Art by Divya Tak
For this special episode, we’ve passed the mic to our listeners to hear six unexpected stories about sound. Featuring auditory hallucinations, amplified heartbeats, long remembered voices, and whistles both strange and familiar.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Sound of Picture - Beachhead
Eric Owyoung - Roman Candles
Bitters - Bridgewalker
Farrell Wooten - The Task at Hand
Wesley Slover - Benevolent Cantrip
Lennon Hutton - Whispers in the Fog
Blush Room - Stir
DEX 1200Hanna Extröm - Roseé du matin
Adrian Disch - Missing Earth
Kyle McEvoy - Something Special
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View Transcript ▶︎
Listener Voices: You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz: Listener Stories
Call and Response, by Andrew.
Andrew: [whistling melody]
Andrew: That is our family whistle.
[music in: Sound of Picture - Beachhead]
Andrew: When I was growing up, my parents came up with that so we could always find each other in a crowd, or in the grocery store when we were little kids and would get lost. So it was a call and response kind of thing.
Andrew: If ever you were somewhere out in public, and you heard the first...
Andrew: It was obligatory to respond with the...
Andrew: And then to help zero in and find each other, again, there'd be a...
Andrew: And you'd respond...
Andrew: And then you'd find each other.
Andrew: And I just think that's really neat. It was pretty embarrassing when I was little. But that's kind of what makes family special, I guess. The embarrassing things that are actually really neat when you think about them.
[sfx: recording UI sound]
Phantom Strings, by Renee
Renee D: My story about sound is about something that happened to me years ago. It's one of the weirdest experiences of my life. And what it was, was I had auditory hallucinations for days after I contracted a flu which completely plugged up my ears so that I couldn't hear anything, or I could hear very little.
Renee D: The first day of the flu, mostly my head felt like it was wrapped in a big cotton ball. You know, I had that white noise sound in my ears all the time.
Renee D: And I kept thinking, “I just can't stand this.”
Renee D: And I woke up the second morning hearing music. Very distinct music. Not imagining it, hearing it. And what it was, was a kind of hundred and one strings, perpetual, repetitive, violin adagio. “Da da da da, da da da da, da da da da”
Renee D: I thought, "There's a radio somewhere. The sound must be coming from somewhere.” Of course, there wasn't a radio. It was coming from my head. My brain was constructing this music out of the white noise that I hated so much in order to sort of give itself something to do auditorily.
Renee D: And If I tried, if I paid attention to it, I could control it. I could make it play a Beatles song.
[strings morph into clip: The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby]
Renee D: I could make it play Creedence Clearwater, something I like.
[clip: Creedence Clearwater Revival - Have You Ever Seen the Rain] Renee D: But as soon as I started thinking about something else, it would come back. “Da da, Da da da da da da da da da.” [designed strings]
Renee D: When I finally got to the doctor, he looked at my ears and said there was a lot of fluid behind my eardrums, which explained what I had been experiencing. Of course, when I told him what exactly I'd been experiencing, he looked at me like I had two heads, like I was just babbling wildly.
Renee D: The music faded away as my ears cleared, and I've never experienced anything like it again. [strings fade out into music in: Eric Owyoung - Roman Candles]
Renee D: I've since learned that this is not a rare phenomenon, that people who suddenly lose their hearing or who suddenly have nothing to listen to, that their brains do this.
Renee D: It taught me, one, that one of your senses going haywire is extremely disorienting. The other thing I learned from it is that what you hear is not just a function of your ears. It's also a function of your brain interpreting the signal, and boy can it interpret it.
[sfx: recording UI sound]
One Muffled Sentence, by Lee
[music in: Bitters - Bridgewalker]
Lee B: In the summer of 1978, when I was nine years old, my friend Dale moved out of the neighborhood. We still went to the same school, but as there was a year difference in our age, we never really saw each other again.
Lee B: Fast forward to the winter of 2011 and I'm seated in a booth with my parents at our favorite restaurant. And In the very next booth was a lady with her back to me who was directly across from the person she was eating with. I couldn't see their faces and really hadn't bothered to try until I heard her friend speak.
Lee B: I couldn't even quite hear what he said, but a strong sense of deja vu came over me. I leaned nonchalantly in both directions trying to get a glimpse, and mom noticed something was wrong, and I asked her, “Do you remember Dale?”
Lee B: “The one that lived two houses up?”
Lee B: “Yeah. And I would bet you $50 right now, after not hearing him all these years that that's him, just a couple of booths away.”
Lee B: Just then I heard him say, “I'm going to run out to the car for a minute. I forgot something.” And as he walked by our table, I stopped him and asked “Dale?”
