Sound Escapes: Nature’s untouched soundtrack

This episode originally aired on Birdnote.

Over his long career, Gordon Hempton has mastered the art of truly listening. He’s known as the Sound Tracker. Some people call him an acoustic ecologist. His recordings and books have made him an international expert on the beauty and importance of undisturbed, natural soundscapes — and the ways human beings have changed them.

Now, Gordon Hempton is losing his hearing. But with that loss has come an intense urgency to share his life’s work — and his passion — with as many people as are willing to listen.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Balance by Adam Bokesch
Learning to Lose You by Lovelast

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

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Check out the whole Sound Escapes series at BirdNote.org/SoundEscapes.

Check out Gordon’s work and buy recordings on his website soundtracker.com.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Natural Sound]

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

[music in]

This will come as no surprise, but I’m really into sound. And I don’t just host a podcast about it, I’m also a sound designer. I started a company called Defacto Sound, and our team has been collecting and crafting a huge library of sounds for over 10 years.

...and, when it comes to capturing the sounds of the natural world, there’s an undisputed king. Gordon Hempton has made many of the best nature recordings of all time. Every reputable sound designer in the world knows his name, and you’ve heard his recordings in countless movies, television shows, and games.

But Gordon isn’t just an amazing sound recordist. He’s also an exceptional listener, and we can all learn a lot from the way he hears the world.

Today we’re featuring a story by the podcast Sound Escapes. Host Ashley Ahearn spoke with Gordon. Here’s Ashley.

[music out]

[SFX: Hawaiian Rainforest]

What if you had dedicated your life to recording the sounds of the natural world...

[SFX: Hawaiian Rainforest]

...from the rainforest of Hawai’i

[SFX: Cross fade to coyotes and iconic prairie sounds]

...to the vast dry prairies of North America.

[SFX: Sound levels rise and rise]

But then one day you woke up…

...to silence.

[SFX: Sound cuts out, abruptly]

Gordon Hempton: I have pretty substantial hearing loss, I have good days and bad days. And it was about two years ago that I couldn’t understand the spoken word on a telephone or anything like that.

[Sound Escapes music in]

Over his long career, Gordon Hempton has mastered the art of truly listening. He’s known as the Sound Tracker. Some people call him an acoustic ecologist. His recordings and books have made him an international expert on the beauty and importance of undisturbed, natural soundscapes - and the ways human beings have changed them.

Now, Gordon Hempton is losing his hearing. But with that loss has come an intense urgency to share his life’s work - and his passion - with as many people as are willing to listen.

He’ll give us a crash course in the art of truly listening. Something that he says it’s a dying art that is constantly under threat in our noisy, modern lives.

Gordon Hempton: So noise pollution today has become the curtain that separates us from what is truly meaningful. The connection that we have for gaining information, for our sense of place, from nature.

First, I want you to meet Gordon and hear the story of how he became the Sound Tracker…

[music out]

Gordon Hempton believes that we are born good listeners, but over time we lose that skill. As we age, our busy lives and cultural expectations pull us away from this wonderful, innate skill that we all possess.

Anyone who has spent time outside with a kid - maybe on a warm summer night, or walking through a forest, listening for birds, knows that children are the best listeners.

Gordon Hempton: I find that they make great naturalists. There’s nothing we need to teach a preschooler about listening.

Gordon remembers the first time he was captivated by sound. But it wasn’t what you might expect. There were no birds or wind in the trees, no coyotes in the distance - the kind of soundscapes he’s spent his life recording. It was a much more simple, elemental experience.

Gordon Hempton: I think the first time I listened to a natural soundscape, was when I was a child. And I would dive into the pool [SFX] and I would let the air out so I would sink to the bottom of the pool [SFX]. And I really enjoyed the pressure around my whole body, it was the swaddling effect. And when I was down there I felt a calmness and isolation. You know, had I been a fish, it would not have been a silent experience - but with terrestrial ears not much sound goes in. So it was that silence of the natural underwater world for me, where I truly listened and didn’t criticize it, didn’t evaluate it. I simply took it all in.

That last bit - not criticizing or evaluating - just taking it in - is the foundation of being a good listener. And Gordon says that’s what gets schooled out of us.

Gordon Hempton: You’ll receive instruction as soon as you go to school on how to listen. The teacher stands up in front of the class and says, “Class! Listen!” Right? And everybody turns in the direction of the teacher. And they find out that “oh, she’s important.” And so listening is paying attention to who’s important. And you know, there you begin to apply filters.

Over the course of our lives we just keep applying more and more filters. We filter out interests, hobbies, the types of music that we “like” or “don’t like”. We winnow our experiences down to make the world more manageable and less overwhelming. Well, the same is true for the way we listen to the world around us. We don’t hear the birds anymore. Or the wind in the trees.

And life is less rich for it, Gordon says. But here’s the good news: we can re-learn how to listen. Gordon had to do that, too.

But that didn’t happen until many years after his experience as a kid listening under water in the swimming pool.

He was in his 20s, driving non-stop from Seattle to Wisconsin to start grad school in plant pathology. He’s young, he’s full of himself, he thinks he’s got it all figured out. And on this long drive he pulls over somewhere in the middle of Iowa, completely exhausted.

Gordon Hempton: I just laid down in a corn field to get some rest during a long drive, and a thunderstorm [SFX] rolled over me, and I simply took it all in. And I had such a vivid description of the valley as the result of the echoes of the thunder and the textures of the rain and the insects. It was so overwhelmingly informative about where I was, but the question that remained was “Who was I?”

[SFX: Thunderstorm rolls in, builds, rolling peals then trail off…]

Gordon Hempton: And it was at that moment that I truly listened. That I understood that I didn’t know who I was. That I had been living someone else’s life, as if there was some invisible set of instructions. And that the first step that I would take in trying to discover who I was, was to become a listener.

[SFX: Pensive, sound break to let that last thought sink in - the sound of the thunderstorm... building behind his cut, then rolling peals of it trailing off here - segue into rain]

Gordon Hempton is what’s called an acoustic ecologist. He spends hours listening to nature — all the intricate, subtle layers of sound that make up a landscape — and really, an ecosystem. He’s particularly fond of the dawn chorus, that special moment as the sun rises and the birds greet it with song [SFX].

Each day, as the earth rotates on its axis, the sun’s light spreads around the globe, and the dawn chorus happens again and again and again, across the earth’s surface.

It’s kind of beautiful when you stop to think about it - that somewhere, at every moment, birds are awakening and singing to the sunrise. Gordon calls it “the global sunrise.” And he’s described the Earth in his writing as “a solar powered jukebox.” And he wants more of us to experience the wonder of actually hearing it.

[SFX: Rainforest ambience]

Gordon Hempton: I was recently in a very remote part of the Amazon rainforest. And I just was taking it all in. Just, like, listening to the place. And trying to relax, because, you know, I knew there were jaguars and like countless viperous snakes, but, relaxing, nevertheless, because the ears do contain some of the smallest muscles and bones so the slightest tension will interfere. And I begin to hear the insect patterns, and how they are rhythmic and each rhythm is a different insect, especially as the light weakens and we make the transition from day into evening and night. Oh my God. And I realized this is the sound of the spinning Earth. That this is actually like a huge clock, and I’m listening not just to the seconds but to the milliseconds, and it’s a beautiful clock, it’s just so elaborate and so precise that it is beyond human invention.

To make one of his recordings, Gordon chooses his spot carefully. He looks for parabolas in nature - places where sound collects and from where you can hear in many different directions - sort of like scenic viewpoints… but for listening. And often, the locations he picks are popular with wild creatures, as well. There have been times where Gordon will pick a spot and sit down, and then he’ll notice that the grass is flattened or even warm because a deer has bedded down there.

He uses special microphones, arranged to simulate the human head and the way sound comes from all directions. And once he’s got his gear set up, Gordon will sit for hours, perfectly still, just letting the sound wash over him. It’s a sort of listening meditation, that sometimes reveals surprising things.

Gordon Hempton: It takes me a certain amount of time just to get deeply immersed myself. Because it’s not the early sound, it’s not the obvious sound, it’s those faint, subtle layers which really provide the depth of the experience.

I can’t move my head or the microphone will just pick it up. My eyes, you know are quiet, though. You know. They’re just - they can move, they can look wherever they want. And then I look around and it’s amazing how often that I see evidence of ancient people. I was in the cliff dwellings area of Utah. I picked a site that was indicated by wildlife to be a choice listening spot. GH: So there I am, and sure enough my eyes then rest on the charcoal and the smudges on the walls that have been left there for literally thousands of years.

Ancient peoples - like those who left the charcoal etchings on the cliffs - depended on their ears to survive far more than we do today. The human ear evolved to hear within a certain range - between 20 to 20,000 vibrations per second. We don’t all hear those frequencies the same, especially as we age and our hearing degrades, but there’s a sweet spot right around 2 to 5 kilohertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human auditory canal. It’s the frequency our ancestors adapted to hear best.

Gordon Hempton: Now, they aren’t around anymore. We can’t ask them or run experiments or even listen to their world. But what we can do, is take all kinds of sounds, put them in the studio mix, put insects [SFX], frogs [SFX], put howler monkeys [SFX] in there just because they so much fun to listen to. I’ve even put modern sounds, like people talking [SFX] and highway noise [SFX]. So I mix all these sounds together and then I apply a steep filter so only those sounds that are around 2.5 kilohertz make it through [SFX].

There’s only one sound that makes it through the filter…

Gordon Hempton: Birdsong [SFX]. Birdsong makes it through. And isn’t it surprising, and perhaps not surprising that bird song is the number-one indicator of habitats prosperous for humans? That if the birds are singing, there’s food, water, shelter, and there’s also a favorable season to get the young off the nest. And I believe that the ability of our distant ancestors as nomadic tribespeople, to be able to hear faint birdsong, guided them as a sonic beacon towards prosperity. And we are here today. Isn’t that great? That birdsong, more than any other sonic element of nature, appears in our classical music? Appears through the ages? That birdsong is music to our ears.

So what happens when you lose the ability to hear that music?

We’ll learn about Gordon’s struggle with hearing loss, and find out what we can all do to become better listeners, after the break.

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

Gordon Hempton is one of the most accomplished nature-recordists of all time. After a long career as a sound recordist, Gordon has so much to teach us about listening to our world. Back to Ashley.

[music out]

[SFX: city sounds]

Birdsong may be music to our ears, but we live in a world where it is harder and harder to hear it - or any natural, undisturbed soundscape, for that matter. We humans are spending more of our time in crowded, noisy cities…

Gordon Hempton: Urban soundscapes are the harsh reality. I don’t think that I’ve ever experienced an urban soundscape where all the sound elements relate to each other in any way. It’s simply an exploding place, and you’re in the way of the shockwaves.

And that may not be good for our health. Research has shown that transportation noise can contribute to higher blood pressure and cardiovascular problems. Living in noisy environments can elevate stress hormone levels in our blood… even shorten our lives.

And those clanging urban environments lack harmony, Gordon says. The sounds in a city have not evolved together the way sounds animals make in nature co-evolve over millennia.

Gordon Hempton: If the Pacific Wren is singing [SFX], it will be singing in its own bandwidth and niche in such a way that it is recognizable to other Pacific Wrens. And the thrushes [SFX], for example, will be singing something entirely different.

Gordon says that when we listen to nature, uninterrupted, we start to hear a bioacoustic system at work - a network where birds and insects and predators and prey are all talking to one another. Like a kind of sonic social network.

If you want to be a good listener, Gordon says the first step is to acknowledge that you’ve probably been doing it wrong.

The second step is to put down your phone, close that social media app, and take control of your own attention span.

Gordon Hempton: In our modern world we do have a choice to pay attention to this, pay attention to that, and there is such a thing as called the “attention economy.” It’s kind of the new currency. Because when they get your attention then they can sell you this, or sell you that, and that’s the way the whole thing works in our world. But that is all intentional information. That’s all information that’s often loud and called “important.” And all these things remove us from the present moment. And once you become aware of the actual place you are, fully, it’s transformative. There’s no other way of expressing it. Because you can never go back.

Gordon talks about noise as a form of pollution. It clouds out our thoughts and it can even separate us from our feelings.

So, the next step to becoming a good listener?

Gordon Hempton: Notice how you feel. There’s already a conversation happening between your senses and where you are. So no matter where you are, notice how you feel. There is this connection going on. Stand on a downtown street corner for just a few minutes and then notice how you feel. And then make the journey sometime to a true wilderness area - and notice how you feel.

When Gordon’s struggling with tough life questions, he says he tucks them away until he can get to his favorite wild place, way out on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State…

Gordon Hempton: And then I pull them out and I ask the quiet - in thought only - I read down the list, I ask the quiet, and the quiet immediately responds to me. Of course, not in words, but in feeling. In feeling. Because it’s - it’s really not the information that’s getting in the way, but it’s the distractions of modern life that are getting in the way. When you’re a true listener there are no distractions. It’s all information.

Gordon talks about his transformation into a “true listener” as a sort of pilgrimage. He says he realizes now that throughout his life, he’s been on a quest to find a true connection to home, to the earth... through his ears.

But then, one day at the age of 50, his ears failed him...

Gordon Hempton: The first time I lost my hearing I was laying in bed and I had my bedroom window open, because I always - I love sleeping where I can listen to the outside and know where I am. And I woke up one night and I was hearing “va vum va vum va vum va vum.”

Gordon thought it was a large tanker ship motoring by his home on the Washington coast, but the sound was actually his own heart beating. Within a matter of days, his hearing was gone.

He figured it was the flu - and that it would pass and his hearing would come back. But as the months went by and doctor after doctor couldn’t diagnose the problem, Gordon started to lose hope.

Gordon Hempton: It was very discouraging. It took me, um - really, it’s hard. [long pause and crying] It’s hard for me... to relive that. I was put out of work. Unprepared to be out of work. I was cut off from… everything and everyone I loved. Including the voices of my children.

And on top of that my own brain created a storm of noise. The sound was a lot like an AM radio being played through a long hose or a tube. It strangely sounded musical, but you couldn’t really make out a rhythm or any words. And the tune never seemed to change. And that was my life, 24/7.

A year and a half went by and Gordon was grasping for answers. He started sinking into depression… and then, out of the blue…

Gordon Hempton: One night next to the wood fire I heard the fire crackle [SFX] perfectly in such detail. The cellulose chambers collapsing and those high frequencies. And then plus the draw of the air. And like, my, the true world, the real world around me, was so vivid. And it lasted like 5 seconds and then disappeared. That’s all I needed. I knew it was possible to hear again.

As his hearing came back, Gordon threw himself wholeheartedly into his work. He started an organization to advocate against noise pollution in national parks and wild places. He wrote articles and did interviews about the importance of protecting natural soundscapes.

But then, four years ago, Gordon’s ears started to fail him once again.

It was an April morning and he woke up and noticed that he couldn’t hear the sounds of birds outside his window.

Gordon Hempton: And so I leaned over and asked my wife, “Do you hear bird song?” And she goes, “Yes.” And… [sigh] Here we go again. And, once again I didn’t waste any time. I went to the doctors and got all kinds of diagnosis and prognosis. And I’m still in the middle of it.

But he’s determined to continue his work.

He’s hired two young assistants - with healthy ears - to help him go through the thousands of recordings he’s made over his career.

Gordon Hempton: You know it’s been interesting to lose my hearing. You start out devastated at first, but in long term it’s really been a blessing. Because I can no longer work alone, and I have to work with young people with perfect hearing. This is an opportunity for me to pass on, not just the information of what I’ve learned over the decades about listening to nature, but also to pass on my passion.

Gordon still doesn’t have a diagnosis for his hearing loss, but he does have a heightened sense of urgency to bring his recordings to the greatest number of people, while he still can...

...because the ability to listen - to truly listen - is such a profound gift.

Gordon Hempton: I am sure there are people who take their hearing for granted. And all I can say is, “Boy, you have a real transformation comin’ up.” You’re going to find out that sound will change your life.

[Sound Escapes music in]

Gordon has teamed up with Sound Escapes to create a 6 episode series, taking listeners on an audio tour around the world. You’ll be immersed in amazing soundscapes from some of the most unique ecosystems on earth.

We’ll start in a rainforest on the Big Island of Hawaii in episode two. Then we’ll head to the grasslands of Saskatchewan to hear a prairie dawn chorus - complete with coyotes.

In episode four Gordon takes us to the Land Between the Lakes in Tennessee. Then in episode five we’re off to the banks of the Mississippi River in Arkansas to hear so many birds that Mark Twain called the experience “a jubilant riot of music”.

Episode six takes us to a remote lake in Eastern Washington. And finally, we end in Ecuador, with some amazing sounds Gordon recorded along the Zabalo River.

Gordon Hempton: Well, for me, the podcast series is an opportunity of a lifetime. Because I’ve spent a lifetime recording all over Planet Earth, and I do have my favorites. It wasn’t hard at all for me to pick themes or locations where I felt these moments - as a listener - of being spiritually enlightened just from listening to the real world around me. Where I felt like, “oh man, life is beautiful, what an opportunity.”

Gordon Hempton: But beyond that, I want you to know that these are only invitations, these podcasts, to the live concert. These are invitations to listen to yourself and not listen to what I think you might want to listen to. But invitations so you can go and explore the world, notice how you feel, listen to the place, and find your special spots.

These recordings are Gordon’s gift to all of us all, and we’re so grateful to share them with you.

Let’s start listening…

[music out]

[SFX: Birdsong continues]

[music in]

CREDITS Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that makes television, film, and games sound amazing. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

Special thanks to Ashley Ahearn, Mark Bramhill, and the whole team at Birdnote. The soundscapes Gordon Hempton created with BirdNote are truly spectacular. Really, they’re not like any podcast out there — you don’t want to miss them. You can check out the whole series at BirdNote.org/SoundEscapes or search for “Sound Escapes” wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can hear more of Gordon’s work and buy recordings on his website - sound tracker dot com. Also, if you’re a sound designer, visit Boom Library dot com and look for the Quiet Planet Series. They’re incredible and we use them all the time here at Defacto Sound.

Finally, you can interact with me on the Twenty Thousand Hertz Facebook and Twitter pages or by writing hi at 20k dot org. You can also find our archive, show notes, and transcripts on our website - 20k dot org. That’s two zero kay dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

The Voyager Golden Record: Humanity’s message to the cosmos

Original artwork by Michael Zhang.

This episode was written and produced by Leigh McDonald.

In the late '70s, NASA launched Voyagers 1 & 2 to explore the furthest reaches of our solar system and beyond. But something amazing was included on those space probes... a 90-minute time capsule of sounds, language, and music from Earth called The Golden Record. Its intended recipient? Any intelligent extraterrestrial life that might stumble upon it. What did Carl Sagan and his team put on the record to represent all of humanity? How would aliens decode it?

