investigation of Watergate.

Here’s Haldemann again updating Nixon on the status of the investigation.

SMOKING GUN TAPE: Pt 5 – Haldeman: the FBI guys working the case had concluded that there were one or two possibilities, one, that this was a White House, they don’t think that there is anything at the Election Committee, they think it was either a White House operation and they had some obscure reasons for it, non political,… Nixon: Uh huh. Haldeman: or it was a…

Nixon: Cuban thing-

Haldeman: Cubans and the CIA. And after their interrogation of, of…

Nixon: Colson.

Haldeman: Colson, yesterday, they concluded it was not the White House, but are now convinced it is a CIA thing, so the CIA turn off would… Nixon: Well, not sure of their analysis, I’m not going to get that involved. I’m (unintelligible).

Haldeman: No, sir. We don’t want you to.

Nixon: You call them in.

Nixon: Good. Good deal! Play it tough. That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it.

When it came to listening to what was on the tapes, technology again played a huge role, but this time because of how we consumed news in that era. There was no internet, no YouTube, and no way to share the recordings with the general public. The only way to hear what was on the tapes was to actually sit in the courtroom.

Luke: You read news accounts of the time it was kind of fascinating when the tapes were eventually used in litigation. People would wait up around the block of the courthouse. This could be the only the only time you can hear tapes. The news account were fascinating because people would wait all day. Overnight they'd sleep on the sidewalk to be one of the 55, or whatever it was, who could sit in the public part of the courtroom.

The press accounts are great because they say things like, "Today is the only time we will ever hear of these conversations." Of course, now we look back, 40 years later, and think, "Well, thanks to the internet and technology, anybody can listen to these in their own homes or on their own mobile device," but at the time this was so earth-shattering that ... a president had this veil of like a monarch. I think Watergate and the tapes, in a sense, tore the veil in half and made the president more human.

Within 10 days, even the most die-hard supporters of Nixon, the Republican Party, and they were dwindling, gave up their case at that point. Within two weeks, Nixon resigned.

Cronkite: Good evening. President Nixon reportedly will announce his resignation tonight…and Vice President Ford will become the nation’s 38th President tomorrow.

Rather: President Nixon released transcripts that he did indeed know about the details of the Watergate break-in…

Rather: During the afternoon the president did more work on his speech. He began clearing out his desk…White House aides said privately, “It is over.” Some secretaries wept…

Cronkite: This is indeed an historic day, the only time a president has ever resigned from office in our nearly 200 years of history…

Nixon: Good evening, this is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office, where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this nation. Each time I have done so to discuss with you some matter that I believe affected the national interest. In all the decisions that I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the nation…

Luke: One of the lores of Watergate, is that the cover-up is always greater than the crime. In this case, it was true for Nixon. It really was his behavior during the cover-up period that ultimately did him in.

The question for many still remains: Since the tapes were ultimately his downfall, why did Nixon secretly record himself in the first place?

Luke: The best answer I can give, is that Nixon wanted his record of what was said to whom and when, that he knew that those around him would go write their own memoirs, they would have their own histories.

You have to remember the law was totally different. These tapes were his personal property. He could've destroyed them, he could've dumped them in the Pacific, that was okay. During Watergate, that would look bad, but he was entitled to do that. Today the law completely errs on the other side, that everything a president does is public, public record. They should be in the archives one day.

I think Nixon wanted his record. He wanted to retire, he wanted to write his multi-volume memoirs, like Winston Churchill did after World War II. These were going to be his history, that he was going to settle scores one day with this.

Nixon’s unfortunate legacy is being the only president in US history to resign. After countless documentaries, TV shows, books, and articles about the Watergate scandal it would seem that the story has been completely written. Or has it?

Luke: 3,451 hours were recorded. Just around 3,000 hours have been released to date. We have this 500-plus hours that have never been released.

We have all these court records, that have never been released because they're serving to protect someone.

To put a time frame on this it typically takes 30 to 50 years to get some records declassified, if ever at all.

Luke: It's taken over a hundred years just to release the clothes Abraham Lincoln was wearing on the day he was assassinated in 1865 at the Ford's Theater.

A couple of years ago there was a World War I document that was declassified, and thought, "What could possibly still be secret from World War I?" This document obviously had some continued operational use for many years to justify its ongoing classification.

In this case, the only way you can get records like this that are in a legal limbo is to find a friendly judge to issue a ruling to open them.

