Twenty Thousand Hertz

Twenty Thousand Hertz episodes:

• 04.17.2024

  Late Night

  The sound of Late Night television is a complex beast with many moving parts. In this episode, we step inside the daily hustle of Broadcast Mixer Fred Hedemark as he and his team bring the sound of Late Night with...

  
• 04.03.2024

  Untranslatable Words

  What do you call it when you’re homesick for a place you’ve never been? Is there a word for letting books pile up in your house without reading them? How about weather that looks beautiful out the window, but that...

  
• 03.20.2024

  Hans Zimmer's Remote Control

  Hans Zimmer is responsible for some of the most iconic film scores of the last 35 years. So how does one person create so much amazing music? It turns out, he doesn’t do it alone. In this episode, Hans Zimmer’s...

  
• 03.06.2024

  Aural Obscura

  All over the world, there are unique and breathtaking sounds that you can only hear in one specific place. In this episode, we travel to two of the most astounding sonic wonders in the United States. The first is a...

  
• 02.28.2024

  All About That Bass

  If you listen to vintage music, one of the first things you’ll notice is the complete lack of bass. But turn on a Top 40 station today, and you’ll hear song after song with deep, sub-ratting bass tones. So how...

  
• 02.21.2024

  Industrial Musicals

  For more than three decades, it was common for American companies to put on “industrial musicals” for their employees. These elaborate productions could rival Broadway shows, and featured original songs about the company and its products. And while this music was...

  
• 01.24.2024

  Into the Huluverse

  Today, virtually every streaming platform has a sonic logo, from HBO’s classic “Static Angel” to the iconic Netflix “Tudum.” For Hulu, standing out in such a crowded marketplace has been a process of experimentation and revision. In this episode, we...

  
• 01.17.2024

  Welcome to Twenty Thousand Hertz

  The world of sound is full of great stories. To get in touch with your sonic world, follow Twenty Thousand Hertz right here in your podcast player. If you’re already a listener, send this trailer to someone you know would...

  
• 12.13.2023

  Tournament of Champions

  For our fourth annual Mystery Sound Game Show, we pitted the winners from the past three years against each other. The result? Chaos and hilarity. So unclog your ears, put on your listening cap, and get ready to play along....

  
• 11.29.2023

  Tune Tech

  From electric guitars to samplers to drum machines and beyond, the music we love is only possible thanks to the technology used to create it. In many ways, the history of popular music is really a history of technological innovation....

  
• 11.15.2023

  Headphone Handbook

  The world of headphones is a deep rabbit hole. With thousands of options and endless technical jargon, it’s hard to know which factors really matter, and which ones are just marketing gimmicks. In this episode, we cut through all of...

  
• 11.01.2023

  Sounds That Sell

  Since the earliest days of commercial radio, companies have been using sound to worm their way into our brains. And over the decades, they’ve come up with all kinds of sonic tactics to make us want, crave and remember their...

  
• 10.18.2023

  Auto-Tone

  The sound of a roaring combustion engine is a fixture of modern life. But as electric vehicles become more and more common, these mechanical sounds will gradually be replaced with artificial tones that have been designed from scratch. And once...

  
• 10.04.2023

  Wilhelm Scream Remix

  For more than seventy years now, filmmakers have been using and reusing a particular scream. Without a doubt, this is Hollywood’s most famous sound effect. Many people even know it by name. But despite how widely-known this sound is, lots...

  
• 09.20.2023

  Subtitles: On

  In recent years, the dialogue in movies and TV shows has gotten harder and harder to understand. No one seems to agree on who or what the main culprit is, much less how to fix the problem. In this episode,...

  
• 09.06.2023

  Mangini's Moments

  Mark Mangini is one of the most prolific sound designers of all time. He’s been credited on over 150 films, including Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Aladdin, Space Jam, The Green Mile, Anchorman, Mad Max: Fury Road, Dune, and tons more....

  
• 08.23.2023

  The Voice Inside

  Many of us talk to ourselves in our heads pretty much all day long. But it turns out that there are plenty of people who don’t. In fact, thinking comes in many shapes and sizes, and no two minds are...

