Vroom Vroom: The symphony of high-performance engines

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

November 4, 2019

Info Pocketknife

Baby Shark: From summer camp song to viral earworm

November 4, 2019

Info Pocketknife

This episode originally aired on Decoder Ring.

Baby Shark is a mega viral YouTube video, an unstoppable earworm, a top 40 hit, a Eurodance smash, a decades old campfire song, and the center of an international copyright dispute. In this episode from the podcast Decoder Ring, we explore the strange history of the song, what makes it so catchy, and who it really belongs to today.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Coast Highway by Sound of Picture
Boop by Sound of Picture

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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

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

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

Sign up for The Great Courses Plus and get a free month at thegreatcoursesplus.com/20k.

Check out SONOS at sonos.com.

Check out and subscribe to Decoder Ring wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

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

[music in]

If you have toddlers or young kids, you knew from the moment you read the title what this show is about… and frankly, I’m kind of worried you’re not listening right now because of it. But if you did decide to tap the play button, I want you to know that you’ll be glad you did.. And for those of you who don’t regularly hang out with young kids, you probably have no idea where this is going, which is perfect.

So, for the latter group, there’s a youtube video of a kids song called Baby Shark that, at the time of me recording this, has 3 point 4 billion views. That billion with a B. It’s also currently the 7th most viewed youtube video of all time, and it’s a kids song. How in the world did that happen?

Well, the story behind Baby Shark goes a lot deeper than you’d expect. Its history spans decades, and illustrates how art can be adapted across cultures and genres. There’s quite a strange story behind this viral sensation.

[music out]

Today’s story comes from the podcast Decoder Ring. Here’s host Willa Paskin.

Willa: About a year ago, Jonathan Wright, a DJ and a children's musician who goes by the stage name Johnny Only, started getting strange comments on his YouTube page.

Jonathan: I don't read my YouTube comments very much, but I did start seeing comments. "Hey, there's a song out there exactly like yours, ya know."

Willa: These comments refer to a song Johnny often performed for toddlers and that he had posted on YouTube in 2011. It came with a video that he'd recorded with his kids and his sister's kids at her pool.

[Music clip: Johnny Only’s Baby Shark]

Willa: This song was perfect for three-year-olds. It has simple lyrics, an oft-repeated chorus, and hand motions that correspond to each verse of the song, which little kids love.

Jonathan: I knew my kids well enough that I knew that it was going to be a hit before I even recorded it, ya know.

Willa: The song did well for Johnny, but it wasn't massively popular or anything. It still has less than 100,000 views on YouTube. But it was an important part of his show for years. Then he started to get those comments.

Jonathan: I go to look for it. It was Pinkfong's version.

[Music clip: Baby Shark Pinkfong’s version]

Willa: This song is called Baby Shark, and that version comes from the South Korean children's entertainment company, Pinkfong. If you don't have a little kid, or know a little kid, or know a little kid's parents, you may not know this song, though that's about to change. Unlike Johnny's version, this version of Baby Shark is extremely, extremely popular. It is beloved by small children.

[SFX clip: child singing Baby Shark]

Willa: That, by the way, is one of my small children singing it. But it has also been performed on talk shows all over the world, tweeted about by famous people, and inspired a viral video dance challenge.

[SFX clip: Baby Shark dance challenge]

Willa: It's been performed by celebrities.

[SFX clip: “Please welcome Sophie Turner” (Sophie Turner singing Baby Shark)]

Willa: It inspired countless covers in different genres.

[SFX clip: Baby Shark alternative version]

Willa: In January 2019, Baby Shark even debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 where it has been as high as number 32. In other words, Baby Shark is a top 40 hit and that, like all of this, is not normal for a song whose target audience just stopped wearing diapers. Baby Shark is a massively popular, Billboard-charting, unstoppably catchy, super-sticky earworm that has endured for decades, gone viral multiple times, and become the subject of an international copyright dispute. Baby Shark is not just a song. Baby Shark is a phenomenon.

Willa: I have had Baby Shark stuck in my head for months. I have two small children and, like a lot of small children, they are totally obsessed with it. As I've heard Baby Shark, and sung Baby Shark, and made up new words to Baby Shark, I have had occasion to wonder, "Who is responsible for this unstoppable earworm?"

Willa: We're going to try to answer that question, starting with the present-day, viral version of Baby Shark, and then swing backwards through time into the song's past of which Johnny Only is just one part. "Where does Baby Shark come from?"

Willa: Let's start with a company that made the viral version of Baby Shark, the aforementioned South Korean company, Pinkfong.

[SFX clip: Pinkfong]

Willa: That's the Pinkfong logo tone, which plays at the beginning of all of their videos, a bit of sonic branding. Since being founded in 2010 by another South Korean company called SmartStudy, Pinkfong has produced more than 4,000 animated videos and stories for children, many of them poppy renditions of kids' songs in the public domain like Mr. Sun and Five Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.

[Music clip: Pinkfong’s Five Monkeys Jumping on the Bed]

Willa: In 2018, Pinkfong had 5.7 billion views across all of its content, and its YouTube channel has 15 million subscribers. Just to put that in perspective, Sesame Street only has 5 million subscribers. Children's entertainment is a world unto itself on YouTube, a bubble populated primarily by a strange but very lucrative genre of super-popular videos expressly designed for toddlers that unless you've got kids, you probably have no idea exists.

Alexis: Little kids' entertainment, like toddler entertainment, is it's totally YouTube driven, it's basically all music videos for kids, and it's like wildly international.

Willa: That's Alexis Madrigal, a staff writer for the Atlantic, who's reported on the types of companies that make these sorts of videos.

Alexis: There are companies in Dubai, India, Hong Kong, South Korea. Turns out that this is kind of a universal thing that you can make. It's like a highly-scalable, across the world kind of entertainment form.

Willa: Alexis estimates there are about a dozen or two dozen major companies doing this sort of work and hundreds of smaller ones. Their videos generally have a similar aesthetic, bright symbol animation with big-eyed human or animal characters often doing funny dance moves to upbeat and catchy songs with pop music flourishes.

[Music clip: Johnny Johnny Yes Papa]

Willa: That song, which you may have noticed bear some sonic similarities to Baby Shark, is called Johnny Johnny Yes Papa and it went viral in 2014. For adults who were raised on Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, or even Dora the Explorer, 30-minute to an hour programs that have a gentle vibe and a clear, well-executed pedagogical vision. These videos can feel like they lack a purpose, you know, besides generating clicks. But kids all over the world are clicking on these things, which means that whatever their flaws, they are unprecedented.

Alexis: Children's entertainment produced all over the world soldered together from all the different world's cultures. Yeah. It's just this new melange of cultures that didn't exist before. Like, you couldn't really make this exist in any real other medium in particular because all these companies copy from each other relentlessly. You know, the Indians copying from the South Koreans copying from the Russians copying from the guys in Dubai or Israel, you know? And then that is making money for YouTube in the United States of America and being shown to people in the Philippines.

Willa: In a world in which entertainment is increasingly segmented, Pinkfong and companies like it have created a kind of global shared experience for three-year-olds. Baby Shark is part of a wild and strange monoculture for toddlers, a demographic that doesn't much care about language, cultural-specific taste, or adult measures of quality. To be fair to Pinkfong, in South Korea, it's considered to be a trustworthy educational company. If its educational bent is lost on English-speaking audiences, that's because we already know what Pinkfong videos are trying to teach, English.

Willa: Baby Shark is a good, simple vocabulary lesson, but the video has been so successful because it also works as pure entertainment. In the video, which was posted in June of 2016, a boy and a girl trade versus and do very specific hand motions, the Baby Shark dance, in front of simple, colorful, aquatic animation. For the verse about Baby Shark, for example, the boy does a little finger pinch that's supposed to be the baby shark's jaws going up and down. The girl uses her whole hands for mama shark. Daddy shark gets both arms. For the let's go hunting verse, they do a particularly cute gesture, pressing their hands together above their heads like they are shark fins and swaying back and forth.

Willa: All these motions make the song extremely appealing to toddlers who love a song that comes with movements. Think of Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands, The Hokey Pokey, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, honestly, most songs for toddlers. But it also made the song appealing to another demographic entirely, South Korean pop singers.

[Music clip: Baby Shark pop version]

Willa: That's the girl group, Red Velvet, in a Baby Shark-inflected ad for lip gloss. K-pop, Korean pop is a very competitive field and it stars are constantly trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, not just the teenagers who make up their core fan base. One of the ways to reach that broader audience is on variety shows, which are extremely popular in Korea and Asia, more generally, and where goofing around with a meme, particularly one that is a children's song, is a good, and reliable, and cute way to appeal to a lot of people.

[SFX clip: Variety show, Baby Shark meme]

Willa: The K-pop stars amplified Baby Shark both as a song and as a viral sensation. More and more regular people began to dance to Baby Shark, recording their own routines to it, and posting them on Tik Tok, an extremely popular app in Asia where you post short clips of yourself lip-syncing and dancing along to a song. Meanwhile, Pinkfong has kept up with the craze by releasing over 100 different versions of the song in 11 different languages. There's now an EDM version of Baby Shark, and a Halloween version, and a Valentine's day version.

Willa: Throughout 2017 and 2018, the song just kept growing and growing, moving around the world until it caught on in the United States, first and foremost with kids who liked it so much, they helped propel it up the Billboard charts.

Chris: I'm not sure there's a real precedent for Baby Shark.

Willa: Chris Molanphy is a host of Slate's Hit Parade podcast and an expert on all things having to do with the Billboard charts. As Chris explained to me, there are a few kids songs that have charted on the Hot 100 before, The Chipmunk Song, a Christmas song, went to number one in 1958. Rubber Ducky from Sesame Street has also been on the charts, so have a number of novelty hits that aren't necessarily kids' songs but that really appealed to kids like Monster Mash and Psy's Gangnam Style, another K-pop crossover mega-hit. But those songs appeal to kids who are like school-aged kids, and the kids who are into Baby Shark are much littler.

Chris: It's the kind of record that somebody under the age of, I don't know, six might hit again, again, again on. That YouTube data factors into the chart and has made it an enormous hit.

Willa: But this raises the question, "Why have all of the animated kids songs that are out there on YouTube do toddlers like this one best? Why did this one breakout here?" Here, I think we have to turn to the song itself. Yes, the Baby Shark video is adorable, but that song, it's catchy.

Charlie: Well, the song is successful because it perfectly balances familiarity, repetition with novelty.

Willa: That's Charlie Harding, a musician and the cohost of Switched on Pop, a podcast that takes pop songs and explains why and how they work.

Charlie: That the melody itself is nursery rhyme, which very simple... Like, it's very memorable, and it has a sort of rhythmic bounciness to it. So it just catches in your ear, and you get it over and over and over again, which you think you should get bored but you don't. The reason why you don't get bored is every time they sing that repeated melody, something changes. So the first time they sing it, it's just a bunch of kids and a bass.

[Music clip: Baby Shark Intro]

Charlie: And then they start adding in hi-hats the second time around [Music clip: Baby Shark with hi-hats]. Then, the next time when you get daddy shark, you get this deep baritone voice [Music clip: Baby Shark with baritone voice]. So the baritone voice was kind of surprising. You get grandma voice, and grandma voice is surprising within the context of what you've heard before [Music clip: Baby Shark with grandma voice]. Then they add keys, and then they add more voices. There's like a chorus of kids that comes in and then, at that point, you've now heard like six or seven of the Baby Shark refrain and they modulate into another key. They take the whole thing higher, which is a very common trope of like '80s and '90s ballads.

[Music clip: Baby Shark continues]

Charlie: Once they do that, they even add even more arrangement. There's more of these piano arpeggios just... At that point, everything drops out except for maybe a kick drum and the voice. Then, last time, everything comes back in. So there's a way of doing the exact same thing over and over again by providing just enough variation that you stay interested.

Willa: I love Charlie's explanation of Baby Shark. Before talking with him, I had never noticed any of that. And I've listened to Baby Shark a lot. Charlie's explanation also made me find Baby Shark a lot less annoying. The fact that there's all this slight variation to it that keeps kids interested, it made me think about how repetition and variation work for adults. Yes, we're more sophisticated listeners than four-year-olds, or I hope we are, but we also like repetition so long as it has the right amount of variation.

Willa: We want the pop song to come back to the hook or the orchestral music to return to the motif. When a song gets it just right, I don't know about you, but I do listen to it dozens of times in a row. And we do the same thing with what we watch. We watch movies and TV shows we've seen before and seek out specific genres, crime shows, or superhero movies, or whatever's happening on Twitter where we basically know exactly what's going to happen. It's just the details that are different.

[music in]

It’s undeniable, Baby Shark is catchy, and it sticks with you long after you’ve heard it. But the story of Baby Shark didn’t start on YouTube. It actually didn’t even start on the internet. The origin of the song is somewhat of a mystery, and it spans decades. We’ll explore where this song really came from and who Baby Shark belongs to today, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Willa: Pinkfong's version of Baby Shark is especially sticky, but I think that there's something elementally enticing and irreducibly catchy about Baby Shark no matter what its arrangement. And I think this because the Pinkfong version, it's not the first time that Baby Shark has gone viral. So now, in order to chase down Baby Shark's origins, we're going to have to leave the present and start moving backwards into the past and the early days of YouTube.

[music out]

Alexandra: My name is Alexandra Mueller. I am from Germany.

Willa: In 2006, Alexandra Mueller was working at a camp for kids teaching journalism. There was a song they sang at the camp called the Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. Kleiner Hai means little shark in German. As you can hear, the song has a different tune than Baby Shark, but it's recognizably related. The verses mean more or less the same thing and it comes with all of the same hand motions.

[Music clip continued]

Willa: Some of the campers recorded Alexandra singing Kleiner Hai and in January of 2007, she uploaded the video to her YouTube channel under the name Alemuel, an abbreviation of her first and last name. In the video, which is pretty grainy, Alexandra is sitting in a retro, pea-green armchair wearing a teal sweater and a bright red headband. Her emotions are exaggerated and very distinct. She gradually gets more and more into it until she gets to the daddy shark, and she starts using her whole body. It's weird but extremely watchable. And people watched it.

Alexandra: I think it took about a half a year that it got a million views, and then emails started to pour in asking me for interviews, like, "You're a viral video and its German. Can we ask you about it?" Then, a record company wrote to me and said, "Hey, you're so famous in the Internet, can we do a recording of the song?"

Willa: This record company was EMI, the giant label that's released music by the Beatles, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, and thousands more. She recorded new vocals for a dance-oriented version of Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. The song became a smash. In 2008, it spent 16 weeks on the German singles chart, peaking at number 25. Alexandra became something of a viral sensation herself. She released the song under the name Alemuel, the name that had been on her YouTube channel. And there was a lot of speculation about who she really was.

[Music clip continued]

Willa: This was further fueled by her outfit, the teal turtleneck and the red headband, which she wore to all of her public appearances like she was playing a character. She had a lot of public appearances in 2008. She went on a number of German talk shows, toured clubs in Germany and Austria, and played two performances in Mallorca [Music clip]. Her performances did not always go exactly as planned.

