That’s All Folks! Mel Blanc’s curtain call

Art by Zach Christy.

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso.

Mel Blanc is a legendary voice actor who voiced more than 400 distinct characters. But in 1961, Mel was involved in a potentially fatal car accident. In this episode, we discover the unlikely source that saved him and hear how Mel spent his later years. Plus, we explore what it takes to pass the torch. Featuring interviews with Mel’s son, Noel Blanc, and voice actor Bob Bergen.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Tender and Curious by Sound of Picture
Requiem by Davis Harwell
The Relatively Little House by Steven Gutheinz
Redrawn by Steven Gutheinz
Open Space by Future of Forestry
You + Me by Blake Ewing
Hiraeth by Sinai
Falling in Love (Instrumental) by Cody Fry
Real Thing (Instrumental) by Danica Dora

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.

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View Transcript ▶︎

Before we get started, this episode is actually the second episode of a two part series on the legendary voice actor Mel Blanc. If you haven’t heard the first episode, I’d recommend quing that up and making this a nice double feature. Here’s part 2....

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Duck season.

Daffy Duck: Wabbit season.]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[SFX clip continues: Bugs Bunny: “Wabbit season!”

Daffy Duck: I say, “It’s duck season,” and I say, “Fire!”

[SFX: Cartoon gunshot]

[music in]

Mel Blanc is widely regarded as the most prolific voice actor of all time. He was a key figure during both the golden age of radio and the golden age of animation. He’s most famous for voicing nearly every character in the Looney Tunes and a bunch more at Hannah Barbara. Every voice you’re about to hear is from Mel.

[music out]

[SFX clips: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Eh, what’s up doc?

Wile E Coyote from YouTube clip: You are a rabbit, and I am going to eat you.

Sylvester the Cat from YouTube clip: Boy, acres and acres of Tweety Bird and its mine… all mine!

Tweety Bird from YouTube clip: I tat I taw a iddy biddy puddy cat.

Daffy Duck from YouTube clip: Buster it may come as a complete surprise to you, to find that this is an animated cartoon.

Foghorn Leghorn from YouTube clip: What’s going on, I say what’s going on here!

Road Runner from YouTube clip: Meep meep!

Yosemite Sam from YouTube clip: Get outta here rabbit!

Marvin the Martian from YouTube clip: Where’s the kaboom?

Captain Caveman from YouTube clip: Captain Caveman!]

All together, Mel Blanc created over 400 distinct voices. As far as we know, no single person has been able to come close to recreating all the voices Mel did. He had the genes, the talent, and the work ethic to completely transform the way animation sounded. Over time, the entire industry seemed to rest on Mel’s shoulders.

[music in]

So when Mel was in a really bad car accident, a lot of people were justifiably worried. Not only for Mel, but for their own livelihoods. After the accident, Mel fell into a coma, and as the days passed Warner Brothers even went as far as to consider other actors to replace Mel. But the actor who was offered Bugs Bunny refused, hanging onto hope that Mel would get better.

Noel: They tried to bring him out of the coma. It was very, very difficult because he didn't respond.

That’s Mel’s son, Noel Blanc. Noel and his mother sat with Mel in the hospital for days on end. The accident had left Mel in a coma and a full body cast.

Noel: The doctor came in about on the 13th or 14th day.

Noel: And he said, "Mel, can you hear me?" No response. "Mel." No response. I'd say, "Dad, can you hear me." No.

Noel: And he looked up and saw the television screen.

[SFX: Looney Tunes episode plays on TV in background]

It was Looney Tunes on the screen, and hearing Mel’s characters gave the brain surgeon an idea.

Noel: And he finally says, "Bugs, can you hear me? Bugs Bunny can you hear me?” And my dad went [SFX: Bugs Bunny voice], "Eh, what's up doc, yeah."

It was nothing short of a miracle. Bugs Bunny brought Mel Blanc out of a coma. By this point, Mel had been performing some of the Looney Tunes for more than twenty years. That rascally rabbit was such a part of Mel’s brain that the character brought him back from the brink.

Noel: So the doc got an idea and he said, "Porky Pig can you hear me?" He says [SFX: Porky voice], "I can hear you." He went down the list of characters, and my dad came out of the coma at that time. It was so amazing to watch this happen. My mom couldn't believe it. She started crying. He came out of the coma, and he said, "Where am I?" She says, "Look down, you're in a full body cast."

[music out]

Despite a near fatal injury… including a triple skull fracture, broken legs, and a broken pelvis, Mel got right back to work. He understood that tons of people were counting on him both for their jobs and for their entertainment.

His first job during the recovery was Barney Rubble in the Flintstones. Here’s a clip from that show. Keep in mind that Mel was literally in bed recovering while he recorded this.

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: I don’t know, but since he’s in oil, he could slide away easy!]

Noel: During the 65 Flintstones that we did, he was in a full body cast, not able to sit up of course, the microphones were extended over his bed. We'd built a studio on the other side of the house. Joe Barbera and myself would sit in the studio. I'd run the tape recorders, and the guys from his studio would come by, set it up. They put all the cables underneath the house, ran five microphones next to his bed, and the cast would gather around the bed, and he would be Barney in the bed.

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: Oh boy, what a set up Fred! [laughter]]

[music in]

Even while recovering from an accident, Mel kept busy. And that busy lifestyle didn’t stop when he was away from work.

Noel: He never spent an afternoon not signing pictures for kids that came to the door. And then their kids and then their grandkids over the 40 year period.

Noel: They'd get 2000 people there on Halloween. Because they knew where he lived and the kids would come in little buses. He’d open the door, give them each a little candy bar, do the voices for them.

Mel was also a mentor to people who wanted to make it in animation. He even helped one kid achieve his voice acting dreams. Here’s Bob Bergen.

[music out]

Bob: My thought was, if you want to be a brain surgeon, call a brain surgeon. If you want to be a baseball player, call a baseball player. I want to be a Looney Tune. I'm going to call a Looney Tune.

Nowadays, Bob is well known in Hollywood as a first-call voice actor. You’ve most certainly heard his voice, but might not know exactly from where.

[SFX clip: Bob Bergen VO montage]

But, before the success, Bob was just a kid with a dream of becoming a voice actor, and there was one particular role he wanted more than any other.

[music in]

Bob: I actually just wanted to be Porky Pig. That was my goal since I was a five-year-old child. I didn't know there was a business called voiceover. I didn't know it was acting. I had no idea how the industry worked. I just was a five-year-old kid who said, "I want to be Porky Pig."

Bob: I just found his personality and the comedy, you know when Porky is stuttering and then he takes a left turn with a whole different word. "Petunia, will you marry [stuttering] will you marry [stuttering] let's get hitched." Bob has been practicing Porky for as long as he can remember.

Bob: I was just an obnoxious kid who'd be in grammar school, and a teacher would ask me a question and I'd answer like Porky Pig.

Bob: I had Porky's stutter down by the time I was six. I knew exactly how to stutter, and I knew the comedy behind the stutter.

Bob: We’d moved to LA when I was 14, and I just thought, “I want to be Porky Pig. How do I become Porky Pig?” Well, I'll just call the guy doing Porky Pig and say, "Look, I just arrived. I'm sure you're looking for some way to retire, and I'd be more than happy to accommodate."

Bob’s dad got him a stack of Los Angeles phone books. Then Bob called every M. Blanc he could find, but with no luck.

Bob: And I thought, well, maybe it's under his wife's name. So I started all over. I knew his wife's name was Estelle, and I found E. Blanc in the Pacific Palisades, that was his house. And I got him on the phone.

And you’re not going to believe this, but Bob taped his original conversation with Mel.

[music out]

[SFX Clip:Estelle: Hello.

Young Bob from tape: Is Mr Blanc there?

Estelle: One moment please.

Mel: Hello?

Young Bob from tape: Mr Blanc?

Mel: Yes.

Young Bob: My name is Bob, and I’m interested in doing voices for cartoons.

Mel: Yes.

Young Bob. And I was wondering if you could give me any advice about how to go about it and all.

Mel: Tell me, have you created any voices, or do you just do impressions or impersonations?

Young Bob: Well, I’ve got one voice. [Doing high-pitched voice] It sounds like this. [Regular voice] It’s hard to understand.

Mel: Let me tell you something. In the first place, every voice must be understandable to be in a cartoon.]

Mel chatted with Bob for a few more minutes, talking about creating characters and finding agents.

[SFX clip continued: Mel: I tell you, it’s not an easy business to get into. How old are you?

Young Bob: Fourteen.

Mel: Fourteen… Well it takes an awful long time to get established...]

But Bob still wanted more.

Bob: He mentioned the name of the studio he was working at that week. So when I finished talking to him, I called the studio and I pretended to be his assistant and I said, "Hi, I'm Mel Blanc's assistant and I'm calling to confirm his appointment this week. We've got him down for Thursday at nine." And the receptionist goes, "We have them down for Wednesday at 11." I went, "Oh, you're right. I'm looking at the wrong day in the calendar. Sorry about that."

Bob was determined to learn by watching Mel work.

Bob: So I said to my mom, "I'm skipping school on Wednesday and we're going to go watch Mel Blanc work at this studio." And my mom said, "Cool." So when we got to the studio that Wednesday, I told the receptionist that we were invited to come watch. We were guests of Mel Blanc. And she showed me what booth he was in. And then when we walked into his booth, I said to his producer, "We're very good friends of the receptionist." And she said we could watch. And the producer said, "Sure, have a seat." I got to watch him work.

[music in]

After talking to Mel and watching him work, Bob doubled down on his dream of becoming Porky Pig. Even as a kid, he was recording himself practicing the voice.

[SFX clip: Young Bob from tape: [Stuttering] That’s all folks...]

Mel Blanc loved talking to kids like Bob. In fact, he would visit children’s hospitals as often as he could.

Noel: He did about 185 different college speeches during his lifetime, but he never went into any one of those towns that he didn't go to the children's hospital first.

By all accounts, Mel spent hours at these hospitals, giving sick kids a few moments of happiness. Most people had no idea Mel even made these trips. Publicity wasn’t the point. Mel did it because he loved making people happy.

[music out]

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: I just love it. I love my work, which I think, everybody should love before they do, before they go to work, they should love what they’re going to do or don’t take the job. And I love my work…this has worked out beautifully for me.]

Mel Blanc worked well past retirement. Even with the flu, an 81-year-old Mel Blanc made TV with his son. He was still voicing characters he created more than fifty years before.

Noel: We had done a television commercial for Oldsmobile. It was called Not Your Father's Oldsmobile. And he and I were in the Oldsmobile with the characters, Bugs, Daffy, and all the characters.

[Oldsmobile commercial: Noel, Mel, and Looney Tunes from YouTube clip: This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.

Mel: [Porky Pig voice] That’s all folks.]

[music in]

Noel: We did the entire commercial that day, it took us about eight hours. And he had just gotten over the flu and I said, "Well, why don't you go see the doctor, and he can clear out your lungs for you."

When Mel got to the hospital, the doctor’s gave him the option to stay overnight. He thought this was a good idea. So he took it.

Noel: He had fallen out of bed and broken his femur, got fat emboli into the brain, and he was literally gone within 48 hours.

Just like that, after a more-than-60-year career in entertainment, Mel Blanc was gone.

Noel: He had another few years to go that was for sure, and then passed away because of this accident. So he never retired. He worked actually that whole day before he went into the hospital and broke his leg.

When Mel Blanc died, the world lost an incredible talent. Even more devastating, was the loss of a great human being. A generous, kind person who loved to make people laugh. His voice would never be in another cartoon. It was a sudden end to an amazing life that touched generations of people all over the world.

But it wasn’t the end for Bugs, Daffy, and the rest. What does it take to replace a legend? We’ll find out, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

For more than fifty years, Mel Blanc was the voice behind hundreds of animated characters. He created the voices for Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and so many others. Even before he passed away, Mel knew he had to find someone to fill his shoes.

Noel: He thought that I was going to take over all those voices. I said, “No, nobody can take your voices cause they're not built like you. You've got this huge chest, these incredible vocal chords, this great ear, a perfect pitch, eight octave range. Nobody's going to take over for you. It's going to take really a lot of people to take over for you.”

[music out]

Noel was right. After Mel passed away, Warner Brothers scrambled to find actors who could cover his roles. Noel was able to do some of his dad’s voices, like the Tasmanian Devil.

[SFX clip: Tasmanian Devil from “You Asked for It Part 1”: Yes, bunny yummy! [Eating sounds]]

But other actors came in to help, like Bob Bergen.

Bob: [SFX: Speaking as Tweety] I've done Tweety, the little birdy who hates that bad old puddy tat. I did [SFX: Speaking as Marvin voice] Marvin the Martian in Space Jam. I've done [SFX: Speaking as Junior voice] Junior. Oh father, look! Go get them, Pop.

Bob’s taken on a few of Mel’s characters. But none are as important to Bob as Porky Pig, the character who first got him interested in voice acting.

Bob: I was a working voiceover actor doing a whole bunch of cartoons when Mel Blanc passed away. And I had a good agent who was able to get me into a dozen or so auditions and callbacks before I booked my first Porky Pig gig.

Bob: The first thing I ever did was Tiny Toon Adventures.

[Tiny Toon Adventures clip: Porky Pig from Tiny Toon Adventures: [stuttering throughout] Now class, for our cartoon prop lesson open to page 23 of your whoopie cushion instruction manual.]

But filling in for a legend isn’t easy.

Bob: It was a little daunting because I would say the first year that we would do any Looney Tunes project, they had like a 12 minute reference tape of Mel, but it was some cartoons from the 30s and cartoons from the 40s, some cartoons from the 50s, some cartoons from the 60s. And I would say to them, "Well, which one do you want?" And they're like, "Well, they're all Porky." I'm like, "Yeah, they're all Porky, but the character evolved."

Bob: Earlier, the stutter was different.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from “Porky’s Duck Hunt”: [stuttering throughout] I got him! I got him!]

Bob: Later, he was older, his energy was not as good and you could hear the smoking in the voice.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from “The Bugs Bunny Mystery Special” Good evening. You know who I am. Master of mystery and sus- [stuttering] oh you know, Who-done-its.]

Bob: The era where I think Mel Blanc kind of nailed it, my sweet spot for Porky is about 1952 to 1956, '57." I think that's the era where Mel Blanc really just nailed the character.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from “Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century”: [stuttering] Why it’s very simple sir. If we follow [stuttering] those planets, we can’t very well miss Planet X.]

Bob: We did a series about 10 years ago called The Looney Tunes Show, and it was kind of like a sitcom. And the producers wanted the delivery to be a very specific golly gee way.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from YouTube clip: [stuttering throughout] Bugs, as your friend, I think buying Geradi’s is a great idea.]

Bob: But if nobody says, "Here's what we want." I go to my sweet spot, which is early to mid 50s Mel Blanc.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from “Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century”: I’m [stuttering] all set your hero-ship sir!]

Bob: The earlier, earlier sessions were just a committee. A lot of people I had to please, presidents and vice presidents and executives, and it was all scary. It's been quite some time where they kind of trust me, but I will tell you, I've had to re-audition for them six times.

To be fair, re-auditioning doesn’t bother Bob. He’s confident in his Porky Pig, and he understands what it means to carry Mel’s legacy. Now, Bob’s been Porky for thirty years, but Mel did it for more than fifty.

Bob: Animation brings in more box office than live action. His legacy is the industry as a whole. If you think of classic Hollywood personalities and characters, you're going to think Charlie Chaplin, James Steward, Humphrey Bogart and Bugs Bunny. I mean, I think Bugs Bunny fits in to the world of classic Hollywood as any live action actor would.

[music in]

Mel Blanc is among the greatest actors ever to grace the screen. His talent is a big part of what made him so unique.

Noel: You could watch Mel do the voices and actually transmogrify into those characters. We could turn off the sound inside the booth so it was totally silent. And I could watch him go through the different characters and you could see him becoming the different characters. It was pretty amazing. He actually looked like Yosemite Sam when he did Yosemite Sam.

[SFX Clip: Yosemite Sam from YouTube clip: A rabbit! [Laughs] A rabbit.]

Noel: He looked like Tweety. He was a little teeny Tweety.

[SFX Clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: Poor puddy tat. Forgot his parachute.]

Noel: Foghorn Leghorn, he was the big rooster.

[SFX Clip: Foghorn Leghorn from YouTube clip: Now who’s responsible, I say, who’s responsible for this unwarranted attack on my person?]

Mel’s legacy is enormous. It was his voice that took cartoons into the mainstream.

Bob: Besides 60 years of product, he basically put this industry on the map. When he was doing voices for cartoons, these were just something to put in front of a movie. Today, every major studio has a thriving animation department.

Noel: The culture became embedded with these incredible cartoon characters. And cartoon movies are still the biggest thing out there right now.

Melvin Jerome Blanc passed away at the age of 81, but in many ways his kind soul and personality live on through his characters.

His final resting place is at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery - just a few blocks from his and Bugs Bunny’ star on the walk of fame.

It was Mel himself who wrote what’s inscribed on his tombstone… which says...

That’s All Folks. Mel Blanc, Man of 1000 voices.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: If I saw a person smile, that to me was payment in itself…If I could make them laugh when they had been very sad, it was great payment to me.]

[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. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound design and mixed by Soren Begin, and Colin DeVarney.

Thanks to Noel Blanc for sharing stories of his dad. Thanks also to Bob Bergen. You can listen to more of the recorded phone conversation between Mel and Bob at bobbergen.com.

Many of the clips from Mel in this episode came from an amazing documentary called Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices. You can check that out, plus a fun video of Mel’s vocal chords flexing as he does his Looney Tunes voices at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: [stuttering] That’s all folks!]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

What’s Up, Doc? Mel Blanc and the magic of Looney Tunes

Art by Zach Christy.

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso.

Bugs Bunny, Barney Rubble, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, and more were all voiced by one man, Mel Blanc. Discover the incredible life and talent that helped to elevate the animation industry into big business. Featuring interviews with Mel’s son, Noel Blanc, and voice actors Debi Derryberry and Bob Bergen.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

For Real (Instrumental) by Joybird Falling
In by Shawn Williams
Volcano by Human Pyramids
Golden Hour by Sound of Picture
A Stirring of Patience by Chad Lawson
Particles by Tony Anderson

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.

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Eh, what’s up doc?]

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: You’re pretty good, Fred.]

[SFX clip: Daffy Duck from YouTube clip: You’re despicable.]

[SFX clip: Cosmo S. Spacely from YouTube clip: Jetson, I thought I fired you.]

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: I tawt I taw a puddy tat.]

[SFX clip: Yosemite Sam from soundboard clip: Ya better say your prayers!]

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from YouTube clip: That’s all folks!]

[music in]

All of the voices you just heard came from the same person.

[David Letterman from YouTube clip: It's a pleasure to welcome Mr. Mel Blanc.

Mel: Eh… what’s up, David?]

Mel Blanc is a voice acting legend.