Luke has actually been working on this issue for several years which could blow the lid off of some yet unknown details of the Watergate scandal.

Luke: It's still a matter that's before the judge, Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington. This is an ongoing petition now. As a historian, my fingers are crossed that one day we'll have all the records released, so stay tuned.

Watergate changed so much about American politics and our nation. The various ways we consume media, how politicians go about their duties, and what constitutes privacy has all been impacted by a tape recorder that was hidden in the basement of the White House.

Luke: It made journalists into heroes and really launched the field of modern investigative journalism as we know it. A whole generation of young people wanted to go into journalism. The legal structure really changed. New laws scrutinizing public access and records.

It was a break-in that occurred in 1972, but it also was a bigger, more transformative event in US history. People, as stakeholders in our democracy, became more active and called into account our elected officials. Ultimately it was a watershed moment. It changed the political landscape, it changed investigative journalism, and it changed the relationship between the American people and their government.

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

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

Many thanks to Luke Nichter, author of The Nixon Tapes, and founder of NixonTapes.org. Check it out for more info. Also, this episode only scratches the surface of the nuances of Watergate and the Nixon tapes. If this piqued your interest, there are tons of movies, books, and wikipedia articles waiting for you.

All of the music in this episode is provided by our friends at Musicbed. You can listen to these tracks, including this one, “Long Weeks” by Dexter Britain, on our exclusive playlist which you can find at music dot 20k dot org.

Continue the Nixon conversation on Facebook & Twitter. You can also drop us a note with show idea, comments, or other random thoughts at hi at 20k dot org.

If this is the first time you’ve heard Twenty Thousand Hertz, take a moment to go subscribe in the podcast app of your choice. There are lots of other great episodes about recognizable and interesting sounds similar to this one. And, for those of you who are already a subscriber, please tell all of your friends about it!

As always, thanks for listening.

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Sonic Seasoning: Can sound affect our taste buds?

This episode was written & produced by Dave Parsons.

Taste is one of our most subjective of the five senses. A flavor that elicits delight in one individual may evoke strong disgust in another. And while we all have a basic understanding of flavor, we rarely think about the other sonic factors that may be affecting how we interpret different tastes. In this episode, we consider the relationship between sound and taste, and the power certain sounds can have over our taste buds. Featuring Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

Prism by Steven Gutheinz
Wandering by Dustin Lau
North by Blake Ewing
Perfect Timing by Dexter Britain
Ideas by Dexter Britain
Lights by Blake Ewing
Off White33 by Tangerine

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[restaurant SFX]

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 sound can impact our taste buds.

In 1984, a strange and remarkable thing happened across the restaurant industry, and it all had to do... with fajitas.

Up until the early 1980s, tex-mex restaurants primarily served chili, enchiladas and tacos as their signature dishes. But in 1984, the fajita became all the rage. When the popularity of this steak and pepper combo began to spread, national restaurant chains clamored to create the perfect recipe. Some would focus on a unique spice blend, or the addition of side ingredients to lure in curious customers.

...but, Chili’s - the young tex-mex chain out of Dallas - took a different approach. For them, a fajita order was treated like a performance. Once the steak and vegetables were finished cooking, the chef would plate the meal on a fiery-hot skillet [hot skillet SFX], causing them to immediately crackle and hiss. The server would then march the loud, sizzling skillet through the dining room for all the patrons to hear. [sizzling skillet traveling through dinning room SFX]

More than a unique spice blend or specialty ingredients, sound made all the difference. During each mealtime, once the first skillet sizzled down the aisles, restaurant workers quickly discovered that fajita sales would increase immediately. Chef’s all across Chili’s restaurants began referring to this phenomenon as “the fajita effect.”

In fact, once the first order of fajitas made its way to the kitchen, [bell SFX] the cooking staff would begin firing up the skillets and chopping ingredients [chopping SFX] for the massive influx of fajita orders that were sure to follow. Not only did their approach to serving fajitas prove to be a genius marketing tactic, but the sizzle of the dish also provided a sense of flavorful freshness for those enjoying the entree.

And just like that, the summer of 1984 quickly became known as ‘the summer of fajita madness’. Thanks to Chili’s, a huge percentage of restaurants across the country now serves their fajitas on mouth-watering sizzling skillets.

How does the sound of sizzling beef influence our dinner choices? What does the crunch of a potato chip have to do with our overall taste satisfaction? And, can the right music or sound make a dessert taste sweeter?