For the first time ever, the album will be deconstructed track-by-track. Featuring Tim Ferris and Linda Salzman Sagan, two pioneers behind the record.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Polaris by SVVN
Silence by David A Molina
Who am I by Dario Lupo
Closing Rhyme by Chad Lawson

MUSIC DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

Greetings from Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the United Nations - Voyager Golden Record
Greetings in 55 Languages - Voyager Golden Record
United Nations Greetings / Whale Songs - Voyager Golden Record
Sounds of Earth - Voyager Golden Record
Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, BWV 1047: I. Allego by Johann Sebastian Bach, Performed by Munich Bach Orchestra, Deutsche Grammophon
Ketawang: Puspåwårnå (Kinds of Flowers), Performed by Pura Paku Alaman Palace Orchestra - Nonesuch Records
Cengunmé, Mahi musicians of Benin by Charles Duvelle
Alima Song by Mbuti of the Ituri Rainforest - Smithsonian Folkways
Barnumbirr (Morning Star) and Mokoi Song, Performed by Tom Djawa, Mudpo, Waliparu - Recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes
El Cascabel by Lorenzo Barcelata, Performed by Antonio Maciel and Los Aguilillas with Mariachi México de Pepe Villa - Bicycle Music Company
Jonny B. Goode by Chuck Berry - Universal Music Enterprises
Mariuamangi by Pranis Pandang and Kumbi of the Nyarua clan - Recorded by Robert MacLennan
Sokaku-Reibo (Depicting the Cranes in Their Nest), Arranged by Kinko Kurosawa, Performed by Goro Yamaguchi - Nonesuch Records
Partita for Violin Solo No.3 in E Major, BWV 1006: III. Gavotte en Rondeau by Johann Sebastian Bach, Performed by Arthut Grumiaux - Universal Music Enterprises
The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), K. 620, Act II: Hell's Vengeance Boils in my Heart by Wolfgang Amadeaus Mozart, Performed by Bavarian State Opera Orchestra and Chorus - Warner Classics UK
Chakrulo by Georgian State Merited Ensemble of Folk Song and Dance - Melodiya Studio in Tbilisi, Georgia
Roncadoras and Drums, Performed by musicians from Ancash - Recorded by Jose Maria Arguedas
Melancholy Blues by Louis Armstong and His Hot Seven - Columbia Records
Mugam by Kamil Jalilov - Smithsonian Folkways
The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre Du Printemps), Part II - The Sacrifice: VI. Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One) by Igor Stravinski, Performed by Columbia Symphony Orchestra - Sony Classical
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Prelude & Fugue No.1 in C Major, BWV 870 by Joann Sebastian Bach, Performed by Glenn Gould - Sony Classical
Symphony No.5 in C Minor, Opus 67: I. Allegro Con Brio by Ludwig Van Beethoven, Performed by London Philharmonia Orchestra - Warner Classics
Izlel E Delyu Haydutin by Valya Balkanska, Lazar Kanevski, Stephan Zahmanov - Nonesuch Records
Navajo Night Chant, Yeibichai Dance by Ambrose Roan Horse, Chester Roan, Tom Roan - Smithsonian Folkways
The Fairie Round by Anthony Holborne, Performed by Early Music Consort of London - Warner Music UK
Naranaratana Kookokoo (The Cry of the Megapode Bird), Performed by Maniasinimae and Taumaetarau Chieftain Tribe of Oloha and Palasu'u Village Community in Small Malatia - Solomon Islands Broadcasting Company
Wedding Song, Performed by young girl of Huancavelica - Smithsonian Folkways
Liu Shui (Flowing Streams), Performed by Guan Pinghu - Smithsonian Folkways
Bhairavi: Jaat Kahan Ho, Performed by Kesarbai Kerkar - Silva Screen Music America
Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson - Legacy Recordings
String Quartet No.13 in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: V. Cavatina by Ludwig Van Beethoven, Performed by Budapest String Quartet - Bridge Records

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.

Get your copy of the Voyager Golden Record at ozmarecords.com.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: record needle going on to record, scratchy start

Kurt Waldheim [1-01]: As the Secretary General of the United Nations, who represents almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet.]

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

[Clip continues - Kurt Waldheim [1-01]: We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking on peace and friendship. To teach if we are called upon. To be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us. And it is with humility and hope that we take this step.]

[music in]

That was Kurt Waldheim, the fourth Secretary-General of the UN. And what you just heard is the first track from the most epic album of all time. It was made by a team of scientists, artists, and historians hoping that one day other intelligent life forms might find it. It’s the Voyager Golden Record. It’s also a time capsule, and there’s actually two of them. They’re currently over 11 billion miles away, hurtling through space at over thirty thousand miles an hour.

These literal golden records are attached to the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. These probes were launched in the late seventies and today they are farther away from earth than any other human-made object. The Voyager probes could continue to explore worlds unknown for more than a billion years. So, there is a theoretical chance that alien life could find one of these probes.

In the seventies a committee chaired by Carl Sagan curated a record to ride on each craft. Here’s Carl talking about the record on the original COSMOS television series.

[music out]

[Carl Sagan: A phonograph record, golden, delicate, with instructions for use. And on this record are pictures, sounds, greetings, and an hour and a half of exquisite music, the earth’s greatest hits, a gift across the cosmic ocean from one island civilization to another.]

Recently, Ozma Records has re-pressed the Voyager Golden Record using the original master tapes. Before then, no one on earth could hear the Golden Record in context. But now, we’re going to explore it together, track-by-track.

Kurt Waldheim, who you heard at the beginning of the episode, is track 1 of the record. He greeted whoever might find this record on behalf of all humanity. Here’s track 2, which are hellos and greetings in 55 languages.

[SFX 1-02: Greetings in 55 Languages]

Linda: I think it was an amazing project.

That’s Linda Salzman Sagan, she was in charge of organizing all of these greetings. She was married to Carl Sagan at the time the records were made. Their son, Nick Sagan was recorded for the English greeting when he was just 6 years old.

Linda: Nick gave the greeting in English, and we never told him this. He just said “hello from the children of planet earth” and that was his greeting.

Linda: I get choked up when I think about it. I kind of appreciate his wisdom. That he made a special greeting. He’s a very remarkable young man.

[SFX 1-02: Hello from the children of earth]

The greetings continue into track 3. This time it’s from more members of the United Nations.

[SFX 1-03: UN greetings in several languages]

The UN greetings on this track are mixed with another sound: humpback whale songs.

[SFX 1-03: UN greetings mixed whale songs]

And by the track’s end, the whale songs are the only sounds left.

[SFX 1-03: Just whale songs]

The choice of Whale Songs was deliberate. Carl Sagan believed they carried a lot of information - just like human speech.

[Carl Sagan: If I imagine that the songs of the humpback whale are sung in a tonal language, then the number of bits of information in one song is about the same as the information content of the Iliad or the Odyssey.]

If this record is found by intergalactic life, it’s possible they could understand a whale’s song just as well as they could understand human speech.

That brings us to track 4, “The Sounds of Earth.”

[SFX 01-04: Sounds of Earth]

This is a 12 minute sound essay that depicts the history of our planet. The first part is known as “the Music of the Spheres”. It’s a sonic representation of the planets in our solar system rotating around the sun. The music is composed mathematically - each planet is given its own frequency. The highest pitch is Mercury. The lowest is Jupiter.

Timothy Ferris and Ann Druyan led the production of the sound essay. They wanted to present an evolution of our planet. So next comes the sound of thunder, volcanoes, bubbling lava - this is prehistoric earth.

Each minute of the track takes us through thousands of years of planetary development. From the birth of life on earth, to the modern day, and beyond. Linda also helped collect many of these sounds.

Linda: When we were going to actually record sound. I think Ann suggested that we try to do it in an evolutionary way. So I went to a professor at Columbia who specialized in anthropology and I got the sound of him striking a flint. You know there was a sense of wonder to it and a sense of the ridiculous and the sublime.

[SFX 01-04: Sounds of Earth]

About halfway through we hear the first signs of human life:

[SFX 01-04: Sounds of Earth continue underneath VO]

A heart beat…[SFX] Footsteps…[SFX] The first tools….[SFX] Then modern tools...[SFX] Transportation….[SFX] The launch of a spacecraft...[SFX]

The last human sound is a recording of Ann Druyan’s brain activity. The hope was that extraterrestrials might be able to decode that data, and read her thoughts.

Timothy: It's an odd idea to think about whether alien civilization can make sense of an EEG but, one doesn't know.

That’s Timothy Ferris, who produced the Golden Record.

Timothy: You know when you play a piece of music for someone, you don't know what they're gonna make of it exactly. If you're playing it for them you hope they'll find something rewarding in it.

Timothy: But, I suppose that's the idea behind the Voyager record is that if someday far away in space and time you come across this thing, we hope it's meaningful to you in some way.

The essay ends with the sound of a pulsar [SFX]. The patterns of this sound, plus the image of pulsars on the cover of the record, can be used to calculate time and distance in space. It comes together as a map of Earth’s location in the Galaxy.

Timothy Ferris also led music selection for the record. Which brings us to track 5. This is the “Brandenburg Concerto” by J.S. Bach.

[Music 1-05: Brandenburg Concerto]

Timothy: I was concerned to represent some music that has strong mathematical foundations because we might well be communicating with creatures who don't have hearing or don't have hearing in the range or whose timescale is different so that our rhythms might not make sense. None of us imagined that aliens would be like us and that they would lounge back and listen to the music and experience it the way we do.

Timothy: So, I was interested in finding relationships in the music that would make sense even if you were just mathematically analyzing it. And, there are some pieces by Bach and Beethoven that are there for that purpose.

[music out]

In addition to mathematical principles, Timothy also wanted to find songs that could properly introduce us.

Timothy: Much of the time, though, we were just including pieces because they were heartbreakingly beautiful and we thought they represented our human values.

Next up is track 6. It’s an Indonesian folk song called “Ketawang Puspawarna.”

[Music 1-06: Ketawang Puspawarna]

The piece is an introduction for a prince. The lyrics name different flowers. Each symbolizes a spiritual or philosophical state. Apparently, this was a favorite of Carl Sagan.

[music out]

Timothy: Carl Sagan and I were friends. We both had a particular interest in extraterrestrial intelligence. How, really, would you communicate with an alien intelligence in the distant future was of great interest to us. Music was settled on quite early, to make a record with music and then we realized you could put other things in the grooves too, and so we had natural sounds and greetings and the photos and all.

Timothy: Two of my deepest interests in life had always been science and astronomy, the universe as a whole on the one hand and music on the other. So, here was the chance to bring the two together.

Determining which songs represent humanity best is an enormous task. Tim, Carl, and others listened together to album after album. At one of these gatherings they found track 7, “Cengunmé.” It’s a percussion song from Benin, a nation in Africa.

[Music 1-07: Cengunmé]

Timothy: The listening sessions themselves were great. A lot of 'em were done in my apartment in New York. At that time I was, among other things, a music critic and had thousands and thousands of LPs lining the walls and a good stereo. Which is what people used to do in those days, they’d just sit and listen to music on a stereo.

[music out]

It would have been incredible to attend these listening parties. Imagine listening to music with the greatest scientific minds, trying to figure out what music should be on intergalactic greatest hits record.

Track 8 is “Alima Song” This piece is performed by the indigenous people in the rainforests of the Congo.

[Music 1-08: Alima’s Song]

This song is followed by “Australia Barnumbirr and Moikoi Song.” Track 9 sounds like this:

[Music 1-09: Australia Barnumbirr (Morning Star) and Moikoi Song]

Which is followed by track 10, “El Cascabel,” a Mariachi song.

[Music 1-10: El Cascabel]

Timothy: You have to consider the dynamic you're in if you're going to make a brief collection. 90 minutes from all the music on Earth, then you are automatically going to exclude almost all of the great music because there's so much of it. We could have done a Voyager record every year over the past 40 years and they'd all be terrific. It's not as if you're gonna run out of great music.

Timothy: We tried to get music from all around the world, not just from the culture that had created the spacecraft.

[music out]

Timothy: You end up really with one piece representing each kind of thing. The one rock track on the record is “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry.

Here’s track 11.

[Music 1-11: Johnny B. Goode]

Timothy also used some creative engineering to get as much music as possible onto the record.

Timothy: The disc is the size of a record that use to be recorded at 33-1/3 revolutions per minute. I cut the Voyager record to half speed so that we could have twice the content. This took our high end response down from around 18,000 hertz to around 12.5 [SFX: “Johnny B. Goode” adjusts to 12.5 hertz], somewhere in there. I figured a little bit of high end loss was a good trade off for doubling the information content of the record.

[music out]

This doubled space allowed for even more diversity and culture onto the record. Like track 12, “Mariuamangɨ,” a traditional folk song from New Guinea.

[Music 1-12: Mariuamangɨ]

Track 13 it “Sokaku-Reibo.” This Japanese folk song is played on a bamboo flute. Its title means “Depicting the Cranes in their Nest.”

[Music 1-13: Sokaku-Reibo (Depicting The Cranes In Their Nest)]

Next up is track 14. It’s from the Baroque period of Western European music. This is “Partita for Violin Solo No. 3 in E Major” by J. S. Bach.

[Music 1-14: Partita for Violin Solo No. 3 in E Major]

Timothy: Music means a lot to us and I would be surprised if something like music didn't mean a lot to at least some other intelligent species. The fact that it is non-specific and yet communicates something to everyone.

[music out]

Track 15 moves us forward in history, to the Classical period. This is from the Mozart Opera, “The Magic Flute”

[Music 1-15: The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte)]

Timothy: There's something fundamental about rhythms that it's difficult to imagine any intelligent species not having some familiarity with. I thought music was a good way of, maybe communicating isn't perhaps the right word but memorializing the human species.

Track 16 is an ancient drinking song from the country of Georgia. It dramatizes preparing for battle.

[Music: 1-16: Chakrulo]

We’re now halfway through the Voyager Golden Record. At the end of one side of a record, there are wide grooves that catch the needle. These are known as the “take out grooves” or “run out grooves”.

Popular bands sometimes used to leave secret messages hand etched in between these grooves.

Timothy: So, I had composed a dedication and cleared it with the other members, which was "To the Makers of Music, all worlds, all times." When the record was completed and was sent to NASA there's something called a Compliance Officer whose job it is to make sure that every part going on to a spacecraft meets exact specifications. When the Compliance Officer checked The Voyager record here was this handwriting and there was nothing about that in the blueprints, so he rejected the part.

[music in]

So with the project near completion, a simple hand written message almost derailed the entire thing. We’ll flip the record to Side B and finish the story, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

11 billion miles from here, the twin Voyager spacecraft carry golden records. These discs are time capsules - memorials of our global culture. But a tiny visual detail of the record almost stalled the entire project.

Here’s Timothy Farris again.

Timothy: We went through an anxious week or two when NASA was preparing a blank disc to replace the ones we had worked so hard on for fear that the non-standard part might threaten the launch. Carl had to go to the head of NASA to get a waiver. His argument was that this would be the sole example of human handwriting on the spacecraft and that argument carried the day. So, it was with a certain amount of relief that Carl and I and our collaborators watched the launch of the first of the two Voyagers down at the Cape because there were times when we weren't sure it was going to work out at all.

Thankfully it did work out. So it’s time to flip the record.

[music out]

[SFX: Record flip, needle drop]

[Music 2-01: Roncadoras and Drums]

This song, “Roncadoras and Drums,” is track 17. It’s from the Ancash Region of Peru.

[music continues]

The Voyager probes were launched in 1977. Compared to the spacecraft of today, they used simple technology. So NASA engineers had to use special techniques to reach deep space.

[music in]

Timothy: The Voyagers are accidentally interstellar. They used a sophisticated technique to fly past the giant planets; Jupiter, Saturn, on out to Uranus and Neptune in such a way that they were able to accelerate to ever higher velocities. So their velocities exceed the escape velocity of the solar system. That means they'll leave the Sun and our planets behind forever and drift in the Milky Way Galaxy. Because they're going to last so long in space, a billion years is the lower bound on their likely lifetime, it seemed appropriate to put some kind of time capsule aboard the craft.

Each probe travels in a completely different direction. Their billion-year journey is likely to be lonely, It’s fun to imagine a lonely spacecraft drifting through space to track 18, “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and the Hot Seven.

[Music 2-02: Melancholy Blues]

Next is track 19 “Muğam”by Azerbaijani musician Kamil Jalilov.

[Music 2-03: Muğam]

Both Voyagers are now interstellar. That means they’ve completely left our solar system. They are the first and only human-made objects to do so.

The Voyagers will fly on for a billion years, but unfortunately they won’t function for that long. Soon, scientists may have to start shutting down instruments to try and save power. They still send data back to Earth each day. But eventually the probes will go dark, and become hunks of metal hurtling through the void.

[music out]

This is Carl Sagan again.

[Carl Sagan: We do not know whether there are other space faring civilizations in the Milky Way. If they do exist, we do not know how abundant they are, much less where they are. But there is at least a chance that sometime in the remote future one of the Voyagers will be intercepted and examined by an alien craft.]

The Voyagers’ themselves will die. But their mission won’t.

So , back to the music - track 20 is from a ballet, Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”

[Music 2-04: The Rite of Spring]

By the way, when this was premiered in Paris in 1913 - people rioted - this was not what they expected from a ballet.

[music out]

The next piece, track 21, is prelude and fugue no. 1, from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier.

[Music 2-05: The Well-Tempered Clavier]

And coming up next is track 22.

[Music 2-06: Symphony No. 5]

An epic symphony for an epic journey. This is Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5”.

[music continues]

This music sounds familiar to us, but we really have no idea what aliens might make of it. If they can hear like we do at all, they might only be able to hear the higher frequencies...

[SFX: Symphony No. 5 high frequency]

Or maybe the low frequencies...

[SFX: Symphony No. 5 low frequency]

Or maybe they’ll interpret the grooves of the record in a totally different way, and they won’t hear music at all….

[SFX: Symphony No. 5 vibrations only]

Seems like miscommunication is a big possibility. Could we anger aliens with the Golden record? Track 23 is “Izlel E Delyo Haydutin.” This Bulgarian folk song is about an unkillable rebel hero.

[Music: Izlel E Delyo Haydutin]

Could aliens interpret this as a threat?

Timothy: I never took that part of it very seriously, the idea that we'd somehow be threatening someone. There is just nothing in the history of human species or any other relatively intelligent species to suggest anything of the sort. So, I saw no reason to get into such considerations in making the Voyager record.