Alexandra: The people in the clubs were too old. My kind of fan group were a 14, 15-year-olds. I think in the clubs, there were like 25-30 and they often kind of stared at me with wide eyes asking themselves why they should kind of perform a children's song with me.

Willa: By 2009, the Kleiner Hai craze had wound down. EMI offer Alexandra the opportunity to record another song, a kids' song about a fish, but she declined. She went into journalism instead.

Alexandra: People often ask me if I'm embarrassed that this happened to me. But no, it was great and I'm really happy that I just jumped into the cold water and swam without being eaten by a shark. It helped me a lot, I think. I gained a lot of self-esteem because if you're booed from stage, then you're much cooler afterwards, I'd say.

Willa: Her young daughter recently found out about Kleiner Hai in school.

Alexandra: One of the women who work there, she's shown her the video. I didn't do that. Now, she wants to see it all the time. If somebody says, “hai shark”, then she immediately starts doing the gestures.

Willa: Okay. So how is it possible that an American children's musician, a South Korean entertainment company, and a German camp counselor all recorded different but successful versions of a song about a baby shark? To answer that, we have to go back even further in time.

Rebecca: So I think it was about 1989 or 1990, and I was at summer camp in New Hampshire, Camp Merrowvista. It was one of our favorite songs. We loved it.

Willa: That's Rebecca Onion. She's a writer and colleague of ours at Slate, and she is one of the many, many kids who sang Baby Shark in the '80s and '90s when it was just a song kids sang at camp, and school, and after school, and Girl Scouts, and Sunday school, and wherever kids gather and sing songs. There were hundreds of different versions of it. There are some with different tunes, just as there are German versions. There are French versions where it's usually called “Papa Le Cat” that sometimes, but not always, is sung to the tune of Mahna Mahna, the song made famous by the Muppets.

[Music clip: Papa Le Cat]

Willa: But even with all the variation, these versions have similar gestures and almost all of them have something else too, violence. [Music clip: “shark attack...”] There are a lot of variations to the violence, but it seems to be what made the song.

Rebecca: Speaker 10: And then it would be [Music clip: “shark attack...”], and you kind of like would move your body around as though you were being attacked by a shark violently. That was the funnest parts for everyone because we'd all be like, "Oh my God, we're dying." And kind of like lie on the ground.

Willa: The grizzly parts, which are not in the Pinkfong version or a number of other versions of the song on YouTube, including Johnny Only's, made it a little edgy and therefore fun for older kids, teenagers even and why the song was not, until recently, primarily for toddlers. Violence, I think it's a clue about Baby Shark's origins. We kept looking for earlier and earlier versions of Baby Shark. In print, we dug around and found a version of it in a book called Making Music Fun, that was first published in 1981 and that already refers to there being many different versions of the song. Then we spoke to Patricia Shehan Campbell, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Washington and an expert in children's musical culture, who also happens to have worked as a camp counselor in Ohio in the 1970s.

Patricia: This might've been the mid, late '70s, something like that. The song came up on a bus one time, and so I learned it from a child. Every child knew it, actually, already, and it sounded pretty much the same as it does now.

Willa: I asked Pat if it was possible that all of these different versions of Baby Shark had popped up spontaneously, a kind of polygenesis, like the way emus and ostriches evolved on different continents. She was skeptical.

Patricia: That'd be a little farfetched, given that the gestures is just very explicit, could've been separately created without some influence. But I don't know how to connect the dots.

Willa Paskin: We kept looking for a record or memory of Baby Shark before the mid to late 1970s, but we couldn't find one. Then, it occurred to us that there was something happening around this time that was extremely relevant. To be clear, we are now entering the realm of speculation, but honestly, what's the first thing you think of when you think of a shark attack?

[SFX: Jaws theme]

Willa: Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released in the summer of 1975, and it was a huge deal. Huge deal almost undersells it. Besides almost single-handedly creating the blockbuster as we know it today, the movie spread through all parts of American culture. The film industry began producing cheap copycats with titles like Piranha and Orca. There was a video game about sharks, and Saturday morning shark cartoons, and a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch about a shark, and there were tons of novelty records, songs that took John Williams famous theme music and riffed on it.

[Music clip: Jaws by Lalo Schifrin]

Willa: That's an instrumental disco version of the theme by Lalo Schifrin called Jaws that samples William's score. In this next one, Do the Jaws by the End, the song starts with some shark hysteria and there's a beat derived from the Jaws theme [Music clip]. This next one is my favorite. It's called Jaws is Working for the CIA, a novelty funk record by The Investigators, and it starts with a reference to a family of Jaws [Music clip].

Willa: I'm not saying any of these songs directly inspired Baby Shark, but I am saying that they're evidence of the shark-crazy atmosphere at the time and of ubiquity of the Jaws' theme song. If those things inspired a number of musicians, maybe they inspired some camp counselors too [Music clip continued]. If the jump from this song to this song to this song [SFX: Jaws theme] sounds big, remember the Baby Shark was transmitted orally and the jump from “da na da na da na” to “ do do do do do do” with about a dozen stops along the way, that sounds more like a game of telephone.

Willa: In fact, there's a version of Baby Shark song by various Girl Scout troops to this day. It's more of a chant than a song that ties Baby Shark and Jaws together very nicely because it's a version of Baby Shark about a specific shark family, a family of Jaws [Music clip: Girl Scout Jaw song]. So Jaws, that is our provisional answer to where Baby Shark comes from. The fact that it's made it to us over four decades later means that the song and the Jaws' theme music that may have inspired it has always been viral. This is what analog virality looks like, something so catchy that it's passed from person to person, kid to kid, counselor to counselor, musician to musician until it makes its way around the world, slightly different each time but still fundamentally itself, so crisscrossed and cross-pollinated, it's hard to untangle where exactly it started at all.

Willa: So now, we're going to move out of the past and head back to the present. But we're not going to get all the way there just yet because there's still a bit of a gap in the where did Baby Shark come from mystery, which is, "How exactly did Pinkfong find Baby Shark and decide to make their own video with it?" I initially thought this would be pretty straightforward to answer. We talked to someone at Pinkfong, but Pinkfong declined to speak with us and then declined and then declined. To be fair, they are in the middle of a huge wave of attention and I'm sure there are lots of people asking to speak with them.

Willa: But then we learned about Johnny Only, the children's performer who we spoke with at the very beginning of this episode. It became clear that there are some good reasons why Pinkfong might want to be vague about how they discovered Baby Shark. To explore those good reasons, we have to get back to Johnny Only's story. Just a reminder, this is what Johnny Only's version of Baby Shark sounds like.

[Music clip: Johnny Only’s Baby Shark]

Willa: He had first heard the song in the late 1990s while performing at summer camps. He had made some changes to it, like removing the verses about grandma and grandpa shark, but it's not like he had written the thing. So when he heard Pinkfong's version of the song, he thought that was that.

Jonathan: You know, I felt a little bit violated. I was just like, "Oh well, it's public domain, it's public domain. That's the way it goes."

Willa: But then, a representative from a South Korean political party, the Liberty Korea Party, an opposition party, contacted Johnny, asking him for permission to use his version of Baby Shark.

Jonathan: So I just gave them permission.

Willa: So the Liberty Korea Party used the song, at which point, SmartStudy, the company that owns Pinkfong, got involved, threatening a lawsuit against the Liberty Korea Party for copyright infringement.

Jonathan: So all of a sudden, as you can imagine, the lights are going off. I'm like, "Wait a minute. SmartStudy doesn't even realize that it's my version instead of theirs." There's a big red flag. Too, SmartStudy is saying, "Okay, I can sue you for copyright infringement." So all of a sudden I'm like saying, "Wait a minute, that means that I could sue for copyright infringement." You know what I mean?

Willa: There is something called a derivative copyright, meaning that when something like a public domain song, which Baby Shark is considered to be, gets recorded, things that are changed or added to it that are unique to that recording are protected under copyright law. So Johnny got a lawyer and filed a petition in Korean court, which as of this recording, is still pending. He isn't saying that he invented Baby Shark, but he is saying that he added things to his version, that Pinkfong then used in their version.

Jonathan: The key is exactly the same. You know, the driving beat is the same. The tempo increase partway through is the same. The way that they add the harmonies like when daddy shark comes onto the scene. In my recording, I used my voice as a lower voice to emulate daddy shark and they suddenly have a male voice coming in for daddy shark. So it was very similar approaches.

Willa: I want to be really clear here that I have no idea if Pinkfong heard Johnny Only's version of Baby Shark before making their own. But if it wasn't his, it was probably someone's. I mean, they had to have learned it from somewhere. Maybe someone who worked there sang it at summer camp. There's a risk for Pinkfong in revealing if the song comes from any one source because, among other things, there is now a huge amount of money at stake. Pinkfong's parent company's stock price is soaring. The videos are generating ad revenue hand over fist. There's tons of Baby Shark merchandise, and the company just signed a deal with Netflix to create a TV series. Pinkfong is hoping Baby Shark isn't just some flash in the pan, but the beginning of a global children's media empire.

Willa: I'm of two minds about all of this. The entire history of Baby Shark is an iterative one of people taking other people's version of it and changing it, massaging the tune, and the lyrics, and the language, sometimes for the better. Johnny Only and Pinkfong's version sound pretty similar, but Pinkfong's version is catchier. Why should Pinkfong have to worry that they learned the song somewhere and made it their own? That's what everyone else has always done.

Willa: But, at the same time, the history of Baby Shark also shows us that this song belongs to everyone. There's something kind of unsettling about the fact that right now it seems to belong to Pinkfong, who has real financial incentives to try and make it more and more proprietary. A representative of Pinkfong and SmartStudy recently told the CBC, "We are the producer and publisher. We own and control 100% of the song." Many people already think that that's true. And that's why for Johnny, even if he ends up winning his lawsuit, the emotional stakes are settled.

Jonathan: The Pinkfong version is so popular that even my fans prefer theirs over mine now, which is very depressing. You know, it's really kind of disheartening. I mean, they're very kind about it. My fans tell me my version was better. They're very kind about it. But, honestly, I know when they go home, the Pinkfong version is everywhere. I'm watching my audiences as I'm performing my version. Of course, my version does not have grandma shark and grandpa shark, and my audience, as I go into the next line, and they're starting to make the hand motion for grandma shark and it hurts. It hurts. It hurts a lot. It is really discouraging. It's really derailed me in many ways.

Willa: I hope Johnny takes some comfort in the long history of Baby Shark, of which Pinkfong is just a small part. I don't know, maybe their version of the song will help them spawn a children's media empire, but maybe it's just a novelty, another viral craze that has captured our attention right now, for this moment, and that we won't even remember in a few years. But when I say, "We," there, I mean us adults. As Baby Shark demonstrates, both the internet and children's culture are Petri dishes for virality, for memes, for things that get passed from person to person, altered and tweaked, but that stay essentially themselves.

Willa: The story of Baby Shark, in some ways, is this story of these two meme-generating powerhouses joining forces to amplify this song. This will not be the last time that this happens. The amount of video content being directed at kids is only going to increase as is the amount of time they spend in front of screens. It's hard to make a song as catchy as Baby Shark, but someone will manage it, maybe by rifling through children's songs of the past again. When they do, they will have an even bigger audience of three-year-olds all around the world doing exactly what they did with Baby Shark, watching and singing it over and over again.

[music in]

Willa: One of the funny things about Baby Shark is that this two-minute video that was designed for little kids' very short attention spans is going to live on longer in their collective memory than it is in the memory of most adults. For us, Baby Shark is a passing fad, yet another fleeting internet meme. But for kids, Baby Shark doesn't just exist on the internet, it's not some pop-culture object, something cute to share on social media. It's outside of all of that too, part of an older but still viral, still vital way of communicating. If the history of Baby Shark tells us anything, it's that the version of Baby Shark that was made to last is the version you can sing however you want. So, if you can bear it, keep singing.

That story came from Willa Paskin and the fantastic podcast Decoder Ring. In each episode, they examine the history, meaning, and importance behind an aspect of our culture. Be sure to go tap the subscribe button!

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 defactosound.com

This episode was produced by Colin DeVarney and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was edited and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

If there’s another earworm you just can’t get out of your head that you think would be a great Twenty Thousand Hertz episode, tell us! You can reach me and the rest of the team on facebook, twitter, or by writing at hi @ 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Featured

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

October 21, 2019

Info Pocketknife

Virtual Choir: 8,000 Voices, One Song

October 21, 2019

Info Pocketknife

This episode was written and produced by Colin DeVarney.

Singing with others is a powerful form of expression. That's why the composer Eric Whitacre started the Virtual Choir; an experiment that connects singers from every corner of the globe. In this episode, we hear how a choir can unite people from different backgrounds to achieve a common goal - creating beautiful music.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Pretty Build by Sound of Picture
In My Head by Sound of Picture
Morels by Sound of Picture
Celadon by Sound of Picture

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

Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Join our community on Reddit and follow us on Facebook.

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

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

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

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

Go to forhims.com/20k for your $5 complete hair kit.

Check out SONOS at sonos.com.

View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

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

The music you’re hearing now is not an ordinary choir. It’s a teenager in her bedroom, singing into a laptop microphone. It’s a grandparent performing while their grandchild helps with the camera. And it’s a businessman, reliving his years of choir in school. What you’re hearing are hundreds of individual voices performing both together, and alone. The result is mesmerizing, and powerful, and greater than the sum of its parts.

[music out]

This performance is the first installment of what’s known as the Virtual Choir. It’s a project that connects singers from around the world to create music. The human voice is an instrument we’re born with. It doesn’t cost anything, and we can use it to express all sorts of emotions and stories. And if you sing with others, that expression can be amplified into something more.

But not everyone has the chance to do that.

Eric Whitacre had that in mind when he founded the Virtual Choir in the late 2000’s.

[music in]

Eric: I grew up in northern Nevada, and I really had no musical training. I definitely had an ear. I played piano. My parents tried to get me piano lessons, they just wouldn't stick. I played trumpet in middle school and high school, but I never learned to read music. I would just play by ear.

Eric: Then at 18, I went to The University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And on a whim, I joined choir. On the very first day, I was standing with 100 other people in the room and he said, "Lets begin with the Requiem, and the Kyrie. I didn't know what a Requiem was, I certainly didn't know what a Kyrie was. So I looked over the shoulder of the guy standing next to me and turned to page 10, and we launched into the Kyrie from the Requiem by Mozart.

[music out]

[SFX: Mozart’s Requiem in D minor]

Eric: I'll never forget that moment. That first breath, which to this day entrances me. That first breath that a group of people take before they sing. If you know the Kyrie by Mozart, then you know that it begins with the bass's.

[SFX: Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem in D minor]

Eric: So we start this fugue subject ... the altos join. Then the sopranos, the tenors, and within about 25 or 30 seconds I just found myself standing in the midst of this cosmic Swiss watch. This level of complexity and humanity that I couldn't have imagined existed before that moment. And I remember doing exactly what I still do when I hear music that moves me, which is that I was standing there not singing, and I began trembling, I kind of shake, and then I giggle. It's like I get this feeling in my stomach. Then finally I had tears in my eyes... and I left after that first 50 minute rehearsal, the world's biggest choir geek. I was utterly transformed.

