99% Invisible - 168- All In Your Head

Episode Date: June 10, 2015

People who make horror movies know: if you want to scare someone, use scary music. Some of the most creative use of music and sound to evoke fear and anxiety is on the TV show Hannibal. Hrishikesh Hirway of Song … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. People who make horror movies know that if you want to scare someone, use scary music. And when we want to explore the design of music, we call Rishikesh Herway, from the podcast Song Exploder. So here are two fundamental ways to make something sound scary, according to evolutionary biologist Dan Blumstein. The first way is to use lots of screechy irregular tones. Well, the animals, when they're scared, are blowing a lot of air across their vocal cords or across their serencs if they're a bird. And the sounds of screams are something that is arousing and makes people feel negative.

It's biological. Your lizard brain hears Bernard Herman's knife stabbing music and psycho and says something terrible is happening right now The second way sounds can make you feel uneasy is to go the other way make really low grumbling sounds with lots of bass Another biological cube that might lead to fear and anxiety is hearing low frequencies The lowest frequency a species can produce is a function of its body size. So low frequency probably should scare you. It might mean that something big is around.

Mix those both together and you're on your way to creating classic scary music for scary movies. But horror movies aren't just meant to be horrifying. They're also meant to be exciting and fun, so it's sometimes nice to have a driving beat. The music from the movie Halloween by a composer John Carbiter will always greet me out, and also get me kind of excited. In terms of horror movies, I certainly know that I respond to sound in horror movies in ways that are complex. You know, John Carbenter's soundtracks are, you know, good example, you know,

that's a very specific thing. It evokes dread. David Slade is very good at evoking dread himself. My name is David Slade, I directed the pilot for the first episode of Hannibal, and I'm an executive producer on the show, and I pretty much sound mix every episode. I've been binging on the TV show Hannibal for the past couple weeks, and it really gets under your skin. It's the story of a serial killer named Hannibal Lecter who you may know from Silence of Lams and Man Hunter. This is kind of a prequel to those stories.

Hannibal is a nasty character who commits grisly and unspeakable crimes. The other main character is Will Graham, an FBI profiler who has a knack for getting inside the heads of serial killers to try to catch them. Trust me, there is nothing fun going on inside Wilgram's head, and inside Wilgram's head is exactly where the sound design of Hannibal is trying to place the viewer. Wilgram visualizes things, and he recognizes patterns, this is what he does, he reconstructs things in his head, it's a mental activity, it's an abscess firing, these are things that we want to make an audio and log off.

So there's a lot of clink, clink, clink, clink, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click All the classic horror movie music we mentioned before exists outside the world of the story. In other words, it's not being heard by the character as being depicted. It's just being heard by the audience. But composer Brian Ritesle's score for Hannibal feels different. You get a sense that it's even being heard by Will Graham inside his own imagination. Our whole goal with horror really is to transport people into this other reality, and it's a scary reality. It's a tense reality, but it's a beautiful place too. But to do that, I find the most effective way to scare people is to throw

sounds at them that are unfamiliar to them. So Brian constructs new sounds that the audience can't place to create unease. That's not a guitar. What is that? audience can't place to create unease. That's not a guitar. What is that? A lot of what we do is create all of the sound. So we turn all the sound effects off and the ones that we think are important, we try to make something that resembles that sound or feels like that sound. I don't differentiate really between ambient sounds like a motor and a bass. So in this case, he's on a motorcycle. I thought it'd be really interesting to make the feeling

of what it would be like being on that motorcycle. Russia would adrenaline and the wind and the sound of the engine, which is underneath you. I mean, all this is very powerful stuff. So the first idea I had was to do it with an upright bass. Just glistening up and down the neck. Ooh, ooh, ooh, kind of revving. The cue starts with the motorcycle starting up, so we do lots of little things in there to mimic or hint at those sounds.