[Mel from YouTube clip: I’ve worked in about 5,000 different cartoons. And actually I do about 400 different voices.]

Noel: Mel Blanc was the greatest voice artist that ever lived. His range was a full eight octaves, his ear was unbelievable. His ability to hear a dialect was uncanny.

Noel: And he was the kindest, gentlest man you'd ever know.

That’s Noel Blanc, Mel’s son.

[music out]

Noel: And what do I do? Produce commercials and films and do a lot of the voices that my dad did.

Here’s Noel as Elmer Fudd in Family Guy.

[SFX Clip: Elmer Fudd from YouTube clip: Shh! Be very, very quiet. I’m hunting rabbits.]

[music in]

Everyone in animation agrees that Mel Blanc was unique and completely changed the industry. His voices helped create iconic cartoon franchises that are still going strong today.

Even from a young age, Mel loved doing voices. He was totally the class clown. ...but even though Mel clearly had immense talent, his first job wasn’t even as an actor.

Noel: He was a musician. He played various music on a trumpet on tuba, on violin and piano. At 17 years old, he was conducting the major orchestra out of Portland.

A few years later, he met his soon-to-be wife, Estelle Rosenbaum. They eventually started a radio show together in Portland called Cobweb and Nuts.

Noel: They were paid $15 a week total for the two of them. So they were pretty well starving up there. And then that's when they decided to come down to Los Angeles.

[music out]

Estelle encouraged Mel to pursue his dreams of acting. He knew just the place that needed his specific talents. This clip is from the documentary Mel Blanc, The Man of a Thousand Voices.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: I had seen some of the Warner Brothers voices in the cartoons, and I thought, “Jeez they're missing out on an awful lot. The voices are pretty bad.”]

Even though Mel is now famous for Porky Pig, he actually wasn’t the first person to play the character. Here’s the original voice.

[SFX clip: Original Porky Pig]

Mel was convinced he could do better, so, like clockwork Mel went to Warner Brothers every two weeks. And he was rejected over and over by the person responsible for hiring voice actors.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: I said, “I'd like to audition for you and show you what I can do.” He said, “Sorry we've got all the voices we need.”]

But, after two years of persistence, Mel knocked on Warner Brothers’ door at the perfect time. The person who kept rejecting him just happened to be home sick.

Noel: The next fellow in line happened to be the sound effects engineer for the Warner Brothers cartoons.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: He says, “Well, let me hear what you do.” So I auditioned for him, and he got a big kick out of it. He said, “Would you do it again for the directors?” I said, “Gladly.”]

Noel: And they loved him and said, "What are you doing next week?" Of course Mel wasn't even working. And he said, "Well, I don't know, I think I can make it."

Mel’s first Warner Brothers cartoon was “Picador Porky.” But he wasn’t Porky Pig. He was Porky’s unnamed drunk friend.

[SFX clip: Drunken friend in “Picador Porky”: La cockaroacha! La cucaracha! [Hiccup!] Play it on the ol' guitar! [Hiccup!] La cockarocha! Play it any place ya are!]

The Warner directors recognized Mel’s talent immediately. And when Porky Pig’s original actor was fired from the role, they offered it to Mel.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: I went out to a pig farm and wallowed around the pigs for a couple of weeks. I come back I said, “If a pig could talk he talked with a grunt you know, ‘Oink, oink, oink, oink, blah, blah, blah, that’s P-P-P-P-P-Porky talking with a grunt.’”]

Mel’s debut of Porky came in the 1930’s.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from YouTube clip: Don’t worry. It’s not loaded. Watch. [SFX: Gun shot.]]

The cartoon was called, “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” It introduced one of Mel’s other famous characters: Daffy Duck.

[SFX clip: Daffy Duck from “Porky’s Duck Hunt”: Don’t let it worry you, skipper. I’m just a crazy, darn fool duck. Woohoo! Woohoo! Woohahahoo!]

Porky and Daffy helped make Mel and Warner Brothers famous. But one of Mel’s creations is clearly king.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: They showed me a picture of this little rabbit and he's gonna say, “Hey what's cooking?” And I said, “Instead of him saying, ‘Hey what's cooking?’ why don't you have him say ‘Eh, what's up, doc?’” That's an expression that was being so popular, and I said, “Why don't you name him after the guy who drew the first picture of him?” His name was Bugs Hardaway. “Why don’t you call him Bugs Bunny?”]

Mel first appeared as Bugs Bunny in a 1940s cartoon called, “A Wild Hare.”

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: Well they told me that Bugs was a tough little stinker. And I thought, “What kind of a voice could I give him? He’s a tough character. Maybe Brooklyn or the Bronx.” [switches to Bugs voice] So, uh, I put the two of them together, doc, and that’s how Bugs Bunny came out.”]

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from “A Wild Hare”: What’s up, doc?]

In that first appearance as Bugs, the character had big teeth way outside his mouth and sort of a long face. Today Bugs has smaller teeth closer to his mouth and a rounder face. When the animation changed, Mel changed Bugs’ voice to match. Here’s Mel’s son, Noel again.

Noel: Bugs was a different kind of voice that instead of going, “eh, what’s up doc?”, they had big teeth and that sounded like this, what you heard in early cartoons. “Eh, what’s up doc?” is a totally different kind of a voice until they move the teeth back into the mouth.

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from “A Wild Hare”: Now don’t spread this around… but confidentially. I AM A WABBIT!]

The process of forming a new character always started with the art.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: First they would show me a picture of the character that they wanted to use in the cartoon. Then they would show me what they call a storyboard. This is what this character is going to do throughout the cartoon.]

After Mel looked at the art and storyboards, he would do a little research about the character’s animal. When he landed the role of Daffy Duck, he did a bit of bird watching.

Noel: Actually that's where he picked up Daffy Duck's voice because Daffy Duck, that spray is a spray. It's not a lisp, a lisp is this [SFX]. It's a spray. Well, if you've seen the ducks land in the water, they get a lot of water in both orifices.

[SFX clip: Daffy Duck from YouTube clip: “Listen, sport. You don’t know the meaning of fair play.”]

Daffy Duck sounds a bit similar to another iconic character, Sylvester the cat. There’s one key difference though. Daffy is spraying water out of his mouth. Sylvester is drooling over a little yellow canary that he wants to eat so badly. [SFX clip: Sylvester from YouTube clip: Sufferin’ succotash.]

Noel: Sylvester, which is the lower down here, is just salivating because of Tweety. So they're not lisping. They're salivating.

[SFX clip: Sylvester from YouTube clip: I never thought just being a pussy cat could get so complicated.]

Mel traveled all the way to Australia to find the voice for the Tasmanian Devil.

Noel: When he was in Tasmania in Hobart, they have a wonderful zoo in the main city there. And he visited the Tasmanian devil in the zoo and realized that the Tasmanian devil devoured everything in front of him.

Here’s what actual Tasmanian Devils sounds like [SFX: Tasmanian Devil Vocalization] ...they’re notorious for how aggressively they eat [SFX: aggressive eating].

...and here’s how Mel interpreted those sounds.

[SFX clip: Tasmanian Devil from YouTube clip: [Spitting and incoherent noises]]

Mel’s also famous for the voice of Tweety Bird.

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: I twat I taw a putty tat. I did, I did, I see taw a putty tat.]

From the start people loved Mel’s characters, but their popularity really soared in the 1940s.

Noel: The major thing that sold Bugs Bunny to the public was a two minute song on buying bonds. And those at that time there were war bonds and he and Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig sang the song, "Any bonds today."

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Any bonds today? Bonds of freedom, that’s what I’m selling! Any bonds today?...]

Noel: Every theater between every performance, and this is again where 50 million people a week going to the theater or more. And that's how they really became popular.

[SFX clip: Continue Any Bonds Today clip]

Mel’s characters were so popular that he asked for a raise. But instead of more money, Warner Brothers countered with something no other cartoon voice actor had at the time. That was his name featured in the credits.

That meant his name got out there, and other studios wanted to hire him.

Noel: He was doing 18 radio shows a week at one time. And so he would run from CBS to NBC to ABC, which were very close there. So he would come on, he would know exactly the characters he was doing, whether it was the Abbott and Costello Show...

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Eh, what’s up, doc? What’s cooking, fatso?

Bud Abott: Costello, look it’s Bugs Bunny!]

Noel: … or the Jack Benny Show...

[SFX clip: Jack Benny from YouTube clip: It says here that you do imitations. Is that right?

Mel: Oh yeah, that’s right. I do animals, all kinds of things.]

Mel even had his own show!

[SFX clip: Announcer from YouTube clip: Starring himself in person, Mel Blanc!

Mel: Good evening, folks!]

Mel Blanc was a household name. For decades he voiced many of the Looney Tunes while also doing bit parts for Hanna Barbera. Here he is as George Jetson’s boss, Cosmo Spacely.

[SFX clip: Cosmo S. Spacely from YouTube clip: Jetson! I thought I fired you… Now get out!]

He did the barks for Fred Flintstone’s pet dinosaur, Dino.

[SFX clip: Dino from soundboard: Barking and panting]

...and he was even the voice of Barney Rubble!

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: Now I know how it feels to be hatched.]

[music in]

In all, Mel created over 400 voices.

As far as we know, there is no person on earth who can voice all the characters of Mel Blanc. It was a unique combination of factors that all came together to create his unparalleled talent. We’ll unravel the mystery of what made Mel not just one of the greatest voice actors in history, but one of the greatest actors period, after this.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Mel Blanc was the most prolific and influential voice actor of all time. He performed more than 400 characters, many of which he created out of thin air. And every one of these characters had a distinct personality and voice. No other actor since then has been able to perform every voice Mel did.

Here he is as Yosemite Sam.

[music out]

[SFX clip: Yosemite Sam from YouTube clip: That dirty perka shark a back flat'n port'n filla bunka borton perka luma burton durton bosh da nat'n bart'n da naddah oooh.]

And Mel performed a lot of Hanna Barbera characters too, like Secret Squirrel.

[SFX clip: Secret Squirrel from YouTube clip: If you don’t mind, it’s sort of secret.]

He even did characters who never spoke actual words.

Noel: He was doing all the different craziness of Tom and Jerry.

[SFX clip: Jerry from “Cat and Dupli-Cat”: [Sings in animal noises]]

Mel also created the voice for Woody Woodpecker.

[SFX clip: Woody Woodpecker singing: Everybody thinks I’m crazy. Yessiree that’s me, that’s me.]

Mel actually left the role of Woody early in the series, but the show still used Mel’s pre-recorded laugh for the character.

[SFX clip: Woody Woodpecker from YouTube clip: [Laughs]]

Those few short giggles at the end are totally intentional. They’re actually meant to sound like a woodpecker pecking.

[SFX clip: Woody Woodpecker from YouTube clip: [Laughs]]

How do you even do that? [SFX: Dallas attempts laugh]

[SFX clip: Woody Woodpecker from YouTube clip: [Laughs]]

Nowadays, it takes about a dozen people just to cover all of Mel’s Looney Tunes characters. He could pull off feats of acting that were difficult for even seasoned voice actors. Here’s Hank Azaria, who plays Moe, Chief Wiggum, and more than fifteen other characters on The Simpsons. In this clip from the documentary, Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices, Azaria talks about something Mel can do that the entire cast of The Simpsons can’t.

[SFX clip: Hank Azaria from YouTube clip: Only if you're a voice actor do you realize how incredible this is. When Bugs and Daffy are fighting over whether it's wabbit season or duck season, and Daffy Duck comes out dressed up as Bugs Bunny doing a Bugs Bunny imitation. Then Bugs Bunny comes out dressed as Daffy doing a Daffy impression.]

[SFX clip: Daffy [doing Bugs imitation]: Eh, what’s up, doc? Having any luck with those ducks? It’s duck season, ya know?

Bugs [doing Daffy imitation]: Just a darn minute. Where do you get that duck season stuff?]

[SFX clip: Hank Azaria: You know how hard that is to do, to take your own character and have it imitate another one of your own characters? It’s almost impossible, because if you try to like combine two voices that you’re doing, you kind of just land in the middle… We tried it one day at The Simpsons, we were talking about, we were marveling at Mel Blanc’s ability to do this, and we all tried to do one of our characters imitating another one and have them sound different, and we couldn’t do it.]

[music in]

Mel’s immense voice talent was a unique combination of factors. First, he had an amazing ear for dialects.

Noel: Whether it was Armenian or Scottish, British, Irish, whatever it might be, even in the States. Mel could do voices from every state, somebody was from Mississippi, he could tell that difference between that and Arkansas.

Mel also had a unique vocal chord structure.

Noel: The doctor said after we put a camera down it, because I thought it would be a good idea to photograph his larynx. He said, "We haven't seen this kind of vocal structure." And it's about twice as large as a normal vocal structure. So between the vocal structure of the larynx and his ability and ear and octave range, he had the bare assets for being the greatest voice person that ever lived.

[music out]

There were times when Mel had a little help from technology. Here’s Bob Bergen, one of today’s leading voice actors, who actually got to watch Mel work.

Bob: Many of Mel's voices were sped up electronically. A lot of people don't know that. I actually discovered that when I crashed a recording session when I was about 14. I was watching him work and he was doing Tweety and it was like really bad. I just thought it was because of his age and he was smoking, and they played it back and it was great. And I said to the producer, "What did you do to the playback to make it sound so good?" And she said, "We sped his voice up."

Bob: Technically, they were recorded slower and played back at real time. So they were recorded depending on the character, 10 or 12 percent slower. So when they played it back in real time, it was sped up.

Here’s Tweety as we recognize it from the cartoons.

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: I tawt I taw a puddy tat. I did, I did taw a puddy tat.]

And here’s that same line, slowed down. This would have been the normal recording speed.

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip 12 percent slower: I tawt I taw a puddy tat. I did, I did taw a puddy tat.]

Even with a few genetic advantages and a little help from technology, this kind of acting requires a lot of talent and a lot of work.

Debi: It's commitment to the character. Acting wise, you have to be able to inhabit and commit to fully that character and never leave it for a moment.

This is Debi Derryberry. She’s the voice behind more than 250 animated characters.

Debi: On-camera, they go through inhabiting the character for days and days on end, but in VO, you have to be able to hop into that character quickly, completely, and it will be believable if you are there.

One of Debi’s characters is Jimmy Neutron on Nickelodeon.

[SFX clip: Jimmy Neutron from YouTube clip: Good work everybody! We’re ready for intergalactic travel.]

Debi: Howie Mendell did a cartoon called Bobby's World, and I was his best friend Jackie, who was very cerebral.

[SFX clip: Jackie from YouTube clip: I knew you’d come to your senses, Bobby. You finally realized that I’m the only woman you’ll ever love.]

Both of Debi’s characters you just heard were little kids. Yet they sounded like different people. So she really understands what it takes to create a distinct character.

Debi’s favorite Mel Blanc creation is Pépé Le Pew.

[SFX clip: Pépé Le Pew singing from YouTube clip: Tip-toe from your pillow to the shadow of a willow tree and tip-toe down the tulips, avec… hey!]

[music in]

Despite never being a Looney Tune, Debi knows a ton about Mel Blanc. That’s because everyone who works in the industry studies him.

Debi: We never have to say Mel Blanc. People just know who Mel is.

Debi loves Mel’s characters not just because he’s a legend. Mel was an incredible actor.

Debi: I'll hit on my, the all time common misconception. "Hey, my friends say I have a good voice. I would think I should do voice acting. I think I should be a cartoon voice." "Oh really?"

Debi: Here's the lowdown on that one. Voice acting is an acting job. That means you need to be an actor. You just don't say, "I'm going to be a rocket scientist or a computer programmer." You go to school to learn how to do these things. There's a lot involved in being a voice actor, learning the ins and outs of the microphone and being able to read, get the words off the page, meeting your acting beats in it, being able to change accents, being able to change characters.

[music out]

Lots of people can imitate Bugs Bunny’s voice. For example, I can say, “What’s up, doc?” and sound like Mel. But only a few people can truly become the character of Bugs. It’s a lot harder than you might think.

Debi: So, I just happen to be able to get my voice, oh, in that baby thing where baby's talking, [SFX: baby talk]. So, I can get there pretty easy and then that baby can age up, but each age has to be fully committed, and so if I have no accent, then that age transition can be, [SFX: baby talk that ages into an adult] “I don't know mommy, I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. You know what? He doesn't know what you're talking about. Tell mom he doesn't know. Mom. Look it. I'm just going to go to college. Okay, I am out of here. Honey, when are you going to come home from school? You know what darling? Get that girl home from school.” So, it's just moving it around and committing.

Like Debi, Mel was a master of modifying his voice. He could change the age or the dialect. He could turn the variables of his performance like dials.

Debi: He was able to look at the picture and inhabit them, and as a voice artist, I would say, you layer them, okay? So, you have your Pépé Le Pew.

[SFX clip: Pépé Le Pew from YouTube clip: Comment allez-vous this fine morning?]

Debi: Okay, he uses his voice, but he's got his French accent and his cadence. You know he's got his french accent and everything goes up like this and this [SFX: French accent]. And then you have your Tweety.

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: I did. I did. I did taw a puddy tat.]

Debi: Okay, you put your speech impediment on it and you go down into your baby voice. SFX: baby voice] Still, you're going to the baby spot. First, you're in the baby spot, and then you start doing your Ah's, Oh's, try and get them just right, and then you put the actual sweetness in there, like inhabiting and committing to the sweetness of this little Tweety Bird character, or you're Daffy Duck.

[SFX clip: Daffy from YouTube clip: That’s dandy. Ho ho. That’s rich, I say. Now how about some color, stupid?]

Debi: You're going to start with Mel's voice, you're going to put in your sideways speech impediment there [SFX: Daffy speech impediment] and you've got your sideways thing going in and his voice and then you put in your mischievous and your snark and the nastiness that goes with Daffy.

Other voice actors agree with Debi. Here’s Bob Bergen again.

Bob: Well, he was vocally versatile, but he was also a brilliant actor.

Bob: It was in the creating of the characters. He had lots of characters that might've sounded similar. Like Daffy Duck…

[SFX clip: Daffy Duck from YouTube clip: How about a little something to stimulate the scalp?]

Bob: ...is basically Sylvester sped up.

[SFX clip: Slyvester from YouTube clip: Sufferin’ succotash.]

Bob: But the personalities were totally different. The man could take those words and bring them to life with a uniqueness that was just his own. Also, because of the way his vocal chords were built, he had such a lovely, deep bassy voice, at the same time he had a very nasal voice. So when he was sped up, it didn't sound like a chipmunk. He had so much bottom to his range that the sped up voice didn't sound artificially enhanced. So a lot of it was just the way he was built.

Mel made the characters his own. When Flintstones’ producers gave him direction for Barney Rubble, they said they wanted him to sound like Art Carney on The Honeymooners.

[SFX clip: Art Carney from YouTune clip: Hehe, I knew it would work.]

His response was, “I don’t do impressions.”

