Art by Matthew Fleming.
This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.
We spend a lot of time curating for taste, touch, smell, and vision. But too often, sound gets overlooked. We forget that we can get rid of sounds that annoy us, and surround ourselves with sounds that we love. When we do, it can have huge benefits for our mood and wellbeing. In this episode, Dr. Laurie Santos of The Happiness Lab joins Dallas to create a Handbook for Sonic Happiness. Featuring auditory psychologist David Poeppel, psychology researcher Giulia Poerio, clinical psychologist Ali Mattu, sound scholar Mac Hagood and acoustician Trevor Cox.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Original music by Wesley Slover
Innovations by From Now On
Clearer Views by From Now On
metaclocks by hope mona
Werk That (Instrumental) by The Fancee
Quest for the Skies by Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
Revitalize by Yonder Dale
Tracker by Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
Wings of Sweden Delta 74 by Joseph Beg
Observations by From Now On
Particle Emission by Silver Maple
Under the Marquee by Guy Trevino and Friends
between the trees by coldbrew
Propulsion by Brendon Moeller
You Live or You Die (Instrumental) by Three-Armed Scissor
old coffee by wavcrush
Singularity by Lagua Vesa
Photosynthesis by Lagua Vesa
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View Transcript ▶︎
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.
As humans, we do just about everything we can to make things pleasing to our senses.
When we’re relaxing at home, we might put on some comfy pajamas and cozy up under a warm blanket. We hang art and photos on our walls that we like to look at. We spend money on our favorite restaurants, and learn to cook meals that taste amazing. We light scented candles, and often wear perfume or cologne.
But while we curate for taste, touch, smell, and vision, we often forget to do the same thing for the sounds we hear. Of course, most of us know the music we like, but sound goes so far beyond just music.
We tend to forget that we can get rid of the sounds that annoy us. [sfx: annoying beeps]
And we can surround ourselves with sounds that make us feel good. [sfx: peaceful sounds]
And that is a big mistake, be cause sound has a huge impact on our health and happiness.
[music out]
This is something that's come up a bunch of times on our show, and I've always wanted to collect these pieces together into a kind of handbook for sonic happiness. A practical guide that can tell us how to make our world sound better so that we can feel better.
And I knew the perfect person to help me create that guide.
Laurie: I'm Dr. Laurie Santos.
Laurie is the host of a fantastic podcast called The Happiness Lab.
Laurie: Our podcast is all about these simple strategies that you can use to feel happier.
Laurie: We've done episodes on everything from the benefits of sharing, to avoiding burnout, to overcoming bad habits.
Laurie is also a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale university. And Laurie agrees that we tend to forget about the power of sound to make us happy.
Laurie: I feel like sound is this overlooked modality in terms of how we want to design our spaces, to feel happier. We also forget that we can sometimes intervene on sound when the sounds aren't great in our lives in order to maybe improve our wellbeing.
Laurie: And improve all kinds of other stuff that we forget sound can help us control too.
So let's get started.
[music in: audiobook chapter music]
Announcer: You're listening to the Handbook for Sonic Happiness.
Announcer: Chapter 1: Music.
[music out]
Laurie: So let's talk about the positive sounds and things that we should pay attention to and try to get more of. The first thing my brain goes to when I think about good sounds is music.
So I think a lot about music as almost just like a sonic prescription. For example, when I'm [sfx: cooking sounds] cooking, like I need jazz [clip: jazz playing] or like [clip: bluegrass] bluegrass of all things. I don't know why I gravitate to those, but they like really calm me down.
This calming effect isn't surprising because we hear music from the start of our lives.
When we're in the womb the heartbeat is the first rhythm we hear and feel. [sfx: heartbeat]
[sfx: music playing / baby response sounds]
Laurie: I think there's something built in about this form of emotional regulation. For example, We know that babies, as young as five months of age can tell the difference between a piece of music that an adult would say is like a happy tune [clip: happy music] versus a piece of music that an adult would say as a sad tune. [clip: sad tune]
Laurie: One of the ways it's worth noting that music really affects us is that it's really deeply intertwined with our sympathetic nervous system, which is kind of our fight or flight system. There's alerts [sfx: ping!] that I can play for you that will instantly get your fight or flight system activated as though, I slapped you or showed you some like really scary thing, like a gun or a snake or something like that. [sfx: snake]
Laurie: But then it can also kind of rev down our system. it can make our pulse go slower. [mellow music] It can do all these interesting physiological effects on our body. And some of those are really good for working out.