On screen we're seeing the key turn castenets, then we see the flames from the engine, the sound of heat, is me bowing a wood block. Put some reverb on it and it sounds like smoke. The more I work with the different instruments, the more I understand what you can get out of them. Almost all the sounds in Hannibal start out as an acoustic element from Brian Rytel's workshop. Then the effort is made to strip it of identifying characteristics that would ground the sound in the real world.

I'm constantly trying to de-guitar or D drum, a drum. That's Brian placing a wooden chopstick on a snare drum and pulling a violin bow across the chopstick. You could never tell by listening that a chopstick, bow, or a drum made this sound. Brian doesn't just take regular instruments and make them weird. He also takes weird instruments and makes them weirder. I went around Brian's studio as he pulled out examples of the instruments he uses. For example, the sound of synapses firing inside Wilgram's head started out as a Newton's cradle. If you don't know a Newton's cradle by name, you definitely know the sound.

Right, everybody knows this. It sits on your desk. You know it's that pendulum toy with the stainless steel balls hanging from strings. But what I did is I used it as a, I used it to create these rhythms, um, uh, synapse in your brain stuff. And, and did some different treatments of those and used those as a percussion instrument. You can see I actually broken in the process. There were originally five balls that were a perfect unison. Even the most innocuous instruments turned sinister in the hands of Brian Ritzel.

These slay bells I just used in this first episode of Hannibal because I had snails and I had these macro shots of snails. But really it's C, slave-o. And you know, I can go on and on. David Slade calls the sound design of Hannibal free associative. They look at the footage and talk about the characters and the feelings they're trying to evoke from each scene and design from there. The big bad guy in Hannibal is of course Hannibal Lecter, but Wilgram also is wrestling with

his own demons. He has dreamlike visions of a demon they call the Windigo that represents both the evil of Hannibal and the evil growing inside Wilgram. One of the characters that developed over time was the Wendigo character, which is the bassist of horrors. And we wanted a sound that indicated the coming of that character. That sound, I knew it was circular. We didn't know why, but we knew that was right. And...

I took what David said literally, and I got a bullroar, but basically it's a piece of wood on a string. It's one of the oldest instruments, but it sounds incredible. You spin it in a circular manner and in doing so it slices through the air creating this sort of sound. Once we put it against the picture we knew it was the last time. It's very physical sounding, sort of cutting through the air, spinning around your head, making it surreal, yet also very physical. I also did things to that sound.

I pitched it down, I pitched it up to make it scarier. Well, mission accomplished, guys, because I'm creeped up, f**k out. Rishi Keishirui is the creator of Song Exploder, which I am very proud to say is now a member of the Raditopia collective. I'm so excited. Song Exploder is one of my favorite podcasts and the premise is just perfect. Musicians take apart their songs piece by piece to tell the story of how they were made. If you've never heard Song Exploder before, I want to present what I think is my favorite episode so far featuring John Roderick of the long winters, but I have

a hard time picking a favorite. I really think you should just download them all and pick your own favorite. Now from Radio Topia, this is Song Exploder. My fellow Americans, this day he's brought terrible news and great sadness to our country. At 9 o'clock this morning, mission control in Houston lost contact with our space shuttle Columbia. A short time later, debris was seen falling from the skies above Texas. The Columbia's lost. There are no survivors. That was President George W. Bush addressing the nation on February 1st 2003.

A couple years later John Roderick, singer and songwriter of the long winters recorded a song about the space shuttle Columbia on that day as it broke apart while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. It's called The Commander Things Allowed. This episode is made from an interview I did with John Roderick in front of a live audience in Seattle about how and why he made this song. I am John Roderick. I had my pilot's license when I was 17. My dad was a small plane pilot. And that was the way my dad, it was one of the ways that we bonded, was in a small plane, you know, trying to make it over a mountain range. So I had a lot of experience in planes.

