Radiolab - Making Radiolab

Episode Date: November 9, 2007

In spring of 2006, Jad and Robert took the stage at the SoHo Apple Store to talk about the making of Radiolab. Jad geeks out on the nitty-gritty of digital sound editing, and Robert discusses the editorial questions raised in creating imaginative soundscapes. And film editor Walter Murch weighs in on the components of storytelling.

I should quite You're listening to Radio Lab, the podcast. From New York Public Radio, WNYC, and NPR. Hello, this is Jad from Radio Lab. While we work on season four of Radio Lab, which we hope to release sometime in the new year, very soon in the new year, we thought we would play you some excerpts from a talk that Robert and I gave at the Apple Store in Soho. They asked us to come talk about the show, and we ended up talking about the thing that we never actually address explicitly on the air,

which is how we use sound, which we do a lot of on radio lab. This is the one time we actually got to talk about it. About 250 people showed up to hear us. I fired some clips from my laptop. They had this big, beautiful sound system and a very fancy screen behind us, and we started the whole presentation with a piece of tape that got stuck in our heads as we were making one of our programs. It's a little clip that became the...

the basis for the musical language show and we played it for the crowd. It happened during an interview with a developmental psychologist by the name of Anne Fernald. She was talking about how moms talk to their babies and she said this thing. Well, you know, I think it's more, we're used to thinking of sounds like that as being about something because speech is always about something. But it feels to me more like touch, where touch isn't about something. If you whack me on the arm in a sudden sharp way I'm going to be startled or a gentle touch has has a different effect. And I think, you know, actually, sound is kind of touch at a distance. Sound is kind of touch at a distance.

For some reason, that phrase just stayed in the air. Sound is kind of touch at a distance. And it just didn't leave. And I thought, well, you know, that's, I said, well, you know, actually, that's literally the case, because if I'm making the sound, particularly through this enhanced device. Air is pulsing and it's going into your ears and actually we could do a journey that way. There's another reporter in our group named Jonah Lera who's up in living in Concord,

New Hampshire. We called him, he began sending us notes. He had a notion which we'll explain in a bit. But this is then what we made. And I'm going to play it to you first and then we're going to dissect it and you'll see what a genius

I'm working with actually. All right, so this is this is an interview with Robert and Jonah, which we embroidered, shall we say. More like touch. It's just waves of vibrating air. It's just your voice. Touch.

At a distance. Beginning in your voice box, compresses air, and that air travels through space and time. Into my ear. The little tunnel. Waves of diffuse vibrating air. focused and channeled into my eardrum, which vibrates a few very small bones.

And the little bones transmit the vibration into this salty sea, where the hairs are. And the hair cells are fasting. The hair cells become active when they are literally bent by way. They bend like trees in a breeze. And when these hair cells bend, charged molecules flood inwards and activate the cell.

So the sound triggers the bones, the bones disturbs the fluid, the fluid rocks the hairs. Yes. And then the hair set off essentially electricity? Yes. Huh. That's the language of neurons. All those changes from waves to bones to electricity, all those things were a trip on their way to being heard. It's only when the electricity finally forms a pattern in your brain.

Only when it's deep inside, that's when you hear something. It feels to me more like touch. Sound is kind of touch at a distance. Now, I don't exactly know how he did that. And I don't exactly know, you know, I mean, at the time. Well, should I jump in? I wonder if you could just break it down. Sure.

When you open up sound in a sound editor, it looks kind of like that. So you see that each of the words... Okay, podcast listeners, I'm going to interrupt here just to tell you visually what happened next. I took that scrap of sound that we just heard. Sound is like touch at a distance, and I opened it in a sound editor,

and it popped up on the big screen behind me, and what the audience saw was the waveform of that sentence. In a waveform, it looks kind of like a mountain range. Each little piece of sound is like a peak or a valley, and if it's a sharp consonant, it's a sharp peak, if it's a vowel, it's broad. and I demonstrated to people how you can literally grab these little mountains, these little hills of sound, and stretch them.

