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The Seinfeld theme song w/ Composer Jonathan Wolff

Art by Zach Christy

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling .

No bass for you!! In 1987, TV composer Jonathan Wolff was still trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Then one day, he got a call from Jerry Seinfeld, who needed music for his new sitcom. This is the story behind the unforgettable music of Seinfeld, and how Jonathan Wolff’s unique approach helped make Seinfeld a TV classic.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Bit Rio by Sound of Picture
Slotcar by Sound of Picture
Reddit by Sound of Picture
Sunny Day (Instrumental) by Kylie Odetta
Swing It by Joseph William Morgan
Our World (Instrumental) by Sonny Cleveland
Nocturne in E flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2 by Will Herrington
If It Ain't Broke (Instrumental) by Sonny Cleveland

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.

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Check out SONOS at sonos.com.

Find Jonathan on Instagram and on Twitter.

You can reach Steve at stevelack.com

Check out An Arm and a Leg wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Seinfeld intro shaker]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[SFX: Seinfeld theme song]

Seinfeld is one of the most successful sitcoms of all time. During the nine years that it ran, Sienfeld had millions of viewers. It won ten Emmys, three Golden Globes, and its cast have become superstars.

Seinfeld ended over twenty years ago, but it’s still very much alive. It has a huge, obsessive fanbase, and still gets referenced all the time. It’s theme song, that we’re hearing now, was unlike any theme song that came before it, or has come after. And there’s a crazy backstory behind that wacky slap bass.

[SFX: Seinfeld theme song out]

But before we get into it, I need to tell you about my friend Steve.

[music in]

Steve: My name is Steve Lack and I am a post-production audio mixer and sound designer.

Steve and I worked together years ago when we were both sound designers at the Discovery Channel.

Steve: I consider Dallas one of my best friends. I really love Dallas.

Steve: We were both the night shift guys and we'd both come in around 6:00.

Steve: Night shift is generally unsupervised. You come in, you get your assignments, you work on your mixes, you work on your work, and then when you feel like taking a break, you take a break.

To give you a picture of what Steve’s like, he’s the type of guy who’s lived 100 different lives. Like the time he was a circus drummer and got into a fist fight with a clown. Or the time when he dropped everything moved to Trinidad. Or the time he was doing things he should’ve have been doing in a parking garage that collapsed hours later in the Northridge earthquake... yeah, Steve is easily one of my favorite people in the world.

Steve: I would wander over to his suite or he would wander over to my suite and we would talk politics or the events of the day or sound design or whatever. But we got to be pretty good friends because we had several hours of quiet time at night where we could just hang out and chat.

During one of those random late nights, Steve told me about the time he worked on Seinfeld.

[music out]

[SFX: record scratch]

Wait, what?! So apparently in the late 80s and early 90s, he’d been an assistant to a TV composer named Jonathan Wolff.

[music in]

Jonathan: When I first moved to LA, I was 17 years old.

...and that’s Jonathan. He’s composed the music for 75 TV shows, including Will & Grace, Married With Children and Who’s the Boss. But no one becomes a major TV composer overnight. Jonathan spent his first decade in LA doing musical odd jobs and making connections.

Jonathan: The studios were happy to have me, they treated me like a Swiss Army multi-purpose utility tool for musical chores, because I had good training in a wide range of fields.

But after ten years, Jonathan was ready for a change.

Jonathan: I decided that I no longer wanted to continue having the telephone dictate to me where I was going to work each day, and what I was going to do when I got there. So, I declared myself a composer.

Jonathan wrote letters to all of his Hollywood contacts. He thanked them for their support, but asked them to stop sending him these low-level musical jobs. Instead, he wanted to compose original music. This was a huge risk. It’s like an actor who’s only ever had bit parts deciding that he’ll only accept lead roles from now on. Jonathan knew he might regret it, but he mailed those letters anyway.

Jonathan: Then, I held my breath.

[music pause]

Jonathan: I may have just nuked the last 10 years of my life.

[music resume]

Jonathan: But, when those letters started arriving at their destinations, all over Hollywood, people just shrugged and said, "Well, that's too bad. He's a good utility guy." And then, they started throwing me little writing assignments, song writing assignments for their movies, and scoring assignments and that is how my composing career began.

[music out]

This is around the time that Steve got hooked up with Jonathan.

Steve: He landed Who's The Boss and he was doing some other afterschool specials and starting to really take off as a TV composer. And so he was looking for somebody to help out with MIDI tech, engineering, some orchestration and transcriptions, setting up gear and all that stuff. I wore many hats.

Gradually, more and more jobs started coming in.

Steve: We were doing Who's The Boss.

[SFX: Who’s the Boss Theme]

Steve: We did some Who's The Boss spin off shows. Some other sitcoms.

But getting connected with Jerry Seinfeld happened almost by chance.

Jonathan: It turns out, in real life, Jerry has a best friend named George. It's George Wallace, the comedian.

[George Wallace Clip: You know what makes me sick - people saying stupid stuff. I got off the airplane today, a man said to me, “My wife gonna die when I tell her I saw you.” I said, “Well don’t tell her.”]

Jonathan: George Wallace and I have been buddies for a long, long time. When Jerry Seinfeld confided to his best friend George Wallace that he was having trouble with the music for his new show, Wallace said, "Hey, call my buddy Wolff.” So, I got a phone call from Jerry Seinfeld.

Jonathan: He described to me a sound design issue. He told me that the music for his new show, which, at the time, was called, The Seinfeld Chronicles, the opening credits for that show would be Jerry, standing in front of an audience. He tells jokes…

[Standup Clip: Oscar Meyer is expanding his little area. It’s not little anymore, is it? Oscar Meyer is now a huge, monstrous place. That area, that whole section there keeps getting bigger. And for him it’s not easy to come up with new products. You realize for Oscar Meyer to come up with a new product, he has to invent meat. Folks, there is no olive loaf animal, as far as I know.]

Jonathan: People laugh.

Jonathan: That's the opening credits. And, he wanted music to go with it. I told him right away, that sounds like an audio conflict, because what we really need to hear is you telling jokes and people laughing.

Ya see, TV theme music leading into Seinfeld were these epic belting lyrical odes. Like the Golden Girls [SFX], A-Team, Family Ties, Dukes of Hazzard, or my personal favorite as an 80’s kid - Transformers [SFX]. All of these songs were designed to play in the clear, not as a device to prop up dialogue.

Jonathan: Theme music in the late eighties on TV was melodic. There was a lot of sassy saxophones…

[SFX: Facts of Life Theme: "When you’re learning the facts of life."]

Jonathan: And silly lyrics.

[SFX: Charles in Charge Theme: "Charles in charge of our days and our nights."]

Jonathan: I'm guilty of creating a lot of that kind of music, but it was not going to work in this case.

So Jonathan pitched a crazy idea: Instead of making a traditional theme song with verses and a catchy chorus, he would build music around Jerry’s standup bits.

Jonathan: So I pitched to Jerry, "How about this? How about we treat your human voice as the melody of the Seinfeld theme? Every time you do a different monologue will be a variation on the theme. My job, Jerry, will be to accompany you in a way that works well with your human voice, but does not interfere with the audio of you telling jokes."

Jonathan: “For example the human, organic nature of your human voice might go well with the human, organic nature of my human lips, tongue, finger snaps. Like this [SFX: finger snaps, mouth/tongue movements in a rhythmic way]." I had his attention, because that was music from Mars in the late eighties. Sampling was in its infancy. He said, "How's that work?"

Jonathan: And I said, "Come on over."

Jonathan had to prove he could make music that was memorable and fun, but didn’t distract from Jerry’s standup.

Jonathan: I threw it up against one of his monologues.

Jonathan: He liked what I showed him. He held the phone up to the speakers so that Larry David could hear it over the phone [SFX]. Larry liked it. That was, at that time, the entire approval process for the Seinfeld theme.

[music in]

Unfortunately, the network was less impressed.

Jonathan: There was a meeting, where they laid out some conditions. And the first thing on the list was music.

The network executives had some major concerns.

Jonathan: "What's up with the music? What is that sound? What's with the popping? What instrument is that? Can we not afford real music? It's distracting, it's weird, it's annoying."

Jonathan: When he said “annoying,” Larry David perked up. Larry, as you may know, likes to be annoying. So, I turned to our boss and huddled with him, and Larry, and Jerry and said, "Look, guys, I'll change the music, it's not a big deal.”

Jonathan: Larry David would have none of it. He just started yelling at me. He says, "What do you mean? What do mean, Wolff? Get out! You're done here. Out!" and I left the meeting because Larry David had thrown me out for suggesting that maybe we would change the music. Obviously, Larry hung tight on the music, and the music stayed in the picture. He's the hero of that story.

[music out]

So what made up this so-called “annoying” music? Let’s break it down to it’s essential parts. First up is that iconic slap bass.

[SFX: Bass fill 1]

Jonathan: At the time, slap bass was an element of funk music, buried in the mix. It had not yet enjoyed celebrity status as a solo instrument. I brought it forward, illuminated it, put it hot in the mix. It sounded kind of quirky.

[SFX: Bass fill 2]

Interestingly, these bass lines weren’t played on a real bass. Jonathan actually played them on a keyboard controller that could trigger different samples, including bass sounds.

Jonathan: It was about at that time that sampling was becoming really usable and I used Seinfeld as a proving ground for that bleeding edge technology.

To get the sound for the original Seinfeld bass, Jonathan and Steve took bass patches from two different devices and blended them together.

Steve: The actual original bass sound was a Roland D550 Popper and… a Korg M1 Slap Bass.

Steve: I think he started out with the M1 [SFX] and felt like it wasn't cutting enough, so then we added that D550 Popper in there [SFX], which had kind of more of an edge to it. And what I would do is, I would kind of get a balance between these 2 synths, while he was playing. Until we kind of just nailed exactly the right sound.

Jonathan: The bass line of Seinfeld [SFX: Seinfeld bass ling], the actual music of it, so basic, so simple, It did not require four beats to a bar, it did not require meter at all to hold water. I could stop and start the bass to make allowance for the timings of his jokes, and his punchlines, and the people laughing.

Then there are those “organic” sounds that Jonathan mentioned.

[SFX: Mouth Sounds]

Jonathan recorded these noises himself using his fingers and mouth, and mapped them to his keyboard so he could play them on the fly. Combine that with a simple shaker...

[SFX: Shaker]

These noises served as the rhythmic backbone of the Seinfeld theme. Even the tempo was set around Jerry’s comedic timing.

Jonathan: I watched Jerry's standup comedy. I noticed that he has a lyric sensibility about the way he delivers his lines. The way he moves, his choreography, his facial expressions move. There was a meter to it, that I put different clocks on. Finally, I settled in on [SFX: snaps] about 110.

[SFX: Jerry: I don’t think people think of their office as a workplace, I think they think of it as a stationary store with Danish. You know what I mean? You wanna get your pastry, your envelopes, your supplies, your toilet paper, six cups of coffee and you go home.]

Jonathan: And that seemed to work well with the metrics of Jerry's comedy. So, that became the tempo of the Seinfeld theme, in general.

A few other musical elements were used to emphasize punchlines and other key moments.

Jonathan: There was some horns... [SFX]. In Vaudeville, when someone told a joke, there'd be a rim shot [SFX]. Well, my music served the aural space of that. So, the horns would accentuate the end of jokes, and the end of the monologue itself.

Let’s listen to the opening monologue from the episode “The Mango.” Notice how the musical elements ebb and flow to match Jerry’s delivery.

[SFX: “The Mango” monologue.]

Jonathan: The idea of having to recreate a recording of the theme every episode was a new concept. I treated it like Lego music. These were elements that could be modularly manipulated to fit the individual timings and the overall length of each monologue. I knew that if this show went anywhere, I was going to have to recreate music bespoke for each monologue.

And so he did. To score an episode, Jonathan would watch and rewatch every scene, playing along on his keyboard to what was happening on screen.

Jonathan: They had to be done to picture so that the timings would be right. And so that I could maybe use some of his choreography, sometimes he would do things with his hands or his head that would give me musical instruction.

The music wasn’t just customized for the monologues, but also for the unique transitions between scenes. Like going from the terminal to the plane in the episode called “The Airport”:

[SFX: Transition 1]

Or from the cafe to Jerry’s apartment in “The Gum”:

[SFX: Transition 2]

Or when the gang ends up in a sleepy Massachusetts town in “The Finale”:

[SFX: Jazzy version]

This level of customization was completely unheard of in Hollywood.

[music in]

Most shows have one main theme song and a handful of filler tracks that get reused over and over. But on Seinfeld, every single episode is unique. It would have saved tons of time and effort to do things the normal way. But that perfectionism is exactly what makes Seinfeld feel so polished, even today.

But the main theme only scratches the surface of Jonathan’s work on Seinfeld. As the show progressed, Jonathan got to play around with a wide range of musical genres and tropes. These unique tracks underscored some of Seinfeld’s most hilarious and memorable scenes. That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

When creating the music of Seinfeld, composer Jonathan Wolff took a revolutionary approach: For each episode, he built the music around Jerry’s opening and closing monologues, and added unique transitions between scenes. This means that no two episodes are alike. Even the bass sound itself changed over the course of the show.

[music out]

Jonathan: The Seinfeld bass progressed, it evolved. In fact, there were multiple Seinfeld basses throughout the show. It became a thing around my office for my staff, to leave me gift bass samples to weave into Seinfeld cues [SFX].

It made it more fun and, for Seinfeld connoisseurs... they note how the Seinfeld bass sound changed from season to season, and from episode to episode sometimes.

As for the actual melodies, the early season transition music tends to stay a lot closer to the melody of the main theme song. Like this.

[SFX: Early Transition]

In the later seasons, the bass fills get a lot wackier:

[SFX: Later Transition]

There were also plenty of opportunities to branch out from the main theme, depending on what the script called for.

[music in]

Jonathan: About a week before an episode begins shooting, each production department receives a script, so they can prepare. Wardrobes, props, set dressing. My music editor would read the script, and database a to-do list of music pieces, and/or on-stage music assistance that this episode might need. Sometimes it's necessary to pre-produce music before they shoot the scenes. For example, when there's on-camera singing or dancing, I would need to create the music recording far enough in advance so the other departments, the actors, dancers, choreographer, director, camera crew, had time to prepare for the shoot.

[music out]

Jonathan: For example, I had to create the instrumental tracks for Jason singing “Believe It or Not, George Isn't At Home” in advance for playback during the audience shoot.

[SFX: Answering Machine]

Jonathan: Kramer's head-banging metal.

[SFX: Car song]

Jonathan: Rochelle, Rochelle: The Musical.

[SFX: Rochelle Rochelle song]

Jonathan: And Kramer's photoshoot of semi-naked George.

[SFX: Photoshoot song]

Jonathan: Also, in post is the time to create underscore music that heightens a dramatic or emotional scene, or serves as a comedic device.

Jonathan: In “The Hot Tub” episode, Elaine wanders the cold night streets, upset about her writer's block. The music is, at first, worried. Then, at the end, triumphant as she solves her Himalayan walking shoes assignment.

[Seinfeld Clip: Elaine: My back aches, my heart aches, but my feet… my feet are resilient. Thank God I took off my heels and put on my Himalayan walking shoes!]

Or the sentimental music that plays when George, and later Jerry, watch happy couples on the pier and decide to get married.

[SFX: Pier music]

Jonathan: On Seinfeld, cinematic action music with chase scenes became a thing. Jerry chasing Newman, the cable guy chasing Kramer, the geriatric bike gang chasing George, and the German tourist chasing Kramer. And that became a recurring Seinfeld comedy tradition. I always scored the Seinfeld chases in post as if they were serious, dramatic chases.

[SFX: Chase Music]

Jonathan: Same with, you know, Jerry's dream sequence, Tarantino-esque death scene in “The Baby Shower.”

[SFX: Shootout music]

Jonathan: Or, in “The Frogger,” when Jerry runs from The Lopper.

[SFX: Lopper music]

Jonathan: You get the idea. There's these moments for me to go over the top, silly, movie underscore.

[music in]

Jonathan: So, there was music in pre-production, there was music in post-production, and sometimes my duties were on set.

Because of the fast-paced filming schedule, Jonathan typically had just a single day to complete each episode.

Jonathan: In general, for a normal episode, I liked one full calendar day between receiving an episode and delivering finished music.

It was a hectic schedule, but all that hard work paid off. Seinfeld became a smash hit, and stayed that way all the way through it’s final season. The 1998 finale had 76 million viewers, making it the third most-watched finale of all time.

[music out]

Steve: It’s just such an interesting point in television history.

Steve: It's like working on Mary Tyler Moore.

[SFX: Mary Tyler Moore Theme: “You’re gonna make it after all”]

Steve: Or going back, if you worked on The Lucy Show.

[SFX: The Lucy Show Theme]

When a TV show captures a wide enough audience, it becomes a shared memory for a whole generation. A show’s theme song can be a huge part of that.

Jonathan: Often, the theme not only reflects the show's sensibilities, but also welcomes the audience by bridging the gap between the show's set and the viewer's living room.

Jonathan: I didn't write it, but the Cheers theme does that so well.

[SFX: Cheers Theme: “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name.”]

Jonathan: You really feel welcome to that show, because of the theme.

Jonathan: A TV theme like no other production element, transports you into the world of the show itself [SFX: Cheers theme]. TV themes are woven into the fabric of our personal experiences, like the soundtrack of our lives. Familiar themes, like Seinfeld, serve as pop cultural touchstones, marking times and places in our lives.

Jonathan: For me, those lifeline markers include themes like Mission Impossible…

[SFX: Mission Impossible Theme]

Jonathan: Pink Panther…

[SFX: Pink Panther theme]

Jonathan: Beverly Hillbillies…

[SFX: Beverly Hillbillies Theme: “So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Hills, that is.”]

Jonathan: For my kids, it's probably the Friends theme song.

[SFX: Friends Theme: I’ll be there for you, as you’re there for me too.]

Jonathan: People hold warm, fuzzy connections to the TV themes in their memories.

[music in]

For the millions of Seinfeld fans out there, the show’s music will always hold a special place in their hearts. So what was it like to work on something monumental?

Steve: Oh, it was great. I mean, the thing with Jonathan was, he had been in the business five or six years longer than me. I was a young guy. I was looking to break in and learn the ropes and he was just so helpful. He started many careers. Everybody who worked for him after me and at the same time I was there has gone on to big Hollywood careers… and it's all because of his mentorship and his guidance. He was really a giving person. He wasn't jealous of the success. He shared it.

Jonathan: I'm happy that the Seinfeld music became a unique identifying signature for the show. It became Seinfeld’s sonic brand. That satisfies me a lot, that even apart from the show, even when there's no picture to go with it, they recognize it as being the Seinfeld theme.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound - a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound incredible. Find out more at defactosound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound edited by Soren Begin. It was sound designed and mixed by Jai Berger and Colin DeVarney.

Special thanks to our guests Jonathan Wollf and Steve Lack. Jonathan says he loves hearing from fans.

Jonathan: The fans find me on my Instagram or Facebook. It's easy to find me. My handle is “SeinfeldMusicGuy.” If you're listening to this, and you want to reach out to me, please do. I'll respond.

You can get in touch with Steve through his website, stevelack.com.

Finally, I also love your feedback! You can reach out to me and the rest of the team over through Facebook, Twitter, or by writing hi@20k.org. Also, if you haven’t checked out our website, you’re really missing out. Be sure to check it out at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Sonic Wonderland: The world’s most incredible sounding places

Art by Zach Christy

This episode was written and produced by Fran Board.

