Satanic Panic: Backwards messages and '80s hysteria

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

February 19, 2020

Info Pocketknife

Noise “R” Us: The evolution of noisy toys

February 19, 2020

Info Pocketknife

This episode was written and produced by Marissa Flaxbart.

From See ‘n Say to Speak & Spell, and beyond, toys provide the soundtrack of our childhoods. Huge advancements in computer technology in recent decades mean that today’s toys can make a wider variety of sounds than ever before. In this episode, “The Toy Guy” Chris Byrne takes us on a nostalgic look back at the recent history of recorded sound in toys; then, with Dr. Hamid Djalilian, we consider what all that technological advancement means for young ears in the 21st century.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Poppyseed by Sound of Picture
Cheesy Soul Loop by Breakmaster Cylinder
Kiss by Sound of Picture
Mr. Chompers by Breakmaster Cylinder
Amethyst by Breakmaster Cylinder
Unicycle Flips by Breakmaster Cylinder
All These Pieces Drifting Into Place by Breakmaster Cylinder
A Spiral Staircase by Breakmaster Cylinder
The Rainbow Road by Breakmaster Cylinder
Nocturne Op 15 No 2 by Sound of Picture
Sinister Fingertips by Breakmaster Cylinder

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

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

Check out Chris Byrne’s podcast The Playground wherever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

Even before we are born, the sounds of the womb shape our world. As newborns, while our vision is still coming into focus, our sense of hearing is already fully developed. The first sounds that we come to love are our parents’ voices and lullabies. And before long, we become obsessed with a very different kind of sound: the sounds of our toys.

[SFX: toy sounds - toy fire truck siren, toy train whistle, Tamagotchi, Elmo]

Few things trigger nostalgia as quickly and powerfully as the sounds of our childhood -- sounds like sifting through the lego bin [SFX - hand rifling through a lego bin] or for me, the friendly storytelling bear, Teddy Ruxpin [SFX: Teddy Ruxpin].

For most of human history, kids’ toys couldn’t generate much sound on their own. Though, over the course of the past five decades, advancements in manufacturing and in computer technology have changed all that.

[music out]

When today’s adults think back to the sounds of our toys, we’re likely to think of sounds the toys made themselves, at the pull of a string [SFX: “There’s a snake in my boot!”] or the push of a button [SFX: Classic 80’s laser gun toy]. Nowadays, toys can create more sounds than ever… for better and for worse.

Chris: Hi, I'm Chris Byrne and I'm known as the Toy Guy. I've spent the better part of the last 40 years in the toy industry in a lot of different positions from marketing and operations to writing and being a goofball on TV.

Chris really loves toys. He’s a frequent guest on morning shows across the country, where he’s usually talking about the hottest new toys on the market. [SFX: Kelly & Michael Clip] But Chris is also passionate about the history of the toys we love. He wrote a book called “Toy Time!”, and in it, he asked hundreds of people about the toys that left the biggest impact.

Chris: One of the things that I think is always so remarkable about the toy industry is that the role of play in a child's life in terms of having new experiences, exploring the world and expressing yourself really doesn't change from decade to decade and generation to generation. That said, the toys themselves can be quite different.

Though toys have changed a lot over the years, the history of toys that play recorded sounds dates back almost as far as recorded sound itself.

Chris: Sound has been a component of toys really since Thomas Edison put a record player inside a doll.

[Clip: “Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are”]

[music in]

Toy makers have come a long way since then. Up through the 1950s, most toys were analog, and the kids who played with them made the sound effects themselves. In the late ‘50s, the Fisher Price company released the trusty Corn Popper. When you pushed the toy like a vacuum, its colorful balls would bang against the toy’s plastic dome. [SFX - Fisher Price Corn Popper] Fisher Price used simple technologies like this to add sounds to many of their toys. Another one called toy barn made a signature mooing sound everytime the door swung open [SFX: Family Farm door “moo”]; they also had a toy cash register “dinged” like the real thing [SFX: Fisher Price vintage register].

[music out]

It was around the same time in the late ‘50s when Chatty Cathy was introduced. She could say a monumental 11 different phrases when you pulled the string in her back. [SFX: Chatty Cathy commercial]

Chris: It was essentially a small record inside a big plastic box that was stuck in the back of the doll.

[SFX: Chatty Cathy - “I love you.”]

[music in]

By the 1960s, advancements in plastics made it easier to mass-produce toys of all kinds, including ones with recorded sound components. The toy company Mattel had struck gold with Chatty Cathy. Now they had the brilliant idea to put their pull string technology into a toy that toddlers still play with today: namely, The See ‘n Say, first produced in the mid ‘60s. That’s the one with, like an arrow in the middle, that just spins in a circle and lands on an animal.

[SFX: See ‘n Say - “This is a pig”]

[music out]

By the early ‘70s, Fisher Price released the first version of a musical toy made to look like a record player, complete with thick, brightly colored, plastic records [SFX: 1971 Fisher Price Record Player]. Inside, the toy worked just like a music box, the raised ridges on its two-sided records dictating what song the music box played. But these simple, mechanical sound-makers were about to have some competition from the computer age.

Chris: Jumping ahead, when we started to see chips come into toys, that really revolutionized sound. That was the next big revolution in sound for toys because suddenly you could put a lot more sound on a chip.

Chip-based toys had humble beginnings. In the 70s, space toys and toy laser guns could only play one or two sounds [SFX: ‘70s Star Wars toy]. By the late ‘70s, toy and game makers Milton Bradley proved that with just 4 tones, you could make a toy that helped define a generation [SFX: Simon Tones]. They named their soon-to-be iconic puzzle toy “Simon,” after the children’s game “Simon Says.”

Chris: It had lights and sounds and if you remember it, it was a follow the maze type of game where you had to follow the different colors. That was one of the first to have a chip in it.

The chip inside Simon was made by Texas Instruments. They’re the ones that made that famous graphing calculator you may have used in high school. The same year that Simon came out they also made the chip in another iconic toy.

[SFX: Speak and Spell ad: “He’s learning spelling with Texas Instruments Speak & Spell. ‘Spell Rain...R-A-I-N...that is correct”]

Speak & Spell’s child-sized keyboard let little fingers type and hear each letter out loud. A classic robotic voice would ask kids to spell words that appeared on the screen. It also had mini-games that could teach kids other things, like how to pronounce difficult words.

Chris: Speak & Spell was really a revolution as well because we'd seen the Pull-String types of toys in the past where you pulled the string and you had to mechanically turn the arrow to say, "The cow says moo." And then the cow would moo. Speak & Spell was really much more child-focused where you're punching letters and had kind of a keyboard. And the letters would pop up and then it would say them.

The invention of the Speak & Spell marked the first time a children’s toy had speech recorded onto a computer chip, as opposed to mechanical technology like a record or a tape.

Chris: The thing that's been amazing since Speak & Spell is how much better speakers have gotten in toys, because it was really kind of hard to tell the difference between an N and an R in some of those early toys.

[SFX: Speak & Spell - “Now spell child.”]

And interestingly enough, at that time what we were seeing was that chips that had become obsolete for consumer products, for adults and families, were now filtering down into the toy industry.

[music in]

The Speak & Spell had revolutionized the electronic toy market as well as the educational toy market. It went through a huge number of upgrades and improvements over the next decade, but by the early ‘90s, computer technology had advanced so much that the groundbreaking toy became somewhat obsolete. In its wake came a whole new wave of electronic toys, educational and otherwise.

Chris: It really depended on how much you wanted to spend, what the compression rates were, what you wanted the toy to say. But toys suddenly went from the miraculous 11 sayings in 1959 to hundreds and hundreds, if not more, by the Eighties and Nineties.

The growing affordability and computing power of these chips made it possible for toys to make so, so many sounds. They also made it feasible for more kinds of toys to make sounds. You see, when a ‘90s kid opened a toy box, it wasn’t just your dolls and action figures that talked to you. It was your stuffed animals [SFX: “I love you”] , your toy police car [SFX: toy car siren], and your laser blasters [SFX: toy laser blasts]. By the middle of the 90’s, even your board games and your keychains were making noise.

[music out]

Chris: One of the things that's really driven the evolution of sound and lights and things like vibrations in toys has been the declining cost of electronics. So you suddenly have a bump switch that can activate something. You suddenly have a speaker that's less expensive than it was before. You've suddenly got a sound chip that you can put so much more on than you could before. And all of that is designed to enhance the play experience. So the sounds that we used to make with our mouths, you know “bang, bang” and “buzz” and whatever it was that we did when we were playing back in the dark ages when I was growing up, the toy can now do that.

In the mid-nineties, some of these noise-making toys sparked their own cultural phenomenons.

[SFX: Tickle Me Elmo commercial: “Just tickle Elmo, and he really talks! (that tickles) and laughs”

Chris: I was the very first person to have Tickle Me Elmo on national TV. I showed it to Al Roker on the today show from Toy Fair in 1996. It became a phenomenon and Interestingly enough, it always laughed, but It began its life as a monkey with the electronic unit inside it. But it was the advertising agency and specifically an account guy named Bob Mole who said, "This thing has to shake because you need that TV moment to make it work." And the rest is kind of history.

The Tickle Me Elmo doll was SUCH a phenomenon that its Christmas release has gone down in history as one of the most chaotic toy crazes of all time.

[Audio clip: “No wonder he's laughing... all the way to the bank. Because North America has been gripped by Tickle Me Elmo hysteria."]

Chris: I was actually going through security in the New Orleans airport with one probably around the 10th or 12th of December. And a guy offered me $500 for it right on the spot. And I said, "Well, I can't do it. This is the only one I've got and I need it."

[SFX: Tickle Me Elmo laugh]

Also invented in the mid-nineties was the trusty Tamagotchi, [SFX: Tamagotchi beeping] a tiny digital display toy that you had to feed and play with to keep alive. If it died, you had to start all over again. On an average school day [SFX: Kids, school yard, multiple Tamagotchis] during a certain stretch of the late nineties, the needy beeping of the Tamagotchi was unmistakable and impossible to miss.