  
• 08.09.2023

  Zelda: Tones of the Kingdom

  The original Zelda game featured three melodies that would come to define the franchise: the Secret Unlocked Sound, the Treasure Chest sound, and the classic Zelda theme. Throughout the series, these melodies have been transformed again and again. Each version...

  
• 07.26.2023

  Zelda: A Beep to the Past

  Music is a quintessential part of the Zelda series. And some of Zelda’s most iconic melodies go all the way back to the original game, on the Nintendo Entertainment System. These tunes were born in an age of 8 bits,...

  
• 06.21.2023

  From Cylinders to Streaming

  The history of recorded sound stretches back over a hundred and fifty years, starting with a device that could “record” a voice on a piece of paper. Today, we can enjoy lossless streaming anywhere we go… but getting here wasn’t...

  
• 06.07.2023

  Seventh-Inning Stretch

  Baseball fan or not, there’s one song that virtually every American knows… or at least, we think we do. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is one of the top three most recognizable songs in the country, next to...

  
• 05.24.2023

  Vocal Stratosphere

  Our vocal system is incredibly complex. What we call “the voice” starts with very precise movements of our vocal cords, and then goes through an entire “resonation system” that includes our throat, mouth, lips, tongue, and teeth. With enough control...

  
• 05.10.2023

  Songbugs

  Why do bugs make the sounds they do? And how do they make them? In this episode, we explore the un-bee-lievable world of insect sounds, including crickets who craft tools to make themselves louder, and moths who can jam the...

  
• 04.28.2023

  Breathe Deep

  In honor of Mental Health Awareness month, we’ve revamped one of the most personal episodes we’ve ever worked on. To create it, Dallas worked with the team from Meditative Story to tell a story from his former life as a...

  
• 04.19.2023

  The Spatial Race

  In the 1960s, stereo sound revolutionized the music industry. But it turns out, a pioneering engineer named Alan Blumlein had actually invented stereo a full three decades earlier. Due to tragic events in World War II, his innovations were forgotten...

  
• 04.12.2023

  Found In Translation

  Have you ever seen something so cute that you just wanted to squeeze it? Have you ever felt sleepy after a big meal? Or enjoyed bouncing on a puffy cushion? There are words for all of these, just not in...

  
• 03.22.2023

  Insurance Jingles... Why?

  For decades, the jingle was king. But in the last twenty years, jingles have nearly gone extinct. Many brands have now dropped their melodic earworms in favor of spoken word slogans. Today, there’s just one industry where jingles are still...

  
• 03.08.2023

  Soundalikes

  “Soundalikes,” also called “voice doubles,” are voice actors who perform as characters that were originally played by someone else. They’re used extensively by studios like Disney and Pixar, in order to keep their iconic characters consistent across games, rides, toys,...

  
• 02.22.2023

  Golden

  In a noisy, tumultuous world, how can we find inner peace? This episode features two stories about the transformative power of silence. In the first, the Lieutenant Governor of Washington State abandons politics to become a Jesuit novice, and takes...

  
• 01.25.2023

  Recalculating

  The voices inside our navigation systems are with us nearly every day. They frustrate us when they lead us astray, and guide us through our most memorable adventures. But who are the people behind those voices? In this episode, an...

  
• 12.14.2022

  Endless Hertz

  In our third annual Mystery Sound Game Show, the crew from Endless Thread compete to guess the most sounds from this year’s batch. Get ready to listen along and test your knowledge of classic sci-fi movies, strange animal calls, video...

  
• 12.07.2022

  Update: Jessie Unmasked

  After months of speculation, the person behind TikTok’s current text-to-speech voice reveals her true identity. This is an update to episode #155, TikTalk. Follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, & Reddit. Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Sign up for Twenty Thousand Hertz+ to...

  
• 11.16.2022

  Synth War II: Digital Doom

  In the 1960s, Bob Moog and Don Buchla built synthesizers that changed the world. But by the early 80s, they faced a new challenger who threatened to bring it all crumbling down: the digital synthesizer. To defeat this opponent, they’d...