There’s a reason we call tourists “sightseers”. As a society, we’re totally obsessed with the way things look. But our world is full of beautiful, fascinating and bizarre sounds. Join us on a sonic adventure around the world, as we climb up sand dunes, plunge into the Arctic Ocean, and even travel back in time. When we celebrate these treasures, we become better listeners and the world becomes a richer and more exciting place. Featuring Trevor Cox, author of Sonic Wonderland and Now You’re Talking.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Faded by Vesky
Flares (No Oohs and Ahhs) by Roary
Cherries by Sound of Picture
Theme in G by Sound of Picture
Little Black Cloud by Sound of Picture
Pineapple by Sound of Picture
Daydreamer by Sound of Picture
Lake Victoria by Sound of Picture
Lazy River by Sound of Picture

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.

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

Check out SONOS at sonos.com.

Check out and subscribe to Reveal wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

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

[music in]

We’ve all heard of the Seven Wonders of the World. And there’s actually a bunch of these lists. There’s the Natural Wonders [SFX: jungle atmosphere], Underwater Wonders [SFX: underwater atmosphere], Engineering Wonders [SFX: heavy machinery], and Architectural Wonders [SFX: construction site]. But what about sonic wonders?

The truth is, we are obsessed by the way things look. After all, there’s a reason we call tourists “sightseers”. But there’s a wealth of amazing sound out there that’s totally being underappreciated.

So today we’re becoming sonic tourists, and we’re going to explore some of the world’s most magical sounding places.

This adventure is inspired by the book Sonic Wonderland. Its author, Trevor Cox, started coming across interesting and unexpected sounds during his work as an acoustician.

[music out]

[music in]

The eureka moment that inspired the book came to him in an unexpected way. Here’s Trevor.

Trevor: I was down a sewer of all [SFX: Sewer atmosphere] places and heard this really strange sound effect. [SFX: Voice effect on Trevor]

Trevor heard that the sound in the sewer was spiraling all around.

[SFX: Voice effect and swirling on Dallas]

Trevor: I was both amazed as a human being, what's that sound? But as a scientist, I'm going, "Oh, what's creating that?"

Trevor: And it got me wondering about what the most amazing sounds might be in the world.

But when Trevor looked for answers, he was surprised to find that there wasn’t much information out there.

Trevor: I mean, it's interesting that there's not that many books about sound really. There’s quite a lot of books about music, but sound in general; there's a few books on silence, a few books about noisy worlds and how everything's becoming awful and noisy. But actually writing about sounds is unusual.

It turns out, we don’t tend to celebrate interesting sounds. Trevor wanted to change this, so he set out on a mission to find the most unusual and mind-blowing sounds our planet has to offer. This is how Sonic Wonderland was born.

So buckle up, [SFX] because we’re on our way to the Kelso Dune Field in the Mojave Desert to find our first sonic wonder.

[music out]

[SFX: Wind]

[music in]

You have to be a very dedicated sound explorer to experience this sound in person. The Kelso Dune Field is vast. It covers over sixty square miles and it's biggest dune is an absolute monster at 650 feet tall.

If that wasn’t daunting enough, the dunes only sing under very specific conditions. First, the sand needs to be at its driest. So, this involves visiting the desert in the height of summer.

Trevor: It's incredibly hot in the middle of summer, so it's a struggle to walk [SFX: walking in deep sand] up them to start with.

Trevor: The sand has to be really dry and it has to be just the right dune. The grains have to be all fairly similar size and have the right coating for this to work.

Then, once you’ve found the perfect sand, it needs to move. Sometimes this happens spontaneously when the wind picks up and creates these mini avalanches.

[SFX: Sand dunes singing]

[music out]

If you’re not lucky enough to be there on a windy day, you’ll need to do the hard work yourself.

Trevor was prepared for the heat, but not for trudging up and down sand dunes all day while they’re at their most slippery. He was also holding his breath to keep from ruining the recordings.

Trevor: You know when you're in the right place almost immediately ‘cause you walk on the dune, you get this weird sort of… it sounds a bit like a bad played tuba.

[SFX: sand dunes burping]

After you’ve finally made your way up, sliding down the dunes is a lot more fun.

Trevor: What you have to do is sit down in your backside [SFX], scoot down the side of the slope [SFX] and create the avalanche yourself. [SFX: sand dunes sliding] And when you do that, you can actually feel the dune vibrating under you.

[SFX: Sand sliding]

Trevor: And of course, being a desert, it's really quiet. So, it's really impressive to listen to.

Trevor: I think one of the wonders about trying to get these sounds is finding things that are unusual and out of the way and quite rare. And this is an example of quite a rare sound.

Singing sand dunes have historical significance too. Marco Polo and Charles Darwin wrote about them. And ancient texts describe how people in China would rush down the dunes as part of their dragon festivals, creating a huge roar of sound.

[SFX: Dragon sand dune roar]

So maybe in the past we were a little better at exploring sound? Trevor thinks this might be the case.

[music in]

Trevor: Partly it's because we’re visually dominated as a species, especially since writing happened, you know we conveyed lots of information for our eyes.

Trevor: In the past we've had more ways of sharing images and we've had more dependency on image for communication of information.

Before we could write, people had to listen very carefully to information. Nowadays, we can stop, pause, and rewind so it’s easier to take sound for granted.

People used to take more time to stop and appreciate sound. Trevor has even found 17th Century lists of sounds, describing different kinds of echoes. One type of echo that was written about a lot is known as a “whispering gallery.”

[music out]

Whispering galleries are great fun to explore with a friend. [SFX: Museum atmosphere] They owe their special sound to their curved shape.

Trevor: Whispering gallery effect is when you go to one side of, say a sphere or curve, and you whisper into it. And the sound whizzes around the inside of that curve to your friend on the opposite side.

[SFX: whispering on left and right]

Trevor: So, you can have lots of fun with your friends and actually make them think the sound is coming from the wrong direction.

[music in]

You can find whispering galleries around the world: The Mapparium in Boston, the US Capitol Building in DC, Grand Central Station in New York City, and St Paul’s Cathedral in London. But the most fun places are the ones that are less well-known. Because, well, they have less rules.

Trevor: When you get to religious sites you have to whisper, and it's actually much more fun to go to a place where you can really let rip and shout.

Trevor: You can go there and you can get your guitar, you can burst balloons, you clap your hands, you can whoop and you can make lots of sounds.

One place like this is an abandoned Cold War listening station in Germany that acts as a whispering gallery. It’s called Teufelsberg and sound aside, it’s quite an interesting place.

Trevor: It's up on a high hill and there's these spherical domes up there, which used to hide spy equipment.

Trevor: Teufelsberg's quite a strange place, partly because it's a health and safety nightmare. So, if you're up in the main dome, there's a great big hole missing. And a lot of the stuff is graffitied and in quite a mess.

Trevor: That's probably the most impactful aspect of going ‘round it, it is a sense of slight danger.

[music out]

Here’s Trevor talking inside the dome. Hear how his voice hugs the inside of the walls.

[SFX: Whispering gallery voice]

Trevor: [with echo from whispering gallery] It’s quite a, a weird place to talk; you can probably hear. And if I clap on the floor, bang with my foot [Trevor stomps his foot], you can hear the sound repeatedly bouncing and being focused back to me.

Of course, being an avid sound explorer that he is, Trevor’s made all sorts of noises in here. Bursting a balloon was one of his favourites.

[SFX: Whispering gallery balloon]

That reverberating noise you can hear is the sound doing laps around the dome’s curved walls, until it eventually dies away.

[SFX: Balloon reverberation dies out]

[music in]

Exploring sound is rewarding and entertaining. But there’s often more to these sounds than first meets the ear.

To find our next Sonic Wonder, we’re leaving Germany and whizzing across the ocean [SFX: airplane flying overhead] to Mexico, and the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá. You might’ve seen photographs of its iconic pyramid with steps running up each side. It’s actually one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. And its sound is pretty wonderful too.

[music out]

[SFX: Jungle atmosphere]

The sound of Chichén Itzá is no great secret.

Every year over a million people visit the ruins and, as tours reach the famous main pyramid, the guides stand a few meters back and ask everyone to start clapping their hands.

Trevor: When you clap your hands, what you get is you get a chirping sound.

[SFX: Chichén Itzá chirping clap sound]

We know from acoustic science how the noise is created. Each step gives a little reflection and these slowly space out a bit, which gives you the dip in frequency and the chirping sound [SFX: Chichén Itzá chirping clap sound continued]. But what other secrets might it unlock?

Trevor: The interesting thing about Mayan pyramids is, does it give us an insight into what our ancestors were thinking?

Trevor: Did our ancestors know about that sound? Was it done in any way deliberately? Or even if it wasn't deliberate, did they find out after they built the pyramids, "Oh, it makes this interesting sound. Let's use that in our ceremonies."

Chichén Itzá isn’t the only place in the world that makes this sound.

Trevor: You can experience this effect you get at this pyramid just by finding a staircase which is away from other buildings, which is quite rare, but you can find them, you can find them in soccer stadiums, for example.

But some acousticians believe the pyramid’s chirp is a deliberate part of its design. They say the clue lies in the sounds of the local birds.

Trevor: So, the suggestion with the chirping Mayan pyramids is that it imitates the sounds of the Quetzal bird, which is a very important ceremonial birds to Mayans.

Quetzal birds are found in the very same area of Mexico. They were celebrated by the Mayans and you can hear they do sound similar.

[SFX: Quetzal bird]

[SFX: Chichén Itzá clapping]

[music in]

So as sound explorers we can not only travel the world, but also travel back in time to hear these sounds as they would’ve been heard many, many years ago.

But our journey isn’t over. We’ll venture through dark caves, the Arctic Ocean, and mysterious towers. That’s all coming up after this.

[music out]

[MID ROLL]

[music in]

So far on our travels we’ve slid down sand dunes, explored whispering domes in abandoned spy towers, and visited the Mayan Pyramids of Mexico.

Now, we’re going underground to hear how some of the world’s most beautiful sounds come from stone.

[music out]

Luray Caverns in Virginia was discovered in 1878. [SFX: cave ambience, water dripping]

Trevor: It's the most amazing place full of most amazing cave formations.

Luray Caverns is a big space and it’s full of stalactites and stalagmites. Walking [SFX] all the way through takes about an hour, and it’s at the end of the tour when things get even cooler.

[SFX: The Great Stalacpipe Organ]

Trevor: For the acoustician, you want to get to the end of the tour where you're walking into this chamber, and there will be what looks like a church organ in the corner.

This organ is called the Great Stalacpipe Organ and it’s made by tapping the cave formations. It’s actually what we’re hearing right now.

[SFX: The Great Stalacpipe Organ continued]

Trevor: If you get the right cave formation, when you hit it with a hammer, it will make a nice sorta ‘ding’, kinda sound.

And so in the 1950’s one dedicated engineer set to work turning Luray Caverns into the world’s largest natural instrument. Now, there is a keyboard connected to 37 naturally tuned formations in the cave. And it can be played like a real traditional organ.

Trevor: He actually spent many years going around tapping the cave formations to find ones that are roughly in tune and ring nicely.

Trevor: And of course being in a cave, it's got that reverberant ethereal sort of ringing of the sound, so it is quite a wonderful kind of experience to listen to it.

No list of special sounds would be complete without at least one from the animal kingdom. There are way too many of these to choose from, so here’s a strange sound that you probably haven’t heard before.

Wrap up warm because we’re heading for the Arctic Ocean, [SFX: Wind, footsteps on snow and ice] somewhere between Norway and the North Pole. And the sounds we’re listening for won’t be heard on land.

Trevor: Some animals make the most peculiar sounds and I think of some of the most odd ones come underwater actually.

So, we’re diving in with an underwater microphone called a hydrophone. [SFX] The animal we’re listening out for is the bearded seal. They are enormous beasts with, as their name suggests, thick bristles on their faces. Here they come now.

[SFX: Bearded seal]

Yep, these weird, alien-like noises, are Bearded Seals.

Trevor: You get this most incredible sound where they sing these glissandos, a bit like I'm playing a trombone and gradually lengthen the trombone to give you a lower and lower note.

Trevor: These glissandos go on and on and on and actually they can last half a minute.

These calls are all part of an elaborate mating ritual. I mean, who wouldn’t be charmed by these sounds.

Trevor: Of course what they're trying to do is signal to a female, because he's a male calls to a female that, "Come over here, I'm the right person to, kind of, mate with." And if the females latching onto some vocal trick they've got, that vocal trick will get more and more exaggerated to be more and more appealing to the female.

The lady seals apparently couldn’t get enough of these eerie sounds, which is why they evolved into such long elaborate displays. And to add to the display, they’re also swimming round in circles and blowing bubbles.

[SFX: Bearded seal and bubbles panning left / right in circles around us]

Trevor: The glissandos presumably over evolutionary time, have become longer and longer to make them more and more impressive or that progresses singing and it's one of those signatures that they have put across to the females to get their mate.

We’ll finish our journey in Trevor’s hometown of Manchester, England, to prove that sonic wonders can be found right on your front doorstep.

[SFX: Beetham Tower]

A few miles from Trevor’s home is a skyscraper called Beetham Tower. The architects wanted it to be the tallest residential building in Europe, so to make the building a little bit taller, they included an extra decorative structure on top.

Trevor: When they first built it, they suddenly realized when the winds got really high, that it made this amazing humming sound [SFX: Tower humming] you could hear about five, six miles away. It was pretty loud.

Trevor: There's a structure on the top that the wind whistles through, and it's a bit like blowing over the top of the beer bottle.

They’d accidentally created a giant flute. Not many people enjoyed the sound, least of all the architect.

Trevor: I suppose there's a bit of schadenfreude because actually the architect owns the top flat and so it must really annoy him when it goes off as well.

The set of a UK soap opera called Coronation Street was also situated close by. Coronation Street also happens to be the world’s longest running TV soap opera. When the tower was first built the whistling frequently stopped their filming.

Eventually, this magnificent sound was considered too unruly and the building was treated to stop it being so loud. But when the winds really pick up, you can still hear Beetham Tower’s whistle. As always, Trevor goes to great lengths in his pursuit of sound. He’s gone out to record the tower on nights when the winds are particularly strong.

[SFX: Beetham Tower during a storm, thunder]

Trevor: It was storming one evening and really early hours. I got up and just about to go to bed. I thought, "No, I'm going to go make the recording." So, that was my recording trip to the Beetham Tower.

Trevor: I remember driving around in my old car, which had a sunroof, with a microphone stuck out on the top catching this sound.

[music in]

Trevor’s book has inspired a small army of sound recordists who share their unlikely finds with him all the time.

Trevor: A week doesn't go past where someone doesn't email me with another delight. This week, what was it? Someone had some recordings of piledriving of wind farms out in the North Sea, and was pointing out they were chirping.

It’s probably fair to say that for every one sound recording made in the world, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of photographs taken.

When it comes to finding amazing sounds, we’ve barely scratched the surface. It’s a huge, unexplored universe, many times right on our front doorsteps. So as a newly recruited sound explorer, your mission is to tune in, appreciate, and preserve the sounds around you.

Trevor: It could be the most rarest, the biggest, the loudest and all those kinds of things that appeal to us. Or it could just be something which is plainly very beautiful.

Sonic wonders are all around us, just waiting to be appreciated. There are all sorts of curious and poignant sounds that might simply pass us by, never to be heard again. And all we have to do to find them, is to simply open our ears and listen.

[music fades out to nature SFX montage]

[music in]

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

This episode was written and produced by Fran Board, and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin...and Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to Trevor Cox of Salford University. Be sure to buy his book, Sonic Wonderland. I have it sitting right here on my desk and it’s awesome.

If you have an episode idea, I would love to hear about it. You can tell us on Facebook, Twitter, or by writing hi at twenty kay dot org. And, by the way, if you haven’t checked out our website, be sure to do that. There you can find art, and transcripts, and all sorts of additional information. Again, that’s twenty kay dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Historically Speaking: How language & accent shape your brain

Historically Speaking.png

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.

Language is a uniquely human gift. We have shaped it to our individual and cultural needs, and it has shaped us in return. Professor Lera Boroditsky reveals how the sounds we make with our mouths influence what’s going on inside our brains. And podcaster Helen Zaltzmann shows us how important language can be to our identities, and what happens when those language identities are challenged.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Cascades by Sound of Picture
Blossoming by Sound of Picture
Many Hands by Sound of Picture
Kitten by Sound of Picture
Call Now by Sound of Picture
Dramamine by Sound of Picture
Buzzy Minuet by Sound of Picture
Saver by Sound of Picture
Light Touch by Sound of Picture
Periwinkle by Sound of Picture
Trickledown by Sound of Picture
Happiness by Sound of Picture

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

[SFX: Montage of Hello’s in different languages and voices]

Hello!

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

[music out]

[music in]

Of all the sounds that it’s possible for us to make, nothing comes more naturally than what I’m doing right now. Talking to you, in my native language. When you think about it, the noises that come out of our mouths can be strange, but they’re the basis for how we do... pretty much anything. The languages that we’ve developed to communicate with are really central to who we are, but as the world changes, many languages may be under threat.

Lera: I've always been fascinated by language.

That’s Professor Lera Boroditsky. She’s a cognitive scientist based out of UC San Diego. She’s spent her career thinking about language, and how important it is to us humans.

[music out]

Lera: Language is a uniquely human gift. There are no other creatures that have the incredible, complex system of communication that we have.

Animals do communicate of course. Birds have beautiful and complex songs that they use to attract mates and stake out territory [Birdsong SFX]. Whale calls can be heard for thousands of miles across the ocean [Whale songs SFX]. And even insects have their own code of clicks, buzzes, and squeaks made by the percussion on their hard outer shells [Insect noises SFX].

Lera: There are lots and lots of smart, clever creatures out there, but there are a couple of really important differences between animal communication and human language.

[music in]

Lera: One is the sheer size of it, so for about 15 million years of evolution, the size of the communicative repertoire of most species is about 15 to 30 different communicative signals.

That means that these animals are capable of saying a maximum of 30 different things. They might have specific noises for ‘Hey, I’m over here’ [SFX: Red fox mating call], or ‘Warning, danger approaching![SFX: Sparrow Warning of Hawk].

Lera: Whereas a 20-year-old English speaker knows about 42,000 words.

[music out]

And those 42,000 words can be combined in any number of ways to get a much finer point across. For example, we can tell the difference between having cleaned your car, and having your car cleaned. Same noises, different order, totally different meaning. Or different order, same meaning...

Yoda: “When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not, hm?”

So the size of our vocabulary is one thing that sets us apart from animals. The other difference is how we use it.

Lera: Humans are very social creatures [Chatting SFX]. Humans really like to chat. We like to chew the fat, so we like to talk about, "Oh, what do you think will happen tomorrow, and how do you feel about this?

That’s in sharp contrast to how most other animals use their language tools - they have a much more practical purpose in mind.

Lera: [Bee SFX] When bees come back to their hive and do this wonderful three- dimensional dance in the air to show other bees where the nectar is, that's amazing, but really that's all they ever talk about. They never talk about anything else, right? They don't chew the fat.

[music in]

That inclination to chat has led to us coming up with all kinds of ways of expressing our feelings, and describing the world around us. We can talk about what has happened, what might happen, what will happen, what would have, could have, should have happened. Millions of years of evolution has led to an incredibly complex communication system.

Lera: In fact, it's so complex we don't even fully understand how complex it is. There are 7,000 or so languages, spoken around the world, and there have been many more in the past.

Seven thousand languages. Considering that each one has grown from a separate community independently figuring out a unique system of communication, it’s even more incredible. Around the world, and across the history of the human species, we’ve found seven thousand ways of chewing the fat.