[music out]

Eric is one of the most influential choral composers of our generation. If you’ve been in a choir in the last few decades, there’s a great chance you’ve performed one of his pieces. The list of his accomplishments goes on and on, but the Virtual Choir remains perhaps his biggest creation. The idea though, came from a small gesture.

Eric: So a friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video. He said, "You've got to see this." In this video was a young woman, she was only 17 at the time. Her name's Britlin Losee. And Britlin had gone into a room and made a fan video for me. She says, "Hi Mr. Eric Whitacre, I'm a big fan and here's something that I want to do for you. Here's me singing Sleep."

[Music Clip: Britlin singing “Sleep”]

Eric: This was a piece of music that I had written for choir that had been published, and choirs had started performing. I was thunderstruck watching this. I just was moved by the purity of her voice, and also the purity of her intention.

[Music Clip: Britlin singing “Sleep” continued with other voices]

Watching her video, I thought to myself, "You know, if you could get 25 other people to do what Britlin is doing right now. If they were singing their part alone in their dorm room, or in the kitchen, or in the living room. As long as they were singing in the same key and at the same tempo. If they all just uploaded their parts to YouTube, and I literally started them at the same time then this choir would have to unfold, right? This virtual choir.

[Music Clip: Virtual Choir singing “Sleep”]

[music in]

Eric: I go online to my website and Facebook, and just in all caps, "I've got this idea. Let's make a virtual choir." I have no idea how to actually pull this off. The way Britlin did it was she was listening to a recording and she was singing along with it. But we're not going to be using a recording.

Eric: So I got the idea that what I would do is make a video of myself conducting the piece, but in complete silence. The music would only be in my head. I would upload this to YouTube, and then people would download the sheet music and sit in front of their computers, and watch my little conductor video. I genuinely had no idea if this would work or not.

Eric: I also didn't know if anybody would actually do it. But they did. And almost immediately I could tell, oh this is going to work.

[music out]

There were a few challenges early on though. When you’re singing in a group, everyone hears each other so they can stay in tune with each other. But if you’re singing by yourself though, it’s natural for the key to fluctuate over time, since you don’t have a reference to guide you. So to fix this, they added a piano track for the performers to sing to.

Eric: We've refined that so that now there's usually a choir singing underneath them so that they feel like they're singing into the sound of a choir. Instead of just into a vacuum.

In addition to a video of Eric conducting the piece, he also included detailed musical direction for the singers, just like a conductor would do in a normal rehearsal.

[Clip: Eric’s conducting direction]

With the materials in place, submissions began pouring in on YouTube.

Eric: I think it's one of the great selling points of a choir is that you never have to sing alone. Lots of people like to sing, but maybe don't want to be a soloist. When you're in a choir you can sing your heart out, and you never have to have your voice exposed like that.

These submissions were brought together and the first Virtual Choir was released. The only question was if anyone would notice. Here’s more of that performance of the piece Lux Aurumque, composed and conducted by Eric.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir I begins]

Eric: When I uploaded the first Virtual Choir, I really didn't think anybody but me and my tiny circle of choir geek friends would be interested. And the video went viral, I wasn't prepared for that at all. I started getting all of these requests for media appearances. Then suddenly I was being bombarded with requests from all over the world from singers. Saying, "I don't know what this is, but I have to be a part of it, when is the next one?"

[Virtual Choir I continues and fades out]

Eric: The first one had 185 different singers from 12 countries. At the time I thought, "That's as big as this could ever go." But just based on the number of people writing to me, we all thought, "Oh my God, this could be bigger."

Eric: First what we started to do is just build a better infrastructure. Better tools to help people learn the music. I refined the ability to get them to sing all at the same time. So I made a much better and clearer conductor track. The guide track for them to listen to was clearer.

With these improvements in place, the second piece was finished just one year after the first.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir II begins]

Eric: Then we launched Virtual Choir II which this time was that piece “Sleep” that Britlin Losee was singing the very first time she sent me that video.

Eric: We also bumped up our ability to aggregate the videos themselves. First at that time to find them on YouTube. And then to sort them by sound quality. Those that were recorded the best, and those that were recorded not as good. That became very helpful later on in the process.

Eric: This time we had 2052 singers from 58 different countries. It just overnight turned into this earth choir. I was completely unprepared for that. I could never have imagined it.

Putting that into perspective, this performance featured over ten times as many singers as the first Virtual Choir, and they ranged from nine year olds to senior citizens. If Britlin’s first YouTube video was a tiny snowball, it had now turned into an avalanche with no sign of stopping.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir II out]

The Virtual Choir would only continue to grow, which introduced some interesting challenges for Eric and his team.

Eric: With Virtual Choir III, we knew already going in, it's going to get bigger. So more and more singers wanted to be involved so then we started to build our own infrastructure. We had a small army of volunteers that would connect with anybody that was having technical difficulties. They would station themselves around the globe in different time zones so that anyone who wanted to join, but couldn't figure out how to do it, could join.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir III begins]

Eric: The Virtual Choir III, I think ended up with 3700 something singers from 73 countries. In terms of the style of music, we took it to, I think, as far as we can take it musically. We used a piece that I had written called Water Night that splits a lot. By splits it means that there's lots of different voice parts all making a single chord. So the climax of Water Night has the lines if you “open your eyes, night opens.” On the word, "eyes" it's a 14 part chord.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir III 14 part chord]

Eric: Which was a logistical challenge. Not only to line all that up and make it sound good, but literally just to aggregate the parts. So technically it was a huge challenge for us.

Eric: Spiritually it also really changed, I think, the way we were thinking about all of it. Until then, it had just been about amassing numbers in this extraordinary thing that we were making that seemed to resonate with people in a way. But we didn't really understand it at all. But for Virtual Choir III, we set up some places on my Facebook page, and on my website where people could upload their testimonials. They could write about what it was that moved them about the Virtual Choir and why they joined.

Eric: This is when we started to see some of these stories. These extraordinary stories ...

Eric: There was a man from Cuba who desperately wanted to join, but because of government regulations, was unable to send us a video larger than one meg. So we got our tech team together with him, and Cuba became part of the Virtual Choir.

Eric: There was a man who had gone legally blind and because of that, hadn't been able to sing in a choir for over 30 years. Now for the first time, he could get close enough to the computer screen to see my little conductor track, and he was able to join the choir.

Eric: There was a young woman who had sung in choirs with her mother. It's just a thing that the two of them did together. Her mother was dying of cancer and couldn't sing. So this young woman recorded her video looking straight into the camera but just off screen was holding her mother's hand in hospice as a tribute to both of them singing together, and their life together.

Eric: So suddenly for me too, I was seeing the sense of borders and governments starting to dissolve. There really was just this tribe with a common goal, and a common love. Which is to come together to make something larger than themselves. It gave me incredible hope for humanity, and really restored my faith in people.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir III out]

[music in]

Eric brought people from all walks of life together for a common purpose, in a way that had previously never been possible. From the beginning, the Virtual Choir was about so much more than just singing. But, the Virtual Choir was far from over. More after this.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

By the time the Virtual Choir became a viral sensation, Eric Whitacre was already a sensation in the instrumental and choral music worlds. His music was performed everywhere from middle school cafeterias to the most renowned symphony halls. And while he’s written music for lots of different instruments, vocal compositions are always something special.

Eric: I love writing for instruments. I love writing piano music, but there is something about the voice. Especially when I want to express something that I find to be fundamentally human. Sorrow, joy, love, the bond between a parent and a child. There's just no vehicle other than the voice for me.

Eric: I heard Ned Rorem one time, the American composer, somebody asked him, "Are you a singer yourself?" And he said, "No, I'm not, but I think the reason composers compose is because they can't sing." That really resonated with me. Because I have the soul of a singer. I have the heart of a singer, I just don't have the instrument of a singer. It's tragic situation actually.

[music out]

Eric composed for the voice to express things that he otherwise couldn’t. Choral music can communicate nuances in emotion in a way that speech can’t. With the Virtual Choir, Eric opened up that experience to a world of people who didn’t previously have an outlet. Anyone who’s been part of any sort of team knows the joy of working together for a common goal. But there are lots of people who have never had that chance. The Virtual Choir is a team with no boundaries or limitations. It allows people from any background to make a meaningful connection… albeit a digital one.

Following the success of Virtual Choir three, Eric knew the fourth installment would continue to feature more and more singers. But he wasn’t content to just grow in terms of numbers.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir IV begins]

Eric: Going from three to four, I knew that we would continue to grow with singers.

Eric: What I didn't want to do is just keep making the same thing over and over, and over. I wanted to grow. I wanted to grow the idea. So I thought, "Maybe what I'll do is I'll just go back to my pop roots a little bit." I had been working for years on a musical called Paradise Lost that was part musical, part opera, and then part electronica. There's a DJ and all different kinds of electronica beats in it.

Eric: I thought, "Okay, I'll take a piece from that." This piece called “Fly To Paradise,” and then we'll put dubstep in it. Lets just see what happens. And we made Virtual Choir IV, Fly To Paradise, something completely different.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir IV out]

“Fly to Paradise” featured nearly six thousand singers from over one hundred different countries. It was also a departure from the more standard choral music of the first three Virtual Choirs. Eric wanted to do something that stretched the norm. He’s a fan of pop music, so it felt like a natural fit.

Eric: There is great virtue in popular music. I think sometimes in the modern world it's easy to say music used to be so much better, more sophisticated and now it's this. The challenge of course is we never have the perspective of time. In 1965, yes there were the Beatles. Yes, there was Pink Floyd. But there was also 10,000 other groups that we never listened to. So we've really had the luxury of sorting out the wheat from the chafe. We can remember the 60's fondly because all we remember are the huge hits.

Eric: I would say in terms of popular music versus classical music, or lets say concert music. There's two things about it. One, concert music, when really well written is hyper-constructed. The composer spends weeks and months, and sometimes years constructing this whole world of relationships between notes. The architecture of a well written concert piece is something to behold. It's a marvel.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir V begins]

The first three Virtual Choirs were performances of more traditional choral pieces. The fourth was a take on a new genre. The question was, where would it go from here? It ended up taking years to answer to answer that question.

Eric: Mostly I just wanted to make something different and at the time I was in the throws of writing this piece called Deep Field. Deep Field is inspired by the image of the same name that was taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995. To me that image, the Deep Field image is the most important image in human history. It shows us how impossibly large our universe is, and how truly small we are in it.

Eric: I wanted to write a piece of music about that. Originally my concept, which is how the piece was originally performed is that it would be for orchestra. This big orchestral piece, and it would ... the music itself would follow the story of the Hubble.

Eric: And in my mind what would happen is I would turn to the audience, and I would give a little gesture to the audience, and they would know then to push play on their smartphones. And everybody had pre-downloaded an app. What would happen is as they push play, you would have a fly through to deep space, and then this final reveal of the Deep Field image on the phone. But then also from each phone was emitted a small electronica sound. Which on its own isn't that interesting but when you have 1000, or 2000, or 5000 phones in the audience playing a sound all at the same time. Then you surround them with a choir, it really is something special. It feels a bit like you're floating in space. Like you're inside the Deep Field image itself.

Eric: There's the Virtual Choir that comes in at the end.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir V virtual choir section]

Eric: Then we had a film made. So there's the piece itself, then we added the Virtual Choir and then we made an entire film, a 23 minute film to the piece itself.

Eric: And now what can happen is orchestras can perform the piece live with the film being projected.

Eric: The conductor just follows the film hits all the right moments and then at the end when the Virtual Choir is revealed, now the audience has all of the shimmering electronica on their phones, the Virtual Choir is being projected from the screens, and then a real choir is surrounding the audience. So now it adds this other dimension. Not only do we have all of these people in the room creating the sense of floating in space, but now you're joined by over 8000 virtual voices on the screen.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir V continues]

The Virtual Choir began with simple gesture from Britlin Losee. Today, it’s a global phenomenon that connects people across borders, age, experience, and beliefs. It’s a team of humans expressing in a way they otherwise couldn’t. But while the Virtual Choir certainly isn’t done, Eric isn’t really sure what comes next.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir V out]

Eric: I definitely want to keep doing the virtual choirs. It's fun, and it's a great way to get people interested in singing. And for me as a composer, it's just a great way to express things that I'm feeling.

Eric: I don't see how we can get bigger in terms of an ideological thrust. What do you do after you've done the universe? So maybe this time we get more smaller, more intimate, or I'm not sure.

Eric: One thing that will remain the same is ethos we've had since the beginning which is, if you upload a video, you're in, there’s no auditions. Every single person who makes a video gets to be part of the choir. And I'll continue that as long as we do the virtual choirs.

[music in]

The Virtual Choir is based around a belief that singing connects us in a unique and profound way. The voice is our most natural instrument, and it’s important that we use it to express ourselves the best we can.

Eric: I believe that singing is the single most fundamental way we have of communicating with each other, more than even speaking. There's something about a voice, when singing, that it carries terabytes of emotional information. When I listen to an amazing singer, say Ella Fitzgerald...

[Music clip: Dream a Little Dream by Ella Fitzgerald]

Eric: It's not just the music, it's not just the words that she's singing. You hear her entire life. There's something about the magic of the voice that can do that.

[Music clip: Dream a Little Dream by Ella Fitzgerald continues and fades out]

[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2]

Eric: There is something truly transformative that happens when you get a whole bunch of people together, singing at the same time, it's extraordinary. There's now all kinds of scientific studies that show that the physiology of it is transformative in itself. That stress hormones decrease. It's good for breathing, it's good for your musculature. There's even some studies now that suggest that people who sing together, their heartbeats begin to synchronize.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 swells]

Eric: There's nothing like singing together to teach a sense of compassion and empathy.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 continues]

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 defactosound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Colin DeVarney and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was edited and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

Thanks to Eric Whitacre. You can listen to his extensive catalogue of music on Apple Music or Spotify. You can find him online at eric whitacre dot com. Also, be sure to visit our website 20k dot org there we’ve posted of all 5 virtual choirs.

Finally, if you know a great story in the choir, band, or orchestra world, be sure to tell us about it. You can do that by writing us on twitter, facebook or by email at hi @ 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[Music clip: Virtual Choir 2 out]

Recent Episodes

Featured

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

October 14, 2019

Info Pocketknife

The Price is Right: The drama behind TV’s catchiest theme song

October 14, 2019

Info Pocketknife

This episode was written and produced by M ike Baireuther.

As a young composer, Edd Kalehoff was looking for his break. In the early 70s he struck gold, writing for the theme song and music cues for The Price Is Right. However, suspect business dealings would cast a dark shadow over this hallmark of daytime game shows for decades.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

We Three Kings by Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors
Just Watch Me Now (instrumental) by Lady Bri
Cherry (instrumental) by Chair Model
Grey16 by Tangerine
No Limits (instrumental) by Royal Deluxe
Me and My Friends by Juliet Roberts
Airliner Remix (Instrumental) by Secret American

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by D allas 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 The Price is Right Drum Cover on Youtube by RTDUMS2121.