I always love to fly. And when the nose comes off the ground, I always feel a charge. I didn't want to be a person that was anxious about flying. Well, at that point in 2005, I guess, we were still pretty close to 9-11, and the space shuttle disaster followed pretty close on the heats.

But also there were all those smaller disaster crashes. The Alaska Airlines crash that happened off the coast of California where they lost their vertical stabilizer, the jack screw one. The pilots were aware there was a problem, everyone was aware there was a problem, it just flew around and then flipped upside down and plummeted into the ocean. And then there was the one off of Long Island where maybe the gas tank exploded and then there was that lear jet that lost compression and everybody in it gone until it ran on a gas. And all of these disasters stuck with me,

particularly the ones where there was a sense that the people on board knew that they were lost, but they were still alive. The unfolding, dawning realization like, you know, we're not getting out of this. And what's your reaction in that situation, do you scream? You probably don't.

Probably everybody is really calm in that situation. And so I pictured the astronauts on reentry. They knew there was something wrong with their ship. They were worried about it, but everybody had convinced them it was going to be fine. And they're performing their duties, they are having the peak experience of their lives. And maybe one of the peak human experiences like we are coming back to Earth, having just like looked down at Earth and had that, feeling how beautiful that kind of dumb little stuff is. The beauty of the mundane, right, like boys and girls and cars and dogs and birds on lawns,

like seeing it maybe, like no one else would ever see. Boys and girls in cars, dogs and birds on lawns. From here I can touch the sign. Did you sit down with the idea that you were going to write a song about the spatial disaster? Yeah, but I didn't know how it was going to work. Every once in a while you get one as a songwriter where you sit down at your instrument, you have an idea, you have a first line, you sing it and compose the entire song in an hour, and then you go, I don't know where that came from. I resisted piano lessons as a kid, but sometime in high school, I started to sit at the piano

voluntarily when no one was home and try and figure it out. And I got as far as you could go if you were just practicing for 11 minutes at a time. And I didn't really learn the piano until I was in my 30s. Learned the piano as much as I know it now. In the early 90s, in Seattle especially, there was a mentality that you didn't want to over-learn your instrument Right because that was going to affect the authenticity of your feelings And I embraced that hook line and sinker

So the producer of this track was Tucker Martine Tucker had a just a stand-up parlor piano in his living room That was recorded in his living room. Now we would probably just record at one measure and loop it. But at the time I had to sit and play it for five minutes and then I would get to the end and he'd be like, hmmm. Let's hit it again. Let's hit it again. Eric Corison, Long Winner's bass player, and my chief musical partner. He sat down at the microchord, which is not an instrument he knew, but he worked with

it for a little bit and figured it out. There are five or six moments in the song that without Eric's part, it would be so much less of a complete work. His part is very cinematic. As the song unfolds, it just starts to go sideways and every successive verse, stuff is starting to break. Most of the long-winner songs are about relationships and they are

intentionally difficult to parse because they're meant to communicate in an emotional language rather than in a literal language. And so as I was writing this song, I As I made my way through the emotional story I was trying to tell I did arrive at a place where I was like I need to arrive at a place where I was like I need to give a clue here somewhere. The crew compartment's breaking up. I was embarrassed to say the crew compartment's breaking up because I felt like it was too literal. And so to say the crew compartment's breaking up, the first time I went through it, I was just like, ah, you know, but it needed it. The crew compartment's breaking up.

The crew compartment's breaking up. And the thing was, you sing it once, the second time everybody gets it, the third time they've heard it now, the fourth time they're like, okay, all right. Fifth, the sixth time, it heard it now, the fourth time they're like okay all right, fifth, the sixth time it starts to get annoying and then a new kind of gravity enters in seventh time. You start to feel the emotion. Breaking up the crew compartments breaking up. And when I perform at live, if I'm not careful,

I will start to cry during that part. Those are real violins. We tried to get a little string quartet to come and we ran several passes at it. We took that and played it double speed. And they did their own version of this kind of swarm of bees. So we didn't have a drummer and it was like who should we get? Should we call that one guy? He was like, or I could get the best drummer in the country. Any producer would make that choice if he had Matt Chamberlain's number. And Tucker did.