[music out]

Some of them sound familiar, like Shetlandic, from the small Islands north east of Britain...

[SFX: Shetlandic speaking clip]

While others are difficult for non-speakers to even get their head around. This language from South Africa called Xhosa.

[SFX: Xhosa speaking clip]

Lera: Each of these languages carries in them an incredible cultural history, all of the ideas and thoughts and adaptations that were made by generations and generations of other humans. It's an incredible human artifact, but also an incredible tool for humans to think and communicate. There's absolutely nothing like it anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Language has given us these tools for communication, which in turn have allowed us to cooperate in a way that’s unique to the animal kingdom too. Shared language is the foundation for civilization. Without it, it’s hard to see how we could organise ourselves to make towns, cities, schools, shops, or any of the stuff that sets us apart from even the most intelligent animals.

But that’s not to say that everything always runs smoothly...

Lera: George Bernard Shaw had this wonderful quote. He said, "The only problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred." We always think that we have communicated things perfectly, only to find out later, "Wait, you thought I said what? For 20 years you thought that?"

Lera: There's no achieving perfect communication, but of course the more rich the communication channel is, the more ways you can come back and verify and say, "I think you said this. Is this what you meant?"

[music in]

Another person who spends a lot of time thinking about language is my friend and fellow podcaster, Helen Zaltzmann. Helen makes a podcast called The Allusionist, which you should totally subscribe to. From her exploration of language, she’s all too aware of the power, and the limitations, of the words we use.

Helen: It's not like there's a treaty saying that, "This word means this, and it only means this, and it specifically means this." There's just this kind of tacit agreement between us that something means a certain thing, and we roughly agree on that, and that is how we communicate.

Helen: It really takes everybody to agree to that bargain, and anyone can break it at any time, and then you get chaos.

Helen: It is extraordinary that it works as well as it does.

Helen: The thing is, language is not a concrete thing. It hasn't been invented. It is something that is shaped by every human that uses the language because everyone will use it slightly differently, even without necessarily realizing it… even because our mouths sound different.

[music out]

At the most basic level it all comes down to our mouths. All languages are made up of a variety of speech sounds, called phonemes. These are noises that we make by constricting the different parts of our mouths and throat in one way or another, changing the way air flows. Changing the location of that constriction, and how much it’s closed off, will create different kinds of sounds.

Like plosives. “P” and “B” sounds are made by exploding air from between the lips. The same kinds of explosions further back in the mouth make “D”, “K”, “G”. You can literally feel your tongue touching different parts of your palette.

So, give it a try for yourself, and pay attention to where your tongue is.

Repeat after me: P, B, D, K, G.

And right at the very back of your throat, you have the glottal stop, the sudden swallowed pause you find in phrases like “uh-oh”. Try that… “uh-oh”.

Other sounds come from vibrating different parts, like “V, va” formed by teeth and lips vibrating together. Try it “vu va”. Other sounds include the nasal cavity like “Mmm” and “nnn”. Try that “MMMM” “NNNN”.

[music in]

Each of the world’s 7000 languages vary on how they use all of the sounds our mouths can possibly make.

Some use relatively few. Piraha in the Amazon region of Brazil uses just 8 consonants and 3 vowels.

[SFX: Piraha clip]

English uses a large set of 44 phonemes, with an unusually large number of vowels. The following sentence uses all the English phonemes:

[SFX: English phonemes clip]

But English isn’t the most diverse. The Taa language from southern Africa has more than 100 phonemes, including many unique types of click.

[SFX: Taa clip]

Now, if you try to imitate a language like that, you’re likely to struggle. If we’re not used to certain phonemes from experience with our own languages, we may have difficulty in finding the right place to form the sounds in our mouths. This is an issue even between American and British English.

[music out]

Helen: I just find my own mouth so incredibly limited phonetically. I can't even say things in American, you know, the rhotic 'R,' which is a great difference between American English and British English. My mouth doesn't have the muscles to do it. It's such a shame. You just take it for granted. You can throw it out whenever you want.

Around the rough and rugged rocks, the ragged rascal ran… ruh ruh ruh, ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh.

Helen: My husband's name is Martin. When he introduces him in America, they're like a little... it's a little hard for Americans to understand when he introduces himself. I mean, how would you say it? Martin.

I’d say Martin, but I’d feel like that was probably wrong.

Helen: There's no wrong. Don't go around saying your way is wrong.

Aw, thanks.

Helen: It’s just different.

So, Helen has first-hand experience with how we use English on a daily basis. As part of Lera’s research, she studies how speech sounds vary between different languages.

Lera: English distinguishes "R" sounds from "L" sounds, so "R" and "L" sound really different to us English speakers, but this isn't a meaningful distinction in Japanese. Japanese speakers have a really hard time telling the difference between "R" and "L," because that's just not a distinction that exists in the Japanese sound system.

[SFX: Lost In Translation Roger Moore Clip]

Even within a language, the phonemes can get warped and twisted to produce an almost infinite variety of accents. And it’s a topic that many people feel very strongly about.

Lera: The way you pronounce things, the accent that you carry, carries so much information about your identity. I grew up speaking Russian as my native language, English is my second language, and the way that I speak English to most people just sounds like a normal American accent. If people meet me and they don’t know that I grew up in Russia, if they find out say, two weeks later, they feel very suspicious about me because they can’t hear my accent and they feel like there’s something I’m hiding. So we really take accents to be a great indicator of who a person is, where they’re from. We expect to get a lot of information from it.

It’s kinda inevitable that with language so central to our personal and cultural identity, it becomes more than just a tool for communicating. It comes to define us, and we shape it to our needs. But, as Lera has discovered, the language we use also shapes us in return.

Lera: Languages talk very differently, even about very basic things, about space, time, number, colors, causality, basic things that you would need to name the rainbow or count your fingers or do the hokey pokey.

Lera: For example, some languages don't use words like "left" and "right" and instead put everything in cardinal directions like north, south, east and west. Like Guugu Yimithirr.

[SFX: Guugu Yimidhirr sample clips]

Lera: This is a language spoken in Australia ... even talking about body parts would involve words like "north," "south," "east" and "west," so you'd say, "There's an ant on your southwest leg."

It turns out that using language in this way had a surprising effect on the minds of it’s speakers.

Lera: People who speak languages like this actually stay oriented incredibly well, better than we used to think that humans could.

If I asked you to point to North right now, could you do it? It might take you a moment or two to orient yourself, but the Guugu Yimithirr speakers could do it without hesitation, even in an unfamiliar place.

[music in]

In many ways we’re the sum of the languages we use. We use our words to describe our feelings, or medical conditions, our environment. And the words that we choose to use shape our own minds and our identities.

Lera: For example, are you the kind of person that uses words like "simpatico" or "serendipitous," or are you the kind of person that only uses "literally" to mean literally and not as an intensifier?

Lera: We strongly identify with people who speak our languages. We feel a lot more comfortable around people who we can understand. It's a real marker of identity.

So, language shapes us as individuals and can define a culture. But cultures change, and right now we’re changing faster than ever. What will that mean for communities’ characteristic sounds? Can language move with the times, or are we facing a mass linguistic extinction? We’ll find out, after this.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

The simple sounds that we make with our mouths are one of the major things that set us apart from animals. The words that we use shape our brains, and are the core of our self-identity.

[music out]

Lera: Human language is infinite, because you can keep recombining words in new ways and create new sentences that you haven't heard before. It allows you to infinitely recombine and make new things, basically every time you speak.

Like the recombination of genes leads to evolution in nature, recombination of words eventually leads to linguistic evolution.

Lera: Languages are tools that we craft to suit our needs, and so we have the ability to change things that we find distasteful or not useful anymore in our language.

That's how languages always have changed, is people negotiate with each other about how they're going to talk, in a way that best suits the way they want to think and the world that they want to live in, and so, just a reminder that languages are these living things that we craft and have the ability to change if we want.

Helen: There are words being invented or added all the time, or the meaning is changed because new things are happening.

Every year, new words are added to the dictionary, that sharply reflect our changing world. Recently, the Oxford English dictionary added the word “exomoon”, a moon orbiting a planet that orbits a different star to our own. Because that’s a thing we know exists now, which is pretty cool.

Helen: People are very often resentful of the new linguistic terms, and yet that is a process that has been happening ever since language was first uttered. None of the terms were born at the dawn of time. All terms have been invented at some point, and, you know, didn't used to need a word for airplane, and came up with one when airplanes were invented.

In this way, slowly, gradually, what we consider to be OUR language transforms beneath our noses.

[music in]

If you go back in time, the subtle changes in the way our words sound, and how they’re used really add up. This concept is outlined really well in a youtube video from Simon Roper. The video is called ‘The Evolution of English’.

Here’s Simon reading a passage from Charles Dickens in 1860:

Simon: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”

Pretty recognisable, for about 160 years ago. Now let’s rewind another 250 years to Early Modern English and the time of Shakespeare:

Simon: “To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and, by opposing them, end them.”

We can still understand that, but just 100 years earlier, people were speaking Middle English, which is suddenly very different.

Simon: “My name ys Parott, a byrde of Paradyse, By Nature devysed of a wonderowus kynde....”

And if we keep going back in time, about 1000 years ago, the Lord’s Prayer in Old English sounds completely foreign.

Simon: “Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod, to becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa, on heofonum.”

We can go even further... you have proto-Germanic, and Proto Indo-European, which was spoken about 4000 years ago. It’s thought to be the ancestor of all European languages.

Simon: “Gheuter tim regm eweukwet “Ihxgeswo deiwom Werunom”.

[music out]

Helen: I think English is an extremely interesting language because it combines so many other languages. It's very unusual.

The English language has come to reflect the long and complicated history of Britain itself.

Helen: 2,000 years ago, the Romans invaded, they added Latin to the mix. And then, Germanic forces invaded. They added their own stuff. Vikings, and then 1066, the French invaded, and they not only brought French, they brought a different form of Latin… And then, added to all that, you have got all of the words that came into English because of Britain's… very enthusiastic is the euphemism I might use, colonization of the rest of the world.

Britain is an island nation, so has always had a strong navy and from the 16th Century, ships sailed far and wide, discovering and colonizing as they went. At its height at the beginning of the 20th Century, the British Empire encompassed almost a quarter of the world’s population, and land area.

Helen: They took concepts and items from other countries, and they brought the names back with them. There was a lot of linguistic interchange.

Like “pajamas”, which was originally a word to describe the baggy trousers worn by Indian muslims. Or the word “Jungle”, morphed from the Hindi term “jangal”, meaning a dense growth of trees.

[music in]

Now, the British Empire is no more, but the English language is still spoken by two BILLION people, more than a quarter of the world’s population. It’s the most widely spoken language in the world, and has been for some time.

And that’s because while the British were bringing home new words, they were also leaving their own language behind.

Helen: English was firstly taken around the world, and often asserted over whatever local languages there were.

Helen: So it was a language of power, and that also might have incentivized people to use it because it is somewhat asserting power or claiming power, or at least attempting to, or communicating with people of power.

Helen: Then it becomes self sustaining because other countries think, "Okay, well if I want to deal with things internationally, I should get on board with what other people can speak." The more countries that do that, the more English is chosen as the international language of, for instance, science.

So for now at least, English is firmly embedded in the cultures of many countries.

[music out]

Helen: I think it's an extremely interesting language, but it's also very problematic because it has linguistically colonized so much of the world, and wiped out a lot of languages whilst doing it. So, I love it, but I also feel a lot of pain about what it has done.

The loss of language is something that we’ve become more aware of in recent years. Linguists claim that we’re losing languages at a rate of one every two weeks. They predicted that half of the world’s 7000 or so languages will be extinct in the next century.

The tragic thing is, we probably won’t even realize they’re gone.

Helen: Because there are also a lot of languages that have no written record, because they would have been oral languages. If there's no physical record of the language, then once it's lost and everyone's dead, and it was pre-recordings… you don't even know what is gone.

[music in]

In many cases, the loss of language is an unintentional consequence of globalisation. But sometimes it can be a little more sinister.

Helen: What happens when you have a language that is quite specific to your geographical region, or to your race, or to your culture, and then you're not allowed to use it. You can lose a huge amount without language. Not only this collective memory and certain things which would be specific to you and the other people who use the language, and there may not be words for it in other languages, because they wouldn't necessarily need them.

Since the language we speak defines our self identity, and our cultural identity, suppression of that language can mean a direct suppression of a cultural group.

[music out]

Helen: For example, the Scots language…

This is a clip from a Ted Talk from Michael Dempster:

[SFX: Scots language clip]

Helen: Which people in Scotland, a lot of them will speak at home, and then they would get to school, and they would be physically punished if they used it. There's a huge amount of shame attached to it. Then, a lot of them would never use it again, or they wouldn't realize that it was actually a language that was very widespread amongst people in Scotland. They might think, "Oh, this is just slang we use in our house, and I mustn't use it anywhere else."

But it’s not all bad news, with a strengthening of the Scottish identity, there’s more widespread support for the language.

Helen: There's been a lot of campaigning to try and revive Scots, and make it more visible. It is an official language now in Scotland, but there are people who are my age or younger who were beaten at school for using it and it's very hard to remove that wiring in your brain. It's such a big thing representing your culture, and your feelings about that culture, and your ways to express it.

The global world of international language is not always easy to navigate, and people haven’t always got it right in the past. But finally we’re waking up to the value of our languages, and what they can tell us about ourselves.

Helen: I think at the root of my interest in language is empathy, because language is so individual to the person who's using it.

Helen: They might not be using it in ways that I think they are, because I only have my subjective experience, and then some academic knowledge of other people, and anecdotal knowledge. I can't truly know what someone else is thinking about, but being aware of the different possibilities of language is one of the few ways available to me to understand someone else's thoughts.

[music in]

If we can understand the power of language, then we can be more conscious about the way we use it.

Helen: It's a very, very complex instrument. To use it thoughtlessly can be very hurtful. It can be dangerous, or misleading. Also, you can use it in a very positive way, if you know how to. You can use it to be very kind, or to really expand your horizons, or other people's horizons.

Not only is it helping us connect with other people around us, it’s the key to making us who we are, as individuals, as cultures, and as a species.

Lera: Language is really part of the human essence. The more we understand about human language, the closer we get to what is really unique about the human species, and how we come to be so incredibly smart and sophisticated as we are. The fact that we have so many languages is a real testament to the incredible ingenuity and flexibility of the human mind, that human minds are able to invent not just one way of looking at the world but 7,000 ways…

Lera: That tells you just how much capacity and creativity human minds have, beyond what we're used to in our own languages and cultures, just how much more we're capable of.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team creating the sonic palette of the world’s most thoughtful brands. Find out more at Defacto Sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound edited and sound designed by Soren Begin, it was mixed by Jai Berger.

Thanks to our guests, Professor Lera Boroditsky and Helen Zaltzmann. Lera continues to research, write, and present on how language helps to make humans so smart. You can follow her work on twitter: @leraboroditsky.

The Allusionist is Helen’s podcast about language, and it’s absolutely fantastic. Be sure to subscribe by searching for The Allusionist. That’s Allusion with an A.

Thanks also to Simon Roper, for the samples of English through the ages, you can find more fascinating stuff on his YouTube channel - just search for Simon Roper.

Gregory Corlett named this episode. If you’d like to help name future episodes, follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Finally, if you haven’t checked out our website, you’re really missing out! You can find all sorts of things, full transcripts of the show, Youtube videos, and links. You can check that out at twenty kay dot org. That’s two-zero and the letter k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Vroom Vroom: The symphony of high-performance engines

Vroom, vroom.png

This episode was written and produced by Nick Spradlin.

When was the last time you turned off your radio and just listened to your car? What’s really going on under the hood? We chat with our own Nick Spradlin about the simple force at the heart of every gasoline engine and talk with legendary recordist Watson Wu about how the sound of wild and powerful sports cars are captured.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

The Zone by Makeup and Vanity Set
HWY 103 Traveling Trail by Makeup and Vanity Set
Everytime (instrumental) by Chair Model
HWY 101 Ancient Archives by Makeup and Vanity Set
Got the Feeling (instrumental) by Juliet Roberts
Dusk by Kyle McEvoy
Hideout (instrumental) by Kingslynn

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

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

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: V8 Engine Start]

[music in]

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

[SFX: Car montage]

For the last century our society has been car crazy. Here in the US, the average person spends 220 hours each year, just driving to work and back.

Now, I’m the type who likes to drown out the sounds of my car with music and podcasts. But there’s a lot of sonic stuff going on under the hood. I’ve also met so many people who absolutely adore the sounds that a car can make. Now, I’ve neer been much of a car enthusiast myself. I don’t know why… I love sound and it seems like a natural fit. So, right now is the time for me to finally get to the bottom of this and figure out why the sounds of car engines can be so visceral to so many people. If you’re a skeptic like me, this is especially for you. First things first, I really need some help. Luckily we have a resident car enthusiast right here in the office. Nick Spradlin. Hey Nick!

Nick: Hey, Dallas.

[music out]

So, tell me… How did you come to enjoy the sound of a car engine?

Nick: You know, I started by just liking cars. When I was a kid, I was at a car show with my dad every weekend, I was just always around them. You can't help but notice the sound of a powerful car when you go to a hot rod show or any kind of car show. You're standing there just watching the cars parade by and one comes by, and it's just like thundering [SFX: Hot rod engine rev] and just feels so powerful. It's so visceral and alive sounding. As a car person, you just enjoy that. I think later in life when I became a sound professional, I started to think about where those sounds were coming from and understood it in a little bit different way.

So you're a sound designer, and I'm a sound designer - What have I been missing out by not being this car enthusiast?

Nick: I think we have to start from a place of if an engine is the soul of a car, or the heart of a car, then the sound of the engine is the voice of the car, and you can learn things and understand things about that car by the sound of it, [SFX: Race cars pass by] the way that it changes gears and revs up and revs down [SFX: Race cars pass by]. So as a sound designer, I think that's where it is for us. We do a car advertisement, or we do car sound design for a movie or a game, and we just use that to make it sound exciting, to reach out and grab you. And I think the average person can just understand that because it's like a voice.

I think the most basic question is I have no idea what actually makes the sound of a car. My entire mechanical history is limited to like changing my oil when I was a teenager, so I don't even know how a car makes a “blugblublubgblug" sound. On the most basic level, can you explain that?

Nick: Yeah, the most basic thing is explosions [SFX]

Explosions. [SFX]

Nick: Explosions. [SFX]

Like every single [SFX: Car idling], is that an explosion? [SFX]

Nick: Yeah, basically.

Okay...how in the world does that work?

Nick: So “engine” is the short name and the real name for it is “internal combustion engine.”

Internal explosions. [SFX]

Nick: Yeah, it means exactly what it sounds. Things are combusting internally in the engine.

Ok...

Nick: So you have gasoline in your tank [SFX: combustion engine cycle] and then a pump will take that gasoline and turn it into vapor and it will spray that gasoline mist into a cylinder. And then a piston will move up, compress that gas, spark plugs do their thing and they set that gasoline on fire. It makes a big explosion, but in a tiny space, so it just causes that piston to slide downward again. Then, they're all connected together, so one explosion in one cylinder causes another piston to move and then the whole sequence starts again. [SFX: Repeat cycle and speedup] You have a car with a V6 if I remember right?

Yea, I think I have a sticker on the back of my Toyota that says V6.

Nick: It means there are 6 pistons inside of that. So once all six have exploded [SFX], that's one revolution, so that's an RPM.