[music out]

The Voyager Gold Record is truly a message of peace. Much of the music is friendly and joyful.

Next up is track 24. It’s a Navajo Night Chant called the “Yeibichai Dance.”

[Music 2-08: Navajo Night Chant]

Track 25 is “The Fairie Round,” by British composer Anthony Holborne.

[Music 2-09: The Fairie Round]

Track 26 is from the Solomon Islands. It’s name, “Naranaratana Kookokoo,” which translates to “The Cry of the Megapode Bird”.

[Music 2-10: Naranaratana Kookokoo]

If he had to do it all over again, Timothy says he would still use a record over newer, digital technology.

[music in]

Timothy: People say "Well, with digital technology, we could include so much more information" but more isn't necessarily better. A 12-hour feature film is not necessarily better than a two-hour feature film. So, just shoveling large amounts of data in to a time capsule does not necessarily create a work of art. With the Voyager record, we were interested in creating a work of art.

There’s also the question of durability. Remember these records are supposed to last 1 billion years. They’re not vinyl records, like you’d find at home on your shelf. The Voyager Golden records are made of copper and plated in gold.

Timothy: If I were doing the Voyager record today, I would use exactly the same technology because I can warrant that the information on that disc will last for a very long time. There is no digital medium that would give me the same assurance. So, the technology of making the record, I would have done the same. That would probably be a little harder to do today than it was in the '70s when that was the universal industry standard.

Track 27, “Wedding Song,” is a Peruvian folk song. The young woman singing the song laments marrying too young. It’s a haunting melody.

[Music 2-11: Wedding Song]

Track 28 is “Liu Shui.” The title means, “Flowing Streams,” in Mandarin. It captures the feeling of ever-moving water.

[Music 2-12: Liu Shui]

The Voyager craft will flow through space almost endlessly. And possibly long after we’re gone.

Timothy: I have no way to estimate the odds that the record would ever be encountered by an alien civilization. There's so many variables. We don't yet know at what rate intelligence emerges on planets that have life. I imagine that life itself is fairly widespread in the universe.

Timothy: Another big variable is we don't know how long intelligence typically lasts. A powerful species, technologically powerful species like ours might still be here in a hundred thousand years or it might not.

Timothy: You then get to the question of how many of those intelligent species get involved in space exploration or wire up a whole part of the galaxy so that they would even be able to detect something like Voyager. We don't know that either. The Voyager probe would be pretty easy to pick up. It doesn't look like a space rock. Discovering its out there in the first place, though, is pretty much a random chance.

The next track, track 29, “Jaat Kahan Ho.” from India.

[Music 2:13 - Bhairavi: Jaat Kahan Ho]

The Voyagers will travel huge scales of time and distance, truly entering the unknown. Carl Sagan talks about this in his book, Pale Blue Dot.

Quote - “Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. [In that time] the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms.

Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.”

[music out]

[Music 2-14: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground]

We’re nearing the end of the record. This is the second to last the track on the record. Track 30.

Timothy: My very first suggestion was the track, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” a field recording from decades ago in the American South.

This song is about enduring a cold night with nowhere to sleep.

Timothy: Everything on the Voyager project was both personal and universal. We're trying to represent the whole human species. The first meeting we ever had on the Voyager record, I proposed two goals. The first that we try to be as inclusive as possible.

Timothy: And second, that we make a good record.

[music out]

[Music 2:15 - String Quartet No. 13: in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: V. Cavatina]

The final track, track 31, is Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 13: Cavatina”.

This record is about humans. It could be our first introduction to alien life - or, It could become the only remaining evidence of our existence. Or, it might just be for us.

Linda: You know Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. There's a certain wonderfulness that this project was wrapped up in.

Timothy: The Voyager record says about humanity that however limited or small or primitive we may be or have been when we made the record, we had the imagination and the intellect to think about scales of time and space far beyond our own.

The Voyager Golden Record will circle our Galaxy essentially forever. That means there is plenty of time for it to be found - If there is anyone out there to find it.

It’s message may not be understood, but it’s intent may be. The Voyager Spacecraft itself is a message to the cosmos, it simply says “we are here, and we are listening”.

[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 Leigh McDonald...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to science writer Timothy Ferris. Timothy was the lead producer on the Voyager Golden Record. You can find him online at timothyferris dot com. Thanks also to artist and writer Linda Salzman Sagan.

We absolutely couldn't have made this episode without Ozma Records. They recently repressed the Golden record from the original master tapes. For 40 years before that, no one on Earth could listen to it. It also comes with an incredible book that I keep in my own studio. It outlines the history of the project in much greater detail than we had time for. It also includes all of the photos that were on the record. Go buy it at Ozma Records dot com. Thats, O-Z-M-A records dot com.

The non-Golden Record music in this episode was from Musicbed. Find out more at musicbed.com

Lastly, what would you include on a contemporary Voyager Golden Record? Let us know what music and sounds you’d choose on Facebook, Twitter or by writing hi at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Bird Translation Guide: Decoding Tweets, Hoots, & Warbles

Original artwork by Jon McCormack.

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.

When was the last time you stopped and really listened to birdsong? Ever wonder what they’re singing about? We chat to Kenn Kaufman and Dr. Irene Pepperberg about the extraordinary complexity to the avian arias, how they’re produced, what they mean, and how vocal acrobatics can reveal a surprising hidden intelligence.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

From Zero by String Theories
Better by Airplanes
Breaking Light by Dexter Britain
Flight by Max LL
0º by Erik Kinny
The Fragile Part by AJ Hochhalter
Chrome by Steven Gutheinz
Tracking Aeroplanes by The Echelon Effect
Spring (Instrumental) by Icelanders

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

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

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Birdsong Ambience]

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

[music in]

Humans love to make noise. ...and we’ve been developing our extraordinary noise-making abilities for around a million years. [SFX: loud truck and car speed by, scares birds] We’ve graduated from simple grunts, to the intricacies of speech in thousands of languages. [SFX: Mix of people speaking different languages] Now, with the help of technology, we can make pretty much make any sound we want. [SFX: Synthetic recognisable sounds] So it’s little wonder that we consider ourselves to be the ultimate masters of sound.

[music out]

But there’s an extraordinary group of animals that might just be able to do better. Those animals are birds. Nearly half of all the birds on Earth are what’s known as songbirds. And most of them are able to produce elaborate songs, like this one… from the nightingale.

[SFX: Clear nightingale song]

Songbirds can be found in pretty much every country around the world. Wherever you go, it’s pretty likely that you’ll catch a refrain or two drifting across the air. But, if you think about it, when was the last time you actually stopped and listened to these birdsongs?

[music in]

Kenn: Since I started birding at such a young age, hearing birdsong is just a ... it's a natural part of being awake

That’s Kenn Kaufmann, a lifelong naturalist and birder. Ken’s also the author of loads of iconic field guides for identifying birds across North America.

Kenn: When I was a little kid, I was in northern Indiana in the Great Lakes area, and the neighborhood really didn't have anything in the way of rare birds or anything unusual, but even things like house sparrows [SFX: House Sparrow call] and cardinals [SFX: Cardinal call], they were just so intense. That was the thing, just birds just seemed so intensely alive, that I was fascinated by them.

[music out]

Kenn: Birds, they can make an incredible variety of sounds from extremely low-pitched sounds, [SFX: low pitched bird sound] and they can make high-pitched sounds [SFX: high pitched bird sound] beyond the range of human hearing. They really have quite a range, and they can go from harsh, to sweet, to buzzy, so all different tone qualities [SFX: complex buzzy bird sound].

The key to this extraordinary range of sounds lies in the bird’s physical anatomy.

Kenn: Humans and other mammals, we've got this organ called the larynx that's at the top of the trachea, at the top of our windpipe. And the action of the muscles and the folds around that, when air goes through the larynx, we make things like the voice, like the words that I'm saying now.

You can try it yourself. Put your fingers over your Adam’s Apple. When you speak, you can feel the vibrations from your Larynx, which comes out of your mouth as sound.

Songbirds have a larynx too, but they don’t use it for making sound. For that, they have different organ called the syrinx.

Kenn: It's at the base of the windpipe where it connects to the lungs. And at that point the windpipe, divides into two. There's two branches there, and those two collectively make up the syrinx. So each half, each of these tubes going into half the lungs, has its own set of really intricate muscles and membranes, and the way that they vibrate as the air passes through creates the bird sound.

There are a lot of similarities between the human larynx and the songbird’s syrinx. But the fact that the syrinx is placed on the two branches leading to the lungs is all-important.

Kenn: The two parts of the syrinx can actually operate independently, so a bird literally can sing two notes at once. It can sing a chord. There's a bird in New Zealand called the kokako. It's this amazing bird that goes bounding around in the rainforest. It looks bizarre. But when the kokako is singing, you can really hear the two notes being sung at once, [SFX: Kokako songs] and it's beautiful. It sounds like someone's improvising on an organ back in the forest, just slowly doing these notes, these little trills, and grace notes, and chords. And then every once in a while, it'll throw in this weird, odd sort of squawk or ugly noise just so we know it's actually a bird.

With a two-part syrinx that’s more versatile than our own voice boxes, songbirds can vocalise all sorts of sounds. For instance, here’s a crow mimicking someone saying “y’alright love?”. [SFX: Crow saying ‘Y’alright love’]

Doctor Irene Pepperberg is a professor of animal cognition and interspecies communication at Harvard. She’s working with African Grey Parrots, training them to broaden their repertoire into the realms of human speech.

Irene: They can't say the words right away. It turns out in order to produce the vocalizations, they have to control their sound source which is the syrinx, and they have to learn to control the tracheal muscles, the larynx and the glottis, the opening and closing of their beak and the tongue back and forth and up and down the way we use our tongue up and down, back and forth.

[SFX: Groucho the Parrot singing “jingle bells”]

Irene: There's lots of muscles and lots of things they have to learn to control. Just like we, I mean think about going Ah versus Ee, so they have to learn all of those.

Some words are especially hard for Irene’s birds. They might not have the right anatomy to replicate the sound faithfully, but they can usually improvise.

Irene: For something like a Pa with lips, imagine saying Pa without lips. That takes much, much longer because the bird has to actually learn how to use esophageal speech to sort of burp it.

[SFX: Parrot speech inc ‘peekaboo’, bird singing “Happy Birthday’]

[music in]

Getting your ear into the components of birdsong makes it a lot simpler to hear the differences between species, groups, and even individuals. And although there’s a huge amount of variety among the 4000 or more species of songbirds, it’s pretty clear that there are different songs for different situations.

Kenn: So a black-capped chickadee will make a certain kind of scraping sound if there's some sort of undefined danger, like a predator at a– distance.

[music out]

Kenn: [SFX: Black-capped chickadee song from :42] It'll do a chickadee-dee-dee call, and the number of dee notes at the end will increase with increasing anxiety, or the approach of a predator, and so on [SFX: extended Black-capped chickadee song].

Kenn: The black-throated green warbler is one where the male has two different kinds of songs. Onesong is mainly just for defending the territory and communicating with other males. [SFX: Black-throated warbler territory song] The other type of song is more for communicating with the female, communicating with the mate. [SFX: Black-throated warbler mate song]. So they'll use these different songs in different situations.

Even the African Grey Parrots that Irene studies have a vast repertoire of songs in the wild.

Irene: My students were in Africa for several field seasons. It's extremely hard to study these birds. They live in the canopy [SFX: Forest ambience]. They take off and you're back down on the ground. So, tracking them is extremely hard, but what we were able to figure out was that they have a huge repertoire.

[SFX: African Grey natural vocalisations]

Irene: Certain vocalization seem to be aggressive, certain ones seem to be affiliative a pair-bonded bird had specific vocalizations they use with one another to identify one another.

[music in]

Birds of the same species will tend to sing the same song, but when groups of those birds live in different regions, some interesting differences start to creep in.

Irene: There seems to be for certain parrots, we don't know if this is true for Greys, but for Amazonian parrots, there are dialects. And, if a bird leaves one flock and goes to a different flock, they have to learn a slightly different dialect.

Kenn: White-crowned sparrows just west of Hudson Bay in Canada will sing something that sounds like, I-wanna-go-swee-swee-now." [SFX: White crowned sparrow calls] It's the same pattern. You can hear them in migration, or even on the wintering grounds, occasionally doing that same song. [SFX: White crowned sparrow calls] But you could go some place over farther west in Canada and it will be a completely different pattern of songs. It'll still be some whistles, and buzzes, and trills, but they'll be arranged in a different pattern.

[SFX: White crowned sparrow calls fade out]

[music out]

It’s not just the remixing of a particular bird’s song that you can hear when you travel from place to place. Environmental noise will also shape what a bird sings.

Kenn: Birds that live along rushing streams tend to have really loud songs. So like the dipper, for example, has a really loud song so you can hear it over the sound of rushing water.

[SFX: Dipper song with rushing stream sound]

Kenn: Birds that live down in dense undergrowth often have louder and lower-pitched songs than birds that live up in the treetops where things are more open.

[SFX: Thrush-like antpitta with rustling leaves ambience]

But how exactly do these birds learn these songs to begin with?

Kenn: Their call notes, are instinctive, so they're born with those, but the songs are learned. The bird apparently has sort of a mental template for what the song is supposed to be, but if it doesn't actually hear the song, it will never learn it. So the template is important because a baby bird is gonna hear all kinds of birds in the neighborhood, and it could easily pick up the wrong language.

So, just like a human baby, the instinct to cry out is hardwired, but a bird’s song, like our speech, is learned.

Kenn: Something like a young song sparrow is sitting around listening to the male song sparrows singing in the neighborhood, and hearing that, and so it picks up the sound. [SFX: Song sparrow layered songs]. And during the first summer after it hatches, it may not make much sound. In the fall, it may begin doing these weird little whisper songs that are very disorganized [SFX: song sparrow song broken up]. But then the following spring, it will go rapidly through this sequence where it does these really disorganized songs [SFX: rapid practicing song with errors]. Then it starts putting the elements together, and eventually it's doing a song very much like what it had heard the previous summer [SFX: clear accurate song sparrow song].

On the other hand, there are birds whose songs, as complicated as they might be, are completely innate. One such bird is the flycatcher.

Kenn: People have tried the experiment of raising these birds in the laboratory and not letting them hear any natural sound of their own species, but even so they grow up to sing the right song just perfectly. [SFX: flycatcher song] If you try that with something like a song sparrow, it won't develop the right song. But the flycatchers, they've got it as an instinct, and so it's the main way that they recognize their own species. It's not visual. It's entirely based on these songs.

Even in the relatively short time that towns and cities have been spreading across the countryside, birds have stayed one step ahead.

Kenn: Studies have found that birds are singing differently in urban areas. In some cases they sing more loudly, or they'll sing in a lower pitch for it to carry better through the surrounding sounds.

[SFX: Loud urban song example with urban ambience]

So with all these noises and competing songs it’s amazing that birds can learn the right melodies.

But birds are not just singing for fun - they are communicating with each other. And, sometimes they can communicate with us too. Literally, in english. We’ll meet an extraordinary bird who learned to communicate at a new level and changed animal science forever. Thats coming up after the break.

[MIDROLL]

[SFX: Noisy layered birdsong ambience and natural sounds]

To human ears, birds songs are beautiful background noise. But some birds are so adept to learning new sounds, they can perform sounds from entirely different species.

Mockingbirds are known for mimicking the sounds of other birds and animals around them. Their night-time medley might include the songs of [SFX: smooth medley of birdsongs] blackbirds, cardinals, house wrens, hawks, and even the sound of frogs.

In Australia, the Lyre bird takes mimicry to the next level. Here’s an alarm, a chainsaw, and camera shutter. Again, these sounds are coming from a bird.

[SFX: Lyre bird alarm, chainsaw, camera shutter]

The Lyre Bird has one of the most complex syrinxes of all songbirds, which means it doesn’t just replicate other birdsong and animal voices, but pretty much any noise it hears.

[music in]

Irene: Birds are known as vocal learners. There aren't that many creatures in the world that are vocal learners. Mostly it's humans, dolphins, bats, sea lions...

Vocal learners are animals that are able to hear a sound, assimilate it, and figure out how to produce it themselves. It turns out it’s quite a rare skill, that could hint at an underestimated intelligence.

Certain birds like the Lyrebird and the African Grey Parrot continue to learn new sounds throughout their entire lifetime.

Irene: In humans there are seven brain areas that are responsible for the ability to learn vocalizations. We know that they are seven of these areas in the avian brain on the songbirds that learn. There are very similar areas in the parrots that learn. We know there's even an extra area in the parrot brain, a sort of a shell that allows them to not just learn vocalizations but learn vocalizations that are not specific to their species.

[music out]

At the interspecies communication lab at Harvard, the birds are taught to associate sounds with objects. Over time they can demonstrate vocabulary, and an understanding of the world around them. For thirty years, the star of Dr Pepperberg’s lab was a bird named Alex.

[music in]

Irene: Alex was very special not because he was an Einstein of a parrot, but because he was an only bird for 15 years and he had this small army of students working with him and treating him like a toddler and talking to him constantly.

Irene: He became my closest colleague. I cared for him the way you care for a colleague. I mean you ask after a colleague's health. You commiserate with them. You care about them in ways, but you have a different relationship with them than you would with a pet or with a significant other or with a child. He was my collaborator and colleague.

With the attention of a team of researchers, Alex learned hundreds of words, as well as their meanings, and was soon amazing his human colleagues with his linguistic creativity.

[music out]

[SFX: Alex-Irene interactions inc Alex: “I want banana” , “I want corn, soft corn”, “Wanna go eat dinner”]

Irene: For example we were training Alex on apple, and the “Pa” sound is quite difficult and he knew cherry and banana and he just started calling it banary, like it tastes a little bit like a banana, looks like a big cherry..

[SFX: Alex: ‘banarry’ - Irene: “go see in your bowl if you’ve got Banarry’ - Alex: ‘Do you want bannary’]

Irene: Sometimes he would spontaneously come up with labels, he came up with banacker, banana cracker. We gave him dried banana chips, he hated them, so that was the end of banacker.

[music in]

With a solid vocabulary in place, Irene could start to test Alex’s cognition with some basic tasks.

Irene: We were trying to get comprehension of numbers and we'd give him a tray with numbers of blocks, of different colors and slightly different sizes, so there would be, say, six blue, three yellow and two purple and I would say, "What color is six?" and they'd be all mixed up and he had to find the size on the tray and say, "Oh, those were that color”.

[music out]

[SFX: Irene: ‘Alex, what matter’ / Alex: “wool” / Irene: ‘That's right! How many?’ / Alex: two / Irene: ‘That's right!)]