Charles: This is a really fun area to talk about, to explore, because it is something that is counterintuitive.

That’s Professor Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University. Crossmodal is a term used to describe when an experience in one of our main senses - touch, taste, hearing, vision, or smell - impacts or changes the perception of another sense. Charles is the leading authority on this phenomenon. He started his research in the 1990s, and has published over 500 articles in scientific journals on the subject. He’s also consulted for a number of multinational companies, advising on various aspects of crossmodal design, packaging, and branding.

Charles: For example, if I spray a certain perfume around and suddenly the people you're looking at look more attractive that would be a crossmodality effect of scent on sight. The more we look the more of these crossmodal connections are that what we see changes what we hear, what we hear can change what we feel, what we feel might change what we taste, and what we taste might change what we smell.

By changing what people hear, you can influence what they taste, and how they think about what they’re tasting. If you happen to have a piece of plain chocolate nearby, keep it handy. Later in the show, we’ll be doing our own crossmodal experiment featuring sound and taste, so you can experience these sensory connections for yourself. Connections that, in his early research, Charles investigated through the sensation of ‘crunch.’

Charles: We started out by having people in the lab here in oxford biting into potato chips [potato chip crunch SFX] and every time they bit into a potato chip we would change the sound of their crunch. Sometimes making it louder [loud crunch SFX] or quieter [quiet crunch SFX]. Sometimes boosting just certain frequencies of people's crunching sounds. In so doing we could add about 15% freshness or crunchiness to the potato chip simply as a function of sound.

Think about what things taste like, maybe what they smell like, what they look like but very few really think about sound. Yet, when you think about what it is you do like in foods and what you like to snack on then probably things like crunchy, crispy, crackly, creamy, carbonated, maybe even squeaky will come in there. All of those attributes that you might think that you feel in your mouth or between your teeth are really primarily driven by what you hear when you bite into and interact with those foods.

Crunch is certainly ONE aspect of taste, but the crossmodal effects of sound don’t stop there. Sound can also manipulate flavor. Now, for any skeptics out there, Charles was kind enough to supply us a few tracks he uses in his experiments. Still have that piece of chocolate? Go ahead and take a bite, then listen to the following two music tracks I’m about to play. While listening, think specifically about how the chocolate tastes. Here’s the first track.

[SWEET track]

Did any flavor stick out in your mind? Now, with the same piece of chocolate - or a new piece. Or three or four new pieces - take a listen to this second track.

[BITTER track]

Any change? According to Charles’ research, the first track - the higher-pitched music - should have brought out the sweetness of the chocolate. The second track - the low-pitched music - should have brought out the bitterness.

Charles: It's kind of bizarre at one level that playing music would change the taste of a food. If you are trying to bring out sweetness then you are looking for higher pitch [high pitch ding SFX] rather than looking for lower pitch [low pitch ding SFX].

Feel free to go back and test this with as many chocolates as you like - don’t worry, I won’t judge.

Charles: The whole world of taste and flavor is a complex one because one, people can't agree what the basic things are. I know that kind of on your tongue you get sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, that mysterious fifth taste of tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. Beyond that what are the other basic categories that we could play with? Is it maybe citrus or meaty, floral, fruity, burnt, creamy?

The majority of us all seem to share these surprising connections between our senses, between sounds and tastes that no one really knew existed but the more we study them the more robust they seem to be and the more we can integrate them into experience design.

The practical uses of crossmodal research have expanded beyond Charles’ lab. Companies and celebrities alike are getting in on the experience.

Charles: I was lucky enough to go to New York to work with The Roots.

Charles teamed up with QuestLove and the rest of The Roots to bring sonic seasoning to the masses.

Charles: The Roots created a new song, together with Stella Artois, based on our research of the sounds of tastes that you find in that beer. As you move the dial across the screen on your computer then different instrumentation comes in or fades out to enhance the sweetness or the bitterness of the drink.

In this experiment, The Roots created two versions of the same track - Side A & B - one with higher pitched instrumentation, which is suppose to bring out the fruitier and sweeter notes and one with lower pitched instrumentation, which is suppose to bring out the bitter notes. Take a listen, and see if you can tell the difference as we switch back and forth.

Here’s side A...

[Bittersweet Side A]

And here’s side B...

[Bittersweet Side B]

Did you hear the difference? Again, the first track was designed to bring out the sweetness, while the second was to bring out the bitterness. Pretty cool, right?"

