Dining on Decibels: Why are restaurants so noisy?

Original artwork by Kyle Hodgman

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.

Have you noticed how loud it gets in restaurants these days? Have you found yourselves shouting just to keep a conversation going? Architecture critic Kate Wagner explains how changing design trends have led to dining experiences that aren’t just antisocial, but are negatively impacting our health as well.  


MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

A Stirring of Patience by Chad Lawson
The High Wind (Instrumental) by Brooke Waggoner
Money Makes The World Go Round (Instrumental) by Marcus Meston
Back Then ft. William $ (Instrumental) by Alexander Lewis
Mischief Afoot by James Childs
Fast Forward by Virgil Arles
Lit (Instrumental) by Har Megiddo
Now and Then by Uncle Skeleton
The Last Warmth by The Echelon Effect
Dizzy (Instrumental) by Fuzzy Halo
Cocoa Nibs by Uncle Skeleton
On The Grow! by Uncle Skeleton
Falling In by Shawn Williams
Coast (Instrumental) by Con Vos

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.

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

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

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

Contribute your local restaurant noise to the SoundPrint app at soundprint.co

Go to forhims.com/20k for your $5 complete hair kit.

Redeem your Harry’s trial set at harrys.com/20k.

Check out Hi-Phi Nation at hiphination.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Restaurant ambience building]

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

[music in]

One of my biggest pet peeves is overly loud places. For some reason our society has confused loud places as fun places. They’re not. I’m usually the first person to leave a party when it gets too loud. In my opinion, nothing productive happens when you have to start yelling at each other just to be heard. Sadly, this perception of louder is better stretches across all of our society. Concerts, parties, restaurants, clothing stores, ….and even churches have jumped on the bandwagon of uncomfortably loud music. Ironically though, public restrooms are way too quiet. Honestly, that’s the one place I wouldn’t mind a little death metal.

[music out]

For the longest time, I felt like it was just me and 90 year olds who cared about this. Well, that was until I met Kate.

Kate: Hi, my name is Kate Wagner, and I'm an architecture and design critic based on Baltimore, Maryland.

You might know of Kate through, McMansion Hell, which is her website, which deconstructs some of the idiocracy in modern, suburban house design. However, her other intense passion is sound.

Kate: I was working as a recording engineer and was a music student as well and was very concerned about hearing loss. Paranoid more like it.

Kate: I was always afraid that one day I would wake up and not be able to hear.

[music in]

Kate: I was developing these aural skills to able to listen to sound at very specific frequencies to be able to hear things like the overtone series and whatnot and all of the sort of ear training you do when you work in recording and I was afraid that if I listened to music too loud or if I went to the bar and it was too loud that I wouldn't be able to do that anymore. That I would lose those skills and that was scary for me because at the time that's what I wanted to make a career out of.

So Kate became hyper-sensitive to the loud sounds that could damage her hearing, and actively tried to avoid them.

But that’s easier said than done, especially if you want to live a little.

[music out]

Kate: I think that since the dawn of electro acoustics probably, it’s been cool to be loud.

Kate: It was just about the raw, visceral power of electronic sound and I think that, that's translated to some extent into rock and roll.

Rock and Roll, Hip Hop, Pop... almost all genres.

Kate: There's a sort of culture of if it's too loud you're too old and I think that there's a point of pride, it's like it's attributed to youth and the raucousness of youth. The untamed, unwieldiness of adolescence and what not.

Kate: It's cool to listen to music really loud in your car. It's cool to listen to music really loud when you're a teenager in your parent's house.

Kate: It’s cool to listen to music really loud when you're in a rock concert or when you're at band practice et cetera.

We all know what she means, some music just isn’t meant to be played at anything less than 11. But sometimes we don’t get a choice about the loud noises assaulting our eardrums.

Kate: When the sound is unwanted then it becomes more irritable… loud music is about this weird sublime pleasure and sort of sadomasochistic pain, pleasure thing with music.

Kate: But loud noise I think is different than that. I think it's just irritating and then you start to sort of worry and then you start to think about, what about my health. [SFX: Bulldozer] Or it's just like God I wish the bulldozer would stop bulldozing at 7:00 in the morning. I think the unwanted characteristic is a key qualifier there.

There are so many sources of sound in the world today that we have no control over, and once you start to notice them, they can really get under your skin.

Some, like the busy background hum of a coffee shop [SFX: coffee shop ambience] seem to blend together to create a white noise that lots of people like, and will actively seek out. But other sounds, regardless of setting, or time of day, [SFX: jackhammer] are always [SFX: baby crying]- unwelcome.

Kate: I think that part of the reason why people listen to music so loud on headphones, earbuds especially, is because they're trying to drown out the other types of environmental noise

[SFX: tinny beats as if through headphones]

Kate: sounds like the bus for example, people listening to podcasts and music on the bus, it's like the bus sounds are irritating [SFX: bus motor], the other people are irritating [SFX: background chatter], the air brakes [SFX: air brakes] are irritating but what they're listening to even though it's too loud, it may be uncomfortably so, is somehow less irritating than the ambient sounds around them.

On busy city streets, on public transit, and in public spaces, you can see the truth in Kate’s words. More and more people are turning to the music and podcasts in their headphones to drown out the otherwise inescapable noise.

[music in]

But there are places where headphone listening can’t save us. Places that can be louder than construction sites, but that we choose to go to on a regular basis. Restaurants. If you haven’t noticed it before, I’m sorry, but you’ll almost certainly notice it now... Actually I’m not sorry - more people need to be angry about it. I’ve got serious problem with it, and so does Kate.

Kate: I personally have a beef with it 'cause eating out is a lot of fun, right? Its social, you get to eat delicious food that you don't have to cook, you get to have delicious drinks and deserts. I mean eating out is a good time, but the fact that it's so loud makes it much less of a good time.

[music out]

There’s no getting away from it, today’s restaurants are loud. It’s hard to hear yourself think, not to mention have a conversation.

[SFX: Building restaurant noise, layering new sounds]

There’s music thumping, the clatter of machines, cutlery, glasswear, and people shouting to be heard over, well, all of the other people.

Kate: So we ask ourselves why are restaurants so loud?

[SFX: Restaurant noise out]

Kate: A loud restaurant seems like it's more popular, like its more funky. That's why restaurateurs in the 90s and 2000s started pumping loud music in their restaurants even though no one was there, and that's just now ubiquitous. You can't go anywhere without a loud restaurant.

Kate: The bagel shop I go to in the morning, [SFX: muffled thumping drum and bass] they're just playing Rihanna, thumping, bassing, its 8:00 am and I'm just like my God do we need to play club music at 8:00 am at the bagel store?

But it’s not just the music. The problem goes much deeper, to the styles and trends that underlie modern restaurant design.

Kate: Another reason why restaurants are so loud as far as the design perspective goes, is because for example, things like communal turnovers, bars that are in the restaurant that are not separated in any way from the restaurant.

Having the two together isn’t just trendy, it reduces the need for table service, and you need fewer staff, helping restaurants to cut back costs.

[music in]

But even the look of your restaurant can have a big effect on what it sounds like. The biggest culprit, Kate says, is minimalism.

Kate: Minimalism, just in the broadest sense is basically very sparse furnishings, nothing plush or fluffy or anything like that. Nothing traditional, it’s very modern. And so you get things like slate floors, wood walls, Danish designer chairs, rusticated light fixtures.

Kate: There's industrial minimalism, which is Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood and all this other stuff, but then there's also minimalism that's super designy, everything is metal, steel, glass, all these hard surfaces and materials.

Kate: Curtains and carpets and low ceilings or acoustic ceilings in any way are very much not minimalist, and they are considered kind of a drag, or they're considered too plush…. and so what you end up with is you have these tall ceilings, and you have nothing to absorb sound, and you have these hard materials on all of your surfaces, no tablecloths, nothing.

[music out]

You’ll see it if you go into any trendy bar anywhere in the country. It’s the very essence of coolness right now. But minimalism comes with an added bonus if you’re trying to run a restaurant. No soft surfaces means much less effort to keep everything clean. But soft surfaces do more than soak up spills, they also soak up sound.

[SFX: Underlying restaurant chatter]

Kate: Not even a tablecloth to absorb sound, the only thing absorbing sound in a restaurant is other people, and they're making sound, so it kind of cancels each other out. And so what you get is just a big box that just bounces sound around a room.

Kate: In order to absorb sound you need a material on a wall, or ceiling or floor that is absorptive. And when you have none of those things the sound just keeps bouncing off instead of being absorbed or transmitted through a wall or something like that.

Kate: So what you get is you get a room that is unintelligible and you get one that's loud because the more people talk the more new sound energy comes into the room and so then that's bouncing off the walls and it combines with the sound energy that's already bouncing off the walls. And so you just get a big soupy mess of sound.

[SFX: Loud unintelligible restaurant noise]

Ugh...I don’t know about you, but that much loud noise is just exhausting. And that soupy mess can get really, really loud. Even in supposedly relaxing coffee shops, including the one Kate likes to work in, the volume levels can get surprisingly high.

Kate: It was kind of a down time at the restaurant… even then, the ambient level was in the 70 decibel range and to give an example of what else is in that range, that's freeway noise [SFX: fast cars passing], and that's a sewing machine [SFX: sewing machine] and a vacuum cleaner [SFX: vacuum cleaner], so it's not exactly quiet.

Kate: But when we get into other restaurants, like the wine bar I was in that was in the 80 decibel range. Then you start to get into levels that can start to be damaging to hearing over time. So for example, 85 decibels over eight hours permanently damages your hearing.

Kate: The restaurants that were the loudest that I measured were at the 90 decibel range.

The noise levels are posing a real health risk. It would seem that Kate’s worries about hearing loss during dinner are justified. Plus, there’s clear research showing that this much noise in a restaurant is unhealthy.

Kate: Like those studies that link excessive restaurant noise to excessive alcohol consumption because we drink when we're stressed.

Kate: But there was also a series of restaurant studies done at Oxford that showed that stressful restaurant conditions, including noise drive people to make unhealthier choices.

[music in]

Kate: These are all things that benefit restaurateurs, they have lower overhead, they have less maintenance and they have higher turnover and more alcohol sales. But at the expense of everyone who dines there, so I was kind of peeved by that.

Through our unconscious drive to follow fashion, we go to these trendy places. They’ve got integral cocktail bars and shiny metal tables - they’re the very essence of cool. But electing to spend our time in these places is actively harming us!

Perhaps it’s not all bad news, though. Taking a step back, we can figure out how we got here, and if there’s anything we can do about our current dining dystopia. Find out, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

If, like me, you love eating out, then you’ll understand the pain and frustration in not being able to enjoy a meal because of overwhelming and inescapable noise. And it’s becoming more and more common. We’re facing an epidemic of antisocially and dangerously noisy restaurants right now.

Kate Wagner is an expert in architectural acoustics. She blames the loudness of our dining experience on the current trend for minimalist design. Clean lines and shiny surfaces have been the death of sound-friendly materials in our restaurants.

But the sounds we experience in the environment have changed drastically over human history. And just like today, they were driven by innovations and trends.

[music out]

Kate: Before people there were these sound like bird noises [SFX: bird noises], like the sounds of the natural world. You start to get early people noise… conversation [SFX: muffled conversation], these kinds of things but you start to get things like the church bell [SFX: church bell] and the town crier and agriculture, horses [SFX: farming sounds], Metal, blacksmithing [SFX: anvil strike].

Kate: The industrial revolution changed the soundscape forever and you started to get things like factory noise, mechanical noise, you started to hear things like bicycles and cars, cobblestones, all this stuff. [SFX: Building industrial noise] Everything exploded all at once and now it's really noisy. And what's so interesting about noise is that at the beginning of modernity, the mid to late 19th century and the early 20th century, noise was thought of as a celebration of progress.