It’s the sort of activity you’d use to test small children on their counting abilities. But, just like working with small children, things didn’t always go as planned.

Irene: When we did this study, it was very boring because he knew these objects, he knew these colors, he knew these numbers.

Irene: So I come in one day and I have three, four and six sets on the tray and I say, "What color three?" and he looks at me and he goes, "Five," and I go, "No, Alex. What color is three?" and he repeats, "Five," and I'm looking, "Okay, there is no set of five on the tray." He's not throwing things on the floor. He is not turning his back and preening. He is not saying the wrong color. I ask him again and again, "Five." So I said, "Okay, smarty. What color five?" thinking, "All right, you want to talk about five. I don't know what you're going to say." He looks at me and he goes, "None." There are obviously no five things on the tray. Basically, not only had he shown the zero-like concept, but he had manipulated me into asking the question that he wanted to answer.

[SFX: Alex-Irene interaction: “You’re a good boy” “Can I go back?” “No sweetie, you can’t go back yet.” “Want some water” “Alright, you want some water or are you just asking to interrupt? Are you asking to interrupt?”]

Whether he was cooperating or not, Alex’s work on these kinds of tests allowed researchers to begin to compare his and other parrots’ intelligence levels to those of humans.

Irene: In terms of their vocalization abilities, they never got beyond 1-1/2 or 2-year-old child. I mean we never had complex sentences, but in terms of cognitive processes, some of the task’s we did with Alex showed he was at level of a 4-year-old child.

[SFX: Alex-Irene interactions: “Hey look, can you tell me, on the tray how many green block?” “Two” “What color bigger?” “Green”]

Irene: Alex was able to infer the cardinality of a number its place on the number line the way young children could do and apes have not yet been able to do that.

[SFX: Irene: “how many corners? What shape?” Alex: “Four...Corner”]

Alex’s curiosity and his high performance in cognitive tests pointed at an incredible intelligence that was a total surprise to scientists.

Irene: They thought that birds are at best mindless mimics, that they were completely inferior to mammals and absolutely inferior to primates. Basically, “bird brain” was a pejorative term - and here I had this bird that was doing the same types of tasks as the primates. This was a huge breakthrough. I mean a brain the size of a shelled walnut literally, an animal separated evolutionarily from humans by 300 million years and doing the same types of tasks as the non-human primates. That was a shock.

[music in]

Having revolutionised the way that we look at birds - not only in terms of their vocal versatility, but also their underappreciated intelligence, Irene and Alex were looking forward to a productive future together.

Until, disaster struck.

Irene: I was doing email which I always do over breakfast and had just learned that we had gotten a lovely grant so I was very excited. I treated myself to a second cup of coffee to celebrate and I came back with that second cup of coffee and there was an email and it said, "Sad news." I initially didn't think anything of it.

Irene: Then I opened it up and it told me that there was an ex-parrot in the lab and it was Alex's cage and I just completely freaked out. According to my veterinarian, it was a heart arrhythmia which is something that just happens.

Everyone had expected Alex’s life, and his career, to go on for decades more. His death was a loss that was felt across the scientific community.

Irene: He had an obituary in The Economist, The New York Times, and Time Magazine. The emails were pouring in. My phone was ringing. My lab manager's phone was ringing. The lab phone was ringing. The emails, we couldn't even keep up with the emails.

Alex was 31 years old when he passed. He was expected to live another 15-20 years. His last words were to Irene the night before. He said, “you be good, see you tomorrow, I love you”.

[music out]

[music in]

Irene: I'm fascinated with the idea of understanding how other creatures interpret our world and how they function in our world and helping other people understand the beauty of recognizing other intelligences.

On the surface, birdsong is simple. It’s a pleasing wash of sound that happens in the background. But if you stop and listen, you might find a deeper meaning.

[SFX: Birdsong ambience building]

Kenn: I would like to encourage people to go out and listen to birds, to just go out and make the conscious effort to focus, and concentrate, and just listen to the birds. Even if you don't know what kind they are, I think you'll be amazed at the variety of sounds that you hear. And if you start to pay more attention, it really will brighten up your world.

[music out / birdsong continues]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios 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 Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to Kenn Kaufman and Dr. Irene Pepperberg. You can find out more about the work Irene is doing at Alex Foundation dot org.

And if you want to take Kenn up on his advice to go out and listen to birdsong in YOUR neighborhood - which I really, really hope you do - then you should pick up one of his beautifully illustrated field guides, you can find that at kaufmanfieldguides dot com. That’s KAUFMAN - fieldguides dot com. You can also find them on Amazon or in most places you buy books.

All of the human-made music in this episode was from our friends at musicbed. Check them out at musicbed.com.

Finally, if you have a comment, episode, or just want to tell us what your favorite bird song is… reach out on twitter, facebook, or by writing hi at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[birdsong out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Phone Tones: The hidden language of phone number beeps

Original artwork by Michael Zhang.

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling.

We unpack how touch tone dialing changed communication forever. Join us on a deep, quirky dive into telephone history. We’ll also deconstruct these sounds and reveal their hidden brilliance. Featuring author Annabel Dodd and telephone aficionado Jim Hebbeln of the Telecommunications History Group.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Before the Lens by Steven Gutheinz
Soft Shoe by Steven Gutheinz
Friday Night 8pm by James Childs
Creature Set by Uncle Skeleton
Allright by Uncle Skeleton
Ode to Estes by Uncle Skeleton
All Coming Together by Dexter Britain
Retrofuture by Uncle Skeleton
Something to Believe In (Instrumental) by Benjamin Love
Sweethearts by Uncle Skeleton
Cherry (Instrumental) by Chair Model
Waiting on You (Instrumental) by Breakup
When You Come (Instrumental) by Kylie Odetta
You've Got Me Running In Circles (with Oohs & Ahhs - Instrumental) by Sonny Cleveland

20K is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by Dallas Taylor.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Dial tone] + [SFX: Phone dialing] + [SFX: ringing]

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

[music start]

The sound of a number being dialed on a telephone is instantly recognizable. But now-a-days, how often do you really hear those sounds? When we call a friend, we just scroll down to their contact. When we call a business, we Google it, tap the phone number, and tap to call. Or we just ask our phone to call it for us.

[SFX: Siri Voice: Okay, calling Music Millennium]

Up until pretty recently every call you made meant dialing all 10 digits of a phone number, one button at a time. And that meant hearing those tones over and over. If there was a phone number you dialed a lot, like your best friend, or your parents, you’d eventually memorize what their number sounded like. Strung together, the tones would start sounding almost musical. Like a jingle you couldn’t forget even if you tried.

[SFX: Mario DTMF]

[music out]

But before we jump into the push button phones most of us are familiar with, we need to go back to the very beginning.

[music start]

There’s still some debate as to who exactly deserves credit for the invention of the telephone. But we do know know that Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent it. That was back in 1876. A year later, Bell and his father-in-law formed the Bell Telephone Company. Over time, the Bell Company evolved into the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, or AT&T as we know it today.

[music out]

[SFX: AT&T Slogan: When you can hear the joy, that’s AT&T. Reach out and touch someone.]

A quick sidebar: The distinction between Bell and AT&T gets pretty convoluted, and you’ll hear them being used interchangeably throughout this episode.

Right away, it became clear that AT&T had a monopoly on the new telephone industry, meaning they could charge whatever they wanted for phone service. This was especially bad news for anyone who lived outside of the city, since it was expensive to run miles of phone line out to just a few houses. So, to convince regulators they should be allowed to operate, AT&T did the most obvious thing a major corporation could do! They struck a deal with the federal government.

[music in]

Annabel: AT&T would promise to provide phone service throughout all of the United States, Canada too…

That’s Annabel Dodd, a professor, consultant and author of The Essential Guide To Telecommunications.

Annabel: Then in return, AT&T would not only provide the phone service, but would provide universal service where people in rural areas weren't charged anything higher than people in urban areas, so that there was comparable prices throughout the United States.

With the signing of that deal, the era of the telephone had begun. Soon, telephone lines were installed all across the country. But, calling someone back then was very very different than we know it today.

[music out]

Annabel: The early years are very interesting. At the time in the early 1900s, late 1800s, United States was largely agrarian, rural country. People had phone service, but they didn't have a dial on the phone. They'd pick up the handset and reach the operator and they would direct the call to whomever that person requested. And that telephone operator knew everything that was going on in the town. And who was talking to whom.

As you might imagine, being the gatekeeper for every phone call made in your town gave these operators quite a bit of power.

Jim: In Kansas City there was an undertaker, his name last name was Strowger, S-T-R-O-W-G-E-R.

That’s Jim Hebbeln. He worked in the telephone industry for over 40 years, and now volunteers with the Telecommunications History Group.

Jim: And he was wondering why he wasn't getting as much business as his competitor, until he realized that his competitor’s wife was the switchboard operator in Kansas City, and so if someone asks for an undertaker, his competitor got the business.

Strowger realized that if people could call each other directly, without an operator, he could stop his rival from stealing his business. So, using a hatbox and some mechanical equipment, he designed what would become known as the Strowger Switch.

[music in]

Jim: It didn't have a dial at the time, initially you might have three buttons on your phone. You'd pick up the phone and one button would be labeled hundreds, another one would be labeled tens and another one would be labeled units, and if you were supposed to dial 1-5-3 you'd press the hundreds button once, [SFX] and it would cause the switch in the central office to jump up one level and connect to another switch. Then you'd press the hundreds key five times, click, click, click, click, click, and it would go up five and then you press it the units digit three times. Click, click, click and it go over three and it would ring their phone [SFX].

The Strowger Switch was eventually replaced by the type of phone we all know from old movies, the rotary dial phone.

[music out]

To dial a number on a rotary phone, you put your finger in the corresponding slot, spin it clockwise all the way to the right [SFX], then pull your finger out while the dial spins back into place.

[SFX: Rotary Dial Ad: For example, suppose you want to dial 23650. Dial each numeral in this manner, pulling the dial around to the finger stop each time. Be sure to allow the dial to freely return to its normal position.]

Annabel: So those phone calls, took I think it was 11 seconds to complete dialing. And the problem with that was that the dialing tied up phone company equipment for a long time. The phone company couldn't handle as much traffic as they wanted to.

[music in]

To speed up long-distance calling, which still required an operator, the phone company developed a new switching machine called the Number Four Crossbar. This was the first time a keypad of numeric buttons was widely adopted, though it was only available to operators.

Jim: The operators had a key pulse, it's a dial, but digits were arranged in two columns of five digits per column, and they could just tap on these buttons and it would produce a pair of tones for each digit dialed.

Since each number on the dial used a specific pair of pitches, the sounds they produced were called “multi frequency” tones, or “MF” tones.

[music out]

Jim: The tones were 700 [SFX], 900 [SFX], 1,100 [SFX], 1,300 [SFX], 1,500 [SFX] and 1,700 [SFX] hertz, and some combination of two of those tones would represent each digit. For example, 700 and 900 was a one [SFX: MF 1], 700 and 1100 was a two [SFX: MF 2], 900 and 1100 was a three [SFX: MF 3].

The Bell System saw the benefits of a touchpad right away.

Jim: People within the Bell System watch these operators just be able to go [SFX] push, push, push, push, push, push, push, push and dial these numbers rapidly in a couple of seconds rather than using a rotary dial.

Bell wanted to get push-button phones into the hands of customers, but the oscillators that made these MF tones were too expensive to mass produce. In 1948, in the suburb of Media, Pennsylvania, Bell made a handful of these push-button, keypad telephones and gave them to customers to try out.

Jim: They had six different length reeds that were tuned and you could push the buttons, one, two, three, four, five on the phone, but it would produce multiple frequency tones like the operators did by plucking two of the six reads, [SFX: Kalimba plucking] bing, bing, bing bing.

[music in]

Customers immediately loved the convenience of dialing with a touchpad. Unfortunately, the reeds weren’t sturdy enough to stay in tune after repeated use, and the prototype was shelved. Though in the 1950s, Bell experimented with different phone designs, and eventually settled on using transistors to produce the tones for each key. They still hadn’t decided on the best layout for the buttons, so they brought in a group of volunteers to test different button arrangements.

Jim: And in the process of doing human studies, they decided that the best kind of a dial was something similar to like what accountants used on adding machines, but the public didn't like the dial starting from the bottom and going up like adding machines did. They wanted their digits displayed across the dial like you read off of page of paper: one [SFX], two [SFX], three [SFX] across the top, seven [SFX], eight [SFX], nine [SFX] across the bottom. Accountants did not like Touch Tone dials, but everybody else enjoyed the design.

[music out]

Arranging the buttons in a grid allowed Bell to assign a pitch to each column and a pitch to each row. Each button pressed would simultaneously produce the tone from its column [SFX: tone] , and the tone from its row [SFX: tone] . These were called “Dual Tone Multi Frequency” or “DTMF” tones. AT&T patented it with a catchier name, “Touch Tone.”

[SFX: World's Fair: Hi, this is the Bell System’s new Touch Tone dialing. With this indicator, you see how many seconds you save the new way. Let’s try it! Okay, I’ll race ya. Ready, go… I beat ya.]

[music in]

Although DTMF shares many similarities with MF tones, there are important differences. For one thing, they use a completely different set of pitches.

Jim: So in the process of figuring out what tones they wanted to use, they picked some really odd tones that don't really match up with any tuned musical instrument, they're always off key. So they picked these bizarre frequencies like 697 hertz [SFX] or 852 hertz [SFX] for the different pitch tones.

And unlike MF tones, which are only dialed at the beginning of a call, DTMF tone-receivers are ready to receive a key input at time during the call. By choosing these odd, specific frequencies, Bell made sure that nothing else, from music [SFX: distant music] to traffic [SFX: cars] to human voices [SFX: Voices] could be misinterpreted as a key press.

Here are the numbers one through nine on a Touch Tone phone. See if you can hear the two separate pitches for each button.

[SFX: Dialing 1-9]

If you listen closely, you can hear how the row pitch, (which is lower) changes after every third button, while the same pattern of three pitches (for the columns) repeats on top of it.

[SFX: Dialing 1-9]

Since the bottom row of keys had two extra slots, Bell added the pound and star keys. These buttons really didn’t have an intended use early on, but later gained more functions. Things like dialing *69 to find out the last number that had called you or star 67 to prevent the person you’re calling to see your number on their caller ID.

[music in]

Touch Tone technology would go on to dominate the second half of the 20th century. But, it wasn’t without a few hitches. After the break, we’ll hear how people learned to “hack” the Touch Tone system, and how these tones might be disappearing from our society altogether.

[music end]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Early versions of the telephone led to AT&T’s patented “Touch Tone” technology. The phone company loved it because it tied up their switching equipment for far less time than rotary phones did. Customers loved it because, well, it was more convenient.

Here’s a commercial by C&P Telephone, an East Coast branch of Bell.

[music out]

[SFX: Touch Tone Ad - It’s a lot easier. And if you have to have to make a lot of calls, like we do here in this office, it’s just great to have. Where with a Touch Tone, you’re dialing a number as fast as you’re thinking it. You’re thinking, uh, 411 for an operator, where with a dial phone it’s 4… 1… 1… My parents had dial service for years and years and years. It took me like a year to talk them into getting Touch Tone, and now they wouldn’t give it up.]

[music start]

This Touch Tone technology quickly swept the globe, and businesses developed automated answering systems that you and I know and love. It took advantage of this new DTMF technology.

Annabel: It became a way for entry into data systems. So the automated attendants, “Press one if you want to reach sales, press two if you want customer service, press three if you want to hold for three hours for an operator.” You know most people hated it.

[SFX - Answering system - “Your call is important to us… Please hold”]

It may not surprise you to hear that pre-recorded phone menus weren’t exactly popular, but there were some benefits. For example, you could enter in sensitive information like your bank account number or social security number without having to say the numbers out loud. Now, that doesn’t mean someone listening in can’t decode them, but that’s another story. Another important use of these tones was voicemail control.

[SFX: Voicemail: You have three saved voice messages. To listen to your messages, press one.]

Annabel: Voice messaging was a big application for Touch Tone.

While answering machines that recorded onto tape had been around since the 1940s, the voicemail services that came out in the early 80s began storing messages digitally, and relied on DTMF tones to control functions like restart, skip, and delete.

The explosion of voicemail machines also led to a bizarre trend of using kitschy, pre-recorded songs for voice messages. In the early 80’s, a company called Formidable Inc. sold a tape of “Tele-Tunes” with 13 different messages that people could put on their answering machines.

[SFX: Song 1: Talk to this machine. Leave a message that you mean. If you leave your name, and where you’re at, I’ll call you right back!]

[SFX: Song 2: We’re not in, but you can leave a message at the tone. We’re not in, we’ll be back soon. We’re not in…]

[SFX: Song 3: So when you hear that little sound you can start to speak, but don’t hang up when you hear the beep. I’m in the shower, can I call you back? I’m in the shower, can I call you back?]

DTMF also had applications beyond the telephone. For instance, DTMF tones were used by TV networks to insert local commercials into national broadcasts.

Jim: They were using touch tones to tell a local controller that they were able to then insert their local commercial for the next 30 seconds.

So, let’s say it’s 1988. You’re watching a new sitcom called Full House, on ABC. The show cuts to commercial.

[SFX: ABC Messages: After these messages, we’ll be right back.]

First, you see some ads for big, international brands:

[SFX: RC Cola Ad: Nothing really gets to you like RC Cola can.]

[SFX: Atari Ad: The fun is back, oh yessiree, new 2600 games from Atari.]

[SFX: Die Hard Trailer: Bruce Willis. Die Hard. Got invited to the Christmas party by mistake. Who knew.]

These ads are visible to everyone watching the show, no matter where they are. But then you see an ad specific to your area: maybe it’s for a local furniture store...

[SFX: Harlem Furniture Ad: Harlem furniture, you'll like our style…]

A DTMF signal transmitted by ABC tells the affiliate station when to insert these local ads, and when to cut back the main broadcast. In fact, before the technology improved, you could actually hear these tones during the commercial break. Here’s a less than subtle example on A&E.

[SFX: A&E DTMF: You're watching the A&E Cable Network, the best in comedy, drama, documentary and the performing arts.]

And here’s one from Nickelodeon.

[SFX: Nickelodeon DTMF: Ready or not, fellow mutants, I'm back with more freaky facts on Nick's Kid Almanac.]

[music start]

No discussion of phone tones would be complete without mentioning the Phreaks (that’s Phreak with a “P H”). It’s important to remember that even after phones started using DTMF to communicate with switching equipment, calls were still connected using those original MF tones. In the 60s, a group of college students figured out how to manipulate the receiving machines by producing these tones artificially.