Sign up for The Great Courses Plus and get a free month at thegreatcoursesplus.com/20k.

Check out and subscribe to Just the Beginning wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

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

If you are from the US, that song means Plinko, spinning the big wheel, and showcase showdowns on The Price Is Right. This game show is a hallmark of American daytime television. If you’re outside of the US and haven’t seen the show, it’s the pure joy of retail therapy distilled into one hour of games. It’s centered around guessing the prices of stuff you probably don’t need, and in my opinion, it’s the most perfect game show ever.

[music out]

[Music clip: Price is Right Modern Intro]

The sound of this show is iconic. It’s like a slot machine on jackpot, fueling frenzied fans in the studio audience eagerly waiting for the chance to “Come on down!” and be contestants.

[SFX clip out]

But even devoted fans of the show might not know that The Price Is Right, used to sound completely different.

[Music clip: Original Price Is Right Intro]

This is from the original Price Is Right, which premiered in 1956 on NBC with host Bill Cullen. That’s right, there was a host BEFORE Bob Barker. Impossible! The original show was way more subdued, to put it lightly. Well-dressed contestants sat behind podiums on stage, and did their best to guess the prices of items.

[SFX clip: Price Reveal]

In the classic version of the show, this is the structure of the qualifying round to get into the actual game.

[SFX clip continued: Price Reveal]

So, that sounds about as fun as wandering the aisles of a department store, but the original Price Is Right lasted for nine years before being canceled.

Then, in the early 70’s, pioneering TV producer Mark Goodson decided to revive the show. Goodson, along with his business partner Bill Todman, created many of the most famous game shows in history, including Family Feud [sfx], Match Game [sfx], and To Tell The Truth [sfx].

At the same time, a young composer named Edd Kalehoff was just getting his start making TV show themes.

[music in]

Edd: I had recently come to New York and I met a guy that turned out to be not such a nice guy but he had a lot of themes going on television. Introduced me to Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the game show kings of the time. And I started out doing a few of the smaller games ... Password and I've Got a Secret. Those shows that he has bringing back on television.

Edd: And then he was going to bring back The Price is Right, he was going to take it to Los Angeles.

[music out]

Needless to say, American culture and television changed dramatically from the premiere of the original Price Is Right in the late fifties to the it’s early seventies revival. For the show to stick with modern audiences, it needed a contemporary sound.

[music In]

Edd: Mark Goodson had already been hearing the Moog synthesizer, which I had gotten from Dr. Moog. He was intrigued with this new sound and one of the first people to really delve in… and there was actually nobody doing much with melody. Being a kind of a jazz guy and very varied in my styles, I was playing a lot of different kinds of music on the Moog, which does incredible things.

Edd: The great influences on me were the great movie composers. I loved writing accessible music. I loved writing stuff that was intelligent, what I would call intelligent.

[music out]

Edd: Mark Goodson was really a special guy. He was unique in a lot of ways. Certainly a genius of games. And there were no show runners. It was Mark. Mark enjoyed coming to my studio on 45th Street and 5th Avenue in New York. He got out of his tower up on Park Avenue and could come down and hang with the truth and soul network, as I called it.

Edd: He said, "Well, what do you have for me?" Ed: I like to say the name of the show in the melody. So I said, "The Price is Right. Yeah, yeah. The Price is Right." [Music clip: Price is right theme song] "The Price is Right. Yeah, yeah. The Price is Right."

Edd: And he said, "I like that." And of course, if he started to wiggle his foot you knew you had him.

Edd: And so, it was kind of a groovy sound. And that's how I presented the theme to Mark and he said, "Okay, kid. How much to go do it?" So I came up with a price and, "Okay. Go do it."

Edd: So I said to him, I said, "Mark, why don't you ever challenge me with my budget to go and do this music?" And he said, "Look, that's what it costs. If you say that's what it costs, that's what it costs."

Edd: He didn't hear another note until I showed up at CBS in the sound booth and played it when they were loading in the first week of shows.

[music in]

..but, we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s rewind to find out how Edd recorded this iconic theme.

Edd: At that time we were doing a lot of London business for other projects and I had great orchestras over there. So I went to London [SFX: jet airplane flyover] And took a synthesizer over there. Customs had a great time trying to figure out what it was. The Cold War was still on. They thought I was a spy.

But once Edd got setup in the studio in London, some real magic began to happen with the session musicians.

Edd: Once you have good guys, the best players in the world that mastered their instruments, you can't go wrong. It's like having the best orchestra in the world to play your stuff.

Edd: They get the music and they go, "What do you want? We know the notes. What do you want it to be?" And I tell them a story about, "Well, this is going to be, tell them what won, Johnny." These guys would play that way.

Edd: I got to give them credit.

[music out]

Edd: So I learned the art of if you have a good pocket ... meaning the good pocket of the rhythm ... the drummer made that happen.

[Music clip: Price is Right drum cover]

Edd: It was almost a swing thing, almost a dotted 8th feel but it wasn't. It was written in 16ths, which are even.

Edd: What a drummer. I said, "How'd we get him?" "Well, you were like you'd been here a couple times before. And so they said yeah. We want to see who this Yank is. Who this Edd Kalehoff guy is."

Edd: He made it swing. And these players over there they got behind it. And they said, "Hey, this isn't TV music. This is something else." They made it come to life.

[music out]

Edd’s contributions to the Price is Right went well beyond the theme song. He’s also responsible for music and sound effects throughout the show. That included the notorious horn that plays when someone loses, named “The Lose.”

[SFX: Losing Horn]

And, for correct answers, Edd went to a hardware store and tested a bunch of different doorbells before recording the perfect option.

[SFX: Winning Ding]

[music in]

Edd’s music was the perfect pairing to each episode of The Price Is Right. The show became a huge wholesome daytime TV hit, but the story behind the royalties for the theme song is anything but wholesome [sfx: sad horn]. More on that, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

In the early 1970’s, the re-booted Price Is Right with host Bob Barker was on its way to becoming a mainstay of daytime television. Edd Kalehoff was the young composer of the show’s theme song, he should have been in an amazing position to profit from the show’s success. Writing a long-running theme song is a career-maker, with residuals providing a constant stream of income for years. But if you check the credits for the show’s theme during that time period, you won’t see Edd’s name.

[music out]

You’ll see Sheila Cole.

Edd: A man, I won't mention his name because I don't want to take anything away from his ability to do business.

Edd: Sheila Cole was his wife. And after I had written the Price is Right theme and come back from London, he said, "I have to put her name down as the composer. It's just a technicality." And I was just new at the BMI, ASCAP world. And he said, “You know what? This time it won't make much difference."

BMI and ASCAP are the two main performing rights organizations that represent American music writers and publishers working in TV and film. They set pay rates, work hours, and help determine how residual income is calculated and divied up. Show producers provide a “cut sheet,” which lists all the music cues needed in a given episode, and BMI and ASCAP ensure these composers and publishers get paid for their work accordingly.

Edd: Well, I was originally ASCAP when I first came to New York because that's all I knew. That's what I saw in sheet music that I would play in the night clubs.

[music in]

Edd: ASCAP is American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. BMI is Broadcast Music Incorporated. That was founded in Nashville. The government made them do that ‘cause there was only one performing rights society and they in the 40's made them start BMI to anti-monopoly.

Edd: So they came to me and they said, "Look, man, we can make your world much better."

Edd: How it works is there's a theme. Look at it as two 100% pies. One is the publishing earnings. And one is the writing earnings. The composer and the publisher.

Edd: It's based on air time, and it was based on television income. A percentage of their advertising income. It's a small percentage. It would go from maybe 2% to 3.5% of their annual gross income, that would go to the performing rights.

Edd: Well, what happened was this gentleman, to make a relationship with Mark Goodson said, "Okay, I'll make you the publisher. You'll make the money from the publishing." That 100% pie. "But I'll collect the writers."

[music out]

Based on those rules, The Price Is Right doled out a percentage of their ad revenue each year. But since Edd’s name wasn’t listed as the composer, he didn’t receive any of the royalties.

Edd: And I have to say you can carry around the vehemence and the harsh feelings for a guy that would do that to a young kid. Why not split it?

Edd: The income from that one theme, the Price is Right theme that I wrote on the Hammond that Mark shook his foot too, then I went to London, took it to LA and that was done. If you had written something that has earned to date maybe $40 or $50 million to date, that would have made a difference in your life.

Forty to fifty MILLION dollars. That’s what it means to write the theme song to one of the longest running television shows ever. Just think, that small percentage of ad revenue, piling up, year after year, into a fortune… and Edd, missed out on all of it.

Edd: I went to Mark Goodson and said, "Mark Goodson, I can't work for you anymore. You let that happen." He says, "I'll tell you what. I'll put your name down on the credits. On the television." I said, "Well, that would mean a lot for me." "And I'll give you all of the other music credits," which is income. Let's face it.

Edd: That first deal with the Price is Right, let me tell you. I still get it kicked every time that theme plays. That would have made a big difference in my life.

Edd: It would have been nice to recover that. I didn't. BMI and the mentors there said, "Look, man, just look. You're talented, have a great career, you’ll do great.

So, with Edd’s modern, high-energy sound, the revived Price Is Right soared in the ratings. The show, and Edd’s music, defined a generation of game shows, and became a timeless piece of Americana. While the Price Is Right became one of the most successful shows in history, Edd was building his career.

[music in]

Edd: First I was with the king of games, Mark Goodson.

Edd: I play guitar and I played a theme... it was NBA on ABC. And I played the guitar solo [Music clip: Straw Dogs w/ Guitar Solo]. It was good. It made it. It was different.

Edd: And that got ABC opened. That was Jeff Mason, who was then a producer and then he became the president of ABC sports.

[music out]

Edd even put a new spin on a classic Football theme.

Edd: We were doing Monday Night Football, you know that one? [SFX clip: Plays theme on the piano], you know, that thing. I was known for making things hipper, different twist.

Edd became one of the most prolific and prominent TV theme show composers in the industry. In addition to his work on Monday Night Football, his credits include themes Nickelodeon’s Double Dare, PBS News Hour, and ABC’s World News Tonight.

After the relaunch of The Price Is Right in the early 70’s, the format and sound of the show remained mostly unchanged for decades. Then, in the mid-2000s, Edd found himself once again working on the theme that helped start it all.

Edd: When Drew Carey took over when Bob Barker retired, Drew said, "Man, this is in mono. It's a mono recording." And he said, "Can you do it in stereo?" I said, "Well, I... I think I can." We'd already been dealing with surround sound by that time.

Edd had to make the sound of the Price Is Right appeal to a new audience, all while leveraging the nostalgia audiences have for this beloved franchise. Here’s what that mono recording sounded like:

[Music clip: The Price is Right theme, mono recording]

Edd: That was written at a time when I was young and on fire, and already had started making a living. Difficult but making a living. And it was okay. And I brought with me all of the wants and desires, and that theme goes through three key changes in the first 10 seconds.

And here’s what the new, stereo version sounds like:

[Music clip: The Price is Right theme, stereo recording]

Edd: And I said, "Listen. It's got to be real instruments. It's got to be a real Moog... If you don't do that, it's not going to be the same thing."

Edd: Some new musicians. All in New York. A lot of the guys that play Saturday Night Live are on the session. Some great players. And we all studied my old mono recording and what's on the air now is a remake of the original mono recording.

Edd: It's still running and it's a lot of fun to hear it.

[music out]

[music in]

After more than four decades in the industry, Edd hasn’t stopped writing themes or playing music.

Edd: That's what I was born to do. I never did anything else. I love sailboats, I love working with my hands, I love the art world.

Edd: And yet, writing music is something ... it's like I hear something, "Sheesh, that's a great idea that guy just used up." If I'm not out there writing some good stuff, these guys are going to write the themes and I'm going to wish I wrote them.

Edd: Even as late as last night, I heard something, a manipulation of sound. It had a whoosh in it, it had a low frequency, warm chordal harmonic movement. And it went into a melody and it was just that three seconds of sound like, "That was a special moment of something that really spoke to me."

Edd: I said, "I wish I thought of that." I said, "I can't stop."

[music out]

Before we go, here’s the entire :96 second modern-version of The Price is Right Theme song. Written by Ed Kalehoff, but still to this day credited to Sheila Cole (who also still collects the royalties.) Anyway... Enjoy.

[Music clip: The Price is Right Theme song modern version]

[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 on Instagram.

This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther. And me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was edited and sound designed by Soren Begin. It was mixed by Jai Berger. Thanks to our guest, Edd Kalehoff. To hear more of Edd’s work, visit eddkalehoff dot com.

Thanks also to RTDRUMS2121 from Youtube for their drum cover of The Price is Right theme. You can find a link to that on our website, 20k.org.

The music in this episode is from our friends at Music Bed. Go listen at musicbed dot com.

Finally, are there any other classic TV 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]

Recent Episodes

Featured

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

October 7, 2019

Info Pocketknife

The Loudness War: Can streaming finally end it?

October 7, 2019

Info Pocketknife

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling.

In part 2 of the story of mastering, we explore the consequences of the Loudness War and call out some of the worst offenders. We’ll also hear about the artists and mastering engineers who have been fighting back, and learn how modern listening habits might finally put an end to this sonic arms race. Featuring Greg Milner and Ian Shepherd.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Working Man is Always Poor by Live Footage
The Light Instrumental by SAILR
The Human Flute by Ryan Taubert
Wonderful Life Instrumental by Reagan James
Sparrows Instrumental by Jamie
Money Making Machine Instrumental by Jamie Lono
Airliner Remix Instrumental by Secret American
Waterfalls Instrumental by Reagan James
Do What We Want Instrumental by Spirit City
Smoke by Sound of Picture

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by D allas 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 Ian Shepherd’s podcast The Mastering Show.

Check out Greg Milner’s book, Perfecting Sound Forever.

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

Try ZipRecruiter for free at z iprecruiter.com/20k.

View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, I’m Dallas Taylor, and this is part two of the story of mastering.

[music in]

In the last episode, we looked at the history of mastering. Up until the 80s, the constraints of analog equipment meant that music had to be mastered on the quieter side. While this may sound like a bad thing, the upside is that music from this era has really strong dynamics, almost across the board. Pick nearly any song from the 70’s or older, and you’ll find a striking contrast between the quietest parts, and the loudest parts. This gives the music a much more spacious and vibrant quality.

But once digital technology took over, things changed pretty quickly. New audio technology allowed mastering engineers to make songs much louder. Artists also started trying to one-up each other with how loud their songs were, and music overall got louder and louder. But all of this volume came at a price, and music became so compressed that it lost a lot of that impact and depth. The Loudness War had begun.

[music out]

For some people in the industry, even music that was pushed right up to the limit wasn’t quite loud enough. But if you’ve already compressed a song as much as possible, what happens when you try to make it even louder?

Ian: Beyond that, you can actually start to get distortion, where, if you just push the loudness up so that it hits that digital ceiling, where the tops of the waveforms, the musical waveforms, are literally sliced straight off [SFX], you get an effect called clipping. That sounds distorted.