Charles: These findings have created a lot of interest now and there are a number of examples from out there in the real work of people who have taken up the findings and incorporated them into their offering.

After the break, find out how other companies are putting Charles’ research to good use, and why these crossmodal relationships might exist between our senses.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We’ve already heard some fantastic examples of ways sound can influence the taste of food, but other than making for some really cool party tricks - why are these relationships important? What are the broader applications?

Charles: I've seen interesting examples of people taking research and running with it. One would be from British Airways. The airline who, a couple of years ago, took our findings and for their long-haul passengers offered one channel on the headset with music designed to match the meals that you could choose from the menu. A bit of sonic seasoning for the passengers given the deleterious effects of that background noise. Putting on those headphones with the noise cancellation and then bringing in music to match the taste of the food seems like a good idea.

We have earlier this year a café in Vietnam, where they are playing sweet music 24 hours a day with the idea that that will allow them to put a little bit less sugar into their cakes, pastries, and drinks, but keep the perception in the mind of those who go to the café the same. You're eating, drinking something a little bit less unhealthy, but it tastes just as good as always and that may be down to the music in the background.

Who knows, maybe sonic seasoning will become more of a diet trend in the coming years... but...until that happens, the application of Charles’ research can most often be found in advertising campaigns.

Charles: I know of companies over in the Netherlands who are selling bitterballen. These little fried snacks that go with your beer, a very Dutch treat. They're accentuating the sound of the crunch in the adverts on TV.

You might think of something like Magnum ice cream, a chocolate-covered ice cream lolly. Again when the model on the TV set in the advert bites into that ice cream you'll hear a crunch, a crack, the chocolate may be louder than is really the case because the advertisers are now understanding the importance of sound and conveying a certain expectation.

If this kind of commercial manipulation sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard it before. Take this Pringles commercial from the 90’s:

[Prinples commercial]

Or more recently, this TV ad by KitKat.

[Kit Kat commerical]

Many food companies utilize sonic branding as a way to convince customers that their products are fresh and delicious. Think of the pop of a Snapple cap [Snapple cap pop], or the fizz of an ice cold Coca Cola [Coca Cola fizz].

But not all sonic branding is intentional, or even desired for that matter. In 2010, SunChips developed a new 100% compostable chip bag, with one unfortunate design flaw - the bag was way too loud. [loud bag crunch SFX] After numerous complaints and a dip in market share, SunChips later released a modified, quieter bag. [quieter bag crunch SFX]

For better or worse, the snack industry has been keen to crossmodal relationship for quite some time. But all these real world examples beg the question - what makes them work?

Charles: We don't know for sure where these cross-sensory associations between taste and sound come from. If you think about that sweet taste being higher in pitch, bitter tastes being associated with lower-pitched sounds, where might that come from? Well, if you look at birth in humans, in rats, in chimpanzees, that all species, when you put a sweet taste on their tongue at around birth will stick their tongue out and up to kind of lick and ingest the goodness, the calories they need for growth. [baby giggle SFX]

Put a bitter taste on a newborn's tongue, be it a human, be it a rat, be it a chimpanzee and the tongue will immediately kind of go out and down because we're all born ejecting bitter tastes [baby whine SFX] because that's something that signals quite often poison...If you think about the kind of gurgles that a newborn would make with a tongue in different positions or you might make now if you try and stick your tongue out up and down, you'll hear a slight difference in the sonic qualities. Maybe that it's there from birth, and our brains pick up the statistics of the world.

Even if these multisensory relationships have been with us since birth, they aren’t without limitations.

Charles: If I gave you a glass of water it's not really magic. There's no music I could play that would make you think that water was wine. … but what I can do if I give you a complex taste like that spicy salad, like a rich creamy chocolate or a glass of wine, a cup of coffee, a soft drink. Then I can accentuate something in that tasting experience.

It may not be turning water into wine, but enhancing an existing taste through sound is still a remarkable discovery.

Charles: It's kind of nice almost to talk to people, to share your findings and to try and bring them into this new space that initially they think is bizarre, is bonkers, is ridiculous. Then maybe they come away thinking, "Wow. I never realized that sound had that kind of effect."

Food is often considered one of the great joys of life, and for good reason. Eating involves all of our senses. And while sound influences how our food tastes, it may not be as obvious as the alluring sight of a bright red apple or the delicious smell of a fresh-baked cookie - but learning to appreciate its sonic nuances can open a whole new world of flavor.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound team dedicated to making the world sound better. 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 Jai Berger.