At the time, the sound of industry was as much a symbol of cutting edge modern advancement as the 8am drum and bass in the bagel shop. But the noisy advance of progress wasn’t going to last forever.

Kate: It started to be negative starting around the turn of the 20th century. There were certain noises that were considered to be bad.

Noises from things like steamships [SFX: steamships] and railways [SFX: steam train] and factories [SFX: mechanical factory noise]. As much as they were a sign of progress, people really hated those sounds, and soon they became a major public health concern. Eventually, measures were taken to radically change the acoustic environment.

Kate: Early noise control in architectural acoustics for example, there is an ideology of sanitized sound. It was like that noise became a symbol of inefficiency. It became a symbol that things are not working as they could and so the acoustic ideal of the 1920s and 30s was to make places that are entirely silent.

Kate: It got so extreme, the mentality of total absorption that reverberant or any kind of reflections became seen as noise as well. And there was this idea that the ideal acoustic condition was one of total absorption.

[music in]

Kate: For thousands of years in architectural acoustics, whether you're talking about the acoustics of churches or you're talking about the acoustics of the Roman Amphitheater or you're talking about acoustics of 19th century shoebox halls, the acoustic ideal was based around reverberance because reverberance was at the time, the sonic picture, the sonic image of what a building was.

Kate: And in the 20th century with the advent of these new acoustic materials for absorbing sound you could. You could have a building that looked cavernous and it be silent and that completely divorced the architecture of a building from what it sounded like for the first time in human history.

[music out]

So, as public opinion waxes and wanes, acoustic ideals do change over time, just like design trends. Right now, minimalism is a trend with apparently little care for acoustic aesthetics. In restaurants, it’s led to a soupy mess of sound. But the good news is, the tides might be starting to turn once again.

Kate: These trends, like this minimalism and these design trends and the high ceilings and the no soft goods, is very much equivalent to what we consider to be high luxury

Kate: In residential design you're starting to see more soft goods come into play, you're starting to see lots of attention being paid to carpeting and rugs specifically. You're starting to see a move away from minimalism towards what consumer level magazine would say is maximalism, which is just interior design speak for houses with people's actual stuff in it. But I really think that interior design is starting to finally get sick of minimalism because it has been so many years of minimalism in high architecture and design, and it is so boring.

Perhaps, then, there is hope for our horrifyingly loud restaurant culture. But right now there are already a few places you can shelter from the noisy storm.

[SFX: Gentle clink of cutlery and glassware]

Kate: The restaurants that are the quietest are those hole in the wall, Napolese, Indian and Thai restaurants 'cause they still have the carpet and they still have the acoustic ceiling tile and they still have the table settings and things like that.

Kate: I mean anyone who's been to a Napolese restaurant is familiar probably with this décor that's like red carpet floors, lots of white table cloths, very kind of formal décor and that's why they're so much more quiet than the bar across the street.

Kate: So it's kind of funny actually, those restaurants, which I think if people were being pejorative would call them dated or tacky are actually way quieter and therefore more enjoyable to eat in than everything that's super hip but so loud that your ears are splitting.

If you’re a restauranteur with your diners’ happiness on your conscience, you don’t necessarily need to embrace the dated decor. There are thoughtful solutions that can keep everyone happy.

Kate: It's about avoiding the bad really. Designing the good is a lot more nuanced but you at first have to avoid the bad.

Kate: Thinking and building for sound starts at conception. It's not something that can be applied after the fact. Acoustics starts at the beginning of the architectural process.

That means thinking carefully about bringing noisy features into the dining areas. Open kitchens might add atmosphere to the restaurant, but they also add a lot of noise.

Kate: Things like high ceilings are a concern. If your ceilings are high it's gonna be probably louder or at least more reverberant unless you've just coated the whole thing in padded foam.

Kate: But what the good news is, and I think this is a really great thing is that design for acoustics has been on fire lately.

[music in]

Industrial noise was solved with brand new acoustic materials in the early 20th Century. Today, designers are redoubling their efforts to make spaces that not only look good, but sound good too.

Kate: You have things like acoustic furniture now, like these booths with these really tall backs to sort of isolate sound and give both visual and sonic privacy. There's all these colorful artworks that are now acoustics panels. They are architectural features and not just things that you tacked on 'cause you screwed up the sound in your space.

Kate: The acoustic ceiling does no longer have to be drop ceilings from elementary school with fluorescent lights built in.

Kate: Now they have these sculptural ceilings, with acoustic backing and micro perforated surfaces that allow sound to be absorbed behind them but they'll look just like wood or metal or anything else that you really want it to look like.

Kate: 'Cause a lot of them are screen printed and they're really, really, really, really high def screen printing, so you really can't tell that, that's not real wood. So if your restaurant is horribly loud and you want to remodel there's lots of options for you.

[music out]

We’re really fortunate to be living through this time of acoustic innovation and unprecedented flexibility with materials and design. But ultimately it’s up to us, the consumer, to make it clear that something needs to change.

Kate: Now there are these apps, like Sound Print is an app that's devoted specifically to having sound meter. You open up Sound Print, and you record some noise for a little bit, and it will capture and enter this database of restaurant noise.

It’s basically Yelp, but for loud restaurants.

Kate: So they'll tell you what restaurants are loud, they'll give you sonic profiles for restaurants. It's like do you want it to be raucous bar loud, do you want it to be coffee shop loud or just casual conversation loud. Do you want it to be very quiet and private?

[music in]

These days, we have unprecedented control over our lives, with almost unlimited choice in what we eat, where we eat, and who we eat with. So, why shouldn’t we make a choice about our acoustic experience too?

Our sense of hearing is chronically underappreciated, but it’s one that has a surprising lasting impact on our culture.

Kate: I wanted to work in making spaces that sounded better because I felt like that had a longer legacy than anything else. Because we still go to listen to music in Musikverein in Vienna and it was built in the 19th century. We still go to Boston Symphony Hall and it's built in 1900. I mean, you have an influence of centuries.

In a hundred years, I doubt we’re going to be longing for the soundscape of our minimalist wine bars.

So if - like me - you’re infuriated by the almost unavoidable assault on our ears in restaurants, how about we make a stand. It won’t take much - maybe just ask them to turn the music down, or start contributing restaurant noise to the sound print app. Tell your friends and get them to make sound-based meal choices too. I’d LOVE to make it to the end of the night without my ears ringing and still having my voice. I’d really, really like to make this a thing... Perhaps we can start a new trend of actually being able to hear each other while we’re eating out.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, an insanely talented sound design team creating beautiful sonic landscapes for television, film and games. Hear sound design excerpts at instagram dot com slash defacto sound.

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

Thanks to our guest Kate Wagner. You can find Kate’s well crafted opinions on poorly crafted houses at mcmansionhell.com. Plus, you can find her over on twitter and instagram at mcmansionhell.

All of the music in this episode is from our friends at MusicBed. Check them out at musicbed dot com.

Thanks to Sarah Ault for naming this episode. Finally, if you’re as outraged as Kate and I are about noisy restaurants, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach out on Twitter, on Facebook, or by writing me at hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Do Not Disturb: The unseen impacts of alarms and alerts

Original artwork by Kyle Hodgman

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.

Alarm sounds have been around almost as long as humans themselves. But as our world has transformed, so have they. Today’s alarms are having an unexpected effect on our minds and bodies, and can even be putting our lives at risk when we’re at our most vulnerable. Dr Judy Edworthy and Yoko Sen talk to us about our alarming sound environment, and how it can be improved.


MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

The Fairest Things by Chad Lawson
A&O by Uncle Skeleton
Autonoe by AM Architect
Seeing the Future by Dexter Britain
Glacier by Jacob Montague
Begin Again (feat eebee) by Generdyn
Infinite Sonata by Jordan Critz
Sleep Walker by Dexter Britain
Rennaissance by AJ Hochhaltar

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.

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

Visit mystery.20k.org to enter this week’s mystery sound.

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

Consolidate your credit card debt today and get an additional interest rate discount at Lightstream.com/20k.

Try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/20k.

You can find HowSound at transom.org/topics/howsound or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out Moonshot at moonshot.audio or wherever you listen to podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Noisy alarm ambience]

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

Do me a favour, and turn off your notifications for the next half hour [SFX: alarms cut out]. Put your phone on silent, place it out of arm’s reach, and whatever you do, don’t give into the temptation to check it for notifications.

[music in]

How does that make you feel? Stressed? Disconnected? In the past few decades, the world has become a noisier place, full of devices of every sort vying for your attention. Attention that many of us seem all too ready to give.

But have you ever really wondered what effects all those alerts and alarms are having on you? The sound of a text message arriving only lasts about a second, [SFX: IPhone ding alert] but has the ability to affect your brain, your body, and your whole approach to life.

And to find out why, we need to go way back in time, to the beginning of human society.

[music out]

Judy: I guess people have always used sound to attract attention, because that's what the auditory sense is for.

That’s Dr Judy Edworthy, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Plymouth in the UK. She’s trying to understand what’s going on in our brains when we hear alarm sounds.

Judy: Hearing and vision work together, and because your ears are all-round sense, really they're there for directing your ears to face the right way so that you then use your eyes.

Judy: When people wanted to attract attention, the obvious way to do that is to make a sound, and there's a whole history of things that make very loud sounds, across mountains and all sorts of things.

Those ancient alarms would sound in times of crisis, to forewarn and call for help, and they play a big part in fictional and historical accounts of war. [SFX: War ambience begin]

One such alarm is the Gjallarhorn, which translates literally as the “yelling horn”. It’s from Norse mythology. At Ragnarok - the coming apocalypse - the horn would be blown [SFX: Horn Blow] and would be heard in all the worlds, where it would awaken the Gods for their last stand.

Judy: When society became more industrialized, of course you needed to announce the end of a factory shift or things like that, and the only ways you could produce sound was either to hit something or to pass air through something. So, you had a range of bells [SFX: single large bell] or klaxons [SFX: Vintage Klaxon sound] and very little else, really. Anything that made a loud sound, really. Because you couldn't do it any other way.

So, historically, alarm sounds have been used when someone really really needed to get your attention. We heard relatively few of them, and as a result, many of them are burned into our collective consciousness.

Judy: A very good example would be the air raid siren from the Second World War [SFX: Air Raid Siren] . Everybody knew what that sound was. It had a particular characteristic, because you had to literally wind it up. Everybody knew what that meant. It was very, very loud, so it could spread across the whole town. And as soon as you heard it, you knew what you had to do.

[music in]

But in more than 70 years since the war, the technological revolution has totally transformed our world, and the sounds that fill it.

Judy: The technology's got a lot better, so we can now produce any sound, rather than having a very restricted range of sounds.

Electronic advances have miniaturized and totally mastered sound production. Now, the most incredible sounds can be made from the device in your pocket. [SFX: Complex alert tone].

But despite the capabilities, beautiful sounds are not always what we get in day to day life.

Judy: Everything that surrounds us just beeps now, because if it's easy and cheap to put a sound on a piece of equipment, then you can be sure that people will do that. And of course we're now completely overwhelmed with these sounds.

[music out]

[SFX: Alarm clock interrupts music]

Judy: From the time you get up, you have your clock on [SFX: clock sound]. You have a phone as well [SFX: phone alert sound]. And then you've got the microwave that beeps [SFX: beeping microwave]. And then you've got your car that will beep about all sorts of things [SFX: car beeps]. And then you get to work and you open your computer and that beeps at you as well [SFX: PC alert sounds]. And so it goes on.