For instance, if you took the ch from touch, just the ch, and you grabbed it and stretched it, it would sound something like this. So that's ch' extended over a long period of time. Yeah, and you hear how it starts to sound a little bit like wind. Yeah. So that plus let's take the breath that you were just pointing to. Yes. And let's do the same sort of, you know, smearing of that.

moment combined with the other thing and you get something like this. That's built from Anne Furnold's voice. Nothing added, nothing extra. From her breath and her ch. Now let's take the t of touch. Yeah. And just use the little grains of sound that are in the t. And then stutter those and you get something like this.

So there you've got wind. You've got a nice low sort of gravelly watery thing going on. You've got the t which is the sound of the hairs bending. in the ears, perhaps? And then you've got... You built the whole thing out of her sentence? With a few exceptions.

With the bones, except for the bones, except for some splishy, splashy water. The entire journey of sound which you heard a moment ago and we'll play it again is built entirely

of that sentence. Completely and totally from the syllables... The bones I know were extra, right? From the sound effects records? I couldn't figure out to do that.

It was just... Wow. It was just that. There's one last thing. Can I just... Yeah, yeah. The electricity, I don't know if you wonder. That is the hard S on distance.

Kind of have to use your imagination, but that run through many distortion filters and the volume jacked up becomes this. Really? Yeah. Because in a... I don't hear any... Or I just hear...

Well, if you can imagine that little peak there at the very end, being a much more... much more pointy and taller peak, and then running it through basically the same kind of distortion pedals. I'd like for everybody to listen again to the exact same thing. Now that you know that the entire thing was a manufacturer from the raw material of just one sentence, let's just hear it one more time and then we'll move on, but realize that this has been a re-this is just basically a re-assembly from the raw stuff.

More like touch. It's just waves of vibrating air. It's just your voice. Touch and a dist. Beginning in your voice box compresses air, and that air travels through space and time. Into my ear. The little tunnel.

Waves of diffuse vibrating air focused and channeled. Into my eardrum, which vibrates a few very small bones. And the little bones transmit the vibration into this salty sea. Where the hairs are. And the hair cells are fascinating. The hair cells become active when they are literally bent by way. They bend like trees in a breeze.

And when these hair cells bend, charged molecules, flood inwards and activate the cell. So the sound triggers the bones. The bones disturbs the fluid. The fluid rocks the hairs. Yes. And then the hair's set off essentially electricity? Yes.

Huh. That's the language in their arms. All those changes from waves to bones to electricity, all those things were a trip on their way to being heard. It's only when the electricity finally forms a pattern in your brain. Only when it's deep inside, that's when you hear something. It feels to me more like touch. Sound is kind of touch at a distance.

Sound is also in our case, we use it for a variety of things, and one of the more important elements is a kind of paint. We like emotion and feeling and surprise, and we are always trying to goose what we've got. And in a show about minds and bodies, and the conversation between brain and body that goes on constantly, and sometimes gets out of hand and sometimes gets us confused, it's a show coming up, so we haven't heard, this hasn't been aired yet, there is a scene in which we have some pilots. These pilots have been brought into a room, and they've been put into some kind of a sort of a centrifugee kind of thing.

Can you explain? Let me, let me, Anne, Carra, are you guys here? Those two very fine radio producers right there. They talk to a lot of pilots about something that was happening to pilots many years ago. Pilots fly in planes that go very fast, and when they make these fast, hard turns, there's a tremendous amount of gravitational force that's applied to their person, which, if you've ever heard the term G-force, that's what we're talking about. As the turns get harder and faster, there's a very unfortunate thing that happens to the pilots,

which is that the blood in their brains gets pulled violently and pulls in their abdomen, and they black out, which is not a good thing to happen when you are flying a plane. So there was an experiment which we wanted to profile, and so Ann and Kara interviewed the guy who did this experiment. He got a bunch of pilots into his centrifuge, which is this big long, 50-foot arm that spins round and round, and at the end of this arm is a mock pretend-content cockpit. Pilots sit in that, pretend to fly a plane, chasing an enemy aircraft, and then all the while it gets spun. And they have to sit and do something. They have to pretend they're flying.