Thank you to our guest Charles Spence from the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University. His incredible work in the field of crossmodal relationships is what made this episode possible. If you’re interested in the work Charles and his team are doing, check out his new book - Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating.

This episode was inspired by two other great podcasts. The first was 99% Invisible’s episode called "the sizzle" and the second was GastroPod's Crunch Crackle Pop show. Both are worth a listen.

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, including this one, "Off White33" by "Tangerine", on our exclusive playlist. Start listening now at music.20k.org.

You can get in touch with me at hi at 20k dot org. You can also connect with us on Facebook and Twitter. If you tried our taste experiment earlier, please let me know if it worked for you.

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

Thanks for listening.

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Fight or Flight: Why airplane sounds make us anxious

This episode was written & produced by Jim McNulty.

Are you afraid to fly? Does even the thought of boarding an airplane make you anxious? You’re not alone. Millions of Americans suffer from clinical aviophobia. While some manage to distract themselves long enough to endure a flight, countless others avoid flying altogether. What are those mysterious sounds that trigger our fears on airplanes? And how do we keep our anxieties from interfering with our lives? Featuring Dr. Devika Fiorillo, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders, and Tom Finnegan, a commercial airline pilot with more than 20 years in the air.

Music in this episode

Kings - Ryan Taubert
Wallflower - Steven Gutheinz
Heo - Kino
Blissful Ignorance - Dexter Britain
Timeline - Blake Ewing
Open Sea - Moncrief
Just Watched - Steven Gutheinz
As it Was (Piano Strings Instrumental) - Future of Forestry
Tavern - Steven Gutheinz
Prayer - One Hundred Years
Deeper (Extended Version) - Chris Coleman

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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Follow Bose on Twitter & Facebook.

View Transcript ▶︎

[Airplane cabin SFX]

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 the sounds we hear on an airplane, and how to take the fear out of flying.

[Airplane take off SFX]

Tons of people have a fear of flying. Even celebrities who have to travel all the time for work share in these fears. People like Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Sandra Bullock, and Colin Farrell have all been reported to struggle with this. Even John Madden, the former NFL Coach turned TV Commentator. He had such a big fear that he famously travelled cross-country between Monday Night Football games in his custom bus, dubbed the “Madden Cruiser”. He stopped flying after a panic attack he suffered on a flight. And, he’s not alone.

As many as 1 in 3 Americans is either afraid to fly or has some uneasiness about getting on an airplane. And for many, the sounds, the sensations—even the thought of flying—can trigger a full-on panic attack.

So, some quick math.

At any given time, there are as many as five (5) THOUSAND aircrafts in the skies above the U.S. alone. That’s according to the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. Now, The International Air-Transport Association tells us that the average flight has 65 people on it. That means, at this very moment while you’re listening to this podcast, there could be over a hundred thousand people white-knuckling it across the friendly skies here in the U.S alone. And the National Institute of Mental Health says that roughly 20 million Americans in total are afraid to fly!

So, what’s up with this? Why are so many people afraid to fly? Is this an isolated fear? Or is it a common symptom across multiple conditions? And what role does sound play in triggering these fears?

Devika: The fear of flying is called aviophobia.

That’s Dr. Devika Fiorillo, a clinical psychologist with advanced training in addressing trauma, anxiety and related disorders.

Devika: About half of the people tend to be afraid of flying because they're afraid of crashing. There's also the other half, which primarily tends to be people who are either claustrophobic, so they are afraid of being in these enclosed spaces, or people who have agoraphobia, which is the worry about having a panic attack when escape is difficult.

Sometimes the fear of flying originates after a bad flight situation. Someone might have had been in a flight where there's a lot of turbulence, possibly an emergency landing, something somewhat traumatic or highly stressful.

If we’re being honest—flying can be stressful on a good day!

By the time you get to the airport [car door slam SFX], check your bags [luggage SFX], take off your shoes [removing shoes SFX], pull out your laptop [removing laptop from bag SFX], go through the screening process— and heaven forbid you have to get a pat-down [TSA SFX] by the time you reach your gate [airport intercom SFX], you’ve been through a lot already.

But this is about more than inconvenience. For some, being afraid to fly can significantly interfere with their ability to earn a living or spend time with loved ones. And for travelers already on edge before they even leave the ground, any unknown sound can trigger an attack.