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: [Barny Rubble voice] The voice for Barney Rubble. I did the voice for him. And, uh, you know it's a different voice than Art Carney, but they said, “Do a voice like Art Carney.” I said, “No, I won’t do that, but I'll give you this voice here. I'll take the same inflections that he uses and a slow laugh at the end.” [Laughs]]

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: Oh boy! Wait’ll Fred sees my new bowling ball...STRIKE! [Laughs] They’ll call me twinkle toes Rubble, the terror of the alleys. STRIKE!]

Mel Blanc was at the height of his career… and the characters he created grew the animation industry into big business. There were more than 400 voices in one man. Hundreds, if not thousands of jobs depended on him… and millions of viewers had come to rely on him for their escape and entertainment. All of that, came to a sudden halt. Here’s Mel’s son Noel again.

[SFX: Start drone that slowly over takes the music under the following.]

Noel: He was driving in Dead Man's Curve... Big curve around UCLA. And a kid in a big Oldsmobile jumped through the divider on Dead Man's Curve and plowed him straight on, head on, head to head. The kid didn't get hurt because he was driving this huge car. My dad was in an aluminum car, an Aston Martin. It folded up.

We’ll hear the rest of the story, next time.

[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 defacto sound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Colin DeVarney.

Thanks to Noel Blanc for sharing stories of his dad. Thanks also to Katherine Blanc, Noel’s wife, who wrote a children’s book called Melvin the Mouth, which shares more of Mel’s life. Thanks also to Debi Derryberry. You can find her work, books, and more at debiderryberry.com. That’s Debi with an “I” not a “Y.” Finally, thanks to Bob Bergen. You can find out all about Bob on his web site at bobbergen.com.

Many of the clips of Mel came from an amazing documentary called Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices. You can check out the whole video on our website, 20k dot org. There you’ll also find the music tracks and transcripts for all of our episodes, plus original artwork. So go check it out.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

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Twenty Parts Per Thousand: Designing with smell

Art by Zach Christy.

This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther.

The stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting smells.

Throughout history, humans have gone to great lengths to indulge their sense of smell. We explore the contemporary scent industry to see how modern creatives are utilizing works of olfactory art everywhere from Disney World to high-end museums. Featuring Disney Imagineer Gary Powell and former New York Times scent critic Chandler Burr.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Sanguine by Dexter Britain
Date Prep by Kerry Muzzey
Kaleidoscope by Lights and Motion
Dizzy (Instrumental) by Fuzzy Halo
Breathe by Chad Lawson
Divisions by Max LL
In Circles by Max LL
Breather by Breakmaster Cylinder 
Old Technology Has My Heart by Breakmaster Cylinder 
Birds Dress Me In The Morning (No Breakbeat version) by Breakmaster Cylinder 
(Dorian) And The Moustache Was His Name by Breakmaster Cylinder 
Fabulous Flying Merkins by Breakmaster Cylinder 

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.

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

Check out Chandler’s exhibits at chandlerburr.com.

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Parts Per Thousand, the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting smells.

[SFX: Big sniff]

[music in]

Here at Twenty Per K, we are obsessed with everything olfactory. As longtime listeners of this smell-cast are aware, scent is powerful. It can trigger deep nostalgia and emotion. The ancient Greeks and Romans really knew the power of scent, they burned pepper, cinnamon, and cloves on holy altars. Their most sacred places were filled with sweet smells drifting up to the heavens [SFX].

Back then, it took a legendary amount of work to burn fragrances in the direction of Zeus and his buddies. Many of these spices grew on the other side of the world and it could take months to bring them home. All of that, so they could light something on fire because it smelled good.

Just as our ancestors defined their places of worship by burning spices, we use perfumes, scented candles, and other aromas in our homes or businesses to build atmosphere. And here in America, I’d argue that there’s no place more revered and more indulgent for your senses, than Disney World.

[music out]

[music in]

From the moment you arrive at the Magic Kingdom, [SFX: Theme Park Ambience] you’re hit with the sweet smells of desserts on main street, and every attraction you explore has something to smell. The Haunted Mansion has a rich old wood smell and Splash Mountain smells like a jungle after a rainstorm. Even the on-site Disney resorts each have their own distinct smell.

And they’re all created by Disney Imagineers, like Gary Powell.

Gary: We try to emerge the guests in using all of the senses, and have them just totally emerged into the experience. We want them to be able to forget about everything that may be going on in the world, and just really enjoy themselves and their family time, make memories that'll last forever.

Gary: Smell in my opinion, is a memory enhancer. And it really brings back places, happy moments. It's very important and very instrumental to the storytelling.

[music out]

When Gary and his team work on an attraction, they have to coordinate between many creative aspects. The goal is to stimulate all of our human senses to create an unforgettable experience.

Gary: My role is a special effects designer. So we will sit there and go through the story concepts with the creative teams, and try to come up with different ideas, whether they be fire effects, projected effects, fiber optics. There's numerous types of special effects that we work on. So we will go through the storyboarding process with the creative teams and try to say, "What if?" What if is something that is used quite a bit over at the Walt Disney Imagineering. What if we did this?

Incorporating smell into an experience is a holistic experience. They’re not just spraying some perfume in the air, they’re making everything work together to tell a story.

Gary: Well, we'll sit there and once again go back to the storyboards, and say, you know "What will really enhance the guest experience?"

[music in]

Gary: So what if you smelled the oranges as you are gliding [SFX] through in the Soaring Over California attraction? What if you could smell the ocean [SFX] as you're going through that experience? These are all different things that we talk about in the storyboarding process. And then we go through a process of developing those smells.

[music out]

When Gary and his team are ready, they’ll reach out to a perfumer to create the scent that they’re thinking of.

[music in]

Gary: Working with a perfumer, you go through a very lengthy explaining verbally, or the best way that you can communicate a scent to a perfumer. They will take that information, and they will go back and do their work, and then send us samples back out.

Every scent for a client like Disney starts with a “brief.” Chandler Burr knows this all too well, he’s the former Perfume Critic for the New York Times, and has documented the process of creating high-end perfumes in his book called The Perfect Scent.

Chandler: The brief is, in a sense, the screenplay, or the blueprint in the case of architecture. It is the concept that is going to be turned into the art.

Olfactory artists or perfumers are the people that come up with the formulas to make a smell. The perfumers at these companies create a first round of scents based on the brief, and then bring these initial ideas to the clients to smell.

Chandler: The perfume houses will come back and they'll say, "These are our first sketches of the brief or the concept that you want." Then the brand is going to say,"You know what? We like this one."

[music out]

When you think of a perfumer you might assume that they’re wandering an evergreen forest smelling wet moss [SFX: Forest, sniffing footsteps] or drifting through gardens sniffing flowers [SFX] all day. I mean they might do that on their off time but modern perfumers create scents in high tech purpose built laboratories.

[SFX: Lab ambience (AC, computer hum), SFX of perfumer working: typing, stirring, writing]

Chandler: People have this idea that perfumers are sitting there pouring Rose absolute into Jasmine, at their desk, like some magician, or something, and it's not that at all. Today it is highly, highly scientifically done. The perfumers actually sit at their desks, and have bottles, and bottles of mods.

Mods are short for modifications or a new iteration of a scent that a perfumer is working on. Each time a perfumer tweaks their formula and wants to smell their new scent they create a mod to take a whiff.

Chandler: There are programs, computer programs, that are made to keep track of formuli, and raw materials, at extremely precise portions. They do it in parts per thousand, for some reason, which is sort of interesting, they don't do it in percent.

Getting to a finished smell takes tons of revisions. It can take rounds and rounds of modifications and reviews to hit a smell just right. For Gary and his team at Disney, they’re trying to find something that helps complete their story, but also appeals to the wide audience of visitors at the park.

Gary: Scents are very particular to different people. Some people really enjoy different types of scents, where others may not like it as much.

Gary: So we get a large group of employees [SFX: Crowd ambience - people chattering, sniffing] to come over and start sampling the scent, and try to get a reaction from them to see if they do enjoy it, or they don't. So it's not where we would sit there and say, "Okay. Here. This is the perfect scent. This person likes it." There's quite a few tests that we go through over at Walt Disney Imagineering with different people sampling it to get their opinions.

Gary: So it could take a month. It could take six months or even longer to get through that process. I have gone through as many as 30, 40 different types of samples before we finally got to one that was fairly close to what the creative team was looking for.

Accommodating these changes pose a constant challenge for perfumers, who construct, and reconstruct their formulas over and over.

[SFX: Scientific lab ambience (soft machines whirring, class clinking, liquids being stirred, typing on keyboard) - ideally a repeating sequence, stopping and starting a few times over and over ]

Chandler: With perfume you're constantly evolving the work, the formula. You're adding materials, you're subtracting materials, you are trying different angles and aspects and directions.

Chandler: And in the end, you wind up with a formula that when you compound it, when you put it together, you wind up with the work that is your vision.

While Chandler didn’t collaborate with perfumers who worked on Disney attractions, the perfumers for the Soarin Over California attraction struggled to nail down one very specific scent.

[music in]

[SFX: Ocean or beachy]

Gary: The creative team wanted to have an ocean smell. So with this ocean smell, we had gotten in touch with some perfumers, and had them give us different samples. When we brought them over to the creative team and had them sampling these, we found out that none of them really worked from a creative perspective. So we were scratching our heads, saying, "What are we going to do in order to get something that creative likes and creative will buy into?"

Gary: In this case, we went out and bought some new cotton socks. [SFX: Ocean] Went over to the Pacific Ocean, and we dropped the sock into the ocean [SFX] and just saturated it there for a little bit.

Gary: We then took that, put it into a plastic bag [SFX], and we sent it to the perfumer that we were using, and had that perfumer sit there and recreate that scent [Pouring and mixing SFX]. Well, when they sent us back the samples the first reaction from creative was they loved it. It was great. It was exactly what they were looking for. Until that experience, I'd never realized that the different ocean waters had a different smell, depending upon where you were.

[music out]

When perfumers find the right mix of ingredients to create that perfect smell, the craft and care of the teams behind Disney’s Parks are able to create something magical.

[SFX: Theme Park Ambience]

Gary: One of the exciting parts of my job is after we finish an attraction, and you have the guests going through experiencing it for the first time, is standing right outside listening to their reactions, seeing their reactions on the hard work that you had done over the past couple of years.

Gary: Soarin’ Over California, the people that were leaving the attraction would make comments on the different scents that they smelled while they were experiencing the ride. And the majority of them were running back over, getting in line to experience the attraction again.

Gary: So when I go into the Disney theme parks, and I hear the guests' reactions to the experience of a new attraction that we have opened, I look at it and say, "Okay. All of this was worth it. Everything that we went through prior was worth it." I mean, to get that smile on the guest's face, it's just amazing. I mean, it's one of my most enjoyable parts of the job that I have.

[music in]

For Gary’s team of Imagineers, smell is part of the larger Disney sensory experience, but for perfumers, creating a scent is an artform unto itself. The multi-billion dollar perfume industry is a hidden world of artistic geniuses, cutting edge science, and high-stakes gambles. We’ll explore secrets behind the scents after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

If you’ve ever been to Disney World, whether you know it or not, you’ve been affected by smell. From the aromas of regional cuisines in Epcot, to the smoky musk of cannonfire [SFX] on Pirates of the Carribean, smell transports you into these fictional worlds.

[music out]

But as the perfume critic for the New York Times, Chandler Burr found that master perfumers create scents that are their own art form.

[music in]

Chandler: Scent as an art medium can convey, I think it's very, very clear, can convey things in ways that other mediums can't. I think that scent is certainly one of the weaker mediums in conveying intellectual information and abstract concepts. It doesn't do that well. It is extraordinarily powerful, and I think more than other mediums, in conveying raw emotion and in rendering the person experiencing the work of art, helpless in the face of its power as a medium.

Chandler: It's an extraordinary medium for that reason.

[music out]

Just as you can appreciate the sculpture with your eyes, or a work of music with your ears, a work of perfume brings together a collection of elements to create art for your nose.

Chandler: Composers are going to use an accord, they're going to put notes together, form a chord [SFX]. And you're constantly mixing these materials to get the full work of music. It's exactly the same in perfume.

Chandler: There are some perfumes in the market that have 11 or 12 scent materials [SFX: keyboard notes counting up], and there are some perfumes in the market that have 20, 30, 40, 50 [SFX: keyboard notes counting up].

Chandler: The number of raw materials has tended to fall, and one of the reasons is that synthetics gives you a control over the medium.

[music in]

Here’s the thing, when you hear the word “synthetic” people start to get a little nervous. Which makes sense! It sounds like you’re spraying toxic chemicals all over yourself so you can smell like a pretty flower. But the truth is that there’s way more nuance to the idea of synthetic versus natural and its way more about marketing than safety.

Chandler: First of all, there is no natural material in perfume. Okay, let's get that straight right out of the gate. I mean, this is dumb. You know, people say, "Oh, that has rose absolute and jasmine and vetiver and that's all it has. And it's all natural." Um... You know what? All of these materials have been treated with chemicals.

Chandler: It's ridiculous. There have never been natural materials. You don't take something from some mint leaf and then put it in a bottle.

[music out]

Getting any scent from a raw material takes a good deal of chemistry. Even the most simple elements require some amount of processing.

[music in]

Chandler: Now, in rose, if you extract a rose and get an essence and if you extract it with the oldest technology that we use, which is just steam, okay? You've got about a thousand molecules. Of those thousand molecules, only about 30 actually smell. None of the others smell. So take those 30. Well, actually, if you take the 30, only about 15 of them really smell of rose. And so now you're down to 15, and from 15, you really can go down to 10, 8, 7.

By extracting the scent of a rose from thousands of molecules to just around a dozen means there’s fewer ingredients that can cause allergic reactions, and there’s fewer elements to test. So if something does cause a problem it’s way easier to figure out the cause. Rather than following an industrial process to extract these molecules from natural roses, scent companies can simply create these exact same chemical compounds synthetically in a safer and more environmentally conscious way.

Chandler: You can construct a beautiful rose out of four or five materials, but you don't actually have to destroy all these rose bushes and use all this fertilizer and all these chemicals. And it really is a more efficient, lower carbon way of creating these scent materials.

[music out]

Thanks to synthetic ingredients, perfumers have a constantly expanding collection of tools to make their art. That creative freedom empowers scent artists to explore lots of inspirations and styles through their work. After all, modern perfume isn’t all about smelling like flowers. There might not be anyone better at explaining all that nuance and craft than Chandler. He can take a single scent and give it the same amount of background and analysis as a painting in the Louvre.

[music in]

Chandler: There is a work by two extraordinary olfactory artists named Christine Nagel and Francis Kurkdjian and it is Narciso Rodriguez for Her Eau de Parfum is the name of it. It is a work of neo-romanticism that is absolutely extraordinary. It takes the romanticism of the 1800s and transports it to the 21st century.

Chandler: When you experience it it transports you, it is almost like being caught in a tide or a wind. It is deep, it is dark. It makes you feel emotion. I think it's absolutely wonderful.

[music out]

Great perfumers are great artists and they make art that is consumed by millions of people around the globe. There are giant advertisements for perfumes in international airports and small town drug stores, but there’s a reason that most of us have never heard the name of the geniuses that create these works.

Chandler: Scent in most cases is made in the same way. You have these huge brands, L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, and then the names of the brands themselves, Tom Ford, Le Labo, Jo Malone, Yves Saint Lauren and so on. So those are the ones that hire the perfumers.

Chandler: And they didn't want the artists to be recognized because they felt that it detracted. I think that acknowledging the artist, only elevates what is a product.

Chandler: Acknowledging the artist only helps us understand these works and their value and their beauty and their importance more.

To help raise the profile of scent artists, Chandler worked with the Museum of Arts and Design in New York to create a brand new kind of museum exhibit. He created an experience that focused entirely on perfumes, and treated their creators with the same reverence as famous painters or sculptors.

Chandler: The Art Of Scent, which is the first scent art exhibition that I did, we started with a work of art that was created in 1889.

The exhibit takes people through over a century of scent art. Unlike walking through a department store, where staff are spraying you with various perfume samples, Chandler’s exhibitions use techniques specifically designed for appreciating olfactory art.

[music in]

[SFX: Museum ambiance]

Chandler: In The Art Of Scent, we actually have two sections for experiencing it. One we call The Gallery, is a very formal space, that's where I have my wall labels on each work.

In the Gallery, Chandler used specially designed, scented beads infused with the perfume

Chandler: You lean toward it and you trip an infrared wire and then the scent comes out [SFX: Perfume spray, sniff sniff]. So it's a very, very efficient and it's a wonderfully fun way, frankly, a sort of high tech way to experience the scent. The second section of the Art of Scent exhibit was the salon, a social space for people to try and discuss different scents.

[SFX: more personal crowd than museum, sniffing, bottles clinking]

Chandler: We actually have the perfume there in glasses and we provide a ton of blotters and you dip them and people talk about them and they hold them and then they shove them in other people's faces. They say, "Smell that, I love that. I think it's amazing." Or, "Smell that, that's insane. I don't understand this." And it really gets sort of experienced by communication

[music out]

Chandler’s exhibits appear in museums around the world, and he continues to advocate for widespread appreciation of olfactory art.

[music in]

While modern society may not go to the same great lengths as the ancient Greeks or Romans to cater to our sense of smell, Chandler has found that the right scent is as profound as it always has been.

Chandler: It's a wonderful mission, if you will, to make people understand these works of scent convey these same things, are drenched in subjectivity, actively seek to change the way you perceive reality, are in fact major works of art in the mainstream of art history.

Chandler: I remember one time I was giving a curator tour, and I went through and there was this guy who ... just sort of nice guy. And he was clearly a tourist in New York, he was there with his family, and he went through and he's not the kind of guy who you think was going to respond to things and he was transfixed and he stood there. After we finished, he stood there after the last work of art just smelling it and smelling it and he turned to me and he said, "What's amazing about this is not just the works of art, is that I never would have imagined that this thing could have this kind of impact on me the way a movie, or a book, or a painting could," and he said that's why it blows me away.

Chandler: I love that.

Twenty Parts Per Thousand is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the studios of Defacto Smells. A scent design team that makes commercials, documentaries, and trailers smell incredible.

Okay so, by now, surely you know something’s up with this episode. And you may be listening to this episode like three years in the future. so I’ll just say it, this is an April Fools episode.

[music in]

Don’t worry, Twenty Thousand Hertz will be back to exploring the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds next time.

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

Thanks to our guest Gary Powell for joining us and to Disney for helping out with this episode. And also thanks to Chandler Burr. You can find out more about Chandler’s exhibits at ChandlerBurr.com. The music in this episode is from The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Music Bed. You can find every track name, artist, for every episode we’ve ever done on our website, 20k dot org. Thanks for smelling.

[music out]

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Cremona: Saving the world’s most prized violin sounds

Art by Jon McCormack.

This episode originally aired on This Is Love.