That’s Ian Shepherd, a professional mastering engineer who also hosts a podcast called The Mastering Show.

Greg: When you clip, you literally are inserting a little blip [SFX] of noise.

And that’s Greg Milner. Greg writes about music and technology, and wrote a book called Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music.

Greg: At that moment, the digital system is just saying, "I can't read this." So, if you're careful with it, you just do it every once in a while and the clips last just a fraction of a second, supposedly you're not going to be able to hear those parts, but a lot of recording engineers and musicians will say, "Yes you can.”

[music in]

Just imagine what would happen if you started pushing up every nanosecond of a song until it clipped. Pretty soon, all of that clipping would start to overpower the actual music. [SFX: music gradually clipping more and more] If you kept going and going, eventually, you’d be left with pure white noise. So whenever a song is clipping, it’s like a little bit of the music has been cut out, and replaced with white noise. Human ears aren’t supposed to hear this type of noise all the time.

[music out]

Greg: This is very difficult to prove and I don't know if it ever will be proven, but you ask a lot of engineers and they'll tell you that it causes fatigue. Some people will even say that it's a physical fatigue, that your eardrums are just being bombarded by these compressed parts and you are less likely to listen to music for long periods of time.

If you look at the waveform of a song in an audio program, you can see how the soundwaves swell at the loudest parts, and shrink at the quieter parts. But if you look at a song that’s clipping, you’ll see that the soundwaves no longer have these dramatic peaks and valleys.

Greg: When the sound clips, the soundwaves actually look like mountaintops with the peaks shaved off, which is not the way soundwaves ever behave in nature.

If a song is compressed enough, the waveform will look like a flat block, almost like a floating row of bricks in Mario [SFX]. When a song has had this done to it, engineers will say it’s been “brick walled.” and since the 90s, a ton of albums have been given the brickwall treatment.

Greg: If you look at certain recordings that really are notorious for being really poorly mastered in terms of loudness, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication for a long time was really Exhibit A. There is so much compression and clipping in that, it just assaults the ears [Music clip: Red Hot Chili Peppers': "Parallel Universe"].

As the name implies, brickwalled music often has a kind of wall-of-sound quality to it, where instruments struggle to stand out from each other, the snare drum doesn’t really pop like it normally would… It just sounds kind of… squashed, because it is. It’s almost just like every single sound in a song is exactly the same volume. Take a listen to “Spaceman,” by The Killers and see if you can hear what I mean:

[Music clip: The Killers - "Spaceman"]

Compare that to the 1978 song “Roxanne” by The Police, ” and you can sense a little bit more of a natural difference between the instruments.

[Music clip: The Police - “Roxanne”]

But one album in particular has become the poster child for the Loudness War.

Greg: Death Magnetic by Metallica

Ian: Death Magnetic by Metallica [speaking in unison with Greg]

[Music clip: Metallica - “Cyanide”]

Ian: So the Death Magnetic album by Metallica was one of the first albums that really caught the public attention as far as the issue of the Loudness War was concerned. What happened was that a fan emailed the mastering engineer, complaining about the sound of the CD. And the mastering engineer replied off the record, saying, "Yeah, I'm not super proud of this one, but that's what the band wanted, and it is what it is."

According to that fan, here’s the actual response they received from the mastering engineer: Quote, “I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case, the mixes were already brickwalled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say, I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me, I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.” Unquote.

[music in]

Ian: The fan then published this on a forum, in public.

Ian: So, suddenly everyone could see what was meant to have been a quiet, private comment by the mastering engineer. And actually, I spotted this and wrote about it on my blog at the time. And Music Radar and Wired magazine and, ultimately, the Wall Street Journal picked up on the story, and it was briefly in the news. And there was actually a petition signed, with 20,000 fans asking for the album to be remixed and remastered.

[music out]

When 20,000 Metallica fans start complaining about an album being too loud, there might be a problem.

Ian: The really fascinating thing about it, though, was that, as well as the CD release, the soundtrack was available as part of the Guitar Hero game on the PlayStation. We think what happened was that the files were sent out to the game manufacturers earlier on in the production process, before the decision was made to go for this extremely loud final result. So the files that were used in the game were much cleaner, less distorted, than what came out on the CD.

Ian: Some of the fans much preferred the sound of the Guitar Hero version to the released CD.

Let’s listen to the two versions, and see if we can hear the difference. We’ve matched the loudness level so you can focus on the quality of the sound. Here’s a clip from the Guitar Hero version:

[Music clip: Metallica Dynamic 1]

And here’s that same clip from the CD release:

[Music clip: Metallica CD version]

The CD version just sounds awful. Here’s another clip from the Guitar Hero version:

[Music clip: Metallica Dynamic 2]

And here’s the CD:

[Music clip: Metallic CD version]

It’s important to note that in order to match the volume levels in these clips, the CD version had to be turned way down. Here’s the actual difference in volume. We’ll start with the Guitar Hero version:

[Music clip: Metallica Dynamic 1]

Now brace yourself, you might even want to pull out your earbuds—here’s the CD version:

[Music clip: Metallica CD version]

Ian: It's very unusual for us, as music fans, to get the opportunity to compare the final sound of an album with how it might've sounded earlier on in the process.

The original CD release of Death Magnetic is an extreme example but the unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of mainstream music from the last few decades has had some version of this hyper compression treatment. This means that for most of the music that’s come out in the last 30 years, there’s a better sounding version that we’ll probably never get to hear.

Greg: I've found you can almost choose stuff at random.

Greg: “Let's Get it Started” by the Black Eyed Peas is a really big offender.

[Music clip: Black Eyed Peas - "Let's Get It Started"]

Greg: “The Fallen” by Franz Ferdinand.

[Music clip: Franz Ferdinand - "The Fallen"]

Greg: Vapor Trails by Rush was another one that was so poorly mastered that the fans actually rebelled.

[Music clip: Rush - The Stars Look Down (original)]

When Rush released Vapor Trails in 2002, a lot of their fans were unhappy with how it sounded, and the band actually agreed.

In 2013, they had the entire album remixed and remastered. Let’s take a listen to those two versions, and see how they compare.

By the way, we are adjusting the volume levels of these examples so we can compare quality, not the loudness.

Here’s a clip from the original version:

[Music clip: Rush - Nocturne (original)]

That guitar sounds kind of crackly, almost like it’s a broken speaker. Here’s the same clip from the remastered version:

[Music clip: Rush - Nocturne (remix)]

Everything sounds so much cleaner. Here’s the original again:

[Music clip: Rush - Freeze (original)]

And here’s the remaster:

[Music clip: Rush - Freeze (remix)]

[music in]

Vapor Trails is a rare example of a band remastering an album specifically to improve it’s dynamics. Plenty of times though, you’ll hear fans complain that the remastered version of a classic album destroys the dynamics of the original.

Ian: Yeah, remastering is a bit of a controversial topic.

Ian: There have been reissues of classic albums where they've been pushed to the kind of extreme Loudness War levels that we've heard recently, which is not always in the best interest of the material.

Albums by bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones get remastered and re-released over and over. When a new remaster comes out, services like iTunes and Spotify usually remove the older versions from their library. Unfortunately, these new versions might not be as dynamic as the ones they’re replacing. Our whole perception of what classic music sounds like is shaped by the specific releases that we get to hear. But as newer versions replace old ones, that history is constantly being rewritten.

[music out]

These issues don’t just affect one or two styles of music. No genre has been safe from the Loudness War.

Ian: Unfortunately, we now have the situation where it's not being driven by the genre.

Greg: Some music really benefits from a louder, aggressive sound, but if you want to take hip-hop as a genre you can compare the typical hip-hop song today to a hip-hop song from the so-called Golden Era in the '80s and '90s, and I guarantee you that the ones from the '80s and the '90s are gonna have a bigger dynamic range.

Here’s a clip of Young MC’s “Bust a Move”, from 1989:

[Music clip: Young MC - “Bust a Move”]

And here’s “All of the Lights” by Kanye West, from 2010:

[Music clip: Kanye West - “All of the Lights”]

Ian: Ironically, some of the most dynamic releases recently have actually been metal albums, which is an extreme, loud genre

This is the song “Of Unworldly Origin” by the band Revocation.

[Music clip: Revocation - "Of Unworldly Origin"]

Ian: Whereas you get just other saccharine pop stuff that's pushed to within an inch of its life, I mean the last Miley Cyrus album was a country, folky thing, [Music clip: Miley Cyrus - "Malibu"] and it was as loud as Skrillex, [Music clip: Skrillex - "Purple Lamborghini"] which just feels insane.

[music in]

According to Ian, mastering engineers face a lot of pressure to make music as loud as possible.

Ian: Most mastering engineers, if you ask them, would say that they prefer not to go for the super loud stuff.

Ian: I'm really lucky because I've talked about this issue for a long time. Most people know that I'm a fan of dynamics, and I'm not a fan of super-loud mastering. So, most of the people who come to me are not asking for extreme loudness, but a ton of my colleagues in the industry, all they get is requests for things to be louder. You know, the classic comment when they get back the master is, "It sounds great, but please can you make it louder?"

And even though these issues have gotten more attention recently, Ian says that not much has changed.

Ian: Over the last five years, lots more people are aware of this issue, and the reasons you might not want to go super loud, but they still request it anyway, because there's this idea that maybe they need it in order to compete, or to sell lots of copies, or to get the right sound for the style that they're performing in. None of that, in my experience, is true. There's research to show that loudness has no effect on the sales. There's research to show that users don't really care what the loudness is, it's all about the music.

So it’s not just mastering engineers who are responsible for making music louder. Musicians, mixers, producers, and basically everyone involved in the music production process have a roll in the Loudness Wars. But, there are signs of hope, and they’re hiding in some pretty surprising places. More after this.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

Starting in the 90s, popular music became completely consumed by the Loudness War. Most albums since then have been extremely loud and compressed, and many have been pushed so high that they clip and distort unnaturally. Nirvana’s Nevermind arrived in 1991, just as this trend was catching on. Nevermind became one of the best selling albums of all time, but by today’s standards, it's pretty quiet. On the other hand, Californication, by Red Hot Chili Peppers, came out eight years later, and it was also a huge hit. Californication is a great album, but for better or worse, it's super loud, and super compressed. So I wonder, if it had been a little quieter, with stronger dynamics, would it really have hurt sales?

[music out]

I’m not saying that music should sound exactly the same way that it was in the 1970s. But surely there’s a middle ground between the extremely light touch of the 70s, and the heavy-handed approach that took over in the 90s.

Greg: There are ways to do music that's very compressed that competes in the Loudness Wars and still has enough of a range from the difference between average levels and peak levels, to really sound nice.

Ian: So you’re always looking for the loudness sweet spot: that perfect balance between loudness and dynamics, where it’s loud enough, but it works musically, the sound is right, and it has the right emotional impact.

In recent years, some artists and mastering engineers seem to have found this sweet spot, and have made big hits.

Ian: For example, “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars was a huge hit

[Music clip: Bruno Mars: Uptown Funk]

Ian: “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk

[Music clip: Daft Punk - Get Lucky]

Greg: “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk I think is a good example. If you look at it on paper, you look at the peaks and the averages it looks like it's just peaking nonstop, but it's very subtly done so that there's enough of a difference between the averages and the peaks to really sound nice.

Ian: “God's Plan” by Drake is a massive worldwide hit and is not ridiculously loud.

[Music clip: Drake - God's Plan]

Greg: In terms of the Grammy winners, the song that Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga did, if you look at that, that's got a more traditional sort of dynamic range.

[Music clip: Bradly Cooper and Lady Gaga - Shallow]

Greg: One interesting one, if you want to talk about going against the trend is Chinese Democracy by Guns N' Roses. Especially given that they were out of the public eye for so long you might think that they'd want to come back with a huge bang.

[Music clip: Guns N’ Roses - Chinese Democracy]

Greg: The story I heard from Bob Ludwig, the mastering engineer, is that he mastered three versions of that album and played them for Axl, and Axl chose the one that was the least compressed.

Ian: Bob Ludwig, who's a legend, offers his artists the choice. And if they choose the super loud version, that's the version that he goes with. But he personally prefers more dynamics, balanced dynamics.

This “loudness sweet spot” applies to remastering, as well. While some remasters have been overly compressed, others have done a great job preserving the dynamics of the originals, while making them sound even better.

Ian: The reissues of The Beatles' original albums that were done a few years ago are a fantastic example of that. They preserved everything that was great about the originals, and they sound even better than they have before.

Let’s see if we can hear how the sound changed across a few different Beatles releases. Here’s the original version of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”:

[Music clip: The Beatles - “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (original)]

Here’s a remaster from 2009:

[Music clip: The Beatles - "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" 2009]

And here’s the remixed and remastered Super Deluxe edition, from 2017:

[Music clip: The Beatles - "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" Super Deluxe]

All three versions sound great, but the newest one somehow manages to sound the most punchy, and the most spacious. Let’s do another example, here’s the very first mix of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” from The White Album:

[Music clip: The Beatles - “Back in the USSR” (original)]

And here’s the 2009 remaster:

[Music clip: The Beatles - "Back in the USSR" 2009]

And here’s remixed and remastered version from 2018:

[Music clip: The Beatles - "Back in the USSR" 2018]

These albums were recorded over 50 years, but by using the master tapes, the engineers at Abbey Road made these classic albums sound like they were recorded yesterday.

[music out]

Audio tape was patented all the way back in 1929. In the 9 decades since then, a massive history of music has been recorded on analog tape. For special projects like the Beatles remasters, you can go back to these original tapes and use modern technology to bring the sound quality into the 21st century. But what if we lose these tapes?

[music in]

In 2008 there was a fire at the Universal Studios Vault. The fire started from construction work on the roof. Universal Music Group hasn’t released the exact details on this fire, but it’s estimated that there were over 100,000 tapes with 500,000 songs stored in this vault.

The list of artists is unbelievably long and there’s no way I could go through the entire thing now, but just casually looking over it, here is a tiny fraction of who’s master tapes were probably stored there:

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, The Eagles, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Iggy Pop, Barry White, Patti LaBelle, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Who, the Police, Sting, George Strait, Dolly Parton, R.E.M., Janet Jackson, Guns N’ Roses, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Sonic Youth, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Tupac, Eminem, 50 Cent, The Roots.

This is a tiny tiny fraction of what could’ve been in this vault. We don’t know for sure because in the ten years after the fire there still hasn’t been full confirmation. Losing even just one master tape is a huge hit to the music industry.

If these original master tapes were indeed destroyed, and had not been digitized, this is the biggest loss in our modern music history. That would also mean that none of these albums would have the opportunity to be remixed and remastered in the future like what we heard with The Beatles.

[music out]

In recent years, music production has become almost completely digital. But a lot of people still prefer the sound and experience of analog. So, many modern artists have been releasing their music on vinyl, and that’s an encouraging sign for the Loudness Wars.

[music in]

Greg: Vinyl is the only medium in the music industry that's actually growing.

Vinyl technology hasn’t changed a whole lot since the 70s. Due to the sensitivity of the cutting equipment, there’s still a hard limit on how loud you can make a vinyl record. As vinyl sales rebound, mastering engineers are being forced to consider how their mixes will sound on vinyl, just like they used to.