By the end of the ‘90s, kids who loved needy toys could now make a major upgrade...to the Furby.

[SFX: Furby ad “What’s that?” “Me up!” “It’s my Furby!”... “Tickle me! “Furby, the first gigapet you pet!”]

Chris: Well, I think what I can say about Furby is “da who oo eh ah ah”... no seriously. It looked like a big croquette with fur on it. And it had a sort of a beak and eyes and ears and at the time a lot of people thought it looked like the gremlin from the Gremlins movies. But it talked to you. The thing about Furby that was newsworthy if you will, it was the first toy that kind of grew up as you played with it. So it would start out babbling and the more you played with it and talked to it and had all kinds of different sensors on it, the more sophisticated the play would get.

[Audio: Furby ad, “Your Furby sneezed, and gave MINE a cold”]

Chris: I'm not sure how many kids actually played with it to get it to grow to that extent, because it took some time.

Even if you never had a Furby, it’s likely you recognize the name. That’s because the Furby became more than just a toy.

Chris: Furby was one of those rare toys – like Tickle Me Elmo, like Cabbage Patch kids – that made that leap from interesting toy to cultural phenomenon. It was kind of frustrating to play with, but everybody wanted to have a Furby. It didn't have an off switch... So it would keep talking for hours. And it was controversial. People brought them into work and they thought they were spying on them because it reacted to your voice.

[music in]

Perhaps that Furby paranoia seems pretty quaint compared to now, when many households have devices specifically designed to wait and listen for the sound of our voices calling for them. But that very advancement represents how far technology in general has come. And when technology advances in the world at large, toy technology advances right along with it. Nowadays, toy aisles are jam-packed with more powerful tech than even our computers had just a few decades ago.

What’s more, updated versions of many of the 20th century’s popular toys are still available today, or available again.

Chris: One of the things that we've seen that's been really interesting in recent years is that kids who have been immersed in electronics, I mean today's, what, 14 year olds have never lived in a world without a smartphone. The idea of a tactile toy, a mechanical toy, something that's not necessarily digital or chip driven is absolutely fascinating to them because it's novel.

[SFX: toys build up over next paragraph, coming to a cacophony]

When you walk down the toy aisle, there are more sound-making playthings than ever before, including many familiar voices. But as manufacturing noisy toys has become easier and cheaper for toymakers, the volume of some of these toys has been cranked up to the point that it could literally be damaging children’s ears. We’ll get into that, after this…

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Toys have been around forever, but it wasn’t until around the ‘50s that analog methods of adding sound became much more common. Advancing technology made the ‘80s and ‘90s an era for some of the most iconic sounds in toy history. Then, around the turn of the millennium, things went bananas.

Nowadays, physical toy stores are getting harder and harder to find. But whether it’s FAO Schwartz or the toy aisle at Target, children still lose their minds over the sight -- and sound -- of all those shiny new toys. Lately, parents are losing their minds too. Not with the same playful whimsy, but with a new awareness of the sheer noise of it all. It’s starting to feel like the toys are shouting over each other -- as if the toy with the loudest voice will be the one that gets bought and taken home. And interestingly, there may be some truth to that.

[music out]

Hamid: When we're actually born, our ears – and when I'm talking about the ears, I'm talking about the inner ear structures that do the actual sensing of the hearing. Those structures are actually adult size at birth. So pretty much our inner ear and everything is the same size as it is when you're born as it is now.

That’s Dr. Hamid Djalilian. He’s a professor at UC Irvine and an expert in problems of the ear, including hearing, balance, and tumors. He’s especially concerned with the long-term damage that noise exposure can do to children’s ears.

Hamid: Now we're born with a limited number of cells in our inner ear. So, we have these cells that pickup the sound, they have these microscopic hairs on top of them that pick up the vibration of sound as it travels through this liquid in our inner ear. And those cells are called hair cells with those little hairs on them.

As sound waves travel into the ear, it’s these “hair cells” that ultimately send a signal to a hearing-person’s brain. That signal is what lets us know that we’ve heard a sound.

Hamid: And we're born with about 3000 or so of these so called inner hair cells, which are the main ones that do the function of hearing. Now, damage that occurs to those cells is permanent. So if you get a very loud sound exposure, for example, [SFX: Loud crowd, explosion] that will cause some damage [SFX: Ears ringing] to those cells and then you've lost some of those cells.

This kind of damage won’t necessarily show up on any hearing test. But as we age, continued damage to these hair cells adds up, and no new ones are created.

Hamid: And then later on in life when they start getting age-related hearing loss, that's when we will see the loss of hearing reflect on the hearing test.

[music in]

Hamid: The critical, probably most important thing that we need to kind of keep in mind is that children's ears are just as likely to potentially get damage from very loud noise as adults could be. And that the sooner we start protecting children's ears from loud noise, the more cells they kind of have going into adulthood. So then they're more likely to have good hearing as they get into older adulthood, like fifties and sixties, etc....

Generally, we have more sensitive hearing when we’re younger. But a curious child, understandably, may not be the best protector of their own hearing.

Hamid: If you've ever seen a child play with a toy that makes noise, they want to just keep making the noise come out of it, so they'll just keep listening to it over and over and press the button over and over.

Hamid decided to research the volume of toys after seeing this first hand.

[music out]

Hamid: I was in one of these large stores [SFX: toy store ambience] that sell toys as well, and I was in the toy aisle and I saw this child that was basically, there's the little try me button to kind of see what it sounds like. He would press the button and then hold up his ear against the toy and then press the button [SFX: laser sound] and then hold up his ear against the toy [SFX: laser sound]. And I just thought to myself, this can't be good for this kid because this sounds very loud to me. And I was standing, you know, four feet away.

Hamid: That's sort of what's interesting to these kids, beyond the initial aesthetics of what the appearance is, it's really the sound that's the next most interesting thing about it.

[music in]

It’s been more than a decade since then. In that time, Hamid and his team of researchers have been putting noisy toys to the test in their lab at UC Irvine. In the United States, the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety regulates how loud toys can be. The guidelines are not especially stringent: toys cannot produce a sound that reaches more than 85 decibels from 30 centimeters, or about 1 foot. That’s the approximate noise level of a busy restaurant, or a semi-truck passing by.

Hamid: We actually found that there are a lot of toys that actually make that level of sound that is above 85 decibels. Every year we go to a couple of the major outlets of toys and actually screen a whole bunch of toys and then buy the loudest ones, bring them to our lab and test them there to see how loud they actually are.

[music out]

The official guidelines measure sound from a foot away. But, kids don’t always play with their toys from a safe distance, especially the littlest ones.

Hamid: If you've seen children play, and I have a couple of little children myself, children oftentimes will take the toy and actually put it by their ear because they're trying to figure out where the sound is coming from because that's sort of what's interesting to them about the toy and they hold it up against their ear. So children don't abide by the rule of “hold the toy 30 centimeters away from your ear.” They will play with it and one of the things they'll do is they're trying to figure out where the sound is coming from.

The results from Hamid’s lab are startling. They’ve tested some truly LOUD toys. Toys like the Power Rangers Beast-X Ultrazord.

[SFX: “Ultrazord, ready for flight!” “Danger, let’s pull up!”]

Hamid’s lab found that Beast-X Ultrazord clocks in at over 87 decibels from 30 centimeters away — that’s higher than the federal standard. And if you hold your ear up to the speaker, get ready to be blasted at 107 decibels. That’s the volume level of a chainsaw [SFX]. And this toy is recommended for children as young as four years old.

Not all the offending toys at the lab tested are quite as obvious as the Ultrazord. Take, for example, the V-Tech’s Starshine the Bright Lights Unicorn, a sweet toy designed to teach kids ages one to four about colors, words, and shapes.

[Audio clip: Starshine Unicorn; “Hello there! I’m Starshine the Unicorn.” “Can you put the orange flower into one of my magic hearts?”]

Straight out of the speaker, toddlers are hearing about those orange flowers at nearly 104 decibels. That’s the same volume level as your average rock concert. And even from the requisite foot away, Starshine is still shouting at over 87 decibels.

[Audio clip: “Hello there! I’m Starshine the Unicorn.”]

The list goes on and on, but an alarming number of toys on it break the 100 decibel mark if you get too close, including a nearly unrecognizable descendent of the Bop-It called the “Bop-It Smash.”

[Audio clip: “You killed it! 114 points”]

[music in]

Hamid: Unfortunately noise is not something that people think about much. We kind consider kids to be able to be resistant to the things that are potentially dangerous to us, but you know the reality is they're just as sensitive to loud sounds as we are. Their sort of sole noise exposure risk when they're very young is toys, and the fact that digital music that's essentially being played, the speaker quality and all that stuff has improved. So you can play loud sound at a much higher fidelity than you used to be able to do maybe 20 years ago.

It’s terrifying to think that the toys we bring home could be damaging our kids’ hearing in ways that won’t be measurable for decades. As if the list of things for parents to worry about wasn’t long enough.

[music out]

So is there any hope for parents who want to protect their child’s sensitive ears?

Hamid: If a toy is loud and the way to assess whether a toy is loud is you can hold it up against your ear, and if it hurts then that's too loud.

Hamid: Now if a toy is loud, then place some kind of either glue or tape over the speaker. It's important to just make sure that the tape is placed such that a young child can't peel it off and potentially eat it and cause airway obstruction.

Culturally, we sadly think that loud is good. That loud means fun! But sunlight is good too, and yet we know we need to wear sunscreen. We understand that over the long-term, sun exposure can be damaging. As a society, we need to start treating hearing protection the way we treat sunscreen. And that can start with teaching our children about the importance of protecting their ears.

Hamid: So if you're in a loud noise environment, then either try to get out of the noise environment, wear earplugs, cover your ears with your hands or something, and teach your children that loud noise is not good for your ears, that noises can be damaging to your ears and it's permanent, and they learn that kind of going forward in their life.

Chris: One of my sort of soapboxes if you will, about learning toys is toys don't teach kids. People teach kids, but the role of these toys is to reinforce things kids are learning. And give them a chance to use them in different situations.

[music in]

When a toy grabs our attention at the store, there are many reasons we want to take it home: toys are fun! In some cases, they even remind us of the sounds of our own childhood. But as Hamid’s research shows, the Loudness Wars have hit the toy aisle. Toys are getting louder and louder, and not necessarily for enjoyment or education, but for the sake of marketing.

And another thing: toys like Beast-X Ultrazord are more than just loud. They’re a perfect example of how far toy tech has come. It has sensors in it that can sense how a child is playing with it. And it’s smart enough to shift between special flight noises when you’re flying it around and battle noises when you’re staging a fight against evil [SFX: Ultrazord voice sounds]. But...why? Kids are perfectly capable of making those sounds, or maybe even better ones, on their own. Imaginative play is a critical part of child development. Cutting the wires, removing the batteries, or taping the speakers of your kid’s toys could protect more than just their hearing. It might also protect their developing imaginations. And that imagination is way more powerful than a toy could ever be.

Chris: I think when it comes to parents and electronic toys, the greatest innovation of the last decade is the off switch.

[SFX: Starshine Unicorn fades in and is switched off]

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound. A sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com. This episode was written and produced by Marissa Flaxbart. And me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Colin DeVarney.

Thanks so much to our guests, Christopher Byrne and Dr. Hamid Djalillian. You can hear more from Chris on his podcast, The Playground.

The music in this episode is from The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Sound of Picture. Full track details for this episode and all episodes can be found on our website, two zero kay dot org.

Special thanks to Matt Altobell from Facebook, Scott Simons and Anthony Mikos from Twitter and user Hot as Milk from Reddit for naming this episode.

If you’d like to help us name future episodes as well as get the inside scoop on all things Twenty Thousand Hertz, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or on our official subreddit… which you can find at r slash two zero kay. You can also reach out directly at hi at twenty kay dot org. Outside of making this show, my favorite thing is interacting with you, so don’t be shy.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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We know that music has the power to affect our moods, but you might be surprised by just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Music can affect our brains and bodies in profound ways. Professor Jessica Grahn tells us how our love for music has shaped us as humans while Nate Sloan unpacks our appreciation of music, and reveals how it can be used to manipulate us, both for bad and for good.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Little Dipper by Sound of Picture
Gruyere by Sound of Picture
Enrichment by Sound of Picture
Loll by Sound of Picture
Morning Colours by Red Licorice
Leaving by Vesky
Love Never Fails (Instrumental) by Ellie Holcomb
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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.

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

Check out Switched On Pop wherever you get your podcasts.

Also, check out Nate Sloan’s new book, Switched on Pop, wherever you get your books.

Follow Jessica Grahn’s music and neuroscience research at the Twitter handle @Neurobeats.

View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

It probably comes as no surprise that music has the power to change our mood. Perhaps you’ve experienced the high of a funky song, or feel your heart break to a ballad.

Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, we pick music to suit our tastes and moods in the moment.

Which got me wondering, what’s actually going on inside our brains when we make those choices? Do we control the music, or does the music control us?

To help answer these questions I need a musicologist… and I just-so-happen to know one!

Nate: Okay. We are live. Just double check my levels. Check, check, check. Testing, testing. Looking good.

[music out]

Nate: I'm Nate Sloan. I’m an assistant professor of musicology at the USC Thornton School of Music, and I'm the cohost of the podcast, Switched on Pop.

Right now, you might be wondering what exactly a musicologist is.

Nate: A musicologist is, wow. Tough question right off the bat, Dallas.

Nate: A musicologist is someone who studies the history of music and tries to understand how it both reflects and shapes culture through close attention to the composition, theory, and reception at different moments in time and space.

And right now, you’re probably STILL wondering what a musicologist is.

Nate: So, a musicologist is a really pretentious way of saying a music historian.

Nate’s an expert in dissecting the musical devices that keep us listening. But to understand what music is doing to us, we first need to get a handle on where music really begins and ends. What’s the simplest thing we can consider to be music?

Nate: Music is organized sound. Though there's also a question to that of who's doing the organizing? Sometimes I find myself nodding along to like, the rhythmic hum of the uptown C train [SFX]. And I'm like, "Is this music?"

You can find rhythmic, organised sound in some of the most unexpected places. In the dripping of a leaky pipe [SFX], the squeak of a door [SFX], or the mechanical thunk of office equipment.

[SFX: Desktop printer]

Nate: Desktop printers, I think, are some of the funkiest instruments imaginable when they really get going. If you're doing a big print job and you have a printer that's just kind of like humming on ... I really find myself nodding my head and tapping my foot to the sound of a printer.

Nate: I have to step back and I'm like, "Wait a minute. Is this music?" I don't know. I think my answer is, "Yeah. Sure. Definitely." So organized sound, but I think that anyone can organize it, including a Xerox machine.

Maybe we don’t all get our groove on to the copy machine, but there is one uniting principle of music.

Nate: We all have a heartbeat [SFX], so when we hear music that has a beat [SFX: Music in with heart beat SFX underneath], it resonates with us in some way.

Nate: There may be certain characteristics of music that you could say, okay, anyone with a pulse is going to enjoy this. There might be some fundamental attraction we have to repeating rhythms, beats.

[music out]

Rhythm is often a key element in music. Just like a painting is a composition in space, formed by patterns over a canvas, a piece of music is a composition in time, and the rhythm is the pattern it makes through time.

And that organised beat has a surprising effect on our brains and bodies.

[music in]

Jessica: There are some basic physiological things that happen when we listen to music whether we like it or not.

That’s Jessica Grahn. She’s a cognitive neuroscientist of music at Western University in Ontario, Canada...

Jessica: ...which basically means I study music and the brain.

Scientists like Jessica have spotted a trend in how us humans respond to music.

Jessica: We can't close our ears. When music is playing, we tend to process it automatically. That means that we have responses in various brain areas. So, sound processing areas immediately light up. If this is music that might be familiar to us, we'll have memory related areas. We also have reward system areas, so the areas that respond to drugs, and other things that really stimulate dopamine production in certain parts of the brain.

Jessica: If the music happens to be fast and up tempo, [SFX: sped up music] up beat, and loud, that is arousing. That stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, so our heart rate tends [SFX] to go up, our respiratory rate [SFX] tends to go up.

[music out]

So our bodies are getting a workout from our running playlist, before we even set foot on the track.

And it’s the rhythm at the core that guides our response.

Jessica: Because rhythm is the key to what makes us move to music. If we don't have rhythm, if we can't perceive the rhythm very well, if we don't really know how to predict it, we don't move along to it.

We may not all be the first up on the dance floor, but we’ve all experienced it. [music in] That irresistible toe tapping when a tune gets in your head. And it seems that moving to the music is something we start to do very early on.

Jessica: Interestingly, we move along to music from a very, very young age. Before we can crawl or move or speak. We don't synchronize accurately to the beat that we perceive in the rhythm, but even young infants [SFX: Infant giggles] will start moving rhythmically when they hear music.

[music out]

That link between music and movement is also seen in primitive cultures too.

Jessica: If you look at cultures today that are probably similar to cultures that were existing when humans were evolving, sort of hunter, gatherer cultures, some of them don't even have different words for music and dance. The idea that music was something you would have without movement is completely foreign to them.

So, in our brains and bodies, music subconsciously makes us move. It doesn’t take any learning, or practice, it just happens. That type of a primitive reaction like that might seem like an animal instinct, but amazingly, it’s almost uniquely human.

Jessica and her team have been working with monkeys to test this primitive response.

[music in]

Jessica: It does not appear to be that any of our closest evolutionary relatives show responses to music.

Jessica: It's actually very hard to even train them to pay attention to the sound because they're really not interested in sounds that aren't directly relevant, like a communication sound from another monkey.

[SFX: Monkeys communicating with each other]

Jessica: This makes it problematic because you spend so much time trying to even train the monkey to notice and respond to the auditory stimulus that it's really inefficient.

But there are other species, more distant from us humans, that do seem capable of moving along to music.

Jessica: Particularly birds that have what we call vocal learning.

[SFX: Songbirds]

Jessica: This ability to modify their vocal output based on what they hear and those birds seem to be more likely to move along to music than some other species.

Vocal learning is most obvious in songbirds like parrots that can learn the noises we make and repeat them back to us. But it’s also been found in some other mammals, like elephants, dolphins, whales and seals.

Jessica: There's a fantastic example of a sea lion named Ronan who was trained to move to a metronome [SFX: metronome], and then automatically extrapolated moving to the metronome, to moving along to music.

[music in: Boogie Wonderland]

In a video on YouTube from the Pinniped Lab at UC Santa Cruz, you can see Ronan bobbing along to his favorite song Boogie Wonderland. It really is quite a thing to see.

[music out]

But although these animals can respond to a beat, it’s not quite the same as what we as a species seem to be capable of.

[music in]

Jessica: In general, certainly, the universality of music in human culture, the early age at which we respond to it and the spontaneous production of music, it's something that we all do automatically from a very young age. A lot of these things do seem to be specifically human.

Jessica: This is a part of the way the brain operates that we don't really see in other species. It may be part of our fundamental human nature. It's certainly one of our more mysterious activities.

[music out]

So our unique relationship with music is one of the things that makes us human, and there’s an enduring theory that it helped to give our brains a boost.

[music in: Mozart]

Jessica: There is a history to music and babies, and childhood development that's gotten into the popular culture.

...that theory is that listening to classical music will give young children an intellectual head-start, to make them smarter.

Jessica: We buy this baby Einstein music CDs, and other, try to enrich the environment. Some people even buy headphones that they can put on their bellies when they're pregnant, to transmit music to the fetus earlier, because earlier is always better, right?

Jessica: There really is zero evidence for that.

[music out]

Nate: I think there's a pervasive myth that listening to classical music, listening to Mozart will make you smarter, and that is categorically untrue.

That’s not to say that studying music doesn’t have ANY effect…

Jessica: There are some studies that suggest that a year of music lessons leads to an increase in six year olds an IQ of five or six points.

Jessica: However, almost all of these differences really seem to be minimal by the time kids get to college. That's in part because people do a lot of things with their time. You might be intensively doing music, but someone else might be intensively doing other types of activities that are also developing.

So if it’s not intelligence, why are we humans so obsessed with music?

[music in]

Another theory is that it helps to shape us as social creatures.

Jessica: The idea is that people who move together tend to feel more positive toward each other, more socially bonded, and are more altruistic to each other.

Jessica: Music, and particularly in a steady drum beat is one way of synchronizing massive groups of people. This is why we can have rock concerts with thousands of people attending all moving or clapping together, because sound is a very effective synchronizing cue. And one thought is that the groups in which music was present were moving together, and were more socially bonded, more altruistic, so would perhaps be better at resource sharing and other evolutionarily youthful behaviors.

So the early humans that leaned in and embraced music were the ones that succeeded, and survived.

[music out]

Nate: So on one hand, there's the experience of playing music, composing music on your own. [SFX: Solo Tabla Player] I liken that to the experience of writing, I don't know, writing in a journal or going on a walk or something or staring out the window on a train ride, meditating even. I think it's a mindful activity.

Nate: And then there's the experience of making music with other people. [SFX: Indian Ensemble comes in] That is one of the most extraordinary social experiences you can have. I think one of the big reasons for that is that it often transcends verbal communication

[music out]

Nate: That's pretty exciting and almost kind of addictive in a way because I wonder if it's not a way of actually getting closer to people than you could by ever talking to them.

Nate: There's an intimacy there in communicating through the medium of music that can be really healing and really just a powerful force for bringing people together.

Of course, despite all these theories about how evolutionary and socially important music can be, many of us don’t share that experience. Some people just don’t consider themselves musical.

Jessica: A lot of people feel they can't dance or they can't sing, or we test people's rhythm abilities and they come in, and, "Oh, I can't keep a beat." Most of the time, the people that come in can do these things completely adequately. I think what they're saying really reflects a terrible thing that western culture has done to music, which is to make a divide between performers and consumers. Performers are ever more the experts, and no one should be forced to hear anybody's music except somebody who is deemed good.

But that’s not how music is used in all cultures worldwide.

[music in]

Jessica: In fact, one of the best things about music is the fact that it is something we all pick up on from a very early age and respond to, and can continue to respond to without any formal training. Things like folk dancing, or Ceilidh dancing in Scotland. These are activities that are based around music that are appealing because absolutely everybody can participate at some level.

So music made us the social creatures we are, and today, it’s still a powerful force to unite us. But music is also deeply personal. We pick our music to suit our mood, our taste, and our personal identity. But that gives others the chance to use our musical choices to manipulate us, for good, and for bad.

We’ll find out how, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

Our appreciation of music is one of the things that makes us uniquely human, and although it might not make us more intelligent, it certainly helps us to be more socially successful.

But for many people, musical choice is incredibly personal. Often, we choose to listen to a certain kind of music based on how it makes us feel.

[music out]

Jessica: Music can be an enhancer of a mood that we're in, loud and intense music can increase physiological arousal, but exactly what you do with that and how that gets expressed is really dependent on the person and the situation they're in, and what they want to achieve with this music.

It’s like when you might put on sad music when you feel sad just to really lean into it. Or maybe you put on some peppy music to get you through some household chores.

[music in]

Jessica: People usually have a pretty good intuitive sense of what the music is doing for them.

Jessica: I also use music to emotion regulate. So I've learned that if I'm feeling a bit irritated or frustrated...and there's really nothing I can do about it right now...then I absolutely have some music that I use to do that. Despite having a degree in classical piano, most of the music that I go to tends to be pretty cheesy pop music.

Jessica: The intensity of the music, I think for me, matches the intensity of what I'm experiencing, which is somehow helpful.

[music out]

So while Jessica is working through her feelings with cheesy pop, others might prefer 80s ballads, or some soothing jazz.

Nate: It would be wrong to assume that we have some objective relationship with music, some objective physiological relationship... that when you, Dallas Taylor, listen to a song and I, Nate Sloan, listen to a song that we hear the same thing, that we as common members of the human species have the same reaction to a song.

Nate:You may listen to death metal [SFX: Metal] and come away with it with a feeling of, wow, that was loud. That was intense. That was overwhelming. That was scary. That made me uncomfortable to listen to because it has all those musical qualities. And yet I wouldn't want to say therefore we have, as humans, have a biological reaction to heavy metal, death metal, black metal, with those qualities, you know, scary, overwhelming. Because if you talk to a death metal fan, they will not tell you that's how they experience that music.

...and it just so happens that we have a serious metal fan here at 20k HQ. None other than our ace producer Sam. So I thought I’d test out Nate’s theory, and ask her about her relationship with metal.

[music in]

Dallas: So this is really, really straightforward. What kind of music do you like, personally?

Sam: I mainly listen to metal, like melodic metal.

Dallas: And how does metal make you feel?

Sam: It's a lot of emotions actually, it makes me feel happy, but it makes me think, because a lot of the music I listen to is incredibly thoughtful and it's difficult, and there was a lot of work put into it.

Sam: Sometimes puts me in this trance. I go into my own little world while listening to metal, but it could also make me really energized.

Sam: The funniest thing I notice when you meet people that listen to metal is that they are the happiest people. And when they find other people that listen to metal and when they listen to metal together they just jam out, and it's just a silly, fun experience and you just geek out over it.

[music out]

So understanding what music appeals to us, and what it does to us, is harder than it might seem. But doing just that has become a holy grail for some surprising… companies. It’s not only music producers aiming to get the next best-selling hit, it’s also shops and restaurants looking to maximize profit.

Nate: That's why there is a whole subset of the music industry that is involved with using music to influence, for instance, our shopping patterns.

Nate: But again, it quickly emerges that that's not necessarily that there's a certain kind of tempo or pitch or sound that will induce someone to go shopping.

Nate: It's much more cultural. It's like what kind of music will entice a younger target audience to go shop at Forever 21 versus perhaps the older audience that will go shop at William-Sonoma, or something I guess.

[music in]

Consumer neuroscience, or neuromarketing, is nothing new. Businesses tap into our unconscious minds with colours, pictures, and music that a target group is likely to respond to.

Jessica: We form our musical identities, usually in our early teens up to early 20s. And we may continue to stay up to date on the latest music, but the music of that time does have a special influence on us.

Jessica: Stores absolutely know this, and when they want to send a message for, you know... who this clothing line is for, they can do that through music. Same with eating establishments. [SFX: Restaurant chatter, followed by Classical music] If this is an upscale expensive place, playing a little bit of classical music will fit people's perception of, "Oh yes, I should be paying $65 for a steak, because this is a nice place."

Jessica: Whereas if someone's playing rock or pop music at a high volume [SFX: Rock pop music with restaurant chatter, "I'm Doing Me - Instrumental"], you might influence turnover, so you might not want people to linger. You might want to get them in, eat quickly, and get out, and louder music seems to have that effect.

[music out]

Musical neuromarketing might not always get it spot on, but the effects of music on our shopping habits HAS been proven in scientific studies. And to make it more difficult for the musical neuromarketers, musical preference often changes with age and life experiences.

Nate: I love every kind of music. You can throw anything at me and I will say, "I have nothing but love and respect for that."

Nate: I think I used to believe that there was objectively good and objectively bad music and that I could play a song for anyone and they would understand how I felt about it or if I could just make them understand.

Nate: And now I don't think that's true any more. I think we all have our ears. Our ears are shaped by the time and the place that we live in.

Nate: And music isn't bad or good. It's like people are bad or good and what we do with that music is bad or good.

People have used music to do some pretty bad stuff. If you think musical neuromarketing is manipulative, it gets MUCH worse than that.

[music in]

Nate: During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when the American military had the go-ahead to use so-called enhanced interrogation techniques

Nate: One of the forms of sonic torture they would use would be to expose Arabic prisoners to Western pop music and often music that was designed specifically to be offensive to their cultural or religious sensibilities.

So, female singers could be offensive, or it could have lyrics that insult God. And even the Barney music has been used for bad stuff.

[SFX: Barney theme]

Nate: Eminem, I think, was pretty popular as well [Music clip: Eminem - The Real Slim Shady] as a form of torture. Now, if you're Eminem that probably feels horrible. But again, is that his fault? No. Music is something that can be used as a force of good or a force of harm, but music itself isn't good or harmful. It just is. It's just music. It's how we use it and how we deploy it and what we do with it that affects people.

[music in]

To balance the intentional harm being done with cruelly chosen music, others are working on using music to help and heal.

Jessica and her team have been studying how music can be used to help people that have difficulty moving.

Jessica: One of the populations we've been studying are people with Parkinson's disease who'd have problems in the later stages of the disease with walking.

We’re most familiar with the tremors that Parkinson’s causes, but the loss of nerve cells in the brain can have other, wider effects on the body’s movement.

Jessica: Often just initiating the movement, getting the movement going is tricky, and they may have problems with the speed that they move, as well as freezing where particularly if they go through a doorway or pass by somebody, they may suddenly find that they're feet are frozen to the ground, and not responding to any commands to move.

But that can change when a rhythmic sound is involved.

[SFX: Simple, steady beat, getting gradually more complex]

Jessica: For some patients, playing a regular steady beat or playing music that has a steady beat seems to make this much better.

If we play music that makes them want to move, they tend to walk faster, and we can measure this scientifically in the lab. This seems to happen regardless of whether they enjoy the music.

[music out]

[music in]

So music can make us happy or sad. It can be used to cause harm, and it can also be used to heal. It helped to shape us into the social animals that we are, but it can also help us work through our most private emotions. Jessica thinks it’s similar in many ways to language.

Jessica: It's made by people for people and as long as it's achieving the functions its set out to achieve, in the case of language, communication, it doesn't really matter if you're grammar is perfect or you got everything right, if somebody understood what you meant, then you have achieved the function of language, and I think the same is true for music. If in producing music or in sharing your music or in listening to somebody else's music, you have been affected, it's something you enjoy, it's something that you want to continue with, then that music has done exactly what it is supposed to do.

And each of us has a unique relationship with music. We may love it or hate it, or we might not care all that much. There’s no right or wrong way to feel about it, but it can tell us so much about ourselves and others, if you are willing to keep an open mind.

Nate: I prided myself on someone who hated Britney Spears and loved avant-garde jazz. How wrong I was, Dallas. How much better my life has come now that I've let all sounds into my ears. This is incredibly hokey, but forgive me. They say don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes. I think you could alter that. You say don't judge someone until you've listened an hour through their ears.

[music out]

[music in]

This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Jai Berger.

Thanks to our guests, Nate Sloan and Jessica Grahn. Nate co-hosts the podcast Switched on Pop, all about the making and meaning of popular music. I love it, and you should definitely go subscribe. Nate also has a brand new book, also called Switched on Pop.

Jessica’s music and neuroscience lab is actively researching music’s effect on our brains. You can see what she’s up to at the twitter handle @Neurobeats.

Thanks also to Sam Schneble, for offering a surprise insight into the world of a metal fan.

Is there a certain type of music that you use to change your mood? If so, tell us on Facebook, Twitter, or by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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4’33”: John Cage’s revolutionary “silent” musical piece

January 22, 2020

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This episode was written and produced by Martin Zaltz Austwick.

John Cage was a respected composer when, in 1952, he created his “silent piece”, 4’33’’ - a piece that would have the music world scratching their heads. This episode asks whether 4’33’’ is really “silent”, and we explore the history of a piece musicians still talk about today - and speak to the man who campaigned to get it to the top the British charts in 2010. Featuring composers Kyle Gann and Nahre Sol, and artist Dave Hilliard.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Plastic Furniture by Audioblocks
Sleepwalker by Hey Lunar
Minor Stretch by Sound of Picture
Footnote by Martin Zaltz Austwick
A Bad Crossword (Instrumental) by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Snowmelt by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Slow Minnesota by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Am Trans by Sound of Picture
Got Spark by Martin Zaltz Austwick

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

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Check out Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" wherever you get your books.

See Nahre’s work at nahresol.com.

Find Dave Hilliard on Instragram at davehilliardart.

Listen to more of Martin Zaltz Austwick’s music at palebirdmusic.com.

View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[Music clip - In a Landscape, performed by Stephen Drury]

John Cage was one of the most significant figures in 20th Century music. He was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, but went on to be an influential composer in his own right. His work drew on Chinese and Japanese influences at a time when American society was just starting to open up to these cultures. He influenced avant garde composers like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as songwriters and artists like Yoko Ono and Lou Reed, and even Aphex Twin. He was also hugely influential in modern dance. What you hear playing is his 1948 piece “In A Landscape”. This version was recorded in 1994 by Stephen Drury.

[music continues]

This piece is actually not very typical of John Cage’s writing - he’s more known for his innovations in music, and his avante garde techniques. As far as John Cage pieces go, this is pretty much as “mainstream classical” as it gets.

But despite his reputation for avante garde writing, no one was prepared for what he did in 1952. This was the year he created the most daring piece of his career - something really “out there”, even for him. It was called “Four Minutes and Thirty Three Seconds” - It was a piece that some critics even refused to call “music”.

[music out]

Kyle: oddly enough, my first experience with 4'33" was playing it on my high school piano recital. I played it when I was 17 before I had heard anybody else play it.

That’s Kyle Gann, a Professor at Bard College. He’s also a composer, and a former critic at the Village Voice.

Kyle: I bought the sheet music in Dallas for 50 cents.

It’s almost ironic that you can buy sheet music for 4’33”. Because for the entire duration of the piece, the performer plays... nothing at all.

Well, to be technically, the performer is playing “rest” but to the audience, it looks like nothing is happening.

Nahre: I think people just looked around at each other and kind of smiled, then a few giggles here and there.

That’s Nahre Sol - composer, musician, and video creator.

Nahre: I was first introduced to John Cage in an academic environment.

Nahre: At first, it didn't really make sense to me, because here I was in the conservatory. I was really concentrated on playing the piano and when I first heard about Four minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds, it's a piece where you're not playing. So, it just didn't make any sense.

John Cage’s 4’33’’ was performed for the first time in the summer of 1952 by renowned pianist, David Tudor. It was at Maverick Concert Hall, which is an outdoor concert hall in Woodstock, New York [SFX: outdoor ambience, small crowd]. The concert featured all new piano music from different composers.

So, what happened here was a pianist walked out on stage [SFX], sat down at the piano [SFX]. Then, to start 4’33” he closed the piano lid [SFX]. He then sat there in silence, doing nothing, playing nothing - for thirty seconds. At that point, he opened the piano lid [SFX]. And immediately closed it again [SFX]**...**

He sat in silence for two minutes and twenty three seconds. Then, he opened the piano lid [SFX] and closed it once more [SFX]**...**

A minute and forty seconds later, he got up and walked off the stage.

The audience had no idea what to think.

[music in]

Nahre: I think it really pushed the edge around what people considered acceptable in classical music or any kind of music and that, in today's context, sounds quite ridiculous, because almost everything has been done in almost every way.

Kyle: A lot of people were kind of bemused by it.

Kyle: Cage's mother asked one of his friends, "Don't you think John has gone too far this time?".

A friend of Cage wrote to him, begging that he not turn his career into a joke.

John Cage had, well if you could call it “created” a piece of music that really challenged some very established ideas about music composition. It’s something that musicians are still inspired by - and still debate - even today.

[music out]

To understand just what John Cage was thinking, let’s back up to the 1940s. Back then, John Cage was making a name for himself composing for “The Prepared Piano”.

[music in]

Kyle: All during the 40s Cage's big instrument was the prepared piano, and the thing about the prepared piano is you put screws or erasers, or tape or anything on the strings of one note, and every note ends up having a different timbre and so you're no longer working with a continuum of pitch, you're working with a whole bunch of distinct sounds.

The music you can hear is Cage’s “Sonata Number Five” from “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano”, probably his most famous work outside of 4’33’’.

[Music clip: Sonata Number Five continues]

Nahre: What I find interesting is that when you prepare a piano, you're really dealing with a lot of elements of spontaneity and chance, because here you are dealing with foreign objects that are placed in the piano, and because of this set up, there are a lot of things that are unpredictable, once you do it, and it's really hard to keep the outcome consistent [Music clip: Sonata Number Five, chaotic part of song]. So, just by circumstance, you have to embrace that margin of not knowing the outcome. And so, when I was working with Prepared Piano, at first, I was really frustrated because I really wanted to reproduce a certain outcome.

[music out]

The sheet music for prepared piano has some really detailed instructions about where to place each object. But it’s impossible for every performer to have the same piano, or the same screw, or the same rubber eraser. So the sound you get is always different. This was pretty bananas and pretty alien to the way most composers, and musicians are taught to do things.

Nahre: I definitely have been trained to really put a priority on getting as much control as possible. I'm a little bit of a control freak when it comes to just wanting something to sound a certain way and wanting to play something a certain way.

Today we call a lot of John Cage’s work “chance music”. Basically composers of chance music create some guidelines for the performer, but major parts of it are left up to chance. So, every performance is something really special. Never heard before, and never to be replicated. John Cage used ideas from East Asia to find new ways to do that.

Kyle: It was really in 49 and 50 that Cage started getting heavily interested in zen. There was a tremendous influx of Japanese culture into America right after World War II.

The Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching, was a huge influence on John Cage. The I-Ching is over two thousand years old, and it’s pretty complex to explain. But basically you generate random numbers - by flipping coins, for example - and the sections that come up tell you something about a decision you need to make. It’s a bit like a Tarot deck, or a magic eight ball - just much, much, much more complex.

Kyle: You ask a question and it would give you any one of 64 answers randomly. And the synchronicity of the universe is supposed to ensure that that answer will be the right one for the moment, and Cage got interested in this idea and started... even before he wrote 4'33", started using the I-Ching in his composing.

[Music clip: John Cage, David Tudor - I]

This piece of music you’re listening to is Cage’s “Music of Changes” - composed by flipping coins and using chance to make music. This version was performed by Martine Joste [Music clip continues: John Cage, David Tudor - I]. You can hear how there are long periods with no music at all, interspersed with big, loud chords, and melodies which seem… well, pretty random.

[music out]

So, John Cage was getting increasingly interested in chance - in letting the universe provide the answer to the question “what note should I play next?”. But to hear the answer to the question, you have to listen. And in the 1940s, listening to the universe was getting harder to do.

[Musak in]

Kyle: The Muzak corporation was founded in 1934. It really took off during World War II and musicians of that generation were horrified by it, as were lots of other people.

Kyle: There was a case that went to the Supreme Court about it, and it was seen as a terrible scourge by lots of musicians. There were musicians who would make lists of restaurants that didn't play Muzak and only go to those.

But there were attempts to shut down the constant background music.

Kyle: In January of that year, 1952, there was a college student in the Midwest who started selling silent records for jukeboxes. So if you didn't want to listen to the jukebox for a moment, you could put in your nickel [SFX: coin going into jukebox] and it'd play a silent record [SFX: button press, needle drop, soft jukebox motor hum].

John Cage became obsessed with the idea of silence - and the idea that, increasingly, people were losing the option to shut out the background noise of the world. He worried that Musak would stop people from being able to hear silence altogether.

Kyle: He gave a lecture in 1948, and announced his idea to write a four and a half minute piece of silence that he was going to sell to the Muzak Company.

Kyle: It started out I think as kind of a political protest. That if you get a silent piece on Muzak, people get to not listen to anything for four and a half minutes.

So 4’33’’ actually started as an attempt to escape from music being imposed on us everywhere we go. But it struck a real nerve, and quickly evolved beyond that.

Cage was starting to think about silence not as the absence of sound - but as the opportunity to listen. And when he visited a truly quiet place, he made a startling discovery.

Kyle: He came up to Boston and visited anechoic chamber at Harvard.

Anechoic chambers are rooms that are acoustically treated to minimise sound to almost zero. There are no sounds in them - at least, not from the room itself ...

Kyle: He said he heard two sounds in motion and the engineer told him one was his nervous system, the other was his blood in circulation. This has been debunked. You can't hear your nervous system. It's been speculated that he probably had tinnitus like I do. I wish that were my nervous system I'm hearing, but it's the echo of past very loud concerts.

I’ve personally experienced an anechoic chamber, and it’s a really wild experience that can completely change your perceptions about sound and silence. Really, I could hear two distinct sounds. I could hear somewhat of a high-pitched hissing noise [SFX]. I don’t know if it’s a mild tinnitus, but it's something I’ve never heard before in my normal life. It really felt like my brain turning up an amplifier just grasping for anything to hear. And the other thing I could hear really clearly was blood pushing through my body [SFX].

Kyle: It gave Cage the idea that wherever we are, even our bodies make sounds. There's no such thing as a silent environment. As long as you're in your body, you're always hearing something.

This is where John Cage’s interest in chance and randomness met his interest in silence. He realised that creating an environment with no distractions wasn’t about creating silence. It wasn’t even about controlling noise. It was about the sounds that were already there, but you suddenly hear for the first time - when you’re really ready to listen.

That’s what’s so often misunderstood about 4’33’’, people think that it’s a joke, and the punchline is… well, nothing at all. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. What John Cage really wanted us to hear the beauty of the sonic world around us.

[music in]

Our world is getting noisier and noiser, and 4’33’’ has even more importance today than it did when it premiered, over 60 years ago. So much so that it recently broke into the UK pop charts. We'll find out how that happened after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

John Cage was fascinated by the idea of chance. So he started experimenting with “prepared” piano, and later with the I-Ching. His distaste for Musak and interest in silence took him to the quietest place on earth. Once these two strands of his life met, he created one of the most controversial and influential pieces in history.

[music out]

But here in the 21st Century, 4’33’’ went mainstream, and even got into the UK Top 40.

Dave: So Cage against the machine started as a joke really.

That’s Dave Hilliard - a visual artist and psychotherapist - and founder of the “Cage Against the Machine” campaign.

Dave: What gets to number one in the UK music charts at Christmas, is historically quite a big deal. And so what I think had happened around 2009 and those X factor type shows [X-Factor - Joe McElderry - The Climb in], it started to become quite big. So as a reaction against that, you had a Facebook based campaign to try and get Rage Against the Machine [Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name Of] to number one at Christmas. They did that kind of, really just off the back of a Facebook page, and it was this really successful “people power” kind of idea.

Amazingly, Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” topped the UK charts at Christmas 2009 thanks to this campaign. So in 2010, Dave decided to start his own Christmas number One campaign.

[music in]

Dave: It was a joke really at first, me suggesting 4'33 in the music charts.

It was taking the idea to a kind of ludicrous extreme really. I didn't really have any plans of how it might actually take place. It was literally just me doing something that amused myself. So I created a Facebook page.

At first, the page only had a few followers.

Dave: And I think it grew gradually and after that it started going up into the hundreds. It just started gathering momentum until it got into the thousands really. It was more media attention, and for a while silence became quite hot property. Silence was quite a desirable commodity.

Dave’s Cage Against the Machine campaign shifted from a joke into a reality. He was contacted by a couple of people who had the idea to air 4’33 as a Live Aid promotion.

[music out]

If you’re a child of the 1980s, you might remember the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” [music clip in] - with a bunch of celebrities singing in a recording studio as part of Live Aid. Dave and his friends were going to do the same thing… but with 4’33’’.

They managed to bring together some of the biggest names in the UK music scene and booked a studio in London. Performers who couldn’t be in the studio on the day of the recording literally phoned in their performances.

Here is a little bit of that performance.

[Music clip: Cage Against the Machine performance]

So what you hear buzzing in the audio lines and people softly shifting in the room. And yeah… that’s the point. Every performance of 4’33” sounds like the place it is performed. That’s the chance element of the music. When the recording was finished, Dave and his team got ready to share it with the British public.

[music in]

Dave: So yea, there was a Single launch party and somebody, thought it was a good idea to hold it in a London nightclub. It was due to be launched at midnight, but it was just a normal club night. So people had just gone there just for a night out.

When midnight arrived, the DJ stopped the music and played Cage Against the Machine’s version of 4’33’’.

[SFX: music cut out, disappointed audience]

Dave: Most of the people there had not asked to be involved in this performance at all. They hadn't gone out that night and thought, “Should we go and appreciate some avant garde performance art tonight?”. And so at first, if you just stopped playing music in a nightclub at midnight people were quite angry and shouting and “play the music” and “why has this stopped?”.

But, surprisingly, that didn’t last for too long.

Dave: And that reached a peak after about one or two minutes and then it went oddly silent and you could just hear little pockets of people talking and stuff. [SFX: Small conversations] And that was one of my favorite bits actually of the whole experience, was that was like a real enactment of the performance and the people involved in it hadn't asked to be involved in it, but they were having an experience and they were part of the experience and I thought it was wonderful really.

Cage Against The Machine made it all the way to number 21. But for Dave Hilliard, it had never really been about getting it to the top of the charts. For him, that strange moment in a London club was worth all the months of work.

Nahre: It's really about creating the environment for which you can experience sound in a specific way.

That’s Nahre again.

Nahre: Specific, not in terms of how it's imposed onto you, but how you experience that performance. You're just creating a space and that space is filled with sound. I think it's hard to accept for a lot of people to really consider that piece a piece of music, because a lot of the sounds being produced is not by the performer and they're not traditional sounds and there is a lot of silence but I think it really makes you reconsider what silences is, what music is in relation to silence.

Kyle: It's very different depending on where you play it,

This is Kyle Gann again:

Kyle: I find it really significant that the first performances is at a outdoor concert hall in Woodstock, the Maverick Concert Hall [SFX: natural ambience], because you know, it's a wonderful natural environment. When I played it in high school, we sat there and listened to [SFX: HVAC sounds] the auditorium HVAC system. It was a pretty antiseptic space for it, and Cage would have... it's just a much more minimalist performance. Cage would have found that just as legitimate as anything else.

[music in]

John Cage was trying to get us to listen. And this way of listening would have an impact far beyond music.

Dave: John Cage was quite into what we might call Eastern thinking, and things like mindfulness and meditation have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years in those cultures. And in the West we act like we've just discovered mindfulness. Whereas actually these things have been proven to be good for humans for thousands of years.

Mindfulness and Meditation are much more mainstream in the west now - but when John Cage created 4’33’’ in the 1950s, they were relatively new ideas to western audiences.

Dave: It's an experience and that allows you to bring whatever you bring to it. It's not a prescriptive experience and it reflects a lot back to you. That's the sort of thing we'd think about quite a lot in psychotherapy, that all your reactions to things and to other people come back to you and your thoughts and your feelings, it all comes from you. And I think that's a really potentially quite useful and quite profound experience to have. It is what you make it I think. It's what you bring to it.

Nahre: It just makes you a little more present and appreciate things just the way they are, and I think that's what everyone is still struggling to do, which is why Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds is still a subject of interest to a lot of people in terms of talking about what exactly is this, what's happening here, what does it mean? Is it really music? Is it sound? Is sound music? Is there a difference? But just really letting go of all of that, and just being and experiencing everything around, including everything that's not happening, it's hard to do.

433 is much more than its face value. Maybe, it’s even more than just a composition. Maybe it’s a philosophical question - unspoken yet universally understood, and worth considering even decades later.

Let’s hear what John Cage had to say in a 1991 interview.

[music out]

John Cage: When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. But, when I hear the sound of traffic, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. I’m completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me.

When I talk about music it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound, and they say ‘you mean it’s just sounds?’, thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless.

John Cage reminds us that music doesn’t just have to be about people sitting on a stage and playing complicated things. And that music isn’t the only kind of sound worth listening to. All sounds are worth thinking about.

[music in]

And in this spirit, we’re going to help you play your own version of 4’33’’ right now. And you and what’s surrounding you are going to be the performer. In fact, if you all play along, this might be the largest and most sonically diverse performance of 4’33’’ ever staged - over a hundred thousand completely different versions of 4’33’’ happening around the world, in wildly different places.

But every version of 4’33’’ will be personal. Completely unique to you.

So, make sure you have four and a half minutes to spare, and do not skip. I don’t want you to think about anything else. I want you to focus all of your thoughts into what you’re hearing. Listen for the high frequencies, the lows, the mids. The loud, the soft. The harmonic, the dissonant. Spend this time as mindful and present in your personal real-life sonic environment. Enjoy the magnificence of hearing and listening. The vibration of the world that in turn vibrates your eardrums.

There will be three movements, and I’ll let you know when they start. Get ready to take in the sounds happening around you right now - wherever you are. Here comes the first movement - it’s 30 seconds, starting [music out] now:

[John Cage’s 4’33]

And here’s movement two. It’ll be 2 minutes and 23 seconds.

[John Cage’s 4’33 continues]

And here is the final movement. It’ll be 1 minute and 40 seconds.

[John Cage’s 4’33 continues]

...and that is the end. You did it.

[music in]

Thank you for taking the time and taking part in this international, multi-location performance of John Cage’s 4’33’’.

So, think about what you heard. And remember these sounds not as distractions, but part of the movement and interaction of life; whether it’s calm or bustling, natural or human made. John Cage taught us an incredible lesson, and that’s that quietness is not an opportunity to stop listening. It’s when we really start to listen and finally hear the world as it is. So, no matter what you heard, you can be sure that your version of 4’33” was unique and never to be replicated again.

[music out]

[music in]

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

This episode was written and produced by Martin Zaltz Austwick, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin, and Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to our guests Kyle Gann, Nahre Sol, and Dave Hilliard.

Kyle Gann is a composer - find his pieces wherever you listen to music. He’s also the author of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33", be sure to pick that up wherever you get your books.

Nahre Sol is a pianist, composer, educator, and YouTuber, and her website is NahreSol.com - that’s N A H R E S O L dot com.

Dave Hilliard is a visual artist and psychotherapist. You can find him on Instagram at dave hilliard art.

Most of the music in this episode is from our writer, Martin Zaltz Austwick, and I just adore this music. You should go listen to more of this music at pale bird music dot com.

You should also go check out our website, because we’ve posted a few videos related to this episode. The first is Nahre Sol playing a piece for prepared piano. The second is the recording of 433 for the Cage Against the Machine project. Both are so much fun to watch. You can find those at 20k dot org.

Finally, I want you to tell me about your personal 433 performance. Did anything surprising happen? How did it make you feel? Was it a powerful experience, or do you think this whole idea is nonsense? Tell me on Twitter, Facebook, or at hi @ 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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The Seinfeld theme song w/ Composer Jonathan Wolff

January 8, 2020

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This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling .

No bass for you!! In 1987, TV composer Jonathan Wolff was still trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Then one day, he got a call from Jerry Seinfeld, who needed music for his new sitcom. This is the story behind the unforgettable music of Seinfeld, and how Jonathan Wolff’s unique approach helped make Seinfeld a TV classic.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Bit Rio by Sound of Picture
Slotcar by Sound of Picture
Reddit by Sound of Picture
Sunny Day (Instrumental) by Kylie Odetta
Swing It by Joseph William Morgan
Our World (Instrumental) by Sonny Cleveland
Nocturne in E flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2 by Will Herrington
If It Ain't Broke (Instrumental) by Sonny Cleveland

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.

View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: Seinfeld intro shaker]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[SFX: Seinfeld theme song]

Seinfeld is one of the most successful sitcoms of all time. During the nine years that it ran, Sienfeld had millions of viewers. It won ten Emmys, three Golden Globes, and its cast have become superstars.

Seinfeld ended over twenty years ago, but it’s still very much alive. It has a huge, obsessive fanbase, and still gets referenced all the time. It’s theme song, that we’re hearing now, was unlike any theme song that came before it, or has come after. And there’s a crazy backstory behind that wacky slap bass.

[SFX: Seinfeld theme song out]

But before we get into it, I need to tell you about my friend Steve.

[music in]

Steve: My name is Steve Lack and I am a post-production audio mixer and sound designer.

Steve and I worked together years ago when we were both sound designers at the Discovery Channel.

Steve: I consider Dallas one of my best friends. I really love Dallas.

Steve: We were both the night shift guys and we'd both come in around 6:00.

Steve: Night shift is generally unsupervised. You come in, you get your assignments, you work on your mixes, you work on your work, and then when you feel like taking a break, you take a break.

To give you a picture of what Steve’s like, he’s the type of guy who’s lived 100 different lives. Like the time he was a circus drummer and got into a fist fight with a clown. Or the time when he dropped everything moved to Trinidad. Or the time he was doing things he should’ve have been doing in a parking garage that collapsed hours later in the Northridge earthquake... yeah, Steve is easily one of my favorite people in the world.

Steve: I would wander over to his suite or he would wander over to my suite and we would talk politics or the events of the day or sound design or whatever. But we got to be pretty good friends because we had several hours of quiet time at night where we could just hang out and chat.

During one of those random late nights, Steve told me about the time he worked on Seinfeld.

[music out]

[SFX: record scratch]

Wait, what?! So apparently in the late 80s and early 90s, he’d been an assistant to a TV composer named Jonathan Wolff.

[music in]

Jonathan: When I first moved to LA, I was 17 years old.

...and that’s Jonathan. He’s composed the music for 75 TV shows, including Will & Grace, Married With Children and Who’s the Boss. But no one becomes a major TV composer overnight. Jonathan spent his first decade in LA doing musical odd jobs and making connections.

Jonathan: The studios were happy to have me, they treated me like a Swiss Army multi-purpose utility tool for musical chores, because I had good training in a wide range of fields.

But after ten years, Jonathan was ready for a change.

Jonathan: I decided that I no longer wanted to continue having the telephone dictate to me where I was going to work each day, and what I was going to do when I got there. So, I declared myself a composer.

Jonathan wrote letters to all of his Hollywood contacts. He thanked them for their support, but asked them to stop sending him these low-level musical jobs. Instead, he wanted to compose original music. This was a huge risk. It’s like an actor who’s only ever had bit parts deciding that he’ll only accept lead roles from now on. Jonathan knew he might regret it, but he mailed those letters anyway.

Jonathan: Then, I held my breath.

[music pause]

Jonathan: I may have just nuked the last 10 years of my life.

[music resume]

Jonathan: But, when those letters started arriving at their destinations, all over Hollywood, people just shrugged and said, "Well, that's too bad. He's a good utility guy." And then, they started throwing me little writing assignments, song writing assignments for their movies, and scoring assignments and that is how my composing career began.

[music out]

This is around the time that Steve got hooked up with Jonathan.

Steve: He landed Who's The Boss and he was doing some other afterschool specials and starting to really take off as a TV composer. And so he was looking for somebody to help out with MIDI tech, engineering, some orchestration and transcriptions, setting up gear and all that stuff. I wore many hats.

Gradually, more and more jobs started coming in.

Steve: We were doing Who's The Boss.

[SFX: Who’s the Boss Theme]

Steve: We did some Who's The Boss spin off shows. Some other sitcoms.

But getting connected with Jerry Seinfeld happened almost by chance.

Jonathan: It turns out, in real life, Jerry has a best friend named George. It's George Wallace, the comedian.

[George Wallace Clip: You know what makes me sick - people saying stupid stuff. I got off the airplane today, a man said to me, “My wife gonna die when I tell her I saw you.” I said, “Well don’t tell her.”]

Jonathan: George Wallace and I have been buddies for a long, long time. When Jerry Seinfeld confided to his best friend George Wallace that he was having trouble with the music for his new show, Wallace said, "Hey, call my buddy Wolff.” So, I got a phone call from Jerry Seinfeld.

Jonathan: He described to me a sound design issue. He told me that the music for his new show, which, at the time, was called, The Seinfeld Chronicles, the opening credits for that show would be Jerry, standing in front of an audience. He tells jokes…

[Standup Clip: Oscar Meyer is expanding his little area. It’s not little anymore, is it? Oscar Meyer is now a huge, monstrous place. That area, that whole section there keeps getting bigger. And for him it’s not easy to come up with new products. You realize for Oscar Meyer to come up with a new product, he has to invent meat. Folks, there is no olive loaf animal, as far as I know.]

Jonathan: People laugh.

Jonathan: That's the opening credits. And, he wanted music to go with it. I told him right away, that sounds like an audio conflict, because what we really need to hear is you telling jokes and people laughing.

Ya see, TV theme music leading into Seinfeld were these epic belting lyrical odes. Like the Golden Girls [SFX], A-Team, Family Ties, Dukes of Hazzard, or my personal favorite as an 80’s kid - Transformers [SFX]. All of these songs were designed to play in the clear, not as a device to prop up dialogue.

Jonathan: Theme music in the late eighties on TV was melodic. There was a lot of sassy saxophones…

[SFX: Facts of Life Theme: "When you’re learning the facts of life."]

Jonathan: And silly lyrics.

[SFX: Charles in Charge Theme: "Charles in charge of our days and our nights."]

Jonathan: I'm guilty of creating a lot of that kind of music, but it was not going to work in this case.

So Jonathan pitched a crazy idea: Instead of making a traditional theme song with verses and a catchy chorus, he would build music around Jerry’s standup bits.

Jonathan: So I pitched to Jerry, "How about this? How about we treat your human voice as the melody of the Seinfeld theme? Every time you do a different monologue will be a variation on the theme. My job, Jerry, will be to accompany you in a way that works well with your human voice, but does not interfere with the audio of you telling jokes."

Jonathan: “For example the human, organic nature of your human voice might go well with the human, organic nature of my human lips, tongue, finger snaps. Like this [SFX: finger snaps, mouth/tongue movements in a rhythmic way]." I had his attention, because that was music from Mars in the late eighties. Sampling was in its infancy. He said, "How's that work?"

Jonathan: And I said, "Come on over."

Jonathan had to prove he could make music that was memorable and fun, but didn’t distract from Jerry’s standup.

Jonathan: I threw it up against one of his monologues.

Jonathan: He liked what I showed him. He held the phone up to the speakers so that Larry David could hear it over the phone [SFX]. Larry liked it. That was, at that time, the entire approval process for the Seinfeld theme.

[music in]

Unfortunately, the network was less impressed.

Jonathan: There was a meeting, where they laid out some conditions. And the first thing on the list was music.

The network executives had some major concerns.

Jonathan: "What's up with the music? What is that sound? What's with the popping? What instrument is that? Can we not afford real music? It's distracting, it's weird, it's annoying."

Jonathan: When he said “annoying,” Larry David perked up. Larry, as you may know, likes to be annoying. So, I turned to our boss and huddled with him, and Larry, and Jerry and said, "Look, guys, I'll change the music, it's not a big deal.”

Jonathan: Larry David would have none of it. He just started yelling at me. He says, "What do you mean? What do mean, Wolff? Get out! You're done here. Out!" and I left the meeting because Larry David had thrown me out for suggesting that maybe we would change the music. Obviously, Larry hung tight on the music, and the music stayed in the picture. He's the hero of that story.

[music out]

So what made up this so-called “annoying” music? Let’s break it down to it’s essential parts. First up is that iconic slap bass.

[SFX: Bass fill 1]

Jonathan: At the time, slap bass was an element of funk music, buried in the mix. It had not yet enjoyed celebrity status as a solo instrument. I brought it forward, illuminated it, put it hot in the mix. It sounded kind of quirky.

[SFX: Bass fill 2]

Interestingly, these bass lines weren’t played on a real bass. Jonathan actually played them on a keyboard controller that could trigger different samples, including bass sounds.

Jonathan: It was about at that time that sampling was becoming really usable and I used Seinfeld as a proving ground for that bleeding edge technology.

To get the sound for the original Seinfeld bass, Jonathan and Steve took bass patches from two different devices and blended them together.

Steve: The actual original bass sound was a Roland D550 Popper and… a Korg M1 Slap Bass.

Steve: I think he started out with the M1 [SFX] and felt like it wasn't cutting enough, so then we added that D550 Popper in there [SFX], which had kind of more of an edge to it. And what I would do is, I would kind of get a balance between these 2 synths, while he was playing. Until we kind of just nailed exactly the right sound.

Jonathan: The bass line of Seinfeld [SFX: Seinfeld bass ling], the actual music of it, so basic, so simple, It did not require four beats to a bar, it did not require meter at all to hold water. I could stop and start the bass to make allowance for the timings of his jokes, and his punchlines, and the people laughing.

Then there are those “organic” sounds that Jonathan mentioned.

[SFX: Mouth Sounds]

Jonathan recorded these noises himself using his fingers and mouth, and mapped them to his keyboard so he could play them on the fly. Combine that with a simple shaker...

[SFX: Shaker]

These noises served as the rhythmic backbone of the Seinfeld theme. Even the tempo was set around Jerry’s comedic timing.

Jonathan: I watched Jerry's standup comedy. I noticed that he has a lyric sensibility about the way he delivers his lines. The way he moves, his choreography, his facial expressions move. There was a meter to it, that I put different clocks on. Finally, I settled in on [SFX: snaps] about 110.

[SFX: Jerry: I don’t think people think of their office as a workplace, I think they think of it as a stationary store with Danish. You know what I mean? You wanna get your pastry, your envelopes, your supplies, your toilet paper, six cups of coffee and you go home.]

Jonathan: And that seemed to work well with the metrics of Jerry's comedy. So, that became the tempo of the Seinfeld theme, in general.

A few other musical elements were used to emphasize punchlines and other key moments.

Jonathan: There was some horns... [SFX]. In Vaudeville, when someone told a joke, there'd be a rim shot [SFX]. Well, my music served the aural space of that. So, the horns would accentuate the end of jokes, and the end of the monologue itself.

Let’s listen to the opening monologue from the episode “The Mango.” Notice how the musical elements ebb and flow to match Jerry’s delivery.

[SFX: “The Mango” monologue.]

Jonathan: The idea of having to recreate a recording of the theme every episode was a new concept. I treated it like Lego music. These were elements that could be modularly manipulated to fit the individual timings and the overall length of each monologue. I knew that if this show went anywhere, I was going to have to recreate music bespoke for each monologue.

And so he did. To score an episode, Jonathan would watch and rewatch every scene, playing along on his keyboard to what was happening on screen.

Jonathan: They had to be done to picture so that the timings would be right. And so that I could maybe use some of his choreography, sometimes he would do things with his hands or his head that would give me musical instruction.

The music wasn’t just customized for the monologues, but also for the unique transitions between scenes. Like going from the terminal to the plane in the episode called “The Airport”:

[SFX: Transition 1]

Or from the cafe to Jerry’s apartment in “The Gum”:

[SFX: Transition 2]

Or when the gang ends up in a sleepy Massachusetts town in “The Finale”:

[SFX: Jazzy version]

This level of customization was completely unheard of in Hollywood.

[music in]

Most shows have one main theme song and a handful of filler tracks that get reused over and over. But on Seinfeld, every single episode is unique. It would have saved tons of time and effort to do things the normal way. But that perfectionism is exactly what makes Seinfeld feel so polished, even today.

But the main theme only scratches the surface of Jonathan’s work on Seinfeld. As the show progressed, Jonathan got to play around with a wide range of musical genres and tropes. These unique tracks underscored some of Seinfeld’s most hilarious and memorable scenes. That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

When creating the music of Seinfeld, composer Jonathan Wolff took a revolutionary approach: For each episode, he built the music around Jerry’s opening and closing monologues, and added unique transitions between scenes. This means that no two episodes are alike. Even the bass sound itself changed over the course of the show.

[music out]

Jonathan: The Seinfeld bass progressed, it evolved. In fact, there were multiple Seinfeld basses throughout the show. It became a thing around my office for my staff, to leave me gift bass samples to weave into Seinfeld cues [SFX].

It made it more fun and, for Seinfeld connoisseurs... they note how the Seinfeld bass sound changed from season to season, and from episode to episode sometimes.

As for the actual melodies, the early season transition music tends to stay a lot closer to the melody of the main theme song. Like this.

[SFX: Early Transition]

In the later seasons, the bass fills get a lot wackier:

[SFX: Later Transition]

There were also plenty of opportunities to branch out from the main theme, depending on what the script called for.

[music in]

Jonathan: About a week before an episode begins shooting, each production department receives a script, so they can prepare. Wardrobes, props, set dressing. My music editor would read the script, and database a to-do list of music pieces, and/or on-stage music assistance that this episode might need. Sometimes it's necessary to pre-produce music before they shoot the scenes. For example, when there's on-camera singing or dancing, I would need to create the music recording far enough in advance so the other departments, the actors, dancers, choreographer, director, camera crew, had time to prepare for the shoot.

[music out]

Jonathan: For example, I had to create the instrumental tracks for Jason singing “Believe It or Not, George Isn't At Home” in advance for playback during the audience shoot.

[SFX: Answering Machine]

Jonathan: Kramer's head-banging metal.

[SFX: Car song]

Jonathan: Rochelle, Rochelle: The Musical.

[SFX: Rochelle Rochelle song]

Jonathan: And Kramer's photoshoot of semi-naked George.

[SFX: Photoshoot song]

Jonathan: Also, in post is the time to create underscore music that heightens a dramatic or emotional scene, or serves as a comedic device.

Jonathan: In “The Hot Tub” episode, Elaine wanders the cold night streets, upset about her writer's block. The music is, at first, worried. Then, at the end, triumphant as she solves her Himalayan walking shoes assignment.

[Seinfeld Clip: Elaine: My back aches, my heart aches, but my feet… my feet are resilient. Thank God I took off my heels and put on my Himalayan walking shoes!]

Or the sentimental music that plays when George, and later Jerry, watch happy couples on the pier and decide to get married.

[SFX: Pier music]

Jonathan: On Seinfeld, cinematic action music with chase scenes became a thing. Jerry chasing Newman, the cable guy chasing Kramer, the geriatric bike gang chasing George, and the German tourist chasing Kramer. And that became a recurring Seinfeld comedy tradition. I always scored the Seinfeld chases in post as if they were serious, dramatic chases.

[SFX: Chase Music]

Jonathan: Same with, you know, Jerry's dream sequence, Tarantino-esque death scene in “The Baby Shower.”

[SFX: Shootout music]

Jonathan: Or, in “The Frogger,” when Jerry runs from The Lopper.

[SFX: Lopper music]

Jonathan: You get the idea. There's these moments for me to go over the top, silly, movie underscore.

[music in]

Jonathan: So, there was music in pre-production, there was music in post-production, and sometimes my duties were on set.

Because of the fast-paced filming schedule, Jonathan typically had just a single day to complete each episode.

Jonathan: In general, for a normal episode, I liked one full calendar day between receiving an episode and delivering finished music.

It was a hectic schedule, but all that hard work paid off. Seinfeld became a smash hit, and stayed that way all the way through it’s final season. The 1998 finale had 76 million viewers, making it the third most-watched finale of all time.

[music out]

Steve: It’s just such an interesting point in television history.

Steve: It's like working on Mary Tyler Moore.

[SFX: Mary Tyler Moore Theme: “You’re gonna make it after all”]

Steve: Or going back, if you worked on The Lucy Show.

[SFX: The Lucy Show Theme]

When a TV show captures a wide enough audience, it becomes a shared memory for a whole generation. A show’s theme song can be a huge part of that.

Jonathan: Often, the theme not only reflects the show's sensibilities, but also welcomes the audience by bridging the gap between the show's set and the viewer's living room.

Jonathan: I didn't write it, but the Cheers theme does that so well.

[SFX: Cheers Theme: “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name.”]

Jonathan: You really feel welcome to that show, because of the theme.

Jonathan: A TV theme like no other production element, transports you into the world of the show itself [SFX: Cheers theme]. TV themes are woven into the fabric of our personal experiences, like the soundtrack of our lives. Familiar themes, like Seinfeld, serve as pop cultural touchstones, marking times and places in our lives.

Jonathan: For me, those lifeline markers include themes like Mission Impossible…

[SFX: Mission Impossible Theme]

Jonathan: Pink Panther…

[SFX: Pink Panther theme]

Jonathan: Beverly Hillbillies…

[SFX: Beverly Hillbillies Theme: “So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Hills, that is.”]

Jonathan: For my kids, it's probably the Friends theme song.

[SFX: Friends Theme: I’ll be there for you, as you’re there for me too.]

Jonathan: People hold warm, fuzzy connections to the TV themes in their memories.

[music in]

For the millions of Seinfeld fans out there, the show’s music will always hold a special place in their hearts. So what was it like to work on something monumental?

Steve: Oh, it was great. I mean, the thing with Jonathan was, he had been in the business five or six years longer than me. I was a young guy. I was looking to break in and learn the ropes and he was just so helpful. He started many careers. Everybody who worked for him after me and at the same time I was there has gone on to big Hollywood careers… and it's all because of his mentorship and his guidance. He was really a giving person. He wasn't jealous of the success. He shared it.

Jonathan: I'm happy that the Seinfeld music became a unique identifying signature for the show. It became Seinfeld’s sonic brand. That satisfies me a lot, that even apart from the show, even when there's no picture to go with it, they recognize it as being the Seinfeld theme.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and 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 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 Jai Berger and Colin DeVarney.

Special thanks to our guests Jonathan Wollf and Steve Lack. Jonathan says he loves hearing from fans.

Jonathan: The fans find me on my Instagram or Facebook. It's easy to find me. My handle is “SeinfeldMusicGuy.” If you're listening to this, and you want to reach out to me, please do. I'll respond.

You can get in touch with Steve through his website, stevelack.com.

Finally, I also love your feedback! You can reach out to me and the rest of the team over through Facebook, Twitter, or by writing hi@20k.org. Also, if you haven’t checked out our website, you’re really missing out. Be sure to check it out at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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