Jim: Most of them were just discovering how the system worked. They were curious, they were not out to make money, they were not out to fraudulently sell free phone calls to their friends for a whole lot less than what the phone company would charge.

[music end]

The key to hacking the phone system was reproducing a tone of 2,600 hertz.

[SFX: 2600 hertz tone]

Jim: It's around E or E flat, a couple octaves above middle C. I used to be able to whistle it, but I can't anymore, which used to really irritate people, cause if I'd walk in a room and whistle it and if they were on a long distance call, it would knock their call down.

By producing a tone of 2,600 hertz, the Phreaks could trick a remote switching machine into thinking the call had been disconnected. From there, they could make long distance phone calls and disguise them as a call to a toll-free number or directory assistance.

Jim: So you had a little box that would manufacture the multi frequency tones and you just punch in deet deet deet deet deet deet deet deet deet [SFX] and the other end just blindly put the call through, no questions asked…

Famously, the Phreaks often used plastic toy whistles that came in boxes of Captain Crunch cereal in the 70s. If you glued a hole on the whistle shut, the whistle would consistently produce a tone at 2,600 hertz [SFX].

Jim: I have to admit, I did it a couple of times using a Hammond organ to simulate the MF tone. It did work. I was satisfied that it did work, but I didn't want to get in trouble because I didn't want to jeopardize my job.

[music in]

Like everything else, the phone industry was changed dramatically by computers. In the 90’s, the phone system started to turn digital, and multi-frequency tones lost many of their original functions.

So, in other words…

Jim: No more phone Phreaking [laughs].

Unfortunately, these technological advancements didn’t translate to higher quality calls. You’ve probably noticed that phone calls still sound pretty terrible. This is because of data compression. To push all of this data, they reduce the audio quality as much as they possibly can. (whispers) Way too much in my opinion.

First, they chop off all of the low frequencies [SFX]. This one kind of makes sense because most of us take calls on tiny speakers. Those tiny speakers can’t make those frequencies anyway. But then, they chop off even more of the low frequencies [SFX]. Ok, well, we can deal with that… but THEN, then chop off some of the high frequencies [SFX]. Ugh, I’m starting to sound pretty terrible. Then the audio gets hyper compressed, meaning it kind of just brick walls and slams all of the audio at a single volume. To top it all off, the audio data gets hyper compressed as well [SFX]. So, here’s where we land. Bla bla bla, yuck yuck yuck, gross gross gross.

Jim: So there's a definite trade off between cost and quality.

[music out]

For most of us, oh hold on one sec… [SFX: switching back to high quality audio]

For most of us, the convenience of a cell phone is worth the tradeoff. As for those Touch Tone sounds, they’re really there just for show.

Jim: It's just a digital packet. Your phone produces Touch Tones only to be able to do end to end signaling, like operating voicemail systems or automated attendants that answer at the far end.

[music in]

But even those uses are becoming outdated. Between text, email, and social media, we don’t leave voicemails anymore. When we do need to check our messages, we can do so through an app, no phone call required. As for automated attendants that use Touch Tone sounds, those are gradually being replaced with voice recognition.

[SFX - Robo voicemail - “You can say 'Billing question,' 'update address,' or 'Speak to a representative."]

It’s very possible that within the next decade or so, Touch Tone signaling will be a thing of the past. Once it is, will phone companies even bother to put these useless noises onto our cell phones? Will the next generation even recognize those sounds? I mean, when was the last time you heard this [SFX: Ready dial tone sound] or this [SFX: Phone off the hook sound].

Just like those other phone sounds, touch tone sounds might slowly fade into oblivion. Before you even realize it. Whatever happens in the future, it’s undeniable that Touch Tone had a huge impact on not only the telephone industry, but mass communication in general… and those of us who grew up hearing DTMF tones on every phone call we made will never forget what they sounded like.

[music end]

[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 insanely cool. Find out more at defactosound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Jai Berger and Colin DeVarney. Special thanks to our guests Annabel Dodd and Jim Hebbeln for taking the time to speak with us.

Jim, last question, so out of all of the sounds in the world, what is your favorite sound?

Jim: It probably would be those multi frequency tones. Well, just a second, I probably would say that comes second, I love you… You know, from my wife.

To learn more about the Telecommunications History Group, the group that Jim volunteers with, go to telecomhistory.org, or check out their museums in Seattle and Denver. And, check out Annabel’s book, The Essential Guide to Telecommunications.

The music you heard throughout this episode came from our good friends at Musicbed. Check them out at Musicbed.com

What’s your most memorable telephone story? We’d love to hear from you, and you can get in touch on Twitter, Facebook, or by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music end]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

The Booj: The secret sound formula behind blockbuster trailers

Original artwork by Kyle Hodgman

This episode was written and produced by Abigail Barr.

Movie trailers have undergone a huge evolution. They’ve gone from those cheesy voice-of-God narrators in the ‘80s and ‘90s, to boojes and bwaas. Professor James Deaville delivers the history of trailers, and Youtuber Craven Moorhaus offers a hilarious takedown of the sounds and dialogue that are common in the modern trailer style. After you hear this episode, you’ll never be able to watch a blockbuster trailer the same way again.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Flare by Chad Lawson
Falling in by Shawn Williams
Furies by Ryan Taubert
Absolute Zero (Instrumental) by Evan Giia
Miracle Caught on Camera (Instrumental) by Icelandia

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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

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

Check out more videos from the Auralnauts at youtube.com/Auralnauts.

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

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Check out Song Exploder wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode was inspired by the following Youtube video:

View Transcript ▶︎

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

[SFX: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon trailer]

When you think about how a “movie trailer” sounds, what comes to mind? Does it sound something like this?

Don LaFontaine: In a land of eternal beauty and infinite mystery, a legend was born...

This is the trailer from the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In it, you have all of the ingredients of a classic trailer.

Don LaFontaine: The story of a warrior...

Including the legendary voice of Don LaFontaine.

Don LaFontaine: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

The only thing that could possibly take this trailer over the top is the classic intro “in a world”.

Don Lafontaine: In a world without gas…"

Don Lafontaine: In a world that's powered by violence…

Don Lafontaine: In a world of falafel…

This is the classic recipe for a movie trailer, right? Well, not really. Movie trailers don’t really sound like that anymore. A boomy voice of god is pretty rare nowadays. Trailers now really sound a lot more like this:

[SFX: Cinematic Effects]

And you’ve got this sound that can only be described… as the booj.

[SFX: Booj]

You know. The booj.

[SFX: Booj]

You usually hear it before or after the more obvious bwah.

[SFX: Bwah]

And after listening to this episode, you’ll start hearing the booj…

[SFX: Booj]

Everywhere.

Craven: The booj is a term that, I think we just made it up. It's the term that we use for the subwoofer shaking, low frequency drops that usually happen at about the peak of some catastrophic event in a trailer.

That’s Craven Moorhaus, co-creator of the Auralnauts. It’s a YouTube channel that uses sound to make fun of and re-contextualize films and trailers.

Craven: We like to make sound a little more transparent to the point of creating something comical. But also to highlight how important sound can actually be.

The booj can also be called a bass drop or a sub drop.

Today you can count on the booj occurring in just about every suspenseful action movie trailer.

[SFX: Montage of booj noises]

Craven: To us in the trailer, that's when you're seeing the biggest thing happen.This would be a planet exploding [SFX: Explosion] or a building collapsing [SFX: Building Collapse].

[music in]

So why do so many trailers use the booj and other super aggressive sound effects?

James: You have to consider that trailers are a form of advertising.

That’s James Deaville, a music professor at Carleton University. His project is called Trailaurality, and it studies the effects of music and sound in movie trailers.

James: As a form of advertising, they’re convincing people of going to movies. Sometimes they’re good. Sometimes they’re not so good, though, and people should be aware of the power of music and sound in trying to persuade them.

The movie industry brings in around 40 billion dollars a year. And that’s in the US alone. It’s a giant, highly competitive business. Every second of sound and music is maxed out to keep your attention.

[music out]

To really prove how much sound can change the tone of a movie trailer, you don’t have to go very far. Simply searching for a recut trailer on YouTube brings up a ton of amazing fan-made trailers. Some of these are serious, but tons are taking a film in one genre, and making it seem like it came out of another. Take for example this Elf trailer, where it’s turned into a thriller. [SFX: Elf clip] ...and here’s a trailer for Dumb and Dumber, but with the score from the Inception trailer. [SFX: Dumb and Dumber clip] On the other end of the spectrum, here’s a trailer that perfectly parodies 90’s family drama trailers, but it’s for The Shining.

[SFX: Shining trailer- narration]

Narrator: Meet Jack Torrance.

Jack: I’m outlining a new writing project.

Narrator: He’s a writer looking for inspiration.

Jack: Lots of ideas, no good ones,

Narrator: Meet Danny, He’s a kid looking for a dad.

Danny: There’s hardly anybody to play around with here.

Dick Halloran: Naah, whats up doc?

These parodies prove just how critical sound is in a trailer. However, trailers obviously didn’t always sound like this. [SFX: Rewinding Reel] So let’s rewind and go on a journey from the very first trailers to the ones we know today.

[SFX: Old trailer music & film reel]

The very first trailer in a movie theater came in 1913 in New York City. Interestingly, this trailer wasn’t even for a movie. It was for a Broadway musical called The Pleasure Seekers. But, this idea of creating a trailer quickly swept the movie industry. Soon theater projectionists everywhere were adding them to the end of their film reels. Hence the word trailers. They were traditionally at the end of the main feature.

Early on, before sound could be married to picture, trailers were accompanied by music with big lines of text appearing on screen between key scenes. These giant lines of text were the early form of a narrator. It gave all of the necessary plot points. Of course, this was mainly because films didn’t have dialog yet, but even after dialog came to films trailers kinda remained the same. That was because, basically, only one company was making all of the trailers.

[music out]

James: In the 1920s, even before sound, there was one company that managed to gain a monopoly by signing various studios to create trailers, The National Screen Services, NSS. So by the time sound comes, they're creating most of the trailers.

With the addition of sound in films, the NSS added an iconic element to trailers: voiceover narration.

Narration: Casablanca - city of hope and despair, located in French Morroco in North Africa. The meeting place of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, refugees lured into this danger swept oasis by the hope of escape to the Americas.

But the NSS was formulaic. Their narration, music, and titles all looked and sounded the same.

James: There was a fairly strong uniformity across the boards, and the kind of music that they would use starting in the 30s then tended to be very dramatic, but these were also tracks that would wander from one trailer to another.

Everything changed when the NSS lost its monopoly. This was around mid 50’s when boutique trailer houses started popping up. This new competition pushed trailer editors to get more creative.

Pink Panther Narrator: Pardon me sir, but what are you looking at? Is that by any chance, the picture called The Pink Panther?

James: They would contract out sound and music from independent producers of music. The trailer house, then would license the music they need for the trailer. They would produce the trailer, and then send it to the studio.

Fast forward to the 80s and suddenly the same booming narrator voices are popping up everywhere.

James: There were two voiceover artists who had probably 90% of the market in the 80s and 90s, and in the 2000s, Hal Douglas and Don LaFontaine.

I’m sure you’ll remember these voices. This is Hal Douglas.

Hal Douglas: Men In Black. Protecting the Earth from the scum of the universe.

And this is Don LaFontaine.

Don LaFontaine: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator 2 Judgment Day, this time he's back for good.

These two voices dominated trailers for decades. But from the year 2000 to 2010 these voice of god type of narrators pretty much disappeared. The movie industry had used this formula for so long. It was becoming so obviously cliche to both the public and the film industry. It was Jerry Seinfeld that might have been the one to finally kill off the classic movie trailer voice. The trailer for his 2002 film Comedian basically made fun of the entire trailer industry. It starred none other than Hal Douglas poking fun at himself.

Hal Douglas: In a world where laughter was king -

Producer: Uh, no “In a world,” Jack.

Hal Douglas: What do you mean “No in a world?”

Producer: It’s not that kind of movie.

Hal Douglas: Oh? Ok. In a land that -

Producer: No “In a land” either.

Hal Douglas: In a time

Producer: I don’t think so

Hal Douglas: In a land before time

Producer: It’s about a comedian Jack.

The other thing that killed narration in trailers was the internet. Before YouTube, people only really saw trailers at the movies. They only had one shot. The narration helped audiences get the story in a single viewing. Today we tend to watch trailers multiple times. There’s a lot less need for narration.

So now, because of all of this. The sound effects and music started to take a more prominent place in trailers.

For example, that iconic bwah noise you’ve heard in every trailer since Inception…

[SFX: Inception trailer bwah noise]

It has a ton of variations.

[SFX: Montage of different bwah noises]

Pair these epic effects with the cover of a well-known song, and you’ve got yourself some movie-trailer-magic.

[SFX: Lorde cover, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World"]

Craven: To get people on board with this trailer, we're going to re-contextualize something to get you excited, so oftentimes people will do orchestral or symphonically trailerized versions of a popular song, and usually an unexpected song.

The cover song trope started becoming popular around 2010. Here’s a Belgian girl’s choir cover of Radiohead’s Creep for The Social Network.

[SFX: Choir: I don't care if it hurts..."]

James: That was perhaps the cover song that really started that revolution.

This trailer was so popular that Producers hired the same choir to do covers for many other trailers. Here they are covering Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” that was featured in the Zero Dark Thirty trailer.

[SFX: Choir: "Forever, trust in who we are..."]

And here’s Gang of Youth’s cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” in the Justice League trailer.

[SFX: Gang of Youths: "We can be heroes..."]

...and here’s Destiny’s Child “Survivor” in the Tomb Raider trailer.

[SFX: Destiny Child: "I’m a survivor..."]

James: Now when I hear it, I think, "Not again."

[music in]

These movie trailer cliches are so common that it’s easy to parody. ...and it’s not just the booj or the bwah or the cover song, but it goes even deeper.

Craven: I think what happened was, we just started noticing certain tropes that were used so ubiquitously that it was becoming funny to us.

Trailers have become so formulaic that Craven and his Auralnauts partner Zak Koonce decided to pack them all into one glorious mega-parody trailer. We’ll deconstruct that trailer as well as teach you how to make your very own booj… after this.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

We are in an age of the biggest and boomiest trailers ever. These trailers sometimes try so hard to be so epic that they border on self parody. Craven Moorhaus and Zak Koonce make silly videos using sound on their YouTube channel. They’re collectively known as the Auralnauts.

[music out]

Craven: In some ways we're trying to make a commentary that does have some comedic value but also gets people possibly interested in what the function of sound is.

In the 80’s and 90’s trailers were dominated by deep gravelly voiced narrators. Now, we’re in a sea of BWAH’s and BOOJes.

[SFX: Booj]

Craven: We just were thinking that people were leaning on that sound effect just too hard. But there is no denying how cool it can be when it happens. You know you feel it in your core.

Our brains are wired to have a survival response to strong low frequencies. Low frequency sounds trigger fear responses. Like rumbling thunder [SFX: thunder] or a lion roar [SFX: roar].

But how exactly is this sound made? The fundamental of most boojs are made by some sort of basic wave. A common choice being a sine wave which has no harmonics. Then, you give it a nice smooth pitch down.

[SFX: Sine wave drop low pitched]

But you could also use a square wave [SFX], sawtooth wave [SFX], or a triangle wave [SFX].

But that’s just the bones of booj creation. Sound designers can make them a bit punchier by adding a kick…

[SFX: booj with kick]

… a bit more aggressive by adding distortion…

[SFX: Booj with Distortion]

… or a add a chorus or double it.

[SFX: Big long booj with chorus]

The Booj possibilities are seemingly endless.

[SFX: 3 unique boojes]

Craven and Zak made a YouTube video called “How To Make A Blockbuster Movie Trailer.” In it, they explore all the tropes you tend to see in a trailer. Of course we have the booj, but as they dove deeper into these sonic tropes, they discovered more and more.

Craven: So right out of the gate we start with the single note trope, which feels like a good way to get the viewer on board with something that is possibly foreign to them.

[SFX: Auralnauts Trailer Video]

Craven: So right at eight seconds, we introduce another sound effect beyond the single note which is the low bwah.

[SFX: Auralnauts Trailer Video]

Craven: Usually the low bwah is sort of the call and response to the single note trope.

Dialogue has its tropes too.

Craven: So the thing that we're trying to juggle here, obviously, with adding dialogue is to give the viewer the impression that this template crosses many levels.

[SFX: Movie Hero - "Have you ever wondered about this particular thing?"]

[SFX: Movie Hero - "Because it turns out that that thing is real."]

Craven: At about this point in the trailer, the music that has been following the action thus far in the trailer than blossoms into what is a recognizable cover of a song that typically has not been covered before.

[SFX:"You spin me right round baby right round. Like a record baby right round round round."]

Craven: We landed on “You Spin Me Round" because that song is so hyper ridiculous and awesome. The idea that it would be used as the most dramatic song for a trailer was about as abstractly ridiculous as we could get.

Craven: It just immediately felt perfectly stupid.

Craven: You get people hooked and then you do some sort of tonal shift that introduces a problem or a bad guy or some sort of conflict.

[SFX: Villain- "You didn’t think it’d be that easy did you?"]

Craven: When you have a rhythm, a pulse going, and then it's duh duh duh duh duh. The triplet can be really effective, but for some reason in trailers, that's the hottest thing ever is a triplet locked to visuals snapping in at the same moment.

The climax of the trailer is punctuated by not one, but two boojs.

[SFX: Movie Hero - "I don’t think I’m the one, I don’t think I’m the one that can stop this thing."]

[SFX: Hero’s friend - "You are that person. Now take my hand. RUN!"]

Craven: It's like, why a second booj? That's as ridiculous as it can get.

After the double-booj rise, it’s time to start bringing the trailer home.

[SFX: Auralnauts Trailer Video]

Craven: So of course everything has to build to a head where the music will pause. And usually within that breath, sonically, there's a character bite.

[SFX: Movie Villain - For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction..."]

Craven: We went with a secondary statement from a bad guy.

[SFX: Movie Villain - "I am the reaction."]

Craven: And then give you that last single note smash in the face for the title reveal.

Craven: One final iteration of the chorus.

[SFX: Song playing "Like a record baby right round round round".]

Craven: Which feels even more stupid.

[Trailer End]

[music in]

While trailers are boomier than ever before, this certainly isn’t the first time time they’ve all sounded the same. The 30s had many of the same overly dramatic music tracks. The 80s and 90s were dominated by two deep aggressive voices. Today’s trailers have the bwah and the booj. With that in mind, what will future trailers sound like?

James: I'd like to see more original music, and music that doesn't sound like it's taken off of the shelf and reused.