There’s a town in northern Italy that’s home to the most famous violin makers in history. The museum there holds some of the most unique and prized violins in the world - but we’re in danger of losing their sounds forever. In this episode from the podcast “This Is Love”, Phoebe Judge reports on how a town stayed quiet to preserve an instrument they love.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Winter+Theme by Blue Dot Sessions
Illa Villardo by Blue Dot Sessions

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

There’s a town in northern Italy named Cremona. I’ve been there. It’s not your typical Italian tourist destination, but it still has all of the Italian charm. But more than anything, this town is known for being home to some of the most renowned violin makers in history, including the legendary Antonio Stradivari.

The people of Cremona are clearly proud of their city’s connection to the violin. It’s why they’ve gone to great lengths to preserve both the history and sound of the instrument they’re known for.

The podcast, This is Love, captured the entire feel and heart of this town perfectly… and I’m excited to share their story now. Here’s host Phoebe Judge.

[music out]

Phoebe: What does a violin sound like?

Paolo: What do violins sound like? They sound like a violin. There's something special in the way that sort of penetrates in your body and gets to your soul. It's very emotional. It's very emotional.

Phoebe: There's a wooden chamber that sits in the middle of a large room, a room in the middle of a noisy building in the middle of a city. There seems to be an understanding that this room has something special inside. People wait their turns quietly to go in. When you enter the chamber, it's empty and pitch black, but then it fills with this music.

Phoebe: Outside of the chamber, violins are everywhere. Real violins, pictures of violins, pieces of violins. The people here protect some of the most precious instruments in the world, instruments made hundreds of years ago carved by hand by the world's earliest violin makers, and they did it here in a city in Northern Italy, Cremona.

Virginia: Cremona, I mean, everyone knows is the place where the story of violin making began.

Phoebe: This is Virginia Villa.

Virginia: I think violin makers are very happy persons. You can concentrate in every part of your work. And then at the end, after a little piece of wood, you listen.

Phoebe: The violin we have today was born from a collaboration between instrument makers and musicians. Violin makers would modify their design based on what musicians needed and what sounds they wanted to make.

Paolo: The people here started to look at musical instruments and decided to improve them because they were a musician that wanted to have better music. So from this combination, most likely, the violin came to life.

Phoebe: Paolo Bodini works with Virginia Villa here at Cremona's violin museum. He's also a doctor, and he's also the former mayor of Cremona. Like most of the people in town, he's very interested in violins and how they were created here almost 500 years ago.

Paolo: The first family, the first makers were in Cremona. The violin became all of a sudden sort of a revolutionary instrument. It was so powerful that everybody wanted to have a violin.

Phoebe: The world's most famous violin maker, Antonio Stradivari, established his workshop here. Stradivari wanted to make his instruments expressive and loud. Earlier violins were made to be played in quiet performances in homes. He wanted the instrument to be heard, so he kept changing the dimensions of his violin. One curator once said all his life, he was searching for the ideal shape. He kept searching until he died in 1737. He made over 1000 violins, violas, and cellos.

Phoebe: Even if we could replicate their shape exactly, we couldn't make a violin like a Stradivarius today. There's nothing like it. There are lots of theories about why his violins sound different than what we make today. One theory is that we don't have wood like that anymore. Researchers have speculated that particularly cold winters and cool summers in the 17th century meant trees grew more slowly. Their wood was dense in a way that we haven't seen since. Another theory is that Stradivari gathered his wood from ancient churches.

Paolo: There is a magic attraction to these ancient objects, and probably the seasoning of the wood itself and the time that goes by [inaudible 00:04:39] change is sound and makes it more round, more mature, more interesting.

Phoebe: And each violin is different. They have their own character, their own difficulties. One musician said it doesn't always do exactly what you want. It's said that the sound the violin produces is the closest thing to the human voice. And like the human voice, a violin gets tired. The instruments in Cremona are getting older. They're fragile. Their distinctive sounds are changing. Museum curator, Fausto Cacciatori, says it's part of their life cycle. After they reach a certain age, they become too fragile to be played and they go to sleep.

Phoebe: Can the sound of an instrument be lost? Can it get so delicate that you can't anymore play it?

Paolo: Well, [inaudible 00:05:37] becomes too fragile to be played. When you put friction on these things, you put a lot of stress on the violin, especially nowadays with this type of ... and depending from the music you're playing, of course. There is a point where it's better to stop playing it because it can break.

Phoebe: Some of the violins could become too delicate to play in our lifetime and when people in Cremona heard that they may never hear these instruments again, they decided to do something about it. They asked everyone to be quiet.

Phoebe: There's a place on a Norwegian Island in the Arctic where there's a vault tucked into the side of a mountain where people are collecting seeds, seeds from all kinds of plants from 243 countries. They're kept and protected just in case the worst happens so that we won't lose the plants forever. It's been referred to as Noah's Ark. This museum in Cremona is trying to do the same thing. They're collecting the sounds of these ancient instruments so that we always have them. They call it the sound bank.

Paolo: Single notes, single notes played in all the different variants that you can have, piano, pianissimo forte, vibrato and so on. You have to record notes by notes on all the different various instruments. And then people go to this sound bank and can compose music, picking up single notes and put them together in their computer. So the idea of this special sound bank, what to do it with ancient instruments, this was the sparks of the city.

Phoebe: They chose four instruments from the museum's collection, two violins from 1727 and 1734, a viola from 1614 and a cello from 1700. The idea for the sound bank was proposed by two young sound engineers from the next town over, Matea Bersani and Leonardo Tedeschi. Here's Leo.

Leo: We thought that me and Matea are two DJs. We are not fancy dressed or stuff like that. And so we thought that if we went there, me and him, probably they will have to push a button to call the security.

Phoebe: But they convinced Paolo that the project was worth all the effort it might take, and Paolo convinced the museum. To get started, they made some test recordings in the auditorium in the museum. The auditorium is incredibly beautiful, all curved wood. It feels like you're actually sitting inside a violin. They set up highly sensitive microphones, turn them on and then they notice something.

Leo: We found out that we can hear a lot of car engine rumbles and a lot of other different kinds of noise because the auditorium where we make all the recording, it doesn't have any soundproof door that cover the outside part, and so we had to find some solution.

[music]

The team had to figure out a way to isolate the auditorium from the city sounds around it. It’s a similar situation to when you have a noisy neighbor while you’re trying to work. The obvious answer in that case is to politely ask them to be quiet. But can you do that with a whole city? We’ll find out, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music]

Cremona’s violin museum wanted to preserve the sound of some famous instruments before they were lost forever. To do it properly though, they needed highly sensitive microphones that could capture every nuance of the instrument. The only problem was, the microphones were so sensitive that they captured the city life outside as well. Here’s Phoebe again.

[music out]

Phoebe: The museum is in the middle of the city. People live all around it. There are cafes and restaurants and businesses, people rolling suitcases, walking in high heels, shouting and laughing and honking their horns. It's loud. People are living their lives. It wasn't going to be possible to make nice recordings with so much background noise, so the museum and the engineers did the only thing they could think of. They asked the people of Cremona to stop and to be quiet for the sake of the violins. If this was going to work, they need the mayor's help.

Leo: That was the most difficult part because in Italy, bureaucracy is not that fast.

Phoebe: But the mayor was onboard. He loves the old violins, too. He closed the streets. A notice was placed in the newspaper and letters were mailed. The request was simple. Please be quiet.

Leo :You could breathe. You could walk around and be bouncing on your heels and so on, but I mean, living their normal life, trying not to make loud noises.

Phoebe: They unscrewed the light bulbs so you wouldn't hear the faintest electric buzz coming from them. They stopped the elevators. They turned off the ventilation in the auditorium. Silence. The museum's curator put on gloves and handed the instrument to the musician in the now dim auditorium, and then they began.

Paolo: Each note can be short or too long, can be a loud or soft, piano, pianissimo, vibrato and so on. All these different variation were recorded for each note, for the entire extension of the instruments. We decided to use young musician because it was a very heavy work. They worked for hours trying to looking for the perfect note, so to say. They work for 10 hours a day, two shifts. So each musician was working four to five hours of recording.

Phoebe: Note after note after note, they did this for five weeks and for five weeks, Cremona kept quiet for the most part. We stopped at a cafe right outside of the auditorium and spoke with the barista behind the counter.

Phoebe: What did it mean? Did it mean that you had to move more slowly?

Barista: Slowly, yes, no loud voice. Very, very, very little voice. A very had thing for me. Very hard thing, yes. In a bar, there's a lot of sounds.

Phoebe: Do you think more about noise now? Because you had to be quiet for so long, do you think more about noise?

Barista: Yes. Yes. Really, yes. Yes.

Leo: A lot of the people respected our project and some of them were happy to be quiet. That for Italian is pretty odd.

Phoebe: Did you ever walk outside one day during a break in the recording and just stand in the middle of that square and listen to how quiet everything was?

Leo: Yeah. Actually, the silence is very odd to reach, but you can feel the willing of the people and you can see the willing of the people on doing less noise. So we are noisy people. I used to speak very loudly in all the occasion even if I am in a place that I cannot, because I have these in my DNA, so it was very fun to see Italian people try to be quiet.

Phoebe: Leo says he once had to break up two teenagers kissing and laughing outside of the auditorium. He says he felt kind of bad about that one, but the teenagers moved along quietly. People were trying. The garbage trucks started coming at night instead of during the day. One man turned off his motorcycle when he got near the area and walked with it the rest of the way. There is a security guard posted outside of the auditorium. His job was to remind people to be quiet and he worked very long shifts outside in January. The neighbors would see him standing out there and bring him cups of tea.

Neighbor: Where are you from?

Phoebe: America.

Neighbor: Ah, yes. I heard that you were speaking English, British English, American English. It does matter. So I wanted to wish you a good to stay in Cremona.

Phoebe: Thank you very much. Are you from Cremona?

Neighbor: Yes, I live here. I live just on the corner.

Phoebe: What did you think when you heard that you'd have to be quiet for a month?

Neighbor: I didn't mind. Violins are very, very, very important. I like the violin very fond of music.

Phoebe: Were you careful when you were walking around to be very quiet?

Neighbor: Yes. Yes. I care. I care. I like silence. I like silence.

Phoebe: Even with everyone's participation, the recordings took a very long time. They had to pause a lot because there still was some background noise. They couldn't freeze the city.

Leo: We had some unexpected noises like flights, like ambulance, like police. And so outside, we had to find some solution and not always there was a clear way to solve the problem, but we all adapted. Obviously we have to break the recording a lot of time, but we had enough time to record everything, and this is the only thanks to the people and to the workers of the area because if they didn't do less noise, we had to stop every five, six seconds for some noises and it is impossible for a musician to be focused on a job that every six second someone say to you, "Please, we need to stop. Redo it, redo it, redo it, redo it." And so we were able to do it.

Phoebe: Would you find yourself, even if you didn't need to be, would you find yourself whispering?

Leo: Yeah, a lot of times. And we were always tense about doing noises, and so I had to train myself a lot to do this, because as I said before, I am a very, very loud person and we are nightlife DJs with playing in clubs. We scream, we dance. That's our attitude usually.

Phoebe: After five weeks, it was done. They had the recordings they needed, and when you listen in a way, you can also hear the people of Cremona working together.

Leo: The power of this instrumental is mystical. When I heard the first recording I was hearing not from only from the headphones and stuff, but sometimes I take out the headphones and I wanted to feel the violin inside the room and not from the recorder. And this is something that is physical. The sound, we tend to forget that is something that is physical. We cannot see, but when you see a speaker, there is sound inside, that is wave form that is coming out from the speaker and go to your body. The sensation of the body when you can feel some kind of music are amazing and that are huge in that the context of hearing this little instrumental playing that powerful.

Phoebe: Leo says he still gets chills each time he listens to someone play. Every day at lunch, the people of Cremona are invited to come listen to a concert. At 12:00, one of these ancient instruments is removed from its display and taken by guard into the auditorium. Performers come from all over the world for the chance to play them. On the day we were there, the auditorium was filled with children on a school trip.

Phoebe: The violinist performed a variety of pieces showing us the full range of the instrument. She described why she loved playing each piece. She joked with the school kids. The concert only lasted half an hour, but it was clear she wouldn't have minded if it went on and on.

Lana: My name is Lana Yokoyama. I come from Osaka, Japan, and I've been living here in Cremona for 12 years. I started playing the violin when I was seven years old. At the beginning, I simply studied the violin as an instrument. Then, I began to feel it as a part of my body and since I began to feel this unity, it has become just as if I was expressing myself directly. It is the easiest way to express my emotions because music is a language which reaches directly into the heart.

Phoebe: After the performance, the guard takes the instrument back to its glass case, where once again, all we can do is look at it and listen to it when we can until it's time for it to go to sleep.

CREDITS

This story came from the wonderful podcast, This Is Love. Be sure to show them some love by subscribing in your favorite podcast player. Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This story was produced by Nadia Wilson, Lauren Spohrer and Phoebe Judge for the podcast, This is Love. Audio Mix by Johnny Vince Evans and Rob Byers. The show explores love in all kinds of unexpected forms -- check it out at thisislovepodcast.com.

You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. You can also see what’s happening behind the scenes by following Defacto Sound on Instagram.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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Satanic Panic: Backwards messages and '80s hysteria

Art by Lauren Davis

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso.

From the sixties to the nineties parents worried messages hidden in rock albums would make their children do drugs and worship the devil. The truth could only be revealed if these records were played backwards. Bryan Gardiner unveils the history behind the backmasking panic and Curiosity Daily’s Ashley Hamer explains why our brains hear hidden messages... even when they’re not there!

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

(phrygian) the chills by Breakmaster Cylinder
Purplebutter NO DRUMS - MELODIC ONLY by Breakmaster Cylinder
Fool by Ryan Taubert
Alaska by Luke Atencio
Hangtime by Fuzzz

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

Hey everyone. A quick heads up. Twenty Thousand Hertz is usually ultra squeaky clean. [music fade in] But due to the subject of this episode, we couldn’t get away from the acknowledgement of more serious things like drugs, death, devil stuff, and rock and roll. It’s actually 95 percent about rock and roll, but the other stuff kinda comes along with the territory. This episode is still clean. No cursing or anything. I just wanted to let you know just in case you’d like to avoid those subjects with the littlest ears. Also, according to some sources, this episode may entice you to worship the devil. You’ve been warned. [music out] So here we go.

.ztreH dnasuohT ytnewT ot gninetsil er’uoY

[music clip: “Better By You, Better Than Me” by Judas Priest]

I want to take you back to 1985. Tragedy occurs in Reno, Nevada. Two young men attempt to take their lives together. One of them dies instantly, and three years later the other dies from complications related to the attempt.

But their parents aren’t convinced the young men acted on their own. The night of the tragedy, they listened to this song.

[music continues: “Better By You, Better Than Me” by Judas Priest]

This is Judas Priest’s cover of the Spooky Tooth song “Better By You, Better Than Me.” In 1990, the young men’s family sued Judas Priest over this song.

[music out]

*[SFX Clip: Dream Deceivers documentary clip at 10:10:

Trial Judge: “What is on trial is whether subliminal messages are present, and if so, if they have an effect upon the listener.”]*

The prosecution against Judas Priest made a big claim. They said secret messages in the song encouraged them to take their lives. And the only way to hear these messages was to play the record backwards.

Listen carefully.

[SFX: Song at 3:00 sounds like “I shot my demons dead when I’m with you”]

Did you hear the words “I shot my demons dead when I’m with you?” Here it is again.

[SFX: Song at 3:00 sounds like “I shot my demons dead when I’m with you”]

[music in]

Adding secret backward messages in music wasn’t anything new. Even before the so-called Satanic Panic in the 80’s and 90’s, people had been playing recorded sounds backwards since the invention of the phonograph.

Bryan: The ability to capture and preserve sound also gave people the ability to manipulate it.

That’s Bryan Gardiner. Bryan wrote about the history of backmasking for Atlas Obscura.

Bryan: When people talk about backmasking in the audio world it's generally considered a deliberate recording process where a sound, whether it's an instrument or a voice is recorded and played backward and then placed somewhere into the forward mix of a song.

Bryan: Sometimes that can be obvious [SFX: music being played in reverse], you're hearing a song and then you hear some sort of weird garbled reverse version. You can kind of make it out. Sometimes it's more hidden in a track, but that's the basic idea of backmasking.

The earliest example of backmasking in popular music comes in the early 60’s from a band called The Eligibles. But their most famous recording has no backmasking in it.

[music clip: Gilligan's Island Season Two Theme

Song: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale/A tale of a fateful trip.”]

That’s right. The Eligibles, who performed the Gilligan’s Island theme song, also had the first backmasking hit. In the late fifties, they recorded this song, called “Car Trouble.”

[music clip: “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles]

Bryan: It's… about a boy who's taking out a girl on a date in his car.

Bryan: During the song, there's two instances of what sound like really garbled yelling, the first instance is the girlfriend's father…

[music clip: “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles

Song: “Be back home at half past ten or else” followed by garbled yelling of the dad.]

Bryan: Supposedly the message is, "Now look it here cats, stop running these records backwards."

Let’s hear the piece with the dad yelling again, but this time backwards.

[music clip reversed: “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles garbled yelling of the dad played backwards to reveal message.]

[Moment of awkward pause, followed by drumsticks bringing the song back in]

After the girlfriend’s dad yells, the boy and girl go on their date. When they try to come back, the boy’s car won’t start. They have to walk home, show up late, and dad yells again.

[music clip: “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles

Song: “As we walked in the gate I could hear her daddy yell” followed by more garbled yelling of the dad.]

Bryan: The song...says, "Didn't I tell you to get my daughter back by 10:30, you bum?"

[music clip : “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles garbled yelling of the dad played backwards to reveal message.]

[music in: “Rain” by the Beatles]

A few years after Car Trouble, it was the Beatles who really brought backmasking to the forefront of music culture.

Bryan: The Beatles were recording 1966's Revolver. the idea for backmasking made its way into the song Rain.

[music continues: “Rain” by the Beatles]

Bryan: If you listen to it all the way through there's sort of this ending coda.

...and here’s that coda.

[Cut to coda: “Rain” by the Beatles ending coda]

Bryan: And it's just basically a reverse of the first line of the song.

And here’s the coda played in reverse.

Bryan: Bands were actually, legitimately doing this. They were inserting messages, often they were just reversed lyrics in their own songs but in general fans of rock and roll music were aware of this, at least the sort of geeky audiophile ones.

So far this all sounds pretty tame, but it was this next song that was spark that ignited the initial flames of panic.

[music in: “Revolution 9” by the Beatles]

Bryan: In 1969 there was a radio DJ named Russ Gibb and he gets a phone call from a student at Eastern Michigan University and the student claims that…there's this rumor about Paul McCartney, he's been dead actually and replaced by some strange doppelganger Paul McCartney who looks and sounds just like him but is not the real Paul McCartney.

[SFX: record scratch]

(Gasp!) Oh no...