Laurie: [music in] there's lots of evidence for example, that if you're playing a super high tempo song, you actually experience less physical exertion when you're exercising.
Laurie: So it's kind of like a legal drug, like a performance enhancing drug to kind of make you not feel the effects of your own physical exertion.
I'm curious what music do you listen to to do that prescriptive mood thing with music?
Laurie: For me, it's, it's partly the tempo. It's partly what the music is doing to me physiologically. I think sometimes when I'm cooking, I just want something upbeat to put me in a good mood. [music in]
Laurie: But for me, it's also music that really connects to memories, you know? So I'm going to be listening to bad eighties pop music.
[clip: Rick Astley]
Laurie: Which, you know, puts me in a good mood. Cause it reminds me of friends back in the day or like bad nineties boy bands.
[clip: Back Street Boys]
And it's not just listening to music that can affect our mood. Playing music in a group actually makes us feel more connected.
[music in]
David Poeppel: One very compelling experience is the feeling of groupiness, right? Of social cohesion.
That's David Poeppel, Professor of Auditory Psychology at New York University.
David Poeppel: The first thing is you're a group. And the second thing is you're trying to actually synchronize.
David Poeppel: One of the very interesting new areas is to try to figure out how, not just pairs of people, but entire groups actually become synchronized. I mean, that's why for instance, an orchestra can work, right? Or a choir.
When people are musically in sync with one another, their brain activity starts to sync up as well.
David Poeppel: If I have a group of people chanting and I wire them all up with EEG recording equipment, you can show that actually the extent to which they're really synchronized with each other is reflected in their neurophysiological activity very directly.
David Poeppel: So there is something that is a universal feature as is If you're doing something in a group, it increases your physiological activity, or your synchronization between people.
And the more synchronized you are, the better you feel.
David Poeppel: That in turn actually correlates with the extent to which you like the experience, or find it engaging.
This experience of groupiness doesn't just make people happier. It can also make them kinder to one another.
David Poeppel: It correlates with all kinds of interesting things, like the extent to which you find, you know, each other empathic and so on and so forth. So that's a fun and exciting new research area that we're also pursuing very intensively.
[music out]
[music in]
Announcer: Chapter 2: ASMR
[music out]
What do you know about ASMR?
Laurie: Assume I don't know very much about ASMR. So Dallas, tell me about ASMR.
So ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. And I didn't even realize I had this until I did a show about it. But what it is is when you, listen to very delicate sounds, traditionally, like somebody whispering or just like really like whispering in your ear really nicely and sweetly.
What that can trigger internally is this tingling sensation that starts kind of at the base of your neck and goes up into your head and down shoulders. I am literally having it right now because I can trigger it at any point.
[music in]
So there's all these ASMR artists on YouTube, doing everything from like whispering very quietly, like sweet, happy things, [Gibi ASMR clip]
To someone who might just be like manipulating an object that just crackles or something, to in the case of somebody that I spoke with, um, eating pickles into a microphone, [sfx pickle] uh, and that, and that triggers this kind of like tingley response.
Giulia Poerio: What's interesting about ASMR is that it's a stimulus in one modality, like sound, that is producing a tactile sensation.
That's Giulia Poerio, a psychology researcher studying ASMR at the University of Sheffield.
Giulia Poerio: So you are experiencing almost the feeling of being touched through sound.
ASMR might feel great for some people, but not everyone has it. And for the people who do have it…
Giulia Poerio: People generally fall into one of two categories. They either think that ASMR is something that everybody has. Or they think that they're the only person that's had it. And they don't realize that it's something that other people experience.