It means a flight simulator, essentially. And they get spun around really fast, and then they black out. and when they black out, Jim Winnery, the researcher, measures how long they're blacked out, what happens, do they convulse, don't they convulse, all kinds of various things. The results... And then they're called back, they try to get them to wake up. Yes, they do. No. Right. I guess that's worth saying. So we're going to play, I guess, a minute and a half clip from that piece. They essentially, they, those two over there, ask these pilots, well, what does that like? Tell us about the experiment, give us a sort of sense of, of... of how that was for you. Scared?

Pilots don't do scared. Three, two, one, pressure. The task was to chase this little airplane, so I'd sit there and you'd follow it, and first couple maneuvers would be, you know, three Gs. G-forces is the... Well, it's like when you're on a roller coaster. Five Gs.

That force that pins you back in your seat? Yeah, yeah. Seven Gs. Except really on a roller coaster, you're only ever going to experience. It's about two Gs. And then nine Gs. Nothing like these guys.

The high G force is hurt. The skin on your face sagged, your eyelids sag so low that you can't see out from under them. You wind up tilting your head back to look out from under your own eyelids that are sagging down in front of your face. Meanwhile, you're tensing all your leg muscles and your abdominal muscles and your arm muscles as hard as you can. You learn to use your body to fight it, and what you do is you tense every muscle from your toes to your calves and thighs. Push it out. Push it all the way up. All the way up. Okay, get a breath. And you start to say the word hook.

And you hold it for three seconds. And then you finish it off by finishing the k of the hook. So these pilots, they sound like they're wrestling or fighting or something. Hook. They're grunting and groaning and hook. Making all these hook noises. It's like that. the most G I've ever pulled was 12.4 G's.

Now, you can understand when you listen to that, there's a couple of tensions that were introduced. How do we know that what we've just heard is a real thing or our thing? Well, I see where you're going with this. It's an Ed Murrow kind of question. Sure, sure. These are real interviews, if that's, I mean, just to sort of clarify. They were done very much not knowing how they would be sort of composed and arranged in the final product.

It just so happened in the case of the hook. That's just something that pilots do. And every pilot that they talked to made that sound. And it's something very visceral and percussive and musical about that moment. So when you get to that moment where they actually do the hook, it becomes a kind of musical event at that point, which is, I think, one of the secrets of our notion to storytelling is that it is a musical act. You're playing with rhythm, you're playing with meter, you're playing with beats. So when you've got these sort of great vocal, whatever those are, you just treat them almost as a composer would with notes.

I think you have a raw interview with a pilot, do you not? I do. And you have an enhanced one. I think it would be interesting just to hear what it sounds like when they did it and what it sounds like after he abused it. And then... So let's just hear. Do we need to set this up at all this pilot? Yeah, I'll do the setup.

This is one of our guys that we heard just a moment ago. His name's Tim Sestak. He's, if you can imagine, in the course of this experiment, getting spun around, spun around, spun around, well, he blacks out. This is the moment which he comes to, or he's recalling that moment. And he's in this little pod,

and he has to kind of assess the situation. When I woke up, I remember just sitting there, and I'm in this little white space. I actually had no idea who I was, where I was, or what I was doing. So I'm sitting in this little white ball, and I'm looking around and I hear this beeping. There's this white-like beeping. And then at that moment, I realize that I'm in a little room and that I'm supposed to do something

and that one of the things I'm supposed to do is press that button. So I press the button. And at that moment, I realize, holy mackerel, I'm a pilot, I'm in an airplane, and I'm not flying it. and I grabbed the controls and then just in a giant rush. I'm Tim Sestack. Holy mackerel. I'm Tim Sestack. I'm a pilot.

I'm flying in the centrifuge. All came back to me at once and I was okay. All right. So that's the raw version. Son sound design. Let me just go right ahead and I'll see what you did to it. When I woke up, I remember just sitting there and I'm in this little white space. I actually had no idea who I was.

