Twenty Thousand Hertz

By Dallas Taylor

Arts Music Design

What's Twenty Thousand Hertz about?

A lovingly crafted podcast that reveals the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

4.8

2,885 ratings

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Tune Tech

11.29.2023

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. ...

Twenty Thousand Hertz episodes:

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 ...
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 ...
03.16.2022 Hidden Hitmakers The names of pop and rock stars are known by millions of people around the world, but the people who actually write their music often stay in the shadows. In this episode, we peel back the curtain on the songwriters ...
03.02.2022 Happy Little Episode In the forty years since The Joy of Painting first started airing, Bob Ross has become a cultural icon. His gentle, soothing voice is instantly recognizable, and still gives comfort to millions of people around the world. But despite his ...
02.16.2022 Pirate Radio In the 1960s, the BBC had a vise grip on British radio, and rarely played the pop and rock music that was all the rage. So a group of rebellious radio DJs decided to give the people what they wanted, ...
02.02.2022 Being Dallas Taylor Your name is so much more than the sound that people call you by. It’s an entire human identity, distilled into a few syllables. So what do six people who share the exact same name have in common? It turns ...
01.19.2022 Sul Sul When The Sims was first being developed, the creators faced a problem. They knew they wanted these characters to talk and interact, but they were worried that using a real language would quickly get repetitive and annoying. So, they decided ...
01.07.2022 Welcome to Twenty Thousand Hertz A lovingly crafted podcast that reveals the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. Subscribe now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
12.15.2021 Aural Exam For our second annual Mystery Sound competition, we’ve rounded up the 20 best sounds from the past year, and invited the hosts of Underunderstood to test their ears in a competitive guessing game. So bust out those Q-tips, turn up ...
12.01.2021 HBO 2.0 In part 2 of our series on HBO, we explore the tough questions that the company faced in the digital era: Are people still willing to sit through a 90-second theme song before they watch a movie? Does the sound ...
11.17.2021 It's Not TV. It's HBO. In the 1980s, every movie that aired on HBO began with a truly epic theme song—a sweeping orchestral piece that triggers instant nostalgia for anyone who grew up with it. Then in the 90s, HBO introduced a 5-second audio logo ...

Older episodes

Twenty Thousand Hertz

What's Twenty Thousand Hertz about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Twenty Thousand Hertz episodes:

Tune Tech

Headphone Handbook

Sounds That Sell

Auto-Tone

Wilhelm Scream Remix

Subtitles: On

Mangini's Moments

The Voice Inside

Zelda: Tones of the Kingdom

Zelda: A Beep to the Past

From Cylinders to Streaming

Seventh-Inning Stretch

Vocal Stratosphere

Songbugs

Breathe Deep

The Spatial Race

Found In Translation

Insurance Jingles... Why?

Soundalikes

Golden

Recalculating

Endless Hertz

Update: Jessie Unmasked

Synth War II: Digital Doom

Synth War

A Thousand Words

The Booj Strikes Back

1-900-20K-HRTZ

Tokyo Rose

TikTalk

Ted Lasso's Dark Forest

Handbook for Sonic Happiness

Shock Horror (A)

Sleight of Ear

Breathe

Relearning Boléro

Ghosts in the (Hit) Machine

Windows_Logon.wav

Ta-da! It’s Windows

Liquid Terror

Mind the Gap

Hidden Hitmakers

Happy Little Episode

Pirate Radio

Being Dallas Taylor

Sul Sul

Welcome to Twenty Thousand Hertz

Aural Exam

HBO 2.0

It's Not TV. It's HBO.