Giulia Poerio: So a lot of people, when they find out about the ASMR community and they find out that they can watch these videos on YouTube, they're like, "Wow, this is amazing because this is something that I've experienced all my life. And I didn't know that I could go and intentionally experience it.
[music out]
Laurie: One of the things I think is really interesting about sound is I feel like we don't really understand its effects on our psychology very well.
Laurie: I mean, we could point to specific kinds of sounds that affect us strongly. Like if I was to blast a like siren right now in the middle of this podcast [sfx: siren] episode, you have the sense that it could probably accurately forecast that it would make you feel a little bit stressed.
Laurie: But when you're talking about like eating a [sfx: pickle eating] pickle, you know, very quietly, or whispering, I'm not sure that's a case where I have like strong, affective predictions about how this is going to feel. I might get the direction right, but I definitely wouldn't have predicted before we started having this conversation, like "tingly feeling inside my head."
Laurie: And I think this is just generally true of sound where we really don't have strong intuitions about how it's going to affect us. So that there are these kinds of like funny cases, like ASMR, where you get people whispering on YouTube and it profoundly affects the listeners who are hearing it.
So is it safe to assume that you have never experienced, "This is ASMR?"
Laurie: Yeah, no, I definitely get chills.
Laurie: But for me, those kinds of chills tend to come from different kinds of things. Not to say I wouldn't get them from ASMR, but you know, something like in an awe inspiring piece [classical clip] or, you know, a sound or a piece of music that really reminds me of an important memory, right?
Laurie: But yeah, there's this kind of interesting question about why sound can affect us so profoundly, you know, something like whispering.
Laurie: You could imagine it being connected with certain kinds of acoustic signals that are very familiar with caregiving or like infant directed [sfx: baby/parent sounds] speech. You could imagine these kinds of cases, you know? And so maybe we have some leftover physiology that goes with that stuff, but I think it's more just interesting that we can start playing with sound in a different way now and noticing interesting things about it that we might not have documented well before.
But the question is, can ASMR actually make us happier?
Laurie: Yeah, I mean, there's not really any great research on this, but my guess is that listening to these acoustic signals that are kind of interesting and sort of quiet can make us a little bit more present. And there's lots of evidence that being mindful and being present can make us feel better and increase our positive mood.
Laurie: I also think that these kinds of sounds can actually make us a little bit calmer. I mean, a lot of these sounds are sort of quiet. They make us listen more carefully. I think they might actually decrease our fight or flight system. But again, all of this is just speculation. I think it'd be great to actually explore whether or not ASMR sounds can make us happier, I think we just don't know yet.
[music in]
Announcer: Chapter 3: Misophonia.
Sam: Please note: The following chapter contains noises that might be triggers for people who are sensitive to certain sounds. If you don't want to hear them, please skip forward by about four minutes.
[music out]
When we've gotten into the topic of misophonia, which literally translates to the hatred of sound, most people have no idea that they have it and it, and sometimes it's like tied in with like a sensory sensitivity in general. But essentially it can give people like extreme panic reactions certain sounds that to some people is perfectly fine.
So think of if someone kind of uses their teeth to scrape food off of a fork [sfx] or the most classic is nails on a chalkboard. [sfx] But that idea goes much further into normal sounds that people have these really strong reactions to.
Laurie: Even you talking about like finger is going on a chalkboard, I'm feeling like that the hairs on my arm kind of tingling up.
[music in]
Meredith: It feels like a bear is chasing you.
That's Meredith Rosol.
Meredith: You freeze, whatever you're doing, you're not able to focus on anymore. Your heart races, [sfx: pounding heart] you feel tense, you feel irritable and not just mildly irritable, like you're really, you're really irritable.
Her misophonia started when she was six and it caused problems at home.
Meredith: The hardest part was listening to my parents chew. [sfx: chewing] So at the dinner table I would cry and my mom would not know what was wrong. And I remember she would teach my sister and I table manners, you have to keep your hands in your lap, but I would just want to cover my ear with it. And that would frustrate her. So at dinnertime was the hardest.
Laurie: For most of us chewing just sounds...normal. We might not even notice it. But Dr. Ali Mattu, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University says that misophonics have a totally different experience.