[SFX: record starts to play backwards]

The caller tells Gibb to basically play the Beatles song “Revolution Number 9” backward. Gibb hears the phrase, "Turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man…"

[music clip: Reverse “Revolution 9” by the Beatles]

Bryan: So Gibb freaks out and begins telling all of his listeners about what he calls sort of this great Beatles coverup and more and more people start listening for clues and low and behold they found them. Including there was another alleged backmasked message, "Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him." And that was in the song “I'm So Tired.”

[SFX: Reverse “I’m So Tired” by the Beatles]

[SFX: tape fast forward]

[SFX: Reverse “I’m So Tired” by the Beatles]

[Slowly fade music in]

The dead Paul messages found by Beatles fans sound stranger and subtler than the ones in “Rain” or “Car Trouble.” Many people, including the Beatles, said that’s because this wasn’t actual backmasking. They didn’t mean to do it.

Keep in mind, this was at a time when people were already worried about subliminal messages.

Bryan: There was this renewed interest in subliminal manipulation and this is largely the result of books. They claimed basically that the general public was being manipulated by ad agencies.

The idea was that hidden messages could get into your subconscious. Once planted there, they could influence the way you think.

Bryan: Supposedly certain images would be inserted on the front box of cigarettes or you could make out naked women in the bubbles in the gin ad in a magazine.

These subliminal manipulations were not limited to visuals. Many believed these backwards messages in songs could also control the way people think and act. To be more blunt, many people believed that backmasking could make you worship the devil.

Bryan: There had always been this idea that rock and roll was the devil's music [SFX: Fade in devil voice under Bryan] and once certain conservative pastors...found out about this, this gave them an opportunity to listen to these things and I guess, in some cases, they literally could hear the voice of the devil...hahaha... [SFX: devil laughter]

[music out]

What these pastors found shocked them. Here’s a clip from the Praise the Lord Show. Pastor Paul Crouch and his wife Jan listen as their son, Paul Junior, plays Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backwards.

[YouTube Clip: Paul Jr: All right. I’ll slow this down a little bit. Listen for “Here’s to my sweet Satan.”

music clip: “Stairway to Heaven” plays backwards then Paul Jr. stops the tape.

Paul: Did you all hear that?

Audience: Yeah!]

…and it wasn’t just Led Zeppelin. Satanic messages were supposedly hidden all over rock albums. Here’s a backwards version of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Eldorado .” Listen for this message, “He is the nasty one. Christ you're infernal. It is said we're dead men.”

[music clip: Reverse “Eldorado” by ELO]

...and here’s the backwards version of “Hotel California” by the Eagles. The message this time is, “Satan had ‘em. He organized his own religion.”

[music clip: Reverse “Hotel California” by the Eagles]

Beyond that, here’s Styx proclaiming “Satan moves through our voices” in the backwards version of the song “Snowblind?”

[music clip: Reverse “Snowblind” by Styx]

Apparently, there are examples of this all over seventies and eighties rock music. The Praise the Lord Show wasn’t the only one finding these hidden subversive messages.

Bryan: There was a famous pastor, Gary Greenwald, who actually started a sort of backmasking tour where he would travel around the United States and even went up to Canada and would hold basically what are record listening parties where he would play these things for the audience pointing out every time what the backmasked message supposedly was and people would freak out. Often they would be followed by album burning parties or whatever...He also had a television show briefly where he would do these sorts of things as well.

[YouTube Clip:

Gary Greenwald: Is it possible that this could be preparing us subconsciously through backward masking to accept a child that is coming that is none other than the son of Satan? Let me play that for you backwards and you tell me who the child is. Listen carefully (music plays)”]

[music in]

By this point, many had gone into full blown Satanic Panic. So, obviously, the next step was for the government to put a stop to it.

Bryan: Starting in the early 80s, you saw an uptick in actual legislation aimed at combating backmasking.

A member of the California State Assembly created a panel to investigate satanic messages in “Stairway to Heaven” and other songs.

Bryan: He gathered all these witnesses, he gathered a person who purportedly was a neuroscientist who explained how these backward messages were influencing or could influence kids who didn't necessarily play the albums backward and then it kind of just snowballed.

The call for local legislation turned into a cry for national laws. Now, it was time for the US Congress to get involved.

Bryan: People were actively introducing legislation and trying to pass bills that if not outlawed the practice, mandated warning signs on all the albums that supposedly had these nefarious messages on them.

Rock bands and producers claimed the backwards messages were completely and totally unintentional.

Bryan: Styx's James Young called the whole idea of satanic backmasking a hoax perpetrated by religious zealots.

Bryan: Led Zeppelin's record label issued one statement based on the backmasking controversy which was, "Our turntables only rotate in one direction."

So when tragedy struck in Reno Nevada in 1985, the music industry was already under a microscope for backmasking.

And even though none of these laws actually passed, the Judas Priest trial in 1990 had everyone in the music industry watching. If the band lost, it would set a precedent that anyone can be sued for backwards combinations of sounds creating an unintentional message. We’ll get the verdict. Plus, the brain science behind backmasking... after this.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

In the late 80s the Satanic Panic was in full swing. Parents, government officials, churches, and even some scientists believed that backwards messages in rock songs influenced young people in terrible ways. Then in 1990, Judas Priest were being sued over hidden commands in their songs which allegedly influenced two people to take their lives. If they lost this case, it would mean that any band could be held liable for the actions resulting from their supposedly hidden messages.

[SFX clip: News report: “In a one hundred eight page written decision, judge Jerry Carr Whitehead found that Judas Priest and CBS Records are not liable in causing the deaths. The judge also ruled that there is no proof of backwards masking on the album, and in any case, no scientific proof that backwards making can be perceived or affect conduct.”]

In the end, Judas Priest, and the music industry, were cleared of all charges. And no matter if it's intentional or accidental, they proved backmasking can’t control your thoughts.

Still, backmasking had become a really, really big deal. Some musicians today still use it to place intentional messages in their songs. Albeit, usually to poke fun at the whole controversy. Here’s an example from Weird Al Yankovic’s “I Remember Larry.” See if you can understand what he’s saying...

[music clip: Reverse “I Remember Larry” by Weird Al Yankovic]

So, what Weird Al was saying was “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands. Here it is one more time.

[music clip: Reverse “I Remember Larry” by Weird Al Yankovic

Song: “Wow you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands.”]

Despite the music industry’s efforts, many people still hear unintentional backmasking messages. Here’s an ironically titled song from Cheap Trick called “Gonna Raise Hell.” See if you can make out the message...

[music clip: Reverse “Gonna Raise Hell” by Cheap Trick]

You can hear a big difference between the two. Weird Al’s message is clear.

And Cheap Trick’s message is much harder to understand. Supposedly they are saying “You know Satan holds the keys to the lock.”

Here it is again.

[music clip: Reverse “Gonna Raise Hell” by Cheap Trick]

Ashley: I think it is pretty evident in the difference you hear between songs that have intentional backmasking and songs that don’t necessarily.

That’s Ashley Hamer, the managing editor for Curiosity.com and the co-host of The Curiosity Daily Podcast. Ashley wrote about backmasking for the website.

Ashley: I'm actually also a freelance musician. I have an undergrad and a master's in jazz performance.

So, she’s uniquely qualified for this particular topic.

Ashley: When it's intentional, you hear a very clear voice saying something. But when you hear these unintentional ones, it sounds like a ghost, like someone who can’t quite talk, they’re trying to speak through a vale or something. And the same is true when you turn them backward.

Here’s that backwards message in Weird Al’s “I Remember Larry”... but this time played forward.

[music clip: “I Remember Larry” by Weird Al Yankovic]

It sounds a lot like all those unintentional backwards messages.

Ashley: It sounds satanic. Its sounds ghostly.

Ashley: I don't think there is a human on earth who can actually talk like that. Bob Garcia of A&M Records once said, "It must be the devil putting these messages on the records because no one here knows how to do it."

Ashley: When you see the kind of backmasking that has become famous, the inadvertent backmasking, it's pretty simple and it doesn't really make a lot of sense. Like, they're not really things that people would normally say like, like “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin.

Ashley: "Here's to my sweet Satan,"[music clip: Reverse “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin “Here’s to my sweet Satan.”] it only has one two-syllable word in it. Everything else is just a single syllable. And that's how a lot of these supposed backmasking messages are. They're very simple, they're just syllable by syllable, and a single syllable can sound like a lot of different things.

[music in]

Even if the words are simple, these unintentional noises sound like language. This concept is called pareidolia. It basically means that humans really like to find patterns, sometimes in places where there are no patterns. It's the same reason you might see a face on Mars or a bunny rabbit in a cloud. Our minds are constantly on the look out to make sense of the world around us. Sometimes we turn things that don't actually make sense into things that do.

Ashley: But the big thing with backmasking is the idea that we really love language. It's really important for us to be able to communicate. It is basically what keeps us alive. If we can't tell each other our needs, if we can't get mates, if we can't tell each other that, "Oh, I found this food over here. Let's go get it," we're not really going to survive.

Our brain is hardwired to find messages. We are so good at picking out language that sometimes we do it by accident. That’s because our brains processes information in two different ways: bottom up, and top down.

Ashley: Bottom up processing is basically when you build things from the ground up, you have a texture or a color or a shape and you kind of figure out what it is from all of the details. But top down processing uses kind of that higher order thinking where you're thinking about context and what you've experienced before and what you kind of know about the situation to form a judgment. That's how we interpret language.

[music out]

Our brains particularly hear language if another person primes us by telling us what to listen for. Here’s an example from Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” played backwards. I’m not going to tell you what it is.

[music clip: Reversed “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen]

If you didn’t know what to listen for, you probably heard gibberish. Here it is again. Now listen for the message, “It’s fun to smoke marijuana.”

[music clip: Reversed “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen]

Ashley: When someone tells you that a bunch of noise actually is saying, "It's fun to smoke marijuana," you're going to hear it because your brain is using that higher order information that has already told you that this is language to hear the thing that you're told to hear.

And an early 80s study in the Journal of Science backed up Ashley’s point.

Ashley: They divided the participants into three groups and the first group was just asked to describe what they heard. They weren't told anything else.

They heard something like this.

[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]

Ashley: And most of those people said they heard things like science fiction sounds or animal cries.

Ashley: Researchers played people sign wave speech. It's real speech, but it's artificially degraded so that any evidence of a message is completely lost and there are only certain frequencies leftover. So if you were to listen to this without any context, it would just sound like noise, which is kind of what backmasking sounds like.

Ashley: The second group was told that they would hear an actual sentence that was produced by a computer and they were asked to write down what that sentence said.

Ok, now that you know this is human speech, let’s hear it again. See if you can pick out any words.

[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]

And again...

[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]

Ashley: And actually, most of those people figured out at least a few of the words correctly because again, this sign wave speech, it had been real speech before and it was just degraded.

Ashley: As soon as those people knew that it was a sentence, they were able to describe what some of these words were. And then the third group was actually told what the sentence said, and all of them said that they could hear it.

The distorted message you heard earlier said, “Mama was kept in a cage at the zoo,” Now take a listen.

[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]

Here’s the clean version.

[SFX: Example #1 Clear]

[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]

It’s easier for your brain to hear a message if someone else primes it, like a just did.

So, if priming is a thing, maybe backwards messages have the ability to influence our thinking? Well, as it turns out accidental and intentional backwards messages have no control over our brains.

Ashley: People have done studies on this. They've actually taken backward audio that is real and played it for people and then they've given them a test that should elicit some sort of recognition if a seed was planted for a particular word or something that was played backward, and it just doesn't work. People who hear backward messages have no idea what those things are saying and it doesn't communicate any subliminal message to anybody.

Backwards messages in songs can’t hypnotize us into bad behavior. But they can make us laugh. Like this backmasked thought on the B-52’s “Detour Through Your Mind.”

[music clip: Reversed “Detour Through Your Mind” by the B-52’s “I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you're playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle.”]

Backmasking can also be used artistically, like in Missy Elliot’s “Work It.”

[music clip: “Work It” by Missy Elliot]

...and here’s that same section reversed.

[music clip: “Work It” by Missy Elliot reversed]

Many backmasked messages are comments on the Satanic Panic of the 70s and 80s. Electric Light Orchestra played to their evil reputation by adding backmasking to their song “Fire On High.” This was in response to accusations of hiding satanic messages in previous releases. Here is the song in reverse...

[music clip: Reversed “Fire On High” by Electronic Light Orchestra “The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!”]

You might think the Judas Priest verdict was the reason backmasking outrage ended. But, actually, it was technology.

Ashley: The whole Satanism scare in backward music kind of died down when CDs became more popular, because you can't really play CDs backwards, so people weren't as worried about it anymore.

For a couple decades, we didn’t hear many backmasked messages at all, intentional or otherwise. But, now it’s starting to come back… thanks to the internet.

Ashley: It's kind of ramping back up now that there's so much digital music software where you can actually play things backward again.

[music clip: Twenty One Pilots “Nico and the Niners”]

More recently, here’s a track by Twenty One Pilot’s called“Nico and the Niners,” and they put backmasking in the intro. Here's a snippet of what it sounds like when played forward.

[music clip: Twenty One Pilots “Nico and the Niners” played forward]

And here it is reversed. The poetic message says, “We are banditos [music clip]. You will leave Dema and head true east [music clip]. We denounce Vialism [music clip].”

[music clip: Reversed “Nico and the Niners” by Twenty One Pilots]

And of course with intentional backmasking comes the unintentional. This time it’s Lady Gaga praising the devil in the backwards version of “Paparazzi.” The internet has revealed this message, “Evil save us! These stars above, above... we model it on the arts of Lucifer.”

[music clip: Reversed “Paparazzi” by Lady Gaga]

[music in: “Hangtime” by Fuzzz from 00:00]

Ashley: It wouldn't be this big of a deal if music wasn't so integral to our culture and the way we interact with each other and the way we kind of process our feelings and our thoughts about the world. The idea that someone is putting in secret messages to hijack the way that we interact with our music is so scary because it's so important to us.

The facts say the Satanic Panic over backmasking was much ado about nothing. The devil-worshipping messages were unintentional and ineffective. I mean, how many people do you know that listen to Led Zeppelin or Judas Priest now actively warship the devil all the time. It was really only the rise of CDs that stopped the backmasking outrage.

But with that in mind, now that I think about it, has anyone ever really thoroughly gone through all of the songs over the past 20 years of digital music… at least just to check for backward messages? We have a lot to sort through. Maybe all of the backward messages we haven’t found yet have been controlling our every thought and feeling.

[incomprehensible gibberish]

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 defacto sound dot com.

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

Thanks to Bryan Gardiner and Ashley Hamer. Ashley is the managing editor of Curiosity.com and the co-host of the award-winning Curiosity Daily Podcast, which comes out every weekday. She also plays saxophone with the band Fuzzz. That’s F-U-Z-Z-Z if you want to find them on spotify. You’re listening to their song “Hangtime” right now.

Finally, I want you to go find backmasked messages in popular songs and send it to me. Find a track, play it backwards, and tweet what you hear @20korg on Twitter. If it’s funny and relatively clean, I’ll retweet it. Let’s start a panic.

.gninetsil rof sknahT

[incomprehensible gibberish]

[music out]

Recent Episodes

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Noise “R” Us: The evolution of noisy toys

Art by Lauren Davis

This episode was written and produced by Marissa Flaxbart.

From See ‘n Say to Speak & Spell, and beyond, toys provide the soundtrack of our childhoods. Huge advancements in computer technology in recent decades mean that today’s toys can make a wider variety of sounds than ever before. In this episode, “The Toy Guy” Chris Byrne takes us on a nostalgic look back at the recent history of recorded sound in toys; then, with Dr. Hamid Djalilian, we consider what all that technological advancement means for young ears in the 21st century.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Poppyseed by Sound of Picture
Cheesy Soul Loop by Breakmaster Cylinder
Kiss by Sound of Picture
Mr. Chompers by Breakmaster Cylinder
Amethyst by Breakmaster Cylinder
Unicycle Flips by Breakmaster Cylinder
All These Pieces Drifting Into Place by Breakmaster Cylinder
A Spiral Staircase by Breakmaster Cylinder
The Rainbow Road by Breakmaster Cylinder
Nocturne Op 15 No 2 by Sound of Picture
Sinister Fingertips by Breakmaster Cylinder

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

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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.

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Check out Chris Byrne’s podcast The Playground wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

Even before we are born, the sounds of the womb shape our world. As newborns, while our vision is still coming into focus, our sense of hearing is already fully developed. The first sounds that we come to love are our parents’ voices and lullabies. And before long, we become obsessed with a very different kind of sound: the sounds of our toys.

[SFX: toy sounds - toy fire truck siren, toy train whistle, Tamagotchi, Elmo]

Few things trigger nostalgia as quickly and powerfully as the sounds of our childhood -- sounds like sifting through the lego bin [SFX - hand rifling through a lego bin] or for me, the friendly storytelling bear, Teddy Ruxpin [SFX: Teddy Ruxpin].

For most of human history, kids’ toys couldn’t generate much sound on their own. Though, over the course of the past five decades, advancements in manufacturing and in computer technology have changed all that.

[music out]

When today’s adults think back to the sounds of our toys, we’re likely to think of sounds the toys made themselves, at the pull of a string [SFX: “There’s a snake in my boot!”] or the push of a button [SFX: Classic 80’s laser gun toy]. Nowadays, toys can create more sounds than ever… for better and for worse.

Chris: Hi, I'm Chris Byrne and I'm known as the Toy Guy. I've spent the better part of the last 40 years in the toy industry in a lot of different positions from marketing and operations to writing and being a goofball on TV.

Chris really loves toys. He’s a frequent guest on morning shows across the country, where he’s usually talking about the hottest new toys on the market. [SFX: Kelly & Michael Clip] But Chris is also passionate about the history of the toys we love. He wrote a book called “Toy Time!”, and in it, he asked hundreds of people about the toys that left the biggest impact.

Chris: One of the things that I think is always so remarkable about the toy industry is that the role of play in a child's life in terms of having new experiences, exploring the world and expressing yourself really doesn't change from decade to decade and generation to generation. That said, the toys themselves can be quite different.

Though toys have changed a lot over the years, the history of toys that play recorded sounds dates back almost as far as recorded sound itself.

Chris: Sound has been a component of toys really since Thomas Edison put a record player inside a doll.

[Clip: “Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are”]

[music in]

Toy makers have come a long way since then. Up through the 1950s, most toys were analog, and the kids who played with them made the sound effects themselves. In the late ‘50s, the Fisher Price company released the trusty Corn Popper. When you pushed the toy like a vacuum, its colorful balls would bang against the toy’s plastic dome. [SFX - Fisher Price Corn Popper] Fisher Price used simple technologies like this to add sounds to many of their toys. Another one called toy barn made a signature mooing sound everytime the door swung open [SFX: Family Farm door “moo”]; they also had a toy cash register “dinged” like the real thing [SFX: Fisher Price vintage register].