Now, is that the RPM, each individual explosion [SFX] or is it the six cycle?

Nick: Every six makes one RPM, one revolution. And then you measure that every minute, so revolutions per minute.

Okay, so six cycles pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop [SFX: Cartoon car engine], is my one RPM, but then I have a little dial on my car that says RPMs and it pops faster [SFX: cartoon car engine] and higher when I push down the gas.

Nick: Yeah.

So what's happening there?

Nick: So when you add more gasoline into the cylinder, you'll get a bigger explosion [SFX] and that will cause the engine to run faster. [SFX]

Oh, so that's how you go.

Nick: Yeah. that's why it's called a gas pedal. You're just pushing more gas into the engine.

That sounds terrifying. So basically, three or feet in front of us we have a ton of explosions [SFX] going off?

Nick: Yes, Let's figure out how many explosions [SFX] that is. You have a V6 and say it idles at 1,500 RPM?

Let's say that...

Nick: So every minute, if you're just sitting at stoplight, every minute there are 9,000 explosions [SFX] in your car in front of you

[SFX: tape stop]

Nick: Hey all, this is Nick from the future. After we first aired this episode, I realized I got my math wrong, and the real number is actually half that. In a V6, there are 4,500 explosions every minute at 1,500 RPM.

Nick: Basically I got excited telling my story to Dallas, and forgot about the exhaust cycle. What happens is, the piston will move 1 more time and push the exhaust out of your tail pipe. But there’s no explosion then.

Nick: And I want to say a quick thank you to all of our awesome listeners who wrote in to help me get this right.

Nick: Anyway, back to the story.

[SFX: tape start up]

Why don’t… H-How does… How does the engine keep the whole thing from just exploding [SFX] everywhere?

Nick: It's made of steel. It's just really strong, so people don't have to be scared of that. They're safe to drive.

Okay…Okay, so my Toyota sounds terrible. [SFX] How come it doesn't sound cooler with the pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop? [SFX] How come that and then another six-cylinder luxury car [SFX], one sounds very pleasant, and the other one sounds like white noise? [SFX]

Nick: It's been designed that way. So, for a car that is just meant to get you around town, it doesn't need to be very powerful, it needs to not annoy your neighbors, so they put a muffler on there that makes it more quiet.

Except for that one person who decides to take the muffler off and annoy everyone. [SFX: junky car]

Nick: Right. That happens. Like, you'll get to a stop light, and you'll hear a car that's just so loud…

Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop...

Nick: ...and you look at it and it doesn't look very nice, it's just a really loud car. [SFX: car speeds away]

It's always a not nice one.

Nick: Yeah, and that's just somebody who is equating loud sounds to performance, which is not true.

Okay, so those are our everyday, household type of get around town cars. So, to go to the other extreme, I'm thinking like NASCAR and it sounds like vroom ,vroom [SFX: NASCAR whoosh past]. What's happening there?

Nick: Take the same basic way that your car works and max it all out. NASCAR runs on a V8, and it’s run at 9,000 RPMs constantly, they're going 180 miles an hour, just at the limit. They never slow down. Those cars also don't have a muffler on them. They're really loud and then they go really fast, so that vroom [SFX] sound is just a factor of them going past you so fast and if you were just on the car, it's just a continual loud roar from the engine. [SFX]

So a V8... times 9,000 RPMs, is 72,000 explosions [SFX] per minute.

Nick: Yeah, per one NASCAR.

[SFX: tape stop]

Nick:Hey it’s Nick from the future again. Same deal here, take half that number. So it’s actually 36,000. Thanks!

[SFX: tape start, multiple NASCARs zoom past]

[SFX: multiple NASCARs zoom past]

It's starting to come together for me for the first time ever in my entire life. Now, let's go to another direction, like drag racing. A drag race car doesn't sound like vroom [SFX: NASCAR zoom past].

Nick: Yeah. You're talking about when the cars are getting ready to go?

Definitely when it's starting because then you have “blugblublubgblug” [SFX].

Nick: Yeah.

Then, you see the thing go to red, and it goes “blugblublug!” [SFX]. Like, sometimes you'll see fire coming out of the engine. Are those just bigger explosions?

Nick: I'm glad you brought up drag racing because cars that are purpose built for drag racing are some of the most insane cars in the world. Like a Top Fuel dragster doesn't even run gasoline. It runs nitro methane.

That sounds dangerous.

Nick: It's so dangerous. If you look at a Top Fuel dragster, there are these giant straps that go around the engine and hold it together because sometimes they do just blow up. [SFX]

Are drag race cars like a monument to our human arrogance?

Nick: You could say yes, but you could also say they're a monument to our ingenuity.

So it's like as far as we can go before we literally explode an engine, we're going to do that with a drag race car.

Nick: Yeah.

Okay, so we have normal cars, we have NASCAR, we have drag race - what other types of cars make interesting sounds?

Nick: Do you know what a Formula One car sounds like?

I know a Formula One car looks like a hammerhead shark at the front.

Nick: Okay.

I know this is sad, even as a sound designer, in my mind it sounds like a NASCAR car, but I know that that's wrong and you're disapproving right now. How does it actually sound?

Nick: Well... you're not wrong, I guess. I mean...

[SFX: Formula 1 cars racing by with Dallas’ own interpretation]

Nick: That was perfect ...the reason that it sounds different, but kind of similar, is because it's the same basic principle of explosions [SFX] happening. But, the shape of all of the parts of the engine on the inside will change how the explosion [SFX] sounds. That's what gives each car its voice is that they're all made a certain way and the more you learn about cars, the more you can identify which parts are being used by the sound of the car. In a Formula One or any road race, you're going to hear the car shifting up through the gears and down through the gears a lot more often. [SFX: Formula 1 car shifting gears]

These are different engines inherently. Right?

Nick: Yeah.

How does that affect the engine sounds?

Nick: Formula One now is actually a hybrid, so they have a combination of electric motors, turbochargers, and a V6 engine. [SFX] They kind of sound futuristic in a way. I like the sound of them and that might not be a popular opinion. I think a lot of the people really prefer the older Formula One engines, which were V12s. [SFX] So after these cars are done driving, they'll take them back into the shop and hook it up to a computer and the computer can kind of drive the engine to do all these diagnostics tests [SFX: engine testing]. And also, kind of a party trick that some of the Formula 1 teams were doing for a while was programming in songs into the engine. So the engine would change RPM and hold it there, just like you would do with a musical note.

[SFX: Formula 1 engine playing “God Save the Queen”...]

Oh that’s a real engine? That’s not just the computer simulating it?

Nick: Correct.

[SFX: Formula 1 engine playing “God Save the Queen” continues]

Wow ok so… we're going to veer towards sound design. Obviously, we work together, you're a sound designer. Do you hear cars on television or in films and stuff that just don't match the proper car and how does that make you feel?

Nick: Yes. I definitely hear that. It doesn't make me mad at anybody, but it just makes me feel off-balance and takes me out of the moment of whatever I'm watching because they're sounds that are so familiar to you and when you hear it wrong, it just really sticks out. There is some leeway there. As a sound designer, I know that sometimes you just want a really exciting car sound. That's more important than absolute realism.

[music in]

And cars change every single year, so it's just an ongoing progression of changing sounds, better manufacturing techniques, like things are going to change continuously, so you need someone who specializes in that because there's just this giant wealth of car sounds that need to be captured.

Nick: There are people who specialize in recording cars. So like in the movie Baby Driver, they're hopping in and out of all these different kinds of cars and they recorded that real car to do the stunts, so it sounds both authentic and larger than life.

Maybe I should talk to the person who recorded that car.

Nick: That sounds like a great idea.

Who did that?

Nick: ha I could tell you...but it’s the perfect time to take a little break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

So to break it down, the sound of a car is basically made by a ton of explosions. [SFX] Albeit small, controlled, and ...”safe” explosions [SFX]. For myself, and the other sound designers at Defacto Sound, it’s critical to understand how car sounds work. And how they are recorded. So with that in mind, I reached out to one of the worlds best automotive recording engineers.

Watson: My name is Waston Wu. I am a sound effects producer and sound effects recording artist.

Watson is something of an ‘Audio Stuntman.’ When you hear an amazing car in a movie you might think that’s how it sounded on the set. But a movie set is a busy place. It’s almost impossible to get a good audio recording of anything, so the cars especially have to be added later.

[music out]

Watson: People come to me for the extreme sounds. Things that are loud [SFX: Jet Plane], too hard to manage. [SFX: WWII Fighter Plane] Such as weapon fire, loud cars [SFX]. It is a very small, small niche. Only a very few of us can control those sounds and record in a pleasant way [SFX: Ford GT500] you can hear them rather than just loud distortions. [SFX: car sounds distorting].

Watson: I had to go through a lot of recording equipment, a lot of different microphones to find what works and what doesn’t work. Just to manage all those really loud, harsh sounds.

[music in]

Watson travels around the world recording sports cars, weapons, roller coasters, and tons of other unique things.

Watson: What I do, it's not glamorous as you would think. It's a lot of sweating. It's a lack of sleep. It's a lot of hurry up and wait, a lot of flying with heavy gear, but I just love to capture great sounds.

But Watson didn’t originally set out to make sound effects.

Watson: Early on, I was involved with music and got good enough that I was offered a scholarship to continue my practice. I found out that writing music was my strong point, so I started writing more music. And then my client asked me, "Can you also do sound effects?" I had already owned gear and I always loved recording so I designed the sounds, I recorded them, edited them. It got me thinking, "I like this". So I just kept going job after job leading up to working on AAA titles, games, working on movies like Baby Driver.

[music out]

[SFX: Baby Driver clip]

Baby Driver was nominated for an Oscar in both sound categories. The main character is always listening to music as he drives, so the director wanted the music and sound effects to be perfectly synchronized together.

[SFX: Baby Driver clip continues]

It’s an awesome movie and I recommend you check it out. Especially if you’re into sound.

[SFX: Baby Driver clip continues]

Watson was hired to record all of the vehicles in the movie so that the sound editing team would have the best materials to work with. A ton of planning goes into a car recording session. It’s important to record the cars performing exactly the same moves that are happening on screen.

Watson: A lot of times I'm given a shot list of what to record and depending on it's a movie or a game, so movie I do according to what you see, it's linear, so I might have to do the same shot again and again. And in a game I have to do basically everything possible.

That includes the usual forwards and backwards, but also particular gears and specific RPMs. Game developers also need some special sounds to program a virtual car that you can drive.

[SFX: Audi R8 engine start]

Watson: What they call a ramp, put the car in gear and drive it smoothly up to the redline [SFX: engine revs peak] and then smoothly break down to a complete stop [SFX: engine stops]. Those are the most important moments in a car recording session.

In a normal car, Watson sits in the passenger seat with all of his recording gear. But many race cars only have 1 seat. And that presents some interesting challenges for recording.

Watson: For NASCAR, we had to record an actual race car and that is a very loud beast so put some of my best microphones on and inside of vehicles while the vehicle was going 9,000 RPM 190 miles per hour on the track. [SFX NASCAR zoom past] Every time the car would come back [SFX] I would have to hit stop, swap memory cards [SFX] and copy the sound files to my laptop. [SFX] And during the review I could then walk over, adjust the levels on my recorder inside a car, hit record [SFX] and let the car go again. [SFX] And we did that all day long until I was satisfied with what I've captured. [SFX: NASCAR zoom past]

Selecting the right microphone is essential. But choosing where to place them makes an even bigger difference. Cars are so large that they sound different depending on where you’re listen from.

Watson: [SFX: Car start] The onboard sounds is what the driver and passenger hears. [SFX] What we hear in front of us typically it's the engine [SFX] and then behind us is the exhaust sounds. [SFX] So I would put microphones in those areas, and right above the driver. [SFX] So that at all times I could dial in and listen to each of those areas.

The engine also has many different areas that contribute to the sound.

Watson: I use the firewall area to get close as possible to the engine block. [SFX] And then sometimes I put the mic into the air intake box so you get those sucking sounds as you floor the gas pedal. [SFX] And sometimes I'll put the mic really close to the super charger if it has one to get that high pitch belt driven sound [SFX] like you hear with a Dodge Hellcat. If you put two of the different brands of microphones for the exhaust, [SFX] they usually will sound different from each other. [SFX] You could use one or the other or a mix of both to enhance the car sound.

All these different perspectives really add a lot to the realism of a video game or movie.

Watson: If you're playing a racing game, you could change the camera angle so that you're looking at a third-person view of the car [SFX] then you're hearing more exhaust sounds from that point of view. And when you go back to the first-person [SFX] as the driver inside a vehicle you might hear a little more of the engine mixed into it.

Watson: Certain games if you win the race you win fictitious money [SFX: Game winning chime] and you could take that money and enhance your engine, enhance your exhaust. And then when you do afterwards you get on the road, [SFX: Cheesy car game upgrade sound] your car then sounds meaner, more like a beast so that's why we had to use a lot of channels, just in case they do modifications in the game.

[music in]

Tires are the only part of a car to actually touch the road. Sound designers can use tire sounds to let you know the car is sliding [SFX] or doing a sweet drift. [SFX] But to get the sound of high performance tires without a roaring engine is tough.

Watson: I hired a guy who has a Tesla, electric car, and this guy is a very professional driver. So I got him to do all kinds of stunt driving just to get the pure tire sounds without the exhaust sounds of a conventional car, the engine sounds leaking into the recording. We had to get burnouts [SFX], skids [SFX], drifting, cornering [SFX].

Watson: The driver is the actor. So the driver has to be very patient, very skilled and willing to do anything to get a great sound.

[music out]

Car recording sessions can actually be dangerous for the sound recordist. Imagine standing close to the side of the road while a sports car drives past you at high speeds [SFX] ...dozens of times [SFX] ...until you get the perfect take. [SFX] You have to place your own safety in the hands of the driver.

Or think about microphone in a hot engine compartment. [SFX: Engine revving] If you place it wrong it could literally melt. [SFX: Sound reduced to static] And there are dozens of other potential hazards.

[music in]

Watson: Let's see, how many microphones have I broken? Anything water related has to be last because when you're done with water, you're done. All the microphones are wet. The wind jammers to block the wind, they're all soaked and potentially your microphones will stop working. Instead of waiting for rain for a wet road, I rented a water pump and pumped water on to the street where I could control the situation. While we were doing the skids I pumped up some water but just enough that we could do slight skids because if you pump too much water onto the road, and you hit the brakes, what happens? You hydroplane, [SFX] which is not good, you're out of control and that's it, this session is over. It's something you'll learn from past experience and talking to people who do stunts. Control the situation.

[music out]

Watson has recorded literally hundreds of cars all around the world. And he makes safety a priority in every recording session. So these sessions happen on race tracks and closed roads away from traffic, but he also has a special recording location all to himself.

Watson: Not far from where I live is what I call my top secret road. I've recorded over 200 cars there. All kinds. Motorcycle, muscle cars, Ferrari's, Bentley. You have smooth asphalt, not so great roads, roads with reflectors to go over, grass, dirt, a little bit of gravel. It's in the middle of nowhere. The longest stretch of road, it's like two miles long. And I like how wide it is so that you could see if anything's coming towards you or not. So it's very safe.

Still, sometimes audio recording does draw some extra attention.

Watson: I'm probably going to get myself in trouble. I've actually met a few very kind law enforcement officers and while we're recording we're just doing simple stuff, maybe driving 20 miles per hour and they ask, "What are you doing?" And I said, "Well, I'm doing a recording session of this car." And I show them my equipment and they say, "Very good, carry on." And so I just keep going.

Watson: I was recording ambient sounds in Sarasota [SFX: City sounds] some years ago and apparently somebody called on me and said there was a suspicious looking guy with equipment. I knew the look when they were walking towards me and I said, "Well, hello officer. I'm recording sounds of this place." He says, "What? What are you doing?" I said, "I'm recording sounds. I'm recording sounds of the ambience of what it sounds like in this downtown area." So, I show him my equipment and we had a nice chat. And he said, "Yeah, somebody called and we had to check it out." I said, "Good, good. If I saw me I would check me out, too.”

[music in]

The sound of an internal combustion engine has defined a century of automotive history. But race cars retire, new cars come out, and old technologies go away. How we define the sound of a car now will eventually change. Probably sooner than we think. This is a reminder that sound comes and goes without us thinking about it. And zooming out beyond cars, it’s important for us to capture the sound of everything. Sound is incredibly temporary. It’s created, then it’s gone. But with a recording, we can hold on to that history forever.

Watson: I wish I had a recording of my mother when she was alive a long time ago. I remember what she said but I can't recall how she sounded like? What if you had a recording of your grandmother or your grandfather or their parents? If you had something, not just video, but if you have video with sound it becomes very personal. I think sound is documenting what has happened in the past. It’s almost like being a historian.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound incredible. Check out some of our car sound design at defactosound.com.

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

An enormous thanks to Watson Wu. Be sure to check out his website watsonwu.com. Also, a huge thanks to our own Nick Spradlin for writing, producing, editing, sound designing and mixing this episode.

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

Special thanks to Cary Webb from Facebook and Matt Gore from Twitter for helping to name this episode. If you’d like to help name episodes, and keep in touch with me between episodes, go follow our Facebook and Twitter pages. You can find those at facebook.com/20korg and twitter.com/20korg. And, you can always write us by email, at hi at 20k d org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Baby Shark: From summer camp song to viral earworm

Artwork provided by Benjamin Frisch.

Artwork provided by Benjamin Frisch.

This episode originally aired on Decoder Ring.

Baby Shark is a mega viral YouTube video, an unstoppable earworm, a top 40 hit, a Eurodance smash, a decades old campfire song, and the center of an international copyright dispute. In this episode from the podcast Decoder Ring, we explore the strange history of the song, what makes it so catchy, and who it really belongs to today.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Coast Highway by Sound of Picture
Boop by Sound of Picture

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View Transcript ▶︎

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

[music in]

If you have toddlers or young kids, you knew from the moment you read the title what this show is about… and frankly, I’m kind of worried you’re not listening right now because of it. But if you did decide to tap the play button, I want you to know that you’ll be glad you did.. And for those of you who don’t regularly hang out with young kids, you probably have no idea where this is going, which is perfect.

So, for the latter group, there’s a youtube video of a kids song called Baby Shark that, at the time of me recording this, has 3 point 4 billion views. That billion with a B. It’s also currently the 7th most viewed youtube video of all time, and it’s a kids song. How in the world did that happen?

Well, the story behind Baby Shark goes a lot deeper than you’d expect. Its history spans decades, and illustrates how art can be adapted across cultures and genres. There’s quite a strange story behind this viral sensation.

[music out]

Today’s story comes from the podcast Decoder Ring. Here’s host Willa Paskin.

Willa: About a year ago, Jonathan Wright, a DJ and a children's musician who goes by the stage name Johnny Only, started getting strange comments on his YouTube page.

Jonathan: I don't read my YouTube comments very much, but I did start seeing comments. "Hey, there's a song out there exactly like yours, ya know."

Willa: These comments refer to a song Johnny often performed for toddlers and that he had posted on YouTube in 2011. It came with a video that he'd recorded with his kids and his sister's kids at her pool.

[Music clip: Johnny Only’s Baby Shark]

Willa: This song was perfect for three-year-olds. It has simple lyrics, an oft-repeated chorus, and hand motions that correspond to each verse of the song, which little kids love.

Jonathan: I knew my kids well enough that I knew that it was going to be a hit before I even recorded it, ya know.

Willa: The song did well for Johnny, but it wasn't massively popular or anything. It still has less than 100,000 views on YouTube. But it was an important part of his show for years. Then he started to get those comments.