Ali: You're experiencing it as, as if someone is chewing right in your face, [sfx: loud chewing] to the point where maybe their spit or the bits of their food are just flying all over you.
Ali: So maybe it's tapping into this basic aversion that we all have. But again, the volume of these sounds, the experience of these sounds are, is turned up way high for people who have misophonia.
Psychiatrists have only recently become aware of misophonia. As a result, it doesn't have a clear psychiatric definition.
[music in]
Ali: So the unfortunate thing here is there is very limited research on misophonia. It's a part of a set of sensory experiences we're beginning to better understand, like ASMR, like synesthesia. We're beginning to understand that our senses are more complicated and there's more diversity how we experience our senses than we knew before.
And we're still not exactly sure what causes misophonia.
Ali: We're beginning to think that how people experience sounds and also how they are connected to memories and the way people regulate their emotions is very different for people who have misophonia versus those who don't. So we don't really know why that is. I have theories, but I don't have any data to back it up.
However you define it, the effects for people like Meredith are very real. And the sounds that trigger it can come from anywhere.
Meredith: My triggers are eating [sfx: eating] gum popping, [sfx: gum pop] slurping, [sfx: slurp] feet shuffling [sfx: shuffle] , bass coming from cars and apartments, [sfx: bass-y noises] keyboard typing. [sfx: typing] Newer ones are whistling [sfx: whistling] and humming. [sfx: humming]
At the moment, there is no cure for misophonia, but there are techniques that can help people to manage it.
Ali: It's about learning how to distract yourself from the anger in a healthy way.
Ali: So Finding activities that distract you from sounds, making a comparison to a different time when you were coping better with a situation or comparing yourself to someone else who might be struggling more. Temporarily pushing yourself away from the situation that is difficult for you and creating sensations that shock your body into focusing on something else. [music out]
Yeah, I think that like kind of opening people's minds to become a little bit more conscious, active listening, and associating mood with certain sounds and sonic environments can really help people, kind of understand this mystery of sometimes when, when somebody is in a bad mood or something.
Laurie: Yeah, this was happening to me today, which is very salient. Cause I knew I was going to have this conversation with you. I was in my office at Yale and I was just feeling kind of frustrated. Like I was trying to check my email and I was kind of in a pissy mood. And then I had this realization that there was a horrid beeping sound happening somewhere down the hallway that had probably been going on for like the last 45 minutes. And I was like, "Wait a minute. My mood is intricately tied to this annoying sound that's been repetitively going off." And it's probably not just my mood. Like the reason I think the email was feeling frustrated is that we know that sound can automatically affect our attention right? You know, we have this limited store of attention, the spotlight, when I'm trying to do some work on a computer and get my emails done. If part of my brain is naturally going to vigilantly to like, "What is this random sound that's going on in the background? I might not notice all that consciously, but my processing speed is going down.
Laurie: It's feeling a little bit more frustrating to do this kind of thing." You know, I think there are these clear cases where our sound environment is negatively affecting us And we might not even consciously realize it.
[music in]
Announcer: Chapter 4: Noise
[music out]
Laurie: There's one funny study I tell my students about in my class that looked at how well you savor a positive experience when you get a phone ding.
[music in]
Laurie: So they had people experiencing a massage and there's just a phone in the background that just dings [sfx: ding!] once during the massage, your, that your enjoyment of the massage goes down like a whole point on a 10 point scale, just cause you heard that ding.
Laurie: There was another study that looked at people playing Mario Kart.
[Mario Kart sounds]
Laurie: so you're playing Mario Kart. Right? And you just hear your phone buzz in the background, [sfx: phone vibration] all of a sudden your enjoyment of that Mario kart game goes down just because you heard a little text message.
[music in]
Laurie: I think we forget the strong consequences that noise can have for us. Maybe not the whine of a refrigerator, but outside construction [sfx: drilling] noise, outside traffic noise, [sfx: traffic] the evidence that this stuff is affecting us deeply is stronger than we really think.
Laurie: You know, there's lots of evidence, for example, that hospital patients that are in louder rooms with like louder, noise mechanisms and like beeping things, [loud hospital room] wind up healing from surgeries more slowly than patients that happen to be in more quiet rooms.