[music out]

It was around the same time in the late ‘50s when Chatty Cathy was introduced. She could say a monumental 11 different phrases when you pulled the string in her back. [SFX: Chatty Cathy commercial]

Chris: It was essentially a small record inside a big plastic box that was stuck in the back of the doll.

[SFX: Chatty Cathy - “I love you.”]

[music in]

By the 1960s, advancements in plastics made it easier to mass-produce toys of all kinds, including ones with recorded sound components. The toy company Mattel had struck gold with Chatty Cathy. Now they had the brilliant idea to put their pull string technology into a toy that toddlers still play with today: namely, The See ‘n Say, first produced in the mid ‘60s. That’s the one with, like an arrow in the middle, that just spins in a circle and lands on an animal.

[SFX: See ‘n Say - “This is a pig”]

[music out]

By the early ‘70s, Fisher Price released the first version of a musical toy made to look like a record player, complete with thick, brightly colored, plastic records [SFX: 1971 Fisher Price Record Player]. Inside, the toy worked just like a music box, the raised ridges on its two-sided records dictating what song the music box played. But these simple, mechanical sound-makers were about to have some competition from the computer age.

Chris: Jumping ahead, when we started to see chips come into toys, that really revolutionized sound. That was the next big revolution in sound for toys because suddenly you could put a lot more sound on a chip.

Chip-based toys had humble beginnings. In the 70s, space toys and toy laser guns could only play one or two sounds [SFX: ‘70s Star Wars toy]. By the late ‘70s, toy and game makers Milton Bradley proved that with just 4 tones, you could make a toy that helped define a generation [SFX: Simon Tones]. They named their soon-to-be iconic puzzle toy “Simon,” after the children’s game “Simon Says.”

Chris: It had lights and sounds and if you remember it, it was a follow the maze type of game where you had to follow the different colors. That was one of the first to have a chip in it.

The chip inside Simon was made by Texas Instruments. They’re the ones that made that famous graphing calculator you may have used in high school. The same year that Simon came out they also made the chip in another iconic toy.

[SFX: Speak and Spell ad: “He’s learning spelling with Texas Instruments Speak & Spell. ‘Spell Rain...R-A-I-N...that is correct”]

Speak & Spell’s child-sized keyboard let little fingers type and hear each letter out loud. A classic robotic voice would ask kids to spell words that appeared on the screen. It also had mini-games that could teach kids other things, like how to pronounce difficult words.

Chris: Speak & Spell was really a revolution as well because we'd seen the Pull-String types of toys in the past where you pulled the string and you had to mechanically turn the arrow to say, "The cow says moo." And then the cow would moo. Speak & Spell was really much more child-focused where you're punching letters and had kind of a keyboard. And the letters would pop up and then it would say them.

The invention of the Speak & Spell marked the first time a children’s toy had speech recorded onto a computer chip, as opposed to mechanical technology like a record or a tape.

Chris: The thing that's been amazing since Speak & Spell is how much better speakers have gotten in toys, because it was really kind of hard to tell the difference between an N and an R in some of those early toys.

[SFX: Speak & Spell - “Now spell child.”]

And interestingly enough, at that time what we were seeing was that chips that had become obsolete for consumer products, for adults and families, were now filtering down into the toy industry.

[music in]

The Speak & Spell had revolutionized the electronic toy market as well as the educational toy market. It went through a huge number of upgrades and improvements over the next decade, but by the early ‘90s, computer technology had advanced so much that the groundbreaking toy became somewhat obsolete. In its wake came a whole new wave of electronic toys, educational and otherwise.

Chris: It really depended on how much you wanted to spend, what the compression rates were, what you wanted the toy to say. But toys suddenly went from the miraculous 11 sayings in 1959 to hundreds and hundreds, if not more, by the Eighties and Nineties.

The growing affordability and computing power of these chips made it possible for toys to make so, so many sounds. They also made it feasible for more kinds of toys to make sounds. You see, when a ‘90s kid opened a toy box, it wasn’t just your dolls and action figures that talked to you. It was your stuffed animals [SFX: “I love you”] , your toy police car [SFX: toy car siren], and your laser blasters [SFX: toy laser blasts]. By the middle of the 90’s, even your board games and your keychains were making noise.

[music out]

Chris: One of the things that's really driven the evolution of sound and lights and things like vibrations in toys has been the declining cost of electronics. So you suddenly have a bump switch that can activate something. You suddenly have a speaker that's less expensive than it was before. You've suddenly got a sound chip that you can put so much more on than you could before. And all of that is designed to enhance the play experience. So the sounds that we used to make with our mouths, you know “bang, bang” and “buzz” and whatever it was that we did when we were playing back in the dark ages when I was growing up, the toy can now do that.

In the mid-nineties, some of these noise-making toys sparked their own cultural phenomenons.

[SFX: Tickle Me Elmo commercial: “Just tickle Elmo, and he really talks! (that tickles) and laughs”

Chris: I was the very first person to have Tickle Me Elmo on national TV. I showed it to Al Roker on the today show from Toy Fair in 1996. It became a phenomenon and Interestingly enough, it always laughed, but It began its life as a monkey with the electronic unit inside it. But it was the advertising agency and specifically an account guy named Bob Mole who said, "This thing has to shake because you need that TV moment to make it work." And the rest is kind of history.

The Tickle Me Elmo doll was SUCH a phenomenon that its Christmas release has gone down in history as one of the most chaotic toy crazes of all time.

[Audio clip: “No wonder he's laughing... all the way to the bank. Because North America has been gripped by Tickle Me Elmo hysteria."]

Chris: I was actually going through security in the New Orleans airport with one probably around the 10th or 12th of December. And a guy offered me $500 for it right on the spot. And I said, "Well, I can't do it. This is the only one I've got and I need it."

[SFX: Tickle Me Elmo laugh]

Also invented in the mid-nineties was the trusty Tamagotchi, [SFX: Tamagotchi beeping] a tiny digital display toy that you had to feed and play with to keep alive. If it died, you had to start all over again. On an average school day [SFX: Kids, school yard, multiple Tamagotchis] during a certain stretch of the late nineties, the needy beeping of the Tamagotchi was unmistakable and impossible to miss.

By the end of the ‘90s, kids who loved needy toys could now make a major upgrade...to the Furby.

[SFX: Furby ad “What’s that?” “Me up!” “It’s my Furby!”... “Tickle me! “Furby, the first gigapet you pet!”]

Chris: Well, I think what I can say about Furby is “da who oo eh ah ah”... no seriously. It looked like a big croquette with fur on it. And it had a sort of a beak and eyes and ears and at the time a lot of people thought it looked like the gremlin from the Gremlins movies. But it talked to you. The thing about Furby that was newsworthy if you will, it was the first toy that kind of grew up as you played with it. So it would start out babbling and the more you played with it and talked to it and had all kinds of different sensors on it, the more sophisticated the play would get.

[Audio: Furby ad, “Your Furby sneezed, and gave MINE a cold”]

Chris: I'm not sure how many kids actually played with it to get it to grow to that extent, because it took some time.

Even if you never had a Furby, it’s likely you recognize the name. That’s because the Furby became more than just a toy.

Chris: Furby was one of those rare toys – like Tickle Me Elmo, like Cabbage Patch kids – that made that leap from interesting toy to cultural phenomenon. It was kind of frustrating to play with, but everybody wanted to have a Furby. It didn't have an off switch... So it would keep talking for hours. And it was controversial. People brought them into work and they thought they were spying on them because it reacted to your voice.

[music in]

Perhaps that Furby paranoia seems pretty quaint compared to now, when many households have devices specifically designed to wait and listen for the sound of our voices calling for them. But that very advancement represents how far technology in general has come. And when technology advances in the world at large, toy technology advances right along with it. Nowadays, toy aisles are jam-packed with more powerful tech than even our computers had just a few decades ago.

What’s more, updated versions of many of the 20th century’s popular toys are still available today, or available again.

Chris: One of the things that we've seen that's been really interesting in recent years is that kids who have been immersed in electronics, I mean today's, what, 14 year olds have never lived in a world without a smartphone. The idea of a tactile toy, a mechanical toy, something that's not necessarily digital or chip driven is absolutely fascinating to them because it's novel.

[SFX: toys build up over next paragraph, coming to a cacophony]

When you walk down the toy aisle, there are more sound-making playthings than ever before, including many familiar voices. But as manufacturing noisy toys has become easier and cheaper for toymakers, the volume of some of these toys has been cranked up to the point that it could literally be damaging children’s ears. We’ll get into that, after this…

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Toys have been around forever, but it wasn’t until around the ‘50s that analog methods of adding sound became much more common. Advancing technology made the ‘80s and ‘90s an era for some of the most iconic sounds in toy history. Then, around the turn of the millennium, things went bananas.

Nowadays, physical toy stores are getting harder and harder to find. But whether it’s FAO Schwartz or the toy aisle at Target, children still lose their minds over the sight -- and sound -- of all those shiny new toys. Lately, parents are losing their minds too. Not with the same playful whimsy, but with a new awareness of the sheer noise of it all. It’s starting to feel like the toys are shouting over each other -- as if the toy with the loudest voice will be the one that gets bought and taken home. And interestingly, there may be some truth to that.

[music out]

Hamid: When we're actually born, our ears – and when I'm talking about the ears, I'm talking about the inner ear structures that do the actual sensing of the hearing. Those structures are actually adult size at birth. So pretty much our inner ear and everything is the same size as it is when you're born as it is now.

That’s Dr. Hamid Djalilian. He’s a professor at UC Irvine and an expert in problems of the ear, including hearing, balance, and tumors. He’s especially concerned with the long-term damage that noise exposure can do to children’s ears.

Hamid: Now we're born with a limited number of cells in our inner ear. So, we have these cells that pickup the sound, they have these microscopic hairs on top of them that pick up the vibration of sound as it travels through this liquid in our inner ear. And those cells are called hair cells with those little hairs on them.

As sound waves travel into the ear, it’s these “hair cells” that ultimately send a signal to a hearing-person’s brain. That signal is what lets us know that we’ve heard a sound.

Hamid: And we're born with about 3000 or so of these so called inner hair cells, which are the main ones that do the function of hearing. Now, damage that occurs to those cells is permanent. So if you get a very loud sound exposure, for example, [SFX: Loud crowd, explosion] that will cause some damage [SFX: Ears ringing] to those cells and then you've lost some of those cells.

This kind of damage won’t necessarily show up on any hearing test. But as we age, continued damage to these hair cells adds up, and no new ones are created.

Hamid: And then later on in life when they start getting age-related hearing loss, that's when we will see the loss of hearing reflect on the hearing test.

[music in]

Hamid: The critical, probably most important thing that we need to kind of keep in mind is that children's ears are just as likely to potentially get damage from very loud noise as adults could be. And that the sooner we start protecting children's ears from loud noise, the more cells they kind of have going into adulthood. So then they're more likely to have good hearing as they get into older adulthood, like fifties and sixties, etc....

Generally, we have more sensitive hearing when we’re younger. But a curious child, understandably, may not be the best protector of their own hearing.

Hamid: If you've ever seen a child play with a toy that makes noise, they want to just keep making the noise come out of it, so they'll just keep listening to it over and over and press the button over and over.

Hamid decided to research the volume of toys after seeing this first hand.

[music out]

Hamid: I was in one of these large stores [SFX: toy store ambience] that sell toys as well, and I was in the toy aisle and I saw this child that was basically, there's the little try me button to kind of see what it sounds like. He would press the button and then hold up his ear against the toy and then press the button [SFX: laser sound] and then hold up his ear against the toy [SFX: laser sound]. And I just thought to myself, this can't be good for this kid because this sounds very loud to me. And I was standing, you know, four feet away.

Hamid: That's sort of what's interesting to these kids, beyond the initial aesthetics of what the appearance is, it's really the sound that's the next most interesting thing about it.

[music in]

It’s been more than a decade since then. In that time, Hamid and his team of researchers have been putting noisy toys to the test in their lab at UC Irvine. In the United States, the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety regulates how loud toys can be. The guidelines are not especially stringent: toys cannot produce a sound that reaches more than 85 decibels from 30 centimeters, or about 1 foot. That’s the approximate noise level of a busy restaurant, or a semi-truck passing by.

Hamid: We actually found that there are a lot of toys that actually make that level of sound that is above 85 decibels. Every year we go to a couple of the major outlets of toys and actually screen a whole bunch of toys and then buy the loudest ones, bring them to our lab and test them there to see how loud they actually are.

[music out]

The official guidelines measure sound from a foot away. But, kids don’t always play with their toys from a safe distance, especially the littlest ones.

Hamid: If you've seen children play, and I have a couple of little children myself, children oftentimes will take the toy and actually put it by their ear because they're trying to figure out where the sound is coming from because that's sort of what's interesting to them about the toy and they hold it up against their ear. So children don't abide by the rule of “hold the toy 30 centimeters away from your ear.” They will play with it and one of the things they'll do is they're trying to figure out where the sound is coming from.

The results from Hamid’s lab are startling. They’ve tested some truly LOUD toys. Toys like the Power Rangers Beast-X Ultrazord.

[SFX: “Ultrazord, ready for flight!” “Danger, let’s pull up!”]

Hamid’s lab found that Beast-X Ultrazord clocks in at over 87 decibels from 30 centimeters away — that’s higher than the federal standard. And if you hold your ear up to the speaker, get ready to be blasted at 107 decibels. That’s the volume level of a chainsaw [SFX]. And this toy is recommended for children as young as four years old.

Not all the offending toys at the lab tested are quite as obvious as the Ultrazord. Take, for example, the V-Tech’s Starshine the Bright Lights Unicorn, a sweet toy designed to teach kids ages one to four about colors, words, and shapes.

[Audio clip: Starshine Unicorn; “Hello there! I’m Starshine the Unicorn.” “Can you put the orange flower into one of my magic hearts?”]

Straight out of the speaker, toddlers are hearing about those orange flowers at nearly 104 decibels. That’s the same volume level as your average rock concert. And even from the requisite foot away, Starshine is still shouting at over 87 decibels.

[Audio clip: “Hello there! I’m Starshine the Unicorn.”]

The list goes on and on, but an alarming number of toys on it break the 100 decibel mark if you get too close, including a nearly unrecognizable descendent of the Bop-It called the “Bop-It Smash.”

[Audio clip: “You killed it! 114 points”]

[music in]

Hamid: Unfortunately noise is not something that people think about much. We kind consider kids to be able to be resistant to the things that are potentially dangerous to us, but you know the reality is they're just as sensitive to loud sounds as we are. Their sort of sole noise exposure risk when they're very young is toys, and the fact that digital music that's essentially being played, the speaker quality and all that stuff has improved. So you can play loud sound at a much higher fidelity than you used to be able to do maybe 20 years ago.

It’s terrifying to think that the toys we bring home could be damaging our kids’ hearing in ways that won’t be measurable for decades. As if the list of things for parents to worry about wasn’t long enough.

[music out]

So is there any hope for parents who want to protect their child’s sensitive ears?

Hamid: If a toy is loud and the way to assess whether a toy is loud is you can hold it up against your ear, and if it hurts then that's too loud.

Hamid: Now if a toy is loud, then place some kind of either glue or tape over the speaker. It's important to just make sure that the tape is placed such that a young child can't peel it off and potentially eat it and cause airway obstruction.

Culturally, we sadly think that loud is good. That loud means fun! But sunlight is good too, and yet we know we need to wear sunscreen. We understand that over the long-term, sun exposure can be damaging. As a society, we need to start treating hearing protection the way we treat sunscreen. And that can start with teaching our children about the importance of protecting their ears.

Hamid: So if you're in a loud noise environment, then either try to get out of the noise environment, wear earplugs, cover your ears with your hands or something, and teach your children that loud noise is not good for your ears, that noises can be damaging to your ears and it's permanent, and they learn that kind of going forward in their life.

Chris: One of my sort of soapboxes if you will, about learning toys is toys don't teach kids. People teach kids, but the role of these toys is to reinforce things kids are learning. And give them a chance to use them in different situations.

[music in]

When a toy grabs our attention at the store, there are many reasons we want to take it home: toys are fun! In some cases, they even remind us of the sounds of our own childhood. But as Hamid’s research shows, the Loudness Wars have hit the toy aisle. Toys are getting louder and louder, and not necessarily for enjoyment or education, but for the sake of marketing.

And another thing: toys like Beast-X Ultrazord are more than just loud. They’re a perfect example of how far toy tech has come. It has sensors in it that can sense how a child is playing with it. And it’s smart enough to shift between special flight noises when you’re flying it around and battle noises when you’re staging a fight against evil [SFX: Ultrazord voice sounds]. But...why? Kids are perfectly capable of making those sounds, or maybe even better ones, on their own. Imaginative play is a critical part of child development. Cutting the wires, removing the batteries, or taping the speakers of your kid’s toys could protect more than just their hearing. It might also protect their developing imaginations. And that imagination is way more powerful than a toy could ever be.

Chris: I think when it comes to parents and electronic toys, the greatest innovation of the last decade is the off switch.

[SFX: Starshine Unicorn fades in and is switched off]

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. A sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com. This episode was written and produced by Marissa Flaxbart. And me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Colin DeVarney.

Thanks so much to our guests, Christopher Byrne and Dr. Hamid Djalillian. You can hear more from Chris on his podcast, The Playground.

The music in this episode is from The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Sound of Picture. Full track details for this episode and all episodes can be found on our website, two zero kay dot org.

Special thanks to Matt Altobell from Facebook, Scott Simons and Anthony Mikos from Twitter and user Hot as Milk from Reddit for naming this episode.

If you’d like to help us name future episodes as well as get the inside scoop on all things Twenty Thousand Hertz, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or on our official subreddit… which you can find at r slash two zero kay. You can also reach out directly at hi at twenty kay dot org. Outside of making this show, my favorite thing is interacting with you, so don’t be shy.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Good Vibes: Unlocking music’s hidden power over your brain

Art by Zach Christy.

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.

We know that music has the power to affect our moods, but you might be surprised by just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Music can affect our brains and bodies in profound ways. Professor Jessica Grahn tells us how our love for music has shaped us as humans while Nate Sloan unpacks our appreciation of music, and reveals how it can be used to manipulate us, both for bad and for good.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Little Dipper by Sound of Picture
Gruyere by Sound of Picture
Enrichment by Sound of Picture
Loll by Sound of Picture
Morning Colours by Red Licorice
Leaving by Vesky 
Love Never Fails (Instrumental) by Ellie Holcomb
I'm doing me (Instrumental) by Paper Kings
One Eight Four by Skittle
Bundt by Confectionery
Lupi by Orange Cat
Thannoid by Bodytonic 
Cold and Hard by Cold Case
Quiet Sill by Darby
Ozi Logo by MVM Productions
Ambient Metal by Black Rhomb

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.

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

Check out Switched On Pop wherever you get your podcasts.