Craven: Usually what happens is somebody does something way outside the box and then people latch onto it and then it just becomes the new thing that people are doing. I can almost imagine some movie trailer producers watching that video and saying… "Okay, these guys just blew it for the next six months for us."

[music out]

Hrishikesh Hirway: ...and now here’s How to Make a Blockbuster Movie Trailer, by Auralnauts…. in its entirety.

[Play How to Make a Blockbuster Movie Trailer]

[music in]

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

This episode was written and produced by Abigail Barr, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Jai Berger.

Thanks to our guests, James Deaville and Craven Moorhaus. James’ trailer-dissecting project can be found at Trailaurality.com. Craven Moorhaus is one of the co-creators of Auralnauts, and you can find their channel at Youtube.com/Auralnauts. You can find their fake movie trailer that inspired this episode on our website, 20k dot org. Thanks to Hrishikesh Hirway from the podcast Song Exploder for reading the introduction to the full Auralnauts trailer. Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I’ve been a huge fan from the very beginning and you should totally go subscribe to it.

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

Lastly, what’s your favorite booj, bwah, or a reimagined cover song from a trailer? Tell us on twitter, facebook or by writing hi at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Dining on Decibels: Why are restaurants so noisy?

Original artwork by Kyle Hodgman

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.

Have you noticed how loud it gets in restaurants these days? Have you found yourselves shouting just to keep a conversation going? Architecture critic Kate Wagner explains how changing design trends have led to dining experiences that aren’t just antisocial, but are negatively impacting our health as well.  


MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

A Stirring of Patience by Chad Lawson
The High Wind (Instrumental) by Brooke Waggoner
Money Makes The World Go Round (Instrumental) by Marcus Meston
Back Then ft. William $ (Instrumental) by Alexander Lewis
Mischief Afoot by James Childs
Fast Forward by Virgil Arles
Lit (Instrumental) by Har Megiddo
Now and Then by Uncle Skeleton
The Last Warmth by The Echelon Effect
Dizzy (Instrumental) by Fuzzy Halo
Cocoa Nibs by Uncle Skeleton
On The Grow! by Uncle Skeleton
Falling In by Shawn Williams
Coast (Instrumental) by Con Vos

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.

Contribute your local restaurant noise to the SoundPrint app at soundprint.co

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Check out Hi-Phi Nation at hiphination.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Restaurant ambience building]

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

[music in]

One of my biggest pet peeves is overly loud places. For some reason our society has confused loud places as fun places. They’re not. I’m usually the first person to leave a party when it gets too loud. In my opinion, nothing productive happens when you have to start yelling at each other just to be heard. Sadly, this perception of louder is better stretches across all of our society. Concerts, parties, restaurants, clothing stores, ….and even churches have jumped on the bandwagon of uncomfortably loud music. Ironically though, public restrooms are way too quiet. Honestly, that’s the one place I wouldn’t mind a little death metal.

[music out]

For the longest time, I felt like it was just me and 90 year olds who cared about this. Well, that was until I met Kate.

Kate: Hi, my name is Kate Wagner, and I'm an architecture and design critic based on Baltimore, Maryland.

You might know of Kate through, McMansion Hell, which is her website, which deconstructs some of the idiocracy in modern, suburban house design. However, her other intense passion is sound.

Kate: I was working as a recording engineer and was a music student as well and was very concerned about hearing loss. Paranoid more like it.

Kate: I was always afraid that one day I would wake up and not be able to hear.

[music in]

Kate: I was developing these aural skills to able to listen to sound at very specific frequencies to be able to hear things like the overtone series and whatnot and all of the sort of ear training you do when you work in recording and I was afraid that if I listened to music too loud or if I went to the bar and it was too loud that I wouldn't be able to do that anymore. That I would lose those skills and that was scary for me because at the time that's what I wanted to make a career out of.

So Kate became hyper-sensitive to the loud sounds that could damage her hearing, and actively tried to avoid them.

But that’s easier said than done, especially if you want to live a little.

[music out]

Kate: I think that since the dawn of electro acoustics probably, it’s been cool to be loud.

Kate: It was just about the raw, visceral power of electronic sound and I think that, that's translated to some extent into rock and roll.

Rock and Roll, Hip Hop, Pop... almost all genres.

Kate: There's a sort of culture of if it's too loud you're too old and I think that there's a point of pride, it's like it's attributed to youth and the raucousness of youth. The untamed, unwieldiness of adolescence and what not.

Kate: It's cool to listen to music really loud in your car. It's cool to listen to music really loud when you're a teenager in your parent's house.

Kate: It’s cool to listen to music really loud when you're in a rock concert or when you're at band practice et cetera.

We all know what she means, some music just isn’t meant to be played at anything less than 11. But sometimes we don’t get a choice about the loud noises assaulting our eardrums.

Kate: When the sound is unwanted then it becomes more irritable… loud music is about this weird sublime pleasure and sort of sadomasochistic pain, pleasure thing with music.

Kate: But loud noise I think is different than that. I think it's just irritating and then you start to sort of worry and then you start to think about, what about my health. [SFX: Bulldozer] Or it's just like God I wish the bulldozer would stop bulldozing at 7:00 in the morning. I think the unwanted characteristic is a key qualifier there.

There are so many sources of sound in the world today that we have no control over, and once you start to notice them, they can really get under your skin.

Some, like the busy background hum of a coffee shop [SFX: coffee shop ambience] seem to blend together to create a white noise that lots of people like, and will actively seek out. But other sounds, regardless of setting, or time of day, [SFX: jackhammer] are always [SFX: baby crying]- unwelcome.

Kate: I think that part of the reason why people listen to music so loud on headphones, earbuds especially, is because they're trying to drown out the other types of environmental noise

[SFX: tinny beats as if through headphones]

Kate: sounds like the bus for example, people listening to podcasts and music on the bus, it's like the bus sounds are irritating [SFX: bus motor], the other people are irritating [SFX: background chatter], the air brakes [SFX: air brakes] are irritating but what they're listening to even though it's too loud, it may be uncomfortably so, is somehow less irritating than the ambient sounds around them.

On busy city streets, on public transit, and in public spaces, you can see the truth in Kate’s words. More and more people are turning to the music and podcasts in their headphones to drown out the otherwise inescapable noise.

[music in]

But there are places where headphone listening can’t save us. Places that can be louder than construction sites, but that we choose to go to on a regular basis. Restaurants. If you haven’t noticed it before, I’m sorry, but you’ll almost certainly notice it now... Actually I’m not sorry - more people need to be angry about it. I’ve got serious problem with it, and so does Kate.

Kate: I personally have a beef with it 'cause eating out is a lot of fun, right? Its social, you get to eat delicious food that you don't have to cook, you get to have delicious drinks and deserts. I mean eating out is a good time, but the fact that it's so loud makes it much less of a good time.

[music out]

There’s no getting away from it, today’s restaurants are loud. It’s hard to hear yourself think, not to mention have a conversation.

[SFX: Building restaurant noise, layering new sounds]

There’s music thumping, the clatter of machines, cutlery, glasswear, and people shouting to be heard over, well, all of the other people.

Kate: So we ask ourselves why are restaurants so loud?

[SFX: Restaurant noise out]

Kate: A loud restaurant seems like it's more popular, like its more funky. That's why restaurateurs in the 90s and 2000s started pumping loud music in their restaurants even though no one was there, and that's just now ubiquitous. You can't go anywhere without a loud restaurant.

Kate: The bagel shop I go to in the morning, [SFX: muffled thumping drum and bass] they're just playing Rihanna, thumping, bassing, its 8:00 am and I'm just like my God do we need to play club music at 8:00 am at the bagel store?

But it’s not just the music. The problem goes much deeper, to the styles and trends that underlie modern restaurant design.

Kate: Another reason why restaurants are so loud as far as the design perspective goes, is because for example, things like communal turnovers, bars that are in the restaurant that are not separated in any way from the restaurant.

Having the two together isn’t just trendy, it reduces the need for table service, and you need fewer staff, helping restaurants to cut back costs.

[music in]

But even the look of your restaurant can have a big effect on what it sounds like. The biggest culprit, Kate says, is minimalism.

Kate: Minimalism, just in the broadest sense is basically very sparse furnishings, nothing plush or fluffy or anything like that. Nothing traditional, it’s very modern. And so you get things like slate floors, wood walls, Danish designer chairs, rusticated light fixtures.

Kate: There's industrial minimalism, which is Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood and all this other stuff, but then there's also minimalism that's super designy, everything is metal, steel, glass, all these hard surfaces and materials.

Kate: Curtains and carpets and low ceilings or acoustic ceilings in any way are very much not minimalist, and they are considered kind of a drag, or they're considered too plush…. and so what you end up with is you have these tall ceilings, and you have nothing to absorb sound, and you have these hard materials on all of your surfaces, no tablecloths, nothing.

[music out]

You’ll see it if you go into any trendy bar anywhere in the country. It’s the very essence of coolness right now. But minimalism comes with an added bonus if you’re trying to run a restaurant. No soft surfaces means much less effort to keep everything clean. But soft surfaces do more than soak up spills, they also soak up sound.

[SFX: Underlying restaurant chatter]

Kate: Not even a tablecloth to absorb sound, the only thing absorbing sound in a restaurant is other people, and they're making sound, so it kind of cancels each other out. And so what you get is just a big box that just bounces sound around a room.

Kate: In order to absorb sound you need a material on a wall, or ceiling or floor that is absorptive. And when you have none of those things the sound just keeps bouncing off instead of being absorbed or transmitted through a wall or something like that.

Kate: So what you get is you get a room that is unintelligible and you get one that's loud because the more people talk the more new sound energy comes into the room and so then that's bouncing off the walls and it combines with the sound energy that's already bouncing off the walls. And so you just get a big soupy mess of sound.

[SFX: Loud unintelligible restaurant noise]

Ugh...I don’t know about you, but that much loud noise is just exhausting. And that soupy mess can get really, really loud. Even in supposedly relaxing coffee shops, including the one Kate likes to work in, the volume levels can get surprisingly high.

Kate: It was kind of a down time at the restaurant… even then, the ambient level was in the 70 decibel range and to give an example of what else is in that range, that's freeway noise [SFX: fast cars passing], and that's a sewing machine [SFX: sewing machine] and a vacuum cleaner [SFX: vacuum cleaner], so it's not exactly quiet.

Kate: But when we get into other restaurants, like the wine bar I was in that was in the 80 decibel range. Then you start to get into levels that can start to be damaging to hearing over time. So for example, 85 decibels over eight hours permanently damages your hearing.

Kate: The restaurants that were the loudest that I measured were at the 90 decibel range.

The noise levels are posing a real health risk. It would seem that Kate’s worries about hearing loss during dinner are justified. Plus, there’s clear research showing that this much noise in a restaurant is unhealthy.

Kate: Like those studies that link excessive restaurant noise to excessive alcohol consumption because we drink when we're stressed.

Kate: But there was also a series of restaurant studies done at Oxford that showed that stressful restaurant conditions, including noise drive people to make unhealthier choices.

[music in]

Kate: These are all things that benefit restaurateurs, they have lower overhead, they have less maintenance and they have higher turnover and more alcohol sales. But at the expense of everyone who dines there, so I was kind of peeved by that.

Through our unconscious drive to follow fashion, we go to these trendy places. They’ve got integral cocktail bars and shiny metal tables - they’re the very essence of cool. But electing to spend our time in these places is actively harming us!

Perhaps it’s not all bad news, though. Taking a step back, we can figure out how we got here, and if there’s anything we can do about our current dining dystopia. Find out, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

If, like me, you love eating out, then you’ll understand the pain and frustration in not being able to enjoy a meal because of overwhelming and inescapable noise. And it’s becoming more and more common. We’re facing an epidemic of antisocially and dangerously noisy restaurants right now.

Kate Wagner is an expert in architectural acoustics. She blames the loudness of our dining experience on the current trend for minimalist design. Clean lines and shiny surfaces have been the death of sound-friendly materials in our restaurants.

But the sounds we experience in the environment have changed drastically over human history. And just like today, they were driven by innovations and trends.

[music out]

Kate: Before people there were these sound like bird noises [SFX: bird noises], like the sounds of the natural world. You start to get early people noise… conversation [SFX: muffled conversation], these kinds of things but you start to get things like the church bell [SFX: church bell] and the town crier and agriculture, horses [SFX: farming sounds], Metal, blacksmithing [SFX: anvil strike].

Kate: The industrial revolution changed the soundscape forever and you started to get things like factory noise, mechanical noise, you started to hear things like bicycles and cars, cobblestones, all this stuff. [SFX: Building industrial noise] Everything exploded all at once and now it's really noisy. And what's so interesting about noise is that at the beginning of modernity, the mid to late 19th century and the early 20th century, noise was thought of as a celebration of progress.

At the time, the sound of industry was as much a symbol of cutting edge modern advancement as the 8am drum and bass in the bagel shop. But the noisy advance of progress wasn’t going to last forever.

Kate: It started to be negative starting around the turn of the 20th century. There were certain noises that were considered to be bad.

Noises from things like steamships [SFX: steamships] and railways [SFX: steam train] and factories [SFX: mechanical factory noise]. As much as they were a sign of progress, people really hated those sounds, and soon they became a major public health concern. Eventually, measures were taken to radically change the acoustic environment.

Kate: Early noise control in architectural acoustics for example, there is an ideology of sanitized sound. It was like that noise became a symbol of inefficiency. It became a symbol that things are not working as they could and so the acoustic ideal of the 1920s and 30s was to make places that are entirely silent.

Kate: It got so extreme, the mentality of total absorption that reverberant or any kind of reflections became seen as noise as well. And there was this idea that the ideal acoustic condition was one of total absorption.

[music in]

Kate: For thousands of years in architectural acoustics, whether you're talking about the acoustics of churches or you're talking about the acoustics of the Roman Amphitheater or you're talking about acoustics of 19th century shoebox halls, the acoustic ideal was based around reverberance because reverberance was at the time, the sonic picture, the sonic image of what a building was.

Kate: And in the 20th century with the advent of these new acoustic materials for absorbing sound you could. You could have a building that looked cavernous and it be silent and that completely divorced the architecture of a building from what it sounded like for the first time in human history.

[music out]

So, as public opinion waxes and wanes, acoustic ideals do change over time, just like design trends. Right now, minimalism is a trend with apparently little care for acoustic aesthetics. In restaurants, it’s led to a soupy mess of sound. But the good news is, the tides might be starting to turn once again.

Kate: These trends, like this minimalism and these design trends and the high ceilings and the no soft goods, is very much equivalent to what we consider to be high luxury

Kate: In residential design you're starting to see more soft goods come into play, you're starting to see lots of attention being paid to carpeting and rugs specifically. You're starting to see a move away from minimalism towards what consumer level magazine would say is maximalism, which is just interior design speak for houses with people's actual stuff in it. But I really think that interior design is starting to finally get sick of minimalism because it has been so many years of minimalism in high architecture and design, and it is so boring.

Perhaps, then, there is hope for our horrifyingly loud restaurant culture. But right now there are already a few places you can shelter from the noisy storm.

[SFX: Gentle clink of cutlery and glassware]

Kate: The restaurants that are the quietest are those hole in the wall, Napolese, Indian and Thai restaurants 'cause they still have the carpet and they still have the acoustic ceiling tile and they still have the table settings and things like that.

Kate: I mean anyone who's been to a Napolese restaurant is familiar probably with this décor that's like red carpet floors, lots of white table cloths, very kind of formal décor and that's why they're so much more quiet than the bar across the street.

Kate: So it's kind of funny actually, those restaurants, which I think if people were being pejorative would call them dated or tacky are actually way quieter and therefore more enjoyable to eat in than everything that's super hip but so loud that your ears are splitting.

If you’re a restauranteur with your diners’ happiness on your conscience, you don’t necessarily need to embrace the dated decor. There are thoughtful solutions that can keep everyone happy.

Kate: It's about avoiding the bad really. Designing the good is a lot more nuanced but you at first have to avoid the bad.

Kate: Thinking and building for sound starts at conception. It's not something that can be applied after the fact. Acoustics starts at the beginning of the architectural process.

That means thinking carefully about bringing noisy features into the dining areas. Open kitchens might add atmosphere to the restaurant, but they also add a lot of noise.

Kate: Things like high ceilings are a concern. If your ceilings are high it's gonna be probably louder or at least more reverberant unless you've just coated the whole thing in padded foam.

Kate: But what the good news is, and I think this is a really great thing is that design for acoustics has been on fire lately.

[music in]

Industrial noise was solved with brand new acoustic materials in the early 20th Century. Today, designers are redoubling their efforts to make spaces that not only look good, but sound good too.

Kate: You have things like acoustic furniture now, like these booths with these really tall backs to sort of isolate sound and give both visual and sonic privacy. There's all these colorful artworks that are now acoustics panels. They are architectural features and not just things that you tacked on 'cause you screwed up the sound in your space.

Kate: The acoustic ceiling does no longer have to be drop ceilings from elementary school with fluorescent lights built in.

Kate: Now they have these sculptural ceilings, with acoustic backing and micro perforated surfaces that allow sound to be absorbed behind them but they'll look just like wood or metal or anything else that you really want it to look like.

Kate: 'Cause a lot of them are screen printed and they're really, really, really, really high def screen printing, so you really can't tell that, that's not real wood. So if your restaurant is horribly loud and you want to remodel there's lots of options for you.

[music out]

We’re really fortunate to be living through this time of acoustic innovation and unprecedented flexibility with materials and design. But ultimately it’s up to us, the consumer, to make it clear that something needs to change.

Kate: Now there are these apps, like Sound Print is an app that's devoted specifically to having sound meter. You open up Sound Print, and you record some noise for a little bit, and it will capture and enter this database of restaurant noise.

It’s basically Yelp, but for loud restaurants.

Kate: So they'll tell you what restaurants are loud, they'll give you sonic profiles for restaurants. It's like do you want it to be raucous bar loud, do you want it to be coffee shop loud or just casual conversation loud. Do you want it to be very quiet and private?

[music in]

These days, we have unprecedented control over our lives, with almost unlimited choice in what we eat, where we eat, and who we eat with. So, why shouldn’t we make a choice about our acoustic experience too?

Our sense of hearing is chronically underappreciated, but it’s one that has a surprising lasting impact on our culture.

Kate: I wanted to work in making spaces that sounded better because I felt like that had a longer legacy than anything else. Because we still go to listen to music in Musikverein in Vienna and it was built in the 19th century. We still go to Boston Symphony Hall and it's built in 1900. I mean, you have an influence of centuries.

In a hundred years, I doubt we’re going to be longing for the soundscape of our minimalist wine bars.