Laurie: And the effects on kids, is profound. Some super famous studies in the 1970s showed that kids who live on like the lower floors of an apartment building in New York, that happened to be like near a big bridge.
[sfx: new york traffic]
Laurie: They wind up showing reading scores that are worse than the kids on the higher floors. And at first folks were like, "Oh my gosh ambient sound is kind of messing up learning" and folks fought this cause that's not people's intuition of "Well, how can sound effect learning?
Laurie: Maybe the people on the lower floors are you know, of a lower income, you know, maybe there's something else correlated with it." And then finally this guy, Gary Evans at Cornell was able to do a really cool study on this.
[music in]
Laurie: He was studying noise pollution near the Munich airport [sfx: planes] and just as it would happen, they decided to move the Munich airport, I guess it was under renovation. And so they moved it somewhere else.
Laurie: So he was able to track kids learning who were near the super loud airport. And then the airport moved versus kids who were at the new spot for the airport and compare what happened. And what he finds is if you look at, say like third and fourth graders, like reading scores, go up when the airport moves for the kids who live near the loud airport and the kids who are now near like the new place where the airport goes, their reading scores go down over time.
Laurie: And so all this goes to say that, I think if you asked those folks, "Hey, is it noisy?" They'd probably consciously realize like, "Oh, it's noisy," but I think, would you think like, you know, "Is it messing up your cognitive processing?"
Laurie: I think people don't really realize this stuff. And it can have huge effects on things that matter a lot for your happiness. It doesn't just make you happier. Cause that annoying sound is gone. There's evidence that if you have less annoying sounds around, you're more likely to be nicer to people. You just become a worse person when there's bad sounds around. [music out]
But there are simple things we can do to make our lives quieter.
[music in:]
Announcer: It's time to play the Quiet Game, the game where you could win a quieter life. But first, you have to complete all four stages. Let's play.
Announcer: Stage one.
Spray all of the door hinges in your home with WD 40. [sfx: squeaking / spraying] I do this every few months.
Announcer: Stage two.
Turn off every appliance in your home.
[sfx: switch off]
Then turn them back on again, one by one.. [sfx: click, click] If you find one, that's making a lot of noise, there might be something that needs fixing, or maybe eventually you can replace it.
Announcer: Stage three.
Consider adding more soft materials to your home, like curtains, throw blankets, pillows, rugs, and fabric based furniture. These will soak up sound so your home feels quieter and more intimate.
Announcer: Stage four.
**Put your phone in silent mode. Your phone should work for you, not the other way around.
Announcer: Congratulations. You have won yourself a quieter life. Thanks for playing the Quiet Game. We'll hear you next time!
[music out]
Announcer: [music in] Chapter five: Sleep
[music out]
Laurie: So we've talked about how noisy sounds can negatively affect our emotional state, our learning state, but there's another thing that noise in particular can negatively affect and that's our sleep.
[music in]
Laurie: If I could change one thing about my current college students' mental health, I would make them sleep more because instantly that would improve their levels of depression, their levels of anxiety, their wakefulness in class. We forget that sleep is so essential for our mental health and sound can really affect sleep.
Do you have any like sonic thing, any rituals that you have to do around sleep?
Laurie: So I definitely wake up a lot in the middle of the night. These days I listen to a lot of sleep meditations.
Here’s a part of a sleep meditation from a YouTuber named Jason Stephenson.
[clip]
Laurie: And for me, these are really powerful for just like helping me fall asleep.
[music out]
I can't sleep without some form of noise.
[sfx: white noise machine]
Like white noise.
Mack: The reason that this white noise is useful in that circumstance is that white noise is basically sound that's covering all of the possible sounds that your ears could hear.
That's Mac Haygood.
Mack: I'm a sound scholar at Miami University of Ohio.
The same way that white light is a combination of every color, white noise is combination of all of the frequencies that we can hear.
Mack: And the reason that's useful is you could have any sound in any particular frequency.
Like the sound of a dog barking, which is in the 1000 to 2000 Hertz range.