Also, check out Nate Sloan’s new book, Switched on Pop, wherever you get your books.

Follow Jessica Grahn’s music and neuroscience research at the Twitter handle @Neurobeats.

View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

It probably comes as no surprise that music has the power to change our mood. Perhaps you’ve experienced the high of a funky song, or feel your heart break to a ballad.

Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, we pick music to suit our tastes and moods in the moment.

Which got me wondering, what’s actually going on inside our brains when we make those choices? Do we control the music, or does the music control us?

To help answer these questions I need a musicologist… and I just-so-happen to know one!

Nate: Okay. We are live. Just double check my levels. Check, check, check. Testing, testing. Looking good.

[music out]

Nate: I'm Nate Sloan. I’m an assistant professor of musicology at the USC Thornton School of Music, and I'm the cohost of the podcast, Switched on Pop.

Right now, you might be wondering what exactly a musicologist is.

Nate: A musicologist is, wow. Tough question right off the bat, Dallas.

Nate: A musicologist is someone who studies the history of music and tries to understand how it both reflects and shapes culture through close attention to the composition, theory, and reception at different moments in time and space.

And right now, you’re probably STILL wondering what a musicologist is.

Nate: So, a musicologist is a really pretentious way of saying a music historian.

Nate’s an expert in dissecting the musical devices that keep us listening. But to understand what music is doing to us, we first need to get a handle on where music really begins and ends. What’s the simplest thing we can consider to be music?

Nate: Music is organized sound. Though there's also a question to that of who's doing the organizing? Sometimes I find myself nodding along to like, the rhythmic hum of the uptown C train [SFX]. And I'm like, "Is this music?"

You can find rhythmic, organised sound in some of the most unexpected places. In the dripping of a leaky pipe [SFX], the squeak of a door [SFX], or the mechanical thunk of office equipment.

[SFX: Desktop printer]

Nate: Desktop printers, I think, are some of the funkiest instruments imaginable when they really get going. If you're doing a big print job and you have a printer that's just kind of like humming on ... I really find myself nodding my head and tapping my foot to the sound of a printer.

Nate: I have to step back and I'm like, "Wait a minute. Is this music?" I don't know. I think my answer is, "Yeah. Sure. Definitely." So organized sound, but I think that anyone can organize it, including a Xerox machine.

Maybe we don’t all get our groove on to the copy machine, but there is one uniting principle of music.

Nate: We all have a heartbeat [SFX], so when we hear music that has a beat [SFX: Music in with heart beat SFX underneath], it resonates with us in some way.

Nate: There may be certain characteristics of music that you could say, okay, anyone with a pulse is going to enjoy this. There might be some fundamental attraction we have to repeating rhythms, beats.

[music out]

Rhythm is often a key element in music. Just like a painting is a composition in space, formed by patterns over a canvas, a piece of music is a composition in time, and the rhythm is the pattern it makes through time.

And that organised beat has a surprising effect on our brains and bodies.

[music in]

Jessica: There are some basic physiological things that happen when we listen to music whether we like it or not.

That’s Jessica Grahn. She’s a cognitive neuroscientist of music at Western University in Ontario, Canada...

Jessica: ...which basically means I study music and the brain.

Scientists like Jessica have spotted a trend in how us humans respond to music.

Jessica: We can't close our ears. When music is playing, we tend to process it automatically. That means that we have responses in various brain areas. So, sound processing areas immediately light up. If this is music that might be familiar to us, we'll have memory related areas. We also have reward system areas, so the areas that respond to drugs, and other things that really stimulate dopamine production in certain parts of the brain.

Jessica: If the music happens to be fast and up tempo, [SFX: sped up music] up beat, and loud, that is arousing. That stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, so our heart rate tends [SFX] to go up, our respiratory rate [SFX] tends to go up.

[music out]

So our bodies are getting a workout from our running playlist, before we even set foot on the track.

And it’s the rhythm at the core that guides our response.

Jessica: Because rhythm is the key to what makes us move to music. If we don't have rhythm, if we can't perceive the rhythm very well, if we don't really know how to predict it, we don't move along to it.

We may not all be the first up on the dance floor, but we’ve all experienced it. [music in] That irresistible toe tapping when a tune gets in your head. And it seems that moving to the music is something we start to do very early on.

Jessica: Interestingly, we move along to music from a very, very young age. Before we can crawl or move or speak. We don't synchronize accurately to the beat that we perceive in the rhythm, but even young infants [SFX: Infant giggles] will start moving rhythmically when they hear music.

[music out]

That link between music and movement is also seen in primitive cultures too.

Jessica: If you look at cultures today that are probably similar to cultures that were existing when humans were evolving, sort of hunter, gatherer cultures, some of them don't even have different words for music and dance. The idea that music was something you would have without movement is completely foreign to them.

So, in our brains and bodies, music subconsciously makes us move. It doesn’t take any learning, or practice, it just happens. That type of a primitive reaction like that might seem like an animal instinct, but amazingly, it’s almost uniquely human.

Jessica and her team have been working with monkeys to test this primitive response.

[music in]

Jessica: It does not appear to be that any of our closest evolutionary relatives show responses to music.

Jessica: It's actually very hard to even train them to pay attention to the sound because they're really not interested in sounds that aren't directly relevant, like a communication sound from another monkey.

[SFX: Monkeys communicating with each other]

Jessica: This makes it problematic because you spend so much time trying to even train the monkey to notice and respond to the auditory stimulus that it's really inefficient.

But there are other species, more distant from us humans, that do seem capable of moving along to music.

Jessica: Particularly birds that have what we call vocal learning.

[SFX: Songbirds]

Jessica: This ability to modify their vocal output based on what they hear and those birds seem to be more likely to move along to music than some other species.

Vocal learning is most obvious in songbirds like parrots that can learn the noises we make and repeat them back to us. But it’s also been found in some other mammals, like elephants, dolphins, whales and seals.

Jessica: There's a fantastic example of a sea lion named Ronan who was trained to move to a metronome [SFX: metronome], and then automatically extrapolated moving to the metronome, to moving along to music.

[music in: Boogie Wonderland]

In a video on YouTube from the Pinniped Lab at UC Santa Cruz, you can see Ronan bobbing along to his favorite song Boogie Wonderland. It really is quite a thing to see.

[music out]

But although these animals can respond to a beat, it’s not quite the same as what we as a species seem to be capable of.

[music in]

Jessica: In general, certainly, the universality of music in human culture, the early age at which we respond to it and the spontaneous production of music, it's something that we all do automatically from a very young age. A lot of these things do seem to be specifically human.

Jessica: This is a part of the way the brain operates that we don't really see in other species. It may be part of our fundamental human nature. It's certainly one of our more mysterious activities.

[music out]

So our unique relationship with music is one of the things that makes us human, and there’s an enduring theory that it helped to give our brains a boost.

[music in: Mozart]

Jessica: There is a history to music and babies, and childhood development that's gotten into the popular culture.

...that theory is that listening to classical music will give young children an intellectual head-start, to make them smarter.

Jessica: We buy this baby Einstein music CDs, and other, try to enrich the environment. Some people even buy headphones that they can put on their bellies when they're pregnant, to transmit music to the fetus earlier, because earlier is always better, right?

Jessica: There really is zero evidence for that.

[music out]

Nate: I think there's a pervasive myth that listening to classical music, listening to Mozart will make you smarter, and that is categorically untrue.

That’s not to say that studying music doesn’t have ANY effect…

Jessica: There are some studies that suggest that a year of music lessons leads to an increase in six year olds an IQ of five or six points.

Jessica: However, almost all of these differences really seem to be minimal by the time kids get to college. That's in part because people do a lot of things with their time. You might be intensively doing music, but someone else might be intensively doing other types of activities that are also developing.

So if it’s not intelligence, why are we humans so obsessed with music?

[music in]

Another theory is that it helps to shape us as social creatures.

Jessica: The idea is that people who move together tend to feel more positive toward each other, more socially bonded, and are more altruistic to each other.

Jessica: Music, and particularly in a steady drum beat is one way of synchronizing massive groups of people. This is why we can have rock concerts with thousands of people attending all moving or clapping together, because sound is a very effective synchronizing cue. And one thought is that the groups in which music was present were moving together, and were more socially bonded, more altruistic, so would perhaps be better at resource sharing and other evolutionarily youthful behaviors.

So the early humans that leaned in and embraced music were the ones that succeeded, and survived.

[music out]

Nate: So on one hand, there's the experience of playing music, composing music on your own. [SFX: Solo Tabla Player] I liken that to the experience of writing, I don't know, writing in a journal or going on a walk or something or staring out the window on a train ride, meditating even. I think it's a mindful activity.

Nate: And then there's the experience of making music with other people. [SFX: Indian Ensemble comes in] That is one of the most extraordinary social experiences you can have. I think one of the big reasons for that is that it often transcends verbal communication

[music out]

Nate: That's pretty exciting and almost kind of addictive in a way because I wonder if it's not a way of actually getting closer to people than you could by ever talking to them.

Nate: There's an intimacy there in communicating through the medium of music that can be really healing and really just a powerful force for bringing people together.

Of course, despite all these theories about how evolutionary and socially important music can be, many of us don’t share that experience. Some people just don’t consider themselves musical.

Jessica: A lot of people feel they can't dance or they can't sing, or we test people's rhythm abilities and they come in, and, "Oh, I can't keep a beat." Most of the time, the people that come in can do these things completely adequately. I think what they're saying really reflects a terrible thing that western culture has done to music, which is to make a divide between performers and consumers. Performers are ever more the experts, and no one should be forced to hear anybody's music except somebody who is deemed good.

But that’s not how music is used in all cultures worldwide.

[music in]

Jessica: In fact, one of the best things about music is the fact that it is something we all pick up on from a very early age and respond to, and can continue to respond to without any formal training. Things like folk dancing, or Ceilidh dancing in Scotland. These are activities that are based around music that are appealing because absolutely everybody can participate at some level.

So music made us the social creatures we are, and today, it’s still a powerful force to unite us. But music is also deeply personal. We pick our music to suit our mood, our taste, and our personal identity. But that gives others the chance to use our musical choices to manipulate us, for good, and for bad.

We’ll find out how, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

Our appreciation of music is one of the things that makes us uniquely human, and although it might not make us more intelligent, it certainly helps us to be more socially successful.

But for many people, musical choice is incredibly personal. Often, we choose to listen to a certain kind of music based on how it makes us feel.

[music out]

Jessica: Music can be an enhancer of a mood that we're in, loud and intense music can increase physiological arousal, but exactly what you do with that and how that gets expressed is really dependent on the person and the situation they're in, and what they want to achieve with this music.

It’s like when you might put on sad music when you feel sad just to really lean into it. Or maybe you put on some peppy music to get you through some household chores.

[music in]

Jessica: People usually have a pretty good intuitive sense of what the music is doing for them.

Jessica: I also use music to emotion regulate. So I've learned that if I'm feeling a bit irritated or frustrated...and there's really nothing I can do about it right now...then I absolutely have some music that I use to do that. Despite having a degree in classical piano, most of the music that I go to tends to be pretty cheesy pop music.

Jessica: The intensity of the music, I think for me, matches the intensity of what I'm experiencing, which is somehow helpful.

[music out]

So while Jessica is working through her feelings with cheesy pop, others might prefer 80s ballads, or some soothing jazz.

Nate: It would be wrong to assume that we have some objective relationship with music, some objective physiological relationship... that when you, Dallas Taylor, listen to a song and I, Nate Sloan, listen to a song that we hear the same thing, that we as common members of the human species have the same reaction to a song.

Nate:You may listen to death metal [SFX: Metal] and come away with it with a feeling of, wow, that was loud. That was intense. That was overwhelming. That was scary. That made me uncomfortable to listen to because it has all those musical qualities. And yet I wouldn't want to say therefore we have, as humans, have a biological reaction to heavy metal, death metal, black metal, with those qualities, you know, scary, overwhelming. Because if you talk to a death metal fan, they will not tell you that's how they experience that music.

...and it just so happens that we have a serious metal fan here at 20k HQ. None other than our ace producer Sam. So I thought I’d test out Nate’s theory, and ask her about her relationship with metal.

[music in]

Dallas: So this is really, really straightforward. What kind of music do you like, personally?

Sam: I mainly listen to metal, like melodic metal.

Dallas: And how does metal make you feel?

Sam: It's a lot of emotions actually, it makes me feel happy, but it makes me think, because a lot of the music I listen to is incredibly thoughtful and it's difficult, and there was a lot of work put into it.

Sam: Sometimes puts me in this trance. I go into my own little world while listening to metal, but it could also make me really energized.

Sam: The funniest thing I notice when you meet people that listen to metal is that they are the happiest people. And when they find other people that listen to metal and when they listen to metal together they just jam out, and it's just a silly, fun experience and you just geek out over it.

[music out]

So understanding what music appeals to us, and what it does to us, is harder than it might seem. But doing just that has become a holy grail for some surprising… companies. It’s not only music producers aiming to get the next best-selling hit, it’s also shops and restaurants looking to maximize profit.

Nate: That's why there is a whole subset of the music industry that is involved with using music to influence, for instance, our shopping patterns.

Nate: But again, it quickly emerges that that's not necessarily that there's a certain kind of tempo or pitch or sound that will induce someone to go shopping.

Nate: It's much more cultural. It's like what kind of music will entice a younger target audience to go shop at Forever 21 versus perhaps the older audience that will go shop at William-Sonoma, or something I guess.

[music in]

Consumer neuroscience, or neuromarketing, is nothing new. Businesses tap into our unconscious minds with colours, pictures, and music that a target group is likely to respond to.

Jessica: We form our musical identities, usually in our early teens up to early 20s. And we may continue to stay up to date on the latest music, but the music of that time does have a special influence on us.

Jessica: Stores absolutely know this, and when they want to send a message for, you know... who this clothing line is for, they can do that through music. Same with eating establishments. [SFX: Restaurant chatter, followed by Classical music] If this is an upscale expensive place, playing a little bit of classical music will fit people's perception of, "Oh yes, I should be paying $65 for a steak, because this is a nice place."

Jessica: Whereas if someone's playing rock or pop music at a high volume [SFX: Rock pop music with restaurant chatter, "I'm Doing Me - Instrumental"], you might influence turnover, so you might not want people to linger. You might want to get them in, eat quickly, and get out, and louder music seems to have that effect.

[music out]

Musical neuromarketing might not always get it spot on, but the effects of music on our shopping habits HAS been proven in scientific studies. And to make it more difficult for the musical neuromarketers, musical preference often changes with age and life experiences.

Nate: I love every kind of music. You can throw anything at me and I will say, "I have nothing but love and respect for that."

Nate: I think I used to believe that there was objectively good and objectively bad music and that I could play a song for anyone and they would understand how I felt about it or if I could just make them understand.

Nate: And now I don't think that's true any more. I think we all have our ears. Our ears are shaped by the time and the place that we live in.

Nate: And music isn't bad or good. It's like people are bad or good and what we do with that music is bad or good.

People have used music to do some pretty bad stuff. If you think musical neuromarketing is manipulative, it gets MUCH worse than that.

[music in]

Nate: During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when the American military had the go-ahead to use so-called enhanced interrogation techniques

Nate: One of the forms of sonic torture they would use would be to expose Arabic prisoners to Western pop music and often music that was designed specifically to be offensive to their cultural or religious sensibilities.

So, female singers could be offensive, or it could have lyrics that insult God. And even the Barney music has been used for bad stuff.

[SFX: Barney theme]

Nate: Eminem, I think, was pretty popular as well [Music clip: Eminem - The Real Slim Shady] as a form of torture. Now, if you're Eminem that probably feels horrible. But again, is that his fault? No. Music is something that can be used as a force of good or a force of harm, but music itself isn't good or harmful. It just is. It's just music. It's how we use it and how we deploy it and what we do with it that affects people.

[music in]

To balance the intentional harm being done with cruelly chosen music, others are working on using music to help and heal.

Jessica and her team have been studying how music can be used to help people that have difficulty moving.

Jessica: One of the populations we've been studying are people with Parkinson's disease who'd have problems in the later stages of the disease with walking.

We’re most familiar with the tremors that Parkinson’s causes, but the loss of nerve cells in the brain can have other, wider effects on the body’s movement.

Jessica: Often just initiating the movement, getting the movement going is tricky, and they may have problems with the speed that they move, as well as freezing where particularly if they go through a doorway or pass by somebody, they may suddenly find that they're feet are frozen to the ground, and not responding to any commands to move.

But that can change when a rhythmic sound is involved.

[SFX: Simple, steady beat, getting gradually more complex]

Jessica: For some patients, playing a regular steady beat or playing music that has a steady beat seems to make this much better.

If we play music that makes them want to move, they tend to walk faster, and we can measure this scientifically in the lab. This seems to happen regardless of whether they enjoy the music.

[music out]

[music in]

So music can make us happy or sad. It can be used to cause harm, and it can also be used to heal. It helped to shape us into the social animals that we are, but it can also help us work through our most private emotions. Jessica thinks it’s similar in many ways to language.

Jessica: It's made by people for people and as long as it's achieving the functions its set out to achieve, in the case of language, communication, it doesn't really matter if you're grammar is perfect or you got everything right, if somebody understood what you meant, then you have achieved the function of language, and I think the same is true for music. If in producing music or in sharing your music or in listening to somebody else's music, you have been affected, it's something you enjoy, it's something that you want to continue with, then that music has done exactly what it is supposed to do.

And each of us has a unique relationship with music. We may love it or hate it, or we might not care all that much. There’s no right or wrong way to feel about it, but it can tell us so much about ourselves and others, if you are willing to keep an open mind.

Nate: I prided myself on someone who hated Britney Spears and loved avant-garde jazz. How wrong I was, Dallas. How much better my life has come now that I've let all sounds into my ears. This is incredibly hokey, but forgive me. They say don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes. I think you could alter that. You say don't judge someone until you've listened an hour through their ears.

[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 Leila Battison, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Jai Berger.

Thanks to our guests, Nate Sloan and Jessica Grahn. Nate co-hosts the podcast Switched on Pop, all about the making and meaning of popular music. I love it, and you should definitely go subscribe. Nate also has a brand new book, also called Switched on Pop.

Jessica’s music and neuroscience lab is actively researching music’s effect on our brains. You can see what she’s up to at the twitter handle @Neurobeats.

Thanks also to Sam Schneble, for offering a surprise insight into the world of a metal fan.

Is there a certain type of music that you use to change your mood? If so, tell us on Facebook, Twitter, or by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

4’33”: John Cage’s revolutionary “silent” musical piece

Art by Jon McCormack.

This episode was written and produced by Martin Zaltz Austwick.