Devika: Someone that’s coming in with a fear of flying is already coming in with some vulnerabilities.

Not every person who has a fear of flying is afraid of the same sounds. When they notice a sound [turbulence SFX], immediately our brains work very quickly.

How does this information get processed. Does it go through this really quick fear route, which is our very primitive system, how we survived? Or it might decide to go a different route, where it engages this higher ability to reason.

Our capacity as humans for reason and abstract thought allows us to solve complex problems. But the built-in, primal fear response can lead us down a dark path.

Devika: If you think about problem-solving and imagination, there is definitely a link there. Imagination when it comes to fear of flying is not very productive imagination. 1) it takes you away from the moment, the here and now, and, 2) you're often engaging in these what-ifs that may or may not occur.

The moment your brain perceives that there might be real or imagined danger, immediately your system starts to go into this panic mode. Our bodies respond pretty automatically. You might notice a lot of trembling, shaking, lightheadedness, dizziness, trouble with breathing. your body's getting ready to fight or to flee the situation.

The problem with fear of flying, though, is once you’ve developed that problem, you're more likely to pay attention to all of the information that is in your environment, and this is where sounds come in, telling you that something dangerous could happen. Once you go into that mode, your senses are heightened and you're looking for any piece of information that really feeds into this narrative that flying is dangerous and that itself becomes sort of a vicious cycle.

Basically our brains are looking for affirmation for its preconceived notion that every little creek, bump or bang must mean that the wing is breaking off or the engine is about to blow up. Our mind can be an internal echo-chamber.

Of course, in this age of YouTube, and the ability of a news source to bring the worst possible, extremely rare situations to the forefront of our attention in an instant... it’s unnaturally easy to find examples to feed this internal, fear-focused echo chamber.

[Airplane rattling SFX]

THAT is the sound of an entire airplane rattling around like a washing machine, posted by Instagram user maesaya. In 2017, an Air Asia X flight was forced to turn around when something went wrong with an engine. Passengers had to endure that vibration for close to two hours as the plane limped home, with the captain asking everyone to pray—twice!

And who can forget the Miracle on the Hudson?

[Flight 1549 cockpit recording]

In 2009, U.S. Air Flight 1549 makes a forced water landing in the Hudson River after striking a flock of Canada geese after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

[Flight 1549 cockpit recording]

THESE! are the kinds of close calls that give even the hardiest of travelers pause.

But isn’t air travel supposed to be one of the safest forms of travel around?

Here’s Tom Finnegan, a commercial airline pilot with more than 19,000 flight hours and 20 years in the business.

Tom: The reliability of these airplanes is nothing short of astonishing. They work and they last a long time.

Tom says that airlines in the US and Europe offer the best combination of engineering, maintenance and training in the world.

Tom: We’re very lucky here in the U.S., the aviation system here, from the small regional airlines up to the big global airlines, are so safe that it's taken for granted a lot. The percentage of times we have to do it right isn't just 99%. It's 99 and I think out to like 7 decimal points how often we do it right here in the US. Our system is so safe, it's boring, which is a good problem to have in a lot of ways.

These airplanes are designed to a level where if one system fails, as a passenger, it’s going to be invisible to you. They're built with the idea that they're going to keep going in the event of one failure or even a couple of failures.

The airplanes I fly have two engines. They're mounted on each wing. Before I take off, I already know, if the engine blows up on the runway, I have either enough room left of runway to stop, or I have enough power to continue to take off on one engine.

That’s one of the things that we practice absolutely the most, those takeoff failures.

Your flight crews train constantly for those worst-case scenarios so passengers don’t HAVE to worry about them. And all that training seems to be paying off. According to the FAA, if you happened to be the 1 in 11 million could be involved in an airline accident, you still have a 96% of survival. Flying is estimated to be two HUNDRED times safer than driving! And most of us don’t think twice before getting behind the wheel.

Intellectually, we get it. But emotionally? That’s a whole different story. So, what’s the solution? How do we cope with these fears? And what ARE all those noises on an airplane? More on that in a minute.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We’ve heard a lot about why so many people have such a fear of flying. And we also know that flying is one of the safest ways to get around. Now, let’s talk about how people cope with these fears, so that they don’t have to interfere with work, vacations, or visiting family. For that, we turn back to Dr. Fiorillo.