Lee B: It was him! Over three decades later, after last hearing an eight year old kid's voice, I was able to recognize him as an adult after just one muffled sentence.
A Constant Reminder, by Robin
Robin: So, about 10 years ago, when I was 30, I tore the artery in my neck that goes to part of my brain, and it clotted and threw little clots to my brain.
[music in: Farrell Wooten - The Task at Hand]
Robin: So, at the age of 30, I was the only breastfeeding mom on the stroke floor, and I would not stay in the hospital. I would not go to rehab. I had a baby at home and a toddler. So they officially discharged me.
Robin: A few weeks later, I was home on blood thinners to keep me from throwing more clots to my brain. And I heard this sound.
Robin: And I was like, “I hear my heartbeat in my ear! That is bizarre!” And I'm a doctor. I'm a family physician. And I was like, “That's also really scary because pulsatile tinnitus is bad.”
Robin: Not always, but it's possible that if it's a vascular cause from blood vessels, it's bad. And I had just had quite a bad experience with my vessels.
Robin: The first time I went to the hospital, they gave me about a 40 percent chance of dying that night. And I made it through. I didn't dissect any further into my brain. So that was cool. But I didn't want to repeat that experience.
Robin: I called my neurologist, and he sent me straight to the emergency room where they did another image of my blood vessels. And what they discovered is that my blood vessel had started to open up a little bit. And when blood vessels are open all the way, they don't make any noise, just like if you open your mouth really wide and you blow, it doesn't really make any noise. But if they're really tight, then they do make sounds, kind of like if you're gonna whistle, you hold your lips pursed in order to make the whistling sound.
[Andrew’s whistle]
Robin: So my blood vessel whistles, only it just sounds like my heartbeat.
Robin: And ever since then, it's been about 10 years now, I can hear my heartbeat at all times. And if there's a lot going on, I don't notice it.
[sfx: children playing]
Robin: If it's quiet, I notice it. And if I get sinus symptoms, if I'm stuffy or congested, it's super loud. Robin: So now I'm always with my heartbeat. And once in a while, it gets me extremely anxious because hearing your own heartbeat all the time is unnerving, to say the least.
Robin: But I've learned to use it as an opportunity to remember my heart is still beating.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Benevolent Cantrip]
Robin: And I'm still around for my kids and my life and all the things that I want to be doing.
Robin: So sound is important in many, many ways. And thanks to your podcast, everywhere I go, I'm monitoring the sounds and saying, “How did they make that? And why do they have it that way?”
Robin: And how did mine get made? Why do I have it? Well, how it got made is that I tore my artery and almost died. And why? I guess it's so that I can remember that I'm alive.
[sfx: recording UI sound]
The Night Whistler, by Matt
Matt: Back in college, junior year was my first year off campus, and I was renting a house with some friends, and it was kind of off the beaten path.
Matt: You couldn't really see lights outside of the house, so when it's dark outside. You can't really see three feet away from the house.
Matt: Anyway, my roommate asked if I wanted to go to a party with her that night and I declined and said I needed to stay back and practice because I was a dorky music major. And, uh, so I'm just back at the house by myself, all the windows open in late August playing trombone.
[sfx: trombone practice]
Matt: And I hear this strange whistling, something like… [whistling]
[music in: Lennon Hutton - Whispers in the Fog]
Matt: And I was freaked out. In my mind, the only thing it could have been was someone looking in the windows at me, and it being so dark, I couldn't see out and figure out who is possibly looking at me, practicing and whistling at me. It was really unsettling. So I went around and locked all the windows, [sfx] put my trombone away, [sfx] and went to bed.
[morning ambiance]
Matt: So I get up the next morning, I make some coffee [sfx] and I'm sitting in the living room and I hear again… [whistling + music sting]
Matt: And I am wondering “What is happening?”
Matt: So it turns out my roommate had put a hourly bird clock, a different bird sings on every hour. It turns out at 10 o'clock the last night, the mourning dove had done its mourning dove thing. [mourning dove call]
Matt: And at 10 AM, the mourning dove did its morning dove thing again. So the mystery was solved, and I thought it was hilarious that I'd been so freaked out the previous night about a clock. [mourning dove call]
Up next, a final story from a listener who had to give up almost all of the sound in her life… How that happened, and what she did next, after the break.
MIDROLL
[sfx: recording UI sound]
Lost and Found, by Bethany
Bethany: About seven years ago, I had a concussion, pretty serious, which resulted in me developing chronic post concussion syndrome.
[music in: Blush Room - Stir]
Bethany: It's basically a brain injury that results in chronic symptoms of headaches, really severe fatigue, sometimes like nausea or dizziness… But more importantly for this story, it was really severe, light and noise sensitivity. So, basically it just made my brain extremely sensitive to all noise.