Ian: I wrote a blog post a few years ago, recommending that people master as if it's going to vinyl, but use that same master everywhere, for online, and for CD, and everywhere else, because that master will translate, and will work everywhere.

Ian: If a client was insisting on a super loud master for the CD release, for example, I would always encourage them to send a more dynamic version for the vinyl cut, simply because, as we said, there's a physical limitation. And again, there's no point in pushing that loudness super hard in the mastering for the vinyl if it's going to get turned down at the cutting stage anyway.

Ian: And actually, you do see a fair number of releases these days where the vinyl master actually sounds quite a bit different from the CD master, for that reason.

[music out]

But the biggest change in recent years is the way most of us consume music: by streaming it.

[music in]

When it comes to sound quality, there are pros and cons to streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and Apple. On the one hand, they compress audio files down to make them smaller. This data compression can definitely result in a lower-quality sound. This is primarily so you can stream it and not eat up your cell phone’s data plan. But there’s another thing these platforms do to songs that’s actually pretty great.

Ian: The interesting thing about streaming is that, because sudden changes in loudness are the number one source of user complaints in TV and radio and also online, streaming services like YouTube and Spotify and Tidal, they want to give people the best user experience, so they have started measuring the loudness of songs they're playing back, and they turn louder songs down to stop people being blasted by sudden increases in loudness.

Greg: They keep it on a constant level because otherwise, especially if you were listening to a mix, if you were listening to Pandora or something, you'd have to be constantly adjusting your volume knob to deal with the fact that some records were louder than others.

Ian: And that's had two interesting effects. One is that it has removed the incentive, really, to make stuff super loud in the first place.

Greg: You’ve gotta figure that if you make music, a lot of it is going to be listened to through some sort of streaming service just because that's the way a lot of people listen to music today.

Ian: 87% of US music industry revenue in 2017 came from non-physical formats. So, only 13% came from CDs and vinyl and cassettes. Everything else was from streaming and downloads. So when that many people are hearing music for the first time online, the temptation to try and use loudness to stand out goes away, because even if you make something super loud, it's going to get turned down afterwards.

Ian: And then you have the situation where maybe some of those compromises that we've talked about, in order to get that super loud sound in the first place, actually become more obvious when they're compared to other songs that were more dynamic to begin with. Because you have this song that was squashed into this small space in order to get the loudness up there, but then you reduce the loudness again and suddenly it sounds kind of held in and constrained in comparison to the music that had more space to breathe in the first place.

Greg: Really, if you're a smart artist you know that and you don't use hypercompression because there's really no point to it.

[music out]

A few artists have actually started making two different versions of their tracks: a more dynamic one that they send to streaming platforms, and a more compressed one that gets put on the CD and on iTunes.

Ian: Some people are optimizing music for streaming services. For example, the YouTube version of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe is actually more dynamic than the iTunes version.

Let’s see if we can tell the difference, here’s the iTunes version:

[Music clip: Janelle Monáe - "Make Me Feel" (iTunes)]

And now, Here’s the more dynamic YouTube version:

[Music clip: Janelle Monáe - "Make Me Feel" (YouTube)]

Ian: For me, I think it sounds better as a result. They both sound fantastic, but the YouTube version just sounds incredible. And the iTunes version, to me, when I compare it, just sounds held in. It's a bit more in a box, it's a bit more constrained.

As an artist, is it really fair for artists to give paying fans a worse sounding version of your new album? Doing so isn't just a disservice to them, it's a disservice to the music you worked so hard to make.

Greg: Why would you want to limit the tools that you have at your disposal? And I really think that's what hyper dynamic-range compression does. It just takes a tool out of the toolbox and there's no reason to do it.

If you like to listen to your music loud, the best tool is your volume knob. Making music louder in mastering, just for the sake of being loud, simply degrades the overall quality of sound. This brings us to why dynamic range even matters in the first place.

Greg: Well, you think about it in terms of what music and sound is. It's a sonic palette and there's different ways to use that palette. One of the ways is to vary the music from soft parts to loud parts. It sounds very elementary, but it's very important. You can say music sounds fine today and I'm not gonna argue with that, but it really is undeniable that there is an important part of that sonic palette that just is not being used and I think that a lot of music benefits from that kind of rollercoaster ride of soft to loud to soft. We like our ears to be kind of tickled by these really quick bursts of high energy that go from soft to loud. So that's why I think it's important.

[music in]

Let’s use Photoshop as an analogy. Think about all of the tools you can use to tweak an image. You’ve got brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature. Dynamic range in a song is like contrast in a photo. High contrast means there’s a stark difference between dark and light, loud and soft. But when music has had all of the dynamics drained out of it, it’s like the contrast is stuck at its lowest setting. The image becomes gray, flat, and lifeless. Turning up the brightness on that gray image is like boosting the volume on a hyper-compressed song. Now you’re left with an image that’s almost completely white. Think about if we treated photography like we treat our music and made all of these photos just as bright as possible so that they could stand out from each other. Just think about how much less impactful those photos would be.

Ian: There are various examples of albums where I love the music, and I just find them frustrating to listen to because the sound doesn't do what I want emotionally.

Ian: It just feels like a missed opportunity to me, and especially if it's music where I love it and I want it to have that emotional impact.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Since streaming services even-out the volume between tracks, artists don’t really have to worry about standing out with ultra-loud music. So while it was digital technology that started the Loudness War in the first place, ironically, digital technology might be the thing that finally ends it.

Ian: Because we don't have to compete for loudness anymore, we can just choose whatever's perfect for the music itself, and know that it's going to be played back on a level playing field.

Ian: For me, it's an opportunity to go back to what mastering is all about, which is making the music as good as it can possibly be.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that makes television, film and games sound incredible. 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 sound Edited by Soren Begin. It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Special thanks to our guests Greg Milner and Ian Shepherd.

If you want to dive deeper into these subjects, be sure to check out Ian’s podcast, it’s called The Mastering Show. His website is called Production Advice. And check out Greg Milner’s book, Perfecting Sound Forever. You’ll find links in the show description.

The background music in this episode came from our friends at Musicbed. Visit musicbed.com to explore their huge library of awesome music.

What album captivates you with its amazing sound? You can tell me on Twitter, Facebook, or through our website at 20k.org. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to tell your friends and family about us. Also, if there’s anyone in your life who records music seriously be sure to tell them about these two mastering episodes. And finally, support the artists you love by buying their music, and buy it in high quality.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Featured

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

September 23, 2019

Info Pocketknife

Music

The [COMPRESSED] history of music mastering

September 23, 2019

Info Pocketknife

Music

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling .

Join us on a musical journey from the Golden Age of analog mastering to the digital methods of today. We’ll find out why the music industry became obsessed with loudness, and learn how the digital era transformed the way that music sounds. Featuring Greg Milner and Ian Shepherd.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Isn't it Strange by Spirit City
Stand Up by Soldier Story
Lonely Light Instrumental by Andrew Judah
Who We Are by Chad Lawson
No Limits Instrumental by Royal Deluxe
Crush by Makeup and Vanity Set
Rocket Instrumental by Royal Deluxe
Light Blue by UTAH
Love is Ours Instrumental by Dansu
Shake This Feeling Instrumental by Kaptan
Wrongthink by Watermark High
Rocket Instrumental by Johnny Stimson
Lola Instrumental by Riley and the Roxies
Quail and Robot Convo by Sound of Picture

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by D allas 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 Ian Shepherd’s podcast The Mastering Show.

Check out Greg Milner’s book, Perfecting Sound Forever.

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

Go to forhims.com/20k for your $5 complete hair kit.

Check out SONOS at sonos.com.

View Transcript ▶︎

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

[music in]

Even those of us who know next to nothing about the music industry probably have some idea what mixing is. For instance, we all know mixing involves some sort of leveling— like how loud [SFX], or quiet [SFX] you want something to be. It also involves panning—whether you want an instrument or vocal part to be on the left [SFX], the right [SFX], or somewhere in the middle. And while you might use some effects while recording, a lot of other effects get added during the mixing phase. Maybe you want to add some reverb to the vocals [SFX], double-track to give it a little more oomph [SFX], or autotune those sweet vocals [SFX].

While working on a song, a mixing engineer will make a ton of decisions like these, both big and small. But after being mixed, songs go through a whole other process before they get released. This stage is much harder to explain, and while it’s definitely more subtle than mixing, it still ends up having a huge impact on the final sound. This process is called “mastering,” and even inside the music industry, it’s considered something of a dark art—something that only a small group of elite specialists know how to do.

[music out]

Greg: Mastering is the final step in making a commercial recording.

That’s Greg Milner. He’s written about music and technology for publications like Slate, Wired, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.

Greg: It's taking the fully mixed recording and essentially making it absolutely pristine and correct to actually make it into something that people will listen to or buy. In the old days, before digital technology, the mastering engineer was the person who would literally make the physical master from what the recordings would be stamped from.

Ian: Back in the day that would've been a vinyl master, then cassette, then CD, and these days for digital files.

This is Ian Shepherd.

Ian: I'm a mastering engineer. I have a podcast called The Mastering Show, and I run the Production Advice website.

Ian says mastering isn’t just about preparing music for public consumption.

Ian: It's also an opportunity to get the music to sound the best that it can be.

Ian: If it's a hard rock song [music in] maybe you want to bring even more aggression and density into the sound [music out]. Or, if it's a gentle ballad, [music in] maybe you want a lovely, soft, sweet, open sound… [music fade out]. So it's very much a collaboration between you and the artist.

[music in]

So how is mastering different from mixing?

Greg: Mixing is when you take all the individual tracks, the separate tracks that go into making a recording and you mix them together. I like to visualize it as if you had a lot of jars of different colored sand and you poured them all into one big jar, and you wanted to control how much of each color was there. You might pour a little of one, more of another, into the big jar, but then the sand would be in that jar permanently. You couldn't actually extract the different colors, so that's a finished recording. That's mixing. And then mastering is maybe taking that jar of sand and doing little things to it, maybe moving stuff around here and there, but it's already mixed. You're not doing any mixing when you're mastering. You're working with a fully mixed recording.

Ian: The other analogy is that mastering is like Photoshop for audio. So, we've all taken photographs, you know, on a mobile phone or a camera, and then maybe you have one that you actually want to print out or put on the wall. And you look at it, and actually you suddenly realize it's not quite as good as you thought it was. So, maybe you want to tweak the color balance, or enhance the contrast and the brightness, or maybe take out some red eye from a flash.

Ian: Mastering is the same thing for audio. So, you might adjust the equalization, which is the overall amount of bass [SFX] and treble [SFX] and mid range [SFX] in the sound, to get the tonal balance as good as it can be. You might want to adjust the balance of loudness and dynamics, which is like adjusting the contrast and the brightness in a picture. You might want to take out clicks [SFX] or thumps [SFX] or hiss [SFX] or buzz [SFX], and that's a bit like fixing red eye in a photograph.

[music out]

Ultimately, the mastering engineer is responsible for making an album sound cohesive, rather than just a random collection of songs.

Ian: Often, if you have a collection of recordings maybe from a bunch of different studios, and over quite a long length of time, it's a chance to balance those against each other, optimize the levels, the overall sound, to get the best possible results.

That includes deciding whether songs have gaps of silence between them, or whether they flow naturally into each other.

Ian: The final thing about mastering is to actually choose all of the starts and ends of the songs, and put them in sequence, and choose the gaps between them. And if you widen out the Photoshop analogy a little bit, that's maybe like doing a presentation of your images, maybe laying them out in a photo book or even a little exhibition, you know, and saying... what frame am I going to put this in? How am I going to light this? Should this be large, should it be small? All those kind of things.

Let’s compare the way a song sounds before and after it’s been mastered. Here’s a clip from the song Closer from Nine Inch Nails, before mastering:

[Music clip: Nine Inch Nails Closer Unmastered]

And here’s the mastered version:

[Music clip: Nine Inch Nails Closer Mastered]

Now, they both sound great, but the mastered version sounds fuller, clearer, and noticeably louder. It’s the same song, just...a little better. This shows how simple the effects of mastering can be.

But mastering engineers don’t just work on new music. It’s also common for older albums get remastered using newer technology.

Ian: The advantage is quite often you can go back to the original master tapes, you can make a clean transfer with the best possible equipment.

Ian: And the remastering is also an opportunity to maybe correct come faults.

For instance, Ian was once hired to restore and remaster a 1967 song called “Hush,” by the British songwriter Kris Ife. You may know Deep Purple’s version of the song, from a year later.

[Music clip: “Hush”]

Unfortunately, the original master tape of the track had been lost, so all Ian had to work with was an old vinyl 45. As you’ll hear, the record was in pretty bad shape. But through the magic of mastering, Ian managed to cut out the hiss and crackle. He also tweaked the EQ to make the song sound warmer and punchier. Here’s the original:

[Music clip: Remaster (first section)]

And here’s Ian’s remaster:

[Music clip: Remaster (second section)]

Ian: Sometimes, what was on the vinyl didn't sound as good as what was on the master tapes. And remastering is an opportunity to let people hear that. So that’s the ideal.

But the most controversial part of mastering has to do with loudness.

Ian: Part of the process of mastering is to get a great balance between the dynamics of the music and the loudness. So, the dynamics mean contrast in the music. So, in an orchestral score, you have pianissimo for the quietest moments [music in] and fortissimo for the loudest moments [music up]. And the same thing applies to a rock song [music in], for example. You want the introduction to be quiet and gentle, maybe, and then the verse and the chorus to get louder [music up], and you want the screaming guitar solo to really lift up in level to have the right emotional impact [music up].

[music out]

The natural difference between loud and soft sounds in music is referred to as dynamic range. The word “loudness” has an easier definition. It works just like your volume knob - basically a mastering engineer will change the overall loudness of each song so they all play nicely together as an album, and you don’t have to reach for the volume knob on your sound system.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, when vinyl was king and recording was all analog, songs could only be as loud as the equipment would allow.

The machines that physically cut music into vinyl records were especially fragile.

Greg: In an analog system... you're really limited.

Greg: So I think their mindset was a little bit different in the '70s and '80s. The mindset was that there is this limit beyond which we really can't go so we have to be very, very careful about the way we master these recordings.

As a result, music from this period tends to have a very high dynamic range. So, there’s a lot of contrast between the quietest parts of a song and the loudest.

Greg: So many things back then had a great dynamic range. You know, you listen to Abbey Road for example, “Here Comes the Sun.” If you really listen closely you can really hear the range.

Here’s the quietest part of “Here Comes the Sun:”

[Music clip: Here Comes the Sun (intro)]

And here’s the loudest part:

[Music clip: Here Comes the Sun (loud)]

Just to be clear, we didn’t adjust the volume at all between the two clips, that’s the exact dynamic range from the album.

Greg: But you know what? If you listen to a Black Sabbath song that came out about a year later, a lot of those actually have an even greater dynamic range.

The song “Black Sabbath,” from Black Sabbath’s first album, Black Sabbath, shows off it’s impressive dynamic range within the first minute. At the start, it’s extremely subdued, with nothing but the sounds of rainfall and church bells.