  
• 11.02.2022

  Synth War

  In the United States, the East Coast and West Coast have rivalries across food, sports, music and more. But there’s another rivalry that’s less well known, but just as important. This standoff created sounds that were unlike anything that had...

  
• 10.19.2022

  A Thousand Words

  Audio description allows you to enjoy a movie or TV show without the need for any visuals. But how do these narrators strike the right tone for a scene? How do the writers decide what needs to be described? And...

  
• 10.05.2022

  The Booj Strikes Back

  In the 80s and 90s, movie trailers were ruled by “voice-of-God” narrators who used stock phrases like, “In a world…” Today, movie studios have a different trick up their sleeves: epic sound design. In this episode, Professor James Deaville explains...

  
• 09.21.2022

  1-900-20K-HRTZ

  In the late 80s and early 90s, 900 numbers were all the rage. For a couple bucks a minute, you could call and hear from Hulk Hogan and Freddy Kreuger, have a psychic predict your future, and even find true...

  
• 09.07.2022

  Tokyo Rose

  In World War II, the Japanese military operated a propaganda station called Radio Tokyo. Along with jazz music, the station featured several English-speaking female announcers, who became collectively known as Tokyo Rose. But who was Tokyo Rose? And was she...

  
• 08.24.2022

  TikTalk

  In 2018, voiceover artist Bev Standing recorded 10,000 sentences for the Chinese Institute of Acoustics. Bev was told the recordings would be used for a translation app, but three years later, she was shocked to discover that she had become...

  
• 08.10.2022

  Ted Lasso's Dark Forest

  Ted Lasso is about more than just an incompetent soccer coach—it’s about overcoming challenges by working together. And that’s exactly what the show’s sound team had to do when the pandemic hit just two episodes in. From creating crowds of...

  
• 07.27.2022

  Handbook for Sonic Happiness

  We spend a lot of time curating for taste, touch, smell, and vision. But too often, sound gets overlooked. We forget that we can get rid of sounds that annoy us, and surround ourselves with sounds that we love. When...

  
• 07.13.2022

  Shock Horror (A)

  There’s a certain musical phrase that you’ve probably heard hundreds of times. It’s used to emphasize dramatic moments in movies, cartoons, commercials and musicals, most often as a gag. But while this little melody is everywhere today, the question is:...

  
• 07.06.2022

  Sleight of Ear

  What does a sound designer do all day? How do noise canceling headphones really work? And why do modern movie trailers all sound the same? In this follow-up to our 150th episode, Dallas shares the secrets of sound design with...

  
• 06.22.2022

  Breathe

  What if you woke up one day, and found that you could no longer do the thing that gave you the most joy in your life? The thing that gave you purpose? The thing that defined your past, and was...

  
• 06.08.2022

  Relearning Boléro

  In the same way that optical illusions can trick our eyes, auditory illusions can trick our ears. This raises a serious question: what is hearing, and how much of it is actually made up by our brains? In this story...

  
• 05.25.2022

  Ghosts in the (Hit) Machine

  Many of today’s biggest songs are written and produced by people whose names don’t appear anywhere in the credits. They’re called ghostwriters and ghost producers, and they’re a huge part of the music industry. So what’s it like to watch...

  
• 05.11.2022

  Windows_Logon.wav

  Part 2 of our series on the Windows startup sounds picks up when Microsoft made the radical decision to kill the startup sound in Windows 8. In this episode, we explore the forces that led to that decision, unpack how...

  
• 04.27.2022

  Ta-da! It’s Windows

  Over the years, Microsoft has made at least ten iconic startup sounds for Windows—from the triumphant “Ta-da!” of Windows 3.1, to the ambient chime that Brian Eno crafted for Windows 95, to the orchestral sweep of Windows XP. In this...

  
• 04.13.2022

  Liquid Terror

  For nearly half a century, one eerie sound has been showing up again and again in movies and TV shows. It’s typically used when something spooky or mysterious happens—and it can be heard in Poltergeist, The Matrix, Let the Right...

  
• 03.30.2022

  Mind the Gap

  The voices of subway and train announcements are deeply ingrained in peoples’ lives. Many of us hear them every day, for years on end. And yet, hardly anyone knows who those voices belong to. In this episode, we uncover the...