And he managed to not just introduce swing into it, but make this piano part, which on its own is very square and on top of the beat. And he played to it and introduced swing to it, played a little bit behind and a little bit with this tremendous sort of breath and energy. And watching it all happen was a revelation to me as a musician. I understood how much I had to learn. So what Matt did, he came in, he set up his drums and he had one microphone that he pulled out of a bag

and set up himself. And we all just were watching him, like you would watch a black panther that came into your kitchen. It's like, what's it gonna do? And he put the microphone in front of his drums and he was like, okay, you know, record me. And so he plays for about a minute and then he's like, play that back for me.

He listens to the track for a minute. And then he stands up, he walks around and he moves the microphone imperceptibly. Sits back down and says, roll it. And he plays all the way through the track. And I was listening to it and going like, you know, I'm the songwriter and kind of the main guy here. And I was like, yeah, that was pretty good. I mean, I've got some comments. And we got to the end and he was like, okay, roll it again.

You know, and didn't wait to hear any comments from the songwriter, which is like, all right. He played through it again, and I was like, no, it was really interesting. You know, this kind of variation. And he was like, give it to me again. He did that five times. And then he's like, all right, you know, I'm coming into the control room. And he comes in, he sits down and he's like all right you know I'm coming into the control room and he comes and he sits down and he's like okay pan those five tracks hard left middle left center middle

right hard right in the order that I recorded them five mono drum parts and he had the four side that there are drum fills that start on one track and continue through all five tracks. So, you know, you hear about guys and you're like, oh, that guy's amazing! But this was something truly amazing. As part of his drum kit, I forgot to mention, he has a piece of rusty sheet metal. Just attached to a clamp. And he starts to go up to this sheet metal like and all of that sheet metal noise that he was creating. The whole end of the

tune where the spaceship is coming apart he was making that sound on the rusty metal. He had a vision of the song that I didn't even have. You know, the title of the song wasn't clear until right about this point in the recording. And so then, if the commanders, you know, thinking aloud, why is he telling us this story? ZI WANTED TO BRING HOME ZI WANTED TO BRING HOME TO YOU That's his last word, I guess. Do you have a sense of who he was addressing when he says that?

I don't publicly out myself as a utopian and a people lover because it's not my brand. But I'm an idealist and I love humanity and I imagine us as all in a ship together and with a common cause. And space exploration seems like the ultimate expression of human beings doing their best work. So I imagine he's bringing that back to us, all of us, something that if we could only share that the simple feeling of just like like why the hell do we go up into space we go up into space to bring back that little tantalizing like vision of

the earth being a borderless place full of birds and boys and girls And now here's the commander things allowed by the long winters in its entirety. Boys and girls in cars, dogs and birds are long From here I can touch the sun Yeah, yeah With your jacket on I feel we're being born The tropical capricorn is below Yeah Yeah Yeah

Yeah We start above the pole Still your face is young As we feel our weight return Yeah Yeah The trail of shit takes stars The horses call the storm Because the earth contains the charm Yeah, yeah, yeah The radio is on The year is on

And Houston knows the score Can you feel it with all of my own time? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Oh Break it now Criminal components Break it now Scythe, Criminal components Break it now Scythe, Criminal components Break it now Scythe, Criminal components Reckless breaking the sun

Declaring requirements Reckless, I'm just ready ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ The Rishikesh Rwae is the creator of Song Exploder, now from Radio Topia. Find out more at songexploder.net. 99% Invisible is Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan,, Avery Troubleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arkson, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, we're on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Spotify too, but if you want to tell a fanable, that's a fan of the show Hannibal about our show.

The best place to send them is 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX. From PRX.