John Cage was a respected composer when, in 1952, he created his “silent piece”, 4’33’’ - a piece that would have the music world scratching their heads. This episode asks whether 4’33’’ is really “silent”, and we explore the history of a piece musicians still talk about today - and speak to the man who campaigned to get it to the top the British charts in 2010. Featuring composers Kyle Gann and Nahre Sol, and artist Dave Hilliard.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Plastic Furniture by Audioblocks
Sleepwalker by Hey Lunar
Minor Stretch by Sound of Picture
Footnote by Martin Zaltz Austwick
A Bad Crossword (Instrumental) by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Snowmelt by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Slow Minnesota by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Am Trans by Sound of Picture
Got Spark by Martin Zaltz Austwick

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

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Check out Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" wherever you get your books.

See Nahre’s work at nahresol.com.

Find Dave Hilliard on Instragram at davehilliardart.

Listen to more of Martin Zaltz Austwick’s music at palebirdmusic.com.

View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[Music clip - In a Landscape, performed by Stephen Drury]

John Cage was one of the most significant figures in 20th Century music. He was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, but went on to be an influential composer in his own right. His work drew on Chinese and Japanese influences at a time when American society was just starting to open up to these cultures. He influenced avant garde composers like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as songwriters and artists like Yoko Ono and Lou Reed, and even Aphex Twin. He was also hugely influential in modern dance. What you hear playing is his 1948 piece “In A Landscape”. This version was recorded in 1994 by Stephen Drury.

[music continues]

This piece is actually not very typical of John Cage’s writing - he’s more known for his innovations in music, and his avante garde techniques. As far as John Cage pieces go, this is pretty much as “mainstream classical” as it gets.

But despite his reputation for avante garde writing, no one was prepared for what he did in 1952. This was the year he created the most daring piece of his career - something really “out there”, even for him. It was called “Four Minutes and Thirty Three Seconds” - It was a piece that some critics even refused to call “music”.

[music out]

Kyle: oddly enough, my first experience with 4'33" was playing it on my high school piano recital. I played it when I was 17 before I had heard anybody else play it.

That’s Kyle Gann, a Professor at Bard College. He’s also a composer, and a former critic at the Village Voice.

Kyle: I bought the sheet music in Dallas for 50 cents.

It’s almost ironic that you can buy sheet music for 4’33”. Because for the entire duration of the piece, the performer plays... nothing at all.

Well, to be technically, the performer is playing “rest” but to the audience, it looks like nothing is happening.

Nahre: I think people just looked around at each other and kind of smiled, then a few giggles here and there.

That’s Nahre Sol - composer, musician, and video creator.

Nahre: I was first introduced to John Cage in an academic environment.

Nahre: At first, it didn't really make sense to me, because here I was in the conservatory. I was really concentrated on playing the piano and when I first heard about Four minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds, it's a piece where you're not playing. So, it just didn't make any sense.

John Cage’s 4’33’’ was performed for the first time in the summer of 1952 by renowned pianist, David Tudor. It was at Maverick Concert Hall, which is an outdoor concert hall in Woodstock, New York [SFX: outdoor ambience, small crowd]. The concert featured all new piano music from different composers.

So, what happened here was a pianist walked out on stage [SFX], sat down at the piano [SFX]. Then, to start 4’33” he closed the piano lid [SFX]. He then sat there in silence, doing nothing, playing nothing - for thirty seconds. At that point, he opened the piano lid [SFX]. And immediately closed it again [SFX]**...**

He sat in silence for two minutes and twenty three seconds. Then, he opened the piano lid [SFX] and closed it once more [SFX]**...**

A minute and forty seconds later, he got up and walked off the stage.

The audience had no idea what to think.

[music in]

Nahre: I think it really pushed the edge around what people considered acceptable in classical music or any kind of music and that, in today's context, sounds quite ridiculous, because almost everything has been done in almost every way.

Kyle: A lot of people were kind of bemused by it.

Kyle: Cage's mother asked one of his friends, "Don't you think John has gone too far this time?".

A friend of Cage wrote to him, begging that he not turn his career into a joke.

John Cage had, well if you could call it “created” a piece of music that really challenged some very established ideas about music composition. It’s something that musicians are still inspired by - and still debate - even today.

[music out]

To understand just what John Cage was thinking, let’s back up to the 1940s. Back then, John Cage was making a name for himself composing for “The Prepared Piano”.

[music in]

Kyle: All during the 40s Cage's big instrument was the prepared piano, and the thing about the prepared piano is you put screws or erasers, or tape or anything on the strings of one note, and every note ends up having a different timbre and so you're no longer working with a continuum of pitch, you're working with a whole bunch of distinct sounds.

The music you can hear is Cage’s “Sonata Number Five” from “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano”, probably his most famous work outside of 4’33’’.

[Music clip: Sonata Number Five continues]

Nahre: What I find interesting is that when you prepare a piano, you're really dealing with a lot of elements of spontaneity and chance, because here you are dealing with foreign objects that are placed in the piano, and because of this set up, there are a lot of things that are unpredictable, once you do it, and it's really hard to keep the outcome consistent [Music clip: Sonata Number Five, chaotic part of song]. So, just by circumstance, you have to embrace that margin of not knowing the outcome. And so, when I was working with Prepared Piano, at first, I was really frustrated because I really wanted to reproduce a certain outcome.

[music out]

The sheet music for prepared piano has some really detailed instructions about where to place each object. But it’s impossible for every performer to have the same piano, or the same screw, or the same rubber eraser. So the sound you get is always different. This was pretty bananas and pretty alien to the way most composers, and musicians are taught to do things.

Nahre: I definitely have been trained to really put a priority on getting as much control as possible. I'm a little bit of a control freak when it comes to just wanting something to sound a certain way and wanting to play something a certain way.

Today we call a lot of John Cage’s work “chance music”. Basically composers of chance music create some guidelines for the performer, but major parts of it are left up to chance. So, every performance is something really special. Never heard before, and never to be replicated. John Cage used ideas from East Asia to find new ways to do that.

Kyle: It was really in 49 and 50 that Cage started getting heavily interested in zen. There was a tremendous influx of Japanese culture into America right after World War II.

The Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching, was a huge influence on John Cage. The I-Ching is over two thousand years old, and it’s pretty complex to explain. But basically you generate random numbers - by flipping coins, for example - and the sections that come up tell you something about a decision you need to make. It’s a bit like a Tarot deck, or a magic eight ball - just much, much, much more complex.

Kyle: You ask a question and it would give you any one of 64 answers randomly. And the synchronicity of the universe is supposed to ensure that that answer will be the right one for the moment, and Cage got interested in this idea and started... even before he wrote 4'33", started using the I-Ching in his composing.

[Music clip: John Cage, David Tudor - I]

This piece of music you’re listening to is Cage’s “Music of Changes” - composed by flipping coins and using chance to make music. This version was performed by Martine Joste [Music clip continues: John Cage, David Tudor - I]. You can hear how there are long periods with no music at all, interspersed with big, loud chords, and melodies which seem… well, pretty random.

[music out]

So, John Cage was getting increasingly interested in chance - in letting the universe provide the answer to the question “what note should I play next?”. But to hear the answer to the question, you have to listen. And in the 1940s, listening to the universe was getting harder to do.

[Musak in]

Kyle: The Muzak corporation was founded in 1934. It really took off during World War II and musicians of that generation were horrified by it, as were lots of other people.

Kyle: There was a case that went to the Supreme Court about it, and it was seen as a terrible scourge by lots of musicians. There were musicians who would make lists of restaurants that didn't play Muzak and only go to those.

But there were attempts to shut down the constant background music.

Kyle: In January of that year, 1952, there was a college student in the Midwest who started selling silent records for jukeboxes. So if you didn't want to listen to the jukebox for a moment, you could put in your nickel [SFX: coin going into jukebox] and it'd play a silent record [SFX: button press, needle drop, soft jukebox motor hum].

John Cage became obsessed with the idea of silence - and the idea that, increasingly, people were losing the option to shut out the background noise of the world. He worried that Musak would stop people from being able to hear silence altogether.

Kyle: He gave a lecture in 1948, and announced his idea to write a four and a half minute piece of silence that he was going to sell to the Muzak Company.

Kyle: It started out I think as kind of a political protest. That if you get a silent piece on Muzak, people get to not listen to anything for four and a half minutes.

So 4’33’’ actually started as an attempt to escape from music being imposed on us everywhere we go. But it struck a real nerve, and quickly evolved beyond that.

Cage was starting to think about silence not as the absence of sound - but as the opportunity to listen. And when he visited a truly quiet place, he made a startling discovery.

Kyle: He came up to Boston and visited anechoic chamber at Harvard.

Anechoic chambers are rooms that are acoustically treated to minimise sound to almost zero. There are no sounds in them - at least, not from the room itself ...

Kyle: He said he heard two sounds in motion and the engineer told him one was his nervous system, the other was his blood in circulation. This has been debunked. You can't hear your nervous system. It's been speculated that he probably had tinnitus like I do. I wish that were my nervous system I'm hearing, but it's the echo of past very loud concerts.

I’ve personally experienced an anechoic chamber, and it’s a really wild experience that can completely change your perceptions about sound and silence. Really, I could hear two distinct sounds. I could hear somewhat of a high-pitched hissing noise [SFX]. I don’t know if it’s a mild tinnitus, but it's something I’ve never heard before in my normal life. It really felt like my brain turning up an amplifier just grasping for anything to hear. And the other thing I could hear really clearly was blood pushing through my body [SFX].

Kyle: It gave Cage the idea that wherever we are, even our bodies make sounds. There's no such thing as a silent environment. As long as you're in your body, you're always hearing something.

This is where John Cage’s interest in chance and randomness met his interest in silence. He realised that creating an environment with no distractions wasn’t about creating silence. It wasn’t even about controlling noise. It was about the sounds that were already there, but you suddenly hear for the first time - when you’re really ready to listen.

That’s what’s so often misunderstood about 4’33’’, people think that it’s a joke, and the punchline is… well, nothing at all. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. What John Cage really wanted us to hear the beauty of the sonic world around us.

[music in]

Our world is getting noisier and noiser, and 4’33’’ has even more importance today than it did when it premiered, over 60 years ago. So much so that it recently broke into the UK pop charts. We'll find out how that happened after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

John Cage was fascinated by the idea of chance. So he started experimenting with “prepared” piano, and later with the I-Ching. His distaste for Musak and interest in silence took him to the quietest place on earth. Once these two strands of his life met, he created one of the most controversial and influential pieces in history.

[music out]

But here in the 21st Century, 4’33’’ went mainstream, and even got into the UK Top 40.

Dave: So Cage against the machine started as a joke really.

That’s Dave Hilliard - a visual artist and psychotherapist - and founder of the “Cage Against the Machine” campaign.

Dave: What gets to number one in the UK music charts at Christmas, is historically quite a big deal. And so what I think had happened around 2009 and those X factor type shows [X-Factor - Joe McElderry - The Climb in], it started to become quite big. So as a reaction against that, you had a Facebook based campaign to try and get Rage Against the Machine [Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name Of] to number one at Christmas. They did that kind of, really just off the back of a Facebook page, and it was this really successful “people power” kind of idea.

Amazingly, Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” topped the UK charts at Christmas 2009 thanks to this campaign. So in 2010, Dave decided to start his own Christmas number One campaign.

[music in]

Dave: It was a joke really at first, me suggesting 4'33 in the music charts.

It was taking the idea to a kind of ludicrous extreme really. I didn't really have any plans of how it might actually take place. It was literally just me doing something that amused myself. So I created a Facebook page.

At first, the page only had a few followers.

Dave: And I think it grew gradually and after that it started going up into the hundreds. It just started gathering momentum until it got into the thousands really. It was more media attention, and for a while silence became quite hot property. Silence was quite a desirable commodity.

Dave’s Cage Against the Machine campaign shifted from a joke into a reality. He was contacted by a couple of people who had the idea to air 4’33 as a Live Aid promotion.

[music out]

If you’re a child of the 1980s, you might remember the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” [music clip in] - with a bunch of celebrities singing in a recording studio as part of Live Aid. Dave and his friends were going to do the same thing… but with 4’33’’.

They managed to bring together some of the biggest names in the UK music scene and booked a studio in London. Performers who couldn’t be in the studio on the day of the recording literally phoned in their performances.

Here is a little bit of that performance.

[Music clip: Cage Against the Machine performance]

So what you hear buzzing in the audio lines and people softly shifting in the room. And yeah… that’s the point. Every performance of 4’33” sounds like the place it is performed. That’s the chance element of the music. When the recording was finished, Dave and his team got ready to share it with the British public.

[music in]

Dave: So yea, there was a Single launch party and somebody, thought it was a good idea to hold it in a London nightclub. It was due to be launched at midnight, but it was just a normal club night. So people had just gone there just for a night out.

When midnight arrived, the DJ stopped the music and played Cage Against the Machine’s version of 4’33’’.

[SFX: music cut out, disappointed audience]

Dave: Most of the people there had not asked to be involved in this performance at all. They hadn't gone out that night and thought, “Should we go and appreciate some avant garde performance art tonight?”. And so at first, if you just stopped playing music in a nightclub at midnight people were quite angry and shouting and “play the music” and “why has this stopped?”.

But, surprisingly, that didn’t last for too long.

Dave: And that reached a peak after about one or two minutes and then it went oddly silent and you could just hear little pockets of people talking and stuff. [SFX: Small conversations] And that was one of my favorite bits actually of the whole experience, was that was like a real enactment of the performance and the people involved in it hadn't asked to be involved in it, but they were having an experience and they were part of the experience and I thought it was wonderful really.

Cage Against The Machine made it all the way to number 21. But for Dave Hilliard, it had never really been about getting it to the top of the charts. For him, that strange moment in a London club was worth all the months of work.

Nahre: It's really about creating the environment for which you can experience sound in a specific way.

That’s Nahre again.

Nahre: Specific, not in terms of how it's imposed onto you, but how you experience that performance. You're just creating a space and that space is filled with sound. I think it's hard to accept for a lot of people to really consider that piece a piece of music, because a lot of the sounds being produced is not by the performer and they're not traditional sounds and there is a lot of silence but I think it really makes you reconsider what silences is, what music is in relation to silence.

Kyle: It's very different depending on where you play it,

This is Kyle Gann again:

Kyle: I find it really significant that the first performances is at a outdoor concert hall in Woodstock, the Maverick Concert Hall [SFX: natural ambience], because you know, it's a wonderful natural environment. When I played it in high school, we sat there and listened to [SFX: HVAC sounds] the auditorium HVAC system. It was a pretty antiseptic space for it, and Cage would have... it's just a much more minimalist performance. Cage would have found that just as legitimate as anything else.

[music in]

John Cage was trying to get us to listen. And this way of listening would have an impact far beyond music.

Dave: John Cage was quite into what we might call Eastern thinking, and things like mindfulness and meditation have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years in those cultures. And in the West we act like we've just discovered mindfulness. Whereas actually these things have been proven to be good for humans for thousands of years.

Mindfulness and Meditation are much more mainstream in the west now - but when John Cage created 4’33’’ in the 1950s, they were relatively new ideas to western audiences.

Dave: It's an experience and that allows you to bring whatever you bring to it. It's not a prescriptive experience and it reflects a lot back to you. That's the sort of thing we'd think about quite a lot in psychotherapy, that all your reactions to things and to other people come back to you and your thoughts and your feelings, it all comes from you. And I think that's a really potentially quite useful and quite profound experience to have. It is what you make it I think. It's what you bring to it.

Nahre: It just makes you a little more present and appreciate things just the way they are, and I think that's what everyone is still struggling to do, which is why Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds is still a subject of interest to a lot of people in terms of talking about what exactly is this, what's happening here, what does it mean? Is it really music? Is it sound? Is sound music? Is there a difference? But just really letting go of all of that, and just being and experiencing everything around, including everything that's not happening, it's hard to do.

433 is much more than its face value. Maybe, it’s even more than just a composition. Maybe it’s a philosophical question - unspoken yet universally understood, and worth considering even decades later.

Let’s hear what John Cage had to say in a 1991 interview.

[music out]

John Cage: When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. But, when I hear the sound of traffic, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. I’m completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me.

When I talk about music it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound, and they say ‘you mean it’s just sounds?’, thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless.

John Cage reminds us that music doesn’t just have to be about people sitting on a stage and playing complicated things. And that music isn’t the only kind of sound worth listening to. All sounds are worth thinking about.

[music in]

And in this spirit, we’re going to help you play your own version of 4’33’’ right now. And you and what’s surrounding you are going to be the performer. In fact, if you all play along, this might be the largest and most sonically diverse performance of 4’33’’ ever staged - over a hundred thousand completely different versions of 4’33’’ happening around the world, in wildly different places.

But every version of 4’33’’ will be personal. Completely unique to you.

So, make sure you have four and a half minutes to spare, and do not skip. I don’t want you to think about anything else. I want you to focus all of your thoughts into what you’re hearing. Listen for the high frequencies, the lows, the mids. The loud, the soft. The harmonic, the dissonant. Spend this time as mindful and present in your personal real-life sonic environment. Enjoy the magnificence of hearing and listening. The vibration of the world that in turn vibrates your eardrums.

There will be three movements, and I’ll let you know when they start. Get ready to take in the sounds happening around you right now - wherever you are. Here comes the first movement - it’s 30 seconds, starting [music out] now:

[John Cage’s 4’33]

And here’s movement two. It’ll be 2 minutes and 23 seconds.

[John Cage’s 4’33 continues]

And here is the final movement. It’ll be 1 minute and 40 seconds.

[John Cage’s 4’33 continues]

...and that is the end. You did it.

[music in]

Thank you for taking the time and taking part in this international, multi-location performance of John Cage’s 4’33’’.

So, think about what you heard. And remember these sounds not as distractions, but part of the movement and interaction of life; whether it’s calm or bustling, natural or human made. John Cage taught us an incredible lesson, and that’s that quietness is not an opportunity to stop listening. It’s when we really start to listen and finally hear the world as it is. So, no matter what you heard, you can be sure that your version of 4’33” was unique and never to be replicated again.

[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 Defacto Sound dot com.

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

Thanks to our guests Kyle Gann, Nahre Sol, and Dave Hilliard.

Kyle Gann is a composer - find his pieces wherever you listen to music. He’s also the author of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33", be sure to pick that up wherever you get your books.

Nahre Sol is a pianist, composer, educator, and YouTuber, and her website is NahreSol.com - that’s N A H R E S O L dot com.

Dave Hilliard is a visual artist and psychotherapist. You can find him on Instagram at dave hilliard art.

Most of the music in this episode is from our writer, Martin Zaltz Austwick, and I just adore this music. You should go listen to more of this music at pale bird music dot com.

You should also go check out our website, because we’ve posted a few videos related to this episode. The first is Nahre Sol playing a piece for prepared piano. The second is the recording of 433 for the Cage Against the Machine project. Both are so much fun to watch. You can find those at 20k dot org.

Finally, I want you to tell me about your personal 433 performance. Did anything surprising happen? How did it make you feel? Was it a powerful experience, or do you think this whole idea is nonsense? Tell me on Twitter, Facebook, or at hi @ 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

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