Who am I? where I was or what I was doing. Why am I doing this? So I'm sitting in this little white ball, and I'm looking around. What is this all about? I hear this beeping. There's this white-like beeping. And then at that moment, I realize that I'm in a little room,

and that I'm supposed to do something, and that one of the things I'm supposed to do is press that button. So I press the button. And at that moment, I realized, holy mackerel. I'm a pilot, and I'm in an airplane, and I'm not flying it. and I grab the controls and then just a giant rush. I'm Tim Sestack. Holy mackerel. I'm Tim Sestack. I'm a pilot. I'm flying in the centrifuge.

All came back to me at once and I was okay. Commander Sestack, Dr. Bennett. How are you feeling? Like you look, I've been going a long time. Now you see, there's a real difference there. I mean, there are stunning silences. There are times when the sounds are slightly piled up on each other. And the instinct to do that will raise in some quarters some questions

like, you know, like, who's the, what experience are we having here? Ours or his? At the same time, I mean, here's our argument, I mean, anticipating that someone might have this problem. We are manipulating reality to a degree but it is the

music that we create that is in some way our sort of take. Yeah, I mean, how I would put it is that in the case of the thing you just heard, it's a little sort of story lit that has, you know, he's in a white space, he's doing all these things. As a story, I mean, you have to follow the story, I guess. I mean, I think people are savvy enough to know that when you are leading them in a place is that the story doesn't want them to go. And in that moment, I mean, you look for the transformation moments. Like he has five or six points where he wakes up, you know.

He's in a white space, kind of womb-like, all of a sudden, oh, my God, I'm in a plane. I have to fly the plane. And then, oh my God, I'm Tim Sestak. It's like this whole journey of life in this little, like, moment. And so all that the sound is doing there, I mean, there is some emotional information that's being conveyed. But really, it's just sort of hammering each point of transformation. It's saying it's sort of like in a kind of punctuational way.

It's giving a kind of exclamation point on each one. And we do this to ourselves. In the sections in which we're talking back and forth and arguing, and they are real actual conversations, we are very conscious of the musicality. So there will be times when he will say, basically, take it down, or things like, rather frequently.

This is like a difference in age. I mean, if you're born in the 50s and the 60s and stuff, or you're born in the 80s and 90s, I think you have different jokes, different music, different conversations in your head, a whole different set of how you read life. And what I often notice with Ellen and Chan, some of the people that I have to work with who are younger than me,

is I'll come in and I'll say, okay, here's how we should do this. We're always like, Robert, Robert, quiet. Yeah, they do that. And so I accuse them of this intense, ridiculous desire for irony and distance. And I feel that I'm being blamed for my own heart pounding. No, but a bit of indifference to you. You often tell us to get interested. Stop being so mellow.

And that's also, I think. But we are having absolutely a generational story. struggle in the middle of all this, because what I love to hear and what he and she and them love to hear are actually different sounds. And so you really whack each other. What we end up doing in these conversations in the studio is I go, Les. I go, less. I go, yeah.

I go, yeah. I go, yeah. I go, yeah. I said, yeah, that was yeah? You know, and then I look at Ellen, and I said, that was yeah. And it's frankly incomprehensible to me. Still, even now. I mean, to sort of bring this back to that, it is the middle space.

The middle space between your tendency toward want to sort of perform in a more forward way, my tendency to want to kind of lean back. There is that middle ground, which I hope the show kind of lives in, which another of us could come up with on our own. No. And we both share, in fairness, this idea about touching at a distance. Okay, here I played a clip from one of my personal heroes. Merch, who's a great film editor who did The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Cold Mountain, a million

other great movies, and he's a great thinker about editing and sound. As far as we can tell from the evolutionary record, the oldest sense that we have is either the sense of smell or the sense of touch, that's how amoebas and bacteria is used to navigate around in the world. Hearing is a very refined sense of touch. And it developed, of all the five senses, it's the latest to be developed by living entities on earth. The paradox about hearing is that as the child is growing in the womb, it's the first of the senses to get hooked up. About four and a half months after conception, which is to say halfway through gestation, the child begins to hear. Now, the child is not seeing anything because it's dark in there.