Jonathan: I go to look for it. It was Pinkfong's version.

[Music clip: Baby Shark Pinkfong’s version]

Willa: This song is called Baby Shark, and that version comes from the South Korean children's entertainment company, Pinkfong. If you don't have a little kid, or know a little kid, or know a little kid's parents, you may not know this song, though that's about to change. Unlike Johnny's version, this version of Baby Shark is extremely, extremely popular. It is beloved by small children.

[SFX clip: child singing Baby Shark]

Willa: That, by the way, is one of my small children singing it. But it has also been performed on talk shows all over the world, tweeted about by famous people, and inspired a viral video dance challenge.

[SFX clip: Baby Shark dance challenge]

Willa: It's been performed by celebrities.

[SFX clip: “Please welcome Sophie Turner” (Sophie Turner singing Baby Shark)]

Willa: It inspired countless covers in different genres.

[SFX clip: Baby Shark alternative version]

Willa: In January 2019, Baby Shark even debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 where it has been as high as number 32. In other words, Baby Shark is a top 40 hit and that, like all of this, is not normal for a song whose target audience just stopped wearing diapers. Baby Shark is a massively popular, Billboard-charting, unstoppably catchy, super-sticky earworm that has endured for decades, gone viral multiple times, and become the subject of an international copyright dispute. Baby Shark is not just a song. Baby Shark is a phenomenon.

Willa: I have had Baby Shark stuck in my head for months. I have two small children and, like a lot of small children, they are totally obsessed with it. As I've heard Baby Shark, and sung Baby Shark, and made up new words to Baby Shark, I have had occasion to wonder, "Who is responsible for this unstoppable earworm?"

Willa: We're going to try to answer that question, starting with the present-day, viral version of Baby Shark, and then swing backwards through time into the song's past of which Johnny Only is just one part. "Where does Baby Shark come from?"

Willa: Let's start with a company that made the viral version of Baby Shark, the aforementioned South Korean company, Pinkfong.

[SFX clip: Pinkfong]

Willa: That's the Pinkfong logo tone, which plays at the beginning of all of their videos, a bit of sonic branding. Since being founded in 2010 by another South Korean company called SmartStudy, Pinkfong has produced more than 4,000 animated videos and stories for children, many of them poppy renditions of kids' songs in the public domain like Mr. Sun and Five Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.

[Music clip: Pinkfong’s Five Monkeys Jumping on the Bed]

Willa: In 2018, Pinkfong had 5.7 billion views across all of its content, and its YouTube channel has 15 million subscribers. Just to put that in perspective, Sesame Street only has 5 million subscribers. Children's entertainment is a world unto itself on YouTube, a bubble populated primarily by a strange but very lucrative genre of super-popular videos expressly designed for toddlers that unless you've got kids, you probably have no idea exists.

Alexis: Little kids' entertainment, like toddler entertainment, is it's totally YouTube driven, it's basically all music videos for kids, and it's like wildly international.

Willa: That's Alexis Madrigal, a staff writer for the Atlantic, who's reported on the types of companies that make these sorts of videos.

Alexis: There are companies in Dubai, India, Hong Kong, South Korea. Turns out that this is kind of a universal thing that you can make. It's like a highly-scalable, across the world kind of entertainment form.

Willa: Alexis estimates there are about a dozen or two dozen major companies doing this sort of work and hundreds of smaller ones. Their videos generally have a similar aesthetic, bright symbol animation with big-eyed human or animal characters often doing funny dance moves to upbeat and catchy songs with pop music flourishes.

[Music clip: Johnny Johnny Yes Papa]

Willa: That song, which you may have noticed bear some sonic similarities to Baby Shark, is called Johnny Johnny Yes Papa and it went viral in 2014. For adults who were raised on Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, or even Dora the Explorer, 30-minute to an hour programs that have a gentle vibe and a clear, well-executed pedagogical vision. These videos can feel like they lack a purpose, you know, besides generating clicks. But kids all over the world are clicking on these things, which means that whatever their flaws, they are unprecedented.

Alexis: Children's entertainment produced all over the world soldered together from all the different world's cultures. Yeah. It's just this new melange of cultures that didn't exist before. Like, you couldn't really make this exist in any real other medium in particular because all these companies copy from each other relentlessly. You know, the Indians copying from the South Koreans copying from the Russians copying from the guys in Dubai or Israel, you know? And then that is making money for YouTube in the United States of America and being shown to people in the Philippines.

Willa: In a world in which entertainment is increasingly segmented, Pinkfong and companies like it have created a kind of global shared experience for three-year-olds. Baby Shark is part of a wild and strange monoculture for toddlers, a demographic that doesn't much care about language, cultural-specific taste, or adult measures of quality. To be fair to Pinkfong, in South Korea, it's considered to be a trustworthy educational company. If its educational bent is lost on English-speaking audiences, that's because we already know what Pinkfong videos are trying to teach, English.

Willa: Baby Shark is a good, simple vocabulary lesson, but the video has been so successful because it also works as pure entertainment. In the video, which was posted in June of 2016, a boy and a girl trade versus and do very specific hand motions, the Baby Shark dance, in front of simple, colorful, aquatic animation. For the verse about Baby Shark, for example, the boy does a little finger pinch that's supposed to be the baby shark's jaws going up and down. The girl uses her whole hands for mama shark. Daddy shark gets both arms. For the let's go hunting verse, they do a particularly cute gesture, pressing their hands together above their heads like they are shark fins and swaying back and forth.

Willa: All these motions make the song extremely appealing to toddlers who love a song that comes with movements. Think of Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands, The Hokey Pokey, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, honestly, most songs for toddlers. But it also made the song appealing to another demographic entirely, South Korean pop singers.

[Music clip: Baby Shark pop version]

Willa: That's the girl group, Red Velvet, in a Baby Shark-inflected ad for lip gloss. K-pop, Korean pop is a very competitive field and it stars are constantly trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, not just the teenagers who make up their core fan base. One of the ways to reach that broader audience is on variety shows, which are extremely popular in Korea and Asia, more generally, and where goofing around with a meme, particularly one that is a children's song, is a good, and reliable, and cute way to appeal to a lot of people.

[SFX clip: Variety show, Baby Shark meme]

Willa: The K-pop stars amplified Baby Shark both as a song and as a viral sensation. More and more regular people began to dance to Baby Shark, recording their own routines to it, and posting them on Tik Tok, an extremely popular app in Asia where you post short clips of yourself lip-syncing and dancing along to a song. Meanwhile, Pinkfong has kept up with the craze by releasing over 100 different versions of the song in 11 different languages. There's now an EDM version of Baby Shark, and a Halloween version, and a Valentine's day version.

Willa: Throughout 2017 and 2018, the song just kept growing and growing, moving around the world until it caught on in the United States, first and foremost with kids who liked it so much, they helped propel it up the Billboard charts.

Chris: I'm not sure there's a real precedent for Baby Shark.

Willa: Chris Molanphy is a host of Slate's Hit Parade podcast and an expert on all things having to do with the Billboard charts. As Chris explained to me, there are a few kids songs that have charted on the Hot 100 before, The Chipmunk Song, a Christmas song, went to number one in 1958. Rubber Ducky from Sesame Street has also been on the charts, so have a number of novelty hits that aren't necessarily kids' songs but that really appealed to kids like Monster Mash and Psy's Gangnam Style, another K-pop crossover mega-hit. But those songs appeal to kids who are like school-aged kids, and the kids who are into Baby Shark are much littler.

Chris: It's the kind of record that somebody under the age of, I don't know, six might hit again, again, again on. That YouTube data factors into the chart and has made it an enormous hit.

Willa: But this raises the question, "Why have all of the animated kids songs that are out there on YouTube do toddlers like this one best? Why did this one breakout here?" Here, I think we have to turn to the song itself. Yes, the Baby Shark video is adorable, but that song, it's catchy.

Charlie: Well, the song is successful because it perfectly balances familiarity, repetition with novelty.

Willa: That's Charlie Harding, a musician and the cohost of Switched on Pop, a podcast that takes pop songs and explains why and how they work.

Charlie: That the melody itself is nursery rhyme, which very simple... Like, it's very memorable, and it has a sort of rhythmic bounciness to it. So it just catches in your ear, and you get it over and over and over again, which you think you should get bored but you don't. The reason why you don't get bored is every time they sing that repeated melody, something changes. So the first time they sing it, it's just a bunch of kids and a bass.

[Music clip: Baby Shark Intro]

Charlie: And then they start adding in hi-hats the second time around [Music clip: Baby Shark with hi-hats]. Then, the next time when you get daddy shark, you get this deep baritone voice [Music clip: Baby Shark with baritone voice]. So the baritone voice was kind of surprising. You get grandma voice, and grandma voice is surprising within the context of what you've heard before [Music clip: Baby Shark with grandma voice]. Then they add keys, and then they add more voices. There's like a chorus of kids that comes in and then, at that point, you've now heard like six or seven of the Baby Shark refrain and they modulate into another key. They take the whole thing higher, which is a very common trope of like '80s and '90s ballads.

[Music clip: Baby Shark continues]

Charlie: Once they do that, they even add even more arrangement. There's more of these piano arpeggios just... At that point, everything drops out except for maybe a kick drum and the voice. Then, last time, everything comes back in. So there's a way of doing the exact same thing over and over again by providing just enough variation that you stay interested.

Willa: I love Charlie's explanation of Baby Shark. Before talking with him, I had never noticed any of that. And I've listened to Baby Shark a lot. Charlie's explanation also made me find Baby Shark a lot less annoying. The fact that there's all this slight variation to it that keeps kids interested, it made me think about how repetition and variation work for adults. Yes, we're more sophisticated listeners than four-year-olds, or I hope we are, but we also like repetition so long as it has the right amount of variation.

Willa: We want the pop song to come back to the hook or the orchestral music to return to the motif. When a song gets it just right, I don't know about you, but I do listen to it dozens of times in a row. And we do the same thing with what we watch. We watch movies and TV shows we've seen before and seek out specific genres, crime shows, or superhero movies, or whatever's happening on Twitter where we basically know exactly what's going to happen. It's just the details that are different.

[music in]

It’s undeniable, Baby Shark is catchy, and it sticks with you long after you’ve heard it. But the story of Baby Shark didn’t start on YouTube. It actually didn’t even start on the internet. The origin of the song is somewhat of a mystery, and it spans decades. We’ll explore where this song really came from and who Baby Shark belongs to today, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Willa: Pinkfong's version of Baby Shark is especially sticky, but I think that there's something elementally enticing and irreducibly catchy about Baby Shark no matter what its arrangement. And I think this because the Pinkfong version, it's not the first time that Baby Shark has gone viral. So now, in order to chase down Baby Shark's origins, we're going to have to leave the present and start moving backwards into the past and the early days of YouTube.

[music out]

Alexandra: My name is Alexandra Mueller. I am from Germany.

Willa: In 2006, Alexandra Mueller was working at a camp for kids teaching journalism. There was a song they sang at the camp called the Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. Kleiner Hai means little shark in German. As you can hear, the song has a different tune than Baby Shark, but it's recognizably related. The verses mean more or less the same thing and it comes with all of the same hand motions.

[Music clip continued]

Willa: Some of the campers recorded Alexandra singing Kleiner Hai and in January of 2007, she uploaded the video to her YouTube channel under the name Alemuel, an abbreviation of her first and last name. In the video, which is pretty grainy, Alexandra is sitting in a retro, pea-green armchair wearing a teal sweater and a bright red headband. Her emotions are exaggerated and very distinct. She gradually gets more and more into it until she gets to the daddy shark, and she starts using her whole body. It's weird but extremely watchable. And people watched it.

Alexandra: I think it took about a half a year that it got a million views, and then emails started to pour in asking me for interviews, like, "You're a viral video and its German. Can we ask you about it?" Then, a record company wrote to me and said, "Hey, you're so famous in the Internet, can we do a recording of the song?"

Willa: This record company was EMI, the giant label that's released music by the Beatles, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, and thousands more. She recorded new vocals for a dance-oriented version of Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. The song became a smash. In 2008, it spent 16 weeks on the German singles chart, peaking at number 25. Alexandra became something of a viral sensation herself. She released the song under the name Alemuel, the name that had been on her YouTube channel. And there was a lot of speculation about who she really was.

[Music clip continued]

Willa: This was further fueled by her outfit, the teal turtleneck and the red headband, which she wore to all of her public appearances like she was playing a character. She had a lot of public appearances in 2008. She went on a number of German talk shows, toured clubs in Germany and Austria, and played two performances in Mallorca [Music clip]. Her performances did not always go exactly as planned.

Alexandra: The people in the clubs were too old. My kind of fan group were a 14, 15-year-olds. I think in the clubs, there were like 25-30 and they often kind of stared at me with wide eyes asking themselves why they should kind of perform a children's song with me.

Willa: By 2009, the Kleiner Hai craze had wound down. EMI offer Alexandra the opportunity to record another song, a kids' song about a fish, but she declined. She went into journalism instead.

Alexandra: People often ask me if I'm embarrassed that this happened to me. But no, it was great and I'm really happy that I just jumped into the cold water and swam without being eaten by a shark. It helped me a lot, I think. I gained a lot of self-esteem because if you're booed from stage, then you're much cooler afterwards, I'd say.

Willa: Her young daughter recently found out about Kleiner Hai in school.

Alexandra: One of the women who work there, she's shown her the video. I didn't do that. Now, she wants to see it all the time. If somebody says, “hai shark”, then she immediately starts doing the gestures.

Willa: Okay. So how is it possible that an American children's musician, a South Korean entertainment company, and a German camp counselor all recorded different but successful versions of a song about a baby shark? To answer that, we have to go back even further in time.

Rebecca: So I think it was about 1989 or 1990, and I was at summer camp in New Hampshire, Camp Merrowvista. It was one of our favorite songs. We loved it.

Willa: That's Rebecca Onion. She's a writer and colleague of ours at Slate, and she is one of the many, many kids who sang Baby Shark in the '80s and '90s when it was just a song kids sang at camp, and school, and after school, and Girl Scouts, and Sunday school, and wherever kids gather and sing songs. There were hundreds of different versions of it. There are some with different tunes, just as there are German versions. There are French versions where it's usually called “Papa Le Cat” that sometimes, but not always, is sung to the tune of Mahna Mahna, the song made famous by the Muppets.

[Music clip: Papa Le Cat]

Willa: But even with all the variation, these versions have similar gestures and almost all of them have something else too, violence. [Music clip: “shark attack...”] There are a lot of variations to the violence, but it seems to be what made the song.

Rebecca: Speaker 10: And then it would be [Music clip: “shark attack...”], and you kind of like would move your body around as though you were being attacked by a shark violently. That was the funnest parts for everyone because we'd all be like, "Oh my God, we're dying." And kind of like lie on the ground.

Willa: The grizzly parts, which are not in the Pinkfong version or a number of other versions of the song on YouTube, including Johnny Only's, made it a little edgy and therefore fun for older kids, teenagers even and why the song was not, until recently, primarily for toddlers. Violence, I think it's a clue about Baby Shark's origins. We kept looking for earlier and earlier versions of Baby Shark. In print, we dug around and found a version of it in a book called Making Music Fun, that was first published in 1981 and that already refers to there being many different versions of the song. Then we spoke to Patricia Shehan Campbell, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Washington and an expert in children's musical culture, who also happens to have worked as a camp counselor in Ohio in the 1970s.

Patricia: This might've been the mid, late '70s, something like that. The song came up on a bus one time, and so I learned it from a child. Every child knew it, actually, already, and it sounded pretty much the same as it does now.

Willa: I asked Pat if it was possible that all of these different versions of Baby Shark had popped up spontaneously, a kind of polygenesis, like the way emus and ostriches evolved on different continents. She was skeptical.

Patricia: That'd be a little farfetched, given that the gestures is just very explicit, could've been separately created without some influence. But I don't know how to connect the dots.

Willa Paskin: We kept looking for a record or memory of Baby Shark before the mid to late 1970s, but we couldn't find one. Then, it occurred to us that there was something happening around this time that was extremely relevant. To be clear, we are now entering the realm of speculation, but honestly, what's the first thing you think of when you think of a shark attack?

[SFX: Jaws theme]

Willa: Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released in the summer of 1975, and it was a huge deal. Huge deal almost undersells it. Besides almost single-handedly creating the blockbuster as we know it today, the movie spread through all parts of American culture. The film industry began producing cheap copycats with titles like Piranha and Orca. There was a video game about sharks, and Saturday morning shark cartoons, and a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch about a shark, and there were tons of novelty records, songs that took John Williams famous theme music and riffed on it.

[Music clip: Jaws by Lalo Schifrin]

Willa: That's an instrumental disco version of the theme by Lalo Schifrin called Jaws that samples William's score. In this next one, Do the Jaws by the End, the song starts with some shark hysteria and there's a beat derived from the Jaws theme [Music clip]. This next one is my favorite. It's called Jaws is Working for the CIA, a novelty funk record by The Investigators, and it starts with a reference to a family of Jaws [Music clip].

Willa: I'm not saying any of these songs directly inspired Baby Shark, but I am saying that they're evidence of the shark-crazy atmosphere at the time and of ubiquity of the Jaws' theme song. If those things inspired a number of musicians, maybe they inspired some camp counselors too [Music clip continued]. If the jump from this song to this song to this song [SFX: Jaws theme] sounds big, remember the Baby Shark was transmitted orally and the jump from “da na da na da na” to “ do do do do do do” with about a dozen stops along the way, that sounds more like a game of telephone.

Willa: In fact, there's a version of Baby Shark song by various Girl Scout troops to this day. It's more of a chant than a song that ties Baby Shark and Jaws together very nicely because it's a version of Baby Shark about a specific shark family, a family of Jaws [Music clip: Girl Scout Jaw song]. So Jaws, that is our provisional answer to where Baby Shark comes from. The fact that it's made it to us over four decades later means that the song and the Jaws' theme music that may have inspired it has always been viral. This is what analog virality looks like, something so catchy that it's passed from person to person, kid to kid, counselor to counselor, musician to musician until it makes its way around the world, slightly different each time but still fundamentally itself, so crisscrossed and cross-pollinated, it's hard to untangle where exactly it started at all.

Willa: So now, we're going to move out of the past and head back to the present. But we're not going to get all the way there just yet because there's still a bit of a gap in the where did Baby Shark come from mystery, which is, "How exactly did Pinkfong find Baby Shark and decide to make their own video with it?" I initially thought this would be pretty straightforward to answer. We talked to someone at Pinkfong, but Pinkfong declined to speak with us and then declined and then declined. To be fair, they are in the middle of a huge wave of attention and I'm sure there are lots of people asking to speak with them.

Willa: But then we learned about Johnny Only, the children's performer who we spoke with at the very beginning of this episode. It became clear that there are some good reasons why Pinkfong might want to be vague about how they discovered Baby Shark. To explore those good reasons, we have to get back to Johnny Only's story. Just a reminder, this is what Johnny Only's version of Baby Shark sounds like.

[Music clip: Johnny Only’s Baby Shark]

Willa: He had first heard the song in the late 1990s while performing at summer camps. He had made some changes to it, like removing the verses about grandma and grandpa shark, but it's not like he had written the thing. So when he heard Pinkfong's version of the song, he thought that was that.

Jonathan: You know, I felt a little bit violated. I was just like, "Oh well, it's public domain, it's public domain. That's the way it goes."

Willa: But then, a representative from a South Korean political party, the Liberty Korea Party, an opposition party, contacted Johnny, asking him for permission to use his version of Baby Shark.

Jonathan: So I just gave them permission.