So if - like me - you’re infuriated by the almost unavoidable assault on our ears in restaurants, how about we make a stand. It won’t take much - maybe just ask them to turn the music down, or start contributing restaurant noise to the sound print app. Tell your friends and get them to make sound-based meal choices too. I’d LOVE to make it to the end of the night without my ears ringing and still having my voice. I’d really, really like to make this a thing... Perhaps we can start a new trend of actually being able to hear each other while we’re eating out.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, an insanely talented sound design team creating beautiful sonic landscapes for television, film and games. Hear sound design excerpts at instagram dot com slash defacto sound.

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison, and me Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed, and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

Thanks to our guest Kate Wagner. You can find Kate’s well crafted opinions on poorly crafted houses at mcmansionhell.com. Plus, you can find her over on twitter and instagram at mcmansionhell.

All of the music in this episode is from our friends at MusicBed. Check them out at musicbed dot com.

Thanks to Sarah Ault for naming this episode. Finally, if you’re as outraged as Kate and I are about noisy restaurants, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach out on Twitter, on Facebook, or by writing me at hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

VIEW ARCHIVE

Do Not Disturb: The unseen impacts of alarms and alerts

Original artwork by Kyle Hodgman

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.

Alarm sounds have been around almost as long as humans themselves. But as our world has transformed, so have they. Today’s alarms are having an unexpected effect on our minds and bodies, and can even be putting our lives at risk when we’re at our most vulnerable. Dr Judy Edworthy and Yoko Sen talk to us about our alarming sound environment, and how it can be improved.


MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

The Fairest Things by Chad Lawson
A&O by Uncle Skeleton
Autonoe by AM Architect
Seeing the Future by Dexter Britain
Glacier by Jacob Montague
Begin Again (feat eebee) by Generdyn
Infinite Sonata by Jordan Critz
Sleep Walker by Dexter Britain
Rennaissance by AJ Hochhaltar

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Noisy alarm ambience]

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

Do me a favour, and turn off your notifications for the next half hour [SFX: alarms cut out]. Put your phone on silent, place it out of arm’s reach, and whatever you do, don’t give into the temptation to check it for notifications.

[music in]

How does that make you feel? Stressed? Disconnected? In the past few decades, the world has become a noisier place, full of devices of every sort vying for your attention. Attention that many of us seem all too ready to give.

But have you ever really wondered what effects all those alerts and alarms are having on you? The sound of a text message arriving only lasts about a second, [SFX: IPhone ding alert] but has the ability to affect your brain, your body, and your whole approach to life.

And to find out why, we need to go way back in time, to the beginning of human society.

[music out]

Judy: I guess people have always used sound to attract attention, because that's what the auditory sense is for.

That’s Dr Judy Edworthy, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Plymouth in the UK. She’s trying to understand what’s going on in our brains when we hear alarm sounds.

Judy: Hearing and vision work together, and because your ears are all-round sense, really they're there for directing your ears to face the right way so that you then use your eyes.

Judy: When people wanted to attract attention, the obvious way to do that is to make a sound, and there's a whole history of things that make very loud sounds, across mountains and all sorts of things.

Those ancient alarms would sound in times of crisis, to forewarn and call for help, and they play a big part in fictional and historical accounts of war. [SFX: War ambience begin]

One such alarm is the Gjallarhorn, which translates literally as the “yelling horn”. It’s from Norse mythology. At Ragnarok - the coming apocalypse - the horn would be blown [SFX: Horn Blow] and would be heard in all the worlds, where it would awaken the Gods for their last stand.

Judy: When society became more industrialized, of course you needed to announce the end of a factory shift or things like that, and the only ways you could produce sound was either to hit something or to pass air through something. So, you had a range of bells [SFX: single large bell] or klaxons [SFX: Vintage Klaxon sound] and very little else, really. Anything that made a loud sound, really. Because you couldn't do it any other way.

So, historically, alarm sounds have been used when someone really really needed to get your attention. We heard relatively few of them, and as a result, many of them are burned into our collective consciousness.

Judy: A very good example would be the air raid siren from the Second World War [SFX: Air Raid Siren] . Everybody knew what that sound was. It had a particular characteristic, because you had to literally wind it up. Everybody knew what that meant. It was very, very loud, so it could spread across the whole town. And as soon as you heard it, you knew what you had to do.

[music in]

But in more than 70 years since the war, the technological revolution has totally transformed our world, and the sounds that fill it.

Judy: The technology's got a lot better, so we can now produce any sound, rather than having a very restricted range of sounds.

Electronic advances have miniaturized and totally mastered sound production. Now, the most incredible sounds can be made from the device in your pocket. [SFX: Complex alert tone].

But despite the capabilities, beautiful sounds are not always what we get in day to day life.

Judy: Everything that surrounds us just beeps now, because if it's easy and cheap to put a sound on a piece of equipment, then you can be sure that people will do that. And of course we're now completely overwhelmed with these sounds.

[music out]

[SFX: Alarm clock interrupts music]

Judy: From the time you get up, you have your clock on [SFX: clock sound]. You have a phone as well [SFX: phone alert sound]. And then you've got the microwave that beeps [SFX: beeping microwave]. And then you've got your car that will beep about all sorts of things [SFX: car beeps]. And then you get to work and you open your computer and that beeps at you as well [SFX: PC alert sounds]. And so it goes on.

The [alert] constant [alert] interruption is [alert] unlike anything preceding generations [alert] have [alert] had to cope with.

[music in]

Alarms have historically been about action, emergency, a call to arms.

With that ingrained into our basic psyche, today we’re finding ourselves pulled in all kinds of directions by the simple tones that come out of our devices. The alarms assault us throughout the day, and we’re struggling to keep up with the unconscious instinct to react.

Not only are they making us more distracted, but the acoustic intrusion is doing things to your mind and body that you might not expect.

[music out]

Judy: You make a response to a sound on the basis of its acoustic structure in the first instance. So, a shrill, loud sound will stimulate more nerve cells than a quieter, lower-pitched one. So, it will increase your attention levels or your stress levels or your arousal level more than a sound that's not like that. So, you can't really avoid that.

But, even the most innocuous sounds can mess with your mind - if they mean something to you. In psychology it’s called stimulus-response behaviour.

Judy: You hear a sound, and you learn a response. It doesn't require any real thought. You just learn an association between the two.

Judy: So, if you've learnt that, let's say, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star [SFX: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on music box] is the alarm that your submarine uses [SFX: submarine explosion with Twinkle Twinkle little Star alarm tone] if it's just about to be flooded. Now, that will be an urgent sound to you, because you've learnt its meaning. It's not an urgent sound psychoacoustically or acoustically, but because you've learnt its meaning, then it will produce a similar response to the shrill, loud sound, in you, because you know what it means

Now, submarines flooding might not be a problem for most people, but chances are you’re familiar with this kind of learned response. Take email or text for example. Have you ever had a toxic exchange with a colleague, or a loved one, and you’re nervously waiting, dreading their response? For a while after, every time your phone or computer pings [SFX: alert], you’d feel a knot in your stomach, your heart would beat harder in your chest. Basically, you’d be getting an instant, unconscious stress response, before you even knew who sent the message.

[music in]

Science is starting to catch up with some of the effects that alerts from our devices are having on us. Studies have shown that we’re not just experiencing short term distraction, but our habits are leading to more serious symptoms of ADHD.

Plus there’s a phenomenon that scientists have had to come up with a name for, since it never really existed before. Ringxiety is where we are convinced we hear our phone ringing [SFX: Phone ring], when really, it was just some other, broadly similar sound.

On the other hand, there is another response to this busy world of alerts and alarms...

[music out]

Judy: I think we just ignore them. When I'm with people and I hear an alarm, I say, "What's that?" And they're looking at me as if to say, "What? What are you talking about?" It's because I guess I listen to them more than most people. But people just don't hear them.

It’s known as inattentional deafness.

Judy: There's no reason why you didn't hear it, but you paid no attention to it. Or it registered with your ear but not with your brain, really.

Judy: There's so much stimulation of so many sorts, that we can cut ourselves off from all of it.

It might seem like the obvious solution is to switch off our notifications, silence the alarms, and get back to a simpler life, but it might be too late for that. Our relationships with our devices are showing the signs of compulsive addiction. This is the same type of addiction you’d experience from nicotine or hardcore drugs. The alerts give us a sense of social connectedness, and in the modern world many of us feel stress simply by feeling unconnected.

We’re caught in a Catch 22. What’s important is to be mindful of the alerts we are inviting into our lives.

Judy: Pay attention and learn what's important and what's not. Because it probably won't be intuitive.

[music in]

The alarm sounds we hear in our daily lives are creating so much physical and psychological stress, but there’s a place where they’re causing more serious harm, and even be putting lives at risk.

We’ll find out where, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

We are so surrounded by electronic devices today that we can’t get away from the sounds they produce. The assault of alarms and alerts in our everyday lives is affecting our minds and bodies, even though we might not realise it.

But what’s it like for people who are already unwell?

Yoko: My name is Yoko K. Sen and I suppose I am a sound designer. I am a musician.

Yoko: I produce music. I mix, write, record, perform music, I think I'm a very sound person per se.

Yoko: I had to spend some time in hospitals as a patient, and being a musician, sensitive to sound, I was very disturbed by the noise in hospitals

[music out]

If you’ve ever had to visit a hospital, you know that they’re far from restful places. As soon as you walk through the door, and a tide of sound washes over you.

[SFX: Hospital soundscape begins]

Yoko: You hear machine sounds and it's all the beeps of medical devices, but it's not limited to medical devices. You also hear phones, pagers, overhead speakers. Often times in hospitals, the staff members carry this card key and you have to scan the card key, so every time that scan takes place, there's "beep," a tiny sound. And lots of people go through the door, so that accumulates and that's also part of the soundscape. Elevators make the "ding" sound. Parking payment machine makes a sound. So everything makes a sound.

Yoko: Then we have talking of people, that are generally a sort of ambience of conversations and carts rolling, people's footsteps, doors getting slammed, distant muffling sound of people screaming. [SFX: Baby crying] Then there are like white noise from the fan. There's a ice machine. There are all sorts of different sounds, so it's the combination of all, but I think the most characteristics of hospital is those beeps, the medical alarms.

All of this added together isn’t just background noise. It can be really, really loud.

Yoko: When it's quiet, it's about 40 to 50 decibels, but when it's pretty loud, it goes up to easily 60, 70 decibels. Sometimes it hit 80 to 90 decibels as well.

For some context, 60 decibels is about the volume of a normal conversation at home, but in a hospital that’s the minimum you’re likely to experience. Ninety decibels is the volume you get when you’re using a lawnmower. [SFX: lawnmower sound]

Unsurprisingly, these kinds of sound environments aren’t all that healthy for recovering patients.

Yoko: Florence Nightingale said, "Unnecessary noise is the cruelest absence of care." She wrote that more than 100 years ago.

[music in]

Yoko: When things are loud, people complain that it's difficult to sleep at night. It disturbs their sleep. It disturbs their rest. Noisy environment could cause more anxiety, sense of fear, and stress for patients. Especially for pediatric patients and the young patients' parents. I often hear from those parents that when alarms go off for they're babies, the first thing that young parents would think is, "Oh, no. Is my baby going to die?" It's very scary, and it happens so often, so it kind of creates this [SFX: shocked inhale] feeling in not just your sort of mental state, but like physically. It's sort of a physical sensation.

That physical reaction is just like the stomach-dropping, heart thumping stimulus response you get when a dreaded email alert comes in, only much worse. And it stays with you...

Yoko: I interviewed one person. He had his daughter more than 10 years ago in NICU, and there was this particular alarm sound that kept going off, so even after 10 years, if he hears the sound that's similar to that alarm on television or other places, he still gets this, sort of a traumatized reaction.

[music out]

Yoko: When it comes to staff members, like clinicians, nurses, and doctors, they are often conditioned to only think about the welfare of patients. But I think that there is a enormous impact of noise on clinicians' wellbeing, and often times they are not aware of such impact. I think it affects their fatigue, stress, burnout...

That burnout is a pretty well-recognised thing - it’s called alarm fatigue.

Yoko: Alarm fatigue is a desensitization that clinicians have when all the alarms keep going off all the time. [SFX: Medical alarms building] Then they start to get desensitized by all the alarms. There is a study that indicates that 85 to 99% of alarms are either clinically insignificant or false positives, but there's 1% of alarm that you're not supposed to miss, so that creates a extremely tiring environment.

Hold up. Up to 99 out of every hundred of those constant hospital alarms are insignificant. But that 1 percent, could be a sign of someone’s life in danger. That’s - just - TERRIFYING.

Judy: There are some things that the nurses, the doctors, and so on, can do to reduce the false alarm rates. Things like making sure the leads are always fresh and new, and if you got sensors on a patient they're clean, and when you move the patient, you turn the alarms off.

Judy: But of course you're also operating in a culture where the manufacturer doesn't want to be sued. So, the easiest way to do that is to have an alarm, and to have those alarms going off all the time. 'Cause they quite reasonably say, "Well, an alarm went off. You didn't hear it."

It’s a scary environment to be in, let alone work in. But it’s not all bad news.

Judy is part of a group working on improving the global standards for medical alarms.

Judy: It's I-E-C, which stands for International Electrotechnical Commission, which is the International Standards Organization. The alarms currently in the standard are tonal, so they're like little melodies. You'll have heard these, because they're used on medical equipment, and to some extent that explains why when you go into just a general hospital ward you'll hear all these little melodies, 'cause that's really the way people are thinking about designing alarms for medical equipment.

[SFX: generic hospital beeps]

They’re all pretty generic, the same kind of electronic beep. And because they’re so similar, they’re hard to distinguish from each other. But Judy and her team are thinking laterally to design an entirely new kind of alarm.

Judy: When we hear a natural sound, it's because two or more objects or things have interacted. And the sound that you hear is a function of those objects.

Judy: If you think of a bowling ball going down an alley and then hitting the skittles, there's a very characteristic sound. You can imagine it now. But you know that the ball is rolling along the alley [SFX: ball rolling], you know when the skittles have gone down [SFX: skittle drop], because of the structure of the alley and the structure of the skittles and the structure of the ball, and the acoustics of that environment. So you know what's happening.

The plan is to incorporate these kinds of environmental sounds into medical alarms, so that they give information about what they’re alerting for.

Judy: Because environmental sounds can act as a metaphor for the event that's happening, and it's much, much easier for people to understand what the sound is for.

Judy: So, for example, there's only one obvious one for cardiac, which is a heartbeat [SFX: Heartbeat icon].

Judy: If you present people with these sounds, and say, "This is cardiovascular, a rattling pill bottle is infusion pumps [SFX: Pill bottle icon]," ... 'cause it's drugs, right? It only takes them one or two trials to learn that.

Those last 2 examples are some of the alarms Judy has been developing. They’re a huge leap from the kinds of alarms we’re used to hearing, alarms that are based on those ancient bells and horns.

Judy: People might say, "Well, if you use a heartbeat, how will I hear that? I would need a really shrill alarm in order to hear it." And actually, you don't. Because it's harmonically rich, you can detect it in lower signal-to-noise ratios, which means it needs to be less loud for the same noise background, as a traditional tonal alarm. So, you can detect it.

[music in]

When the new standard is finalised in the next few years, it looks set to transform the alarm soundscape in hospitals. It’ll help doctors and nurses to do their jobs, and potentially make hospitals a calmer, and quieter place. But, is it doing enough?

Judy: Alarms are often seen as a bad thing, because they sound so bad. But if they were better, I think people would appreciate their value more. But ultimately, you don't want any alarms at all.

Yoko: Often times people ask me what's the ideal alarm, what's the ideal sound environment, and I say, "No, nothing." And I'd love to design toward the obliteration of my work.

[music out]

Getting rid of alarms altogether is probably a step too far for now, but alarms aren’t the only part of the busy and stressful sound environment in hospitals. Yoko has been thinking about the effect of so much noise on medical staff. After all, they’re the people who spend the most time there.

Yoko: Noise is causing stress, but stress might be causing more noisy behaviors. Like, when I'm stressed out, I become less careful and I might be talking louder, I slam the door [SFX: door slam]. I'm just louder in general. So, we thought about ways to help reduce the stress level of staff members in the hospital in order to reduce their behavior-based noise.

Yoko: So we prototyped and implemented a relaxation space for hospitals' doctors and nurses. [SFX: Tranquility room audio] It's a space with soothing music, dim light, aromatherapy, and amenities. It's like a spa inside hospitals, but for staff members to come and take a moment of peace outside the cacophony of noisy environment.

It’s called the Tranquility Room, and right now you’re hearing some of the soothing music that fills the space. So far, it’s only been installed in one hospital in Washington DC. It’s too soon to say if it’s reduced stress based noise, but it is already having tangible effects on stress levels themselves.

Yoko: On the first day that we opened the space there was a young graduate nurse who had his first patient death, and he was able to use that space to have a moment and collect his thoughts, and he said that made such a difference in his shift.

So if these creative ways to reduce noise just happen to improve people’s mental health in other ways, that can’t be a bad thing, right?

[Tranquility room audio out]

[music in]

The end of life isn’t something many of us like to think about, but it’s a pretty sobering fact that the majority of people over 65 actually come to the end of their lives in a hospital.

Yoko: Some people say hearing is the last sense to go when we die, and I used to wonder what is the last sound I get to hear at the end of my life? And I wondered if it's the combination of beeps, and I just thought that's really sad, you know? If that's the last note the closing note of my life, that's just sad, right?

[music out]

[music in]

Yoko’s approach is a creative, emotive one, while Judy is working hard to improve those necessary medical alarms. Together, they’re pushing towards a better understanding of the sound in hospitals. And with a better understanding will hopefully come a better experience for those that work in them, and visit them.

Judy: You know, we've moved on a long way, and it can affect people's lives. It can in fact even save their lives.

Yoko: I'm fascinated by complexity, and this sound environment is seemingly really simple, but it's very complex and it has very nuanced ways of affecting us, and as a musician I believe that life happens in nuances that words cannot explain, and I like to improve those nuances of life.

CREDITS

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

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

Thanks to our guests, Dr Judy Edworthy and Yoko Sen. You can listen to Yoko’s tranquility room and other sound projects, as well as her other research and outreach at sensound.space.

Dr. Judy Edworthy is the Director of the Cognition institute and Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Plymouth in the UK. As well as designing and understanding alarms in everyday and specific situations, she’s also researching the aesthetics of popular songs.

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

Finally, I LOVE to hear from our listeners, and I’m curious to know what kinds of sounds YOU think you might have an unconscious reaction to. Tell us on Facebook, Twitter, or by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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Blue! 42! How helmet radio changed the NFL

Original artwork by Jason Watson

This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther.