[Music clip: Black Sabbath (intro)]

Suddenly, the song erupts into a monstrous guitar riff.

[Music clip: Black Sabbath (main riff)]

The energy peaks in the final seconds.

[Music clip: Black Sabbath (end riff)]

If you grew up on.

[Music clip: Black Sabbath (actual end riff)]

...I always forget about that. Anyway, If you grew up on classic rock radio, then you have heard these songs many times but may never have realized how they were affected by mastering.

This also applies to all genres of music, from hip hop to classical. Nearly all music gets mastered before it is released.

If you’re a classic rock fan, you’re probably sick of the song “Stairway to Heaven,” but there’s no denying that the song is a powerful example of dynamic range.

[Music clip: Stairway (intro)]

Greg: There's a reason, I think, that “Stairway to Heaven” was so popular. There's several reasons, but one thing is it just has striking dynamic range…

[Music clip: Stairway (drum verse)]

You can tell by how rich the drums often sound. Drums and vocals are I think the things that benefit most from really strong dynamic range.

[Music clip: Stairway (outro)]

From start to finish, that’s a huge change. We’re not just talking about in increase in energy, but in actual volume. A lot of the most beloved music from this era just is like this.

Ian: Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here is a classic audiophile album with amazing dynamics.

[Music clip: Wish You Were Here].

Greg: Then of course the Eagles, love 'em or hate 'em, those early Eagles records had really stunning dynamic range, especially when they were mastered on to the Greatest Hits album that became the biggest selling album of all time. There's just a spaciousness to those records.

Like in the Song Witchy Woman.

[Music clip: Witchy Woman]

Greg: It was really kind of an embarrassment of riches in a way, but you could almost pick and choose, and chances are you'd be listening to something with strong dynamic range.

[music in]

But starting in the late ‘80s, the spread of digital technology caused seismic shifts in the music industry. For one thing, songs could made be louder than ever.

Ian: The new digital technology just allowed people to go even further, push the loudness higher and higher.

One of the main ways they did this was through dynamic range compression. Essentially, this type of compression clamps down the loudest parts of a track so they’re closer to the quiet parts, and once everything is evened out, you can boost the whole thing up. That way, the song stays closer to a maximum level the whole time, with less dynamic range from second to second, or minute to minute.

Of course, compressors weren’t invented in the 80s.

[music out]

Greg: Compression has been something that's been around at least since the advent of multitrack recording.

Ian: In fact, the reason that The Beatles got Abbey Road to buy the first Fairchild compressor, was to try and compete in terms of loudness with the music that was coming out of Motown.

[Music clip: You Can't Hurry Love]

Like this song, “You Can’t Hurry Love” by The Supremes.

[Music clip continued: You Can't Hurry Love]

But while analog compression had been around for decades, digital compression was a whole new ballgame.

Greg: With the advent of the compact disc it became easier to employ very, very harsh dynamic range compression to make things sound louder.

Ian: But there's also a limit in digital formats as well. There's this ceiling, basically, above which you can't go any higher because, at the end of the day, there is a number that is the largest number you can store in the digital format, and there are no numbers larger than that.

In other words, in a digital format, we can now make the volume max out riiiight before it’s absolute maximum possible level. With old analog tech, you it was very wishy washy, so mastering engineers had to be much more conservative in their approach.

[music in]

Ian: I have a bit of a crazy analogy to explain this, which is, if you imagine that the music is a person on a trampoline. If they're in a big sports hall with high ceilings, they can bounce as high as they like, and there's no restriction. But if you then think about raising the floor of the room up towards the ceiling, for a while that's no problem, there's plenty of headroom for the person bouncing on the trampoline, or for the music. But as you get closer and closer to the ceiling, the person bouncing is going to have to maybe start ducking their head or curling over, and twisting and turning to avoid crashing into the ceiling. And exactly the same thing happens with music. For a while, you can lift the loudness up with no problems. But as you get towards that digital ceiling, the highest level that can be recorded, you have to start processing the audio, squashing the audio down into a smaller and smaller space to make it fit.

Ian: You can do that quite gently, which can be beneficial and help things sound glued together and dense and powerful. But if you go too far, it can dull things down, and they start to sound lifeless and weak.

And by the time you’re hearing me right now, we’ve slowly compressed Ian’s voice, my voice, and the music. So right now, what you’re hearing is super compressed. Can you tell? [music plays] ...and here it is back with much lighter compression... Ahhhhh [music clip without compression].

So why was the music industry so obsessed with loudness? If hyper compression can degrade the sound quality of a song, why would an artist ever want it?? And how did all of this affect the future of the music industry? That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

In the analog era of recorded music, songs were mastered to be very dynamic. This meant that there could be a lot of contrast between the quietest parts of a song, and the loudest. But once digital technology hit the scene, mastering engineers could make songs louder than ever before. To do so, they used extreme compression, which boosts the volume but reduces dynamic range. So why were artists so eager to make their songs louder?

[music out]

Ian: If I play you two identical pieces of audio, but one of them is just a fraction louder than the other, they will actually sound different to you, even though they're the same and the only difference is the loudness. So the louder one might sound like it's got a little bit more bass, a little bit more treble, and on the whole, people will tend to say that they think the louder one sounds better.

So let’s try it. Here’s a clip from the song “Juice” by Lizzo. Which one sounds better to you? This:

[Music clip: Juice (quiet)]

Or this?:

[Music clip: Juice (loud)]

You probably picked the second one, and if so, you’re not alone.

Ian: Even though the audio is identical…

Greg: Their initial reaction is often going to be, "Oh, the loud one sounds better. It's just fuller. It's, you know, coming out of the speakers."

Ian: And that means that, if you're producing any kind of audio where you want to catch people's attention, there's a benefit to being loud.

And music isn’t the only place where some people think louder is better. There’s one industry in particular where getting people’s attention matters more than anything else.

[SFX clip: Billy Mays: Hi, Billy Mays here for the Grip and Lift, when you need some extra help for those outdoor chores, it’s a must have!]

That’s right: commercials. And just like music, the volume of commercials used to be limited by analog equipment.

[SFX clip: Bounty Ad (60s): That’s why I switched to Bounty paper towels. They absorb faster than any other leading brand. Bounty is the quicker picker upper.]

But as technology improved, commercials kept getting louder and louder.

[SFX clip: Bounty Ad (00s): The quilted quicker picker upper, Bounty!]

Eventually, things got so bad that Congress had to be the noise police for the entire country. In 2010, Congress passed the CALM Act, which stands for Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation. Under this law, ads are prohibited from being broadcast louder than TV shows.

It basically works by measuring loudness over time. TV shows are longer, so they have time for peaks and valleys in the volume. But TV ads are often just a block of maximum loudness for 30 seconds, so they can still feel a lot louder even though they’re technically the same.

Greg: It's still at the same level, it's just that it's hitting those maximum peaks much more often than the TV show before it.

Ian: We've actually seen a similar thing happen in music, where people have been using loudness to try and get music to stand out as well. On record, originally, and on the radio, and these days, on CD and online... and it's called the Loudness War, because it's basically a sonic arms race. Because people know that if they can be a little bit louder, maybe they'll stand out a little bit more, or sound a little bit better.

Greg: Imagine a jukebox in a crowded bar [SFX] It's set as some kind of master volume. If the song that comes before yours has been mastered to sound louder, naturally that's where the volume is going to be set. [Music clip : Love Is Ours - Instrumental - by Dansu] When your song comes on it's gonna sound kind of weak and wimpy by comparison. Maybe you won't even be able to hear it over the crowd noise, [Music clip: Shake This Feeling - Instrumental - by Kaptan] There was this thought that music really had to just jump out of the speakers and really attack you.

Greg: What's the Story Morning Glory by Oasis: really, really, really aggressively compressed…

[Music clip: Morning Glory - by Oasis]

But on the other hand…

Ian: By modern standards, Nevermind by Nirvana.

Ian: Is quite a quiet record. But nobody ever complained that it didn't sound loud enough, because they just crank it up.

[Music clip: Lithium by Nirvana]

Greg: And that's the thing. We have plenty of volume to go around. All we need to do with records if they're not as loud as we want is just turn up the volume.

Still, Nirvana’s Nevermind ended up being something of an outlier, as more and more artists opted for a loud, ultra-compressed sound.

Greg: While this was all going on, the same thing was happening in radio. Radio stations were facing the same sort of problems. You want your radio station to pop out of the speakers so someone listening to it if they turned to it on the dial and less likely to go to someone else's. So, you had this Loudness War in radio and this Loudness War in recordings and it just combined to be this really crazy morass of loudness and compression.

Ian: Over time, the loudness levels just creep up, and creep up, and creep up.

By the end of the millenium, the Loudness War had spiralled out of control. Music was being hyper-compressed by mastering engineers, and again by radio broadcasters. Just when it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, mp3s appeared, and music got compressed even more. This time, it was through a process called “data compression.”

Unlike dynamic range compression, which is applied while mixing and mastering, data compression happens when a recording is encoded from one digital format to another, like when you used to rip a CD onto a computer.

[SFX: Vintage CD tray SFX]

So let’s rewind to say 2001, [Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely - dream sequence-y] and you want to get the music from your new Backstreet Boys CD onto your computer, and then put it on your mp3 player, or most likely you want to share it to Napster. Of course, you shouldn’t be uploading other peoples’ music to the internet, but it’s 2001, and you don’t know that yet.

So you open a program that turns CDs into mp3’s. But you probably didn’t pay attention to the settings. [SFX and Music out] And something most of us don’t realize is that when you turn those CD’s into a bunch of mp3 files, you are throwing away a huge amount of the actual sound of the music through data compression.

Greg: When MP3s came on the scene, they figured out that you could apply algorithms that would take out a huge amount of the music, and I'm talking like a gigantic amount of the music, because at any given moment there are certain frequencies that our ears are not going to hear because they're being overwhelmed by other frequencies.

[music in]

Ian: So I actually find it pretty impressive that lossy data compression works at all. When you think that often as much as 90% of the information is being discarded in order to get the file size down, it’s amazing that they sound as good as they do.

At higher-quality settings, most people probably won’t notice any loss in sound quality. But when you compress the file down enough, the sound really starts to suffer.

Ian: So what you tend to get back has similar tonal balance to the original, you can hear all of the instruments, it still sounds like the same piece of music. But when you do a direct comparison, you’ll often find, if you’re listening in stereo, what used to sound wide and spacious and lush collapses down into the center of the stereo image. You get much less of that sense of space and depth, and everything sounds a bit claustrophobic, a bit constrained… And the other thing that you hear as the data rate goes down is extra mulch, to use a technical term. It’s just this kind of squelchy, scrunchy, slightly distorted quality to the sound.

We’ve actually been gradually compressing the data of this audio over the last minute or so. Here’s how it sounded when we started, [Back to normal, high bitrate] and here’s where we ended up [Back to low bitrate]. It’s one of those things that if you don’t know what’s happening, you can’t really pick it out. But when you compare the two, you can definitely hear the difference.

[music out]

Ian: It probably won’t leap out at you, but once you start to hear it, it’s quite distinctive. For me, it just makes things sound duller, less interesting, less involving. I’m less likely to be sucked into a recording, and lose myself in it. It’s much less likely to give me goosebumps.

[music in]

Data compression in audio is still a big issue today. When you stream music, or listen to a podcast, the audio files gets encoded down pretty heavily to save bandwidth. This does make sense up to a point, since higher-quality files do take longer to buffer. And of course, a lot of us pay by the gigabyte for our mobile data. On the other hand though, internet speeds are faster than ever these days, and unlimited data plans are pretty common. You can stream 4K video from YouTube and Netflix, so why hasn’t audio caught up?

Unfortunately, audio still often gets treated like a second-class citizen compared to video, and the bar for what’s considered acceptable is significantly lower. Between over-compression at the mastering stage, and over-compression at the encoding stage, most of us have to put up with subpar sound all the time, whether we realize it or not.

[music out]

Ian: It’s quite interesting; because it’s such a subtle effect, if you didn’t do the comparison, you might never notice it. But I think it has quite a profound effect on the way that we feel when we listen to the music, and the way that we’re likely to keep on listening, or switch it off and do something else instead.

[music in]

Here at Twenty Thousand Hertz, we care about sound quality, and we think you do too. If you want to make the music you hear sound a little better, go into the settings of your music streaming app, and turn on “High Quality Streaming.” It’s not going to fix all of the issues we’ve talked about, but it does make a difference.

At this point, things seem pretty dire, but there are some signs of hope. While music has been getting pummeled by the Loudness War, some artists and mastering engineers have been fighting to keep dynamics alive. And while streaming services don’t have a great track record when it comes to sound quality, they might end up being the biggest game changers in the Loudness War. How?

We’ll find out next time.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is presented by Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound insanely cool. Go listen at defactosound.com.

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

Special thanks to our guests Greg Milner and Ian Shepherd.

The background music in this episode came from our friends at Musicbed. Visit musicbed.com to explore their huge library of awesome music.

What album captivates you with its amazing sound? I’d love to know. You can get in touch with me and the rest of the 20K team on Twitter, Facebook, or through our website at 20k.org. And if you enjoyed this episode, tell your friends and family.. And be sure to support the artists you love by buying their music… and preferably in high quality.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Featured

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

September 16, 2019

Info Pocketknife

You’ve Got Mail: The voice behind AOL

September 16, 2019

Info Pocketknife

This episode was produced by Colin DeVarney.

How a simple soundbite on America Online became one of the most recognizable sounds of the internet age, plus the creation of a whole new musical instrument. This episode features Elwood Edwards, the man behind the famous AOL “You’ve Got Mail” soundbite, and Bosco and Maya Kante, inventors of the ElectroSpit.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Dust in Sunlight by Sound of Picture
Fingernail Grit by Sound of Picture
Fives by Sound of Picture
Massive by Sound of Picture
Jack 12 by Sound of Picture
Tipsy Xylo by Sound of Picture
Twinkle Toes by Sound of Picture

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

Sign up for The Great Courses Plus and get a free month at thegreatcoursesplus.com/20k.

Get a 14 day free trial of Zapier at zapier.com/20k.

Check out and subscribe to Gastropod wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out and subscribe to Just the Beginning wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

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

[music in]

There are so many stories out there that we wanted to share with you, but some of the stories just don’t need an entire episode. So this show is going to be a little different. I want to present two completely separate bite-sized stories. The first is about a small little phrase that’s become one of the most recognizable sounds in recent history. And later in the show, we’ll hear about the creation of a brand new spin on a modern musical instrument. So without further ado, this is Jack Dearlove reporting on our first story.

[music out]

Jack: So, I'm sitting here, on my phone, and currently I have 17 unread emails. Most are spam, there are a couple of newsletters, there's something from a letting agent that I probably should look at more carefully.

Jack: But it got me thinking, it wasn't always like this.

[music in]

Jack: Do you remember when checking your email was a pretty major process? Turn on your computer, dial up, log in, wait for it all to load. I mean, you probably still had 17 unread emails waiting for you, but you were the boss of when they were looked at, rather than your phone.