Willa: So the Liberty Korea Party used the song, at which point, SmartStudy, the company that owns Pinkfong, got involved, threatening a lawsuit against the Liberty Korea Party for copyright infringement.

Jonathan: So all of a sudden, as you can imagine, the lights are going off. I'm like, "Wait a minute. SmartStudy doesn't even realize that it's my version instead of theirs." There's a big red flag. Too, SmartStudy is saying, "Okay, I can sue you for copyright infringement." So all of a sudden I'm like saying, "Wait a minute, that means that I could sue for copyright infringement." You know what I mean?

Willa: There is something called a derivative copyright, meaning that when something like a public domain song, which Baby Shark is considered to be, gets recorded, things that are changed or added to it that are unique to that recording are protected under copyright law. So Johnny got a lawyer and filed a petition in Korean court, which as of this recording, is still pending. He isn't saying that he invented Baby Shark, but he is saying that he added things to his version, that Pinkfong then used in their version.

Jonathan: The key is exactly the same. You know, the driving beat is the same. The tempo increase partway through is the same. The way that they add the harmonies like when daddy shark comes onto the scene. In my recording, I used my voice as a lower voice to emulate daddy shark and they suddenly have a male voice coming in for daddy shark. So it was very similar approaches.

Willa: I want to be really clear here that I have no idea if Pinkfong heard Johnny Only's version of Baby Shark before making their own. But if it wasn't his, it was probably someone's. I mean, they had to have learned it from somewhere. Maybe someone who worked there sang it at summer camp. There's a risk for Pinkfong in revealing if the song comes from any one source because, among other things, there is now a huge amount of money at stake. Pinkfong's parent company's stock price is soaring. The videos are generating ad revenue hand over fist. There's tons of Baby Shark merchandise, and the company just signed a deal with Netflix to create a TV series. Pinkfong is hoping Baby Shark isn't just some flash in the pan, but the beginning of a global children's media empire.

Willa: I'm of two minds about all of this. The entire history of Baby Shark is an iterative one of people taking other people's version of it and changing it, massaging the tune, and the lyrics, and the language, sometimes for the better. Johnny Only and Pinkfong's version sound pretty similar, but Pinkfong's version is catchier. Why should Pinkfong have to worry that they learned the song somewhere and made it their own? That's what everyone else has always done.

Willa: But, at the same time, the history of Baby Shark also shows us that this song belongs to everyone. There's something kind of unsettling about the fact that right now it seems to belong to Pinkfong, who has real financial incentives to try and make it more and more proprietary. A representative of Pinkfong and SmartStudy recently told the CBC, "We are the producer and publisher. We own and control 100% of the song." Many people already think that that's true. And that's why for Johnny, even if he ends up winning his lawsuit, the emotional stakes are settled.

Jonathan: The Pinkfong version is so popular that even my fans prefer theirs over mine now, which is very depressing. You know, it's really kind of disheartening. I mean, they're very kind about it. My fans tell me my version was better. They're very kind about it. But, honestly, I know when they go home, the Pinkfong version is everywhere. I'm watching my audiences as I'm performing my version. Of course, my version does not have grandma shark and grandpa shark, and my audience, as I go into the next line, and they're starting to make the hand motion for grandma shark and it hurts. It hurts. It hurts a lot. It is really discouraging. It's really derailed me in many ways.

Willa: I hope Johnny takes some comfort in the long history of Baby Shark, of which Pinkfong is just a small part. I don't know, maybe their version of the song will help them spawn a children's media empire, but maybe it's just a novelty, another viral craze that has captured our attention right now, for this moment, and that we won't even remember in a few years. But when I say, "We," there, I mean us adults. As Baby Shark demonstrates, both the internet and children's culture are Petri dishes for virality, for memes, for things that get passed from person to person, altered and tweaked, but that stay essentially themselves.

Willa: The story of Baby Shark, in some ways, is this story of these two meme-generating powerhouses joining forces to amplify this song. This will not be the last time that this happens. The amount of video content being directed at kids is only going to increase as is the amount of time they spend in front of screens. It's hard to make a song as catchy as Baby Shark, but someone will manage it, maybe by rifling through children's songs of the past again. When they do, they will have an even bigger audience of three-year-olds all around the world doing exactly what they did with Baby Shark, watching and singing it over and over again.

[music in]

Willa: One of the funny things about Baby Shark is that this two-minute video that was designed for little kids' very short attention spans is going to live on longer in their collective memory than it is in the memory of most adults. For us, Baby Shark is a passing fad, yet another fleeting internet meme. But for kids, Baby Shark doesn't just exist on the internet, it's not some pop-culture object, something cute to share on social media. It's outside of all of that too, part of an older but still viral, still vital way of communicating. If the history of Baby Shark tells us anything, it's that the version of Baby Shark that was made to last is the version you can sing however you want. So, if you can bear it, keep singing.

That story came from Willa Paskin and the fantastic podcast Decoder Ring. In each episode, they examine the history, meaning, and importance behind an aspect of our culture. Be sure to go tap the subscribe button!

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

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

If there’s another earworm you just can’t get out of your head that you think would be a great Twenty Thousand Hertz episode, tell us! You can reach me and the rest of the team on facebook, twitter, or by writing at hi @ 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Virtual Choir: 8,000 Voices, One Song

Artwork provided by Jon McCormack.

Artwork provided by Jon McCormack.

This episode was written and produced by Colin DeVarney.

Singing with others is a powerful form of expression. That's why the composer Eric Whitacre started the Virtual Choir; an experiment that connects singers from every corner of the globe. In this episode, we hear how a choir can unite people from different backgrounds to achieve a common goal - creating beautiful music.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Pretty Build by Sound of Picture
In My Head by Sound of Picture
Morels by Sound of Picture
Celadon by Sound of Picture

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.

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

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

The music you’re hearing now is not an ordinary choir. It’s a teenager in her bedroom, singing into a laptop microphone. It’s a grandparent performing while their grandchild helps with the camera. And it’s a businessman, reliving his years of choir in school. What you’re hearing are hundreds of individual voices performing both together, and alone. The result is mesmerizing, and powerful, and greater than the sum of its parts.

[music out]

This performance is the first installment of what’s known as the Virtual Choir. It’s a project that connects singers from around the world to create music. The human voice is an instrument we’re born with. It doesn’t cost anything, and we can use it to express all sorts of emotions and stories. And if you sing with others, that expression can be amplified into something more.

But not everyone has the chance to do that.

Eric Whitacre had that in mind when he founded the Virtual Choir in the late 2000’s.

[music in]

Eric: I grew up in northern Nevada, and I really had no musical training. I definitely had an ear. I played piano. My parents tried to get me piano lessons, they just wouldn't stick. I played trumpet in middle school and high school, but I never learned to read music. I would just play by ear.

Eric: Then at 18, I went to The University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And on a whim, I joined choir. ​On the very first day, I was standing with 100 other people in the room and he said, "Lets begin with the Requiem, and the Kyrie. I didn't know what a Requiem was, I certainly didn't know what a Kyrie was. So I looked over the shoulder of the guy standing next to me and turned to page 10, and we launched into the Kyrie from the Requiem by Mozart.

[music out]

[SFX: Mozart’s Requiem in D minor]

Eric: I'll never forget that moment. That first breath, which to this day entrances me. That first breath that a group of people take before they sing. If you know the Kyrie by Mozart, then you know that it begins with the bass's.

[SFX: Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem in D minor]

Eric: So we start this fugue subject ... the altos join. Then the sopranos, the tenors, and within about 25 or 30 seconds I just found myself standing in the midst of this cosmic Swiss watch. This level of complexity and humanity that I couldn't have imagined existed before that moment. And I remember doing exactly what I still do when I hear music that moves me, which is that I was standing there not singing, and I began trembling, I kind of shake, and then I giggle. It's like I get this feeling in my stomach. Then finally I had tears in my eyes... and I left after that first 50 minute rehearsal, the world's biggest choir geek. I was utterly transformed.

[music out]

Eric is one of the most influential choral composers of our generation. If you’ve been in a choir in the last few decades, there’s a great chance you’ve performed one of his pieces. The list of his accomplishments goes on and on, but the Virtual Choir remains perhaps his biggest creation. The idea though, came from a small gesture.

Eric: So a friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video. He said, "You've got to see this." In this video was a young woman, she was only 17 at the time. Her name's Britlin Losee. And Britlin had gone into a room and made a fan video for me. She says, "Hi Mr. Eric Whitacre, I'm a big fan and here's something that I want to do for you. Here's me singing Sleep."

[Music Clip: Britlin singing “Sleep”]

Eric: This was a piece of music that I had written for choir that had been published, and choirs had started performing. I was thunderstruck watching this. I just was moved by the purity of her voice, and also the purity of her intention.

[Music Clip: Britlin singing “Sleep” continued with other voices]

Watching her video, I thought to myself, "You know, if you could get 25 other people to do what Britlin is doing right now. If they were singing their part alone in their dorm room, or in the kitchen, or in the living room. As long as they were singing in the same key and at the same tempo. If they all just uploaded their parts to YouTube, and I literally started them at the same time then this choir would have to unfold, right? This virtual choir.

[Music Clip: Virtual Choir singing “Sleep”]

[music in]

Eric: I go online to my website and Facebook, and just in all caps, "I've got this idea. Let's make a virtual choir." I have no idea how to actually pull this off. The way Britlin did it was she was listening to a recording and she was singing along with it. But we're not going to be using a recording.

Eric: So I got the idea that what I would do is make a video of myself conducting the piece, but in complete silence. The music would only be in my head. I would upload this to YouTube, and then people would download the sheet music and sit in front of their computers, and watch my little conductor video. I genuinely had no idea if this would work or not.

Eric: I also didn't know if anybody would actually do it. But they did. And almost immediately I could tell, oh this is going to work.

[music out]

There were a few challenges early on though. When you’re singing in a group, everyone hears each other so they can stay in tune with each other. But if you’re singing by yourself though, it’s natural for the key to fluctuate over time, since you don’t have a reference to guide you. So to fix this, they added a piano track for the performers to sing to.

Eric: We've refined that so that now there's usually a choir singing underneath them so that they feel like they're singing into the sound of a choir. Instead of just into a vacuum.

In addition to a video of Eric conducting the piece, he also included detailed musical direction for the singers, just like a conductor would do in a normal rehearsal.

[Clip: Eric’s conducting direction]

With the materials in place, submissions began pouring in on YouTube.

Eric: I think it's one of the great selling points of a choir is that you never have to sing alone. Lots of people like to sing, but maybe don't want to be a soloist. When you're in a choir you can sing your heart out, and you never have to have your voice exposed like that.

These submissions were brought together and the first Virtual Choir was released. The only question was if anyone would notice. Here’s more of that performance of the piece Lux Aurumque, composed and conducted by Eric.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir I begins]

Eric: When I uploaded the first Virtual Choir, I really didn't think anybody but me and my tiny circle of choir geek friends would be interested. And the video went viral, I wasn't prepared for that at all. I started getting all of these requests for media appearances. Then suddenly I was being bombarded with requests from all over the world from singers. Saying, "I don't know what this is, but I have to be a part of it, when is the next one?"

[Virtual Choir I continues and fades out]

Eric: The first one had 185 different singers from 12 countries. At the time I thought, "That's as big as this could ever go." But just based on the number of people writing to me, we all thought, "Oh my God, this could be bigger."

Eric: First what we started to do is just build a better infrastructure. Better tools to help people learn the music. I refined the ability to get them to sing all at the same time. So I made a much better and clearer conductor track. The guide track for them to listen to was clearer.

With these improvements in place, the second piece was finished just one year after the first.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir II begins]

Eric: Then we launched Virtual Choir II which this time was that piece “Sleep” that Britlin Losee was singing the very first time she sent me that video.

Eric: We also bumped up our ability to aggregate the videos themselves. First at that time to find them on YouTube. And then to sort them by sound quality. Those that were recorded the best, and those that were recorded not as good. That became very helpful later on in the process.

Eric: This time we had 2052 singers from 58 different countries. It just overnight turned into this earth choir. I was completely unprepared for that. I could never have imagined it.

Putting that into perspective, this performance featured over ten times as many singers as the first Virtual Choir, and they ranged from nine year olds to senior citizens. If Britlin’s first YouTube video was a tiny snowball, it had now turned into an avalanche with no sign of stopping.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir II out]

The Virtual Choir would only continue to grow, which introduced some interesting challenges for Eric and his team.

Eric: With Virtual Choir III, we knew already going in, it's going to get bigger. So more and more singers wanted to be involved so then we started to build our own infrastructure. We had a small army of volunteers that would connect with anybody that was having technical difficulties. They would station themselves around the globe in different time zones so that anyone who wanted to join, but couldn't figure out how to do it, could join.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir III begins]

Eric: The Virtual Choir III, I think ended up with 3700 something singers from 73 countries. In terms of the style of music, we took it to, I think, as far as we can take it musically. We used a piece that I had written called Water Night that splits a lot. By splits it means that there's lots of different voice parts all making a single chord. So the climax of Water Night has the lines if you “open your eyes, night opens.” On the word, "eyes" it's a 14 part chord.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir III 14 part chord]

Eric: Which was a logistical challenge. Not only to line all that up and make it sound good, but literally just to aggregate the parts. So technically it was a huge challenge for us.

Eric: Spiritually it also really changed, I think, the way we were thinking about all of it. Until then, it had just been about amassing numbers in this extraordinary thing that we were making that seemed to resonate with people in a way. But we didn't really understand it at all. But for Virtual Choir III, we set up some places on my Facebook page, and on my website where people could upload their testimonials. They could write about what it was that moved them about the Virtual Choir and why they joined.

Eric: This is when we started to see some of these stories. These extraordinary stories ...

Eric: There was a man from Cuba who desperately wanted to join, but because of government regulations, was unable to send us a video larger than one meg. So we got our tech team together with him, and Cuba became part of the Virtual Choir.

Eric: There was a man who had gone legally blind and because of that, hadn't been able to sing in a choir for over 30 years. Now for the first time, he could get close enough to the computer screen to see my little conductor track, and he was able to join the choir.

Eric: There was a young woman who had sung in choirs with her mother. It's just a thing that the two of them did together. Her mother was dying of cancer and couldn't sing. So this young woman recorded her video looking straight into the camera but just off screen was holding her mother's hand in hospice as a tribute to both of them singing together, and their life together.

Eric: So suddenly for me too, I was seeing the sense of borders and governments starting to dissolve. There really was just this tribe with a common goal, and a common love. Which is to come together to make something larger than themselves. It gave me incredible hope for humanity, and really restored my faith in people.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir III out]

[music in]

Eric brought people from all walks of life together for a common purpose, in a way that had previously never been possible. From the beginning, the Virtual Choir was about so much more than just singing. But, the Virtual Choir was far from over. More after this.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

By the time the Virtual Choir became a viral sensation, Eric Whitacre was already a sensation in the instrumental and choral music worlds. His music was performed everywhere from middle school cafeterias to the most renowned symphony halls. And while he’s written music for lots of different instruments, vocal compositions are always something special.

Eric: I love writing for instruments. I love writing piano music, but there is something about the voice. Especially when I want to express something that I find to be fundamentally human. Sorrow, joy, love, the bond between a parent and a child. There's just no vehicle other than the voice for me.

Eric: I heard Ned Rorem one time, the American composer, somebody asked him, "Are you a singer yourself?" And he said, "No, I'm not, but I think the reason composers compose is because they can't sing." That really resonated with me. Because I have the soul of a singer. I have the heart of a singer, I just don't have the instrument of a singer. It's tragic situation actually.

[music out]

Eric composed for the voice to express things that he otherwise couldn’t. Choral music can communicate nuances in emotion in a way that speech can’t. With the Virtual Choir, Eric opened up that experience to a world of people who didn’t previously have an outlet. Anyone who’s been part of any sort of team knows the joy of working together for a common goal. But there are lots of people who have never had that chance. The Virtual Choir is a team with no boundaries or limitations. It allows people from any background to make a meaningful connection… albeit a digital one.

Following the success of Virtual Choir three, Eric knew the fourth installment would continue to feature more and more singers. But he wasn’t content to just grow in terms of numbers.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir IV begins]

Eric: Going from three to four, I knew that we would continue to grow with singers.

Eric: What I didn't want to do is just keep making the same thing over and over, and over. I wanted to grow. I wanted to grow the idea. So I thought, "Maybe what I'll do is I'll just go back to my pop roots a little bit." I had been working for years on a musical called Paradise Lost that was part musical, part opera, and then part electronica. There's a DJ and all different kinds of electronica beats in it.

Eric: I thought, "Okay, I'll take a piece from that." This piece called “Fly To Paradise,” and then we'll put dubstep in it. Lets just see what happens. And we made Virtual Choir IV, Fly To Paradise, something completely different.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir IV out]

“Fly to Paradise” featured nearly six thousand singers from over one hundred different countries. It was also a departure from the more standard choral music of the first three Virtual Choirs. Eric wanted to do something that stretched the norm. He’s a fan of pop music, so it felt like a natural fit.

Eric: There is great virtue in popular music. I think sometimes in the modern world it's easy to say music used to be so much better, more sophisticated and now it's this. The challenge of course is we never have the perspective of time. In 1965, yes there were the Beatles. Yes, there was Pink Floyd. But there was also 10,000 other groups that we never listened to. So we've really had the luxury of sorting out the wheat from the chafe. We can remember the 60's fondly because all we remember are the huge hits.

Eric: I would say in terms of popular music versus classical music, or lets say concert music. There's two things about it. One, concert music, when really well written is hyper-constructed. The composer spends weeks and months, and sometimes years constructing this whole world of relationships between notes. The architecture of a well written concert piece is something to behold. It's a marvel.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir V begins]

The first three Virtual Choirs were performances of more traditional choral pieces. The fourth was a take on a new genre. The question was, where would it go from here? It ended up taking years to answer to answer that question.

Eric: Mostly I just wanted to make something different and at the time I was in the throws of writing this piece called Deep Field. Deep Field is inspired by the image of the same name that was taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995. To me that image, the Deep Field image is the most important image in human history. It shows us how impossibly large our universe is, and how truly small we are in it.

Eric: I wanted to write a piece of music about that. Originally my concept, which is how the piece was originally performed is that it would be for orchestra. This big orchestral piece, and it would ... the music itself would follow the story of the Hubble.

Eric: And in my mind what would happen is I would turn to the audience, and I would give a little gesture to the audience, and they would know then to push play on their smartphones. And everybody had pre-downloaded an app. What would happen is as they push play, you would have a fly through to deep space, and then this final reveal of the Deep Field image on the phone. But then also from each phone was emitted a small electronica sound. Which on its own isn't that interesting but when you have 1000, or 2000, or 5000 phones in the audience playing a sound all at the same time. Then you surround them with a choir, it really is something special. It feels a bit like you're floating in space. Like you're inside the Deep Field image itself.

Eric: There's the Virtual Choir that comes in at the end.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir V virtual choir section]

Eric: Then we had a film made. So there's the piece itself, then we added the Virtual Choir and then we made an entire film, a 23 minute film to the piece itself.

Eric: And now what can happen is orchestras can perform the piece live with the film being projected.

