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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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]