Mack: And part of that frequency range of the white noise is going to be covering that up. And so this is known as masking where one sound, if it's in a similar frequency range to another sound, it will cover that sound up.
While you used to need a dedicated device for white noise, these days, you can just download an app. These apps also include nature sounds like birdcalls, wind, and every kind of rain you could imagine.
Mack: You might think well rain is rain, but actually people want the exact kind of rain that they have a really positive, emotional, psychological association with. So, people want rain on a tent, rain on a tarp, rain on a tin roof, on a slate roof. They want, a big storm or they want a light drizzle.
Mack: I had one app developers tell me if I have to make another kind of rain, I'm gonna lose my mind.
So why do many of us need to cover up the random sounds around us, in order to get a good night's sleep? It comes down to evolution.
Mack: Our auditory systems have evolved over time to aid us and to protect us and to be alert and ready for things. And it was probably pretty useful when we were sleeping outdoors on the Savannah to be a light sleeper, right, and be tuned into sounds that are happening out there. [sfx: animals howling in the night]
Mack: So just because our physical circumstances has changed and we sleep in these quite safe houses, that doesn't mean that our auditory systems have completely changed in that way.
Laurie: The way our attention works is we can't say, "Hey attention, I'm about to fall asleep, please stop paying attention to, distracting sounds that pop out." You hear the creak, [sfx: creak] you hear the dog bark outside [sfx: barking] your brain notices that, but also it comes with a certain amount of wakefulness, right?
Laurie: Like these moments where our attention gets queued, make us feel more vigilant. So we're like "oh!" and the "oh!" Comes with a whole rush of you know, our neural system throwing in all these arousal mechanisms.
Laurie: like "We're noticing now," you throw the white noise on.
Laurie: If you can block those out, your brain just has less moments to notice that stuff, which allows you to fall asleep faster.
[music in]
Announcer: Chapter Six: Hearing Protection
[music out]
So this is something that I'm really passionate about mainly because how loud this world is compared to our primitive ears. and as we get older, it is natural for people to lose the highest, frequencies in their, their hearing.
For example, my show is called 20,000 Hertz.
20,000 Hertz is basically the highest frequency that we humans can hear when we were kids. And so if it was more accurate to me, it'd probably be called like 16,500 Hertz at my age range.
Laurie: It's bad that you have to change the name of your podcast. As you get older, we're down to 12,000 hertz.
But it is totally, totally normal for these higher frequencies diminish with age. And it doesn't mean that you can't enjoy hearing. It's just part of life.
[music in]
But hearing damage is different and it's preventable.
[sfx: beach sounds]
The best way to think of hearing protection is to think of it like sunscreen. You can lie on the beach in the sun for a few minutes without it, but if you're going to be there for a long time, you're going to need it.
And with sound a few minutes in a loud space is okay. But any longer, and you're going to risk permanently damaging your hearing. Once it's damaged, it's not like skin that got burnt in the sun. The hair cells in your ear that capture sound never grow back. Once they're gone, they're gone.
[music out]
[sfx: out]
For hearing protection, I think everyone should have earplugs in their pocket.
Anything from the simplest little foam earplugs, to something a little bit fancier. I always keep them with me and it's not just because I'm a sound designer. It's just that I find myself in the gym. watch will go [sfx: notification] off saying:
"This is loud. In 20 minutes, you're going to start doing hearing damage," or I'll find myself in a loud restaurant or I'll find myself at a loud concert. uh, if I'm giving my kids a bath, [sfx] they're just having a ball, splashing and screaming and stuff. But I just start to get really tense because it's so loud in this little bathroom, And my stress level of just having the control of being able to plug that [plugs in] feels nice to me.
**But yeah, I was wondering if you have any thoughts on kind of hearing protection.
Laurie: I think it's super important. I mean, We often discount our future selves and forget what our future selves preferences might be. Everybody's hearing is, going to get a little worse over time, but it can get a lot worse if you're not being really careful.