Eric: The conductor just follows the film hits all the right moments and then at the end when the Virtual Choir is revealed, now the audience has all of the shimmering electronica on their phones, the Virtual Choir is being projected from the screens, and then a real choir is surrounding the audience. So now it adds this other dimension. Not only do we have all of these people in the room creating the sense of floating in space, but now you're joined by over 8000 virtual voices on the screen.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir V continues]

The Virtual Choir began with simple gesture from Britlin Losee. Today, it’s a global phenomenon that connects people across borders, age, experience, and beliefs. It’s a team of humans expressing in a way they otherwise couldn’t. But while the Virtual Choir certainly isn’t done, Eric isn’t really sure what comes next.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir V out]

Eric: I definitely want to keep doing the virtual choirs. It's fun, and it's a great way to get people interested in singing. And for me as a composer, it's just a great way to express things that I'm feeling.

Eric: I don't see how we can get bigger in terms of an ideological thrust. What do you do after you've done the universe? So maybe this time we get more smaller, more intimate, or I'm not sure.

Eric: One thing that will remain the same is ethos we've had since the beginning which is, if you upload a video, you're in, there’s no auditions. Every single person who makes a video gets to be part of the choir. And I'll continue that as long as we do the virtual choirs.

[music in]

The Virtual Choir is based around a belief that singing connects us in a unique and profound way. The voice is our most natural instrument, and it’s important that we use it to express ourselves the best we can.

Eric: I believe that singing is the single most fundamental way we have of communicating with each other, more than even speaking. There's something about a voice, when singing, that it carries terabytes of emotional information. When I listen to an amazing singer, say Ella Fitzgerald...

[Music clip: Dream a Little Dream by Ella Fitzgerald]

Eric: It's not just the music, it's not just the words that she's singing. You hear her entire life. There's something about the magic of the voice that can do that.

[Music clip: Dream a Little Dream by Ella Fitzgerald continues and fades out]

[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2]

Eric: There is something truly transformative that happens when you get a whole bunch of people together, singing at the same time, it's extraordinary. There's now all kinds of scientific studies that show that the physiology of it is transformative in itself. That stress hormones decrease. It's good for breathing, it's good for your musculature. There's even some studies now that suggest that people who sing together, their heartbeats begin to synchronize.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 swells]

Eric: There's nothing like singing together to teach a sense of compassion and empathy.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 continues]

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

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

Thanks to Eric Whitacre. You can listen to his extensive catalogue of music on Apple Music or Spotify. You can find him online at eric whitacre dot com. Also, be sure to visit our website 20k dot org there we’ve posted of all 5 virtual choirs.

Finally, if you know a great story in the choir, band, or orchestra world, be sure to tell us about it. You can do that by writing us on twitter, facebook or by email at hi @ 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 out]

Recent Episodes

The Price is Right: The drama behind TV’s catchiest theme song

Artwork provided by Jon McCormack.

Artwork provided by Jon McCormack.

This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther.

As a young composer, Edd Kalehoff was looking for his break. In the early 70s he struck gold, writing for the theme song and music cues for The Price Is Right. However, suspect business dealings would cast a dark shadow over this hallmark of daytime game shows for decades.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

We Three Kings by Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors
Just Watch Me Now (instrumental) by Lady Bri
Cherry (instrumental) by Chair Model
Grey16 by Tangerine
No Limits (instrumental) by Royal Deluxe
Me and My Friends by Juliet Roberts
Airliner Remix (Instrumental) by Secret American

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.

Check out The Price is Right Drum Cover on Youtube by RTDUMS2121.

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Check out and subscribe to Just the Beginning wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

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

If you are from the US, that song means Plinko, spinning the big wheel, and showcase showdowns on The Price Is Right. This game show is a hallmark of American daytime television. If you’re outside of the US and haven’t seen the show, it’s the pure joy of retail therapy distilled into one hour of games. It’s centered around guessing the prices of stuff you probably don’t need, and in my opinion, it’s the most perfect game show ever.

[music out]

[Music clip: Price is Right Modern Intro]

The sound of this show is iconic. It’s like a slot machine on jackpot, fueling frenzied fans in the studio audience eagerly waiting for the chance to “Come on down!” and be contestants.

[SFX clip out]

But even devoted fans of the show might not know that The Price Is Right, used to sound completely different.

[Music clip: Original Price Is Right Intro]

This is from the original Price Is Right, which premiered in 1956 on NBC with host Bill Cullen. That’s right, there was a host BEFORE Bob Barker. Impossible! The original show was way more subdued, to put it lightly. Well-dressed contestants sat behind podiums on stage, and did their best to guess the prices of items.

[SFX clip: Price Reveal]

In the classic version of the show, this is the structure of the qualifying round to get into the actual game.

[SFX clip continued: Price Reveal]

So, that sounds about as fun as wandering the aisles of a department store, but the original Price Is Right lasted for nine years before being canceled.

Then, in the early 70’s, pioneering TV producer Mark Goodson decided to revive the show. Goodson, along with his business partner Bill Todman, created many of the most famous game shows in history, including Family Feud [sfx], Match Game [sfx], and To Tell The Truth [sfx].

At the same time, a young composer named Edd Kalehoff was just getting his start making TV show themes.

[music in]

Edd: I had recently come to New York and I met a guy that turned out to be not such a nice guy but he had a lot of themes going on television. Introduced me to Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the game show kings of the time. And I started out doing a few of the smaller games ... Password and I've Got a Secret. Those shows that he has bringing back on television.

Edd: And then he was going to bring back The Price is Right, he was going to take it to Los Angeles.

[music out]

Needless to say, American culture and television changed dramatically from the premiere of the original Price Is Right in the late fifties to the it’s early seventies revival. For the show to stick with modern audiences, it needed a contemporary sound.

[music In]

Edd: Mark Goodson had already been hearing the Moog synthesizer, which I had gotten from Dr. Moog. He was intrigued with this new sound and one of the first people to really delve in… and there was actually nobody doing much with melody. Being a kind of a jazz guy and very varied in my styles, I was playing a lot of different kinds of music on the Moog, which does incredible things.

Edd: The great influences on me were the great movie composers. I loved writing accessible music. I loved writing stuff that was intelligent, what I would call intelligent.

[music out]

Edd: Mark Goodson was really a special guy. He was unique in a lot of ways. Certainly a genius of games. And there were no show runners. It was Mark. Mark enjoyed coming to my studio on 45th Street and 5th Avenue in New York. He got out of his tower up on Park Avenue and could come down and hang with the truth and soul network, as I called it.

Edd: He said, "Well, what do you have for me?" Ed: I like to say the name of the show in the melody. So I said, "The Price is Right. Yeah, yeah. The Price is Right." [Music clip: Price is right theme song] "The Price is Right. Yeah, yeah. The Price is Right."

Edd: And he said, "I like that." And of course, if he started to wiggle his foot you knew you had him.

Edd: And so, it was kind of a groovy sound. And that's how I presented the theme to Mark and he said, "Okay, kid. How much to go do it?" So I came up with a price and, "Okay. Go do it."

Edd: So I said to him, I said, "Mark, why don't you ever challenge me with my budget to go and do this music?" And he said, "Look, that's what it costs. If you say that's what it costs, that's what it costs."

Edd: He didn't hear another note until I showed up at CBS in the sound booth and played it when they were loading in the first week of shows.

[music in]

..but, we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s rewind to find out how Edd recorded this iconic theme.

Edd: At that time we were doing a lot of London business for other projects and I had great orchestras over there. So I went to London [SFX: jet airplane flyover] And took a synthesizer over there. Customs had a great time trying to figure out what it was. The Cold War was still on. They thought I was a spy.

But once Edd got setup in the studio in London, some real magic began to happen with the session musicians.

Edd: Once you have good guys, the best players in the world that mastered their instruments, you can't go wrong. It's like having the best orchestra in the world to play your stuff.

Edd: They get the music and they go, "What do you want? We know the notes. What do you want it to be?" And I tell them a story about, "Well, this is going to be, tell them what won, Johnny." These guys would play that way.

Edd: I got to give them credit.

[music out]

Edd: So I learned the art of if you have a good pocket ... meaning the good pocket of the rhythm ... the drummer made that happen.

[Music clip: Price is Right drum cover]

Edd: It was almost a swing thing, almost a dotted 8th feel but it wasn't. It was written in 16ths, which are even.

Edd: What a drummer. I said, "How'd we get him?" "Well, you were like you'd been here a couple times before. And so they said yeah. We want to see who this Yank is. Who this Edd Kalehoff guy is."

Edd: He made it swing. And these players over there they got behind it. And they said, "Hey, this isn't TV music. This is something else." They made it come to life.

[music out]

Edd’s contributions to the Price is Right went well beyond the theme song. He’s also responsible for music and sound effects throughout the show. That included the notorious horn that plays when someone loses, named “The Lose.”

[SFX: Losing Horn]

And, for correct answers, Edd went to a hardware store and tested a bunch of different doorbells before recording the perfect option.

[SFX: Winning Ding]

[music in]

Edd’s music was the perfect pairing to each episode of The Price Is Right. The show became a huge wholesome daytime TV hit, but the story behind the royalties for the theme song is anything but wholesome [sfx: sad horn]. More on that, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

In the early 1970’s, the re-booted Price Is Right with host Bob Barker was on its way to becoming a mainstay of daytime television. Edd Kalehoff was the young composer of the show’s theme song, he should have been in an amazing position to profit from the show’s success. Writing a long-running theme song is a career-maker, with residuals providing a constant stream of income for years. But if you check the credits for the show’s theme during that time period, you won’t see Edd’s name.

[music out]

You’ll see Sheila Cole.

Edd: A man, I won't mention his name because I don't want to take anything away from his ability to do business.

Edd: Sheila Cole was his wife. And after I had written the Price is Right theme and come back from London, he said, "I have to put her name down as the composer. It's just a technicality." And I was just new at the BMI, ASCAP world. And he said, “You know what? This time it won't make much difference."

BMI and ASCAP are the two main performing rights organizations that represent American music writers and publishers working in TV and film. They set pay rates, work hours, and help determine how residual income is calculated and divied up. Show producers provide a “cut sheet,” which lists all the music cues needed in a given episode, and BMI and ASCAP ensure these composers and publishers get paid for their work accordingly.

Edd: Well, I was originally ASCAP when I first came to New York because that's all I knew. That's what I saw in sheet music that I would play in the night clubs.

[music in]

Edd: ASCAP is American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. BMI is Broadcast Music Incorporated. That was founded in Nashville. The government made them do that ‘cause there was only one performing rights society and they in the 40's made them start BMI to anti-monopoly.

Edd: So they came to me and they said, "Look, man, we can make your world much better."

Edd: How it works is there's a theme. Look at it as two 100% pies. One is the publishing earnings. And one is the writing earnings. The composer and the publisher.

Edd: It's based on air time, and it was based on television income. A percentage of their advertising income. It's a small percentage. It would go from maybe 2% to 3.5% of their annual gross income, that would go to the performing rights.

Edd: Well, what happened was this gentleman, to make a relationship with Mark Goodson said, "Okay, I'll make you the publisher. You'll make the money from the publishing." That 100% pie. "But I'll collect the writers."

[music out]

Based on those rules, The Price Is Right doled out a percentage of their ad revenue each year. But since Edd’s name wasn’t listed as the composer, he didn’t receive any of the royalties.

Edd: And I have to say you can carry around the vehemence and the harsh feelings for a guy that would do that to a young kid. Why not split it?

Edd: The income from that one theme, the Price is Right theme that I wrote on the Hammond that Mark shook his foot too, then I went to London, took it to LA and that was done. If you had written something that has earned to date maybe $40 or $50 million to date, that would have made a difference in your life.

Forty to fifty MILLION dollars. That’s what it means to write the theme song to one of the longest running television shows ever. Just think, that small percentage of ad revenue, piling up, year after year, into a fortune… and Edd, missed out on all of it.

Edd: I went to Mark Goodson and said, "Mark Goodson, I can't work for you anymore. You let that happen." He says, "I'll tell you what. I'll put your name down on the credits. On the television." I said, "Well, that would mean a lot for me." "And I'll give you all of the other music credits," which is income. Let's face it.

Edd: That first deal with the Price is Right, let me tell you. I still get it kicked every time that theme plays. That would have made a big difference in my life.

Edd: It would have been nice to recover that. I didn't. BMI and the mentors there said, "Look, man, just look. You're talented, have a great career, you’ll do great.

So, with Edd’s modern, high-energy sound, the revived Price Is Right soared in the ratings. The show, and Edd’s music, defined a generation of game shows, and became a timeless piece of Americana. While the Price Is Right became one of the most successful shows in history, Edd was building his career.

[music in]

Edd: First I was with the king of games, Mark Goodson.

Edd: I play guitar and I played a theme... it was NBA on ABC. And I played the guitar solo [Music clip: Straw Dogs w/ Guitar Solo]. It was good. It made it. It was different.

Edd: And that got ABC opened. That was Jeff Mason, who was then a producer and then he became the president of ABC sports.

[music out]

Edd even put a new spin on a classic Football theme.

Edd: We were doing Monday Night Football, you know that one? [SFX clip: Plays theme on the piano], you know, that thing. I was known for making things hipper, different twist.

Edd became one of the most prolific and prominent TV theme show composers in the industry. In addition to his work on Monday Night Football, his credits include themes Nickelodeon’s Double Dare, PBS News Hour, and ABC’s World News Tonight.

After the relaunch of The Price Is Right in the early 70’s, the format and sound of the show remained mostly unchanged for decades. Then, in the mid-2000s, Edd found himself once again working on the theme that helped start it all.

Edd: When Drew Carey took over when Bob Barker retired, Drew said, "Man, this is in mono. It's a mono recording." And he said, "Can you do it in stereo?" I said, "Well, I... I think I can." We'd already been dealing with surround sound by that time.

Edd had to make the sound of the Price Is Right appeal to a new audience, all while leveraging the nostalgia audiences have for this beloved franchise. Here’s what that mono recording sounded like:

[Music clip: The Price is Right theme, mono recording]

Edd: That was written at a time when I was young and on fire, and already had started making a living. Difficult but making a living. And it was okay. And I brought with me all of the wants and desires, and that theme goes through three key changes in the first 10 seconds.

And here’s what the new, stereo version sounds like:

[Music clip: The Price is Right theme, stereo recording]

Edd: And I said, "Listen. It's got to be real instruments. It's got to be a real Moog... If you don't do that, it's not going to be the same thing."

Edd: Some new musicians. All in New York. A lot of the guys that play Saturday Night Live are on the session. Some great players. And we all studied my old mono recording and what's on the air now is a remake of the original mono recording.

Edd: It's still running and it's a lot of fun to hear it.

[music out]

[music in]

After more than four decades in the industry, Edd hasn’t stopped writing themes or playing music.

Edd: That's what I was born to do. I never did anything else. I love sailboats, I love working with my hands, I love the art world.

Edd: And yet, writing music is something ... it's like I hear something, "Sheesh, that's a great idea that guy just used up." If I'm not out there writing some good stuff, these guys are going to write the themes and I'm going to wish I wrote them.

Edd: Even as late as last night, I heard something, a manipulation of sound. It had a whoosh in it, it had a low frequency, warm chordal harmonic movement. And it went into a melody and it was just that three seconds of sound like, "That was a special moment of something that really spoke to me."

Edd: I said, "I wish I thought of that." I said, "I can't stop."

[music out]

Before we go, here’s the entire :96 second modern-version of The Price is Right Theme song. Written by Ed Kalehoff, but still to this day credited to Sheila Cole (who also still collects the royalties.) Anyway... Enjoy.

[Music clip: The Price is Right Theme song modern version]

[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 on Instagram.

This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther. And me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was edited and sound designed by Soren Begin. It was mixed by Jai Berger. Thanks to our guest, Edd Kalehoff. To hear more of Edd’s work, visit eddkalehoff dot com.

Thanks also to RTDRUMS2121 from Youtube for their drum cover of The Price is Right theme. You can find a link to that on our website, 20k.org.

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

Finally, are there any other classic TV 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

The Loudness War: Can streaming finally end it?

Artwork provided by Michael Zhang.

Artwork provided by Michael Zhang.

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling.

In part 2 of the story of mastering, we explore the consequences of the Loudness War and call out some of the worst offenders. We’ll also hear about the artists and mastering engineers who have been fighting back, and learn how modern listening habits might finally put an end to this sonic arms race. Featuring Greg Milner and Ian Shepherd.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Working Man is Always Poor by Live Footage
The Light Instrumental by SAILR
The Human Flute by Ryan Taubert
Wonderful Life Instrumental by Reagan James
Sparrows Instrumental by Jamie
Money Making Machine Instrumental by Jamie Lono
Airliner Remix Instrumental by Secret American
Waterfalls Instrumental by Reagan James
Do What We Want Instrumental by Spirit City
Smoke by Sound of Picture

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

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Check out Ian Shepherd’s podcast The Mastering Show.

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, I’m Dallas Taylor, and this is part two of the story of mastering.

[music in]

In the last episode, we looked at the history of mastering. Up until the 80s, the constraints of analog equipment meant that music had to be mastered on the quieter side. While this may sound like a bad thing, the upside is that music from this era has really strong dynamics, almost across the board. Pick nearly any song from the 70’s or older, and you’ll find a striking contrast between the quietest parts, and the loudest parts. This gives the music a much more spacious and vibrant quality.

But once digital technology took over, things changed pretty quickly. New audio technology allowed mastering engineers to make songs much louder. Artists also started trying to one-up each other with how loud their songs were, and music overall got louder and louder. But all of this volume came at a price, and music became so compressed that it lost a lot of that impact and depth. The Loudness War had begun.

[music out]

For some people in the industry, even music that was pushed right up to the limit wasn’t quite loud enough. But if you’ve already compressed a song as much as possible, what happens when you try to make it even louder?

Ian: Beyond that, you can actually start to get distortion, where, if you just push the loudness up so that it hits that digital ceiling, where the tops of the waveforms, the musical waveforms, are literally sliced straight off [SFX], you get an effect called clipping. That sounds distorted.

That’s Ian Shepherd, a professional mastering engineer who also hosts a podcast called The Mastering Show.

Greg: When you clip, you literally are inserting a little blip [SFX] of noise.

And that’s Greg Milner. Greg writes about music and technology, and wrote a book called Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music.

Greg: At that moment, the digital system is just saying, "I can't read this." So, if you're careful with it, you just do it every once in a while and the clips last just a fraction of a second, supposedly you're not going to be able to hear those parts, but a lot of recording engineers and musicians will say, "Yes you can.”

[music in]

Just imagine what would happen if you started pushing up every nanosecond of a song until it clipped. Pretty soon, all of that clipping would start to overpower the actual music. [SFX: music gradually clipping more and more] If you kept going and going, eventually, you’d be left with pure white noise. So whenever a song is clipping, it’s like a little bit of the music has been cut out, and replaced with white noise. Human ears aren’t supposed to hear this type of noise all the time.

[music out]

Greg: This is very difficult to prove and I don't know if it ever will be proven, but you ask a lot of engineers and they'll tell you that it causes fatigue. Some people will even say that it's a physical fatigue, that your eardrums are just being bombarded by these compressed parts and you are less likely to listen to music for long periods of time.

If you look at the waveform of a song in an audio program, you can see how the soundwaves swell at the loudest parts, and shrink at the quieter parts. But if you look at a song that’s clipping, you’ll see that the soundwaves no longer have these dramatic peaks and valleys.

Greg: When the sound clips, the soundwaves actually look like mountaintops with the peaks shaved off, which is not the way soundwaves ever behave in nature.

If a song is compressed enough, the waveform will look like a flat block, almost like a floating row of bricks in Mario [SFX]. When a song has had this done to it, engineers will say it’s been “brick walled.” and since the 90s, a ton of albums have been given the brickwall treatment.