The [alert] constant [alert] interruption is [alert] unlike anything preceding generations [alert] have [alert] had to cope with.

[music in]

Alarms have historically been about action, emergency, a call to arms.

With that ingrained into our basic psyche, today we’re finding ourselves pulled in all kinds of directions by the simple tones that come out of our devices. The alarms assault us throughout the day, and we’re struggling to keep up with the unconscious instinct to react.

Not only are they making us more distracted, but the acoustic intrusion is doing things to your mind and body that you might not expect.

[music out]

Judy: You make a response to a sound on the basis of its acoustic structure in the first instance. So, a shrill, loud sound will stimulate more nerve cells than a quieter, lower-pitched one. So, it will increase your attention levels or your stress levels or your arousal level more than a sound that's not like that. So, you can't really avoid that.

But, even the most innocuous sounds can mess with your mind - if they mean something to you. In psychology it’s called stimulus-response behaviour.

Judy: You hear a sound, and you learn a response. It doesn't require any real thought. You just learn an association between the two.

Judy: So, if you've learnt that, let's say, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star [SFX: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on music box] is the alarm that your submarine uses [SFX: submarine explosion with Twinkle Twinkle little Star alarm tone] if it's just about to be flooded. Now, that will be an urgent sound to you, because you've learnt its meaning. It's not an urgent sound psychoacoustically or acoustically, but because you've learnt its meaning, then it will produce a similar response to the shrill, loud sound, in you, because you know what it means

Now, submarines flooding might not be a problem for most people, but chances are you’re familiar with this kind of learned response. Take email or text for example. Have you ever had a toxic exchange with a colleague, or a loved one, and you’re nervously waiting, dreading their response? For a while after, every time your phone or computer pings [SFX: alert], you’d feel a knot in your stomach, your heart would beat harder in your chest. Basically, you’d be getting an instant, unconscious stress response, before you even knew who sent the message.

[music in]

Science is starting to catch up with some of the effects that alerts from our devices are having on us. Studies have shown that we’re not just experiencing short term distraction, but our habits are leading to more serious symptoms of ADHD.

Plus there’s a phenomenon that scientists have had to come up with a name for, since it never really existed before. Ringxiety is where we are convinced we hear our phone ringing [SFX: Phone ring], when really, it was just some other, broadly similar sound.

On the other hand, there is another response to this busy world of alerts and alarms...

[music out]

Judy: I think we just ignore them. When I'm with people and I hear an alarm, I say, "What's that?" And they're looking at me as if to say, "What? What are you talking about?" It's because I guess I listen to them more than most people. But people just don't hear them.

It’s known as inattentional deafness.

Judy: There's no reason why you didn't hear it, but you paid no attention to it. Or it registered with your ear but not with your brain, really.

Judy: There's so much stimulation of so many sorts, that we can cut ourselves off from all of it.

It might seem like the obvious solution is to switch off our notifications, silence the alarms, and get back to a simpler life, but it might be too late for that. Our relationships with our devices are showing the signs of compulsive addiction. This is the same type of addiction you’d experience from nicotine or hardcore drugs. The alerts give us a sense of social connectedness, and in the modern world many of us feel stress simply by feeling unconnected.

We’re caught in a Catch 22. What’s important is to be mindful of the alerts we are inviting into our lives.

Judy: Pay attention and learn what's important and what's not. Because it probably won't be intuitive.

[music in]

The alarm sounds we hear in our daily lives are creating so much physical and psychological stress, but there’s a place where they’re causing more serious harm, and even be putting lives at risk.

We’ll find out where, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

We are so surrounded by electronic devices today that we can’t get away from the sounds they produce. The assault of alarms and alerts in our everyday lives is affecting our minds and bodies, even though we might not realise it.

But what’s it like for people who are already unwell?

Yoko: My name is Yoko K. Sen and I suppose I am a sound designer. I am a musician.

Yoko: I produce music. I mix, write, record, perform music, I think I'm a very sound person per se.

Yoko: I had to spend some time in hospitals as a patient, and being a musician, sensitive to sound, I was very disturbed by the noise in hospitals

[music out]

If you’ve ever had to visit a hospital, you know that they’re far from restful places. As soon as you walk through the door, and a tide of sound washes over you.

[SFX: Hospital soundscape begins]

Yoko: You hear machine sounds and it's all the beeps of medical devices, but it's not limited to medical devices. You also hear phones, pagers, overhead speakers. Often times in hospitals, the staff members carry this card key and you have to scan the card key, so every time that scan takes place, there's "beep," a tiny sound. And lots of people go through the door, so that accumulates and that's also part of the soundscape. Elevators make the "ding" sound. Parking payment machine makes a sound. So everything makes a sound.

Yoko: Then we have talking of people, that are generally a sort of ambience of conversations and carts rolling, people's footsteps, doors getting slammed, distant muffling sound of people screaming. [SFX: Baby crying] Then there are like white noise from the fan. There's a ice machine. There are all sorts of different sounds, so it's the combination of all, but I think the most characteristics of hospital is those beeps, the medical alarms.

All of this added together isn’t just background noise. It can be really, really loud.

Yoko: When it's quiet, it's about 40 to 50 decibels, but when it's pretty loud, it goes up to easily 60, 70 decibels. Sometimes it hit 80 to 90 decibels as well.

For some context, 60 decibels is about the volume of a normal conversation at home, but in a hospital that’s the minimum you’re likely to experience. Ninety decibels is the volume you get when you’re using a lawnmower. [SFX: lawnmower sound]

Unsurprisingly, these kinds of sound environments aren’t all that healthy for recovering patients.

Yoko: Florence Nightingale said, "Unnecessary noise is the cruelest absence of care." She wrote that more than 100 years ago.

[music in]

Yoko: When things are loud, people complain that it's difficult to sleep at night. It disturbs their sleep. It disturbs their rest. Noisy environment could cause more anxiety, sense of fear, and stress for patients. Especially for pediatric patients and the young patients' parents. I often hear from those parents that when alarms go off for they're babies, the first thing that young parents would think is, "Oh, no. Is my baby going to die?" It's very scary, and it happens so often, so it kind of creates this [SFX: shocked inhale] feeling in not just your sort of mental state, but like physically. It's sort of a physical sensation.

That physical reaction is just like the stomach-dropping, heart thumping stimulus response you get when a dreaded email alert comes in, only much worse. And it stays with you...

Yoko: I interviewed one person. He had his daughter more than 10 years ago in NICU, and there was this particular alarm sound that kept going off, so even after 10 years, if he hears the sound that's similar to that alarm on television or other places, he still gets this, sort of a traumatized reaction.

[music out]

Yoko: When it comes to staff members, like clinicians, nurses, and doctors, they are often conditioned to only think about the welfare of patients. But I think that there is a enormous impact of noise on clinicians' wellbeing, and often times they are not aware of such impact. I think it affects their fatigue, stress, burnout...

That burnout is a pretty well-recognised thing - it’s called alarm fatigue.

Yoko: Alarm fatigue is a desensitization that clinicians have when all the alarms keep going off all the time. [SFX: Medical alarms building] Then they start to get desensitized by all the alarms. There is a study that indicates that 85 to 99% of alarms are either clinically insignificant or false positives, but there's 1% of alarm that you're not supposed to miss, so that creates a extremely tiring environment.

Hold up. Up to 99 out of every hundred of those constant hospital alarms are insignificant. But that 1 percent, could be a sign of someone’s life in danger. That’s - just - TERRIFYING.

Judy: There are some things that the nurses, the doctors, and so on, can do to reduce the false alarm rates. Things like making sure the leads are always fresh and new, and if you got sensors on a patient they're clean, and when you move the patient, you turn the alarms off.

Judy: But of course you're also operating in a culture where the manufacturer doesn't want to be sued. So, the easiest way to do that is to have an alarm, and to have those alarms going off all the time. 'Cause they quite reasonably say, "Well, an alarm went off. You didn't hear it."

It’s a scary environment to be in, let alone work in. But it’s not all bad news.

Judy is part of a group working on improving the global standards for medical alarms.

Judy: It's I-E-C, which stands for International Electrotechnical Commission, which is the International Standards Organization. The alarms currently in the standard are tonal, so they're like little melodies. You'll have heard these, because they're used on medical equipment, and to some extent that explains why when you go into just a general hospital ward you'll hear all these little melodies, 'cause that's really the way people are thinking about designing alarms for medical equipment.

[SFX: generic hospital beeps]

They’re all pretty generic, the same kind of electronic beep. And because they’re so similar, they’re hard to distinguish from each other. But Judy and her team are thinking laterally to design an entirely new kind of alarm.

Judy: When we hear a natural sound, it's because two or more objects or things have interacted. And the sound that you hear is a function of those objects.

Judy: If you think of a bowling ball going down an alley and then hitting the skittles, there's a very characteristic sound. You can imagine it now. But you know that the ball is rolling along the alley [SFX: ball rolling], you know when the skittles have gone down [SFX: skittle drop], because of the structure of the alley and the structure of the skittles and the structure of the ball, and the acoustics of that environment. So you know what's happening.

The plan is to incorporate these kinds of environmental sounds into medical alarms, so that they give information about what they’re alerting for.

Judy: Because environmental sounds can act as a metaphor for the event that's happening, and it's much, much easier for people to understand what the sound is for.

Judy: So, for example, there's only one obvious one for cardiac, which is a heartbeat [SFX: Heartbeat icon].

Judy: If you present people with these sounds, and say, "This is cardiovascular, a rattling pill bottle is infusion pumps [SFX: Pill bottle icon]," ... 'cause it's drugs, right? It only takes them one or two trials to learn that.

Those last 2 examples are some of the alarms Judy has been developing. They’re a huge leap from the kinds of alarms we’re used to hearing, alarms that are based on those ancient bells and horns.

Judy: People might say, "Well, if you use a heartbeat, how will I hear that? I would need a really shrill alarm in order to hear it." And actually, you don't. Because it's harmonically rich, you can detect it in lower signal-to-noise ratios, which means it needs to be less loud for the same noise background, as a traditional tonal alarm. So, you can detect it.

[music in]

When the new standard is finalised in the next few years, it looks set to transform the alarm soundscape in hospitals. It’ll help doctors and nurses to do their jobs, and potentially make hospitals a calmer, and quieter place. But, is it doing enough?

Judy: Alarms are often seen as a bad thing, because they sound so bad. But if they were better, I think people would appreciate their value more. But ultimately, you don't want any alarms at all.

Yoko: Often times people ask me what's the ideal alarm, what's the ideal sound environment, and I say, "No, nothing." And I'd love to design toward the obliteration of my work.

[music out]

Getting rid of alarms altogether is probably a step too far for now, but alarms aren’t the only part of the busy and stressful sound environment in hospitals. Yoko has been thinking about the effect of so much noise on medical staff. After all, they’re the people who spend the most time there.

Yoko: Noise is causing stress, but stress might be causing more noisy behaviors. Like, when I'm stressed out, I become less careful and I might be talking louder, I slam the door [SFX: door slam]. I'm just louder in general. So, we thought about ways to help reduce the stress level of staff members in the hospital in order to reduce their behavior-based noise.

Yoko: So we prototyped and implemented a relaxation space for hospitals' doctors and nurses. [SFX: Tranquility room audio] It's a space with soothing music, dim light, aromatherapy, and amenities. It's like a spa inside hospitals, but for staff members to come and take a moment of peace outside the cacophony of noisy environment.

It’s called the Tranquility Room, and right now you’re hearing some of the soothing music that fills the space. So far, it’s only been installed in one hospital in Washington DC. It’s too soon to say if it’s reduced stress based noise, but it is already having tangible effects on stress levels themselves.