Laurie: I think that we forget the cost, that hearing damage can cause especially socially, right. losing the frequencies that are most important for hearing a conversation over a slightly louder restaurant, that deeply affects your quality of life. It deeply affects your social connection. It deeply affects your wellbeing over time. And so taking steps ahead of time to protect that is really important for your future self.
Laurie: But it's also important for you now because we see that noise makes us grumpier. It makes us worse people. It makes us feel a little bit more frustrated and it makes it harder for us to regulate our attention and our presence. So I love this idea of just the earplugs in your pocket, that you can just pop in.
And my argument is, I know it's hard to really convince people about preventative measures in hearing just like it is with sunscreen, but I wouldn't even make that as my primary argument. I would recommend anyone just have it, just have it around, always accessible because you know, when you need it and just, there's a very stark contrast when I suddenly realize, "Oh, I really need earplugs."
Like, to me, it's almost just like a little blankie or like a little bear. Like it's my protective mechanism now because I'm a sound designer. Not because I, you know, wanna protect, hearing so much. It's very much in the moment an anxiety pacifier for me.
Laurie: And, you know, functionally, what you're doing is like some sound that's really tripping up your fight or flight system that's causing you and your body to feel like there's a tiger attacking me right now. You can get rid of that tiger and in the moment that can have a huge effect on how you're feeling.
Announcer: [music in] Chapter Seven: Sonic Tourism
[music out]
Laurie: I know one of the things you've talked about on this show is this idea of Sonic tourism. So what's Sonic tourism? It sounds kind of amazing.
So it's, you know, when we go sightseeing, it's very similar to that. It's like, you know, we, we sight see for a reason because there's that difference between a picture or a video and what we feel there in the place because all of your senses are firing up.
But the idea of becoming more conscious with your hearing in these moments, for me, has brought a lot of joy., and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go seek out like some special, you know, Sonic touristy place. There are lots of them. There's a lot of like buildings with whispering galleries. And usually you're gonna find those when there's a lot of arches and kind of a dome. So like in Grand Central Station, in New York City.
So what's happening is one person can stand in the corner of one side of the room. Somebody else can, can whisper into one on the other corner pretty far away, but the way that the dome is, is that it'll carry that signal very clearly kind of up and over to where you hear it really clearly on the other side.
Laurie: This is one of my favorite things to do when people visit New York and come in on the train at new Haven, Connecticut, where I live, it plops you right into that spot in Grand Central Station. And every time I'm there with a new person, I'm like, "Let's go to this room and stand here. Just stand there, just stand there."
Laurie: Hey, it's Laurie. Can you hear me?
Laurie: And people are like, "What? Whoa!" I think It's people's like favorite spot in New York.
Yeah
Trevor: [music in] I think partly it's because we're very visually dominated as a species, especially since writing happened.
That's acoustician Trevor Cox.
Trevor: We convey lots of information for our eyes. We can take information very quick, whereas sound takes a bit more time to experience.
Trevor wrote an entire book on sonic tourism, called "Sonic Wonderland" with tons of destinations all over the world. One of his favorites are the singing sand dunes of Kelso Dune Field in the Mojave Desert.
Trevor: It it's an exhausting experience going to hear these sand dunes, it's incredibly hot in the middle of summer, so it's a struggle to walk up them to start with.
But once you get to the top, you hear a totally unique sound.
Trevor: You know, when you're in the right place almost immediately, cause you walk on the dune, And it sounds a bit like a bad played tuba sort of, uh, uh, uh, uh.
[sfx: singing sand dunes]
Trevor: In the literature, they talk about this being a burping sound, but I think it sounds more like a badly played wind instrument.
[music out]
So that's one aspect, and then there's a completely opposite aspect of something like an anechoic chamber. Have you been in one of those?
Laurie: I have, it's really creepy. I find it incredibly disturbing that in a kind of trippy, you know, "Oh, what a cool experience" way.
So to explain what a anechoic chamber is, know, if we were doing an echoic chamber, that would be like a symphony hall, [sfx: strings being played in a symphony hall] lots of echoes, lots of sound bouncing around, anechoic is the lack of that echo. So when you speak or when you clap, there is no residual sound, it just goes " pop", it's done.
