Sound Show

There’s an uncomfortable genre of bootleg classical music recordings floating around the internet. They’re big, public bloopers by professional musicians. They’re somewhat rare, and in many cases they’re posted anonymously. They’re sort of mysterious. But hearing a little crack in the facade every now and then, can make music more approachable, and a little more human.

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From the beginning, Pandora has banked on a proprietary music rating system called the Music Genome Project. It involves rating songs on hundreds of attributes, from “aggressive drumming” and “jazz influences” to “angry lyrics” and “ambiguous soundscapes.” These ratings are given by trained musicologists — people who are musicians themselves, many of whom have advanced degrees in music — and it takes about 12 to 15 minutes per song. 

We wanted to know: Was it worth it?

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Back in October 2016, researchers at George Mason University published a report on the peculiar distribution of airport noise complaints. The most lopsided figures came out of Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC, where authorities said a single individual was responsible for 6,500 complaints in 2015. Roberto Vittori is that individual. His dogged persistence single handedly increased the number of noise complaints in DC by a factor of five.

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You can barely hear it, but it's there; each year on "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve," amid the ruckus of Times Square in the moments after midnight, a gentle, plaintive big-band version of "Auld Lang Syne" hums along softly. It's the sound of the New Year in the English-speaking world, but only a phantom presence in the broadcast beamed to those of us not unhinged enough to camp out all night in midtown. A remnant of an age well before Ryan Seacrest, listening to this recording takes us back to a time when Dick Clark, TV, and rock and roll vied against Guy Lombardo (and the Royal Canadians), radio, and sweet jazz for the ears of Americans on New Year's Eve.

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This week we're messing with your head. We've all seen optical illusions, but it turns out there are auditory illusions, as well: sounds that exploit the way we process audio and make us perceive it in unexpected ways. On today's episode, we pick four auditory illusions and try them out on each other.

And by the way, you'll want to listen on headphones, since a lot of these rely on the separation of your left and right ears.

If you're looking for more auditory illusions, check out Diana Deutsch's work on illusions and paradoxes: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/

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Today, we bring you two stories about movie sounds. First, the story behind Deep Note, the iconic audio logo for THX, and how it was almost lost forever. Then, things get a little personal as one producer with an axe to grind embarks on a journey to find a quieter popcorn kernel.

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Hearpeopledie is an offshoot of a subreddit called watchpeopledie, which is for videos of graphic violence. Audio, however, is a little more hardcore.

The clips on r/hearpeopledie range from quiet moments of legal assisted suicide to the violent death of someone being hit by a car. Adrianne Jeffries wanted to understand why people listen to these recordings, and what draws some gore fans to audio in particular.

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The hip-hop theater scene has been around for a while, but it’s been launched into the spotlight by the recent success of the musical Hamilton. In its wake, a workshop called #BARS was created to mix the worlds of hip hop, theater, and verse. There are singers, poets, rappers, actors, and playwrights in here, handpicked by Def Poetry Jam vets, theater directors, and Broadway actors. In short: they have skills. And they are using them to try and change the landscape of contemporary theater.

On this episode of Sound Show, we’re talking about the sounds of verse, and hip hop, and theater, and what it means when they all occupy the same space.

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Sound Show is starting soon. Get ready.

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