Devika: Facing your fears can be really difficult, because it's almost like you're playing this tug of war with your physiological system. On the one hand, you may really want to face your fears. On the other hand, going into it is definitely something that will bring about, for most people, a lot of anxiety…

It’s that aversion to being uncomfortable—to being afraid—that leads some people to create what Dr. Fiorillo calls “safety behaviors.”

Devika: There's a fine balance between distraction and also just being here in the present moment, because if you always distract yourself, you don’t necessarily teach yourself how to cope with the issue.

They might go on a flight, but they might endure it with a lot of distress and they might take a lot of alcohol as a way to numb their system down. Somebody else may take a sleep aid. There's definitely benzos, anti-anxiety medications that people can sometimes take.

There might be other people who really research thoroughly what each and every sound means, what kind of planes are safer. The problem with people who fear flying often is that they are getting a lot of information; it's just not from the right sources.

So knocking back a few drinks might get the job done on that cross-country flight, but it’s not exactly a long-term solution for conquering your fear of flying. And filling your brain with the wrong information can feed into that vicious cycle of what therapists call “catastrophizing.”

Earlier, Dr. Fiorillo brought up this connection between imagination and problem solving, and the tendency to fear the worst when someone hears an unknown sound on their flight. Let’s go back to our commercial airline pilot, Tom, and see if he can take some of the mystery out of these sounds for us.

Tom: The sounds [airplane cabin SFX] a passenger would hear during the pre-flight setup; you’ll hear different chimes as the seatbelt sign is turned on [chime SFX]. You can hear different things if you’re in the last row versus the front row or if you're over the wing— and if you happen to be sitting on the right side of the airplane you’re probably going hear when they close one of the cargo doors [cargo door closing SFX]. It’s a heavy duty latch that kind of clunks into place [latch SFX]. Once the cabin doors close [doors close SFX] and the airplane is being pushed away from the gate, there’s a tow bar and there’s a tractor that they push you back from. You can hear that clunky noise of disconnecting the tow bar, as well as feel it. [tow bar disconnect SFX]

You’ll hear a difference in the air conditioning system [air condition turn off SFX]. Then you'll hear the engines slowly start to whine up [engines whine up SFX], that turbine sound. The airplane engines are started by compressed air that comes off a small turbine engine. Most of them are in the tails of these airplanes. The pilots redirect the air from the air conditioning systems so you can't air-condition the airplane at the same time you start the engines.

Once the engines are started the pilots do a few more checks up front [pilot check point SFX]. I tell the copilot to the the flaps to whatever position our performance requires that day. Flaps [airplane flaps SFX] are the things that are on the front of the wing and the back of the wing and they basically change the shape of the wing to allow the wing in order to allow the airplane to do different things.

That covers most of the pre-flight bells and whistles that passengers may hear [pilot "clear for take off" SFX]. But once the engines rev, and the plane takes to the sky [plane take off SFX], fears can be triggered by sounds AND sensations. And the air itself is responsible for both.

[Airplane in cabin flight SFX]

Tom: Most of the airplanes I've flown—takeoff, cruise, landing—the noise level up in the cockpit is at least 80 decibels. Depending again on the airplane or where you are in the airplane, it can be as low as 70 decibels in First Class, which generally is the quietest part of the cabin. The wind noise outside the airplane that accounts for a lot of the overall kind of white noise, the din that you hear. [airplane white noise SFX]

Now light and moderate turbulence we encounter all the time. It's nothing at all to be worried about. it's a disturbance in the airflow over the wings. And the airflow over the wings is how the airplane generates lift, and if it's disturbed, you'll feel it as a bump. [turbulence SFX]

The density of the air can impact how much lift can be generated at a given speed. When you hit different pockets of temperature, density, rising air, and any other air disturbance, you feel these interruptions as turbulence [turbulence SFX]. All of this is perfectly normal.

Tom: The worst thing that happens is a flight attendant who's out of her seat or a passenger who's in their seat without their seat belt on, can get thrown around the airplane and injured. Things can come loose. The overhead bins may pop open and a bag will fall out. But honestly, for the structural integrity of the airplanes, it's incredibly rare that anything happens that the airplane is actually destroyed in flight. It just doesn’t happen.

That pretty much eliminates the worst case scenario at 35 thousand feet. But for many, it’s the final approach that triggers their worst anxiety as the ground starts to get a whole lot closer.

[airplane descending SFX]

Tom: Once you start to descend and come in for a landing, you may notice the engine noise has changed [airplane engine SFX]. The high-frequency whine maybe is a little bit lower as they reduce the thrust on the engines to have the airplane start to come in and land.