Yoko: On the first day that we opened the space there was a young graduate nurse who had his first patient death, and he was able to use that space to have a moment and collect his thoughts, and he said that made such a difference in his shift.

So if these creative ways to reduce noise just happen to improve people’s mental health in other ways, that can’t be a bad thing, right?

[Tranquility room audio out]

[music in]

The end of life isn’t something many of us like to think about, but it’s a pretty sobering fact that the majority of people over 65 actually come to the end of their lives in a hospital.

Yoko: Some people say hearing is the last sense to go when we die, and I used to wonder what is the last sound I get to hear at the end of my life? And I wondered if it's the combination of beeps, and I just thought that's really sad, you know? If that's the last note the closing note of my life, that's just sad, right?

[music out]

[music in]

Yoko’s approach is a creative, emotive one, while Judy is working hard to improve those necessary medical alarms. Together, they’re pushing towards a better understanding of the sound in hospitals. And with a better understanding will hopefully come a better experience for those that work in them, and visit them.

Judy: You know, we've moved on a long way, and it can affect people's lives. It can in fact even save their lives.

Yoko: I'm fascinated by complexity, and this sound environment is seemingly really simple, but it's very complex and it has very nuanced ways of affecting us, and as a musician I believe that life happens in nuances that words cannot explain, and I like to improve those nuances of life.

CREDITS

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

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to our guests, Dr Judy Edworthy and Yoko Sen. You can listen to Yoko’s tranquility room and other sound projects, as well as her other research and outreach at sensound.space.

Dr. Judy Edworthy is the Director of the Cognition institute and Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Plymouth in the UK. As well as designing and understanding alarms in everyday and specific situations, she’s also researching the aesthetics of popular songs.

The music in this episode was from our friends at Musicbed. Check them out at Musicbed dot com.

Finally, I LOVE to hear from our listeners, and I’m curious to know what kinds of sounds YOU think you might have an unconscious reaction to. Tell us on Facebook, Twitter, or by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Blue! 42! How helmet radio changed the NFL

Original artwork by Jason Watson

This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther.

For decades, NFL strategy slowly evolved from each team running a dozen different plays, to rigid schemes with coaches sending in orders through codewords and secret signals. Then, one piece of audio technology revolutionized the game. Beginning in the early 1990's, the NFL allowed coaches to speak directly to their quarterbacks through radios in their helmets. What followed was an instant increase in excitement for the nation's most popular sport, spawning a high-scoring era of fast paced offenses. Featuring former Super Bowl winning coach, Dick Vermeil, current LA Rams Head Coach Sean McVay, Bose Senior Project Manager Matt Ruwe, and Bose Distinguished Engineer Dan Gauger.  

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Incredible (Instrumental) by Oh The Larceny
Nomad by Cathedral
Together (Instrumental) by Norman
High Wire (Instrumental) by Kaleigh Baker
From Scratch by Chad Lawson
Just a Touch by Chad Lawson
My Way featuring Yacht Money (Instrumental) by Mike Mains and the Branches
Come and Get It by Celldweller
Tangle by Nick Box
Heaven Sent by Soldier Story
Gunslinger by Bytheway-may
Focus by Cultus
Move with it (Instrumental) by Oh the Larceny
Allow Me (Instrumental) by Kilgore
Roller Skates by Virgil Arles

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.

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

Visit mystery.20k.org to enter this weeks mystery sound.

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

Are you a Sound Editor interested in editing for 20k? Apply at soundeditor.20k.org.

Are you a Writer interested in writing for 20k? Apply at writer.20k.org.

Check out Bose at bose.com.

Subscribe to The Truth wherever you get your podcasts. Or go to the truthpodcast.com.

Robert Baker voiced "The Coach" during the play calls.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Football play calls - Bunch right 95 keeper, right Y sly, sprout left exit, Richard Nixon.]

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

[SFX: Football plays continued]

[music in]

Football has been america’s most popular sport for decades, but the game has changed dramatically in recent years. Modern NFL play calls are a complex language of code words that, to most us, just sound like complete nonsense.

[SFX: Football play calls]

Play call: Alright, lets go west slot right, 72 Z bingo, U-split, can it, 58 lexus apple, 314 hammer.

[music out]

[music in]

Just like you don’t have to be an audiophile to listen to Twenty Thousand Hertz, you don’t have to be a sports fan to appreciate this episode. So, stick with me here. By the end of this episode, you’re going to know some things about football that even normal fans don’t understand. ...anyway, to the uninitiated, football can look pretty haphazard, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Strategy and play calling is a huge part of the appeal of football. ...and that’s what originally drew Dick Vermeil to the game.

Dick: I got involved in football as a high school student, my sophomore year, in about 1951. So, it's been a long time. And, then I went on and played in high school and junior college, then, college, then became a high school football coach.

[music out]

Dick: I really loved it. I loved the Xs and Os part of it. It just fascinated me. It's like a chess game, how you move 'em around and all that.

Play calls today might be beyond the comprehension of even the most diehard football fan, but when Coach Vermeil was starting out, the game was far simpler.

Dick: I called my own plays in the huddle, as a player in high school and junior college and in college. Course, that's the archaic way to do it. When I became a coach, at first my quarterback called his own plays from a game plan, but we only had five or six runs and four or five passes in those days.

[SFX: High School Practice Game, QB play calling]

Dick: Whenever I hear from one of my old high school players, I always finish it 'Coach Vermeil', and I put the play 'blast right'. That was the play. We only had one or two formations.

[music in]

But while Coach Vermeil was calling “Blast right,” a legend of the sidelines was experimenting with a technology decades ahead of his time. Paul Brown was the co-founder and coach of the Cleveland Browns, and the team still bears his name today. He won seven league championships over 25 seasons, and invented everything from the facemask to some of the plays still in use today.

During his time two Cleveland fans, John Campbell and George Sarles, came to Brown with an idea. By modifying military radio technology, they could put a radio receiver in a quarterback’s helmet, which would allow for coaches to speak directly to their players from the sideline. This was completely unheard of at the time.

The technology was so new that a suspicious police officer almost arrested Campbell and Sarles when they were out testing the helmet one night. Luckily for them, the cop was a fellow Cleveland Browns fan, and let them go.

Later, during a preseason game against the Detroit Lions, Coach Brown tested the radio in his quarterbacks helmet. Opposing coaches noticed the transmitter on the Browns’ sideline, and the NFL banned the technology shortly after. That ban would stay in place for decades.

[music out]

Meanwhile, Dick Vermeil rose through the coaching ranks. In the seventies, he became the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, and brought with him the latest in play calling techniques.

[music in]

Dick: As a head coach in the NFL, we called the plays from the sideline.

Dick: I would call the play. There would be a coach on each side of me that would signal it in. Now, their bodies were numbered, positions on their bodies were numbered, and they would take a left hand touch the knee, right hand touch his shoulder, that might mean 23.

Dick: I had two signal callers, because we didn't want people to know which guy was calling the play. One was hot one quarter, one was hot the other quarter, and we rotated.

[music out]

This technique is still common in college football, which doesn’t allow direct radio communications between coach and quarterback. Before each play, you can see assistant coaches that look like they’re waving off a swarm of angry bees [SFX: Bees swarming] as they signal to players. Once the call goes in, quarterbacks translate the information to a specific play by looking at a wristband with all the plays listed on it by number.

[music in]

Dick: A quarterback would wear an armband and a coach would signal number two and he'd look and 'ooh, number two is this play', and he would call it. And, the formation packages would change with a substitute going in and out. One, two, sometimes three players going out in different packages.

Although widespread, this system is far from perfect.

Dick: I can specifically remember being 3rd down goal-to-goal on the 2 yard line against the Dallas Cowboys and send in a play and it got all screwed up, so the quarterback called the play, the play call was all screwed up, we scored anyway.

[music out]

After six years coaching the Eagles, including a trip to the Super Bowl in 1980, Coach Vermeil retired from coaching. He became a football broadcaster, watching the game he loved from the press box.

Dick: Through the years, I was in broadcasting, and I watched it change. I wasn't involved in it. It changed and became more scientific. Pretty quick the electronics came into it.

Dick: As we all know, we're in the entertainment business, so we wanna keep the game smoother.

Eventually, the NFL loosened restrictions on the use of radio headsets. Mainly because they wanted to speed up the game. And after nearly 15 years away. Coach Vermeil came out of retirement to head coach the Saint Louis Rams. Once he got there, he found that the league called plays in an entirely new way.

[music in]

Dick: As I came back into the League it was now becoming electronic. At that time you could call the play electronic from the press box to the head coach or assistant coach that was assigned that responsibility and then he would signal it or send it in to the quarterback. In a few years that kept getting more sophisticated. And, pretty quick, you could send it direct to the quarterback. And, it was about time. It took 'em too long to make that decision, really.

The impact of direct coach to quarterback communication was immediate, and dramatic. It made play calling way easier and sped up the overall speed of the game. It allowed for an entirely new level of complexity and strategy.

Dick: I would say most NFL fans don't realize how complicated the schemes have become. It's amazing. And the different terminology used within a huddle call. They would be shocked.

Dick: I could show you a game plan. There might be 150 passes in a game plan and 60 runs in a game plan, one game.

[music out]

When Coach Vermeil started coaching, he had six runs and five passes in his playbook. Now, he could call over two hundred different plays, each with specific directions for every single player.

Dick: You call a protection 'scat right' was a pass protection, 682, and then 'backs flare'. And, you'll talk to a lot of quarterbacks, they'll tell you it is complicated.

[music in]

During the 1999 season, Vermeil coached one of the greatest offenses in NFL history. They were even nicknamed “The Greatest Show on Turf,” and won the Super Bowl.

After the victory, Vermeil retired… well, for the second time... But, of course, that didn’t last long. Only after two years later, the call of football pulled him back in. This time, he came out of retirement to head coach the Kansas City Chiefs.

Despite the advancements in communications, Vermeil and coaches around the league still struggled with the limitations of their headsets.

Dick: I can remember, some friends of mine flew in to see us play in St. Louis. He flew home after the game. At 30,000 feet he called me up on his phone and talked to me at home, but, at that same game, we had about five technical breakdowns in the signal being called from the coach on the sideline to the quarterback [SFX: Distorted talking]. The electronic system didn't consistently work. I remember being upset and I'm saying, "I can't believe that I can talk to somebody 30,000 feet in the air and not to a guy 30 yards away on the field.

[music out]

[music in]

Loud crowds exacerbated problems with the headsets. When a quarterback couldn’t hear a play call over their helmet radio, their team had to take a time out to get it right, or risk a delay of game penalty. When Vermeil coached for the Kansas City Chiefs, he used that to his advantage. They play at Arrowhead Stadium, one of the loudest stadiums in all of sports.

[music out]

[SFX: Loud crowd cheering]

Dick: Well, there's no question crowd noise can impact the game.

Dick: You can feel the electricity of a stadium. When it's on your side, you can feel the negative electricity when it's against you. Arrowhead, my Gosh, when that crowd is into the game and it's going well, you've got a real edge.

Dick: I always felt that they're gonna have to use their time outs, when you wanna save 'em for a two minute drill or something like that, it's critical.