Jack: And there was something else about that era of email that was pretty special. After you've gone through all the process of getting online, you were probably greeted by something that's gone down in Internet history. The voice of a guy who'd tell you-

Elwood: You've got mail.

[music out]

Elwood: I've been a television broadcaster since I graduated from high school.

Jack: So, this is the man himself. He's called Elwood Edwards, he's now in his mid-sixties, and the story of how he became the voice of AOL starts the same way a lot of stories do. Boy meets girl.

[music in]

Elwood: I had just purchased a Commodore 64 computer, and in a Christian chat room I started talking with a woman who was KarenJ2. I was in Gaithersburg, Maryland and she was in Fairfax, Virginia. After we had talked for several months, I invited myself over for dinner. She fixed tuna salad, I remember that... and we became inseparable.

Elwood: We were married in December 1988.

Jack: What I love about this story is that we still treat relationships that start online like they're a new thing, but this was the eighties. They're definitely not.

Elwood: She was a customer service rep for the company called Quantum Computer Services, which in 1989 became America Online. She overheard Steve Case, one of the principles of America Online. He was discussing with some programmers the idea of adding a voice to the software.

Elwood: Karen volunteered me, and on a cassette deck in my living room, I recorded, Welcome! You've got mail. File's done, goodbye.

Jack: What did you think of it when you heard it for the first time?

Elwood: Well, I've been an announcer, even though you wouldn't know it by my voice today. Gee whiz. I've been an announcer my entire broadcasting career. I started in radio while I was in high school, then I was always a staff announcer at the various TV stations I worked at.

Elwood: So, it was nothing new to me to hear my voice coming out of a little speaker. I didn't really think anything of it at the time.

Jack: “I didn't really think anything of it at the time.”

[music out]

Jack: It was just an average day in a series of average days. It was one recording, three little words that are still in use today.

Elwood: I don't think anyone had any idea what it would become. Certainly, had I realized it at the time, I would now be retired, but I'm not. Even today, I have an AOL account, email account, but if you go on AOL.com and then you either open your mail or you create an email account, when you sign onto that and you have new mail, you still hear me say, you've got mail.

Jack: I will be honest. The first time I heard it, El's voice is still there, I couldn't believe it. I actually went and signed up for an AOL account myself, just to double check, and yup. There he is.

Elwood: You've got mail.

Jack: But he's not the only voice you could have over the years.

[music in]

Elwood: Along with the history of all of this, AOL used to have an occasional, I guess it was an annual for a while, celebrity voice contest where users of the system could change from the default voice, mine, to the voice of various celebrities who had recorded the phrases as well.

Elwood: I know Mick Jagger said...

[SFX clip: Mick Jagger: You've got some letters.]

Elwood: But fewer than 20% of the AOL subscribers, throughout the years, had elected to change from my voice.

Jack: El is really proud of this, you can hear it in his voice.

Elwood: I would like to think they like to hear what I sounded like. I don't know for sure, but that's what I like to think.

Jack: It's almost like you've got a secret identity, you know, a bit like a super hero?

Elwood: Yeah, that's sort of true, yeah.

Elwood: It's not something I go around blowing my horn about, you know. My ex-wife used to be my greatest cheerleader. She would be the one who would open up the conversations, and then people would have me perform, if you would.

Elwood: I was on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

[music out]

[Clip: Jimmy Fallon:Elwood!

Elwood: They had me do the "Welcome, you've got mail."

Jimmy Fallon: Elwood!

Elwood: Then they had me say some other things.

Jimmy Fallon: Thank you for coming on the show, Elwood. Now, to prove that it's really you, can you say the classic “You've got mail” line?

Elwood: Welcome! You've got mail.

Jimmy Fallon: That's worth the price of admission, right there. That's enough.

Jimmy Fallon: Now, we've got some other phrases we'd love for you to say, so whenever you're ready, read the cue cards.

Elwood: Uptown funk.

Elwood: Adele Dazim

Elwood: File's done. Goodbye.]

Elwood: That was a great deal of fun, and I really appreciated the recognition. I was slightly taken aback by the audience reaction, it was rather thunderous in the studio, which I had not expected.

Jack: This is a guy who has been famous for decades, but he talks about going on a show watched by millions on TV, and online, all around the world like it was just a nice day out. Maybe that's it.

Jack: He could be milking his fame for everything it's worth, but he's not. He's just happy to have been part of your life.

[music in]

Jack: Do you ever get tired of it, at all?

Elwood: Oh, no. No, not at all.

Elwood: If anything, I enjoy the look on people's faces when they realize who I am. At the TV station where I work, I'm a News Editor, I run the studio cameras. I'm really a behind-the-scenes kind of person, I've never been one to really want to be in the limelight, but it's quite gratifying when somebody does realize who I am, and their reaction to that knowledge.

Elwood: Our world is full of people who were in the right place at the right time, and I'm glad to be one of those.

[music out]

[music in]

The decision to add a voice to America Online probably felt pretty insignificant at the time, but it really became a cultural icon. Elwood was only paid $200 and recorded it on a whim. It was a favor. This phrase has gone on to be synonymous with the early days of the internet, so much so that even younger generations know the phrase. It also made Elwood famous in a unique, hidden way. Almost no one would recognize him if they saw him on the street, case and point - here’s Twitter user Brandee Barker finding out that ther Uber driver was Elwood.

[Clip: Twitter video:

Brandee: This is my Uber Driver and he just told me something very special, that he’s the voice behind

Elwood: Welcome you’ve got mail.

Brandee: No way! Do it again! Do it again! Welcome, you’ve got mail. Yay, ok whats your name?

Elwood: Elwood Edwards.

Brandee: Elwood Edwards, thank you!

Elwood: You bet!]

After the break, we’ll take a look at another story about sound and technology. It’s about an inventor that combined our oldest instrument with modern technology to create something entirely new. After this.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

The human voice is our oldest instrument. It doesn’t take any sort of gear or technology to use it. It’s sort of the opposite of modern day synthesizers if you think about. But naturally, people have tried to blend these two opposites together to create something different and new. Our second story comes from the podcast Just the Beginning, which is about how independent creators bring their ideas to life. This story is of a husband and wife team that created an instrument called the ElectroSpit. Put simply, it kinda lets you sing like a robot. This story is reported by Michael Garofolo.

[music out]

Maya: A melodic robot. [Laughs]

Bosco: Yeah. That’s a great description. A robot…

Maya: Who has a soul.

Bosco: [laughs]

Maya: A robot with a soul.

[Bosko singing with ElectroSpit]: Oh yeah. Welcome, welcome, EeeElectroSpit…

[Bosco continues to improvise beneath intros]

Maya: My name is Maya Kante. I am in charge of business strategy, marketing, and cracking the daily whip.

Bosco: [Laughs] My name is Bosco Kante.

[SFX: Singing: My name is Bosco…]

Bosco: I am charge of engineering, the vision for the company… which is a shared vision.

Maya: Yeah, I was about to say I don’t know about that. [Laughs]

[Bosco continues on electrospit: "We’re going to give you the backstory — oh."]

Michael: I got to see the ElectroSpit when we sat down for this interview, and it looks a little like a pair of headphones that you wear around your neck… with the parts that you’d normally put over your ears — Bosco calls them soundcups — resting right on your throat.

Bosco: So, the way the ElectroSpit works, the sound comes into the soundcups [SFX]. If I put it on my neck it goes through my neck and out of my mouth. It replaces your vocal chords [SFX]. So if I talk at the same time you can kind of hear it in the background [SFX] but if I open the back of my throat now you can hear it now you can hear it oh… That’s what it sounds like.

[Music: Zapp “More Bounce To The Ounce”]

Michael: The ElectroSpit is actually based on an older instrument, called the talkbox… that was used a lot in the 1970s and early 80s… and that’s when Bosco got hooked…

Bosco: I was in middle school at the time, and I would ride in my neighbor’s ’65 Impala, and he would play Zapp, “More Bounce the Ounce”, and then we would go to the skating rink and they would have breakdancing and popping competitions, and that was the main song for those competitions. Ever since that time, I wanted to know how to make that sound, how do they do that.

[Music: Zapp “More Bounce To The Ounce”]

Michael: Bosco spent years mastering his talkbox technique. And he is a master. Bosco is one of the few go-to guys in the music business and his credits prove it. He’s played talk box on tracks by Bruno Mars and Big Boi.

Michael: So, why is he trying to reinvent it?

Michael: Well, first of all, the talkbox is notoriously difficult to play… there are some… let’s say, basic design flaws… for example… you have to try to sing while holding a plastic tube in your mouth.

Bosco: And if you hold it in the wrong place, it doesn’t sound right. And even if you hold it in the right place, it still sounds like you have a tube in your mouth.

Michael: And then, there’s Kanye.

Bosco: Kanye, okay. So, I had the opportunity to play live on the American Music Awards with Kanye West because I did this song called, “Kanye’s Workout Plan,” that I wrote, and there’s a big talkbox solo. But before the show, they’re talking about what the performance is gonna be like and it’s gonna have all these dancers and you’re gonna be moving around.

Maya:‘Cause they were doing a workout routine, dance routine.

Bosco: Right. And the talkbox is not mobile. So I’m gonna have to lip sync. Which sucks because this is my big moment to like show everybody in the world how great of a talkboxer I am and no, I’m out there doing a Milli Vanilli. That was the inspiration for ElectroSpit.

[SFX: Bosco improvising with ElectroSpit]

Maya: Some of our early prototypes we had like a person with a keyboard tie, and you know how they have those snorkeling things where they have the thing in their nose, we thought maybe we could do that.

[SFX: Bosco improvising with ElectroSpit]

Bosco: I had like an attachment to the tube, like I thought of the talkbox as the tube.

Maya: And the more you thought about it it was like that makes it so you can’t share it because it make it unsanitary. And that means that less people can use it. When you go to a studio, anybody can pick up a guitar, right? But if somebody has a spare talkbox laying around, unless you have a clean tube, nobody wants to touch that thing.

[Bosco improvising with ElectroSpit]

Michael: There was maybe no one more qualified to bring the talkbox into the 21st century than Bosco. He’s not only a musician — he’s also a mechanical engineer. He got his first big break in the music industry while he was still in college when he was commissioned to do the theme song for the TV show In Living Color.

[SFX: In Living Color Theme Song]

Michael:And it seems Bosco’s particular brand of genius that combines music and technology, it runs in his family.

Bosco: My mom plays French horn, my grandmother plays trumpet. My aunt plays trumpet. My other aunt plays guitar and sings. So, you know, Christmas carols are very lively.

Maya: I sit silently. [laughs]

Bosco: So music was a huge part of our family. And then, in addition, everybody in my family did math. My mom is a math … she was a math professor and now she’s a civil engineer. My grandmother was a math professor, but before that she was working as an electrical engineer and she was actually part of the team that invented the microwave. My mom’s first cousin invented the laser.

[Music: ElectroSpit “Now Is So Last Year”]

Michael: Like I said… Bosco seemed destined to build this instrument.

Michael: And with a backstory like this, it makes sense that Bosco and Maya really do consider ElectroSpit a family business… even if what they are doing doesn’t exactly look like a mom and pop type of thing.

Bosco: Everything for us is family, you know?

Maya: Yea, everything.

Bosco: Yea, it’s just everything.

Maya: Some people were like, “How do you work together and live together and you’re married?” And I was like, “Well, we actually really do like each other.”

Bosco: That’s right.

Bosco: But when we first got together, Maya had come from the corporate world.

Maya: There was some learning to be done about what looks like work. Entertainment looked like kick it time to me. He’s like, “No, this is a business meeting.” I was like, “No, you’re having drinks.”

Bosco: And I had never had a quote unquote job, I mean…

Maya: You’ve always been an entrepreneur.

Bosco: I’ve always been-

Maya: And people don’t think of that as a job, but it’s so much more grueling than a job because nobody tells you what to do, there’s no set hours. Like, he had way more of a job than anybody that I’ve ever known.

Bosco: Well, yeah, if I didn’t sell this particular song then I wasn’t gonna be able to pay my mortgage. So initially anytime we would face some adversity in our entrepreneurial ventures, Maya would, she started looking at the job-

Maya: Job boards.

Bosco: Job boards.

Maya: And I’d be applying for jobs and stuff. ” And he was like, “You’re just fooling yourself.”

Bosco: You’re just wasting time. Now, when we face some type of adversity or challenge, it’s “we can do it, we can figure this out, we’re gonna get creative.”

Maya: We’re doing it. It’s always we’re doing it.

Bosco: See? We’re doing it. It’s done. Consider it done.

Maya: Yeah.

[Music: ElectroSpit “Now Is So Last Year”]

Bosco: Initially, she looked at ElectroSpit as “this is Bosco’s thing. He’s the producer, he plays talkbox.”

Maya: This crucial turning point where our son was trying to give me a compliment, and he goes, “Mommy, maybe when I grow up I wanna be a music helper like you.” And I was like, “What?” I was like, “I’m a boss.”

[Music: ElectroSpit “Now Is So Last Year”]

Michael: And how about their son? Even though he’s still in elementary school, he’s already angling to take over the family business.

Maya: At his school, they had a project called The Living History of Hip Hop. His dad came in as a part of that whole project and did a demonstration of the ElectroSpit. And all the kids got up and tried it. And then after school that day, our son said, “Okay, so I need to be the salesman.” Because he said, “Everybody in class says that they each have $100, so I think that’s a good price point, around $100.” I was like, okay, you’re in the fourth grade and you’re nine years old and you’re trying to basically pimp out your classmates to buy the ElectroSpit [laughing].

[Music: ElectroSpit “No Chute”]

Michael: When I spoke to Bosco and Maya, the ElectroSpit was just about to go into production. And I couldn’t help but notice that as they talked about the upcoming release, they sounded a bit like parents watching their kid grow up.

Bosco: You know, the talkbox is gonna be out there and people are gonna do all kinds of stuff. And I know that there’s gonna be some kid that’s gonna pick it up and be 10 times better than me and play it upside down or behind his back and that’s the exciting part.

Maya: We don’t wanna put any limitations on it. We’re just excited to see what other people do.

[Music: ElectroSpit “No Chute”]

That story came from our friends at the Just the Beginning podcast. The hosts Zakiya Gibbons and Nick Yulman and they present some fantastic stories on creatives making their dreams become a reality. So take a moment to go find it and hit that subscribe button... You can also find out more about the Electrospit at electrospit dot com.

[music out]

[music in]

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

This episode was produced by Colin DeVarney and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound edited by Soren Begin, and mixed by Jai Berger.

Thanks to reporter Jack Dearlove and the Just the Beginning podcast for letting us share their stories. And if you happen live in London, Jack actually made an awesome app that tells you the status of the London Tube through emojis. So check that out at tubemoji dot com.

Also, if you’ve heard any other great stories about sound or read in another article about sound, be sure to send it to us. You can do that by writing us on Twitter, Facebook or by email at hi@20k dot org. Seriously, my favorite part of doing this show is hearing from our amazing listeners, so don’t be shy.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Featured

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility