Hamilton’s Sonic Secrets: Behind the Broadway phenomenon

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

June 24, 2020

Info Pocketknife

Stop, Collaborate and Listen: Can you copyright a vibe?

June 24, 2020

Info Pocketknife

This episode was written and produced by Fil Corbitt.

Can you steal from yourself? Can you copyright a mood? We look back on some important copyright cases that could have an impact on the entire future of music making. Featuring Adam Neely and Sandra Aistars.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Mercurial Vision by Marble Run
Rafter by Speakeasy
Chromium Blush by Ray Catcher
Allow Me (Instrumental) by Kilgore
Keffel by Sketchbook 2
Vienna Beat by Radiopink

MUSIC DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

Under Pressure by David Bowie & Queen - EMI, Elektra
Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice - SKB Records
U Can't Touch This by MC Hammer - Capitol Records
Super Freak by Rick James - Gordy Records
It Was a Good Day by Ice Cube - Priority Records
Footsteps in the Dark by The Isley Brothers - T-Neck Records
Alone Again (Naturally) by Biz Markie - Cold Chillin, Warner Records
Alone Again (Naturally) by Gilbert O'Sullivan - MAM Records
Paper Planes by MIA & Diplo - XL Records, Interscope
Straight to Hell by The Clash - CBS Records
Run Through the Jungle by Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fantasy Records
The Old Man Down the Road by John Fogerty - Warner Records
Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke & Pharrell Williams - Star Track, Interscope Records
Got to Give it Up by Marvin Gaye - Tamla Records

ONLINE CLIPS USED IN THIS EPISODE

Additional Clips Used in this episode

The Hollywood Reporter - 'Pharrell Williams' Contentious 'Blurred Lines' Testimony Unsealed (Exclusive Video)'

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[Music Clip: Ice Ice Baby]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

Probably the most famous case of music plagiarism is still Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice. The song copied the exact intro from Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen.

[Music Clip: Under Pressure]

When Ice Ice Baby came out [Music Clip: Ice Ice Baby], people would hear that iconic bass line and be totally jarred when some guy yelled “let’s kick it!” instead of the piano coming in [Music Clip: Under Pressure].

Initially, Vanilla Ice famously claimed that the songs were different.

[SFX: Vanilla Ice demo: [Mouths Under Pressure riff] that’s the way their’s goes, ours goes [mouths Ice Ice Baby riff]... that little bitty change, it’s not the same.]

He later admitted to simply sampling the song. He claimed that he was just joking about them being totally different. Queen and David Bowie threatened a lawsuit, but settled out of court. Now they get royalties and all of them were added to the songwriting credits.

[SFX: Vanilla Ice interview: Vanilla Ice: “Rap Music is Sampling and people who don’t understand rap music they say ‘oh he borrows this or steals this…’ rap music, every major rap artist in the world samples music, you know?”]

Adam: The Vanilla Ice thing became such a joke because he wasn't approaching it with any degree of sophistication.

That’s Adam Neely.

Adam’s a bass player and also makes music education videos on Youtube.

Adam: It’s not the best song, but I do on an intellectual level agree with, I do think that Vanilla Ice, when he did that, is very much continuing in the tradition of Mozart and Beethoven and anybody who has built a new melody, a new structure, off of old material. That is what music is. That is what remixing is, and that is an integral part to the lifeblood of music-making.

But Mozart and Beethoven wrote the notes down and new musicians played new music. In the case of Vanilla Ice, this sample is a direct copy of Queen’s original recording. That’s why sampling caused a big stir in the copyright world.

Another famous example of extremely obvious sampling is MC Hammer’s 1990 song “U Can’t Touch this”...

[Music Clip: U Can’t Touch This]

The beat in MC Hammer’s track is sampled from the Rick James Song “Super Freak”...

[Music Clip: Super Freak]

Rick James sued, but the case was settled out of court.

Sampling threw a giant wrench into the gears of copyright law. In acoustic music, you could argue that this chord progression or this vocal melody is similar to that one. In sampling they are exactly the same. It’s literally a copy and paste. It’s a bit of a recording of a song being played within another song.

Sampling has a rich history especially in early hip hop. Many songs even had layers of samples. So in the early days, figuring out who borrowed what, and who got credit, was difficult.

Here’s another example called “It was a Good Day” by Ice Cube:

[Music Clip: Ice Cube]

That was sampled from “Footsteps in the Dark” by the Isley Brothers:

[Music Clip: Isley Brothers]

Ice Cube just used a small part of the intro from that record and built a whole new track out of it.

There are literally thousands of examples like this. Entire new genres of music developed out of sampling and reimagining older music into something new. But over time sampling came under legal scrutiny and became much harder to do.

In 1991, rapper Biz Markie lost a copyright lawsuit to Gilbert O' Sullivan for the song “Alone Again.”

[Music Clip: Biz Markie’s Alone Again ]

And here’s Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Original Song:

[Music Clip: Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again]

The songs share a beat, a piano chord progression, and the title and lyrics “Alone Again”.

In the end, this case really scared the music industry. After this point, it started to become much more difficult to get samples cleared when producing music for commercial release. Some people even say this case marked the end of the golden age of sampling.

Today, sampling has become much more standardized….and also more expensive. Even a small sample can cost a huge amount of money. Sometimes paid up front, and sometimes paid over time through royalties.

Here’s a hit song from 2007, “Paper Planes” by M.I.A.:

[Music Clip: MIA]

And here’s “Straight to Hell” by the Clash:

[Music Clip: Clash]

M.I.A. and producer Diplo built an entire song out of this short instrumental part that the Clash only play twice in their own track.

M.I.A. and Diplo simply got permission, and The Clash were all named as songwriters in advance. No lawsuit, no charges of theft. The Clash embraced the M.I.A. song, saying it was a great use of their work. But the creative possibilities of sampling are still challenged by the legal requirements of copyright.

[music in]

The ownership of a song is broken down into two parts. First is the underlying composition: This is all of the elements that someone wrote, basically the sheet music. Then, there’s the physical recording of the song; which is the performance of the musicians and the tones of their gear.

Sampling requires an artist to get both types of copyright permission.

For the recording, a record label will usually own those rights because they paid for the recording session. So that specific recording of the song belongs to them, but they don’t own the idea of the song. The IDEA on the other hand, is frequently co-owned by the artist and the publisher. So a musical artist might only own a small portion of their own work.

[music out]

In the early 90s John Fogerty was sued for plagiarism.

Fantasy Records, the Publisher of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song Run Through the Jungle, claimed that John Fogerty’s solo song Old Man Down the Road infringed on their copyright.

But John Fogerty was the singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival. So that literally means he was sued for plagiarising himself.

Here’s Run Through the Jungle:

[Music Clip: CCR - Run Through the Jungle]

And here’s Old Man Down the Road:

[Music Clip: John Fogerty - Old Man Down the Road]

So John Fogerty wrote and sang in both songs, but that doesn’t mean he’s the only copyright holder. Remember there are separate rights for writing and recording, and any mainstream artist has to split their earnings with publishers and record labels.

John Fogerty had left with Fantasy records and started a solo career. He spoke in detail about this case during an interview at the grammy museum.

[SFX: Fogerty interview: John Fogerty: “Okay you got the old song, the new song. Fantasy Records is the publisher of the old song. They still have to pay that songwriter, me, right? It’s roughly 50-50. The new song, which was written also by me, called Old Man Down the Road, I’m the songwriter but I’m also the publisher. So if Fantasy prevails, then the new song is nothing and those guys own the whole thing”]

As Fogerty put it, he was being sued for sounding like himself. The melodies were similar but not exact, the guitar riff was related but not the same…

In court, Fantasy Records hired somebody to program the melodies of each song into a computer to compare them. Remember this is in the mid 90s.

[SFX: Fogerty interview: John Fogerty: “What he did was, he programmed the melody of Run Through the Jungle into the computer… beep boop boop...it really sounded like that folks. After that they played, now here’s Old Man Down the Road… beep boop boop… right.”]

Fogerty said the jury looked… confused. When it was his turn to demonstrate, he famously pulled out a guitar and played it in court. He explained how they were different, and that the similarities existed because he was the same person playing the same genre of music.

And...he won the lawsuit.

Some saw this lawsuit as an attempt by Fantasy Records to silence one of their former artist’s. Fogerty as a solo artist was successful enough to mount a defense, but not all songwriters have that kind of money. He countersued and eventually won a supreme court case that basically said, if companies like Fantasy Records lose a copyright lawsuit, they have to cover the lawyers fees of the defense.

[music in]

But even with that ruling, this stuff is expensive.

Sandra: You'll often hear people say that a right without a remedy is no right at all. And I think that's been true for a lot of individual creators and small businesses.

This is Sandra Aistars, a law professor at George Mason University. She sees the current system as cost prohibitive for many small creators.

Sandra: For instance if you are a individual or a small business, and you don't have an army of lawyers at your disposal to deal with all of your business matters, you're going to have to make the decision on a daily basis, "Do I sit down and compose or do I sit at home crawling through the internet trying to find infringements, and then trying to track those people down and deal with them to be able to remain viable as a small business."

You can probably guess what most artists choose.

Sandra: They just try and shoot more images, write more songs, go on tour to try and keep themselves afloat as creative businesses, and they let the copyright protection aspects go by the wayside.

[music out]

Sandra says it can be incredibly expensive to defend yourself against a copyright suit, or to even bring one to court to begin with.

Sandra: That's because copyright is a body of federal law, and so you have to go to the federal courts. There's no small claims proceeding, it's not like when you have an argument with your landlord and you can both go to small claims court. You know, you don't necessarily have to have lawyers, and it doesn't cost you much to resolve this dispute fairly. That doesn't exist in copyright.

But there is a push to change this.

Sandra: There has been an effort over the past couple of years to pass legislation that would create such a system within the copyright office, where whether you are a plaintiff or defendant, you could have access by voluntary agreement to this forum that would act essentially as a small claims court.

[music in]

Copyright law has been getting a lot of public attention. In recent years there have been a spat of high profile cases. The one that’s made the most headlines and seemed to send shockwaves through the music community was Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke vs. Marvin Gaye.

[SFX: Montage of people on the news and youtube saying “Blurred Lines” Rick Beato - “blurred lines”

CNN - “Blurred Lines”

MSNBC - “blurred lines”

Berklee -“blurred lines” ]

We talk about Blurred Lines, and what it might mean for the music industry, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

In 2015 Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams released a song called “Blurred Lines”. It received public scrutiny for many reasons. Pharrell Williams has even gone as far as saying that he regrets writing the song.

But outside of the lyrics, there is more to this story. The estate of Marvin Gaye asked for a songwriting credit on “Blurred lines” because they said it was similar to Marvin Gaye’s 1977 song “Got to Give It Up”. Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke actually sued first to get a ‘declaration’ that their song did not infringe Marvin Gaye’s work. And then Marvin Gaye’s family were forced to defend.

[music out]

There was a corner of the internet that seemed elated that these flashy new pop stars were getting called out for being unoriginal. Proof that “they don’t make ‘em like they used to.” Then there was another group that was seriously concerned. This case wasn’t for a melody, lyrics, or any specific element. It was for the “feel” of a song. The style itself. This is unprecedented. Let’s listen.

Here’s the beginning of Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams.

[Music Clip: Robin Thicke & Pharrell - Blurred Lines]

And here’s the beginning of motown classic Got to Give it Up by Marvin Gaye:

[Music Clip: Marvin Gaye - Got to Give it Up]

Now, there are some obvious similarities.

The two songs are about the same tempo - roughly 120 beats per minute - and they have basically the same instruments; Drums, some high pitched percussion, bass, and energetic voices.

Let’s zoom in on the different parts. We recreated each part and layered it on top of the original songs to help focus on each sound.

Let's start with the percussion. Here’s Blurred Lines:

[Music Clip: Robin Thicke & Pharrell - Blurred Lines]

And here it is in got to give it up:

[Music Clip: Marvin Gaye - Got to Give it Up]

So Blurred Lines uses cowbells, and Got to Give it up uses a coke bottle. They’re playing different grooves but achieve a similar feeling.

The next thing is the Drums. Here’s the drum kit in Blurred Lines:

[Music Clip: Robin Thicke & Pharrell - Blurred Lines]

And here’s Got to Give it up:

[Music Clip: Marvin Gaye - Got to Give it Up]

Also similar, but not exact. The kick and snare drum are pretty much the same [SFX], but this is a super common drum beat. You can probably find a million songs that use the same kick-snare-kick-snare pattern [SFX].

The little drum fills at the end of the phrase are also similar, all of these are common expressions in drumming, so you can’t copyright them.

Up next is the bass line. Here it is in Blurred Lines:

[Music Clip: Robin Thicke & Pharrell Blurred Lines]

Here it is in Got to Give it up:

[Music Clip: Marvin Gaye - Got to Give it Up]

Similar but not the same.

Next is the vocals. Marvin Gaye’s song uses a recording of people at a party. Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams used their own woops and shouts. So again, different but achieving a similar feeling.

To wrap up, let’s listen to the originals one last time.

Here’s Blurred Lines:

[Music Clip: Robin Thicke & Pharrell - Blurred Lines]

And here’s Got to Give it up:

[Music Clip: Marvin Gaye - Got to Give it Up]

Ok, that was a lot of close listening. But it’s important to remember that these songs didn’t exist in a vacuum. Drums, percussion, bass, and vocals at 120 beats per minute describes hundreds, if not thousands of songs. And this is just in the Motown and Pop genres. And that’s exactly what makes this case important.

These elements are almost universal, and each part in isolation could be considered common expression. So how is it that anything we just played for you can be copyrighted?

A lot of musicians were shocked this case went to court in the first place. In every genre, the music that came before helps to give new music context and meaning. So it’s not surprising that Marvin Gaye would have a huge influence on today’s artists.

[music in]

Pharrell was asked about this influence in court. Here’s a clip from his deposition, published by Hollywood Reporter back in 2015.

[SFX clip: Pharrell Williams

Lawyer: Is it your testimony that you and Mr. Thicke never once during the creation of Blurred Lines spoke about, discussed, referenced the song “Got to Give it Up” by Marvin Gaye?

Pharrell: I did not go into the studio with the intention of making anything feeling like, to sound like Marvin Gaye.]

However, before the trial Pharrell gave an interview about the song and said that he was inspired by Marvin Gaye. [SFX clip: Pharell Williams

Lawyer: do you remember, I asked you if Marvin Gaye at all came into your mind at all during the creation of Blurred Lines, and you said no. Do you remember that?

Pharrell: Yeah.

Lawyer: You say in this interview “I was trying to pretend that I was Marvin Gaye”.

Pharrell: mmhmm.

Lawyer: So I guess Marvin Gaye did in fact come into your mind.

Pharrell: You asked me about Got to Give It Up.

Lawyer: I asked you about Got to Give It Up?

Pharrell: Yeah, you asked me about Got to Give It Up.

Lawyer: So Marvin Gaye came into your mind when you were creating Blurred Lines, but not Got to Give It Up…

Pharrell: No, when I look back.

Lawyer: Do you see here anywhere where you say “when I look back”?

Pharrell: No, no, no… I’m telling you, I’m answering you.]

[music out]

Ultimately, Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke lost this case. The verdict was a 5.3 million dollar payout to the Marvin Gaye family, plus 50 percent of the royalties of the song. They appealed...but they lost again.

The judge wrote in the majority opinion that the decision was quote “Far from heralding the end of musical creativity as we know it...” unquote.

In a dissenting opinion another judge wrote that this decision quote “allows Marvin Gaye’s Family to accomplish what no one has done before: copyright a musical style.”

Adam: Well now you can just own a style of music, which is absolutely ridiculous.

This is Adam Neely again.

Adam: The problem is, in recent years, intellectual property holders have started bringing in musicologists and music theorists into the courtroom, and then those music theorists and musicologists do that same thing of finding connections between songs and finding, hey, yeah, you know, Blurred Lines really does kind of sound like Got To Give It Up, and here's why.

Musicology at a basic level, is the study of music in a cultural context. And musicologists often try to find common ground between different musical styles. Adam thinks this field is being misconstrued in court.

Adam: Musicologists and music theorists are kind of gleefully doing what they've always done in the classroom, but now in the courtroom it has very real world effects that are deleterious to the entire craft and the entire history of music-making.

But musicology is not the only thing considered in a copyright case. The testimony of the artist can play a huge role.

Here’s Sandra Aistars again.

Sandra: I think there is some obligation, on creators of all stripes, that where you're going to incorporate the work of someone who came before you, you should give a nod of credit to them.

Sandra: When you have a jury that is in place to hear all of the arguments of the parties, understand all the testimony of the experts, and then apply their own understanding and experience in the world... And one might agree or disagree with the jury's ultimate conclusion...but that to me is how the process is supposed to work.

[music in]

As an audience, and as a culture, we share a common goal.

We want artists to freely express themselves, and be able to male make a living doing that. But the line between inspiration and theft is just… blurry. Who owns what part of which song, and what parts belong to all of us…

Adam: At the end of the day, the whole system probably should be rebuilt in a very, very different way than it exists right now, but I'm not going to call for that, because that's way beyond the scope of me, lonely bass player, music YouTuber, who just has opinions about music.

Sandra: In terms of the basics of copyright law, the structure is there and it's worked for hundreds of years and there have been controversies for hundreds of years.

Sandra: But look how creative our culture is, look how exponentially we expand our creativity year over year, decade over decade.

Sandra: Over the past several years there's been a review by Congress of every aspect of the copyright laws. And they had something like 20 hearings, and heard from a 100 witnesses in those hearings, and then had public round tables all around the country

Sandra: And now they're in the phase of thinking about, well, are there things that should be changed about the law to update it for the future?

In the muck of lawsuits and red tape, creating art can be... confusing. Most everything is inspired by something else. If we're scared to create something because it might accidentally be similar to something else, we’re stifling our creativity.

Sure, the law needs to protect work, but creatives can’t be terrified of being inspired. And just in case, for my own legal safety, maybe I should tell you that this whole Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast is heavily inspired by Radiolab, 99 Percent Invisible, and Song Exploder. So, Jad, Roman, and Hrishikesh, please don’t sue me.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defactosound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Fil Corbitt and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound edited by Soren Begin, it was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

By the way, that whole blurb where people record their own credit… that was inspired by Studio 360. The writer of this episode, Fil Corbitt, is also the host of another podcast called Van Sounds, it’s a unique blend of music journalism, travel writing, and experimental radio. Find Van Sounds right here in your podcast player.

Thanks to Sandra Aistars and Adam Neely for speaking with us. And I highly recommend you go immediately subscribe to Adam Neely’s fantastic YouTube channel.

Also, if you’re a teacher or professor and you want to use Twenty Thousand Hertz in your classrooms - go for it! Our mission is to make the world sound better, and to help everyone understand sound in a deeper way.

Finally, there are sooo many examples of other songs that sound similar. There are also sooo many other lawsuits we couldn’t get to. If there’s another case you’d like to hear us cover in the future, tell us all about it. We’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Our subreddit is r/20k. ...and as always, if you’d like to contact us directly, you can do that at hi at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

Recent Episodes

Featured

Inside Apple: Sonic Accessibility

June 10, 2020

Info Pocketknife

Copyrights & Wrongs: Musical Inspiration vs. Plagiarism

June 10, 2020

Info Pocketknife

This episode was written and produced by Fil Corbitt.

Most western music is built on the same 12 notes. Sometimes the arrangement of those notes sounds similar, which raises the question: Theft or Inspiration? We listen to some famous copyright disputes and try to decode them. Featuring Adam Neely and Sandra Aistars.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Highride by Radiopink
A Path Unwinding by 4K
PlataZ by The Fence
Tarte Tatin by Confectionary
The Molerat by Little Rock
Moon Bicycle Theme by American Moon Bicycle
Slider by Grey River
Kid Kodi by Skittle

MUSIC DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie - TRO-Essex
Stay With Me by Sam Smith - Capitol Records
I Won't Back Down by Tom Petty - MCA Records
Creep by RadioHead - Parlophone, EMI Records
Get Free by Lana Del Rey - Interscope, Polydor
The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies - Epic Records
Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran - Asylum, Atlantic Records
Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye Tamla Records
When the World's on Fire by The Carter Family - Epic Records, The Carter Family
Oh My Loving Brother - Gospel Hymn
Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin - Atlantic Records
You Need Love by Muddy Waters - Chess Records
The Lemon Song by Led Zeppelin - Atlantic Records
The Killing Floor by Howlin' Wolf - Chess Records
Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin - Atlantic Records
Dazed and Confused by Jake Holmes - Tower Records
Dark Horse by Katy Perry - Capitol Records
Joyful Noise by Flame - Cross Movement
Moments in Love by Art of Noise - ZTT, Island Records

CLIPS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[Music Clip: Woody Guthrie - This Land is Your Land]

This Land is Your Land is one of the most famous American folk songs ever written. It’s even been called the other national anthem...but this song, somehow, does not belong to you and me.

You can’t sing it on stage, or put it on a record or in a movie without paying someone to use it. The only way I can even play it is because of fair use - And this song has been enveloped in a growing national debate about copyright law.

[music in]

For thousands of years people have been making and sharing music. And for thousands of years, nobody really owned it. It just existed. But with the rise of our ability to sell music, the way we determine who owns it has changed dramatically.

Sandra: My name is Sandra Aistars.

Sandra’s a professor at George Mason University.

Sandra: And I teach a class here where we represent artists and entertainers on copyright and entertainment law issues.

To start with the very basics... copyright law is intended to protect authors of creative work.

Sandra: Whether those are musicians, or literary authors, or software programmers, visual authors...

To create work, you just have to record it or write it down. You don’t even necessarily have to sell it or market it to own the copyright.

Sandra: A lot of people don't realize that you don't need to go to a government entity and register for a copyright in order to own a copyright in your work. You as the author own the copyright in the work from the moments that it's set down in some sort of tangible medium.

[music out]

If you come up with a melody and lyrics in the shower [SFX: shower running, singing], and you record it on your phone, you own the copyright. If you post it online [SFX: mouse click], and some famous singer rips it off [SFX: crowd cheering, produced version of shower song], you could theoretically sue and legally co-own that song. That is, assuming you could afford to take it to court.

But since music is art, and art is confusing, it’s usually not that easy to tell what’s a rip off and what is just inspired by somebody else.

Sandra: Everybody understands that people are inspired by other people's works, maybe even unintentionally. They've got some earworm that shows up after they've been concentrating on composing something and it sneaks into the work totally unintentionally.

So is it inspiration or theft? That’s the basic question behind a copyright lawsuit.

One recent copyright dispute was the hit song Stay with Me by Sam Smith which came out in 2014. It goes like this:

[Music Clip: Sam Smith - Stay with Me]

The chorus uses the same melody as Won’t Back Down by Tom Petty.

[Music Clip: Tom Petty - Won’t Back Down]

Tom Petty’s publisher got in touch with Sam Smith, who listened to both and acknowledged the clear similarity -- they said it was a complete accident -- and that was it. Tom Petty was given co-songwriting credits, which means he’s also entitled to royalties.

Let’s hear them back to back one more time…

[Music Clip: Sam Smith - Stay with Me]

[Music Clip: Tom Petty - Won’t Back Down]

Tom Petty was quoted in Rolling Stone Magazine as saying, quote “I have never had any hard feelings towards Sam… Most times you catch it before the song gets out the door but in this case it got by.”

So this case was solved easily, both artists agreed on the result. And Like many of these cases, it was settled out of court, so we don’t have much information about it. But what we do know that it's not uncommon for cases to get a lot messier than this.

And unsurprisingly, many artists don’t like being accused of theft.

For example, in 2018 Lana Del Rey posted a tweet claiming that Radiohead was suing her for ownership of the song Get Free, alleging it was similar to their 1992 song Creep.

Here’s Creep by Radiohead:

[Music Clip: Radiohead - Creep]

And here’s Get Free by Lana Del Rey:

[Music Clip: Lana Del Rey - Get Free]

Lana Del Rey tweeted that Radiohead sued her looking for a hundred percent of the publishing rights. Radiohead’s publishers shot back, saying that in fact no lawsuit had been filed, but that they had been in talks with Lana Del Rey’s publisher about the similarities.

Musical copyright is split into two categories. First - “master rights” control how music is used in film or television, and who can use it. And second - “publishing rights” which protect the actual songwriting, music, and lyrics.

Radiohead and Lana Del Rey apparently settled, though neither side has said exactly what agreement they came to. These cases are rarely public. The only reason we know anything, is that Lana Del Rey performed it in Brazil later that year and said this:

[Live Clip: Lana Del Rey “I mean now that my lawsuit’s over I guess I can sing that song any time I want right?” ]

But here’s the twist… in 1992, after Creep was released, Radiohead was sued for plagiarizing Creep from an early 70’s song by the Hollies.

Here’s Radiohead Again:

[Music Clip: Radiohead - Creep]

And this is The Air that I Breathe by the Hollies:

[Music Clip: The Hollies - The Air that I Breathe]

In the early nineties, the two songwriters of The Hollies successfully sued Radiohead and are now credited as songwriters on Creep.

Every copyright claim has to be looked at case-by-case. And to actually make decisions about violations it’s important to zoom in and look at the elements that music is made of.

[music in]

Music is a shared language. So there are tons of parts of music that everybody owns.

Like, you can’t copyright a single musical note. In western music, there are only 12 of them [SFX]. So if somebody were to own the note G [SFX]... it would be almost impossible to write music. It’s a common form of expression, like a letter of the alphabet. So you can’t own it.

Non-ownable forms of expression exist in other media as well. In visual art, you can’t copyright a simple shape - like a circle or a square. And in literature you can’t copyright emotions.

You can take that idea pretty far too. For example - if you were to write a play where boy meets girl, but their families were in a blood feud, so they try to run away with eachother and it goes horribly wrong… that’d be fine. Even though that’s the same basic plot behind Romeo And Juliet.

Sandra: On the other hand, if someone were to copy a Shakespearian ballad from beginning to end, that would clearly be a copyright infringement.

[music out]

Basically, you can’t own things that are considered common. So in music, a 4/4 rock beat [SFX] or a simple bass line [SFX] are pretty common, and almost impossible to copyright.

Likewise - Many folk melodies include scales and even lyrical phrases that are simply too common to own. So when these cases go to court, each side has to prove if something is a “common expression”, or if it’s actually unique intellectual property.

[music in]

Sandra: The parties bring in musicologists that explain various subtleties of music composition, and try to help the jury understand which areas are protectable and which areas are not. Not surprisingly, the musicologist for the plaintiff will typically disagree with the musicologist for the defendant, and so you'll have two competing assertions of what's protectable and what's not protectable.

So in a hypothetical case like Radiohead vs. Lana Del Rey - Lana Del Rey’s lawyers would likely argue that the chord progression isn’t unique enough for Radiohead to own. Radiohead’s lawyers would argue the opposite. And, what’s surprising -- is that it would be up to a jury to decide. Not experts, but a regular old jury.

Sandra: Music is really an interesting area of the law here because we as listeners, audiences, we have our own ideas of what sounds similar, what doesn't sound similar…

So, a group of people who might not know anything about actually writing or playing music get to make the decision.

Sandra: The harder question is where to draw the line when you're talking about something that incorporates common types of musical expression.

And that line has been making some musicians very nervous.

[music out]

Adam: It leads to some pretty dark places, because if you can own one specific simple chord progression, you can own basically anything, and anybody can sue anybody else for any kind of little chord progression that is in any song.

This is Adam Neely.

Adam: I'm a bass player and also a music education YouTuber.

[music in]

Adam has a great youtube channel and has made a couple popular videos about music plagiarism. Adam says that recently the interpretation of copyright law has started finding plagiarism - but he thinks many of these cases should just be considered inspiration.

Adam: So historically, musicians have always built on what other musicians have done. We use the same scales, we use the same chord progressions, we use the same kinds of rhythms. And to say that you can own one of those elements in such a specific manner is just disingenuous to the entire art form and the entire craft.

In the last couple of years, there have been a few cases that have made huge waves in the world of songwriting. Cases that have changed the way we think of music ownership entirely.

We’ll talk about those cases, after the break.

[music out]

[MIDROLL]

[music in]

In the last couple of years, A few massive cases have rocked the world of songwriting. Contemporary pop stars have gone up against giants of music and unknown artists alike.

In 2018 Ed Sheeran was sued for the similarity between his song Thinking Out Loud and Marvin Gaye’s song “Let’s get it on.”

This lawsuit is mainly interesting because it isn’t about the melody, like most copyright cases.

Instead, this one is about the bassline, the chords and the drum grove.

[music out]

Here’s Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran. Pay attention to the bass and drums.

[Music Clip: Ed Sheeran - Thinking out loud]

And Here’s Let’s get it On by Marvin Gaye:

[Music Clip: Marvin Gaye - Let’s Get It On]

So let’s dissect this - the bassline and drum groove are definitely similar. But the vocal melody is different, and the lyrics are different, the musical key is also different - but the chord progression is basically the same.

I’m going to layer these two songs on top of each other - Ed Sheran’s song has to be pitched up a little bit so they are in tune together. Listen to how the basic framework of the songs is the same, but all of the details in between are different…

[Music Clip: Ed Sheeran -layered with Marvin Gaye]

So the chords and the drum beat match. [Music fades to basic piano and drums] But neither Marvin Gaye or Ed Sheran invented these elements. The chords are a progression known as “one three four five”, and the drum beat is a basic rock drum pattern like you might learn in your first few drum lessons.

[music out]

[music in]

Marvin Gaye pretty much reshaped the way our culture sings about love. In many ways, what we think of as a smooth, romantic song can be attributed to his sensibilities. And it’s hard to create a contemporary romantic song without nodding to Marvin Gaye.

But inspiration isn’t illegal. And According to Adam, musicians have always built on what other musicians have done. So the context of what comes before gives new music part of its meaning. Adam argues that this is just a contemporary version of a very old musical concept called Cantus Firmus.

Adam: Cantus firmus was basically the technique of taking a melody that had already been written, and then writing other melodies on top of it.

Adam says this has been standard composition technique for hundreds of years.

[music out]

Adam: This is how Mozart learned how to compose. This is how Beethoven learned how to compose. Everybody learned to write by basically stealing other people's melodies and then writing other stuff on top of that.

And that’s not just for classical music. Think about folk songs. It was super common for people to learn songs from their parents or at church, add new verses and pass them on. Or, people would just take a melody they already knew and change the lyrics.

Which brings us back to Woody Guthrie’s This Land is your Land:

[Music Clip: Woody Guthrie - This Land is Your Land]

So that song that all of us know, simply repurposed a melody from The Carter Family. Here’s their song, “When the World’s on Fire”, from about 10 years before.

[Music Clip: When the World’s on Fire - The Carter Family]

Pretty similar, right? Well, the Carter Family didn’t make it up either. It was originally a Baptist gospel hymn called “Oh My Loving Brother”.

[Music Clip: Oh My Loving Brother]

The Carter Family even repurposed this same melody again for other songs. But none of this was unusual. These weren’t seen as plagiarism and the original songwriters were often anonymous or long, long gone.

[music in]

The first US Copyright Law passed in 1790. At that time, a copyright lasted 14 years, and you could renew it once. After that it was in the public domain, which means anybody could use it. Commercial, private, whatever. In 1909 Copyright was extended to 28 years, then extended again in 1976, and again in 1998. It keeps expanding.

So, when Woody Guthrie released This Land is Your Land, it wasn’t like copyright didn’t exist...people just treated music compositions differently, and a lot more of it was considered common expression. There were references to references to references -- an inception level of copyright violations in all types of music.

In fact, the note that Guthrie submitted with his copyright application read, quote “anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do” end quote.

[music out]

Keeping that in mind, in 2004, the comedy website JibJab posted a video with parody lyrics of the song.

[Music Clip: Jib Jab]

A company called The Richmond Organization claimed that they had purchased the copyright of This Land is Your Land, and threatened legal action.

To be proactive, JibJab sued first, claiming not only that parody was fair use, but that The Richmond Organization didn’t own it at all. Jib Jab won the parody part, but The Richmond Organization still claims ownership.

But how? If a song was copyrighted in the 1940s, and could only be held for 28 years, it seems like it should be in the public domain today.

[music in: Slider by Grey River]

By the mid 70s, copyright was extended to 70 years, OR the life of the author plus 50 years.

And THEN in the late 90s, that was extended to a whopping 120 years or the life of the author plus 70.

Just to reiterate that, what started as a law to protect a work for 14 years now will keep a work as private property for 120.

This is exactly how the Happy Birthday was held for so long. For years chain restaurants would sing some weird version of a birthday song…

[Music Clip: Applebees Happy Birthday]

And that was because the one we all know was protected by copyright, despite the fact that it was written sometime around 1912. The company that owned it was successfully sued recently and now anybody can use Happy Birthday for anything. Finally we can get rid of those uncomfortable happy birthday songs and get back to the real one.

After Happy Birthday was released into the public domain, This Land is Your Land came up in court again. It appeared as if it might be released. But….It wasn’t. The judge ruled that the Richmond Organization still retained ownership of the song, and it will not be in the public domain anytime soon.

Adam: The idea behind intellectual property is the protection of the artist, and as an artist and as a musician and talking to people around me, nobody feels protected by this. The only people who feel protected by this are the estates of pop artists who have passed.

On the other hand, Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora, told the New York Times that this isn’t about the money, it’s about protecting the song from abuse and political use.

[music out]

Copyright is meant to allow artists to create work -and legally own it. Then you can prevent other people from stealing it and claiming it as their own. And that makes sense, because who wouldn’t want their work to help support their family - even after they’re gone.

This brings us to Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin was notorious for brazenly (ahem) borrowing from other songs. There’s even a wikipedia page called “Led Zeppelin songs written or inspired by others.”

Here’s Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love from 1969:

[Music Clip: Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love]

And here is You Need Love by Willie Dixon, sung by Muddy Waters from 6 years earlier.

[Music Clip: Muddy Waters - You Need Love]

Here is The Lemon Song by Led Zeppelin:

[Music Clip: Led Zeppelin - Lemon Song]

And Here’s Killing Floor by Howlin’ Wolf:

[Music Clip: Howlin’ Wolf - Killing Floor]

Covering songs or attributing parts of a song are normal...but Led Zeppelin released these as their own, with themselves listed as the sole songwriters. They had actually even covered that Howlin’ Wolf song before, but when they released Lemon Song, they didn’t credit him, until they were sued and forced to.

Here’s “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin:

[Music clip: Led Zeppelin - Dazed and Confused]

And here’s “Dazed and Confused” from a few years earlier by Jake Holmes:

[Music Clip: Jake Holmes - Dazed and Confused]

On this one, Led Zeppelin didn’t even bother to change the name, and this song was originally credited just to Led Zeppelin. It was later changed to “inspired by Jake Holmes” and settled out of court.

Many of the world’s most famous musicians, from Bach to BB King, embrace the practice of borrowing bass lines, melodies and drum beats. But when does it cross the line from borrowing to outright stealing?

Some argue that this line is starting to move toward finding infringement too freely. In 2019, Katy Perry lost a lawsuit to the Christian rapper Flame. A jury found that her song Dark Horse featured an element that was too similar to Flame’s song Joyful Noise.

Here's the beginning of Katy Perry’s Dark Horse:

[Music Clip: Katy Perry - Dark Horse]

Here is the beginning of Flame’s Joyful Noise:

[Music Clip: Flame - Joyful Noise]

The similarity wasn’t the melody, or a lyric or a beat -- it was something called an Ostinato -- a repeated musical phrase, which in this case was a short synthesizer line.

Here’s Adam Neely’s youtube video Demonstrating Flame’s ostinato in Joyful Noise:

[SFX: Adam Neely Demo

“It Sounds like this:”

[music]

“Dark Horse’s Ostinato sounds suspiciously similar…(cut transpose line)”

[music]

“Oh wait I’m sorry, that’s actually not the Katy Perry -- that’s the adagio from Bach’s Violin sonata in F Minor. This is Katy Perry’s Dark Horse.”

[music]

“Wait sorry got confused again, that’s the traditional Christmas Carol Jolly Old St. Nicolas. THIS actually is the Katy Perry.”

[music]

“So the question is, is this similar enough to Joyful Noise to legally be the same piece of music? The jury seems to have ruled that IS the case.”]

In these examples Adam plays these notes on a synthesizer that sounds like the Katy Perry and Flame songs.

So theoretically you could argue that it’s not just the notes, but it’s also the presentation of the notes -- in this case an airy sounding synth instrument.

With that in mind, here is a song from the early 80s called Moments in Love, by the band Art of Noise:

[Music Clip: Art of Noise - Moments in Love]

Clearly, Flame was not the first person to play a minor key Ostinato like this in music. But, the case wasn’t about where Flame got the idea, it was whether Katy Perry had plagiarized it from Flame.

This ruling was actually reversed in 2020, in favor of Katy Perry. But Adam still worries these kinds of cases can paralyze creativity.

Adam: I really dislike the fact that this is being turned against people who are actually writing and creating music. Will I be protected? Will I be sued because I used a certain chord progression? Like what is the new law? I don't know.

And he says a lot of musicians feel confused and incredibly frustrated by the way this works.

Adam: So add onto that, the internet, and how remix culture and remixing of music has just exploded because of that, in meme culture and everywhere else. Copyright as a whole system just doesn't work the way that it's supposed to. It's supposed to protect people, but it doesn't. There are so few examples I can see of people genuinely needing copyright and genuinely relying upon copyright to protect them…

As if copyright and song ownership wasn’t complicated enough, hip hop in the 80s threw a whole new wrench in the gears with sampling.

We’ll deconstruct a whole new batch of cases - next time.

[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 produced by Fil Corbitt and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin, and Nick Spradlin. The writer of this show, Fil Corbitt, is also the host of the fantastic podcast Van Sounds, a unique blend of music journalism, travel writing and experimental radio. You can find Van Sounds on apple podcasts or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our guests Sandra Aistars and Adam Neely for speaking with us. I am a huge, huge, huge fan of Adam Neely’s Youtube channel, and it was the Katy Perry / Flame video that made me want to do this entire episode.

Finally, what do you think about music copyright law? Do you think it stifles creativity, or do you think it protects an artist’s work without overreaching? Tell us what you think on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or by writing hi at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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This episode originally aired on Brought to You By.

Farts have been funny to humans for thousands of years. This basic bodily function has countless nicknames around the world, but our fascination with farts is probably best illustrated by the simple whoopee cushion. In this episode from the podcast Brought to You By, Charlie Herman reports on the history of the whoopee cushion and why we can't help but laugh when we hear that sound.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Thick Irony by Sound of Picture
March of the Clowns by Lincoln Grounds
Small Town by Lincoln Grounds
Tender Dignity by Paul Mottram
No Dramas by David Kelly and Paul Michael Harris
In the Parlour by Julian Gallant
Liberty by William Davies
Zany Jany by Alexander L'Estrange and Ben Parry
Stick Or Twist by Lincoln Grounds
Tuba Chase by Neil Sidwell
Rooty Toot by Paul Mottram
What A Laugh by Bob Bradley, Adam Dennis, Chris Egan, and Dave Bishop
Bad Vibes by Paul Mottram
Moody Blue by Paul Mottram
Dashing About by Christopher Baron
Misfit by Paul Mottram
Humour Games by Neil Sidwell
Mother of Pearl by Sam Wedgwood and Chesney Hawkes
In a Muddle by Neil Sidwell

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

Sound is used for so many different things in our lives. Alarms get our attention [SFX], notification sounds help us navigate [SFX], and music can relax us or hype us up. It can also be used as peak comedy.

[SFX: Fart noise]

Yep, farts.

...and even the word fart is funny. It feels like a curse word when you say it out loud. Fart Fart Fart Fart Fart. All the derivatives of the word fart are funny too:

Toot, Blurt, Cutting the Cheese, Passing Gas, Trouser Cough, Letting One Rip, Stepped on a Duck, Stepped on a Frog, Barking Spider, Back-end blowout, Butt Bazooka, Booty bomb… I could keep going but I think you get the point.

There’s something about the fart sound. And there’s probably no better example of this than the simple whoopee cushion. You know, that’s the pink rubber cushion you fill with air, then sneak onto someone's chair when they aren’t looking. Then, when they sit down…

[SFX: Whoopee cushion fart]

While kitschy prank gags come and go, the whoopee cushion has stood the test of time. This story is brought to you by a podcast called, Brought to You By. A warning, there are a lot of fart jokes ahead…

[music out]

Mardi: Oh my gosh, we have a giant pencil which is huge.

Mardi Timm is a novelty collector in Wisconsin.

Mardi: A giant rabbit 's foot, and a super colossal jumbo olive...

Charlie: Her house is packed with boxes, filled to the brim with every novelty item you can imagine.

That’s Brought To You By’s Host, Charlie Herman.

Mardi: One of my favorites in the collection, one of my absolute favorites is, it's a comb...and what it does is it puts dandruff in your hair. It's awesome.

[music in]

Charlie: For the past 35 years, she and her husband Stan have built up this treasure trove of gadgets...

Mardi: We have ant farms…

Charlie: And gizmos...

Mardi: We have costumes!

Charlie: And toys...

Mardi: Everyone has heard of, yackity yack the chattering teeth?

Charlie: And magic tricks.

Mardi: The x-ray glasses that supposedly you can put those glasses on and look at your hand and see your bones. It doesn't work. But they’re there.

Charlie: Today, they have about one-thousand-800 items in their collection. And for Mardi, these aren’t just old knickknacks. They’re artifacts.

Mardi: It's Americana. It's really a history of the growth and the changes of the people of America. It's popular culture.

Charlie: She and Stan don’t just collect these things, they try to uncover the history behind them. And one of their most prized items is, you guessed it.

Mardi: So this is the original whoopee cushion. And the original whoopee cushion is a lovely little thing.

Charlie: It’s from 1932. When Mardi and Stan spotted this cushion on eBay, they were willing to wager $94 on it. But, much to their surprise, there were no other bidders.

Mardi: And we got that whoopee cushion for $5.

Charlie: And when you got it and it arrived at your home, I mean…

[music out]

Mardi: We did a happy dance. It was, it was the coolest thing ever. We just couldn't believe it. Now, you couldn't use it because it was too old, but it's original. It's just beautiful.

[music in]

Charlie: I have to say, beauty is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of a whoopee cushion. But to hear Mardi talk about it, you would think she’s describing a Picasso.

Mardi: It's, it's interesting, the green is like army green. And it has um a scalloped edge like if you used pinking shears…

Charlie: And like any good work of art, to truly understand the whoopee cushion, you have to look back at the many historical and cultural influences that led to its creation. It took hundreds of years of history to get that whoopee cushion onto the chairs of unsuspecting teachers and old maid aunts across the United States. And it starts, of course...

[SFX: Whoopee cushion sound]

Charlie: ...with the noise itself.

Jim: An archeologist actually found the earliest joke from the Babylonian period and it was a fart joke.

Charlie: That’s Jim Dawson. He considers himself a “fartologist” because of three books he’s written.

Jim: The first one was “Who Cut the Cheese, A Cultural History of the Fart”. The second one was “Blame it on the Dog, A Modern History of the Fart”. And then “Did Somebody Step on a Duck?, A Natural History of the Fart”.

Charlie: Dawson told me that flatulence has a rich and storied history. People have been talking about farts for ages—I’m talking everyone from first century authors:

Jim: Josephus who was a Jewish Roman writer.

Charlie: To prized playwrights:

Jim: Shakespeare.

Charlie: To the father of English literature:

Jim: Chaucer's the Canterbury Tales.

Charlie: Mark Twain wrote a satirical play called “1601” based on an elaborate fart joke. And Joseph Pujol, Paris’ top entertainer in the 1890s, brought flatulence to the masses...

[music out]

Jim: He was able to control his stomach in a way that he could suck air in through his anus and then blow it back out again. And he had such control, and he would do imitations, and, apparently it, people would be rolling, in laughter at the Moulin Rouge where he performed.

[music in]

Charlie: The whoopee cushion itself dates back centuries as well. Legend has it that an ancient Roman emperor, Elagabalus, was a big fan of using proto-whoopee cushions at dinner parties. By the Middle Ages, it was looking closer to a whoopee cushion you’d recognize.

Jim: The old jokers, the court jesters, would come up with the lowest forms of humor to make the King and the Queen and their court laugh. And one would be like the pig bladder full of air and then you can control the air coming out of it and make all these funny sounds. And that's really where the idea came from.

[music out]

[music in]

Charlie: But it wasn’t until the 1920s that the commercial whoopee cushion you know today hit the shelves. For that, you can thank the Canadian rubber company, “JEM”. Again, novelty collector Mardi Timm:

Mardi: The claim to fame that they had, the JEM rubber company was this valve that they created that allowed the whole mechanism to work. So you blow it up and the valve stops the air from coming back out again. So then it expands and then when you sit on it, it makes that wonderful noise.

Charlie: The Canadian rubber company approached a couple of American novelty companies about selling the cushion in the U.S. And the one that smelled a hit, was Johnson Smith. Now, Johnson Smith made some of its own products, but it was most famous for its enormous catalogue — it was like the Sears catalogue of novelty toys. Seriously, it’s been called “the Rosetta Stone of American culture.”

Charlie: These catalogues were actually what got Mardi and her husband into novelty collecting in the first place. They have an almost complete collection of catalogues from 1914 through the 1950s, and that includes one of the company’s biggest ever: the one from 1932 that broadcast the whoopee cushion’s US debut.

[music out]

Mardi: Here's what it says. The whoopee cushion is made of rubber, it is inflated…

Charlie: Except for the color, which went from military green to that bubblegum pink you know today, the whoopee cushion really hasn’t changed much over the years.

Mardi: When the victim unsuspectingly sits upon the cushion, it gives forth the most indescribable noises, made in two.

Charlie: The whoopee cushion was sold under a handful of nonsensical names at first — everything from the poo poo pillow to the boop-boop a doop (a fan favorite here at BTYB). But one name stuck. Again, fartologist, Jim Dawson:

Jim: The big word in this country was, whoopee. And there was a big play on Broadway called Whoopee. And, Eddie Cantor had a huge hit, “Makin’ Whoopee”.

[SFX: Makin Whoopee Cantor ‘29]

Charlie: “Whoopee” epitomized the 1920s, and papers across the continent wrote about the rise of this new hot slang.

Jim: You know, whoopee!

Charlie: As the Roaring Twenties crashed into the Great Depression, people wanted to hold onto the spirit of whoopee. So when Johnson Smith started selling a “whoopee cushion,” this silly prank product took off.

[music in]

Mardi: What they offered people was humor. And the whoopee cushion and a lot of the novelties and pranks and jokes that they had offered people some levity and a way to get away from the seriousness of what was going on around them.

Charlie: Johnson Smith had a captive audience that was hungry for its products. But there’s a reason you know the name “whoopee” cushion, and not the name of the companies that sold it.

The whoopee cushion was a hit, but it would also become a case study into the unique and sometimes shady novelty business. We’ll hear all about that, plus why exactly people find whoopee cushions so funny, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

While the whoopee cushions we’re familiar with didn’t appear until the 20th century, fart gags have been around for literally thousands of years. It’s pretty impressive that something so simple has remained funny to people for this long.

[music out]

Here’s Charlie again.

Charlie: Before we go any further, I want to take a second and talk about why whoopee cushions are funny in the first place. I mean, they are funny, it’s a scientific fact, at least, that’s according to this guy:

[music in]

Trevor: I'm Trevor Cox, I'm professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford in England.

Charlie: In 2009, Cox embarked on a unique course of research as part of a fundraising campaign for the organization Comic Relief. That work was to systematically test what makes the funniest whoopee cushion sound.

Trevor: First of all we needed a range of whoopee cushion sounds to test so I sent off a very experienced researcher with a recording system and said "see how many sounds you could make out of this whoopee cushion." And he came back with this huge cornucopia of recordings, you couldn't quite believe the range of sounds you could make but if you give it to a really good acoustician, they can make some really strange sounds.

[music out]

[SFX: Whoopee cushion sounds]

Charlie: By the way, these are the actual sounds from his study. (How could you actually take notes while they’re laughing?!)

[SFX: Whoopee cushion sounds]

Charlie: OK, Charlie. Compose yourself. So Cox and his team reviewed this library of noise they’d created. They ran statistical tests to determine which noises were the most different. Then they uploaded them onto a website and asked people to rate them on a scale of 1 to 6, or no smile to a big, open mouthed grin.

Trevor: And we got a really large number of people, I think we ended up with hundreds of thousands of ratings, and about 70,000 people did this experiment so it was big data.

Charlie: When they crunched the numbers, they found a few takeaways. If you’re like most people, then this:

[SFX: Whoopee_Sound_5]

Charlie: Just does not have the same comic effect as:

[SFX: Whoopee_Sound_18]

Trevor: I have this graph which shows you how funny it is versus time and clearly as the whoopee cushion sounds get longer and longer they get funnier, so maybe if you're sitting down on the whoopee cushion, you should do it quite slowly.

Charlie: Just like any good joke, the whoopee cushion abides by the rules of comedy.

[music in]

Trevor: In comedy, the unexpected is often funny and so actually the longest whoopee cushion sound we made. It goes on and you think "oh it's going to stop soon" and it goes on, and on and on and on and it goes on to ridiculous lengths and that makes it very very funny.

Charlie: Some sounds were funnier than others — the whinier the better. Some people were more amused than others — the younger you were, the funnier you found the sounds. And the more sounds you listened to, the funnier you thought they were:

Trevor: If it's a good joke, it gets funnier and funnier doesn't it?

Charlie: Cox actually didn’t mind having to listen through fart sound after fart sound to design his research.

Trevor: Actually in acoustics you spend a lot of time researching noise and how it has a detrimental effect, you know traffic noise, plane noise, all those sorts of things. So it's quite nice to turn it around and think of things, which sounds which create joy and whether you find whoopee cushions funny or not, you know that sound creates a lot of joy in a lot of people, for better or for worse.

[music out]

[music in]

Charlie: And back in the 1930s, it did not take long for companies to catch on to this. Soon after the whoopee cushion’s debut, it was selling like crazy! And one company in particular realized it had made a big mistake. It had the opportunity to be the first to sell the whoopee cushion in the US, but it said, “No. We’ll sit this one out.” That company was S. S. Adams, the guys who pioneered the American novelty industry.

Kirk: Supposedly, it was rejected because the whole concept was said to be in poor taste.

Charlie: Isn’t that kind of the point?? Kirk Demarais has designed packaging for S. S. Adams and he wrote a book about the company’s first 100 years. He says it was Samuel Adams, the founder, who passed on the whoopee cushion.

Kirk: It's kind of funny that he would, you know, turn his nose up at this thing because he'd already put out like, you know, fake doggy doo and things like that.

Charlie: Classy.

[music out]

Charlie: After Samuel blew off the whoopee cushion, the Canadian rubber company struck a deal with Johnson Smith, the ones with the catalogue. However, once the whoopee cushion started selling, Samuel realized his mistake. He supposedly said this bad decision cost him $50,000 in profits the first year alone, or nearly a million dollars in today’s money.

Kirk: Once Samuel noticed the success, he produced what's called the razzberry cushion, which is just, the exact same thing really.

Charlie: He was not the only one to make a copy of the whoopee cushion.

[music in]

Kirk: Knockoffs are extremely common in the novelty industry. And this is probably one of the first times, where Adams did, did the knocking off.

Charlie: Here’s the thing about novelty makers: they’re jokesters. They’re not sitting around talking about how to, protect their assets, they’re thinking about how they are gonna get their next laugh.

Kirk: Samuel said, “by the time one of our products has been ripped off, it's already passe, and it's not really worth, you know, pouring money and time into, you know, any legal entanglements.”

[music out]

David: The legal part of the novelty industry is probably the least interesting part of the novelty industry.

Charlie: This is David Wahl, the “Director of Awesome,” a pretty awesome job title if you ask me, for a company called Archie McPhee. It’s like a modern day S. S. Adams.

David: It's much more interesting to talk about unicorns than it is to talk about lawyers.

Charlie: If Wahl wanted to talk about patents and trademarks and copyrights all day, he would have become a lawyer. It’s not why he got into the novelty joke business. For many in this always innovating, always evolving industry, all that paperwork is a real buzzkill.

David: We put out, you know, 150 new products a year. So, what we would become is a law firm if we decided we were just all of a sudden going to try and protect every idea that we had from every glimmer of a copy that could possibly come from it. And that’s just not our focus.

Charlie: But sometimes you have to talk about lawyers. Because this is an industry in trouble.

[music in]

Charlie: The mindset that drives novelty makers, you see it right there in the name: novel, it’s all about the next best idea. So you have companies that spend decades investing time and money into making new products, nailing the spring in the “snake in a can” or getting the recoil just right on that “dollar bill snatcher.” But many of those companies do not spend the same resources protecting their rights to those products through, say, patents and trademarks.

Charlie: What that means is many of these companies do not have name recognition, but their great products do. That's why you know the "whoopee cushion," but probably can't name a single company that makes one.

Charlie: And it could be why so many novelty companies and stores have been closing.

[music out]

Charlie: Today, if you Google “whoopee cushion,” there isn’t just one item that pops up. There are tons and tons of the exact same product, sold under the exact same name sold by a ton of different businesses. No single company has the patent to exclusively sell whoopee cushions.

[music in]

Michael: You know, it's really odd. So we did a search and we couldn't find anything that came up.

Charlie: This is attorney Michael Cohen. No, not the one you’re thinking of, this Michael Cohen specializes in intellectual property: things like patents and copyrights.

Michael: As far as we know, no one put the effort to put a fight up in regards to the ownership of the name and it just became a generic term.

Charlie: What he means is, “whoopee cushion” describes a category of goods, not one product in particular. It’s not a brand name. It's like the words “automobile” or “cell phone.”

Michael: Anyone can utilize that term because it simply describes what it is. It's a whoopee cushion

Charlie: But it did not have to be this way.

[music out]

Michael: So in a perfect world, if there was a hypothetical, what should they have done? Patents for sure. And trademarks for sure. And possibly even copyrights to some extent.

Charlie: Cohen says the first person to make the whoopee cushion might have been able to protect its shape, appearance and function using patents, and its name, using trademarks. It might have even been able to prevent others from making knock offs of the product by arguing its shape is what people associate with the brand.

Michael: It kinda has that iconic shape to at least when it's an inflated and so maybe there could’ve been, there's an argument that there could have been a trade dress protection for that.

Charlie: But that’s not what happened. In the novelty industry, the focus has been more on inventing new things instead of investing in legal protections for old ones. That means, sometimes people imitate or plain rip off ideas other people created. It’s the nature of this business, though, it’s not always a bad thing.

[music in]

Charlie: When it comes to novelty toys and products, there are a few different types of imitation. The first type, the one the industry is built to support, let’s call it “iteration.” It’s like when someone comes along and says “How about I design a whoopee cushion that inflates on its own?” Novelty makers are all for that. David Wahl, the director of awesome, says it’s kind of like writing jazz music.

David: You have traditional tunes and what happens is you put your own spin in that tune and you record it. And I think that having a novelty product that's an echo of another novelty product is good. Making this beautiful new music out of a reflection of what someone else has done is, you know, that's what creativity is.

Charlie: Using better rubber or developing a new valve that releases the air to make a new, symphonic whoopee cushion melody, that’s all fair game. But problems come up when you get to the second type of imitation. That’s when other companies start straight up ripping off your song.

[music out]

David: There are companies that exist only as a shadow of other companies. They just copy what other companies do as soon as they see what's popular.

Charlie: And when another company comes along and starts selling your exact same product, if you haven’t legally protected it, there’s not much you can do. And that matters when a product, like the whoopee cushion, becomes a household name, but the company that created it, is not.

David: It obviously affects our sales. And, there is customer confusion, which is the worst part about it.

Charlie: There’s one more kind of imitation and it is bad news for the entire novelty industry. That’s when other companies don’t just steal your idea and your customers and then make money; it’s when their product is a cheap knockoff and even ruins the joke. Wahl has seen this happen with the razor blade through the thumb trick: a classic.

[music in]

David: I saw one, not too long ago that wouldn't even fit on my pinky, in the shape of a thumb cause it was so small. And it, and it had no blood on it and it was just, you know, a gray razor sticking in the side of the little tiny thumb finger. So it takes away what the original object was until it just becomes this, you know, it's like a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy.

Kirk: It renders the product useless.

[music out]

Charlie: This again is Kirk Demarais. He’s studied how novelty items are sold, and he says this phenomenon, what’s called “quality fade,” has actually hurt novelty companies across the country.

Kirk: I think over time they became associated with cheap junk. I mean, if you go back to...the dawn of the, the prank novelty industry, a lot of that stuff, you know, was made of metal and made of higher quality materials.

Charlie: As low quality imitations began to flood the market, it got harder and harder for consumers to tell the difference between the well-made, say, whoopee cushion.

[SFX: Whoopee sound]

Charlie: And some cheapo “whoopee cushion.”

[SFX: Whoopee sound]

[music in]

Charlie: People don’t really know which brands of novelty products are better than others, or which ones they prefer, like their favorite shampoo or peanut butter. If you want to buy a “whoopee cushion,” you don’t care if it’s made by JEM Rubber Company or Johnson Smith or S. S. Adams. Novelty companies know this, and it’s reflected in how they advertise.

Kirk: I think they were selling an experience and they are selling this moment of astonishment when it comes to magic tricks or this moment of humiliation when it comes to pranks. The way that so many prank and novelty items were sold, it took the brand name out of the equation.

Charlie: So when someone buys a dinky, unconvincing razor blade thumb from one company or a cheaply made whoopee cushion from another, it hurts every other company selling the same prank. This reality, along with the focus on innovations instead of legal protections, means that in the end, the novelty toy business is struggling.

[music out]

Kirk: After the 80s, even the shops, standalone novelty shops and joke shops, they started closing down and now they're almost nonexistent.

[music in]

Charlie: S.S. Adams, the company that spearheaded the American novelty industry, was sold to an online store in 2009. And at the end of 2019, Johnson Smith, the company that put the whoopee cushion on the map in the U.S., it shuttered its doors after 105 years.

Mardi: Which I have to tell you, makes me incredibly sad.

Charlie: Again, novelty collector, Mardi Timm.

Mardi: Because they've been a part of my life for 35 years and I feel like I've just lost an old friend.

Charlie: After all those years of collecting, Mardi and her husband are selling their collection. She hopes they’ll find a new home for it in one piece, so it doesn’t just become a hodgepodge of stuff. Because she believes there’s something to be learned from all those toys and pranks and jokes.

Mardi: People have a natural funny bone and they need a release of some sort to just not look at life so seriously.

[music out]

Charlie: To be honest, before we started working on this story, I hadn’t really thought about the whoopee cushion in a while. But I could immediately picture one. Round, pink, scalloped edges...and I thought...who would be the perfect person I could use that on today. Because I’d like to think, no matter how old you are or how sophisticated you think you are, there are some practical jokes, if done right, are always funny. But to confirm this, I decided to check with some experts…

[music in]

OSCAR: My name is Oscar, I'm in fifth grade and I'm 11.

CHRIS: My name is Chris.

CAMI: My name is Cami.

LUKE: Luke

JOSH: Joshua.

STEVEN: Steven.

NATE: My name is Nate, I'm in fifth grade and I'm 10 years old.

LUKE: A fart is funny because of the sound.

OSCAR: [imitates fart sounds]

OSCAR: They're funny and stinky and sometimes loud.

CHRIS: and they're kind of inappropriate.

CAMI: they come from a silly part of your body.

LUKE: I've actually thought of them more as human nature as I've gotten older but I still think that they're funny.

JOSH: In movies, like comedic movies when there are like tense moments it just relieves the tensity.

CAMI: It’s probably the most funniest at the most unexpecting moment.

NATE: When I was in class, this one kid he sneezed and farted at the same time interrupting my Spanish teacher [laughing] and the whole class started laughing.

OSCAR: [imitates fart sounds]

LUKE: Just a little [fart noise] is considered comedy these days I guess.

MOM: Did you ever have a whoopee cushion?

LUKE: I did. I had several.

DAD: Who did you use the whoopee cushion on the most?

CHRIS: My sister. I would always like put it under her seat at the dinner table.

NATE: I don't like whoopee cushions because like they're not real.

OSCAR: I never got a good laugh out of it because I never put it in the right place.

STEVEN: You can prank people by thinking they farted and other people saying "ew" but they're like "I didn't fart."

CAMI: When people laugh at farts they’re not actually laughing at you, you shouldn’t be embarrassed because it’s kind of a funny thing.

OSCAR: Farts. You can't not like em.

Charlie: Let’s hope this generation knows a good practical joke not just for the novelty industry, but for all of us. Because say what you will about fart jokes… they have a way of deflating egos. They let the air out of our pretensions and show us we’re all human.

[music out]

Charlie: And sometimes, we all need that breath of fresh air.

[music in]

This story came from the wonderful podcast, Brought to You By. It’s a show about how the biggest household name brands have shaped our lives and culture… for better and for worse. Make sure to listen and subscribe right here in your podcast player.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This story was produced by Julia Press, Sarah Wyman, and Charlie Herman.

Charlie: Special thanks to Claire Banderas and Michael Nowak from Rhode Island Novelties. Thanks also to Josh and Steven’s dad, Nate’s dad, Cami’s mom, Luke’s mom and dad, Chris’s dad, and Oscar’s mom.

It was sound engineered by Bill Moss, with music from Audio Network. Brought to You By’s theme was composed by John DeLore and Casey Holford. Their editor is Micaela Blei. Sarah Wyman is their showrunner. Brought to You By is a production of Insider Audio.

You can find us, Twenty Thousand Hertz, on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. You can also see what’s happening behind the scenes by following Defacto Sound on Instagram. And finally, if you’re in education, whether you’re a teacher or professor or whatever please feel free to use Twenty Thousand Hertz in your classrooms! I love hearing from teachers who’ve used the show in their lessons.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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When you think about Star Wars, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Lightsabers? Spaceships? Alien creatures? What about all of the sounds that go with those things? How were those sounds made, and what makes them so good? In this episode, we explore how legendary Sound Designer Ben Burtt created the sonic universe of Star Wars from scratch, one sound at a time. Featuring Marshall McGhee.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

First Flight by David Molina
This is Our Time by Cassette Deck
Gizmo by Sound of Picture
Reckoning by Sound of Picture
Vox Bubble Rumba by Sound of Picture
Organ Groove by Sound of Picture
Bass Rider by Sound of Picture
Spring Comes Early by Sound of Picture
Lemonade by Sound of Picture
Repose by Sound of Picture
Wide Eyes by Sound of Picture

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: TIE fighter/X-Wing fight]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

The original Star Wars trilogy was groundbreaking in all kinds of ways. The costumes were incredibly creative. The special effects were mind boggling. And for sound design, Star Wars was completely revolutionary.

[SFX: TIE fighter/X-Wing fight continued]

[music in]

Whether or not you’re a Star Wars fan, is completely beside the point, because you know exactly what a lightsaber sounds like, [SFX] , you also know what R2-D2 sounds like [SFX] , and you also know what Darth Vader’s breathing sounds like [SFX] . These sound effects go well beyond the movie. They’re a part of our creative culture. And every bit as famous as the movies’ most quoted lines.

[music out]

[SFX clip: Obi Wan: The Force will be with you.

Yoda: Do or do not. There is no try.

Darth Vader: No, I am your father.]

[music in]

And there’s a reason sound designers keep going back to Star Wars for inspiration, even today, decades later. The sounds of Star Wars do such a great job of immersing us in a galaxy far, far away. They make this wild world of aliens, robots and space wizards feel real. Making these movies sound just right took an incredible amount of effort and creativity. And in the sound design world the mastermind behind these sound effects is truly a legend.

[music out]

His name is Ben Burtt.

Ben (Laserdisk): When I did Star Wars it was the very beginning of my career and I had a lot to learn. in fact I knew very little and so everything I did at that time was going down a new road to some extent.

That’s Ben Burtt in a 1993 interview for the Star Wars Laserdisc Box Set.

[music in]

Ben’s interest in sound started early. When Ben was just six, his father gave him a tape recorder. Growing up, Ben loved recording stories, TV shows, and any other interesting sounds he came across. By age 10, he was filming short dramas complete with customized music and sound effects.

[music out]

Flash forward to Los Angeles, in the early 70’s [SFX: tape fast forward].

[music in]

Ben had just earned his master’s in film production from the U.S.C. School of Cinematic Arts. Across town, a young director named George Lucas was working on his third movie. George’s dream was to adapt the 1936 sci-fi film Flash Gordon, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t get the rights to one of the characters. So instead, he decided to make his own space opera. At that time, it was called “The Star Wars.”

To bring his vision to life, George knew he’d need to bring in all kinds of creative talent. Unfortunately, George’s go-to Sound Editor was unavailable, so he took a chance on a recent graduate named Ben Burtt. Little did George and Ben know that that one decision set off a creative revolution in the field of sound design.

[music out]

Up until then, people working in sound departments were considered more like technicians. But with Star Wars, Ben made it clear that sound design was an art of its own.

Marshall: He wasn't just editing sounds, he wasn't just dealing with dialogue and things like that. He was really creating a world from scratch, a character in the movie.

That’s Marshall McGhee. A game sound designer & host of the youtube show “Waveform”.

Marshall: Sound design is definitively a character in Star Wars.

Of course, sound is important in any movie, but creating the sonic landscape of Star Wars was a monumental responsibility.

[music in]

Ben (Laserdisc): A film such as Star Wars, the soundtrack is completely fabricated in the studio. Probably on the average, 15 or 20% of the dialogue which is in the final film was originally recorded on the set during the performance by the actors. The remaining 85% of that dialogue was added later with the actors coming back and replacing their lines of dialogue, or different actors coming in to give voices to characters or monsters or puppets or something that might be in the show. All of the sound effects you hear in the film are added later. Everything from footsteps to cloth rustle [SFX] to the handling of props [SFX] to the sound of vehicles, [SFX] weapons, [SFX] aliens [SFX] and exploding Death Stars [SFX]. Those are all things which didn’t exist at the time of shooting. They had to be manufactured after the fact.

[music out]

A quick note: Some of these Ben Burtt interview clips are from a commentary track for the Star Wars Blu Ray set, so you’ll sometimes hear the movie playing in the background while he talks. Here’s Ben:

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): Star Wars being a Fox film allowed us to, if we wanted to, to use some sound effects from their old classic library, and being a real fan of the old sound effects, I did pull a few things and use them here and there.

But Ben wanted Star Wars to have a totally unique sonic signature. So he made the vast majority of the sound effects from scratch.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): Most of the effort was put into customizing original sounds for the movie.

To get these sounds just right, he’d have to go find them out in the real world. The first one he found would become the king of Star Wars sound effects.

[SFX: Lightsaber]

[music in]

Marshall: The lightsaber was the first sound that Ben Burtt made for the Star Wars movies. I think that's an important detail because, when you think about establishing a world when you’re starting a new project it's important to get the mood right from the beginning. I think the lightsabers, because of the iconic role they play in the story, it was probably really important for Ben Burtt to sit down and say, here's what this Jedi weapon is going to sound like. Here's what the main emotion of this weapon is going to feel like.

[music out]

Ben (Ep IV sound design): At the time, I was just leaving U.S.C. film school. I was a projectionist at the school, I had a part time job. And in the projection booth were these old 35mm theater projectors, which, when they were just turned on and set idle, they had a very interesting humming sound. It was part of the interlock motors in the projectors. And I used to be in the booth working and I would enjoy that sound. It was a nice musical kind of hum.

To demonstrate Ben’s techniques, Marshall recreated the sound of a lightsaber from the ground up. Here’s his emulation of an idling projector, which he made on a synthesizer [SFX].

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And when I saw the pictures of the lightsaber in the artwork for the film, I thought “Wow, I think that hum of that projector motor is just the right thing.” So I went and recorded the hum and held onto it, as the basis for the lightsabers.

Marshall: When he recorded that originally, he thought it was a good start, but it didn't really sound mean yet. It didn't really sound like it could do any damage yet.

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And the other element came about by accident. I had a microphone cable that was broken, partially, and as I was carrying my tape recorder across my apartment one day, and I went near the television set, the microphone picked up the buzz from the television picture tube, just a direct electronic interference.

What you’re hearing now is Marshall’s recreation of that sound. [SFX]

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And I took the buzz and combined it with the projector hum, and the two sounds together became the basis for the laser sword.

Marshall: Now, when you finish making that, it's just a loop. It's just a humming loop, [SFX] which on its own sounds cool, but it doesn't sound like it's moving yet. It doesn't have any place in the environment.

BB (Ep IV sound design): To produce the sound of the moving lightsabers, I took the steady recording of the hum and buzz, and played it over a speaker in a room and then re-recorded that sound with another microphone. And I could take that microphone and wave it around in the air and it would produce what’s called a Doppler Effect. That is a pitch shift because the sound is moving relative to the microphone. And by doing that, I was able to take the steady sound of the lightsaber– and give it a sense of movement, of coming to and fro, or back and forth.

Marshall: It sounds like it's a physical beam of light that's arcing through the environment. It just sounds so real.

Again, here’s the humming loop Marshall made.

[SFX: Humming loop]

And here’s that same humming loop with a doppler effect Marshall added to it.

[SFX: Humming loop with doppler effect]

Ben Burtt combined unique sounds with a unique performance. This made each swing feel real and added a special human touch.

Marshall: It could have easily been a very sci-fi sound. It could have very easily been a synthesizer or something [SFX], but it sounds so grounded in reality. I think that's the sound for me that gets me every time.

Just like the TV buzz in the lightsaber, Ben found the sound for the blasters completely by accident.

Marshall: So there's this great story of Ben Burtt hiking through the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania. He was hiking and his backpack caught on a guy-wire that was leading up to a radio tower, one of the giant metal wires that connects a radio tower to the ground.

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And as I went by it, it made a twanging sound, an unusual sound [SFX].

Marshall: You can sort of get an idea of what he heard if you have a slinky in your house. If you stretch it out across a room and you hit it with a metal object on one end, you can hear this sort of [SFX] this sound of the frequencies bouncing back and forth in the metal wire.

Ben (Wall-E Animation): That happens because the high frequencies travel faster than the low frequencies. So if you listen to the sound far away, down the wire, the high frequencies get there first, and the sort of mid frequencies and then the low frequencies, so you get [sfx].

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And I immediately said to myself, “Well, that’s a laser gun!” It had an otherworldly sound to it. And when I returned to California, I went around Southern California, in the region of Los Angeles, banging on the guy-wires of different radio towers to come up with just the right sound.

Marshall: He found this great wire out in the middle of the desert and took a contact microphone out, and put it on the wire, and started hitting it with a wrench. What he got were the base of the blaster sounds for Star Wars. [SFX]

These recording sessions also produced the sound of the Y Wings.

Ben (Ep IV sound design): Actually, when I was up trying to record guy wires for lasers, the wind was blowing so hard through one set of guy wires that it was producing a musical note, it was almost a musical chord, and it was used principally for the background sounds of the pilots in the Y wing fighters.

[SFX: Y Wings]

Now, Y Wings are cool, but the coolest sounding ships in Star Wars have to be the TIE Fighters [SFX].

Marshall: The TIE fighters are one of my favorite sounds in Star Wars. I mean talk about an emotional gripping spaceship sound.

Marshall: That spaceship is an enemy spaceship. That's not a friendly spaceship. It's roaring at me.

Marshall: The TIE fighter, was made with two main elements again. The first being the sound of a car passing by a microphone on wet pavement. [SFX]

Marshall: And then layered on top of that are these elephant growls, these horrible elephant growls [SFX]. Not a lot of people even know elephants make this sound, but they do growl from time to time, and they produce this insane roaring. [SFX]

And here’s Marshall's redesign blending these sounds together.

[SFX: Marshalls Tie Fighter Redesign]

Marshall: So those two elements layered together are what creates the base loop for the TIE fighter.

This was one of those times when Ben used the Fox sound library. Here’s a clip of some elephants from the 1958 movie The Roots of Heaven [SFX].

Sound familiar? [SFX: Tie fighter]

This technique of layering animal sounds into sound effects is actually pretty common.

[music in]

Marshall: You find animal layers in a lot of stuff, It's a very widely used technique in sound design.

Marshall: I think the two examples that come to mind that people use animal layers a lot are explosions and gunshots. Or car engines for example, car starts. Like, if you listen to car starts in film, there's very often a lion growl layered in with a car start, just to make it sound even that much more full bodied and that much more interesting.

Here’s the sound of a car starting [SFX].

And here’s a roaring lion. [SFX]

Now here’s how it sounds when we layer those two together. [SFX]

Marshall: I like it in explosions too, when an explosion is going on, you're just looking for character. There's something missing. If you listen through libraries of explosion recordings, a lot of them sound great, but they just are missing an element of character or an emotional component. I find that sometimes I'll layer in like the sound of a screeching as an explosion goes off just to get that extra little intrigue in the high end of an explosion.

Here’s an explosion sound effect [SFX].

And here’s a red tailed hawk screech [SFX].

Now let’s put them together [SFX].

Marshall: One of the main benefits to using animal sounds as a layer in design, whether they're obvious or not, is that animals already have a place in our minds as sort of representing something. So for example, an elephant growl like that may be terrifying. A bird chirp may be sort of small, and it might evoke the idea of stealth or a smaller vehicle. Or for example, a whale might evoke something more emotional and low. As human beings, we already have in our minds ideas of what different animals represent to us.

To demonstrate this, Marshall made several alternate TIE fighter sounds using different animals.

Marshall: This base layer is the car pass by that I made to layer under all of these and sort of give them consistency [SFX].

Marshall: So here's the version of the TIE fighter sound that, instead of the elephant, I played a snake sound. [SFX]

Marshall: And this version, I used a bunch of different bird chirps layered on top of each other. [SFX]

Marshall: And then this final version I made with some underwater recordings of different whales and sea creatures. [SFX]

These alternate designs show that just one layer can change the ship's entire emotional impact. The elephant growls used in the TIE fighter make us feel fear on a primal level. And that’s why they are so powerful.

[SFX: Tie fighter]

[music in]

Making sound effects for the weapons and ships of Star Wars was hard enough, but there’s a whole other category of sounds that we haven’t even brought up yet: Star Wars is brimming with quirky robots [SFX: R2-D2] and bizarre aliens, and they all have their own unique personality [SFX: Chewbaca]. Giving voices to characters like Chewbaca and R2-D2 were some of the biggest challenges Ben faced. That’s coming up after this.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

For his work on Star Wars, Ben Burtt is considered one of the forefathers of modern sound design. To create these iconic sound effects, Ben spent countless hours recording sounds out in the world. Really, just anything that caught his ear.

Ben (Laserdisc): Animals, aircraft carriers, jets, appliance motors, whatever it might be.

Eventually, Ben built up a personal library made up of thousands of hand-recorded sounds. Back in the studio, he’d manipulate them and mix them together like a mad scientist.

[music out]

For instance, in the Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive keeps breaking down. To make the sound effect for it, Ben combined eight different recordings. One of these sounds was a starter on a vintage biplane. [SFX]

There was some hissing air from a piece of dental equipment. [SFX]

The sound of an arclight motor. [SFX]

There was the motor of a tank turret, recorded from inside the tank. [SFX]

Then there was the sound of the groaning old pipes from the building Ben worked in. [SFX]

Ben (Hyperdrive): Now, if we took all these sounds and played them together, we’d get the following effect of the hyperdrive malfunctioning. [SFX]

And Here it is in the movie. [SFX]

[music in]

Think about the hours of recording it took to make that one sound effect. Now multiply that for all of the sound effects in the original Star Wars trilogy. Keep in mind that this was before the age of computers. Back then, you had to record everything to tape. Today, sound designers have access to digital sound libraries that come with thousands of pre-recorded sounds.

Marshall: I have everything in my computer. I have three terabytes of sounds that are just like, I can just click on anything and instantly hear it.

The convenience of digital sound libraries is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means that amateur filmmakers don’t need access to all kinds of expensive equipment in order to have sound effects. On the other hand, it means that Ben’s analogue style of recording everything manually is a lot less common.

[music out]

Marshall: I mean when you look at Ben Burt's work and you think okay, basically everything, other than a few things he drew from the Fox library, basically everything was a recording project. He was out there getting sounds from you know hitting a guy wire with a wrench for the blasters [SFX] and things like that. You don't see that very often anymore because people who grew up with digital audio just sort of open their library and they go, “Well, do I have any laser guns in my library?”

Marshall: There's a temptation there to start every sound from within your own library or “in the box,” as they say.

At some point, that approach can stifle your creativity.

Marshall: It can just sort of feel stagnant when you design that way.

Marshall: It acts as a crutch because your work starts to sound the same if you just use the same library over and over again.

For Ben, virtually everything had to be made “outside the box.” This was especially true when creating the sounds of the many strange characters of Star Wars. Unlike a Stormtrooper’s blaster, which might be something you can somewhat reuse, each of the characters needed a whole set of sounds, or even a believable alien language. One early challenge was Darth Vader.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): Vader was described in the script as having this life support suit on him and keeping him alive, as if he was badly damaged in some way. And so what I did in the early concepts of Vader I had some clicking, like there was some kind of relays and mechanism associated with him. Some signature that always told you he was around. The script mentioned he had some kind of breathing apparatus and so on. The early concepts of Vader I made up, he was beeping [SFX] and clicking [SFX] and breathing [SFX], and he sounded like the ER, the whole room at once, you know? It was kind of distracting.

So Ben cut it back to just the breathing.

Ben (Ep IV sound design): The breathing is me breathing through a particular scuba tank regulator. I went to a local scuba shop one evening, and after they had a class, where people left, there were numerous tanks and regulators laying around the pool. I just went around and recorded different ones. I would breathe through it, and I had a little tiny microphone, and I actually put that down inside one of the regulators so it was extremely close to the valve that opens and closes, and then I breathed through it.

Marshall: That sound was then taken back to the studio and pitched down and became the iconic breathing loop of Darth Vader. [SFX]

As you may know, Darth Vader’s menacing voice was performed by James Earl Jones, but Jones wasn’t the person in the Vader costume. On set, Darth Vader was played by character actor David Prowse. Prowse did perform Vader’s lines while filming, and it’s pretty amazing to hear.

[SFX clip: Prowse Vader “Start tearing this ship apart piece by piece until you find those tapes. Find the passengers of this vessel. I want them alive!”]

Now here’s the final version.

[SFX clip: Vader “Commander, tear this ship apart until you’ve found those plans, and bring me the passengers. I want them alive!”]

Here it is again on set… morphing into what we hear in the final film.

[SFX: Prowse Vader “Start tearing this ship apart piece by piece until you find those plans, and bring me the passengers. I want them alive!”]

Vader also needed a sound for when he used The Force, the mysterious power of the Jedi and the evil Sith. But what would something like that even sound like?

Marshall: The Force is another one of those sounds that just is so menacing and works perfectly, I think, in every scene that it's in.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): There’s a few different effects associated with Vader using The Force. We always put in a deep, low frequency kind of earthquake rumble, which could be amped up as Vader tightened The Force on someone [SFX: Vader using the The Force]. The deep rumbles came from a number of different sources, some of it was just some thunder that was slowed way down, and the high frequencies rolled off, some of it was the slowed down sound of a missile launch, and some it was from the Fox library, actually it was some earthquake material made for Journey to the Center of the Earth. [SFX]

Marshall: I think it works so well in the scenes that it's in, because it's almost scary in how simple it is. It could have very easily been an overt scifi spell cast kind of hybrid sound [SFX] and it would have probably been too much, and it would've evoked the wrong feeling. But when it's just the simple low rumble, you can really feel the space around Darth Vader when he uses it [SFX] it's just like, it’s terrifying.

Making the sound effects for Darth Vader had its challenges, but finding voices for the non-human characters was even harder. [SFX: Chewbaca]

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): My first assignment was to develop the voice of Chewbacca. They wanted to have samples of what Chewbacca might sound like prior to shooting, because it would be an aid in the actual directing of the film.

Chewbacca was famously played by Peter Mayhew. But, again, Mayhew wasn’t the voice of Chewbacca. Here’s how Chewbacca sounds in the final film. [SFX]

...but while filming, Peter Mayhew often spoke Chewie’s lines in English. So here’s what Chewie sounded like on the set.

[SFX clip: Chewie “That old man is mad.” Han “You said it Chewie”]

Marshall: I think some people believe that Chewbacca's voice was actually performed by Peter Mayhew or by an actor in the studio, or by some human being, but it was not performed by a human being.

To get Chewie’s voice, Ben recorded all kinds of animals.

Ben (Sound Advice): …walruses and lions and badgers, sick animals, domestic animals… all sorts of things.

But there was one animal he kept coming back to.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): Ultimately, Chewie’s voice was made up of mostly recordings of bears. And eventually, I was led to a cute little pet bear named Pooh who lived on a farm in Tehachapi, California.

Marshall: Ben Burtt would go out to this farm and collect just hours of these recordings of this bear.

Ben (Screen Stage TV): It wasn’t a simple recording session. Bears don’t just sit down in front of a microphone and just emote. You have to just sort of document whatever they’ll do.

Ben started categorizing these animal sounds by emotion.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): I took the angry sounds [SFX] and put them in one collection, I took the cute sounds [SFX] and put them in another, I took the sounds which sounded like an animal asking a question [SFX], at least the intonation was such that it sounded inquisitive.

He tweaked the sounds to give them just the right character.

Ben (Screen Stage TV): Slow the recordings down, maybe speed other things up and manipulate the bits of recordings and I essentially started a word list for the wookie [SFX].

Marshall: And he would then later in the film would look through these folders that are based on emotions and sort of say, “Okay well Chewbacca is happy here or he's angry,” and he would throw them in based on what the scene felt like. [SFX]

It was clear from the beginning that Chewie’s voice would involve animal sounds. But for R2-D2, there was no obvious starting point. [SFX]

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): The voice of R2-D2 turned out to be the most prolonged and difficult sound to develop because it involved a performance, and it also had no precedent.

Ben (Sound Advice): Here we had, supposedly, a machine that was going to talk, it was going to act, it was gonna draw on our emotions. Yet, it was a machine. It didn’t have a face with a smile or mouth or ears, and it couldn’t speak English and it couldn’t even mouth words. At least Chewbacca could make kind of animal sounds, which you could attribute a personality to.

The script wasn’t much help either.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): The script did not prescribe the specific lines of dialogue that he had, but merely said that R2 “Responded” or R2 “Beeped” or something of that sort, and it was left up to me to come up with possibilities for George Lucas to listen to.

In the beginning, Ben tried a bunch of computerized, mechanical sounds. But nothing he tried had enough character. R2D2 was a robot, but it needed to feel human.

[music in]

Ben (Sound Advice): So the idea came up to really combine this sort of human sound with the electronic sound. That way we still might be able to have the character of a machine, but get the personality and emotion of a living organism.

It was a start, but neither of them knew where this human sound should come from.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): George, at one point, thought that perhaps even recording babies, before they could talk, the sounds that babies make, cooing and sighing and little vocalizations they make as they learn to talk, might be the key to R2’s voice. And it was definitely the right direction to go, because R2 is, well, kind of an ornery child. He’s smart but also has a certain innocence about him. He can be insubordinate, but overall, he’s lovable.

Still, nothing quite seemed to fit.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): One day, when George and I were discussing the voice, we both found ourselves imitating, making little funny noises as we kind of described what R2 might be like.

As Ben and George cooed and beeped at each other, it dawned on them that maybe they didn’t need recordings of babies or anything else. Maybe Ben could give R2 its human side.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): I ended up doing vocalizations at the same time I’d play a keyboard on an old ARP synthesizer, and I learned to sort of whistle and beep along with what I was playing on a keyboard. And through a lot of practice, I would get something that sounded expressive, and I could say, “That’s R2 saying ‘Come this way’ or 'He’s making a rude remark to Threepio' or something."

Ben’s voice turned out to be the magic ingredient that gave R2-D2 its quirky, adorable personality. [SFX: R2-D2]

Performing that voice meant that Ben could also add “Voice Actor” to his long list of duties on Star Wars. Ultimately, it’s that level of dedication and achievement that makes Ben such an inspiration to Sound Designers.

[music in]

Marshall: I think sound designers keep coming back to it for inspiration because of how much emotion he captured in every sound.

Marshall: He takes all of these opportunities to include performance in something that may not even need it. Like the lightsaber, for example, he took the extra effort to actually swing the microphone around in time with the video himself.

Marshall: R2-D2's voice being him just performing his own voice, like whistling with the synthesizer, things like that. He really took every opportunity to put emotion into things that otherwise could have just been done very cheaply and blandly.

Marshall: It's those things, I think, that separate him from a lot of other sound designers. Not only of the time, because he was clearly in a class of his own at the time, but just even today.

If Ben had retired after Star Wars, he still would have been a sound design legend. Fortunately for us, Star Wars was only the beginning of Ben’s long career. Ben’s impact on Sound Design is so huge that it’s hard to imagine what the field would even be like without him. His influence is especially important to sci-fi. Ben’s mastery of sound helps audiences suspend their disbelief, and lose themselves in these strange alien worlds.

Marshall: Sound design gives all the authenticity to these weapons that you're hearing. It gives all the authenticity to these environments. Without it, I don't think Star Wars would have been anywhere near as popular as it's become, because people wouldn't believe what they were seeing.

Marshall: When people first see A New Hope, they're not thinking about sound design, but they're just believing what they're seeing because of the sound design. When sound is done well, that's of course what it does.

Ben (Wall-E Animation): When you use sounds gathered in the outside world, the real world, and you bring them into a science fiction film, you get the credibility of those sounds, to sell to the audience what’s really just a very fantastic world.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. 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 designed and mixed by Jai Berger.

Special thanks to Marshall McGee. Marshall made all of the recreated sound effects for this episode. He’s also the host of a fantastic Youtube channel called Waveform. It was actually his Youtube video called “The Sound Design Secrets Of The Star Wars Universe,” that was the inspiration for this episode. You should immediately go subscribe to Waveform on Youtube.

Ben Burtt’s interview clips came from the 1993 Star Wars Laserdisc Boxset, a commentary track from the Star Wars Blu Ray, Episode 46 of The Commentary Track Podcast, a 1989 20/20 interview, an ABC documentary called Screen, Stage Television, and a special feature on the Wall-E DVD.

The music in this episode came from SoundofPicture.com and Musicbed.com.

If there’s a show topic that you are dying to hear, you can tell us in tons of different ways. My favorite way that you can tell us is by writing a review. In that review, tap 5 stars and then give us your show idea. If your podcast app doesn’t do this, you can always tell us your show idea on Twitter, Facebook, or by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso.

Mel Blanc is a legendary voice actor who voiced more than 400 distinct characters. But in 1961, Mel was involved in a potentially fatal car accident. In this episode, we discover the unlikely source that saved him and hear how Mel spent his later years. Plus, we explore what it takes to pass the torch. Featuring interviews with Mel’s son, Noel Blanc, and voice actor Bob Bergen.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Tender and Curious by Sound of Picture
Requiem by Davis Harwell
The Relatively Little House by Steven Gutheinz
Redrawn by Steven Gutheinz
Open Space by Future of Forestry
You + Me by Blake Ewing
Hiraeth by Sinai
Falling in Love (Instrumental) by Cody Fry
Real Thing (Instrumental) by Danica Dora

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

Before we get started, this episode is actually the second episode of a two part series on the legendary voice actor Mel Blanc. If you haven’t heard the first episode, I’d recommend quing that up and making this a nice double feature. Here’s part 2....

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Duck season.

Daffy Duck: Wabbit season.]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[SFX clip continues: Bugs Bunny: “Wabbit season!”

Daffy Duck: I say, “It’s duck season,” and I say, “Fire!”

[SFX: Cartoon gunshot]

[music in]

Mel Blanc is widely regarded as the most prolific voice actor of all time. He was a key figure during both the golden age of radio and the golden age of animation. He’s most famous for voicing nearly every character in the Looney Tunes and a bunch more at Hannah Barbara. Every voice you’re about to hear is from Mel.

[music out]

[SFX clips: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Eh, what’s up doc?

Wile E Coyote from YouTube clip: You are a rabbit, and I am going to eat you.

Sylvester the Cat from YouTube clip: Boy, acres and acres of Tweety Bird and its mine… all mine!

Tweety Bird from YouTube clip: I tat I taw a iddy biddy puddy cat.

Daffy Duck from YouTube clip: Buster it may come as a complete surprise to you, to find that this is an animated cartoon.

Foghorn Leghorn from YouTube clip: What’s going on, I say what’s going on here!

Road Runner from YouTube clip: Meep meep!

Yosemite Sam from YouTube clip: Get outta here rabbit!

Marvin the Martian from YouTube clip: Where’s the kaboom?

Captain Caveman from YouTube clip: Captain Caveman!]

All together, Mel Blanc created over 400 distinct voices. As far as we know, no single person has been able to come close to recreating all the voices Mel did. He had the genes, the talent, and the work ethic to completely transform the way animation sounded. Over time, the entire industry seemed to rest on Mel’s shoulders.

[music in]

So when Mel was in a really bad car accident, a lot of people were justifiably worried. Not only for Mel, but for their own livelihoods. After the accident, Mel fell into a coma, and as the days passed Warner Brothers even went as far as to consider other actors to replace Mel. But the actor who was offered Bugs Bunny refused, hanging onto hope that Mel would get better.

Noel: They tried to bring him out of the coma. It was very, very difficult because he didn't respond.

That’s Mel’s son, Noel Blanc. Noel and his mother sat with Mel in the hospital for days on end. The accident had left Mel in a coma and a full body cast.

Noel: The doctor came in about on the 13th or 14th day.

Noel: And he said, "Mel, can you hear me?" No response. "Mel." No response. I'd say, "Dad, can you hear me." No.

Noel: And he looked up and saw the television screen.

[SFX: Looney Tunes episode plays on TV in background]

It was Looney Tunes on the screen, and hearing Mel’s characters gave the brain surgeon an idea.

Noel: And he finally says, "Bugs, can you hear me? Bugs Bunny can you hear me?” And my dad went [SFX: Bugs Bunny voice], "Eh, what's up doc, yeah."

It was nothing short of a miracle. Bugs Bunny brought Mel Blanc out of a coma. By this point, Mel had been performing some of the Looney Tunes for more than twenty years. That rascally rabbit was such a part of Mel’s brain that the character brought him back from the brink.

Noel: So the doc got an idea and he said, "Porky Pig can you hear me?" He says [SFX: Porky voice], "I can hear you." He went down the list of characters, and my dad came out of the coma at that time. It was so amazing to watch this happen. My mom couldn't believe it. She started crying. He came out of the coma, and he said, "Where am I?" She says, "Look down, you're in a full body cast."

[music out]

Despite a near fatal injury… including a triple skull fracture, broken legs, and a broken pelvis, Mel got right back to work. He understood that tons of people were counting on him both for their jobs and for their entertainment.

His first job during the recovery was Barney Rubble in the Flintstones. Here’s a clip from that show. Keep in mind that Mel was literally in bed recovering while he recorded this.

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: I don’t know, but since he’s in oil, he could slide away easy!]

Noel: During the 65 Flintstones that we did, he was in a full body cast, not able to sit up of course, the microphones were extended over his bed. We'd built a studio on the other side of the house. Joe Barbera and myself would sit in the studio. I'd run the tape recorders, and the guys from his studio would come by, set it up. They put all the cables underneath the house, ran five microphones next to his bed, and the cast would gather around the bed, and he would be Barney in the bed.

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: Oh boy, what a set up Fred! [laughter]]

[music in]

Even while recovering from an accident, Mel kept busy. And that busy lifestyle didn’t stop when he was away from work.

Noel: He never spent an afternoon not signing pictures for kids that came to the door. And then their kids and then their grandkids over the 40 year period.

Noel: They'd get 2000 people there on Halloween. Because they knew where he lived and the kids would come in little buses. He’d open the door, give them each a little candy bar, do the voices for them.

Mel was also a mentor to people who wanted to make it in animation. He even helped one kid achieve his voice acting dreams. Here’s Bob Bergen.

[music out]

Bob: My thought was, if you want to be a brain surgeon, call a brain surgeon. If you want to be a baseball player, call a baseball player. I want to be a Looney Tune. I'm going to call a Looney Tune.

Nowadays, Bob is well known in Hollywood as a first-call voice actor. You’ve most certainly heard his voice, but might not know exactly from where.

[SFX clip: Bob Bergen VO montage]

But, before the success, Bob was just a kid with a dream of becoming a voice actor, and there was one particular role he wanted more than any other.

[music in]

Bob: I actually just wanted to be Porky Pig. That was my goal since I was a five-year-old child. I didn't know there was a business called voiceover. I didn't know it was acting. I had no idea how the industry worked. I just was a five-year-old kid who said, "I want to be Porky Pig."

Bob: I just found his personality and the comedy, you know when Porky is stuttering and then he takes a left turn with a whole different word. "Petunia, will you marry [stuttering] will you marry [stuttering] let's get hitched." Bob has been practicing Porky for as long as he can remember.

Bob: I was just an obnoxious kid who'd be in grammar school, and a teacher would ask me a question and I'd answer like Porky Pig.

Bob: I had Porky's stutter down by the time I was six. I knew exactly how to stutter, and I knew the comedy behind the stutter.

Bob: We’d moved to LA when I was 14, and I just thought, “I want to be Porky Pig. How do I become Porky Pig?” Well, I'll just call the guy doing Porky Pig and say, "Look, I just arrived. I'm sure you're looking for some way to retire, and I'd be more than happy to accommodate."

Bob’s dad got him a stack of Los Angeles phone books. Then Bob called every M. Blanc he could find, but with no luck.

Bob: And I thought, well, maybe it's under his wife's name. So I started all over. I knew his wife's name was Estelle, and I found E. Blanc in the Pacific Palisades, that was his house. And I got him on the phone.

And you’re not going to believe this, but Bob taped his original conversation with Mel.

[music out]

[SFX Clip:Estelle: Hello.

Young Bob from tape: Is Mr Blanc there?

Estelle: One moment please.

Mel: Hello?

Young Bob from tape: Mr Blanc?

Mel: Yes.

Young Bob: My name is Bob, and I’m interested in doing voices for cartoons.

Mel: Yes.

Young Bob. And I was wondering if you could give me any advice about how to go about it and all.

Mel: Tell me, have you created any voices, or do you just do impressions or impersonations?

Young Bob: Well, I’ve got one voice. [Doing high-pitched voice] It sounds like this. [Regular voice] It’s hard to understand.

Mel: Let me tell you something. In the first place, every voice must be understandable to be in a cartoon.]

Mel chatted with Bob for a few more minutes, talking about creating characters and finding agents.

[SFX clip continued: Mel: I tell you, it’s not an easy business to get into. How old are you?

Young Bob: Fourteen.

Mel: Fourteen… Well it takes an awful long time to get established...]

But Bob still wanted more.

Bob: He mentioned the name of the studio he was working at that week. So when I finished talking to him, I called the studio and I pretended to be his assistant and I said, "Hi, I'm Mel Blanc's assistant and I'm calling to confirm his appointment this week. We've got him down for Thursday at nine." And the receptionist goes, "We have them down for Wednesday at 11." I went, "Oh, you're right. I'm looking at the wrong day in the calendar. Sorry about that."

Bob was determined to learn by watching Mel work.

Bob: So I said to my mom, "I'm skipping school on Wednesday and we're going to go watch Mel Blanc work at this studio." And my mom said, "Cool." So when we got to the studio that Wednesday, I told the receptionist that we were invited to come watch. We were guests of Mel Blanc. And she showed me what booth he was in. And then when we walked into his booth, I said to his producer, "We're very good friends of the receptionist." And she said we could watch. And the producer said, "Sure, have a seat." I got to watch him work.

[music in]

After talking to Mel and watching him work, Bob doubled down on his dream of becoming Porky Pig. Even as a kid, he was recording himself practicing the voice.

[SFX clip: Young Bob from tape: [Stuttering] That’s all folks...]

Mel Blanc loved talking to kids like Bob. In fact, he would visit children’s hospitals as often as he could.

Noel: He did about 185 different college speeches during his lifetime, but he never went into any one of those towns that he didn't go to the children's hospital first.

By all accounts, Mel spent hours at these hospitals, giving sick kids a few moments of happiness. Most people had no idea Mel even made these trips. Publicity wasn’t the point. Mel did it because he loved making people happy.

[music out]

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: I just love it. I love my work, which I think, everybody should love before they do, before they go to work, they should love what they’re going to do or don’t take the job. And I love my work…this has worked out beautifully for me.]

Mel Blanc worked well past retirement. Even with the flu, an 81-year-old Mel Blanc made TV with his son. He was still voicing characters he created more than fifty years before.

Noel: We had done a television commercial for Oldsmobile. It was called Not Your Father's Oldsmobile. And he and I were in the Oldsmobile with the characters, Bugs, Daffy, and all the characters.

[Oldsmobile commercial: Noel, Mel, and Looney Tunes from YouTube clip: This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.

Mel: [Porky Pig voice] That’s all folks.]

[music in]

Noel: We did the entire commercial that day, it took us about eight hours. And he had just gotten over the flu and I said, "Well, why don't you go see the doctor, and he can clear out your lungs for you."

When Mel got to the hospital, the doctor’s gave him the option to stay overnight. He thought this was a good idea. So he took it.

Noel: He had fallen out of bed and broken his femur, got fat emboli into the brain, and he was literally gone within 48 hours.

Just like that, after a more-than-60-year career in entertainment, Mel Blanc was gone.

Noel: He had another few years to go that was for sure, and then passed away because of this accident. So he never retired. He worked actually that whole day before he went into the hospital and broke his leg.

When Mel Blanc died, the world lost an incredible talent. Even more devastating, was the loss of a great human being. A generous, kind person who loved to make people laugh. His voice would never be in another cartoon. It was a sudden end to an amazing life that touched generations of people all over the world.

But it wasn’t the end for Bugs, Daffy, and the rest. What does it take to replace a legend? We’ll find out, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

For more than fifty years, Mel Blanc was the voice behind hundreds of animated characters. He created the voices for Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and so many others. Even before he passed away, Mel knew he had to find someone to fill his shoes.

Noel: He thought that I was going to take over all those voices. I said, “No, nobody can take your voices cause they're not built like you. You've got this huge chest, these incredible vocal chords, this great ear, a perfect pitch, eight octave range. Nobody's going to take over for you. It's going to take really a lot of people to take over for you.”

[music out]

Noel was right. After Mel passed away, Warner Brothers scrambled to find actors who could cover his roles. Noel was able to do some of his dad’s voices, like the Tasmanian Devil.

[SFX clip: Tasmanian Devil from “You Asked for It Part 1”: Yes, bunny yummy! [Eating sounds]]

But other actors came in to help, like Bob Bergen.

Bob: [SFX: Speaking as Tweety] I've done Tweety, the little birdy who hates that bad old puddy tat. I did [SFX: Speaking as Marvin voice] Marvin the Martian in Space Jam. I've done [SFX: Speaking as Junior voice] Junior. Oh father, look! Go get them, Pop.

Bob’s taken on a few of Mel’s characters. But none are as important to Bob as Porky Pig, the character who first got him interested in voice acting.

Bob: I was a working voiceover actor doing a whole bunch of cartoons when Mel Blanc passed away. And I had a good agent who was able to get me into a dozen or so auditions and callbacks before I booked my first Porky Pig gig.

Bob: The first thing I ever did was Tiny Toon Adventures.

[Tiny Toon Adventures clip: Porky Pig from Tiny Toon Adventures: [stuttering throughout] Now class, for our cartoon prop lesson open to page 23 of your whoopie cushion instruction manual.]

But filling in for a legend isn’t easy.

Bob: It was a little daunting because I would say the first year that we would do any Looney Tunes project, they had like a 12 minute reference tape of Mel, but it was some cartoons from the 30s and cartoons from the 40s, some cartoons from the 50s, some cartoons from the 60s. And I would say to them, "Well, which one do you want?" And they're like, "Well, they're all Porky." I'm like, "Yeah, they're all Porky, but the character evolved."

Bob: Earlier, the stutter was different.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from “Porky’s Duck Hunt”: [stuttering throughout] I got him! I got him!]

Bob: Later, he was older, his energy was not as good and you could hear the smoking in the voice.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from “The Bugs Bunny Mystery Special” Good evening. You know who I am. Master of mystery and sus- [stuttering] oh you know, Who-done-its.]

Bob: The era where I think Mel Blanc kind of nailed it, my sweet spot for Porky is about 1952 to 1956, '57." I think that's the era where Mel Blanc really just nailed the character.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from “Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century”: [stuttering] Why it’s very simple sir. If we follow [stuttering] those planets, we can’t very well miss Planet X.]

Bob: We did a series about 10 years ago called The Looney Tunes Show, and it was kind of like a sitcom. And the producers wanted the delivery to be a very specific golly gee way.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from YouTube clip: [stuttering throughout] Bugs, as your friend, I think buying Geradi’s is a great idea.]

Bob: But if nobody says, "Here's what we want." I go to my sweet spot, which is early to mid 50s Mel Blanc.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from “Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century”: I’m [stuttering] all set your hero-ship sir!]

Bob: The earlier, earlier sessions were just a committee. A lot of people I had to please, presidents and vice presidents and executives, and it was all scary. It's been quite some time where they kind of trust me, but I will tell you, I've had to re-audition for them six times.

To be fair, re-auditioning doesn’t bother Bob. He’s confident in his Porky Pig, and he understands what it means to carry Mel’s legacy. Now, Bob’s been Porky for thirty years, but Mel did it for more than fifty.

Bob: Animation brings in more box office than live action. His legacy is the industry as a whole. If you think of classic Hollywood personalities and characters, you're going to think Charlie Chaplin, James Steward, Humphrey Bogart and Bugs Bunny. I mean, I think Bugs Bunny fits in to the world of classic Hollywood as any live action actor would.

[music in]

Mel Blanc is among the greatest actors ever to grace the screen. His talent is a big part of what made him so unique.

Noel: You could watch Mel do the voices and actually transmogrify into those characters. We could turn off the sound inside the booth so it was totally silent. And I could watch him go through the different characters and you could see him becoming the different characters. It was pretty amazing. He actually looked like Yosemite Sam when he did Yosemite Sam.

[SFX Clip: Yosemite Sam from YouTube clip: A rabbit! [Laughs] A rabbit.]

Noel: He looked like Tweety. He was a little teeny Tweety.

[SFX Clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: Poor puddy tat. Forgot his parachute.]

Noel: Foghorn Leghorn, he was the big rooster.

[SFX Clip: Foghorn Leghorn from YouTube clip: Now who’s responsible, I say, who’s responsible for this unwarranted attack on my person?]

Mel’s legacy is enormous. It was his voice that took cartoons into the mainstream.

Bob: Besides 60 years of product, he basically put this industry on the map. When he was doing voices for cartoons, these were just something to put in front of a movie. Today, every major studio has a thriving animation department.

Noel: The culture became embedded with these incredible cartoon characters. And cartoon movies are still the biggest thing out there right now.

Melvin Jerome Blanc passed away at the age of 81, but in many ways his kind soul and personality live on through his characters.

His final resting place is at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery - just a few blocks from his and Bugs Bunny’ star on the walk of fame.

It was Mel himself who wrote what’s inscribed on his tombstone… which says...

That’s All Folks. Mel Blanc, Man of 1000 voices.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: If I saw a person smile, that to me was payment in itself…If I could make them laugh when they had been very sad, it was great payment to me.]

[music out]

[music in]

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

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound design and mixed by Soren Begin, and Colin DeVarney.

Thanks to Noel Blanc for sharing stories of his dad. Thanks also to Bob Bergen. You can listen to more of the recorded phone conversation between Mel and Bob at bobbergen.com.

Many of the clips from Mel in this episode came from an amazing documentary called Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices. You can check that out, plus a fun video of Mel’s vocal chords flexing as he does his Looney Tunes voices at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: [stuttering] That’s all folks!]

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What’s Up, Doc? Mel Blanc and the magic of Looney Tunes

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This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso.

Bugs Bunny, Barney Rubble, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, and more were all voiced by one man, Mel Blanc. Discover the incredible life and talent that helped to elevate the animation industry into big business. Featuring interviews with Mel’s son, Noel Blanc, and voice actors Debi Derryberry and Bob Bergen.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

For Real (Instrumental) by Joybird Falling
In by Shawn Williams
Volcano by Human Pyramids
Golden Hour by Sound of Picture
A Stirring of Patience by Chad Lawson
Particles by Tony Anderson

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

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Check out more of Debi’s work at debiderryberry.com.

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Eh, what’s up doc?]

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: You’re pretty good, Fred.]

[SFX clip: Daffy Duck from YouTube clip: You’re despicable.]

[SFX clip: Cosmo S. Spacely from YouTube clip: Jetson, I thought I fired you.]

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: I tawt I taw a puddy tat.]

[SFX clip: Yosemite Sam from soundboard clip: Ya better say your prayers!]

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from YouTube clip: That’s all folks!]

[music in]

All of the voices you just heard came from the same person.

[David Letterman from YouTube clip: It's a pleasure to welcome Mr. Mel Blanc.

Mel: Eh… what’s up, David?]

Mel Blanc is a voice acting legend.

[Mel from YouTube clip: I’ve worked in about 5,000 different cartoons. And actually I do about 400 different voices.]

Noel: Mel Blanc was the greatest voice artist that ever lived. His range was a full eight octaves, his ear was unbelievable. His ability to hear a dialect was uncanny.

Noel: And he was the kindest, gentlest man you'd ever know.

That’s Noel Blanc, Mel’s son.

[music out]

Noel: And what do I do? Produce commercials and films and do a lot of the voices that my dad did.

Here’s Noel as Elmer Fudd in Family Guy.

[SFX Clip: Elmer Fudd from YouTube clip: Shh! Be very, very quiet. I’m hunting rabbits.]

[music in]

Everyone in animation agrees that Mel Blanc was unique and completely changed the industry. His voices helped create iconic cartoon franchises that are still going strong today.

Even from a young age, Mel loved doing voices. He was totally the class clown. ...but even though Mel clearly had immense talent, his first job wasn’t even as an actor.

Noel: He was a musician. He played various music on a trumpet on tuba, on violin and piano. At 17 years old, he was conducting the major orchestra out of Portland.

A few years later, he met his soon-to-be wife, Estelle Rosenbaum. They eventually started a radio show together in Portland called Cobweb and Nuts.

Noel: They were paid $15 a week total for the two of them. So they were pretty well starving up there. And then that's when they decided to come down to Los Angeles.

[music out]

Estelle encouraged Mel to pursue his dreams of acting. He knew just the place that needed his specific talents. This clip is from the documentary Mel Blanc, The Man of a Thousand Voices.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: I had seen some of the Warner Brothers voices in the cartoons, and I thought, “Jeez they're missing out on an awful lot. The voices are pretty bad.”]

Even though Mel is now famous for Porky Pig, he actually wasn’t the first person to play the character. Here’s the original voice.

[SFX clip: Original Porky Pig]

Mel was convinced he could do better, so, like clockwork Mel went to Warner Brothers every two weeks. And he was rejected over and over by the person responsible for hiring voice actors.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: I said, “I'd like to audition for you and show you what I can do.” He said, “Sorry we've got all the voices we need.”]

But, after two years of persistence, Mel knocked on Warner Brothers’ door at the perfect time. The person who kept rejecting him just happened to be home sick.

Noel: The next fellow in line happened to be the sound effects engineer for the Warner Brothers cartoons.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: He says, “Well, let me hear what you do.” So I auditioned for him, and he got a big kick out of it. He said, “Would you do it again for the directors?” I said, “Gladly.”]

Noel: And they loved him and said, "What are you doing next week?" Of course Mel wasn't even working. And he said, "Well, I don't know, I think I can make it."

Mel’s first Warner Brothers cartoon was “Picador Porky.” But he wasn’t Porky Pig. He was Porky’s unnamed drunk friend.

[SFX clip: Drunken friend in “Picador Porky”: La cockaroacha! La cucaracha! [Hiccup!] Play it on the ol' guitar! [Hiccup!] La cockarocha! Play it any place ya are!]

The Warner directors recognized Mel’s talent immediately. And when Porky Pig’s original actor was fired from the role, they offered it to Mel.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: I went out to a pig farm and wallowed around the pigs for a couple of weeks. I come back I said, “If a pig could talk he talked with a grunt you know, ‘Oink, oink, oink, oink, blah, blah, blah, that’s P-P-P-P-P-Porky talking with a grunt.’”]

Mel’s debut of Porky came in the 1930’s.

[SFX clip: Porky Pig from YouTube clip: Don’t worry. It’s not loaded. Watch. [SFX: Gun shot.]]

The cartoon was called, “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” It introduced one of Mel’s other famous characters: Daffy Duck.

[SFX clip: Daffy Duck from “Porky’s Duck Hunt”: Don’t let it worry you, skipper. I’m just a crazy, darn fool duck. Woohoo! Woohoo! Woohahahoo!]

Porky and Daffy helped make Mel and Warner Brothers famous. But one of Mel’s creations is clearly king.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: They showed me a picture of this little rabbit and he's gonna say, “Hey what's cooking?” And I said, “Instead of him saying, ‘Hey what's cooking?’ why don't you have him say ‘Eh, what's up, doc?’” That's an expression that was being so popular, and I said, “Why don't you name him after the guy who drew the first picture of him?” His name was Bugs Hardaway. “Why don’t you call him Bugs Bunny?”]

Mel first appeared as Bugs Bunny in a 1940s cartoon called, “A Wild Hare.”

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: Well they told me that Bugs was a tough little stinker. And I thought, “What kind of a voice could I give him? He’s a tough character. Maybe Brooklyn or the Bronx.” [switches to Bugs voice] So, uh, I put the two of them together, doc, and that’s how Bugs Bunny came out.”]

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from “A Wild Hare”: What’s up, doc?]

In that first appearance as Bugs, the character had big teeth way outside his mouth and sort of a long face. Today Bugs has smaller teeth closer to his mouth and a rounder face. When the animation changed, Mel changed Bugs’ voice to match. Here’s Mel’s son, Noel again.

Noel: Bugs was a different kind of voice that instead of going, “eh, what’s up doc?”, they had big teeth and that sounded like this, what you heard in early cartoons. “Eh, what’s up doc?” is a totally different kind of a voice until they move the teeth back into the mouth.

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from “A Wild Hare”: Now don’t spread this around… but confidentially. I AM A WABBIT!]

The process of forming a new character always started with the art.

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: First they would show me a picture of the character that they wanted to use in the cartoon. Then they would show me what they call a storyboard. This is what this character is going to do throughout the cartoon.]

After Mel looked at the art and storyboards, he would do a little research about the character’s animal. When he landed the role of Daffy Duck, he did a bit of bird watching.

Noel: Actually that's where he picked up Daffy Duck's voice because Daffy Duck, that spray is a spray. It's not a lisp, a lisp is this [SFX]. It's a spray. Well, if you've seen the ducks land in the water, they get a lot of water in both orifices.

[SFX clip: Daffy Duck from YouTube clip: “Listen, sport. You don’t know the meaning of fair play.”]

Daffy Duck sounds a bit similar to another iconic character, Sylvester the cat. There’s one key difference though. Daffy is spraying water out of his mouth. Sylvester is drooling over a little yellow canary that he wants to eat so badly. [SFX clip: Sylvester from YouTube clip: Sufferin’ succotash.]

Noel: Sylvester, which is the lower down here, is just salivating because of Tweety. So they're not lisping. They're salivating.

[SFX clip: Sylvester from YouTube clip: I never thought just being a pussy cat could get so complicated.]

Mel traveled all the way to Australia to find the voice for the Tasmanian Devil.

Noel: When he was in Tasmania in Hobart, they have a wonderful zoo in the main city there. And he visited the Tasmanian devil in the zoo and realized that the Tasmanian devil devoured everything in front of him.

Here’s what actual Tasmanian Devils sounds like [SFX: Tasmanian Devil Vocalization] ...they’re notorious for how aggressively they eat [SFX: aggressive eating].

...and here’s how Mel interpreted those sounds.

[SFX clip: Tasmanian Devil from YouTube clip: [Spitting and incoherent noises]]

Mel’s also famous for the voice of Tweety Bird.

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: I twat I taw a putty tat. I did, I did, I see taw a putty tat.]

From the start people loved Mel’s characters, but their popularity really soared in the 1940s.

Noel: The major thing that sold Bugs Bunny to the public was a two minute song on buying bonds. And those at that time there were war bonds and he and Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig sang the song, "Any bonds today."

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Any bonds today? Bonds of freedom, that’s what I’m selling! Any bonds today?...]

Noel: Every theater between every performance, and this is again where 50 million people a week going to the theater or more. And that's how they really became popular.

[SFX clip: Continue Any Bonds Today clip]

Mel’s characters were so popular that he asked for a raise. But instead of more money, Warner Brothers countered with something no other cartoon voice actor had at the time. That was his name featured in the credits.

That meant his name got out there, and other studios wanted to hire him.

Noel: He was doing 18 radio shows a week at one time. And so he would run from CBS to NBC to ABC, which were very close there. So he would come on, he would know exactly the characters he was doing, whether it was the Abbott and Costello Show...

[SFX clip: Bugs Bunny from YouTube clip: Eh, what’s up, doc? What’s cooking, fatso?

Bud Abott: Costello, look it’s Bugs Bunny!]

Noel: … or the Jack Benny Show...

[SFX clip: Jack Benny from YouTube clip: It says here that you do imitations. Is that right?

Mel: Oh yeah, that’s right. I do animals, all kinds of things.]

Mel even had his own show!

[SFX clip: Announcer from YouTube clip: Starring himself in person, Mel Blanc!

Mel: Good evening, folks!]

Mel Blanc was a household name. For decades he voiced many of the Looney Tunes while also doing bit parts for Hanna Barbera. Here he is as George Jetson’s boss, Cosmo Spacely.

[SFX clip: Cosmo S. Spacely from YouTube clip: Jetson! I thought I fired you… Now get out!]

He did the barks for Fred Flintstone’s pet dinosaur, Dino.

[SFX clip: Dino from soundboard: Barking and panting]

...and he was even the voice of Barney Rubble!

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: Now I know how it feels to be hatched.]

[music in]

In all, Mel created over 400 voices.

As far as we know, there is no person on earth who can voice all the characters of Mel Blanc. It was a unique combination of factors that all came together to create his unparalleled talent. We’ll unravel the mystery of what made Mel not just one of the greatest voice actors in history, but one of the greatest actors period, after this.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Mel Blanc was the most prolific and influential voice actor of all time. He performed more than 400 characters, many of which he created out of thin air. And every one of these characters had a distinct personality and voice. No other actor since then has been able to perform every voice Mel did.

Here he is as Yosemite Sam.

[music out]

[SFX clip: Yosemite Sam from YouTube clip: That dirty perka shark a back flat'n port'n filla bunka borton perka luma burton durton bosh da nat'n bart'n da naddah oooh.]

And Mel performed a lot of Hanna Barbera characters too, like Secret Squirrel.

[SFX clip: Secret Squirrel from YouTube clip: If you don’t mind, it’s sort of secret.]

He even did characters who never spoke actual words.

Noel: He was doing all the different craziness of Tom and Jerry.

[SFX clip: Jerry from “Cat and Dupli-Cat”: [Sings in animal noises]]

Mel also created the voice for Woody Woodpecker.

[SFX clip: Woody Woodpecker singing: Everybody thinks I’m crazy. Yessiree that’s me, that’s me.]

Mel actually left the role of Woody early in the series, but the show still used Mel’s pre-recorded laugh for the character.

[SFX clip: Woody Woodpecker from YouTube clip: [Laughs]]

Those few short giggles at the end are totally intentional. They’re actually meant to sound like a woodpecker pecking.

[SFX clip: Woody Woodpecker from YouTube clip: [Laughs]]

How do you even do that? [SFX: Dallas attempts laugh]

[SFX clip: Woody Woodpecker from YouTube clip: [Laughs]]

Nowadays, it takes about a dozen people just to cover all of Mel’s Looney Tunes characters. He could pull off feats of acting that were difficult for even seasoned voice actors. Here’s Hank Azaria, who plays Moe, Chief Wiggum, and more than fifteen other characters on The Simpsons. In this clip from the documentary, Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices, Azaria talks about something Mel can do that the entire cast of The Simpsons can’t.

[SFX clip: Hank Azaria from YouTube clip: Only if you're a voice actor do you realize how incredible this is. When Bugs and Daffy are fighting over whether it's wabbit season or duck season, and Daffy Duck comes out dressed up as Bugs Bunny doing a Bugs Bunny imitation. Then Bugs Bunny comes out dressed as Daffy doing a Daffy impression.]

[SFX clip: Daffy [doing Bugs imitation]: Eh, what’s up, doc? Having any luck with those ducks? It’s duck season, ya know?

Bugs [doing Daffy imitation]: Just a darn minute. Where do you get that duck season stuff?]

[SFX clip: Hank Azaria: You know how hard that is to do, to take your own character and have it imitate another one of your own characters? It’s almost impossible, because if you try to like combine two voices that you’re doing, you kind of just land in the middle… We tried it one day at The Simpsons, we were talking about, we were marveling at Mel Blanc’s ability to do this, and we all tried to do one of our characters imitating another one and have them sound different, and we couldn’t do it.]

[music in]

Mel’s immense voice talent was a unique combination of factors. First, he had an amazing ear for dialects.

Noel: Whether it was Armenian or Scottish, British, Irish, whatever it might be, even in the States. Mel could do voices from every state, somebody was from Mississippi, he could tell that difference between that and Arkansas.

Mel also had a unique vocal chord structure.

Noel: The doctor said after we put a camera down it, because I thought it would be a good idea to photograph his larynx. He said, "We haven't seen this kind of vocal structure." And it's about twice as large as a normal vocal structure. So between the vocal structure of the larynx and his ability and ear and octave range, he had the bare assets for being the greatest voice person that ever lived.

[music out]

There were times when Mel had a little help from technology. Here’s Bob Bergen, one of today’s leading voice actors, who actually got to watch Mel work.

Bob: Many of Mel's voices were sped up electronically. A lot of people don't know that. I actually discovered that when I crashed a recording session when I was about 14. I was watching him work and he was doing Tweety and it was like really bad. I just thought it was because of his age and he was smoking, and they played it back and it was great. And I said to the producer, "What did you do to the playback to make it sound so good?" And she said, "We sped his voice up."

Bob: Technically, they were recorded slower and played back at real time. So they were recorded depending on the character, 10 or 12 percent slower. So when they played it back in real time, it was sped up.

Here’s Tweety as we recognize it from the cartoons.

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: I tawt I taw a puddy tat. I did, I did taw a puddy tat.]

And here’s that same line, slowed down. This would have been the normal recording speed.

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip 12 percent slower: I tawt I taw a puddy tat. I did, I did taw a puddy tat.]

Even with a few genetic advantages and a little help from technology, this kind of acting requires a lot of talent and a lot of work.

Debi: It's commitment to the character. Acting wise, you have to be able to inhabit and commit to fully that character and never leave it for a moment.

This is Debi Derryberry. She’s the voice behind more than 250 animated characters.

Debi: On-camera, they go through inhabiting the character for days and days on end, but in VO, you have to be able to hop into that character quickly, completely, and it will be believable if you are there.

One of Debi’s characters is Jimmy Neutron on Nickelodeon.

[SFX clip: Jimmy Neutron from YouTube clip: Good work everybody! We’re ready for intergalactic travel.]

Debi: Howie Mendell did a cartoon called Bobby's World, and I was his best friend Jackie, who was very cerebral.

[SFX clip: Jackie from YouTube clip: I knew you’d come to your senses, Bobby. You finally realized that I’m the only woman you’ll ever love.]

Both of Debi’s characters you just heard were little kids. Yet they sounded like different people. So she really understands what it takes to create a distinct character.

Debi’s favorite Mel Blanc creation is Pépé Le Pew.

[SFX clip: Pépé Le Pew singing from YouTube clip: Tip-toe from your pillow to the shadow of a willow tree and tip-toe down the tulips, avec… hey!]

[music in]

Despite never being a Looney Tune, Debi knows a ton about Mel Blanc. That’s because everyone who works in the industry studies him.

Debi: We never have to say Mel Blanc. People just know who Mel is.

Debi loves Mel’s characters not just because he’s a legend. Mel was an incredible actor.

Debi: I'll hit on my, the all time common misconception. "Hey, my friends say I have a good voice. I would think I should do voice acting. I think I should be a cartoon voice." "Oh really?"

Debi: Here's the lowdown on that one. Voice acting is an acting job. That means you need to be an actor. You just don't say, "I'm going to be a rocket scientist or a computer programmer." You go to school to learn how to do these things. There's a lot involved in being a voice actor, learning the ins and outs of the microphone and being able to read, get the words off the page, meeting your acting beats in it, being able to change accents, being able to change characters.

[music out]

Lots of people can imitate Bugs Bunny’s voice. For example, I can say, “What’s up, doc?” and sound like Mel. But only a few people can truly become the character of Bugs. It’s a lot harder than you might think.

Debi: So, I just happen to be able to get my voice, oh, in that baby thing where baby's talking, [SFX: baby talk]. So, I can get there pretty easy and then that baby can age up, but each age has to be fully committed, and so if I have no accent, then that age transition can be, [SFX: baby talk that ages into an adult] “I don't know mommy, I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. You know what? He doesn't know what you're talking about. Tell mom he doesn't know. Mom. Look it. I'm just going to go to college. Okay, I am out of here. Honey, when are you going to come home from school? You know what darling? Get that girl home from school.” So, it's just moving it around and committing.

Like Debi, Mel was a master of modifying his voice. He could change the age or the dialect. He could turn the variables of his performance like dials.

Debi: He was able to look at the picture and inhabit them, and as a voice artist, I would say, you layer them, okay? So, you have your Pépé Le Pew.

[SFX clip: Pépé Le Pew from YouTube clip: Comment allez-vous this fine morning?]

Debi: Okay, he uses his voice, but he's got his French accent and his cadence. You know he's got his french accent and everything goes up like this and this [SFX: French accent]. And then you have your Tweety.

[SFX clip: Tweety from YouTube clip: I did. I did. I did taw a puddy tat.]

Debi: Okay, you put your speech impediment on it and you go down into your baby voice. SFX: baby voice] Still, you're going to the baby spot. First, you're in the baby spot, and then you start doing your Ah's, Oh's, try and get them just right, and then you put the actual sweetness in there, like inhabiting and committing to the sweetness of this little Tweety Bird character, or you're Daffy Duck.

[SFX clip: Daffy from YouTube clip: That’s dandy. Ho ho. That’s rich, I say. Now how about some color, stupid?]

Debi: You're going to start with Mel's voice, you're going to put in your sideways speech impediment there [SFX: Daffy speech impediment] and you've got your sideways thing going in and his voice and then you put in your mischievous and your snark and the nastiness that goes with Daffy.

Other voice actors agree with Debi. Here’s Bob Bergen again.

Bob: Well, he was vocally versatile, but he was also a brilliant actor.

Bob: It was in the creating of the characters. He had lots of characters that might've sounded similar. Like Daffy Duck…

[SFX clip: Daffy Duck from YouTube clip: How about a little something to stimulate the scalp?]

Bob: ...is basically Sylvester sped up.

[SFX clip: Slyvester from YouTube clip: Sufferin’ succotash.]

Bob: But the personalities were totally different. The man could take those words and bring them to life with a uniqueness that was just his own. Also, because of the way his vocal chords were built, he had such a lovely, deep bassy voice, at the same time he had a very nasal voice. So when he was sped up, it didn't sound like a chipmunk. He had so much bottom to his range that the sped up voice didn't sound artificially enhanced. So a lot of it was just the way he was built.

Mel made the characters his own. When Flintstones’ producers gave him direction for Barney Rubble, they said they wanted him to sound like Art Carney on The Honeymooners.

[SFX clip: Art Carney from YouTune clip: Hehe, I knew it would work.]

His response was, “I don’t do impressions.”

[SFX clip: Mel from YouTube clip: [Barny Rubble voice] The voice for Barney Rubble. I did the voice for him. And, uh, you know it's a different voice than Art Carney, but they said, “Do a voice like Art Carney.” I said, “No, I won’t do that, but I'll give you this voice here. I'll take the same inflections that he uses and a slow laugh at the end.” [Laughs]]

[SFX clip: Barney Rubble from YouTube clip: Oh boy! Wait’ll Fred sees my new bowling ball...STRIKE! [Laughs] They’ll call me twinkle toes Rubble, the terror of the alleys. STRIKE!]

Mel Blanc was at the height of his career… and the characters he created grew the animation industry into big business. There were more than 400 voices in one man. Hundreds, if not thousands of jobs depended on him… and millions of viewers had come to rely on him for their escape and entertainment. All of that, came to a sudden halt. Here’s Mel’s son Noel again.

[SFX: Start drone that slowly over takes the music under the following.]

Noel: He was driving in Dead Man's Curve... Big curve around UCLA. And a kid in a big Oldsmobile jumped through the divider on Dead Man's Curve and plowed him straight on, head on, head to head. The kid didn't get hurt because he was driving this huge car. My dad was in an aluminum car, an Aston Martin. It folded up.

We’ll hear the rest of the story, next time.

[music in]

This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Colin DeVarney.

Thanks to Noel Blanc for sharing stories of his dad. Thanks also to Katherine Blanc, Noel’s wife, who wrote a children’s book called Melvin the Mouth, which shares more of Mel’s life. Thanks also to Debi Derryberry. You can find her work, books, and more at debiderryberry.com. That’s Debi with an “I” not a “Y.” Finally, thanks to Bob Bergen. You can find out all about Bob on his web site at bobbergen.com.

Many of the clips of Mel came from an amazing documentary called Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices. You can check out the whole video on our website, 20k dot org. There you’ll also find the music tracks and transcripts for all of our episodes, plus original artwork. So go check it out.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]

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Twenty Parts Per Thousand: Designing with smell

April 1, 2020

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This episode was written and produced by M ike Baireuther.

The stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting smells.

Throughout history, humans have gone to great lengths to indulge their sense of smell. We explore the contemporary scent industry to see how modern creatives are utilizing works of olfactory art everywhere from Disney World to high-end museums. Featuring Disney Imagineer Gary Powell and former New York Times scent critic Chandler Burr.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Sanguine by Dexter Britain
Date Prep by Kerry Muzzey
Kaleidoscope by Lights and Motion
Dizzy (Instrumental) by Fuzzy Halo
Breathe by Chad Lawson
Divisions by Max LL
In Circles by Max LL
Breather by Breakmaster Cylinder
Old Technology Has My Heart by Breakmaster Cylinder
Birds Dress Me In The Morning (No Breakbeat version) by Breakmaster Cylinder
(Dorian) And The Moustache Was His Name by Breakmaster Cylinder
Fabulous Flying Merkins by Breakmaster Cylinder

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

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Parts Per Thousand, the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting smells.

[SFX: Big sniff]

[music in]

Here at Twenty Per K, we are obsessed with everything olfactory. As longtime listeners of this smell-cast are aware, scent is powerful. It can trigger deep nostalgia and emotion. The ancient Greeks and Romans really knew the power of scent, they burned pepper, cinnamon, and cloves on holy altars. Their most sacred places were filled with sweet smells drifting up to the heavens [SFX].

Back then, it took a legendary amount of work to burn fragrances in the direction of Zeus and his buddies. Many of these spices grew on the other side of the world and it could take months to bring them home. All of that, so they could light something on fire because it smelled good.

Just as our ancestors defined their places of worship by burning spices, we use perfumes, scented candles, and other aromas in our homes or businesses to build atmosphere. And here in America, I’d argue that there’s no place more revered and more indulgent for your senses, than Disney World.

[music out]

[music in]

From the moment you arrive at the Magic Kingdom, [SFX: Theme Park Ambience] you’re hit with the sweet smells of desserts on main street, and every attraction you explore has something to smell. The Haunted Mansion has a rich old wood smell and Splash Mountain smells like a jungle after a rainstorm. Even the on-site Disney resorts each have their own distinct smell.

And they’re all created by Disney Imagineers, like Gary Powell.

Gary: We try to emerge the guests in using all of the senses, and have them just totally emerged into the experience. We want them to be able to forget about everything that may be going on in the world, and just really enjoy themselves and their family time, make memories that'll last forever.

Gary: Smell in my opinion, is a memory enhancer. And it really brings back places, happy moments. It's very important and very instrumental to the storytelling.

[music out]

When Gary and his team work on an attraction, they have to coordinate between many creative aspects. The goal is to stimulate all of our human senses to create an unforgettable experience.

Gary: My role is a special effects designer. So we will sit there and go through the story concepts with the creative teams, and try to come up with different ideas, whether they be fire effects, projected effects, fiber optics. There's numerous types of special effects that we work on. So we will go through the storyboarding process with the creative teams and try to say, "What if?" What if is something that is used quite a bit over at the Walt Disney Imagineering. What if we did this?

Incorporating smell into an experience is a holistic experience. They’re not just spraying some perfume in the air, they’re making everything work together to tell a story.

Gary: Well, we'll sit there and once again go back to the storyboards, and say, you know "What will really enhance the guest experience?"

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Gary: So what if you smelled the oranges as you are gliding [SFX] through in the Soaring Over California attraction? What if you could smell the ocean [SFX] as you're going through that experience? These are all different things that we talk about in the storyboarding process. And then we go through a process of developing those smells.

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When Gary and his team are ready, they’ll reach out to a perfumer to create the scent that they’re thinking of.

[music in]

Gary: Working with a perfumer, you go through a very lengthy explaining verbally, or the best way that you can communicate a scent to a perfumer. They will take that information, and they will go back and do their work, and then send us samples back out.

Every scent for a client like Disney starts with a “brief.” Chandler Burr knows this all too well, he’s the former Perfume Critic for the New York Times, and has documented the process of creating high-end perfumes in his book called The Perfect Scent.

Chandler: The brief is, in a sense, the screenplay, or the blueprint in the case of architecture. It is the concept that is going to be turned into the art.

Olfactory artists or perfumers are the people that come up with the formulas to make a smell. The perfumers at these companies create a first round of scents based on the brief, and then bring these initial ideas to the clients to smell.

Chandler: The perfume houses will come back and they'll say, "These are our first sketches of the brief or the concept that you want." Then the brand is going to say,"You know what? We like this one."

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When you think of a perfumer you might assume that they’re wandering an evergreen forest smelling wet moss [SFX: Forest, sniffing footsteps] or drifting through gardens sniffing flowers [SFX] all day. I mean they might do that on their off time but modern perfumers create scents in high tech purpose built laboratories.

[SFX: Lab ambience (AC, computer hum), SFX of perfumer working: typing, stirring, writing]

Chandler: People have this idea that perfumers are sitting there pouring Rose absolute into Jasmine, at their desk, like some magician, or something, and it's not that at all. Today it is highly, highly scientifically done. The perfumers actually sit at their desks, and have bottles, and bottles of mods.

Mods are short for modifications or a new iteration of a scent that a perfumer is working on. Each time a perfumer tweaks their formula and wants to smell their new scent they create a mod to take a whiff.

Chandler: There are programs, computer programs, that are made to keep track of formuli, and raw materials, at extremely precise portions. They do it in parts per thousand, for some reason, which is sort of interesting, they don't do it in percent.

Getting to a finished smell takes tons of revisions. It can take rounds and rounds of modifications and reviews to hit a smell just right. For Gary and his team at Disney, they’re trying to find something that helps complete their story, but also appeals to the wide audience of visitors at the park.

Gary: Scents are very particular to different people. Some people really enjoy different types of scents, where others may not like it as much.

Gary: So we get a large group of employees [SFX: Crowd ambience - people chattering, sniffing] to come over and start sampling the scent, and try to get a reaction from them to see if they do enjoy it, or they don't. So it's not where we would sit there and say, "Okay. Here. This is the perfect scent. This person likes it." There's quite a few tests that we go through over at Walt Disney Imagineering with different people sampling it to get their opinions.

Gary: So it could take a month. It could take six months or even longer to get through that process. I have gone through as many as 30, 40 different types of samples before we finally got to one that was fairly close to what the creative team was looking for.

Accommodating these changes pose a constant challenge for perfumers, who construct, and reconstruct their formulas over and over.

[SFX: Scientific lab ambience (soft machines whirring, class clinking, liquids being stirred, typing on keyboard) - ideally a repeating sequence, stopping and starting a few times over and over ]

Chandler: With perfume you're constantly evolving the work, the formula. You're adding materials, you're subtracting materials, you are trying different angles and aspects and directions.

Chandler: And in the end, you wind up with a formula that when you compound it, when you put it together, you wind up with the work that is your vision.

While Chandler didn’t collaborate with perfumers who worked on Disney attractions, the perfumers for the Soarin Over California attraction struggled to nail down one very specific scent.

[music in]

[SFX: Ocean or beachy]

Gary: The creative team wanted to have an ocean smell. So with this ocean smell, we had gotten in touch with some perfumers, and had them give us different samples. When we brought them over to the creative team and had them sampling these, we found out that none of them really worked from a creative perspective. So we were scratching our heads, saying, "What are we going to do in order to get something that creative likes and creative will buy into?"

Gary: In this case, we went out and bought some new cotton socks. [SFX: Ocean] Went over to the Pacific Ocean, and we dropped the sock into the ocean [SFX] and just saturated it there for a little bit.

Gary: We then took that, put it into a plastic bag [SFX], and we sent it to the perfumer that we were using, and had that perfumer sit there and recreate that scent [Pouring and mixing SFX]. Well, when they sent us back the samples the first reaction from creative was they loved it. It was great. It was exactly what they were looking for. Until that experience, I'd never realized that the different ocean waters had a different smell, depending upon where you were.

[music out]

When perfumers find the right mix of ingredients to create that perfect smell, the craft and care of the teams behind Disney’s Parks are able to create something magical.

[SFX: Theme Park Ambience]

Gary: One of the exciting parts of my job is after we finish an attraction, and you have the guests going through experiencing it for the first time, is standing right outside listening to their reactions, seeing their reactions on the hard work that you had done over the past couple of years.

Gary: Soarin’ Over California, the people that were leaving the attraction would make comments on the different scents that they smelled while they were experiencing the ride. And the majority of them were running back over, getting in line to experience the attraction again.

Gary: So when I go into the Disney theme parks, and I hear the guests' reactions to the experience of a new attraction that we have opened, I look at it and say, "Okay. All of this was worth it. Everything that we went through prior was worth it." I mean, to get that smile on the guest's face, it's just amazing. I mean, it's one of my most enjoyable parts of the job that I have.

[music in]

For Gary’s team of Imagineers, smell is part of the larger Disney sensory experience, but for perfumers, creating a scent is an artform unto itself. The multi-billion dollar perfume industry is a hidden world of artistic geniuses, cutting edge science, and high-stakes gambles. We’ll explore secrets behind the scents after the break.

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MIDROLL

[music in]

If you’ve ever been to Disney World, whether you know it or not, you’ve been affected by smell. From the aromas of regional cuisines in Epcot, to the smoky musk of cannonfire [SFX] on Pirates of the Carribean, smell transports you into these fictional worlds.

[music out]

But as the perfume critic for the New York Times, Chandler Burr found that master perfumers create scents that are their own art form.

[music in]

Chandler: Scent as an art medium can convey, I think it's very, very clear, can convey things in ways that other mediums can't. I think that scent is certainly one of the weaker mediums in conveying intellectual information and abstract concepts. It doesn't do that well. It is extraordinarily powerful, and I think more than other mediums, in conveying raw emotion and in rendering the person experiencing the work of art, helpless in the face of its power as a medium.

Chandler: It's an extraordinary medium for that reason.

[music out]

Just as you can appreciate the sculpture with your eyes, or a work of music with your ears, a work of perfume brings together a collection of elements to create art for your nose.

Chandler: Composers are going to use an accord, they're going to put notes together, form a chord [SFX]. And you're constantly mixing these materials to get the full work of music. It's exactly the same in perfume.

Chandler: There are some perfumes in the market that have 11 or 12 scent materials [SFX: keyboard notes counting up], and there are some perfumes in the market that have 20, 30, 40, 50 [SFX: keyboard notes counting up].

Chandler: The number of raw materials has tended to fall, and one of the reasons is that synthetics gives you a control over the medium.

[music in]

Here’s the thing, when you hear the word “synthetic” people start to get a little nervous. Which makes sense! It sounds like you’re spraying toxic chemicals all over yourself so you can smell like a pretty flower. But the truth is that there’s way more nuance to the idea of synthetic versus natural and its way more about marketing than safety.

Chandler: First of all, there is no natural material in perfume. Okay, let's get that straight right out of the gate. I mean, this is dumb. You know, people say, "Oh, that has rose absolute and jasmine and vetiver and that's all it has. And it's all natural." Um... You know what? All of these materials have been treated with chemicals.

Chandler: It's ridiculous. There have never been natural materials. You don't take something from some mint leaf and then put it in a bottle.

[music out]

Getting any scent from a raw material takes a good deal of chemistry. Even the most simple elements require some amount of processing.

[music in]

Chandler: Now, in rose, if you extract a rose and get an essence and if you extract it with the oldest technology that we use, which is just steam, okay? You've got about a thousand molecules. Of those thousand molecules, only about 30 actually smell. None of the others smell. So take those 30. Well, actually, if you take the 30, only about 15 of them really smell of rose. And so now you're down to 15, and from 15, you really can go down to 10, 8, 7.

By extracting the scent of a rose from thousands of molecules to just around a dozen means there’s fewer ingredients that can cause allergic reactions, and there’s fewer elements to test. So if something does cause a problem it’s way easier to figure out the cause. Rather than following an industrial process to extract these molecules from natural roses, scent companies can simply create these exact same chemical compounds synthetically in a safer and more environmentally conscious way.

Chandler: You can construct a beautiful rose out of four or five materials, but you don't actually have to destroy all these rose bushes and use all this fertilizer and all these chemicals. And it really is a more efficient, lower carbon way of creating these scent materials.

[music out]

Thanks to synthetic ingredients, perfumers have a constantly expanding collection of tools to make their art. That creative freedom empowers scent artists to explore lots of inspirations and styles through their work. After all, modern perfume isn’t all about smelling like flowers. There might not be anyone better at explaining all that nuance and craft than Chandler. He can take a single scent and give it the same amount of background and analysis as a painting in the Louvre.

[music in]

Chandler: There is a work by two extraordinary olfactory artists named Christine Nagel and Francis Kurkdjian and it is Narciso Rodriguez for Her Eau de Parfum is the name of it. It is a work of neo-romanticism that is absolutely extraordinary. It takes the romanticism of the 1800s and transports it to the 21st century.

Chandler: When you experience it it transports you, it is almost like being caught in a tide or a wind. It is deep, it is dark. It makes you feel emotion. I think it's absolutely wonderful.

[music out]

Great perfumers are great artists and they make art that is consumed by millions of people around the globe. There are giant advertisements for perfumes in international airports and small town drug stores, but there’s a reason that most of us have never heard the name of the geniuses that create these works.

Chandler: Scent in most cases is made in the same way. You have these huge brands, L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, and then the names of the brands themselves, Tom Ford, Le Labo, Jo Malone, Yves Saint Lauren and so on. So those are the ones that hire the perfumers.

Chandler: And they didn't want the artists to be recognized because they felt that it detracted. I think that acknowledging the artist, only elevates what is a product.

Chandler: Acknowledging the artist only helps us understand these works and their value and their beauty and their importance more.

To help raise the profile of scent artists, Chandler worked with the Museum of Arts and Design in New York to create a brand new kind of museum exhibit. He created an experience that focused entirely on perfumes, and treated their creators with the same reverence as famous painters or sculptors.

Chandler: The Art Of Scent, which is the first scent art exhibition that I did, we started with a work of art that was created in 1889.

The exhibit takes people through over a century of scent art. Unlike walking through a department store, where staff are spraying you with various perfume samples, Chandler’s exhibitions use techniques specifically designed for appreciating olfactory art.

[music in]

[SFX: Museum ambiance]

Chandler: In The Art Of Scent, we actually have two sections for experiencing it. One we call The Gallery, is a very formal space, that's where I have my wall labels on each work.

In the Gallery, Chandler used specially designed, scented beads infused with the perfume

Chandler: You lean toward it and you trip an infrared wire and then the scent comes out [SFX: Perfume spray, sniff sniff]. So it's a very, very efficient and it's a wonderfully fun way, frankly, a sort of high tech way to experience the scent. The second section of the Art of Scent exhibit was the salon, a social space for people to try and discuss different scents.

[SFX: more personal crowd than museum, sniffing, bottles clinking]

Chandler: We actually have the perfume there in glasses and we provide a ton of blotters and you dip them and people talk about them and they hold them and then they shove them in other people's faces. They say, "Smell that, I love that. I think it's amazing." Or, "Smell that, that's insane. I don't understand this." And it really gets sort of experienced by communication

[music out]

Chandler’s exhibits appear in museums around the world, and he continues to advocate for widespread appreciation of olfactory art.

[music in]

While modern society may not go to the same great lengths as the ancient Greeks or Romans to cater to our sense of smell, Chandler has found that the right scent is as profound as it always has been.

Chandler: It's a wonderful mission, if you will, to make people understand these works of scent convey these same things, are drenched in subjectivity, actively seek to change the way you perceive reality, are in fact major works of art in the mainstream of art history.

Chandler: I remember one time I was giving a curator tour, and I went through and there was this guy who ... just sort of nice guy. And he was clearly a tourist in New York, he was there with his family, and he went through and he's not the kind of guy who you think was going to respond to things and he was transfixed and he stood there. After we finished, he stood there after the last work of art just smelling it and smelling it and he turned to me and he said, "What's amazing about this is not just the works of art, is that I never would have imagined that this thing could have this kind of impact on me the way a movie, or a book, or a painting could," and he said that's why it blows me away.

Chandler: I love that.

Twenty Parts Per Thousand is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the studios of Defacto Smells. A scent design team that makes commercials, documentaries, and trailers smell incredible.

Okay so, by now, surely you know something’s up with this episode. And you may be listening to this episode like three years in the future. so I’ll just say it, this is an April Fools episode.

[music in]

Don’t worry, Twenty Thousand Hertz will be back to exploring the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds next time.

This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther. And me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound desgined and mixed by Soren Begin and Jai Berger.

Thanks to our guest Gary Powell for joining us and to Disney for helping out with this episode. And also thanks to Chandler Burr. You can find out more about Chandler’s exhibits at ChandlerBurr.com. The music in this episode is from The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Music Bed. You can find every track name, artist, for every episode we’ve ever done on our website, 20k dot org. Thanks for smelling.

[music out]

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