For decades, NFL strategy slowly evolved from each team running a dozen different plays, to rigid schemes with coaches sending in orders through codewords and secret signals. Then, one piece of audio technology revolutionized the game. Beginning in the early 1990's, the NFL allowed coaches to speak directly to their quarterbacks through radios in their helmets. What followed was an instant increase in excitement for the nation's most popular sport, spawning a high-scoring era of fast paced offenses. Featuring former Super Bowl winning coach, Dick Vermeil, current LA Rams Head Coach Sean McVay, Bose Senior Project Manager Matt Ruwe, and Bose Distinguished Engineer Dan Gauger.  

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Incredible (Instrumental) by Oh The Larceny
Nomad by Cathedral
Together (Instrumental) by Norman
High Wire (Instrumental) by Kaleigh Baker
From Scratch by Chad Lawson
Just a Touch by Chad Lawson
My Way featuring Yacht Money (Instrumental) by Mike Mains and the Branches
Come and Get It by Celldweller
Tangle by Nick Box
Heaven Sent by Soldier Story
Gunslinger by Bytheway-may
Focus by Cultus
Move with it (Instrumental) by Oh the Larceny
Allow Me (Instrumental) by Kilgore
Roller Skates by Virgil Arles

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

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.

Visit mystery.20k.org to enter this weeks mystery sound.

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

Are you a Sound Editor interested in editing for 20k? Apply at soundeditor.20k.org.

Are you a Writer interested in writing for 20k? Apply at writer.20k.org.

Check out Bose at bose.com.

Subscribe to The Truth wherever you get your podcasts. Or go to the truthpodcast.com.

Robert Baker voiced "The Coach" during the play calls.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Football play calls - Bunch right 95 keeper, right Y sly, sprout left exit, Richard Nixon.]

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

[SFX: Football plays continued]

[music in]

Football has been america’s most popular sport for decades, but the game has changed dramatically in recent years. Modern NFL play calls are a complex language of code words that, to most us, just sound like complete nonsense.

[SFX: Football play calls]

Play call: Alright, lets go west slot right, 72 Z bingo, U-split, can it, 58 lexus apple, 314 hammer.

[music out]

[music in]

Just like you don’t have to be an audiophile to listen to Twenty Thousand Hertz, you don’t have to be a sports fan to appreciate this episode. So, stick with me here. By the end of this episode, you’re going to know some things about football that even normal fans don’t understand. ...anyway, to the uninitiated, football can look pretty haphazard, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Strategy and play calling is a huge part of the appeal of football. ...and that’s what originally drew Dick Vermeil to the game.

Dick: I got involved in football as a high school student, my sophomore year, in about 1951. So, it's been a long time. And, then I went on and played in high school and junior college, then, college, then became a high school football coach.

[music out]

Dick: I really loved it. I loved the Xs and Os part of it. It just fascinated me. It's like a chess game, how you move 'em around and all that.

Play calls today might be beyond the comprehension of even the most diehard football fan, but when Coach Vermeil was starting out, the game was far simpler.

Dick: I called my own plays in the huddle, as a player in high school and junior college and in college. Course, that's the archaic way to do it. When I became a coach, at first my quarterback called his own plays from a game plan, but we only had five or six runs and four or five passes in those days.

[SFX: High School Practice Game, QB play calling]

Dick: Whenever I hear from one of my old high school players, I always finish it 'Coach Vermeil', and I put the play 'blast right'. That was the play. We only had one or two formations.

[music in]

But while Coach Vermeil was calling “Blast right,” a legend of the sidelines was experimenting with a technology decades ahead of his time. Paul Brown was the co-founder and coach of the Cleveland Browns, and the team still bears his name today. He won seven league championships over 25 seasons, and invented everything from the facemask to some of the plays still in use today.

During his time two Cleveland fans, John Campbell and George Sarles, came to Brown with an idea. By modifying military radio technology, they could put a radio receiver in a quarterback’s helmet, which would allow for coaches to speak directly to their players from the sideline. This was completely unheard of at the time.

The technology was so new that a suspicious police officer almost arrested Campbell and Sarles when they were out testing the helmet one night. Luckily for them, the cop was a fellow Cleveland Browns fan, and let them go.

Later, during a preseason game against the Detroit Lions, Coach Brown tested the radio in his quarterbacks helmet. Opposing coaches noticed the transmitter on the Browns’ sideline, and the NFL banned the technology shortly after. That ban would stay in place for decades.

[music out]

Meanwhile, Dick Vermeil rose through the coaching ranks. In the seventies, he became the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, and brought with him the latest in play calling techniques.

[music in]

Dick: As a head coach in the NFL, we called the plays from the sideline.

Dick: I would call the play. There would be a coach on each side of me that would signal it in. Now, their bodies were numbered, positions on their bodies were numbered, and they would take a left hand touch the knee, right hand touch his shoulder, that might mean 23.

Dick: I had two signal callers, because we didn't want people to know which guy was calling the play. One was hot one quarter, one was hot the other quarter, and we rotated.

[music out]

This technique is still common in college football, which doesn’t allow direct radio communications between coach and quarterback. Before each play, you can see assistant coaches that look like they’re waving off a swarm of angry bees [SFX: Bees swarming] as they signal to players. Once the call goes in, quarterbacks translate the information to a specific play by looking at a wristband with all the plays listed on it by number.

[music in]

Dick: A quarterback would wear an armband and a coach would signal number two and he'd look and 'ooh, number two is this play', and he would call it. And, the formation packages would change with a substitute going in and out. One, two, sometimes three players going out in different packages.

Although widespread, this system is far from perfect.

Dick: I can specifically remember being 3rd down goal-to-goal on the 2 yard line against the Dallas Cowboys and send in a play and it got all screwed up, so the quarterback called the play, the play call was all screwed up, we scored anyway.

[music out]

After six years coaching the Eagles, including a trip to the Super Bowl in 1980, Coach Vermeil retired from coaching. He became a football broadcaster, watching the game he loved from the press box.

Dick: Through the years, I was in broadcasting, and I watched it change. I wasn't involved in it. It changed and became more scientific. Pretty quick the electronics came into it.

Dick: As we all know, we're in the entertainment business, so we wanna keep the game smoother.

Eventually, the NFL loosened restrictions on the use of radio headsets. Mainly because they wanted to speed up the game. And after nearly 15 years away. Coach Vermeil came out of retirement to head coach the Saint Louis Rams. Once he got there, he found that the league called plays in an entirely new way.

[music in]

Dick: As I came back into the League it was now becoming electronic. At that time you could call the play electronic from the press box to the head coach or assistant coach that was assigned that responsibility and then he would signal it or send it in to the quarterback. In a few years that kept getting more sophisticated. And, pretty quick, you could send it direct to the quarterback. And, it was about time. It took 'em too long to make that decision, really.

The impact of direct coach to quarterback communication was immediate, and dramatic. It made play calling way easier and sped up the overall speed of the game. It allowed for an entirely new level of complexity and strategy.

Dick: I would say most NFL fans don't realize how complicated the schemes have become. It's amazing. And the different terminology used within a huddle call. They would be shocked.

Dick: I could show you a game plan. There might be 150 passes in a game plan and 60 runs in a game plan, one game.

[music out]

When Coach Vermeil started coaching, he had six runs and five passes in his playbook. Now, he could call over two hundred different plays, each with specific directions for every single player.

Dick: You call a protection 'scat right' was a pass protection, 682, and then 'backs flare'. And, you'll talk to a lot of quarterbacks, they'll tell you it is complicated.

[music in]

During the 1999 season, Vermeil coached one of the greatest offenses in NFL history. They were even nicknamed “The Greatest Show on Turf,” and won the Super Bowl.

After the victory, Vermeil retired… well, for the second time... But, of course, that didn’t last long. Only after two years later, the call of football pulled him back in. This time, he came out of retirement to head coach the Kansas City Chiefs.

Despite the advancements in communications, Vermeil and coaches around the league still struggled with the limitations of their headsets.

Dick: I can remember, some friends of mine flew in to see us play in St. Louis. He flew home after the game. At 30,000 feet he called me up on his phone and talked to me at home, but, at that same game, we had about five technical breakdowns in the signal being called from the coach on the sideline to the quarterback [SFX: Distorted talking]. The electronic system didn't consistently work. I remember being upset and I'm saying, "I can't believe that I can talk to somebody 30,000 feet in the air and not to a guy 30 yards away on the field.

[music out]

[music in]

Loud crowds exacerbated problems with the headsets. When a quarterback couldn’t hear a play call over their helmet radio, their team had to take a time out to get it right, or risk a delay of game penalty. When Vermeil coached for the Kansas City Chiefs, he used that to his advantage. They play at Arrowhead Stadium, one of the loudest stadiums in all of sports.

[music out]

[SFX: Loud crowd cheering]

Dick: Well, there's no question crowd noise can impact the game.

Dick: You can feel the electricity of a stadium. When it's on your side, you can feel the negative electricity when it's against you. Arrowhead, my Gosh, when that crowd is into the game and it's going well, you've got a real edge.

Dick: I always felt that they're gonna have to use their time outs, when you wanna save 'em for a two minute drill or something like that, it's critical.

[music in]

Coach Vermeil retired for the last time in 2005. His offensive strategies changed the game forever. But, football’s next revolution wouldn’t come from the sidelines, but from engineers working in labs. The NFL needed technology that could keep up with a new generation of innovative coaches. So, once again, battlefield technology would find its way onto the gridiron, giving football’s field generals more power than ever before. We’ll find out how, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

When you watch an NFL game on television, you’ll see coaches wearing large headsets with giant Bose logos on them. ...and before I go any further, a little disclaimer... none of this was written or influenced by Bose. Outside of fact checking, they had no editorial control over this content. They just caught wind of the episode and loved the idea so much that they decided to sponsor it. So, with that out of the way. The NFL legalized quarterback to coach radios in the 90s. That ushered in an era of high speed, complex offenses that took the league by storm. But by the mid 2000’s, the old headsets just couldn’t keep up. That’s when Bose got involved.

Matt: My name is Matt Ruwe. I'm the Senior Product Manager for our aviation, military, and broadcast markets.

[music out]

Matt: Bose makes headsets literally for M1 Abrams tanks. I mean, that couldn't be any more extreme in terms of noise.

Bose was a company known more for home speaker systems and later for military and aviation headsets.

Matt: Some of our aviation headsets started to get used in D1 football, college D1 football, and we started noticing this and we thought "Wow. People really think that this headset must be really good because they're using it on the the sidelines."

To take on a challenge as unique as the NFL, Matt needed the help of Dan Gauger. Dan is one of the founders of the Bose noise cancelling division. He’s now a distinguished engineer at the company.

Dan: I said, "Well, let's go learn about the noise." Matt, and I, and some others went to the most convenient stadium, Gillette Stadium, and measured the noise, recorded it.

Matt and Dan discovered that noise at an NFL stadium is totally different than all of the noise they’ve studied before.

Matt: The dynamic range in football in general is incredible. Football goes from incredibly quiet in an early play in the first quarter. You can go from that to being in Seattle where the 12th man is incredibly loud. supposedly the crowd is the 12th person who actually impacts the game, and it is so loud there that if you're attending the game you probably want to wear earplugs, it gets that loud.

Dan: It's fascinating. I can look at the data from some measurements I took at a Seahawks, 49ers game. You can see in the data the excitement of the crowd, because the human voice changes its mix of ... its tamber, it's a mix of spectral balance. As people start shouting, things shift higher in frequency. You can see that when it happens. It's figuring out who optimize our headphones to work well in that sort of noise, dominated at those frequencies.

Sean McVay: Communication is everything.

That’s Sean McVay, the current LA Rams head coach.

Sean McVay: It can be extremely difficult, especially in some of these road atmospheres from an offensive standpoint, fans going crazy, a lot of different things going on throughout the course of the game.

Sean McVay: One of the most important things that we can provide is clarity to our players. When there is clear communication, there is no gray, and guys can operate with confidence, they can play without any uncertainty, and that’s a big thing in this league.

[SFX: Crowd cheering]

Matt and Dan had to create a headset that could handle not only the unique sound of the stadium, but also the demands of coaching in the NFL.

Matt: Typically on a consumer side we want to cancel as much noise as possible, matter of fact if it was completely silent that would be sometimes perfect for consumers, but in this environment, they really wanted to hear some of the things that were going on around them. And so, you'll see this even in the NFL where a lot of coaches wear a single ear headset, and that's there to allow them to hear some of the sounds around them. At the same time they really still need to hear what's going on on the intercom from the box that's high up in the stadium, or even from some of the other coaches that are right there on the field.

[music in]

While the NFL wanted to help coaches and players communicate better, they didn’t want to turn the league into a video game. Assistant coaches and owners with a sky high view up in the press box can’t radio players on the field. They have to talk to the head coach on the sideline. And while quarterback helmets have speakers that allow them to hear their coaches, they don’t have a microphone, so they can’t respond with questions. All of that means that Coach McVay has to constantly manage chaos on the sideline, while staying on the same page with his players.

Sean McVay: When you’re talking through the headset the unique thing about it is you’ve got the ability to communicate with all the coaches on the offensive staff or if you want to flip over to the defensive staff and then ultimately whoever that play caller is you have the ability to press a button just a one way communication system to the quarterback.

Before every snap, NFL coaches have to process a ton of information. They’re taking input from their coaching staff, referencing a large sheet of notes they carry, and trying to match wits with their opponents.

Sean McVay: You’re battling against a lot of different things. Playing the different situations, making sure that you’ve got contingency plans in place. Does this play have answers? We talk about it all the time. The players need to understand the intent, the mechanics, but then what are the potential problems that can arise within the framework of the play that they might need to solve?

[music out]

That tangled web of voices left Matt and Dan a task that was beyond anything they had experienced working with the military.

[music in]

Dan: I was blown away with the complexity of communication systems that these teams run. I've crawled around in airplanes, I've crawled around in armored vehicles. I was blown away with their system. The real challenge was figuring out how to take what we started with, adapt it to as an input/output device to this very complex communication system, without having to redesign that whole communication system. So that it worked well under normal conditions, and it worked well when some coach was screaming at the top of his lungs.

Not to mention, NFL teams work under a play clock, which means they only have 40 seconds to run their next play. ...and to make it even more complicated, the coach to quarterback communication is automatically cut off by the NFL at 15 seconds. This means that the entire coaching staff has only 25 seconds to strategize, make suggestions, give tips or reminders, pick a play, and get that information to the quarterback. Even then, the defense might line up in a way that would counter the play the coaches called, forcing the quarterback to call an audible, or in other words, pick a new play on the fly by shouting code words to his teammates.

[music out]

[music in]

Sean McVay: A standard play call from us usually starts out where we’ll call the personnel grouping where if you say 12 personnel that means that you’ve really got one half back in the game, two tight ends and then two receivers.

Ok. A two digit number, that’s simple enough.

Sean McVay: And then you start out by the formation, any sort of motion shift and then whatever that specific concept is.

[music out]

So far we’ve covered who’s on the field, and where they’re standing. I think I’m keeping up.

[music in]

Sean McVay: So if we said let’s go west right ace, 18 F sift, we’re going to can it with pass 18 F sift, X strike Z bench.

[music out]

Wait… what?

Sean McVay: Let’s go west right ace, 18 F sift, we’re going to can it with pass 18 F sift, X strike Z bench.

Ok, that’s who’s on the field, where they’re standing, and somehow, instruction for what every player is doing. Just to recap, we’ve gone from Coach Vermeil calling plays like this...

Dick: I put the play 'blast right'. That was the play. We only had one or two formations.

To Coach McVay calling plays now:

[music in]

Sean McVay: Let’s go west right ace, 18 F sift, we’re going to can it with pass 18 F sift, X strike Z bench.

Sean McVay: Basically what we’re looking for there is a run versus a certain premier look with whatever the defense presents if they give us something else then we can run the pass versus a better look and that’s how something like that would operate coming in and out of the huddle.

[music out]

So now, coaches aren’t only calling one play, they’re calling two simultaneously and letting the quarterback choose the best option when they see the defense. With all this new information coming from the sideline, you can understand why Matt was nervous about how their new headsets would perform under the immense pressure.

Matt: The first time the headsets made it into the NFL I was glued to the TV and my phone just checking to make sure that everything was working well. We had done a lot of tests beforehand, but it's nerve racking to know that not only are these coaches depending on it, but the fans who are watching the game and really, really are looking for every angle they can for their team to win, you don't want that headset to fail. You want them to make sure that everything is working perfectly and that communication isn't part of a problem for them.

Bose and the NFL have continued to modify the headsets, making communication better than ever. And by working with players and coaches they’ve created a system that changed football forever.

[music in]

Matt: I've been on the sidelines of the Super Bowl, and initially I thought that was just going to be amazing and how would I even be able to interact with these people? In the end they're people, which is cool. They're people, and they're really nice and really cool people, coaches in general are just very genuine and they're very businesslike.

Matt: We have a lot of coaches who have said, "Wow. This is a really big difference."

Dan: We're entering a day where the ability to wear something at your ear, to take information from electronic sources, to manage distractions, and the noise of the world around you, and put these together, to make you most effective, is becoming increasingly important. It exposes people to new possibilities. It opens the world's mind to the range of things that we can do with sound.

Due in part to the headsets, scoring in the NFL has increased by 30% since the league allowed direct coach to QB communication. That means more excitement for fans everywhere, and even more wonderfully ridiculous play calls.

[SFX: Play call - Trips right, Y motion blade Y out. Green, off nasty hound, two Y flutey X basic backs right. Alright, here we go, here we go, here we go, sprout left exit, Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon, Ok?]

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. A sound design team that makes commercials, documentaries, and trailers sound incredible. To hear some of this sonic goodness, visit defacto sound dot com.

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

Thanks to our guest, Coach Dick Vermeil.

Mike: Coach Vermiel, what is your favorite sound?

Dick: I know, it used to excite me when you’d hear a great hit [SFX: body hit]. But now its a 15 yard personal foul [SFX: whistle].

Thanks also to LA Rams head coach Sean McVay as well as Matt Ruwe, Dan Gauger, and Alexandra Smith from Bose. Robert Baker played the part of our coach throughout the episode. He’s an incredible actor who’s been in tons of movies and television shows that you’ve probably seen. He also, just so happens to be one of my oldest friends. If you’d like to send him a nice note, you can find him on twitter as slyhuckleberry.

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

Finally, are there any other cool sports-focused sound stories that you know of? Well, I’d like to hear all about it. You can chat with me, and the rest of the 20k team through our website, facebook, twitter, or by writing hi at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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