[music in]

Coach Vermeil retired for the last time in 2005. His offensive strategies changed the game forever. But, football’s next revolution wouldn’t come from the sidelines, but from engineers working in labs. The NFL needed technology that could keep up with a new generation of innovative coaches. So, once again, battlefield technology would find its way onto the gridiron, giving football’s field generals more power than ever before. We’ll find out how, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

When you watch an NFL game on television, you’ll see coaches wearing large headsets with giant Bose logos on them. ...and before I go any further, a little disclaimer... none of this was written or influenced by Bose. Outside of fact checking, they had no editorial control over this content. They just caught wind of the episode and loved the idea so much that they decided to sponsor it. So, with that out of the way. The NFL legalized quarterback to coach radios in the 90s. That ushered in an era of high speed, complex offenses that took the league by storm. But by the mid 2000’s, the old headsets just couldn’t keep up. That’s when Bose got involved.

Matt: My name is Matt Ruwe. I'm the Senior Product Manager for our aviation, military, and broadcast markets.

[music out]

Matt: Bose makes headsets literally for M1 Abrams tanks. I mean, that couldn't be any more extreme in terms of noise.

Bose was a company known more for home speaker systems and later for military and aviation headsets.

Matt: Some of our aviation headsets started to get used in D1 football, college D1 football, and we started noticing this and we thought "Wow. People really think that this headset must be really good because they're using it on the the sidelines."

To take on a challenge as unique as the NFL, Matt needed the help of Dan Gauger. Dan is one of the founders of the Bose noise cancelling division. He’s now a distinguished engineer at the company.

Dan: I said, "Well, let's go learn about the noise." Matt, and I, and some others went to the most convenient stadium, Gillette Stadium, and measured the noise, recorded it.

Matt and Dan discovered that noise at an NFL stadium is totally different than all of the noise they’ve studied before.

Matt: The dynamic range in football in general is incredible. Football goes from incredibly quiet in an early play in the first quarter. You can go from that to being in Seattle where the 12th man is incredibly loud. supposedly the crowd is the 12th person who actually impacts the game, and it is so loud there that if you're attending the game you probably want to wear earplugs, it gets that loud.

Dan: It's fascinating. I can look at the data from some measurements I took at a Seahawks, 49ers game. You can see in the data the excitement of the crowd, because the human voice changes its mix of ... its tamber, it's a mix of spectral balance. As people start shouting, things shift higher in frequency. You can see that when it happens. It's figuring out who optimize our headphones to work well in that sort of noise, dominated at those frequencies.

Sean McVay: Communication is everything.

That’s Sean McVay, the current LA Rams head coach.

Sean McVay: It can be extremely difficult, especially in some of these road atmospheres from an offensive standpoint, fans going crazy, a lot of different things going on throughout the course of the game.

Sean McVay: One of the most important things that we can provide is clarity to our players. When there is clear communication, there is no gray, and guys can operate with confidence, they can play without any uncertainty, and that’s a big thing in this league.

[SFX: Crowd cheering]

Matt and Dan had to create a headset that could handle not only the unique sound of the stadium, but also the demands of coaching in the NFL.

Matt: Typically on a consumer side we want to cancel as much noise as possible, matter of fact if it was completely silent that would be sometimes perfect for consumers, but in this environment, they really wanted to hear some of the things that were going on around them. And so, you'll see this even in the NFL where a lot of coaches wear a single ear headset, and that's there to allow them to hear some of the sounds around them. At the same time they really still need to hear what's going on on the intercom from the box that's high up in the stadium, or even from some of the other coaches that are right there on the field.

[music in]

While the NFL wanted to help coaches and players communicate better, they didn’t want to turn the league into a video game. Assistant coaches and owners with a sky high view up in the press box can’t radio players on the field. They have to talk to the head coach on the sideline. And while quarterback helmets have speakers that allow them to hear their coaches, they don’t have a microphone, so they can’t respond with questions. All of that means that Coach McVay has to constantly manage chaos on the sideline, while staying on the same page with his players.

Sean McVay: When you’re talking through the headset the unique thing about it is you’ve got the ability to communicate with all the coaches on the offensive staff or if you want to flip over to the defensive staff and then ultimately whoever that play caller is you have the ability to press a button just a one way communication system to the quarterback.

Before every snap, NFL coaches have to process a ton of information. They’re taking input from their coaching staff, referencing a large sheet of notes they carry, and trying to match wits with their opponents.

Sean McVay: You’re battling against a lot of different things. Playing the different situations, making sure that you’ve got contingency plans in place. Does this play have answers? We talk about it all the time. The players need to understand the intent, the mechanics, but then what are the potential problems that can arise within the framework of the play that they might need to solve?

[music out]

That tangled web of voices left Matt and Dan a task that was beyond anything they had experienced working with the military.

[music in]

Dan: I was blown away with the complexity of communication systems that these teams run. I've crawled around in airplanes, I've crawled around in armored vehicles. I was blown away with their system. The real challenge was figuring out how to take what we started with, adapt it to as an input/output device to this very complex communication system, without having to redesign that whole communication system. So that it worked well under normal conditions, and it worked well when some coach was screaming at the top of his lungs.

Not to mention, NFL teams work under a play clock, which means they only have 40 seconds to run their next play. ...and to make it even more complicated, the coach to quarterback communication is automatically cut off by the NFL at 15 seconds. This means that the entire coaching staff has only 25 seconds to strategize, make suggestions, give tips or reminders, pick a play, and get that information to the quarterback. Even then, the defense might line up in a way that would counter the play the coaches called, forcing the quarterback to call an audible, or in other words, pick a new play on the fly by shouting code words to his teammates.

[music out]

[music in]

Sean McVay: A standard play call from us usually starts out where we’ll call the personnel grouping where if you say 12 personnel that means that you’ve really got one half back in the game, two tight ends and then two receivers.

Ok. A two digit number, that’s simple enough.

Sean McVay: And then you start out by the formation, any sort of motion shift and then whatever that specific concept is.

[music out]

So far we’ve covered who’s on the field, and where they’re standing. I think I’m keeping up.

[music in]

Sean McVay: So if we said let’s go west right ace, 18 F sift, we’re going to can it with pass 18 F sift, X strike Z bench.

[music out]

Wait… what?

Sean McVay: Let’s go west right ace, 18 F sift, we’re going to can it with pass 18 F sift, X strike Z bench.

Ok, that’s who’s on the field, where they’re standing, and somehow, instruction for what every player is doing. Just to recap, we’ve gone from Coach Vermeil calling plays like this...

Dick: I put the play 'blast right'. That was the play. We only had one or two formations.

To Coach McVay calling plays now:

[music in]

Sean McVay: Let’s go west right ace, 18 F sift, we’re going to can it with pass 18 F sift, X strike Z bench.

Sean McVay: Basically what we’re looking for there is a run versus a certain premier look with whatever the defense presents if they give us something else then we can run the pass versus a better look and that’s how something like that would operate coming in and out of the huddle.

[music out]

So now, coaches aren’t only calling one play, they’re calling two simultaneously and letting the quarterback choose the best option when they see the defense. With all this new information coming from the sideline, you can understand why Matt was nervous about how their new headsets would perform under the immense pressure.

Matt: The first time the headsets made it into the NFL I was glued to the TV and my phone just checking to make sure that everything was working well. We had done a lot of tests beforehand, but it's nerve racking to know that not only are these coaches depending on it, but the fans who are watching the game and really, really are looking for every angle they can for their team to win, you don't want that headset to fail. You want them to make sure that everything is working perfectly and that communication isn't part of a problem for them.

Bose and the NFL have continued to modify the headsets, making communication better than ever. And by working with players and coaches they’ve created a system that changed football forever.

[music in]

Matt: I've been on the sidelines of the Super Bowl, and initially I thought that was just going to be amazing and how would I even be able to interact with these people? In the end they're people, which is cool. They're people, and they're really nice and really cool people, coaches in general are just very genuine and they're very businesslike.

Matt: We have a lot of coaches who have said, "Wow. This is a really big difference."

Dan: We're entering a day where the ability to wear something at your ear, to take information from electronic sources, to manage distractions, and the noise of the world around you, and put these together, to make you most effective, is becoming increasingly important. It exposes people to new possibilities. It opens the world's mind to the range of things that we can do with sound.

Due in part to the headsets, scoring in the NFL has increased by 30% since the league allowed direct coach to QB communication. That means more excitement for fans everywhere, and even more wonderfully ridiculous play calls.

[SFX: Play call - Trips right, Y motion blade Y out. Green, off nasty hound, two Y flutey X basic backs right. Alright, here we go, here we go, here we go, sprout left exit, Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon, Ok?]

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. A sound design team that makes commercials, documentaries, and trailers sound incredible. To hear some of this sonic goodness, visit defacto sound dot com.

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

Thanks to our guest, Coach Dick Vermeil.

Mike: Coach Vermiel, what is your favorite sound?

Dick: I know, it used to excite me when you’d hear a great hit [SFX: body hit]. But now its a 15 yard personal foul [SFX: whistle].

Thanks also to LA Rams head coach Sean McVay as well as Matt Ruwe, Dan Gauger, and Alexandra Smith from Bose. Robert Baker played the part of our coach throughout the episode. He’s an incredible actor who’s been in tons of movies and television shows that you’ve probably seen. He also, just so happens to be one of my oldest friends. If you’d like to send him a nice note, you can find him on twitter as slyhuckleberry.

The music from this episode is from our friends at Music Bed. Go listen at musicbed dot com.

Finally, are there any other cool sports-focused sound stories that you know of? Well, I’d like to hear all about it. You can chat with me, and the rest of the 20k team through our website, facebook, twitter, or by writing hi at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Silence: Dispatches from the quietest place on Earth

Original artwork by Jon McCormack

Our world is filled with sound. It exists in even the quietest corners of the planet. But what happens when all that sound is taken away? What is silence? There are very few places on Earth where silence actually exists, but in this episode, Dallas experiences it for himself thanks to a special room called an anechoic chamber. How do our brains process the complete nothingness of silence? Find out as Dallas locks himself alone inside the chamber. Featuring David Alvord and Nick Breen from the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Day Sleepers by Cubby
Innervisible (Chroma Variant) by A.M. Architect
Chapter 3 by A New Normal
Cry by Laxcity
Home Sweet Home by Chad Lawson
Pools of Light by A.M. Architect
Ebb and Flow (feat. Matt Huber) by Josh Hoover
Frame by Frame by Rad Wolf

20k 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.

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

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

Consolidate your credit card debt today and get an additional interest rate discount at Lightstream.com/20k.

Subscribe to Mythology wherever you listen to podcasts, or visit Parcast.com/mythology to start listening now.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Anechoic Chamber Recording]

Dallas: Okay. I’m rolling. You’re going to shut the doors and leave me in here for a little while.

David: That’s right. You may want to point your mic over here because they are heavy-duty reinforced doors. Have fun!

Nick: Have fun!

[SFX: Anechoic Chamber Recording - Door close sound]

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

[SFX: Anechoic Chamber Recording]

Dallas: Okay. Now I’m inside this thing by myself. Oh! They just shut off the lights. Excellent.

You just heard me being locked into an anechoic chamber. It’s a room designed to completely isolate sound. I went in to answer a seemingly simple question. What is silence?

[SFX: Busy, noisy city ambience]

When you think of silence, maybe you picture getting away from the city and going deep into nature.

[SFX: City ambience fades away into a gentle, quiet forest. A very gentle rustling of leaves and birds are heard]

The constant noise of the city fades away, replaced only by birdsong and the gentle rush of wind through leaves. It’s refreshing and calm... But it’s not silence.

[SFX: Nature ambiences crescendo, then cut off abruptly. An uncomfortable, silent pause begins.]

Silence is the complete and total lack of sound. And to many who’ve experienced it, silence isn’t relaxing or calm. It’s terrifying. Some say it can even drive you crazy.

[SFX - Anechoic Chamber Recording]

Dallas: Hey, I’m Dallas.

Nick: I’m Nick, nice to meet you.