Bethany: At its worst, every sound to me was like nails on chalkboard. Like, it was just like, [sfx] cringe.
Bethany: There's certain sounds that I just hated more than anything, like crinkling chip bags like that [sfx] noise.
Bethany: Like clinking cutlery that [sfx] or like loading the dishwasher that like kind of chink chink chink, [sfx] just oh, it was just awful. I couldn't be in the same room as noises like that because it was just painful. Made my ears throb, my head pound…
Bethany: Some days, even just the sound of my own voice just reverberating in my head was too much for me to handle.
Bethany: So basically, my health just continued to get worse and worse, for a few years, and with that, the noise sensitivity just kept getting worse and worse, and it just resulted in me being very isolated.
[music in: DEX 1200Hanna Extröm - Roseé du matin]
Bethany: I'd spend most of the day alone, you know, all I wanted was silence. But at the same time, there was kind of this love hate relationship with sound. Because as much as I just wanted silence forever, I was also just desperate to hear things. I felt so isolated from sound.
Bethany: I don't know how to explain this empty kind of feeling when you don't have that variety of new sounds in your life. It's like there was this desert inside of me. I was like thirsty for sound.
Bethany: I live in Canada so it's cold in the winter and I remember January, February was always so hard for me because that was the months when the birds didn't sing in the morning like they did in the spring and summer.
Bethany: It made such a difference because there was so little sound in my life, that waking up and just hearing the chirping of the birds was like an important moment of my day.
[sfx: birds chirping up, then under]
Bethany: And when that wasn't there, I really felt its absence.
Bethany: Another big thing was that I could not listen or hear any music.
Bethany: Not even a little snippet or a few minutes, I couldn't handle it at all. But it really makes a difference. I was longing so much to hear music, even though I knew that I couldn't.
Bethany: I feel like it's something you don't notice until it's gone. Music is everywhere these days. You know, you can just pull out your phone and play anything you like. I don't think a lot of people have the experience of just nothing, no music at all for years.
Bethany: Another part of my brain injury was that it really affected my vision. I was very sensitive to light, very hard for me to look at things. So I really relied on sound instead of sight.
Bethany: And I want to talk about what a big change it was, going from being mostly in my bedroom alone, in silence, to going and being an inpatient at a hospital. I mean, it was a huge shift in so many ways, but one of those was the change in soundscape.
Bethany: There was all kinds of sounds I hadn't heard before going on all the time and it was really overwhelming and overstimulating. But at the same time, it was really exciting. It was like a breath of fresh air that I finally had sound, new sound to listen to, like I found it very invigorating.
Bethany: I remember sitting on a bench in the lobby of the hospital, and just sitting there with my eyes closed and just how much there is to listen to. Like all the different footsteps and the different ways that people walk. You know, the heavy footsteps and soft footsteps and if they're wearing running shoes or flip flops or high heels. There's just so much information and character in sound that I think we forget about when we're always using our eyes.
[music in: Adrian Disch - Missing Earth]
Bethany: I've come a long way since then, and my tolerance for sound has increased a lot. I can now handle chip bags and cutlery.
Bethany: But I think the thing that has stayed with me is just that new perspective on sound and on music. A real deep appreciation, like this sense of almost reverence, or wonder. You know, we're such visual creatures, I think often, we forget that we have this whole other sense that we can explore the world around us with.
Bethany: Even today, I still have the habit of taking the time to take in a new soundscape when I go somewhere I haven't been before. You know, at a school… [school sounds]
Bethany: A store… [store sounds]
Bethany: Or at a park… [park sounds in]
Bethany: It's always different. It's like a unique signature of that place. And I like to just sit there and take it in.
[park sounds out into music in: Kyle McEvoy - Something Special]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at Defacto Sound dot com.
Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, and Andrew Anderson, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Justin Hollis, Joel Boyter, and Jesus Arteaga.
A huge thank you to all of the listeners who sent in their stories. While we weren’t able to play every one of them, we did hear from Andrew, Lee, Matt, Robin, and Bethany.
We really want to do this again, so if you have a story that’s somewhat about sound that you'd like to share, you can always record it however you’d like and email the file to hi at twenty k dot org. You can even record a voice memo on your phone and send that to us. When you record, if there’s a way to bump up the quality in your settings, so that. Then, just hold your phone up to your ear like you’re talking on a call. Beyond that, the only thing we ask is that you just tell it in your own words. No need to write out a script or edit the audio.
I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.
[sfx: recording UI sound]
Other Voices: Sorry, too shy. [chuckles] Thanks for the great podcast though.