The child isn't tasting anything or smelling anything, but hearing, for all intents and purposes, the world into which the child is developing, which is to say the mother's middle is full of sound. It's got the mother's heartbeat 24 hours a day. It's got her breathing 24 hours a day. The gurgling of her intestines at certain times of day, it's got her voice. And remembering that the womb is pretty thin, does nothing to prevent sounds from. outside, the father's voice, music penetrating in and being heard by the developing child. So sound as touch starts way, way early. Okay, so moving right along, we then played a clip from a segment from our musical language show, which looks at a particular piece of music, Igor Stravinsky's right of spring,

and what it can teach us about how our brains deal with unpleasant noises. In 1913, Stravinsky premiered the rite of spring. It was a ballet. Nijinsky did the choreography. And when it premiered, all hell broke loose. Robert and Jonah Laird do the play-by-play. So let's begin. First, Jonah, how does this just set the scene? This is May 1913. It's a spring night?

It's a balmy summer night. Black-tie costumes. The women have their fedoras. This was evening clothes. Yeah, well, this was the Russian ballet. was high art. And the program said this is a concert about springtime, but as they settled into their seats, it turns out that what Stravinsky had in mind

was not spring like Cunnybees. Now, the spring Stravinsky had in mind was about change, about radical change, ritual murder. Literally, that's what the story of the play is. It's a pagan ritual where at the end, the Virgin, gets massacred. Oh, dear.

But the music itself is fascinating. The beginning is this very charming bassoon. It's a classic Lithuanian folk tune. And it does sound like the earth is warming. And that lasts for about a minute. And then we get some tutia flutes. And it's lovely. It's getting a little more disturbing.

And then about three minutes into it, everything changes. There's just an earthquake. Stravinsky plays this chord. There's a great story that when Diagalev, who is the head of the Ballet Rousse, first heard this chord, and Svinsky was playing it on the piano form, he asked Stravinsky, how long will it go on like that? And Sravinsky looked at him and said, To the end, my dear.

And it literally does. That chord structures the music. It's one of the most difficult sounds you've ever heard. It is just the stereotype of dissonance. It is, it hurts you. Huh. Well, what happened? Well, after about three minutes, they rioted.

They what? They rioted. Meaning what? Like, they screamed or through? They screamed. There was blood. Old ladies were hitting each other with canes. Why were old ladies?

Old ladies should have gone and hit Stravinsky with a cane. Well, once they started screaming, Stravinsky ran backstage. and by some accounts was crying. Nijinsky was off on the side of the stage screaming to his dancers to keep the beat. Wow. Quite the fiasco. And the question is why. You know what I love about that?

It's three minutes simply to ask a question, which is a question we're interested in, which is like why does music sometimes create such intense emotion, not always good emotion? And the why that we go on to sort of answer, subsequently is that it turns out, and this is new science and it's speculative science, we should say,

there are these gangs of neurons in a particular part of your brain called the auditory cortex that are responsible for decoding new sounds, sounds that you've never heard before. And they generally do a really good job, but every so often they hear sounds which are relentlessly new,

which it was in this case. And it never goes back to the sounds they know. And in those cases, when they fail, and they can't decode the sounds, they scored out some dopamine. Dopamine is not always a bad thing. Little dopamine makes you feel happy. That's why sex and drugs and chocolate and various things make you feel good. But too much dopamine has been shown clinically to cause schizophrenia.

Now, we don't want to oversimplify schizophrenia, but perhaps, and this is the argument we put forward, what happened that night was that their brains flooded with dopamine. and they literally went crazy. And then we go on to propose that a year later in Paris, a year later, this same guy comes back to the same hall, plays the same piece of music, and this time he's carried out on the shoulders of the crowd. 25 years later, Mickey Mouse is performing this particular piece with Tuscanyi,

and it's become almost kiddie music. So then we asked, what happened? How did the music that was so fierce, so new, and so disturbing on Monday, become kiddie music on Thursday, and that leads to another notion about the brain that it is a very conservative organ and it steals from artists. Yeah.