Dallas: I’m sorry. Just ignore all this stuff.

Nick: Oh on, that’s fine.

[SFX - Anechoic Chamber Recording fades down]

Nick: We have a large anechoic chamber. It’s, I think, 24 feet tall or so and maybe another 20 or so foot square. It’s a really big room. It’s covered in foam that makes it anechoic so there’s no reflections.

That’s Nick Breen from the Georgia Tech Research Institute. I recently visited the institute to see if the rumors about silence were true. The thing is, quiet places are relatively easy to find on Earth. But silence is incredibly rare. Luckily for me, the institute has two very special rooms where silence exists.

[music in]

David: My name is David Alvord. I’m a senior research engineer with the Georgia Tech Research Institute. We use anechoic chambers to find out what is the true sound generated by an object or an article under test without contamination from any exterior sources, whether it’s environmental or reflections generated in a room.

Nick: You can close the door to the room so there's no sound from the outside world getting in. Then, it's basically the only sounds are what you're producing in the room and because the walls are covered in foam, there won't be any echoes or anything like that because they're treated. If you're just silent, you don't hear anything.

In many ways, anechoic chambers are designed with the same goals in mind as recording studios. Albeit to a much more controlled degree. In both cases, it’s all about minimizing reflections and exterior sound sources.

[music out]

David: The three of us are currently sitting in a standard office, no particularly special acoustic treatments in here. We have carpet on the floor and traditional office acoustic tiles in the ceiling, but beyond that, it's rigid walls and everything.

So what you're hearing from us just conversationally right now is actually the direct path or me speaking at the microphone or speaking at Dallas, but also all of the reflections and multipath that we have going on in this room.

We’re almost always surrounded by acoustic reflections, whether we realize it or not. But that doesn’t happen in an anechoic chamber.

[music in]

Nick: When you make sound... your alarm clock makes sound, it's creating pressure vibrations in the air where it is.

[SFX: Alarm clock buzzing]

Nick: Those pressure vibrations propagate outwards. As molecules hit other molecules, eventually, it comes to your ears. That's what you hear and that's how you hear noise.

David: Very often these days, you see a lot more new constructions are based off of more open floor plans. With the open floor plans, your sound travels a lot more and also with the reflections, those travel much further. Basically, you're having a lot more destructive interference or reflections interfering with your main discussion than you do in maybe a smaller room or in a bedroom where you may have, for example, your bed that has a comforter and that is a soft surface that helps what's called attenuate the sound, which effectively deadens some of the reflections in a similar way that the anechoic chamber does.

I have to admit, I was nervous about being locked in the anechoic chamber alone. We’re used to hearing sound all the time. Would I lose it when all that of is taken away? Before I could find out, I wanted to know why anechoic chambers and acoustic research are important.

[music out]

With our world getting noisier and noisier, acoustic research is more relevant now than ever. We need to understand how sound works in order to make our world sound better. Researchers use more than just anechoic chambers to experiment with all that noise.

David: The opposite of an anechoic chamber, anechoic meaning an echo, like no echo is literally an echo chamber or a reverberation chamber. Typically, these are exactly the opposite of what you might picture for an anechoic chamber. An anechoic chamber is covered in foam wedges and it has a lot of soft treatments inside. Reverb chambers typically have nothing but solid surfaces. If my office was a reverb chamber, we would open the door, walk in. The first step that Dallas takes would just echo off the wall for an extremely long time.

[SFX: Footstep with a really long, cavernous reverb]

Typically, what they look for in reverb chambers are stuff like… Here's a vacuum. You're going to put a vacuum in there. A vacuum is loud.

[SFX: Vacuum sound effect with that same reverb]

Then, what they may do is they may put a treatment in there. They may put some new kind of attenuating service in there or they may put a muffler on part of the vacuum itself.

[SFX: Vacuum sound getting dampened/attenuated]

Researchers use these different chambers to isolate the huge amount of variables that are out in the world. This way they can focus in on just the aspects of one particular sound.

But sound research goes a lot farther than just making our world sound better. It also makes us safer.

[music in]

There are some types of sounds that can have a dangerous impact on our health, and the risk of exposure to these sounds is higher than ever. One example of this is infrasound.

The lowest human frequency that we can technically hear is 20 hertz. The wavelengths of sound below that threshold are too long for our eardrums to vibrate, so we can’t hear them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t feel it.

David: Sound waves around five and six hertz actually resonate with your organs of your body. If you go to a beach and there are offshore wind farms, depending on what speed the blades are turning, they may generate sound waves, infrasonic waves that actually resonate your intestines and make you feel sick, like you're going to throw up.

That’s just one of the many ways infrasound can affect you. These sound waves can also travel farther than audible frequencies, meaning it’s harder to get away from them.

[music out]

David: Like with any sound source, anything can be lethal. There are audible sounds that, sufficiently loud, can kill a person. If you were next to the engines at the base of the Saturn V during liftoff and you weren't completely destroyed by the plume that was generated through the engines themselves, [SFX - Intense, stylized rocket liftoff sound] the amplitude of the sound in the audible range is so high that it would rupture your eardrums, cause brain bleeding and you would likely die from the sound exposure alone.

Similar things can happen in the infrasonic range where if infrasound amplitudes are sufficiently high, it can negatively react with your body and cause any number of health issues.

And because you can’t hear it, you may not even know it’s happening.

David: The longer I work in the field of acoustics... you begin to realize how much noise pollution there really is out there. You start to pick up on how loud background stuff that we take for granted every day actually is.

[SFX: AC units, traffic, office walla, etc.]

Whether it's your AC unit, whether it's people driving or whether it's other people in open office plan is. You start to realize, once sound is taken away…

[SFX: the cacophony drifts away to silence]

...the absence of sound in an anechoic chamber... you don't really hear anything. Then, you start to layer all that sound back in. You realize just how loud even the most acoustically-treated open spaces really are.

[music in]

So what happens when you take all that sound away? I learned a lot about the research done in anechoic chambers, but to really understand what silence is like I had to experience it for myself. Does silence really sound like nothing? What does our brain do without audio input? And most importantly, does silence make you lose your mind? I’ll find out, in a moment.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

If you’ve heard about anechoic chambers in the past, it’s likely you’ve also heard about all the strange things a person can experience when in one... Things like being able to hear the blood pumping through your veins, [SFX - blood pumping] or high pitched noises when there shouldn’t be any [SFX - high pitched insects, stylized]. Some even say anechoic chambers cause hallucinations and can drive a person crazy.

[SFX: heavy breathing, all sounds cacophony and fade away]

It’s all really fascinating. But is it true? Well, I’ll use myself as a guinea pig.

[music out]

David: Now, we're standing in our control room. It's a very lab-type space, but the main function of our control room is to be able to run our anechoic chambers and acquire the data inside the chambers without us having to physically be inside of there, contaminating the data being recorded.

This room is not treated whatsoever because this is just where we are running the experiments. We're making extra sure that none of this noise bleeds into the two chambers we're about to go into.

[music in]

The Georgia Tech Research Institute has two anechoic chambers. The chambers work by isolating the room from any exterior sound sources and using giant foam wedges for absorbing reflections in the room.

Nick: Not only do they absorb sound by themselves, but their shape is uniquely designed to help attenuate noise. Higher frequency noise, instead of reflecting off of these wedges, it will actually bounce between them because of their triangular shapes. By the time it reflects back out, the sound is so reduced that that's what makes these room anechoic.

David: These are called melamine wedges. If you look closely at them, you can see they're very porous, of varying porosities.The porosity is different throughout because the different-sized pores captures different frequencies. If you have one standardized pore throughout this entire wedge, it would be very effective at one frequency, but anything between the harmonics and the primary fundamental frequency, it would be garbage. It'd be as if it wasn't there.

[music out]

The acoustic treatments in these chambers are tested far more rigorously than the treatments you’ll find in a traditional recording studio. To properly research the physical properties of sound, David and Nick need an extremely controlled environment. It’s a whole different field from sound design, and other creative uses of sound. When talking about creative sound design of any sort, that’s more in the psychoacoustic category.

David: Psychoacoustics is the study of acoustic waves interacting with a perceived receiver, so a human. Usually, that's where we get more subjective so we don't say the SPL or the sound pressure level of a room. This is where you start to use your terminology such as loudness, timbre, tinny, stuff that are much more subjective, but reflect the listening experience that you are trying to drive home.

Dallas: Would you say that we're a psychoacoustic show?

David: I would say some of the editing you have done definitely was intended to illicit psychoacoustic responses in your listeners.

Dallas: Okay. As much as I'm trying to get the physics, I'm not there yet.

David: [laughing] You’re getting there.

Alright, I understood how an anechoic chamber works. I also understood what they’re used for. But now, it’s time to go in.

[SFX: Door opening, entering chamber]

David: Alright, after you. Oh is the… light’s on?

Nick: Well half the fun is turning out the lights.

David: Oh then you hit the lights switch then. Give him the big reveal.

[SFX: Door closing, background ambience goes quiet]

David: Alright go ahead.

Dallas: Oh my goodness. Again this looks incredibly dangerous.

David: That’s what a lot of people say. Yeah, give that a good shove.

The contrast between the noisy control room and the silence of the chamber was intense. The first thing I noticed was the complete lack of reflections.

Dallas: The most jarring part of it is when you’re facing away from me...

David: Okay.

Dallas: ...because there’s like no reflection coming back to me. It’s really weird.

I asked David to help me illustrate the effect through counting. He started by facing me, but slowly turned 360 degrees towards the wall and back. Listen to how the frequencies of his voice get absorbed by the treatment in the chamber. There is absolutely no eq or processing on this. This is the raw recording.

David: One, two, three, four, five [voice becomes muffled and attenuated as he turns], six, seven, eight, nine, ten [voice becomes full as he turns back forward], eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

Again, we’re not putting any sort of filter on his voice. That’s how it naturally sounded in the room to my ears. The upper frequencies and reflections are being completely absorbed by the foam. Anyway, the time had come for me to be locked in the chamber alone. There would be no sound except for what I made myself. How long could I handle that nothingness?

Dallas: Okay. I’m rolling. You’re going to shut the doors and leave me in here for a little while.

[SFX: Chamber door closing]

Dallas: Okay, so I’m in a… what you call a cherry picker, which is a motorized thing. It has a little cart. It’s kinda what people use when they’re doing electrical work on electrical lines outside. So they have me two stories above the surface. Which, the surface isn’t really much of a surface because it is a bunch of wedge foam. And it is very quiet in here… With no noise, and no light. It’s pretty odd to hear… nothing.

Dallas: So people say that you can go crazy in these things, but I don’t believe them.

Dallas: Alright I think I’ve been in here for about 7 or 8 minutes. One thing that people talk about when they go into anechoic chambers is pressure. So I do feel pressure, which is odd because there’s nothing that would actually be putting pressure on my ear drums. But having no sound at all feels… feels a little bit like being… like under the water far enough where it starts to hurt your ears. That’s kinda what it feels like.

Dallas: And I hear a high-pitched… I don’t know if I’d say I hear it, but I perceive a high pitched noise. It’s gotta be something that’s just in my brain or ear. It’s like my brain is interpreting it as audible but I don’t know if it is. But I definitely hear a very high pitched, almost like high noise. It’s not a single tone, but it’s like high pitched noise.

Dallas: So another phenomenon, is that you start to hear your internal organs more the longer you’re in here. I’m starting to hear my heartbeat. I can’t even breathe through my nose because it’s so loud.