Greg: If you look at certain recordings that really are notorious for being really poorly mastered in terms of loudness, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication for a long time was really Exhibit A. There is so much compression and clipping in that, it just assaults the ears [Music clip: Red Hot Chili Peppers': "Parallel Universe"].

As the name implies, brickwalled music often has a kind of wall-of-sound quality to it, where instruments struggle to stand out from each other, the snare drum doesn’t really pop like it normally would… It just sounds kind of… squashed, because it is. It’s almost just like every single sound in a song is exactly the same volume. Take a listen to “Spaceman,” by The Killers and see if you can hear what I mean:

[Music clip: The Killers - "Spaceman"]

Compare that to the 1978 song “Roxanne” by The Police, ” and you can sense a little bit more of a natural difference between the instruments.

[Music clip: The Police - “Roxanne”]

But one album in particular has become the poster child for the Loudness War.

Greg: Death Magnetic by Metallica

Ian: Death Magnetic by Metallica [speaking in unison with Greg]

[Music clip: Metallica - “Cyanide”]

Ian: So the Death Magnetic album by Metallica was one of the first albums that really caught the public attention as far as the issue of the Loudness War was concerned. What happened was that a fan emailed the mastering engineer, complaining about the sound of the CD. And the mastering engineer replied off the record, saying, "Yeah, I'm not super proud of this one, but that's what the band wanted, and it is what it is."

According to that fan, here’s the actual response they received from the mastering engineer: Quote, “I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case, the mixes were already brickwalled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say, I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me, I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.” Unquote.

[music in]

Ian: The fan then published this on a forum, in public.

Ian: So, suddenly everyone could see what was meant to have been a quiet, private comment by the mastering engineer. And actually, I spotted this and wrote about it on my blog at the time. And Music Radar and Wired magazine and, ultimately, the Wall Street Journal picked up on the story, and it was briefly in the news. And there was actually a petition signed, with 20,000 fans asking for the album to be remixed and remastered.

[music out]

When 20,000 Metallica fans start complaining about an album being too loud, there might be a problem.

Ian: The really fascinating thing about it, though, was that, as well as the CD release, the soundtrack was available as part of the Guitar Hero game on the PlayStation. We think what happened was that the files were sent out to the game manufacturers earlier on in the production process, before the decision was made to go for this extremely loud final result. So the files that were used in the game were much cleaner, less distorted, than what came out on the CD.

Ian: Some of the fans much preferred the sound of the Guitar Hero version to the released CD.

Let’s listen to the two versions, and see if we can hear the difference. We’ve matched the loudness level so you can focus on the quality of the sound. Here’s a clip from the Guitar Hero version:

[Music clip: Metallica Dynamic 1]

And here’s that same clip from the CD release:

[Music clip: Metallica CD version]

The CD version just sounds awful. Here’s another clip from the Guitar Hero version:

[Music clip: Metallica Dynamic 2]

And here’s the CD:

[Music clip: Metallic CD version]

It’s important to note that in order to match the volume levels in these clips, the CD version had to be turned way down. Here’s the actual difference in volume. We’ll start with the Guitar Hero version:

[Music clip: Metallica Dynamic 1]

Now brace yourself, you might even want to pull out your earbuds—here’s the CD version:

[Music clip: Metallica CD version]

Ian: It's very unusual for us, as music fans, to get the opportunity to compare the final sound of an album with how it might've sounded earlier on in the process.

The original CD release of Death Magnetic is an extreme example but the unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of mainstream music from the last few decades has had some version of this hyper compression treatment. This means that for most of the music that’s come out in the last 30 years, there’s a better sounding version that we’ll probably never get to hear.

Greg: I've found you can almost choose stuff at random.

Greg: “Let's Get it Started” by the Black Eyed Peas is a really big offender.

[Music clip: Black Eyed Peas - "Let's Get It Started"]

Greg: “The Fallen” by Franz Ferdinand.

[Music clip: Franz Ferdinand - "The Fallen"]

Greg: Vapor Trails by Rush was another one that was so poorly mastered that the fans actually rebelled.

[Music clip: Rush - The Stars Look Down (original)]

When Rush released Vapor Trails in 2002, a lot of their fans were unhappy with how it sounded, and the band actually agreed.

In 2013, they had the entire album remixed and remastered. Let’s take a listen to those two versions, and see how they compare.

By the way, we are adjusting the volume levels of these examples so we can compare quality, not the loudness.

Here’s a clip from the original version:

[Music clip: Rush - Nocturne (original)]

That guitar sounds kind of crackly, almost like it’s a broken speaker. Here’s the same clip from the remastered version:

[Music clip: Rush - Nocturne (remix)]

Everything sounds so much cleaner. Here’s the original again:

[Music clip: Rush - Freeze (original)]

And here’s the remaster:

[Music clip: Rush - Freeze (remix)]

[music in]

Vapor Trails is a rare example of a band remastering an album specifically to improve it’s dynamics. Plenty of times though, you’ll hear fans complain that the remastered version of a classic album destroys the dynamics of the original.

Ian: Yeah, remastering is a bit of a controversial topic.

Ian: There have been reissues of classic albums where they've been pushed to the kind of extreme Loudness War levels that we've heard recently, which is not always in the best interest of the material.

Albums by bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones get remastered and re-released over and over. When a new remaster comes out, services like iTunes and Spotify usually remove the older versions from their library. Unfortunately, these new versions might not be as dynamic as the ones they’re replacing. Our whole perception of what classic music sounds like is shaped by the specific releases that we get to hear. But as newer versions replace old ones, that history is constantly being rewritten.

[music out]

These issues don’t just affect one or two styles of music. No genre has been safe from the Loudness War.

Ian: Unfortunately, we now have the situation where it's not being driven by the genre.

Greg: Some music really benefits from a louder, aggressive sound, but if you want to take hip-hop as a genre you can compare the typical hip-hop song today to a hip-hop song from the so-called Golden Era in the '80s and '90s, and I guarantee you that the ones from the '80s and the '90s are gonna have a bigger dynamic range.

Here’s a clip of Young MC’s “Bust a Move”, from 1989:

[Music clip: Young MC - “Bust a Move”]

And here’s “All of the Lights” by Kanye West, from 2010:

[Music clip: Kanye West - “All of the Lights”]

Ian: Ironically, some of the most dynamic releases recently have actually been metal albums, which is an extreme, loud genre

This is the song “Of Unworldly Origin” by the band Revocation.

[Music clip: Revocation - "Of Unworldly Origin"]

Ian: Whereas you get just other saccharine pop stuff that's pushed to within an inch of its life, I mean the last Miley Cyrus album was a country, folky thing, [Music clip: Miley Cyrus - "Malibu"] and it was as loud as Skrillex, [Music clip: Skrillex - "Purple Lamborghini"] which just feels insane.

[music in]

According to Ian, mastering engineers face a lot of pressure to make music as loud as possible.

Ian: Most mastering engineers, if you ask them, would say that they prefer not to go for the super loud stuff.

Ian: I'm really lucky because I've talked about this issue for a long time. Most people know that I'm a fan of dynamics, and I'm not a fan of super-loud mastering. So, most of the people who come to me are not asking for extreme loudness, but a ton of my colleagues in the industry, all they get is requests for things to be louder. You know, the classic comment when they get back the master is, "It sounds great, but please can you make it louder?"

And even though these issues have gotten more attention recently, Ian says that not much has changed.

Ian: Over the last five years, lots more people are aware of this issue, and the reasons you might not want to go super loud, but they still request it anyway, because there's this idea that maybe they need it in order to compete, or to sell lots of copies, or to get the right sound for the style that they're performing in. None of that, in my experience, is true. There's research to show that loudness has no effect on the sales. There's research to show that users don't really care what the loudness is, it's all about the music.

So it’s not just mastering engineers who are responsible for making music louder. Musicians, mixers, producers, and basically everyone involved in the music production process have a roll in the Loudness Wars. But, there are signs of hope, and they’re hiding in some pretty surprising places. More after this.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

Starting in the 90s, popular music became completely consumed by the Loudness War. Most albums since then have been extremely loud and compressed, and many have been pushed so high that they clip and distort unnaturally. Nirvana’s Nevermind arrived in 1991, just as this trend was catching on. Nevermind became one of the best selling albums of all time, but by today’s standards, it's pretty quiet. On the other hand, Californication, by Red Hot Chili Peppers, came out eight years later, and it was also a huge hit. Californication is a great album, but for better or worse, it's super loud, and super compressed. So I wonder, if it had been a little quieter, with stronger dynamics, would it really have hurt sales?

[music out]

I’m not saying that music should sound exactly the same way that it was in the 1970s. But surely there’s a middle ground between the extremely light touch of the 70s, and the heavy-handed approach that took over in the 90s.

Greg: There are ways to do music that's very compressed that competes in the Loudness Wars and still has enough of a range from the difference between average levels and peak levels, to really sound nice.

Ian: So you’re always looking for the loudness sweet spot: that perfect balance between loudness and dynamics, where it’s loud enough, but it works musically, the sound is right, and it has the right emotional impact.

In recent years, some artists and mastering engineers seem to have found this sweet spot, and have made big hits.

Ian: For example, “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars was a huge hit

[Music clip: Bruno Mars: Uptown Funk]

Ian: “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk

[Music clip: Daft Punk - Get Lucky]

Greg: “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk I think is a good example. If you look at it on paper, you look at the peaks and the averages it looks like it's just peaking nonstop, but it's very subtly done so that there's enough of a difference between the averages and the peaks to really sound nice.

Ian: “God's Plan” by Drake is a massive worldwide hit and is not ridiculously loud.

[Music clip: Drake - God's Plan]

Greg: In terms of the Grammy winners, the song that Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga did, if you look at that, that's got a more traditional sort of dynamic range.

[Music clip: Bradly Cooper and Lady Gaga - Shallow]

Greg: One interesting one, if you want to talk about going against the trend is Chinese Democracy by Guns N' Roses. Especially given that they were out of the public eye for so long you might think that they'd want to come back with a huge bang.

[Music clip: Guns N’ Roses - Chinese Democracy]

Greg: The story I heard from Bob Ludwig, the mastering engineer, is that he mastered three versions of that album and played them for Axl, and Axl chose the one that was the least compressed.

Ian: Bob Ludwig, who's a legend, offers his artists the choice. And if they choose the super loud version, that's the version that he goes with. But he personally prefers more dynamics, balanced dynamics.

This “loudness sweet spot” applies to remastering, as well. While some remasters have been overly compressed, others have done a great job preserving the dynamics of the originals, while making them sound even better.

Ian: The reissues of The Beatles' original albums that were done a few years ago are a fantastic example of that. They preserved everything that was great about the originals, and they sound even better than they have before.

Let’s see if we can hear how the sound changed across a few different Beatles releases. Here’s the original version of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”:

[Music clip: The Beatles - “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (original)]

Here’s a remaster from 2009:

[Music clip: The Beatles - "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" 2009]

And here’s the remixed and remastered Super Deluxe edition, from 2017:

[Music clip: The Beatles - "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" Super Deluxe]

All three versions sound great, but the newest one somehow manages to sound the most punchy, and the most spacious. Let’s do another example, here’s the very first mix of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” from The White Album:

[Music clip: The Beatles - “Back in the USSR” (original)]

And here’s the 2009 remaster:

[Music clip: The Beatles - "Back in the USSR" 2009]

And here’s remixed and remastered version from 2018:

[Music clip: The Beatles - "Back in the USSR" 2018]

These albums were recorded over 50 years, but by using the master tapes, the engineers at Abbey Road made these classic albums sound like they were recorded yesterday.

[music out]

Audio tape was patented all the way back in 1929. In the 9 decades since then, a massive history of music has been recorded on analog tape. For special projects like the Beatles remasters, you can go back to these original tapes and use modern technology to bring the sound quality into the 21st century. But what if we lose these tapes?

[music in]

In 2008 there was a fire at the Universal Studios Vault. The fire started from construction work on the roof. Universal Music Group hasn’t released the exact details on this fire, but it’s estimated that there were over 100,000 tapes with 500,000 songs stored in this vault.

The list of artists is unbelievably long and there’s no way I could go through the entire thing now, but just casually looking over it, here is a tiny fraction of who’s master tapes were probably stored there:

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, The Eagles, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Iggy Pop, Barry White, Patti LaBelle, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Who, the Police, Sting, George Strait, Dolly Parton, R.E.M., Janet Jackson, Guns N’ Roses, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Sonic Youth, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Tupac, Eminem, 50 Cent, The Roots.

This is a tiny tiny fraction of what could’ve been in this vault. We don’t know for sure because in the ten years after the fire there still hasn’t been full confirmation. Losing even just one master tape is a huge hit to the music industry.

If these original master tapes were indeed destroyed, and had not been digitized, this is the biggest loss in our modern music history. That would also mean that none of these albums would have the opportunity to be remixed and remastered in the future like what we heard with The Beatles.

[music out]

In recent years, music production has become almost completely digital. But a lot of people still prefer the sound and experience of analog. So, many modern artists have been releasing their music on vinyl, and that’s an encouraging sign for the Loudness Wars.

[music in]

Greg: Vinyl is the only medium in the music industry that's actually growing.

Vinyl technology hasn’t changed a whole lot since the 70s. Due to the sensitivity of the cutting equipment, there’s still a hard limit on how loud you can make a vinyl record. As vinyl sales rebound, mastering engineers are being forced to consider how their mixes will sound on vinyl, just like they used to.

Ian: I wrote a blog post a few years ago, recommending that people master as if it's going to vinyl, but use that same master everywhere, for online, and for CD, and everywhere else, because that master will translate, and will work everywhere.

Ian: If a client was insisting on a super loud master for the CD release, for example, I would always encourage them to send a more dynamic version for the vinyl cut, simply because, as we said, there's a physical limitation. And again, there's no point in pushing that loudness super hard in the mastering for the vinyl if it's going to get turned down at the cutting stage anyway.

Ian: And actually, you do see a fair number of releases these days where the vinyl master actually sounds quite a bit different from the CD master, for that reason.

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But the biggest change in recent years is the way most of us consume music: by streaming it.

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When it comes to sound quality, there are pros and cons to streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and Apple. On the one hand, they compress audio files down to make them smaller. This data compression can definitely result in a lower-quality sound. This is primarily so you can stream it and not eat up your cell phone’s data plan. But there’s another thing these platforms do to songs that’s actually pretty great.

Ian: The interesting thing about streaming is that, because sudden changes in loudness are the number one source of user complaints in TV and radio and also online, streaming services like YouTube and Spotify and Tidal, they want to give people the best user experience, so they have started measuring the loudness of songs they're playing back, and they turn louder songs down to stop people being blasted by sudden increases in loudness.

Greg: They keep it on a constant level because otherwise, especially if you were listening to a mix, if you were listening to Pandora or something, you'd have to be constantly adjusting your volume knob to deal with the fact that some records were louder than others.

Ian: And that's had two interesting effects. One is that it has removed the incentive, really, to make stuff super loud in the first place.

Greg: You’ve gotta figure that if you make music, a lot of it is going to be listened to through some sort of streaming service just because that's the way a lot of people listen to music today.

Ian: 87% of US music industry revenue in 2017 came from non-physical formats. So, only 13% came from CDs and vinyl and cassettes. Everything else was from streaming and downloads. So when that many people are hearing music for the first time online, the temptation to try and use loudness to stand out goes away, because even if you make something super loud, it's going to get turned down afterwards.

Ian: And then you have the situation where maybe some of those compromises that we've talked about, in order to get that super loud sound in the first place, actually become more obvious when they're compared to other songs that were more dynamic to begin with. Because you have this song that was squashed into this small space in order to get the loudness up there, but then you reduce the loudness again and suddenly it sounds kind of held in and constrained in comparison to the music that had more space to breathe in the first place.

Greg: Really, if you're a smart artist you know that and you don't use hypercompression because there's really no point to it.

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A few artists have actually started making two different versions of their tracks: a more dynamic one that they send to streaming platforms, and a more compressed one that gets put on the CD and on iTunes.

Ian: Some people are optimizing music for streaming services. For example, the YouTube version of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe is actually more dynamic than the iTunes version.

Let’s see if we can tell the difference, here’s the iTunes version:

[Music clip: Janelle Monáe - "Make Me Feel" (iTunes)]

And now, Here’s the more dynamic YouTube version:

[Music clip: Janelle Monáe - "Make Me Feel" (YouTube)]

Ian: For me, I think it sounds better as a result. They both sound fantastic, but the YouTube version just sounds incredible. And the iTunes version, to me, when I compare it, just sounds held in. It's a bit more in a box, it's a bit more constrained.

As an artist, is it really fair for artists to give paying fans a worse sounding version of your new album? Doing so isn't just a disservice to them, it's a disservice to the music you worked so hard to make.

Greg: Why would you want to limit the tools that you have at your disposal? And I really think that's what hyper dynamic-range compression does. It just takes a tool out of the toolbox and there's no reason to do it.

If you like to listen to your music loud, the best tool is your volume knob. Making music louder in mastering, just for the sake of being loud, simply degrades the overall quality of sound. This brings us to why dynamic range even matters in the first place.

Greg: Well, you think about it in terms of what music and sound is. It's a sonic palette and there's different ways to use that palette. One of the ways is to vary the music from soft parts to loud parts. It sounds very elementary, but it's very important. You can say music sounds fine today and I'm not gonna argue with that, but it really is undeniable that there is an important part of that sonic palette that just is not being used and I think that a lot of music benefits from that kind of rollercoaster ride of soft to loud to soft. We like our ears to be kind of tickled by these really quick bursts of high energy that go from soft to loud. So that's why I think it's important.

[music in]

Let’s use Photoshop as an analogy. Think about all of the tools you can use to tweak an image. You’ve got brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature. Dynamic range in a song is like contrast in a photo. High contrast means there’s a stark difference between dark and light, loud and soft. But when music has had all of the dynamics drained out of it, it’s like the contrast is stuck at its lowest setting. The image becomes gray, flat, and lifeless. Turning up the brightness on that gray image is like boosting the volume on a hyper-compressed song. Now you’re left with an image that’s almost completely white. Think about if we treated photography like we treat our music and made all of these photos just as bright as possible so that they could stand out from each other. Just think about how much less impactful those photos would be.

Ian: There are various examples of albums where I love the music, and I just find them frustrating to listen to because the sound doesn't do what I want emotionally.

Ian: It just feels like a missed opportunity to me, and especially if it's music where I love it and I want it to have that emotional impact.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Since streaming services even-out the volume between tracks, artists don’t really have to worry about standing out with ultra-loud music. So while it was digital technology that started the Loudness War in the first place, ironically, digital technology might be the thing that finally ends it.

Ian: Because we don't have to compete for loudness anymore, we can just choose whatever's perfect for the music itself, and know that it's going to be played back on a level playing field.

Ian: For me, it's an opportunity to go back to what mastering is all about, which is making the music as good as it can possibly be.

[music out]

[music in]

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

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound Edited by Soren Begin. It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Special thanks to our guests Greg Milner and Ian Shepherd.

If you want to dive deeper into these subjects, be sure to check out Ian’s podcast, it’s called The Mastering Show. His website is called Production Advice. And check out Greg Milner’s book, Perfecting Sound Forever. You’ll find links in the show description.

The background music in this episode came from our friends at Musicbed. Visit musicbed.com to explore their huge library of awesome music.

What album captivates you with its amazing sound? You can tell me on Twitter, Facebook, or through our website at 20k.org. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to tell your friends and family about us. Also, if there’s anyone in your life who records music seriously be sure to tell them about these two mastering episodes. And finally, support the artists you love by buying their music, and buy it in high quality.

Thanks for listening.

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