You're going to have to explain that a little bit. Well, I don't think I will. But what was very cool afterwards is it turns out that with this speculative notion, again, Walter Merch will conclude with Walter Merch. Walter Merch on the phone with Alan is talking, we send him the piece and say, what do you think?

And he says, not only do I think this, I did this. A number of years ago, I was working at a radio station in New York, which is now defunct called WRVR. And I was assigned the job of cataloging the record collection. And they played mostly classical music. They had a jazz section, but it was mostly classical music. I found myself in the basement in a room full of records.

And I was supposed to type out a card for each of the records. And I thought, well, I'll just use this opportunity to teach myself musical history. began at the beginning of what they had, which was a couple of shelves of Gregorian chants. And so for two weeks, I saturated myself in that music from 9 o'clock in the morning until 7 o'clock at night whenever I went home, listening to nothing but those tonalities. Then for some reason, I had to go up to the control booth to ask Gordon, the engineer, a question. So I ran up the stairs and opened the door to the... this cacophony of sounds. And I had for a moment exactly what I imagined the people at the

right of spring experienced, which was kind of a cognitive dissonance. What is this? Why is this radio station playing this kind of musical nonsense? I literally clap my hands to my ears and said, Gordon, what is this music? And he sort of casually leaned over and picked up the album, and it was Bach's St. Matthew Passion. No, if you've never heard Bach's St. Matthew Passions, what it sounds like. Oh, the horror! In two weeks, I had managed, without knowing it,

to reset my neuronal musical receptors to the kind of music that existed before the 16th century. We think of Bach as being the symbol itself of musical respectability, and yet here I was coming suddenly and unexpectedly upon Bach and hearing the dissonances that are dissonant only

when you compare them with the 15th, 16th centuries. Around this time, we took some questions from the audience, and one came up that's near and dear to our hearts. Someone asked if we felt we were constrained by radio, by the medium, by having no visuals.

And here's the answer we gave. Now, what I would say is you have to just kind of reset, but I think for a lot of people, you're cutting your carrots, you're driving along, and if we are doing this right, you should not be having that feeling. But you should actually be having something close to a richer feeling

because here's the deal. If I'm on TV and I say to you, all right, let's imagine a mountain and on the top of the mountain, let's put a little house. On TV, I have no choice. I have to make the mountain, my mountain, and put it on a little house, my house, not your house. And you will see it in a piece of furniture

in your room across the distance, and you will stare at my house on my mountain, and many of you will have some exception about whether it's not merely a house, or kind of other than it is a... Whereas in this case, you are unwittingly co-authors. If I say make a mountain, that's your mountain. If I say, add a house, that's your house.

And I'm indoors. I am in your hand already. So I think we'll have to just basically operate on you. There are... Just sort of, to play the other side for a second, there are moments. there have been one that I could call the mind where the lack of a picture was

frustrating to us. We were doing a show about a swarming behavior in emergence and the sort of crowds coming together and forming a personality irrespective of the individuals and the swarming footage of what are those birds called? Starling. Starling flocking behavior

it's indescribable when you see pictures of it. That was the one time where being sort of, this felt like a constraint only using sound. But generally it's about creating pictures that are much more rich, as he was saying, in your brain. I'll be honest. There are occasions where I really wish I could be on television for certain things.

Because TV's good at some stuff. But abstract stuff, when you approach television with an abstract thought, television itself looks to you right in the face and goes, oh. So radio is a little bit more helpful in that regard. However, if you're murdering someone and someone is dying and screaming, go TV. Go TV on that one. Well, that's all for now.

Thanks for listening to this podcast. The Apple Store event was produced by Ellen Horn and myself. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation. Thanks for listening.