Dallas: When everything goes away, for now ten minutes, I guess my brain is searching for sound. And so it’s boosting everything in that auditory sense as much as it can. I guess it would be like closing your eyes and kind of seeing spots and stuff. It’s like your brain is trying to get visual input. It’s kind of doing the same thing with audio, like it wants audio input. So I’m hearing… or I’m perceiving that I’m hearing things. That’s the weird thing. I know I’m not hearing anything, but my brain is interpreting some sort of signal that I am hearing something.

Dallas: As much as I thought that this would be kind of a going crazy experience, it hasn’t really been like that for me. Now that I’ve been in here for 30 minutes… I don’t know. I think I’d want to stay in here overnight. I’m kind of tired now. Alright, I think this is it, I’m going to have them open up the door.

[SFX: Chamber door opening]

David: He’s alive!

Dallas: I survived.

Nick: He survived.

Dallas: I have to be honest I probably could have just kept going and just taken a nap.

David: I was about to say, the right people could settle in there and just like, “this is pretty good.”

[SFX: Recording dips down under music coming in]

[music in]

So I didn’t go crazy inside the anechoic chamber. The silence was actually in some ways comforting. It could be because I’m used to working in acoustically treated rooms. But, that said, there were some distinct experiences in that silence that could be really uncomfortable. For me, silence didn’t sound like nothing. It sounded like pressure. It sounded like my heartbeat. It sounded like high-pitched insects as my brain struggled to interpret anything. Our brains are simply not wired for true silence.

Thousands of years ago, people lived in nature. The only sounds they heard were from the natural environment around them. Now our world is filled with devices that make noise - machinery, computers, traffic…. Research into sound is so vital to our health and happiness.

David: It's interesting because sound is one of our five senses and yet, it's so commonly overlooked. It's omnipresent and everybody gets exposed to sound in whatever their unique situations are. Whether it's in the different types of areas I've been exposed to whether it's architectural or psycho or aero or just general acoustics, every one of those touches on each one of our lives. I know when I am exposed to sound less, like if it's properly treated, I feel more at ease. I don't feel so anxious.

[music out]

If I had one takeaway to leave you with, it would be this. Appreciate the quiet times and places in your life. They really are increasingly hard to find. As for silence... If you have the opportunity to experience it, I don’t know if I would recommend it. While I didn’t go crazy, you never know what you might hear, or see, in that complete nothingness…

[SFX - the sound of blood pumping, high-pitched insects, and heavy breathing slowly sneak up]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. A sound design team that works in foam covered rooms and makes television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defactosound dot com.

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

The music in this episode is from our friends at Musicbed. Go listen at Musicbed dot com.

Thanks to our guests David Alvord and Nick Breen from the Georgia Tech Research Institute…

Dallas: So David, last question. What is your favorite sound in the world?

David: I think my favorite sound is actually ambient wilderness noise. It’s very calming and it kind of pulls me back to where we all came from.

What’s your favorite sound in the world? You can tell us through our website, facebook, twitter, or by writing hi at 20 kay dot org. Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

A sonic journey through the Solar System

This episode was originally written & produced by Kevin Edds.

What happens when we leave Earth's thin blanket of atmosphere, and what do other planets sound like? In this special episode, we have completely remixed one of our favorite shows! It's been re-written, re-edited, re-narrated, has new music, and even some new additional content. If you've heard the original, you'll definitely want to check out this remixed and remastered version. Featuring Dr. Lori Glaze, Dr. Keith Noll, and Dr. Scott Guzewich from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Sleep Walker by Dexter Britain
Where Were You When the World Was Made by Dustin Lau
Aura by Kollen
Quill by Future of Forestry
12:41 AM by Hotel Neon
Our Sky by One Hundred Years
Green by Eric Kinny
Dreams feat. Eebee by Generdyn


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.

Sign up for Musicbed Membership music.20k.org.

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

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

View Transcript ▶︎

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

[music in]

One of the most common questions I get is “what is my favorite episode of TTH?” ...and after a little thinking I always come back to the Space episode. Not necessarily for it’s sound design or production value, but rather for the subtext of the show… and was meant to communicate.

This episode was written to help illustrate that we’re all humans and we’re tied to this Earth. ...and our sense of hearing is proof. We’re united under a razor thin blanket of atmosphere on a space rock flying through the universe. Essentially, despite all the noise here on Earth, we’re all in this together.

Because our whole team loved the episode so much, we’ve decided to not just re-play it. But we’ve completely re-written it. We’ve even re-edited, re-narrated, and even changed out much of the music. For lack of a better term, this episode is a remix and remaster of one of our earliest and favorite episodes. If you remember it, you’ll love this fresh new take… and if you never heard the original episode, you’re in for a real treat.

Ok, here we go.

[music out]

[music in]

The best marketing tagline in movie history came from the Ridley Scott film, Alien: "In Space, no one can hear you scream." That phrase is true and not only because of the distance from Earth. It has to do with how sound travels.

Lori: You don't have sound in space because sound requires molecules.

That’s Dr. Lori Glaze, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Lori oversees about 300 scientists that study all the planets and small bodies of our solar system.

Lori: You have to be able to move the molecules with the sound waves, and without the molecules there, the sound just doesn't move. You can try and use your lungs to push the sound out of your mouth but it won't travel anywhere.

[music out]

That tagline from Alien I mentioned earlier, no one actually heard that either... as it was never read as voiceover in the trailer. It was just text, silent text, perhaps meant to imitate the specific science that explains how sound travels… or how it doesn’t travel.

Keith: My name is Keith Noll. I am the chief of the planetary systems lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. I think I've studied almost every planet or satellite in the solar system that has an atmosphere.

Sound as we think about it could be vastly different in other places in our solar system. Keith has some ideas on how other planets might sound to our ears..

Keith: What is sound? It's the vibrations of molecules in the air [SFX]. It's a pressure wave. Of course sound can be transmitted through any kind of physical medium. If you are in a swimming pool [SFX] you can still hear sound. That's being transmitted through water. Earthquakes [SFX] are essentially sound waves being transmitted through the solid earth.

Sound takes on many forms but the kind we're most familiar with is pressure waves moving through gas.

The most common example of how different gasses affect your vocal cords is the old party trick of breathing in a helium balloon.

As the gasses, you're pushing it back out of your lungs over your vocal cords, [SFX: play example] because the density is lower, the vibration frequencies end up being higher and that's why you sound like Mickey Mouse.

[music in]

Let’s go from planet to planet in our solar system to find out what each surface would sound like. To our ears. To be clear though, you’d pretty much die instantly everywhere, except for here. But, for these examples we’re going to pretend to have superhuman powers that will keep us alive. So, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s start closest to the sun.

Lori: Places like… Mercury and these rocky bodies with no atmospheres would be similar to being in space. There would not be much sound if any.

Keith: Mercury is an airless body, so we're back to listening for Mercury quakes [SFX], essentially. That would be really the only source of sound.

And you could only hear these Mercury quakes if your head was pressed up against the rock [SFX], because there’s no atmosphere for traditional sound to travel through.

[music out]

Next up, Venus.

Lori: In my mind, what sound would be like on the surface, because you have this really dense atmosphere, much denser than Earth's, the sound would be more like or tend toward what things sound like when you're underwater [SFX].

If you could imagine something in between air and water [SFX], that kind of density, you're running your hand through that and you would feel that [SFX].

If you were to just materialize on the surface in that environment of 900 degrees Fahrenheit and a hundred times our atmospheric pressure, you would first be crushed [SFX] and then you would probably just burn up completely [SFX].

Keith: One thing we do know about Venus is that is has lightning, so you might hear thunder [SFX].

I wonder what other things, like my voice, might sound like. [SFX] I’m on Venus in this ethereal world that’s a mix between a gas-like atmosphere and water. I’m almost floating, but yet it’s not as restrictive as being submerged in water.

My voice… The thunder… [SFX]. It’s all slightly muffled and distorted as it travels through the thick atmosphere.

[SFX: Earth - forest sounds]

Now we’re home: Earth. We’re not going to stay here for long, but it’s worth mentioning the amazing diversity of sound on our planet. The sandy deserts [SFX]… lush forests [SFX]… the sound of the ocean [SFX], both on the surface [SFX]… and below [SFX]. It’s a rich soundscape, because our ears are perfectly in tune with it… More on that later.

[music in]

Now Mars. And here’s where it gets interesting since Mars has been the subject of so much fascination for thousands of years. It’s one of the best places where life might have, or could exist.

Lori: Sound on Mars is going to be the opposite direction of Venus because the atmosphere on Mars is very, very thin compared to Earth's so there's just not very many molecules and sound requires molecules.

Countless movies have been made about Mars, including the Hollywood mega-hit The Martian, starring a stranded astronaut portrayed by Matt Damon.

Keith: Loved the movie. It was fun to watch, but it's not the Mars we know, it's a very different Mars.

[music out]

[SFX: The Martian soundbite]

So the real Mars isn't anything like that, but Mars does have an atmosphere, albeit a thin one.

So that storm scene wasn’t quite accurate.

Keith: You wouldn’t necessarily hear the wind itself… You would hear the dust that's being picked up [SFX] and it would be banging against the faceplate of your spacesuit.

Scott: So I enjoyed that movie a lot, but the atmosphere as it was shown was not scientifically right.

That’s Scott Guzewich, a Research Astrophysicist at NASA.

Scott: Basically, the problem with what you saw in the movie there where the atmosphere is so thick that it's picking up boulders [SFX] and knocking things over. It's just not possible. I mean the wind speed can get very high, as high as hurricane force at the surface sometimes.

So imagine a hundred mile per hour wind on Earth, if you're standing in a hurricane, obviously you'd be almost blown off your feet.

If you were standing on the surface there in Mars and you put your hand out [SFX] in that hundred mile per hour wind, you would feel it, but it would feel like a gentle breeze here on the surface of Earth.

That sounds pretty cool. Standing in a hurricane but it only feels like a soft wind. But without a spacesuit, you’d die pretty quickly right?

[music in]

Scott: You wouldn't die instantaneously but you'd want to be getting into shelter as fast as possible. First, the atmospheric pressure is dramatically lower than it is here on the surface of Earth. So, all the water in your body would attempt to boil, basically, instantaneously [SFX]. The water covering your eye, the water in your mouth, and even the water in your cells and your blood. That wouldn't kill you right away but it would be very uncomfortable immediately. You could probably survive for a few tens of seconds, maybe a minute. You could potentially get a very rapid dose to frostbite on your entire body [SFX]. Again, you wouldn't necessarily die right away, but it'd be quick.

And how about sound. What could we expect to hear?

Scott: Our ears aren't really designed to work in that sort of very near vacuum sort of atmosphere. So we wouldn't hear too much, maybe if you were scuffling along on the surface, you could maybe very faintly [SFX] hear that sound as you were clawing at the ground and gasping for air [SFX].

The temperature obviously is colder in general, so that drives a lower speed of sound, and it seems that a lower speed of sound would tend to lower the pitch [SFX], make your voice sound deeper… but then the atmospheric density would kind of go to raise your pitch, so it seems like the pitch probably balances out.

[music out]

If voices won’t carry far, how about a piano?

[music in]

Scott: The very high-pitched, high frequency noise at the far right end of the piano, you probably wouldn't hear that at all, but maybe the deepest bass sounds that the piano makes [SFX], you might be able to just pick those up with a microphone if it was sensitive enough.

So we’ve explored the first four planets of our solar system, and learned some of the ways their unique atmospheres and conditions shape their soundscape, or lack thereof. We’ll continue our exploration of sound to the outer reaches of our solar system, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

We now know what the planets of our inner solar system would sound like to our ears. Let’s move on to Jupiter.

What’s interesting is that Jupiter doesn’t have a solid surface. Hard to imagine but the whole planet is made up of gas. And that just keeps getting denser and denser—eventually becoming a liquid the closer you get to its core. The pressure and temperature variations are what cause those beautiful swirling bands.