Once you get closer to the ground, that is when the pilots reconfigure the shape of the wing, and as they extend the flaps, you may hear that hydraulic pump. And as that happens you can sometimes even hear a change in the airflow of the air over the wing. [airplane wing SFX]

Once the pilot lands the airplane, you'll notice on the tops of the wings, big boards come up. They're called speed brakes or spoilers. They change the airflow over the wing [airflow over wing SFX].

The last thing you’ll notice, the engines accelerate or rev up [engine rev up SFX] after landing as the pilot adds power to the reverse thrust system.

There are doors inside the cowl that redirect the air instead of out of the back of the engine, out the side. If you happen to be sitting there, you can hear it hitting the side of the fuselage.

[flight attendant SFX]

So now we know… And while knowing may be half the battle, there has to be a better way to handle air travel than just trying to stave off panic attacks or avoiding flying altogether.

According to Dr. Fiorillo, the answer may lie in one of the same treatments that’s used for post-traumatic stress disorder: Exposure therapy.

Devika: The idea with exposure therapy is that you really give an opportunity to the person to face what they're fearing. Some people are afraid of taking off. Some people are afraid of landing. Some people are afraid of turbulence. There's different sounds that people are afraid of. Some people have this anxiety that shows up even in the context of walking around in the airport before you get to the flight itself. Every person looks different.

Think about exposure as this idea of allowing yourself to have difficult thoughts and feelings in the context of a particular stimulus, whether that’s a sound, the sight of an airplane, any of those things, we can get creative to think about how you can do that even if you're not ready to get on an airplane yet.

Nowadays, there's a lot of work on mindfulness, in particular, in terms of anxiety disorders. It's basically like grounding. It has some of those similar principles but this idea of taking your attention from the thing that is causing you a lot of fear ... in this case, it might be the sound ... to something that is here that you can touch, that you can feel, that you can come into contact with.

You have to remind yourself that just because you feel this doesn’t mean the bad thing is going to happen. You're sort of validating the emotion to a certain extent, but also understanding that it doesn’t necessarily mean that something is really going to happen.

Now that we’re challenging our fears, we’re not avoiding. Now what do we do? Well for starters, try something we take for granted every day. I’ll give you a hint.

[takes deep breath in, and breath out]

Devika:One thing that you might have heard a lot of is this idea of doing some deep breathing. There is some value to doing that, which is just slowing down the way you breathe and really making sure you're breathing from your abdomen rather than from the chest, which is the tendency when we're having a panic attack.

The other is really to get people to engage in the current moment on other things that are happening right here, right now. This sometimes is referred to as grounding, so holding onto things that are next to you. You can engage in any of your senses here.

Noticing the feeling as you move your fingers through the chair you're sitting on, noticing what the kid across the aisle looks like and what that person might be doing, taking in information from the environment that you might not otherwise be attending to.

How do we know when things have gotten out of hand? When does being uneasy on an airplane go from being a minor inconvenience to an obstacle requiring treatment?

Devika: There are a couple of different things to look out for. One is have you really not just avoided flying, but has this actually caused problems for you? Has it taken both time and emotional resources from you? Have you missed out on significant life events because of flying? Is it causing problems for you occupationally? Maybe you work in a setting where flying tends to be somewhat a regular thing that you need to do. Is it limiting your life in a way that’s causing you some pain?

It’s often said that admitting that you have a problem is the first step towards healing. How bad is your fear of flying? Did you identify with the safety behaviors Dr. Fiorillo mentioned? Did your anxiety levels go up just listening to the discussion. Perhaps now that you know what many of those mystery sounds are, your next flight won’t be so nerve-wracking. And even if you aren’t afraid to fly, hopefully you’ve gotten some insight into how pervasive fear and anxiety can be.

And if your fears are stopping you from enjoying life the way you want, it’s okay to seek help. The resources are out there: doctors, counselors… even apps! Whatever route your journey takes, I think we can all agree—we could all use a little less turbulence in our lives.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that supports ad agencies and storytellers. Check out recent work for collaborators such as Nike, Netflix, National Geographic, Discovery and more at Defacto Sound dot com.

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

Huge thanks to commercial airline pilot, Tom Finnegan for giving us his first hand experience...as well as to Dr. Devika Fiorillo for her professional expertise.

The music in this episode is from Musicbed, and I’m a huge fan! 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.

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Thanks for listening.

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