And what's funny is it's terrifying for you, interestingly for me, I've been in one for a long period of time with the lights out So when I got in it, I was just like, "Oh, this just feels soothing. It just feels quiet."
The cool thing about it though is, when the doors shut and I'm standing there, there's no echo, what happens is, is there's first. This just like realization of just like, "whoa, okay, this is disorienting." I almost want to fall over because I just feel like something's gone.
[sfx: chamber door closing]
All right, I think I've been in here for about seven or eight minutes. One thing that people talk about when they go into anechoic chambers is pressure. So I do feel pressure, which is odd because there's nothing that would actually be putting pressure on my eardrums, but having no sound at all feels, feels a little bit like being under the water far enough, where it starts to hurt your ears.
That's kind of what it feels like. And I hear a high pitched, I don't know if I'd say I'd hear it, but I perceive a high pitch noise. It's gotta be something that's just in my brain or ear. It's like, my brain is interpreting it as audible, but I don't know if it is.
It's not a single tone, but it's like high pitched noise. So another phenomenon is that you start to hear your internal organs more, the longer you're in here. So I'm starting to hear my heartbeat. I can't even like breathe through my nose because it's so loud.
What was your experience?
Laurie: Mine is just that it sounds kind of weird. I also have some ear balance things. So my ears don't like it when there's no reverb happening. It feels like I'm about to be on a plane and my ears might pop or something.
I wish that there was an anechoic chamber in every state or in every city, just as a tourist attraction, because it is very disorienting.
But you don't need a whispering gallery or an anechoic chamber to be a sonic tourist. All you really need to do is step outside.
[music in]
Laurie: So I think there's all these sounds in nature that just feel evolutionarily nice. You know, we're kind of built to hear them, but Nature sounds also can bring about new kinds of emotions. And one of my favorite emotions that you can get from natural sounds, is this emotion of awe, this sense that the world is bigger than us. We see something really beautiful and it can let us rethink our relationship with things.**
Laurie: I think there are these interesting natural sounds that tend to do that for us, that bring up this emotion of awe in a way that we might not expect. I'm thinking of the sound of wind in like a big storm, [sfx: storm] you know, I've experienced this, being a new Englander and hearing hurricanes, or just the sound of surf [sfx: ocean] or like different kinds of cool animals.
Laurie: You just feel this interesting connection to something bigger than you, whether that's the natural world or something spiritual. And there's so much evidence that experiencing awe can improve our wellbeing over time can make you feel more socially connected with other people in the world around you.
Laurie: And I think this is something we miss out on the natural world is that, that our, our auditory environment can actually give us this sense of awe.
I think we can all relate with being on the internet. On social media, or in work, or in email, or whatnot, to me, that's sonically like an anechoic chamber. It's like very me focused. I'm getting sucked into my brain and I'm starting to hear all of my thoughts I'm hearing all of my fears and I'm doing all of my second guessing.
But when I go out and I listen to nature or have a conversation with a real person, or go to a concert and hear things that are outside of myself, it's awe inspiring. And it reminds me that like, I'm, a piece of like a greater humanity.
So I don't think it has to even be like grand. You don't have to go to the ocean, but, being mindful of , the things around you going for a walk in the neighborhood. For me, it feels like nature. So it's, it's within reach.
[music out]
[music in: painted by snow]
This episode was a co-production between Twenty Thousand Hertz and The Happiness Lab.
Over on the Happiness Lab, Laurie talks to psychologists, therapists, social workers, and other experts about the latest research on happiness. Because happiness doesn’t come from earning more money, a better job, or an Instagram-worthy vacation. To learn what does truly make us happy, subscribe to The Happiness Lab right here in your podcast player.
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. To hear more, visit Defacto Sound dot com.
This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson, Casey Emmerling, and [Happiness Lab producers], with help from Sam Rinebold. It was sound designed and mixed by Justin Hollis. With original music from Wesley Slover.
We recently updated our website to make it much easier to find episodes by subject, by emotion and more. So if you’d like to dive a little deeper into the topics you heard about today, visit twenty K dot org slash archive, and filter by the subject Wellness.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