Keith: So the interesting thing on Jupiter is that the pressure and the temperatures where the cloud decks are, are actually not so inhospitable.

So what are cloud decks?

Keith: So you've got these very distinct cloud layers in Jupiter's atmosphere. So y’know, it's just fun to imagine. What would it sound like? Would you get these echos?... because you have these super powerful lightning bolts, more powerful than anything on the Earth, so you'd have really, really loud thunder [SFX]. You'd hear echoes of echoes of echoes [SFX] just back and forth. It's fun to think about.

[music out]

So how about the rest of the outer planets?

Keith: Jupiter and Saturn, I think you could consider to be pretty similar. Uranus and Neptune are pretty similar to each other. So all four atmospheres are primarily hydrogen and helium.

So it sounds like if you tried to speak on any of them your voice would be higher?

Keith: I think so, cause the atmosphere is 75% hydrogen which is even less dense than helium and the rest is helium. I think we'd all be Mickey Mouse on Jupiter and Saturn.

And what about our old friend Pluto? Anything different?

Keith: It is probably the thinnest bound atmosphere that we know. But, it also looks really complex. It's got layers. It's pretty different. Mainly because the temperature is so low. Nitrogen there is an ice. Carbon monoxide is mostly an ice. That's probably the weirdest, most different kind of place in terms of thinking about how composition, temperature, pressure would affect the sound.

[music in]

We’ve covered the planets and acknowledged our old friend Pluto, and it’s becoming clear that detecting sounds throughout our solar system is pretty difficult. So why is it so easy for us here on Earth?

Keith: Our ears are good for a very specific environment. They've evolved. Once you take them out of that they're probably not exactly the tool you would want. If you built an audio receiver and sent it to all these places… What could you hear that the human ear could hear, and more interestingly, what could you hear that the human ear would never be able to hear?

That's what I want to know.

Surprisingly, we have never recorded another planet with a traditional microphone.

Scott: There is going to be a microphone on the next Mars Rover. The rover launched in 2020, it's supposed to have a microphone on it. We expect that it'll hear a few different things. The sound as the rover drives [SFX] across the surface for example, will be transmitted both through the atmosphere and through the body of the rover itself. You should be able to hear the wheels kind of crunch [SFX] along on the sand and on the rocks [SFX].

[music out]

While the next Mars Rover will have a traditional microphone on it, NASA’s Insight Lander was recently able to pick up sound waves through the air using it’s seismometer. The seismometer, which is designed to measure marsquakes, was able to pick up these low vibrations up to 50Hz. Unless you have particularly bassy speakers, you may not be able to hear the low rumble, but here’s what those vibrations sounds like...

[Play unaltered clip]

And for those of you who couldn’t hear anything, here’s what that clips sounds like pitched up two octaves...

[Play pitched up clip]

[music in]

We’re so accustomed on Earth to hearing sound associated with what we see. But in true outer space no one can hear a titanic supernova explosion, or a hurtling asteroid smash into the moon, or even… hear you scream.

Lori: How rare is sound in the known universe? It's pretty rare. Even just in our known solar system, places like the moon and Mercury and these rocky bodies with no atmospheres would be similar to being in space. There would not be much sound, if any.

When we think of Earth as special in terms of being able to even support life, it goes much further than that. It’s one of the true places in the universe where sound is abundant and has impacted that life on an evolutionary level.

Scott: If you look at life on Earth, being able to hear something seems to be a very big advantage biologically right? From very simple animal species, there is a benefit to being able to hear sound. Because you can become aware of either predators, or prey, or food sources. So if I were to really get out my speculation hat, y’know alien life in the universe would probably have an advantage to hear things also... in whatever planet or ocean or atmosphere they lived in.

However, these aliens might perceive sound in a completely different way, a way that’s in tune with their own environment, and perhaps hear completely different frequencies.

When you think of space, it’s mostly… space. Where no medium exists to transport sound. Yet, it’s perfect for… light. Light fills the universe, but sound does not.

Keith: The whole universe is connected by light. Light anywhere in the universe can travel to anywhere else in the universe, but with sound you really are truly in different islands of sound and they're all isolated because they're all stuck in this space that doesn't transmit sound. It transmits light perfectly well but not sound.

Sound as we perceive and understand it, is so unbelievably rare, but it’s abundant right here, where we are, within this thin blanket of atmosphere. But if we travel straight up, it goes away very quickly. It gets quieter, and quieter [sfx]… until it’s gone.

CREDITS

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

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Edds.

And me.

With help from Sam Schneble.

It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

We’d like to thank Dr. Lori Glaze, Dr. Keith Noll, and Dr. Scott Guzewich for speaking with us.

We’d also like to thank Elizabeth Zubritsky, Aries Keck, Nancy Jones, Richard Melnick, and Kevin Hartnett at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Finally, you can chat with me and the rest of the 20k team through our website, facebook, twitter or by writing hi @ 20k dot org. We love hearing from you, so don’t be shy. Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Boots ’n Cats: The scientific secrets of beatboxing

This episode was written and produced by Rob Sachs.

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

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

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

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

Check out Shri Narayanan and his SPAN team’s MRI videos of beatboxers at sail.usc.edu/span/beatboxingproject

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

Sign up for Musicbed Membership music.20k.org.

Get your FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help build your portfolio at Robinhood! Just sign up at hertz.robinhood.com

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

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

View Transcript ▶︎

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

[SFX: beatboxing]

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

[SFX: beatboxing continued]

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

[music in]

The Beatboxer you just heard is Baba Israel.

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

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

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

[music out]

[SFX:The Show clip]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: TR-808 Clip]

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

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

[SFX: Grandmaster Flash Clip]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: 808 Clip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[SFX: 808 drum beat]

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

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

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

[SFX: Baba Beatboxing]

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

[SFX: Baba Beatboxing continued]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: Afrika Bambaataa - Zulu Nation]

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

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

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

[SFX: Biz Markie Clip]

Or the Fat Boys.

[SFX: Fat Boys Clip]

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

Rahzel from The Roots was another huge innovator for beatboxing.

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

[SFX: Rahzel Clip]

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

Baba: He was a total entertainer.

[SFX: Rahzel Beatboxing Clip]

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

One of the biggest forum for beatboxing is overseas.

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

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

[SFX: Alexinho beatboxing Clip]

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

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

[SFX: Codfish Vs D-Low Clip]

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

Baba has even combined beatboxing with the didgeridoo.

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

[SFX: Baba didgeridoo beatboxing]

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

[Music in]

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

[music out]

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

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

[music out]

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

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

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

[music out]

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

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

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

[music in]

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

[music out]

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

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

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

[SFX: MRI machine]

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

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

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

[SFX: Indian Music Clip]

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

[SFX: beatboxing]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: beatboxing in the MRI machine]

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

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

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

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: Beatboxing - inward click roll with whistle]

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

[music in]

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

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

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

[music out]

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

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Being George Clooney: Dubbing Hollywood celebrities

This episode was adapted from the documentary Being George Clooney.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

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

View Transcript ▶︎

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[music out]

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

Martin Umbach: I am George Clooney.

Shaktee Singh: I am George Clooney.

Tamer Karadagli: I am George Clooney.

Francesco Pannofino: George Clooney.

Detlef Bierstedt:George Clooney.

Marco Antonio Costa: George Clooney.

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

[SFX: Oceans 11 clip foreign dubs montage]

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

[SFX: Ocean 11 clip continues]

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

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

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

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

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

[music in]

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

Interviewer: Which country has the best dubbers?

Emanuela Rossi: Italy. Italy.

Francesco Pannofino: Of course, Italy.

[music out]

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[music out]

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

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

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

[music out]

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

[SFX: French “Up in the Air” clip]

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

This is from The Ides of March.

[SFX: French “Ides of March” clip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[SFX: Polish Shrek clip]

[music in]

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

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

[SFX Dubbing session - Oceans 11 scene]

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

[SFX Dubbing session - Oceans 11 scene]

Christoph Bregler: Loop, loop, loop.

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

[music out]

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

[music in]

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

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

[music out]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: Hermione mouth sounds]

[music in]

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

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

[music out]

[SFX: German The Matrix: Reloaded clip]

This is from The Matrix Reloaded.

[SFX: German The Matrix: Reloaded clip continues]

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

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

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

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

[music in]

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

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

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

[music out]

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

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

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

[SFX: Clip of Samuel in dubbing session]

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

[SFX: French The Descendants clip]

This is from The Descendants.

[SFX: French The Descendants clip continued]

[music out]

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: Portuguese Interstellar clip]

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

[SFX: Portuguese Interstellar clip continued]

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

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

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

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

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

[SFC: Hindi Fast and Furious 6 clip]

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

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

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

[music out]

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

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

[SFX: French Transformers clip]

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

[music in]

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

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

This is a clip from Meet the Parents.

[SFX: German Meet the Parents Clip]

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

This is Taxi Driver.

[SFX: German Taxi Driver clip]

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

[music out]

[SFX: Taxi Driver clip]

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

This is from Annie Hall.

[SFX: German Annie Hall]

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

[SFX: Annie Hall clip]

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

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

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

This clip is from O Brother Where Art Thou.

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[music out]

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

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

[SFX: German “After Earth” clip]

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

[SFX: German Battleship clip]

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

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

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

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[music out]

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

[SFX: French Star Wars Phantom Menace clip]

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

[SFX: French Stars War Phantom Menace clip]

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

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

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

[music in]

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

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

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

[SFX: Montage of dubbing sessions]

[music out]

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

[music in]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

The Xbox Startup Sound: Crafting a console classic

This episode was written & produced by Rob Sachs.

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

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

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

Twenty Thousand Hertz is 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.

Sign up for Musicbed Membership music.20k.org.

Check out the SONOS Beam at sonos.com

Get a free month of Splice at splice.com/20k and enter promo code 20k.

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

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

View Transcript ▶︎

[Xbox One X Start Up]

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

[SFX : Halo 5 Sounds on Xbox One]

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

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

[SFX: Old console montage]

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

[SFX: Xbox One X Startup]

[music in]

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

[music out]

[SFX: Halo:Combat Evolved Main Menu Theme]

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

[SFX: Halo 1]

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

[SFX: Xbox Original Boot Up]

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

[music in]

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

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

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

But during college a new interest sparked.

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

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

[music out]

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

[SFX: Music from Black Knight 2000]

Eventually, Brian moved on to even more challenging projects.

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

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

[music in]

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

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

[music out]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[music in]

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

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

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

[music out]

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

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

[SFX: Sawtooth wave sound]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[music in]

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

[music out]

[SFX: Chicago Symphony]

and have 5000 lines of dialogue...

[SFX: Mass Effect 2 Dialogue]

and lots of high fidelity affects.

[SFX: Sci Fi Cinematic Charge Up]

Memory no longer became an issue.

[music in]

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

We’ll find out, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[SFX: Xbox Original Startup]

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

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

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

[SFX: Xbox 360 Boot Up]

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

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

[SFX: EA Sports audio logo]

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

[SFX: Final Fantasy Playstation Logo]

[SFX: Sonic the Hedgehog Sega Logo]

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

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

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

[SFX: Xbox 360 Kinect Commercial]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: Orchestra strings tuning up]

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

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

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

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

[SFX: Xbox startup sound breath]

[music in]

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

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

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

[music out]

[SFX: Xbox startup sound]

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

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

[SFX: Xbox One X Startup]

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

[music in]

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

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

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

[music out]

[music in]

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

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

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

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

[music out]

[music in]

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

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

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

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

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

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

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

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

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

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE