The Jordan Harbinger Show - 669: Dallas Taylor | The Psychology of Sound Design

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Dallas Taylor is the host and creator of Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast revealing the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds. He is also the Creative Director of Defacto Sound, a TED mainstage speaker, a regular contributor to major publications, and a respected thought leader on the narrative power of sound. What We Discuss with Dallas Taylor: How sound designers create audio more in line with what our brains expect to hear when capturing it in reality would fall short. How the tricks of sound design are akin to a magician's ability to invisibly manipulate our emotions. Why we hear certain sounds recycled in movies and trailers to the point of cliché. With the perspective-bending nature of sound design occupying so many of his waking hours, does Dallas find elements of the job extending into off-the-clock parts of his life? Analog vs. digital (and why many prefer to rely on the older technology). And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/669 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss the show we did with Moby — musician, singer, songwriter, producer, animal rights activist, and author? Catch up here with episode 196: Moby | What to Do When Success Makes You Miserable! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Have you ever had a moment where you think, man, someone should really do something about this? Then you realize, maybe that someone is you. Well, with the help of GoFundMe, you can change someone's life. You could start a GoFund me to help a friend pay for school, fund that new community space, or help a local kid finally get to that national competition. I've seen this myself. Last year, a friend of mine launched a GoFund me to help with medical bills after an unexpected surgery. It was incredible how fast the support rolled in.

People want to help. They just need a way to do it. And GoFundMe makes it easy. So do you have a dream, a person, or a cause in your life that could use some support? Don't wait for someone else to bring change. You can be the one who makes a difference. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com. Gofundme.com. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. There are these kind of funny sounds that they're kind of funny to me because they're so overtly trying to affect you. I'm thinking things like in a trailer where you hear like a blois where it's like,

bra, you know, are we ever going to get there? Maybe. And then some like a line that's like a little piece of what's going to happen in the movie, followed by like a whole reimagined 80s track in a new way that's kind of spooky. It's like the building blocks of a trailer. And so, like, hits and shimmers and shings and those things are used just so liberally in advertising just to, like, reach into your, like, primal brain and try to, like, pull on that fear response.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional journalist-turned poker champion, organizing. crime figure or money laundering expert, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become

a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, the starter packs are where to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like disinformation and cyber warfare, persuasion and influence, China and North Korea, scams and conspiracy debunks, crime and cults, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, my friend Dallas Taylor, the host and creator of 20,000 Hertz, this is a lovingly crafted podcast revealing the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

Now, I know a lot of people are like, what sound? I never really think much about it. I am with you. I get it. Most of us probably think that we experience the world through our eyes. that to me seems like the most obvious channel of input, right? But I think you might start to realize just how much of an influence sound has on our experience of the world once you listen to this episode.

Naturally, in our conversation here today, we dip a bit into sound design, but I wanted to take a dive into Sonic branding. Why is it that some sounds seem specially designed to stick in my head for days or even decades? And how do these crafty SOBs come up with just the right tunes to burrow into your brain and stay there. Also, how does sound actually affect our brains? For me, certain types of genres of sound could really get under my skin or make me feel really relaxed or pump me up. In fact, sound can even influence our shopping habits and even make food taste better. I am not kidding, I had no idea this was even possible. Again, this episode might be a bit outside our usual flavor,

but I really enjoyed it and I know you will as well. Now, here we go with Dallas Taylor. I'm not sure people have heard of sound designers before, and if they have, they probably They're probably in the same page I was before this, which is, oh, yeah, they pick the music for a scene in a movie and that's about it. Or maybe they add like a punching sound if the punch isn't loud enough in the stunt scene. But obviously, there's a lot more to it. And you're kind of part of this big magic trick where you're not, the audience isn't thinking about what they hear, but what they see. And you're maybe adding, if it were a drawing, you'd be shading it, right, with a pencil. Right. You're spot on. Because I think a lot about. sound design as a slight of ear because we're essentially putting up a smoke screen for what it actually sounds like. And so what a sound designer actually does is just tons of like layers of stuff. I do a lot of trailers and like, you know, with big blois and bogees and things that just like want to get you totally hyped. But what I get is like raw dialogue from the set that sounds like

it's, you know, kind of far away and doesn't sound great. You know, we might have music and stuff, but there's just like a million sound effects like categories and layers to every single piece of like video or film or television or ad that we do. So when you look at two guys and they're like, all right, the trailer is they're climbing a mountain and it's really isolated and it's really snowy. It's just kind of muted or maybe there's some ambient noise and they're like, yeah, you're going to have to get rid of that because all you hear is the microphone clipping from a lot of wind hitting it at the same time.

Are you thinking in your head, we're going to make that whistling. sound that snow hitting snow on the top of a mountain makes. Yes, because wind doesn't sound good at all. Wind, if we just take like a sample of wind or like we go out and record wind, usually when you bring it in, it sounds like white noise. It sounds like, shh. Yeah. So even you saying like top of a cold mountain, I'm like, that is like a fake wind. And I'm always telling like I lead a whole sound design team. So every time it's cold, I'm like, don't give me like the white noise wind. I need like the wistly performed when that's like and we gotta perceive it that way as humans

but like when you put a microphone somewhere sometimes the microphone does not capture what you kind of your brain has interpreted. Right, it just sounds like... It just sounds like... Yeah. And there's really like no character or coldness to it. And so even like with every environment

that we do or Foley or something, it's all like performative. Like we're thinking a lot about like what's being said. Should it be like dissonant? wind is something dissonant happening on screen. So we'll even like affect choices based off of the content of like what we're trying to make the viewer feel like. I'm Googling dissonant because it sounds probably like what it is, but I'm not even sure what that means. What is that just lacking harmony is what that technically means? But what does that mean when I'm looking at an image?

Right. Like as sound designers, we can make like wind or environments or walla, walla is just people talking and stuff, we can choose and craft these sounds and mold them to have a character of their own. And so what I mean by that is like wind itself might seem really straightforward. And if you just put a microphone out in the wind, like I said, it's just, but you can have that, the speed at which it's whistling can be the flow of the edit. Like the speed, like the dissonance that you create within that. Maybe it's like hitting something that has like two kind of off pitches that are kind of clashing if we want to make someone start to feel tense along the way. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So like sound design is very much like composing the real world in a lot of ways. You know, when we've also

have this rich cinema history that has kind of taught us what these things sound like as well, which are not really real. Yeah, programs our brain with what we expect to hear. I know it's funny. You mentioned the tension thing because one thing I was thinking of was, I think it was free solo or maybe it was another movie that I saw where somebody was climbing and there's a scene where it might have even been like Mission Impossible with those fake rock climbing scenes with Tom Cruise but there's one you know he's hanging with one hand and I noticed the wind got higher pitched which means faster I'm like oh so the wind just happens to kick up even faster when he's hanging by one hand and I thought oh no no they're trying to get us to feel like he's off balance and that things

are happening rapidly so they just speed the wind up in reality there's probably no wind on this area at all because his clothes aren't even really moving or anything. He's just hanging. Yeah, it's like a magician. I actually love magic. I've gone to so many magic shows. What a magician is doing is something that looks so eloquent and clean in front of you, but there's all this dirty work that happens like just in the shadow. You can't see it and everything looks really fluid. Everything makes sense, but like right underneath the surface, there's a lot of like just work happening just to craft like every microsecond. That's sound design essentially. Yeah, I guess if people want to compare, watch a small indie film that has a scene and then watch a very similar scene in a Hollywood

blockbuster. And the sound, the lighting is a major thing, of course, but the sound is also really, really obvious because you sound like you're in the person's shoe when they're walking on gravel in the Hollywood one, whereas you just don't hear it at all, probably in the indie film. It's very boring. Yeah. For the most part. Because a lot of times we'll receive scenes or a collection of scenes and just hearing what's on set is pretty boring. But then there's like these other categories of sound design that like are much more overt. So, you know, we talked a little about like environments, but there are these kind of funny sounds that they're kind of funny to me because they're so overtly trying to like affect you. I'm thinking things like in a trailer where you hear like a bwa or it's like brer, you know, are we ever going to get there?

Right. Maybe. And then some like a line that's like a little piece of what's going to happen in the movie followed by like a whole reimagined 80s track. in a new way that's kind of spooky. It's like the building blocks of a trailer. And so like hits and shimmers and shings and those things are used just so liberally in advertising just to like reach into your like primal brain. Yeah. And try to like pull on that fear response.

Yeah, it's funny. You're obviously really good at this because as you describe that, I'm like, okay, character standing on a open plane, dystopian skyline in the distance, flash to like split second of an action scene where an alien is like, reaching out towards them later on in the movie. Right. Yeah, exactly. And there's drum beats and that loud, yeah, that loud like foghorn that's not quite a foghorn thing, which just sounds like a, yeah. The blois.

Yeah. Yeah. And so it is funny because it's almost predictably cliche. And yet if you find a trailer that doesn't have that, y'all didn't do your job, right? In this decade anyway. Yeah, exactly. Until we get sick of that because everyone uses it. And then you have to find something else.

But there's a good reason for it. And this is what's so fascinating, just kind of about. sound design to me is like a lot of this stuff may seem like it's just like oh that's a scary sound let's put it in but a lot of this stuff is like very much psychological it's playing off of our primal urges and feelings like we're living in like the future right now this is our ancestors would see this like we're living like legit in the future yeah i'm looking at you on a screen i'm talking to you like you're right across from me with almost no latency it's amazing now even a couple generations ago, the lifestyle for all of human history before that was a lot different. You know,

hunter, gatherer, basic needs, things like that. So, like, when we put in these hits, like, we're, our brains are still pretty, you know, living in a thousand years ago. Like, you know, we're getting there. But, like, there's so many things in the way that we do things that just our brains aren't prepared for, anxiety situations, you know, public speaking, things like that. And sound, that's a thing that you can kind of play off of. You know, if you're in the creaky old house and you hear one little twig break or something in the middle of the night. Like your brain goes straight to there is a robber and I'm about to get, I'm in trouble. Meanwhile, it was just like, you know, your house settling or something like that. Like a lot of those like sounds are

really just trying to like hit you in those places that are kind of the primitive brain to make you feel these like early responses, you know, that they would naturally have. And so it is very much like a magic trick mixed with like neuroscience. You're looking, you've found switches in people's brain and then you flip them with these sounds or you push these little buttons that I guess are, they've got to be kind of tricky to find. You know, how do you come up with the whiz sound, right?

Is that just a trial and error? Usually you make them. Luckily, we have Hans Zimmer who just beautifully baud everything for, you know, a decade. And so we have kind of these just epic sounds here that we hear, but we can't just take Hans Zimmer.

So then you have that to the challenge to all these sound designers and composers to go, can I make something that's like just as epic that can still affect people? that way. Now, I argue that, like, we've gone so far in the epic direction, especially with, like, superhero movies and things like that, that it's, like, becoming a super cliche thing. Yeah. Like, even if we rewind a decade or two ago, do you remember when trailers were just like, Jack met, you know, Julie, in the, in the coffee shop, and there's a little bit... Yeah, it's just

stuff that happens in the movie that's cut together. It's just stuff that happens, cut together with a narrator. Yeah. Now we've hit this, like, the 2010-plus cliche. I think people are getting a little tired of, which is just like the overly epic everything, rather than like kind of crafting a mini story or whatnot. But you know what? It's marketing. There's a lot of money involved. Yeah.

You know, we're trying to get $500 million out of a movie. Like, they're going to probably throw everything they can at it. Yeah. I mean, I remember before these trailers were so commonplace, you'd watch a trailer like that

and it would leave you going, whoa, I cannot wait to see that. And now you just, now it's just like, oh, it's a movie trailer. Right. Yeah.

But you have to constantly evolve these things and sound as a big part of that. Do you find that your curation of sound, because I assume you're not just making trailers, you probably have like a nice acoustic environment in your house that's not that noisy and all this other elements of your sound design coming into your real life we can talk about in a second. But I wonder if it extends to other elements of your personality. Like do you try and, are you a foodie? Do you try and design your food to?

Oh my goodness. That's very sharp to think about. Yeah, like because I think so much about the sense of hearing, which is a sense that a lot of people don't think much about. I do think a lot about just like sensory things in general. I do parallel just personal life. I am just obsessed with fine dining, new flavors, and cooking myself. It's really similar. But yeah, like just stimulating a sense in a brand new way is definitely something that I'm pretty addicted to. I mean, I do that all day long with hearing. Yeah. Food is another place where I spend a lot of way too much time. Yeah, it's like the most obvious kind of, well, if I'm going to

listen to sounds all day, I'm going to also do stuff with tastes when I don't have to do it for money. You also seem like the kind of guy who opens a bag of noodles and goes, whoa, listen to this bag. I should keep this bag. I might need this bag for later. Listen to that sound. The bag makes. Are you that guy? You know what most, like when we are doing footsteps on grass, most of the time, you know

that like a little like yellow sweeper. It looks like there's, it's almost like hay that it's just a real standard like broom. Like a broom? Like if you look at the most classic broom, you could imagine. and it has those like, I don't know, hey looking, I'm sure that there's a name for that. Yeah, the dry straw broom from the 60s over. Yeah, it's a dry straw broom. Most of the time, when we're just putting in footsteps that are on foliage or grass or whatever,

we're just crunching that as we're watching the screen just because it sounds so much more distinct. Wow. And a lot of times even in Foley, like, especially with animation and stuff, actually with dirt, a lot of Foley studios will just have like a little dirt pit where they, I've seen them manipulate just little tiny bits of dirt with their fingers because it sounds more crisp and clear. Not all the time, but, and also, dirt is dirty. So, like, you don't want to just start stomping around in a room and kicking up dust. Right.

Full of electronics. Yeah, for people who don't know what Foley is, this is, well, how do you even explain this? I've seen it in studios. I'll rent a studio and I'll go, why do you have gravel in a small kitty litter sandbox-looking thing? And they'll go, oh, we do Foley here, too. And it's just making a sound that is supposed to be, like, footsteps hitting the ground, like you just mentioned with dirt, except you have to do it into a really high-quality microphone. And like you said, you don't want to just start making a huge mess in a room with a $30,000 soundboard.

You have to have it sort of localized. Yeah, I think that the confusion with Foley is like, why don't you just go to a library, find footsteps, and then kind of sink them in there. Foley's job is to be a very performative art because if you just kind of put in stock footsteps, even the way we walk can vary greatly. Like if you're mad at your partner or something, you want to stomp away. that's a different performance of a stomp, then I don't know, someone just, you know,

you haven't seen it a long time arrives at your front door and you're like, oh my goodness. So Foley is essentially the sound elements that a human in the piece is touching, whether it's with their hands, it could be their clothing, and it could be their feet generally.

Now, Foley will kind of veer into more unique sounds and stuff because they have giant rooms of junk. But for the most part, like the core aspect of Foley is done by humans in front of a screen in real, time because what they're trying to do is all of those intangible moments they're trying to perform for the actor. It's like an extension of what the actor is doing. So if you have bad foley, it can actually take away from the performance of the actor. This makes sense. It's kind of like

when, like if I brush my shirt off, it makes a little sound, but if you're going to do foley of that, it's going to be like you're a microorganism that's between my hand and the shirt in terms of volume. It's like, you know, especially if it's in slow motion. It's like, and each footprint, even if I'm running through a forest, it's almost like there's a microphone on the soul in my shoe that's miced up. Now, it wouldn't actually make that sound. That's exactly right. It makes the sound that you make in your head when you think that, but not the actual sound. So on set and any production set, the only thing that matters is the dialogue, especially when you're working with celebrities, because if you're going to try to get

them back into a room to overdub it or do ADR on top of it, that's where they re-record their dialogue on top of the screen. ADR is say that again. So that's automated dial. replacement. Okay. So that's where if say it's too windy on set and they're outside, these actors have to then go into a really highly polished studio and then they have to watch their performance and re-record the dialogue on top of it. For example, like the Lord of the Rings films, I've heard that 98% of all the dialogue was recorded in a studio. Everything you see on camera was not used other than like 2%. And this is kind of like an American style in general, but the reason that everything is so crisp and clean in Foley is exactly what you just said. The difference, you know,

you're on set, it's just trying to capture the voice because that is just the gold. Because an actor wants to really put everything into their performance there, the sound person's responsibility is that voice, that performance. And so that microphone is not pointing at their feet. The microphone's not pointing at their shoulder. It's not pointing at what they're touching it. It's pointing right at their mouth. And that stuff doesn't matter because all of that stuff can be re-performed. And when it's re-performed in Foley, you're right. Every single body part that's being reflected in the piece, the microphone could be inches away from it. everything is just really crisp and clean.

And that's why, like, movies and high-quality TV shows, just like the sound is, like, so visceral. And it's just, you imagine every single thing making a sound has a microphone that's just, like, inches away from it. And it's just super clean. I know that from watching a ton of TV as a kid, right? Your brain makes this picture, this sound picture of what things should sound like.

And as an adult, when I'm, let's say I'm cleaning a windshield and it doesn't make that squeaky sound that you expect a windshield to make. I'm like, am I doing, am I doing this wrong? Are I not? Where's the sound that a squeegee makes when it touches glass? And it's like, that's not real, man. That's made up by a folie artist. It's quite a bit different.

But then on the flip side, it's amazing what we can hear in real life that it's just a lot more visceral than hearing it through like fakeness and speakers and things. And so that's part of like a thing that I think a lot about is like getting people more conscious about their sense of hearing. Because when you become more conscious about it, it can be really visceral. You know, it's like if you listen to like a wonderful, like a track. of music that just really inspires you or something that makes you feel amazing, you are active listening in that moment. You're opening up this sense, you're letting it absorb into your brain.

But I argue that you can do that with just sound in general, like the sound of your friend's laughter, like just really appreciating that, like, beauty in that. And just real vibrations in the real air, you know, going from a real thing to your real ears is a really powerful sense. Is that like when people say analog sounds better than digital? Is that kind of the same argument. You know, it's funny that I have kind of a controversial opinion on that. I am not really in the camp that analog sounds better than digital, but what I will concede is that the way that we approached music in the analog era was much more active than how we approach music in the digital era. And what I mean by that is like, whether you had a cassette tape or a record, you had to, like,

dig through bins to find something that you may or may not even be able to listen to. You look at the artwork. You know, you go to a tower record, you know, you spend 30 minutes getting there. You go through it. You pull it out. You go buy it. Like, you're invested in listening to this. You have, like, skin in the game for this thing. You put real money down here and you've spent time. So then you go back. So then when you put this record on, like, you're like training your body and mind to, like, think about it and engage with it. Same thing with a cassette tape. You only had so many of them. Like, I wasn't rich. I could only have, you know, a few of them. And some of them I didn't even like, but I would listen to it because that's all I had.

The thing that we lost in the transition from analog to digital is that approach. Because now it's like everything is so disposable. If I don't like something in two seconds, I can skip. If I don't like something, you know. So it's like the programmatic album, like the art of it is just so easily lost. And so we get like a big series of big singles and music that's now being made for that style of just like almost click baity type. I mean, there's still amazing music being made. But I think that's the thing that like bums me out the most is.

that we just don't approach even listening to music with the same level of skin in the game as we did when there are analog mediums. So I wouldn't really say they sound better or worse. I just think that our minds were more conscious about listening. Therefore, that's a big reason why I think analog sounds better because we're more primed for it. Ah, interesting. It might even be, won't go down the evolutionary path here. But yeah, like you said, more primed for it, I think is a great way to phrase it. Sonic branding is interesting, right? can still, people maybe don't even know this exists, but the second I give you an example, the Intel inside sound, right, when you see those commercials. Yeah, we'll play that sample right now,

Jase. I got the samples link for Jase and the show notes here in my notes. My producer will play this. Everybody knows what that sound is. And if they were like, wait, what was that? I think I've heard of that. The second they hear it, they're looking at the logo in their head. And so this is a brilliant play, because you can evoke a branded logo or animation in someone's head, with a sound, even if there's no screen anywhere near you. What else is going on with Sonic branding? That can't be the only reason they do this. When Netflix leaned into that and made a Sonic brand that was there all the time, I felt like that was a moment in history where it really started to explode. Many more companies started going, what's the reasoning for this? You know, we're very

visual creatures in general, so like a logo seems to make a lot of sense. Artwork makes a lot of sense. With sound, we just don't think about it a lot, so we don't go, what does it matter? like what something sounds like. Thinking of like the office episode where like Dwight keeps getting like altoids or something every time he does something, it's like this Pavlov's dog thing. You can make a sound or do something that recalls a feeling. If you walk into like your grandmother's house and you smell that dish that only she makes or that baking that only she did, that just washes you with nostalgia and good feelings.

So when you think of something like, you know, Netflix, which I kind of can see, that are the most iconic sonic branding out there, it's a call to action that says, you're done, put your phone down, you're about to watch something incredible. Your brain unconsciously is thinking about this because hopefully you're watching stuff that has a consistency of entertaining you.

And if you have that positive association, then that sound is essentially training you to go, it's time to stop with all those other things. Listen up. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dallas Taylor. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by

Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiruality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspiruality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, if you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing authors, thinkers, and creators every week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you those same skills, how to build your network. I'm teaching you for free. It's over in our six-minute networking course. That's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. This free course is about improving your networking and

connection skills and also inspiring others to develop a personal and professional relationship with you. It'll make you a better networker for sure, but it'll also make you a better connector and a better thinker. That's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And most of the guests that you hear on the show, subscribe and contribute to that same course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Dallas Taylor. Yeah, I want to talk about the Netflix sound, the t-dum, or whatever it's called. You did an episode on this, and we'll link to that in the show notes to your podcast. The ingredients of this are really interesting. I don't understand for the life of me how people come up with the idea on how to make a sound, but that's why you guys do what you do.

because it's not something that I can just, that anybody can just pick up and do randomly. It just seems like, for those of us that have ever looked into getting Sonic Bryant, like, I would love to do that for this show. And I thought, oh, that's probably going to be like several hundred dollars, but it's worth it. And I got a quote, and they were like, this is more than the house that I grew up in. Right. And they're like, you don't understand. Here's the process.

It's going to take months for us to come up with the values of your company and what you do. And we're going to have to listen to possibly hundreds of hours of things that you've created in order to embody you and your show and you as a creator in like a two or three second long sound. And we have to try zillions of different things in order to get that. There's going to be guys and gals sitting in a room banging on cars and plastic bits and instruments until they get a feeling for what this means and it's got to be translated. It's like translating a book War and Peace into Klingon. Like someone's got to sit there and do that.

And that's what happens with these sounds. That's what's really surprising is because I do a lot of sonic branding and I study it and I make shows about sounds. But I think there is this assumption that like a sonic brand is a cool sound. That is just the opposite. I would say that the thing that takes us the longest out of everything we do is sonic branding. The shorter the sound, the longer it takes. And this thing can take months. And the reason it takes months is because every one of these sonic brands means something deeply.

That's one of the reasons I started the podcast is because there are these incredibly nuanced stories behind why things sound the way that they do, that are just going to be lost to history. And so Sonic branding is something that, if I'm getting into a situation with Sonic branding, it is a long process of strategy. I need to understand what a company believes, where they're going.

I don't need to work with someone who's like an assistant to the marketing assistant. I need to work with the CMO or the CEO. That's hard to get. Because you don't want to be in a situation where you're representing an entire company either visually or sonically. and you don't have the ear of the person who has their finger on the pulse of everything.

So that is hard in and of itself. Otherwise, you find yourself in a situation where you're going through people and then you start designing by committee and then it turns into just a sound that they just never use. Yeah, it's just a crappy jingle at that point. It's just a thing. It just doesn't mean anything. And so that's what's really interesting about Sonic branding is that it all needs to mean something. Hopefully these stories help the company understand themselves better when they do this.

I found out that many of these Sonic logos that we've profiled in the past, that most of them have adopted that internally into their marketing training to have people understand why things are the way that they are. That's what I find so interesting about Sonic Braining is generally, is just because it can teach you what people believe when you unpack it. And you can go into certain periods of time and go, okay, this was made in 1992, and you can understand why they were thinking the way that they were, did they achieve it or not. But yeah, it's a very long strategy process. I would say that it's 95% strategy and 5% creation most of the time. Sure. No, that makes sense. I mean, in the Netflix episode of your show, they sent out a survey to a bunch of people with all these different sounds. They didn't tell them what it was for. Like, what five words does this evoke? And somehow the to dumb sound evoked the word movie, which was just almost like a coincidence, but shows that whoever invented that or came up with that had really nailed it. Because they didn't say this is for Netflix. They just said, what does this sound remind you of or whatever? And a bunch of people said movie.

And this was after probably a year process of going through a, you know, countless. I mean, legitimately, I don't even think it's possible to like know exactly what ballpark it was in because there's just so much experimentation. But by the time it even hits that, this is a year, I believe they said it was like a year of just, you know, trying different things like bubbles coming out of the earth and some sideways thing over here and some sideways thing over there and they were putting it with their logo and all that stuff. What was interesting about that particular thing is when I was, it was actually the first time that the company had ever spoken on it. So I was speaking with Todd Yellen, who led the effort at Netflix, and the thing that he said that, I don't even think he heard when he said it, because it never really registered exactly what he said, but he said, I really wanted this thing to evoke, aha, it's Netflix. And when I heard that in the interview, I went, that's the logo. Do you notice that? And he didn't even kind of register that because I think I even brought that up after we had done, we were done recording. I said, did you realize that you said that in the brief, when you started this, you said you wanted it to evoke, aha, it's Netflix. And I was like, that's legitimately the. exact same thing that's happening here. By the end of this. And so they were exploring all these different options.

You know, he loved that. Kind of going back to what you were saying with the movie and when they were kind of putting this in front of audiences and stuff, there was another option that I found hilarious is that they wanted to kind of evoke the old Leo the lion idea. You know, like MGM, there's a lion in the middle of it. They wanted this to feel like a big cinematic moment. So they thought a lot about animals being a part of it or having some sort of call and response in there. The thing that I learned out of that logo that just kind of blew my mind

is he said there was almost a goat bleat in that sound. And I was like, I don't believe you. And he was like, you can hear it. Don't play it in your podcast because this is like pretty deep stuff. This is Netflix. The PR person played it straight off of their phone. They said, no joke. This is exactly what we were doing. And it sounded exactly like the Netflix logo. It was just like this. It went, uh-ch-ch-ch-ch-uh. No joke. We legitimately. We legitimately, even like in the show with him saying thank God I did not use the goat sound oh man can you imagine spending well how much do you think it cost to develop the final Netflix sound and then imagine spending that amount on a goat I think it's like I don't even know how much it would cost but you

got to realize like the assets of these things what they turn into the value it's like the McDonald's da da da the marketing people I have been quoted as saying that's a billion dollar asset wow because they've been using it for over two decades Really? I remember McDonald's used to change their, I guess, Sonic branding, but a lot of their slogan or whatever, because it used to be like food, folks, and fun. And I remember, this isn't really landing for me. My friend, I remember my best friend and I as a kid, I'm still friends with them. Now he's a prop designer in Hollywood. He's like, I don't like this one. And I'm like, I don't know why I have an opinion, but I agree with you. I'm like 12 years old,

critiquing McDonald's new branding campaign. But I remember thinking food, folks and fun doesn't really land for me. And before that, I can't remember what it was. I think it was a good time for the great taste of McDonald's. And the fact that I remember that means they, invested well in that branding is that was a good one and we played both of those on there but food folks and fun was kind of a dud it was it okay so what they were trying to fix with the da da da da da da is at this point in macdonalds i think it was like early 2000s that's when they were exploding around the world so they had a problem they had every single market with their own ad agencies defining what McDonald's is independently oh man and so what they were trying to solve is they

needed to have some sort of short jingle, some sort of sonic logo that can be adapted, but it's still a holistic focus of what McDonald's is, whether you're in Japan or in Arkansas. That was the challenge, and it was a German ad agency that put this thing together. They had to make like a jingle that would kind of, could be malleable. So like da-da-da-da-da-da-da, it could be hip-hop, it could be on a zither, it could be on anything. You can turn that into a country thing. You can turn into whatever you want it to be, but the core, I'm loving it, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, is always there. Not in every single thing, but at least that's kind of what the quintessential McDonald's message is. And so they've stuck with it two decades. And I was shocked to find out that it's been

that long. Yeah, that is a long time. And there's lots of controversy on who wrote it. Yeah, there's a one might say there's beef surrounding it. Or one might say that it's the realist beef McDonald's is actually involved with. All right, I'm done. It's a pretty fun one. Yeah. Yeah, they had just in. Timberlake in there. And now I remember there was a piece on him kind of thinking he got the raw end of the deal because it's a billion dollar asset. And it's like, well, I don't know if you made, it's like the person who drew the swoosh saying, I only got a few hundred dollars for this. Well, he also did not write it. And what's so funny about the Justin Timberlake aspect is because

he was like, I think he was like in the launch spot or something. But he did before this was even announced, he did a I'm loving it tour before McDonald's even announced that it was going to be part of their branding. Oh, wow. So he had that I'm Lovin' It song. Like, there's this, like, song that Justin Timberlake does that's called I'm Lovin' It. And he does the like, I'm Loving It. And it's a bunch of, you know, dancing people and whatnot. I'm loving it. But like, then that end up turning into the McDonald's thing. But I find it so funny that like there was like this corporate thing that was being seated by Justin Timberlake in the I'm Lovin'init tour before it even happened. I think it's kind of brilliant, but he didn't write it. Yeah. He maybe had some hand in that. But as far as the actual

jingle and the strategy that was a couple of people at an agency, music agency over in Germany. I feel like he was probably compensated quite handsomely for it. And honestly, Yes, I'm sure he's doing it already. It only enhanced his brand, the fact that they were able to play this thing and that you still hear it occasionally and you may be associated with him. I feel like he got his, he was able to make a living off of that. And if not, then it didn't hurt. He pulled himself up from the bootstraps after that and made something of himself. Exactly. Yeah, he's not exactly. Destitute after the McDonald's campaign. Let's talk about Sonic branding when it comes to stuff around the house.

I was doing laundry yesterday. I have an LG washer. Dun, da, da, da, da, da, done. Yeah, you know it. Is that the one? Yeah, that's the one. And my wife can do it. I can do it.

Our auntie that helps take care of the kids will even, I'll catch her kind of humming it. And my mother-in-law can do it. I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old kid, and he can't do it exactly right every time. But even he will start to do it when, or after it goes off, he'll repeat it. And so that means it's really working at kind of a primal level, because this is a kid who barely speaks in complete sentences most of the time, right? He's two and a half years old. Right, yeah. And he speaks two languages, so it's already a little delay there.

But yet this LG washer thing, he's almost got it nailed. Yeah, I could sing the whole thing. Yeah, well, yeah, easily. Because when I was a kid, the washer went bha-b-b-b-er. And I was done, that was it. What that's communicating is just like, I don't care, just come get it. But yeah, the dun da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. To me, that's like the most Japanese thing that we know in America.

That may be the case, yeah. It's so pleasant. It's kind of why I'm jealous of the Japanese in general, because they're so forward-thinking on, like, sound things. It's like even in their metro, they have different jingles for every stop. I mean, come on. That's amazing. So that's great. But, yeah, the appliance sound design is something that's becoming more and more popular.

again, trying to associate positive thoughts with these things that are generally not positive. UI sounds on these things. For me, when I hear that, I just think, oh, God, I got to fold the laundry. Yeah, it means, oh, God, I can't just leave it in there. If you had that jingle after it auto folded it, it would be the best jingle in the world. It would be the most famous jingle in all of history. Yeah, come put on some warm underwear. Now it's just, hey, you better fold this before everything gets cold and wrinkly.

Exactly, in all wrinkly. Yeah, exactly, all wrinkly. NBC has a chime that I grew up with that I still can do, even though I haven't watched TV and decades other than, you know, cord-cutting stuff on the internet. That type of thing seems like, did they pioneer Sonic branding, television stations? Or was it, or sorry, radio stations, and then eventually made it to television? Where did the whole thing start? So what's amazing about that?

I was a sound mixer in Burbank at the NBC Studios, so I would walk by this giant mural that would talk about the chimes like every day. I never really thought about it. So it kind of told that story. But what's interesting about the dong, dong, dong, don't. I wasn't perfect. You might have to auto tune that. Yeah, we'll play the sample. Joking. Autot tune it. That was not like we need a Sonic Brand job in 1932 or something. What it was is it was solving a radio problem. So now we don't have to deal with this. But back in the day of analog, when they were going to go from the news here to the radio drama here, they had to have someone physically pull a patch cord out and put it in somewhere else. And we all know what that sounds like.

You know, we don't do it with our headphones on because it hurts our ears. But they needed something to cover that. So basically they have an announcer saying, you know, this is WNBC. And then literally back then it was an announcer going dong, dong, dong. So they would cut to them. There would be like a patch cable change. And then it's kind of a seamless transition. And so at first it was like seven notes.

I can't even remember what all the notes were, but it was too complex, and then they kind of shorten it down to three that we know now. And also, even back then, they used it to notify affiliate stations of breaking news coming in, and what they call the fourth chime, where it'd go, don, dong, dong, dong, dong, and then, like, everyone would go on alert. Like, when D-Day happened, they did that. So it's like, there's war news or actually important breaking news, not the stuff we have today where it's like, breaking news, here's a photo essay from East Germany. Some celebrity did a thing

Breaking news But back then Like breaking news Yeah Kim Kardashian broke up with Pete Davidson Right exactly So yeah Kind of just like

There was a very pragmatic use For that sound And then because it just continually Was used And then this is now a positive association with people It just kept going So I'm a big fan of like

When you make something great Do not let it go Like NBC If they tried to get a new Hot Shot like Sonic brand It would be a colossal failure Like you have something That's like

Nearly 100 years old that people associate, like it is valuable, lean into it more. And they have, and they've done that. They'll put a little modern. You hear it occasionally with like a plug-in or something where they run it through or they use a different instrument. But even then, in your head, you're almost hearing the original. At least I am.

Right, yeah. Little xylophone. What's going on then with there's new online issues, or I should say internet age issues with sound. And misophonia is a disorder that I, had just recently heard of. Somebody wrote in to our advice inbox, feedback Friday inbox about this. And when I tell friends about it, at least one in a group of 10 will go, oh, I think I have that. I have that. You know, when this and this and this happens, I get really agitated and I start to get

really annoyed. I guess me so funny would be considered a very adverse reaction or just an generally adverse reaction to certain sounds. And there's a scale where it's sort of, hey, that's a mildly annoying thing, stop doing that, or I should move away from that. And then at the end of the scale, it's uncontrolled rage at a certain sound. And most people don't have that end of the scale, but certain people with neurological disorders or like sometimes autism and things like that, they can have a completely violent reaction. Even bad associations, too. Yeah. Yeah, so misophonia is interesting. The thing that I've found, we're like 150 episodes into the show. We do a lot of science shows and concept shows. And the thing that I've learned, because I feel like I'm on the front line of this,

is just how more there is to do in research with sound. Like I think that like with our other senses, we're just a little bit more conscious about it. So I think we think more in general and we study it more. With sound, like I've found the bleeding edge of what we don't know. And misophonia is one of those things. It is very,

even with the most expert guests, it is very hard. There's very little grasp on exactly what's happening there. But what essentially misophonia is, is exactly what you said. It's like a physical, like, overwhelming hatred for a certain type of sound. So for people who are not misophonic, think about like, I wouldn't consider myself one,

but there are certain, like, textures if I rub my nails on or something. Yes. Or, like, if you take, like, a fork and you do your teeth and you pull the food off with your teeth. Yeah. Like, those things, like, will really get me. Nails on the chalkboard is the cliche one. The nails on the chalkboard. But imagine that with a lot more things.

And I believe, and this is completely speculation, I'm not a scientist, but I think that that's part of an overall sensory issue. I believe that the way that we all perceive the world is different. The way that we hear the world is different. The way that we feel the world is different because it's all interpreted by our brains. I've asked people, like, sometimes someone who might have a very, like, over-the-top reaction to certain sounds might also have very over-the-top reactions to very overt spices and things like that. So, like, I think that there's a lot of work to be done in, like, sensory studies.

Like, because I think that there's a very big spectrum of how we all experience our senses. And I think to assume that everyone experiences the senses in exactly your way is tough. And misophonia is one of those that I think it's just helpful to just be aware that just because something doesn't, a sound doesn't bother you, doesn't mean that it can just trigger really nasty stuff for other people. And yeah, there's a lot of people with it. I know right now there's a lot of people saying, I think I have that. Yes. Because every time I bring it up, it's always just like, you just like explained a thing that I've never thought before. but it's legitimate. Right. Yeah. There's people who say there's this guy in my office who's perfectly

nice. We're actually kind of friends, but he does this thing with his foot or with his finger, and it's driving me absolutely insane. It's like Chinese water torture, and they'll put headphones on, and it kind of doesn't help because their ear is almost listening through the headphones for this particular thing, and they have to also not see it because when they see it, they can kind of hear it, even though they can't really hear it. And it's driving them crazy. And for me, ASMR, which is like the, Well, I'll let you explain what it is, but this triggers my misophonia and it makes me want to, I'm not even exaggerate. I've never done this, of course, but it makes me want to pick up my laptop and smash it onto the floor until it explodes.

One of those videos comes on on YouTube because it's the whispering and the lip smacking. And it just makes me physically almost like violent slash ill at the same time. I hate it. I hate it. What it does for me is it gives me very pleasant tingles all the way. down like my spine. I can trigger ASMR response. So to explain what ASMR, it's, I think it's like autonomous sensory meridian response. There you go. Yeah. So what's happening? So there's this concept of synesthesia. So this is a really fascinating topic. And we've covered that before. And it's like

crossover senses, like senses that start to smear together. You know, someone who might hear something, but perceive it as a color. I've worked with sound designers who go, this sound here is very purple to me. And I've come across a lot of people who do that. AsMR is like a hearing touch synesthesia. This is an example, and I'm getting it right now just talking about it. It's an example of like something happening in hearing that's crossing over into some weird part of our brain that's now becoming touch. And so for me, what happens with these really tiny sounds, and there's a lot of arguments of why these sounds work. And a lot of people say it's because like how you were talked to gently as a baby or things like that. But these really quiet sounds, really gentle sounds, and I'm not even getting

close to what they do. It's a lot of like whispering. Maybe we can play a sample of a YouTuber three or five seconds doing it. I can't listen to it because again, I will smash the computer. You're listening to the jarred and breaths. It creates an itch in my brain that I can't scratch. That's the best way for me to phrase it. It's an uncomfortable itch. For me, it's all external, though. It triggers somewhere like where my shoulders meet my spine. And And it just gives me like goose bumps, but not real goosebumps, but it just tingles all the way up my, the back of my head, kind of down my shoulders. And the funny thing is, is I went into making the show going, this is totally bogus.

And then I realized, wait a second, it's like musical chills in a different way. Like, if music gives you chills, like, that's kind of what an ASMR response is. But think of ASMR as something where you can just do it on demand. So I would encourage people, like, you know, if you're in the right environment and you have a very quiet thing and you're kind of watching these things and you're trying to feel something in the back of your neck. There's going to be, you know, a lot of people who go, oh my goodness, I can do that. And I just don't know how our brain works is like, is that something that was valuable to us a million years ago? Yeah, good question. Or are we moving into that crossover sensory stuff? I don't know.

It's just fascinating. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dallas Taylor. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. By the way, those URLs and discount codes, I know you're not going to memorize that stuff. We put them all on one new mobile responsive page over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the search box on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com as well. So please do consider supporting those who support us. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dallas Taylor. I would love to see a study where they measure 60 and 70-year-old men and women and then they measure 20 and 30 year old men and women and see if any of the older folks even have this because they might

be like, what the hell? Meanwhile, everybody who's been sitting in front of a screen for three decades is all programmed. Our brains have all sort of grown roots into the machines, so to speak. We just want like gentle things. Right. Yeah, oh God, for me, I can't, there's one particularly popular, there's tons of ASMR YouTubers and they get millions of views. There was one. I saw a story done on Vice by a friend of mine. And she's beautiful and she's very talented. at what she does and she seems like a very nice person, but her videos when I see them, you know, I just want to put my fist through the screen. And I keep thinking, if I ever met her, I don't think I could have a normal conversation with her because she would immediately trigger me. I would

just be like, I can't even look at your face. And again, she's like a beautiful, nice person, I'm sure. But I just can't deal with the feeling that I get from somebody whispering or eating noodles into a microphone. It just makes me, like, physically ill. Some of that's kind of gross. So I agree with that, but I will say that, like, I like that we're on the complete opposite sides of this because it's like a perfect example because like for me, when I think of ASMR videos, I'm thinking mega relaxation. Like I'm thinking, okay, I'm just going to, it's going to be like almost just like deep breathing for me. It's just like it's going to like ground me. So what these ASMR artists are doing for people who are like that is a really big service. It's kind of like doing a calm app or something. I promise I don't. I'm not saying. Yeah, it's like a guided meditation for somebody. It's almost like a guided meditation. It's just. just like a gentle, it doesn't mean anything. It's just to, like, get you calm. And I really appreciate what ASMR artists are doing. But then with anything online, it can get real weird.

Like, there's this. Well, we had somebody on our show. Like, there was just, like, eating pickles. Like, just to hear the snap of the pickles. That wouldn't bother me. I feel like that wouldn't bother me. I just thought it was like, oh, that's so satisfying. Yeah, yeah.

That does sound satisfying. The whispering makes me, and the whispering in the small, it makes me want to be like, speak louder. Like, I just, again, it's like an itch somewhere in my body or brain that I can't scratch, because it's not really there. Mouth sounds are really, I think when you are talking about smacking or noodles, that's when it's like,

it's just kind of gross. Yeah, well, my dad smacks his lips when he eats. Maybe that's why I hate it because it reminds me of that. Association. Yeah, negative association. Speaking of sound and food,

are there sounds that can make food taste differently or better? That seems like that should exist. Yeah, supposedly. So we've done a show on that too. So that is another synesthesia thing. where we're trying to use something in hearing in order to cross over into food. And so Charles Spence is like the authority on this. But they've done all kinds of studies where they're playing

different tracks of music. They've even done this in marketing to make like beer taste sweeter or more bitter. They've given people like chocolate with different tracks of music or soundscapes and kind of gauge the sweetness on it. And you know, to me, I think there's a legitimate thing there because I think that for me, like music in a, like a fine dining situation is a very important thing. Music in like a super loud bar or something is different. It just doesn't, I don't know, it's not quite the sensory thing that I enjoy. But I think kind of ambiance is really important. And if you go into kind of fine dining, there's a very, that's very important that they keep it very quiet, intimate between you and the person you're talking to, and usually something very light possibly. But with food, yeah, there are

restaurants that play certain things because they believe through studies that it makes things taste better. I believe it, you know, it may be very subtle. And I think with anything sensory, you have to realize that these are extraordinarily nuanced. And it's not something you're just going to have a Hershey bar, put on this track and go, oh, it tastes different. It's like you really have to like dig deep, try different things. And really, again, going back to the very beginning, open up that consciousness on hearing to be able to really kind of even determine if that's possible for you. Looking at new devices like noise canceling headphones, which I really like, they create a bunch of different sounds

probably that I can't hear that fight. Well, actually, how do those work? You'd probably know this. Yeah, the simple answer is that there's a little microphone that's recording everything outside and it's coming in and it's instantaneously

flipping the signal. So think about like what you would consider like a sign wave or just for anybody who's like, have you ever seen just like audio waves? Like think of audio waves in your brain. You think of a line that goes up and there's a line in the middle and then that line crosses and it goes down

and then it comes back and meets in the middle. That's a sine wave. It's the most pure tone. So we're going to think about the sine wave. So what happens is, if you're recording that sine wave, what happens in the noise canceling is immediately it's flipping the phase.

So that's where it's generating an opposite signal to the signal that's coming in. So therefore, in theory, if you have a waveform going up and the same waveform going down, it cancels out to nothing. So that's, even if you've ever worked in audio or anything like that,

If you just simply take a piece of audio, put another piece of audio, flip the phase on it, it will go to silence, even though it'll play in the DA or whatever. But yeah, that's essentially how that works. So if I'm canceling out a really loud sound, does that mean I'm just playing another really loud but opposite sound into my ear? Yeah, there's a lot of debate on that. I've talked to Bose directly about that specific thing. The idea is that you still don't want to be slamming doors around noise canceling headphones, because what you'll hear is the noise canceling will fail. So a lot of times, like, if I have headphones on and maybe I slam a door, you'll actually hear it disengage and you'll kind of hear like a, like just kind of a clicky digital thing because it just

can't keep up with that level of volume and the transient because it's so fast. Is it doing a flip? I'm not exactly, it's so complex. I think it's happening inside like the mechanism. Okay. I think it's actually like doing a cancel out by the time it's hitting your ear. Oh, interesting. But at the same time, Bose and these companies would say you don't use these for hearing protections. So I'm sure there's a lot of nuance to that. Yeah. I love noise. And the reason I'm asking is I love these things.

They've been a godsend because I'm one of those people who can't block things out very easily. And even with noise canceling headphones, I'll hear like my kid say something, which is probably a good thing for keeping kids alive. But it's a bad thing for focus and concentration, especially when my wife or a nanny or a babysitter, a grandparent is there and they're fine. They're just whining about gummy bears. So I love noise canceling headphones, but I also started to think, well, okay, I don't want to become reliant on these things. Like, I have to be able to focus on my own at some point.

I don't want to diminish that ability if that's a thing. I've got a couple of friends of mine. They have to bring a white noise or fan sound device to hotels or they will not sleep. And if they move in with like a significant other, they'll bring a freaking giant 1979 fan that they bought and they've had for years their whole life pretty much. They have to bring it to that person's house because they can't sleep without this exact sort of fan tone all the time. Yeah. What's going on there? So yeah, on the fan side, that's something that's fascinating because I also cannot sleep without white noise. What's actually happening here is it's that primal thing. There's levels of sleep. And I think we all know that there's like kind of deep and

REM. There's kind of light sleep and somewhere you're conscious, somewhere you're not. But there can be external factors that kind of pull you in and out of that sleep that affect that. You know, like if someone's cooking bacon in another, you know, room, like your sense will kind of spark up a little bit. It's not going to ignore it because it's unnatural. So our senses kind of ignore things that is not valuable. But when we're vulnerable, you know, think of us in the cave, you know, or out in the woods, when we're vulnerable, the sense that's going to keep us most protected is going to be kind of amped up subconsciously. And so when we're sleeping, that sense is going to be hearing for the most part. I mean, of course, your other senses will be able to react if someone hits you or something.

Sure. But hearing is kind of like a defense, like a, it's a way to be able to like snap you out of So why I use white noise is because there's been so much bad sleep prior to that. And it's very much like if you're in your house, everything is just dead quiet and you hear a bang. Your brain is so primitive that it's just going to jump right up and think the worst immediately because you're in fighter flight mode at that moment. What may have happened is a dump truck may have just drove by and it just happened to slam something or maybe your trash got picked up at night or something. So there's usually like a reasonable explanation, but once you get that rush of adrenaline and it's your life at stake, that's bad sleep. And there's different versions of that. So for me, I need to block all of that out. Some people are fine. Like I've kind of had this argument with people who live in New York City. Like for me, I'm from the South. I'm from the country. And for me, the sound of just nature and quiet is what comforts me. Yet, you know, when people have kind of born and raised in New York City, they need that constance. That calms them, a lot of people, which blows my mind. So for, For me, I cannot sleep if there's hubbub happening. And again, that could just be childhood, learned, associations.

So for me, I got to block all of it out. And white noises, every frequency happening that we can hear simultaneously. And so it's a masking effect. And that's what the general spirit of why white noise is important, very important to some people. So, yeah, my wife and I have had this debate many times. Oh, God. I can't even imagine if one person needs it quiet or loud and the other person needs kind of the opposite. it, you're in trouble.

Like, she needs a TV going, and I cannot do it. But what she said is it's the, she doesn't watch news things. But there's a reason for that, too. She said that the familiarity of it is a calming, comforting aspect. So she was like, she'll just watch the same shows all the time. She knows what's happening. Her brain knows what's happening, and it kind of tunes it out. My brain does not work that way.

No, that would be, it would drive me crazy. And the changing. Oh, yeah. I can't even think about sleeping in an environment like that. Why do things sound better when they're loud? up to a point. My producer, Jason, is always getting on me about this. He's like, dude, you're turning yourself up. Stop adding bass to your voice in the podcast. I'm just removing it in post productions. Just stop doing that. But I can't. It sounds better up until the point where it's

you know, uncomfortably loud. But up until that point, it just sounds better louder. Why? It's funny because we'll get these notes when we're doing trailers and ads and stuff. We're just like, turn that up. Now turn that up. Now turn the dialogue up. Turn the music up. Turn the sound effects up, all that. And at some point, we're just like, we just literally turn the entire thing up and it's like, that sounds amazing. Proximity effect is probably a big part of this. I have not studied that specifically. I experience it all the time. There's this thing called the Fletcher-Munson curve. Essentially, what's happening here is the world does not sound like how we

perceive it. We are these animals that have these eardrums. Animals perceive sound in slightly different ways, a lot of crossover on that. So what happens is, is like, we do not perceive all frequencies in a flat response. Like, low frequencies need a lot of energy, for us to hear it. High frequencies, it starts to trail off too. The best example I can give is like a xylophone

or like a marimba. You'll see that the low notes on the marimba have very long tubes. I mean, that's for resonance, the length and all that stuff. And then it kind of goes up to short and then it gets long again.

That's also kind of representing how we hear and trying to get the marimba to speak in the way that we hear. Is a marimba the thing that's like a wooden xylophone with the pipes that stick out of the bottom? Right, exactly.

And it's kind of curved, but you see it curve at the bottom and at the top. And that's kind of an example of how our hearing hears the real world. So there could be very blaring high-pitched sounds that we don't perceive as high-pitched. There could be very blaring low-pitched sounds that we also don't perceive as loud. So that's that Fletcher-Munson curve idea. And what that is is that's just basically how we hear. When we come closer and we make things louder, we hear the highs and the sparkle, we hear the lows more. That's something we're trying to accommodate for a lot. Like a lot of time when we pull music under dialogue, the first thing we'd lose because of this concept is the low frequencies. So a lot of times when we're pulling music under, we're boosting the low end because we want to keep that perceived low end. That might be getting way too in the weeds. It's a little technical, but it's interesting because otherwise, how do you explain why things sound better or louder? It doesn't really, it shouldn't really necessarily be that way, especially given that we just talked about ASMR, which is a bunch of things that are so quiet that they make me angry and violent. right so so why i guess for me they really sound better louder slash they only sound good at a certain volume and below that they're just irritating as all hell when we really want to make it hard on us

our mixers or me will mix things at a very low volume and make sure we can hear every nuance of it because when we pull that up it's just really consistent it's not fun to mix things at a low volume because it's just you don't hear every little nuance but when you crank that up it's just like it's a tool in the toolkit to like beef up kind of just the frequency range what do you think of deep fake sound. This is fresh on my mind because I just saw that Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, there was a Russian deep fake of him saying, oh, we're surrendering, lay down your weapons, and, you know, the Russians are going to take you prisoner and it'll all be good and fine. And it didn't fool anyone because the Ukrainians have been seeing Russian disinformation

for a really long time, and so has all of Eastern Europe, for that matter. But they can do pretty impressive deep fake voices. The video's not going to be too much further away in terms of processing power and the ability to do that in the next few years in a convincing way. But these deep fake voices, I haven't seen what Adobe has said they have and shown what they have because they won't release it to the public, right, for a good reason, because it's just going to create all kinds of chaos. I did an episode on deepfakes with Nina Shick. It's episode 486. We mostly talked about video. I predicted that they were going to make a politician either say something that they would never say that's either racist or a big gaff or a policy change. I didn't think they

would have a president surrender in a war, but it's kind of the most obvious use for this kind of technology. But with vocals, it's really going to be hard to detect. Can we trust our ears now? At this moment, maybe. So I did a show on this. And the whole thing that I wanted to make sure of, as I said, I tasked the team and I was like, I want my voice for the first minute, minute, and a half to be as convincing as possible, but it's not me. And so to do that, we worked with one of the guests. And the guest even was very concerned about telling us exactly how it was done. Like, we never really got an answer of the actual ways it was done. But essentially, he had said, send me three hours of your narration, just nothing else. And then I'm going to push it through

some supercomputer and it's going to do a lot of AI stuff and machine learning. And then that's going to kind of make this thing. And the more audio, the better, because there's just all this nuance. And it just takes a, as far as I know, it just takes a long time to make it convincing. So we did that, fooled a lot of people with the intro, not being me. And so that, the experiment was like, can I convince people who've been listening to all of these shows that, like, I am not real? And I think it did a good job. If you, the show is called Deepfake Dallas. So, like, you kind of are tipped off right off the bat. So I think that you can kind of get it. But if you're just, if you didn't even look at the title, I think it's really convincing right off the bat.

even when we make episodes now, we put in a deep fake voice of me that's through our software to where we have a pacing, we have the words per minute, Mike Hadence, all that stuff where we can build out this show, then I can approach it as an outsider and then craft it before I actually come to it. So there's really interesting uses for deep fake like that. I would never use it on the show, but it's just like a tool to put me in the seat of the listener rather than me being the seat of the host, which is a different perspective. But will it get better of, yeah, it's going to, it's going to, it's, it's, it's, it's, going to keep getting better. I haven't heard a lot of deep fakes that are super convincing yet. Where the pitfalls are is in a motion. And I know that's the next frontier where when I'm speaking right now, I'm going up, I'm going down, everything has meaning. I'm communicating meaning in the way that I'm singing. Yeah, if you say three children were killed in Odessa this morning, you don't want to say three children were killed in Odessa this morning, right? That would be horrible. Yeah. So that's like the difference between what the machine is doing now versus where it's trying to go. And can you get the machine to understand the context and emotion? I think that's kind of going to be the thing that

makes that more convincing. And it will be able to pick out in the source audio when someone's like happy or the quirks that they do. I mean, I have voice quirks. You have voice quirks that you just know are you. Yeah. So like the way that we sing our words is complex. And will it get better? Yeah, it will. Yeah, to the point where it can be used against us, especially when you're talking about nation states. Like, I don't think a nation state like Russia or Iran or the United States would have any qualms about grabbing Adobe's software and being like, listen to what we're going to do with this. We're going to make the Ayatollah say this horrible thing, and we're going to play it for everybody in Iran, and it's going to change the political system over there in a way that we can

have, that's desirable for us. Like, that is almost for sure already happening, but it's undetectable or we're very close to that point and we won't know until later that something is fake. You know, one thing I find interesting is that social media and how much that is important to politicians now, I think is going to be a combating effect of that. You know, if you have the talking head in front of a podium and that's all of the communication comes from, you know, the White House press room, you have a lot of data that you can make sound just like that. Sure. But when you have someone like Zelensky or whatever, going out and just, you know, showing him doing this and doing that and being in the world and just a, you know, terrible microphone on the phone or whatever,

being more active. And that's going to be protection with deep fake because that's going to be hard when you're trying to not only get the cadence right and all this stuff and edit. That's the other thing we forget about deep fakes. I'm a sound designer. I'm a sound editor. I can not only get a deep fake, but I could adjust it in ways and then edit it to make it exactly the way that I want. I mean, that's what we did in our show. We did a deep fake, but we did like five takes of deep fakes and still picked the best ones. Right. So it's easier to just. just do it right and real if you can. Right.

It's not going to, it didn't save you time from recording your intro yourself, right? So I think that like part of the way to combat that is putting yourself in a, in situations where it's just not as easy to do that. Like if you're out in the open, if you're social media style,

like that's going to be detectable. There's a lot of complexities in sound design to not only deep fake the performance, but then also get the environments right. Because I think a lot of experts, even like me, I think I'd be able to pick out most if I really analyzed how it,

sounds. Yeah, there's going to be a whole certification process for a video that's been unaltered and is real, and there's going to be almost like digital SSL certificates for this video is not. It's real people, it's real sounds, it hasn't been edited, it's been run through a supercomputer that can detect that kind of thing. And then we're going to have to figure out how to not have those forged all over the place. Man, the chase is on, I suppose. The arms race for deep fakery in audio and video is quite something that we're going to see a lot in the next couple of decades here. Man, thank you so much.

This is really interesting. From sound design to why things sound better loud to Sonic branding, it's like a whole world that most of us have not thought of because it maybe comes in a little bit under our radar, so to speak. Yeah, thanks. This was fun. And it was so nice to see that we're on two different sides

of a hearing thing. Of the ASMR thing? Yeah, well, I realize I'm the weirdo, but it doesn't make me feel any better when I hear somebody eating freaking ramen into a shotgun mic. Yeah, I don't know. I've gotten a lot of reactions.

And when we put the show out, it was just like, I hate this with all of my being. And a lot of people are just like, oh, it's so satisfying. I'm glad to hear I'm not alone. Yeah, well, to each his own, I suppose, when it comes to the sound landscape as well. Dallas Taylor, thank you so much, man. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger show to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer with Moby, iconic musician and producer. This was a super real conversation about creativity, fame,

mental health, money, and what really makes people happy and fulfilled. Mopey was really open with this one, and even if you're not a fan of the music, I guarantee you will dig this episode. I grew up in arguably the wealthiest town in the United States, Derry and Connecticut, but my mom and I were on food stamps and welfare. My first punk rock show was to an audience of one dog, and my first electronic music show was to Miles Davis. I wanted to stop the show and patiently explained to the movie stars and the beautiful people

that they'd made a mistake. They were celebrating me, but I was in nothing. I was a kid from Connecticut who wore secondhand clothes in the front seat of his mom's car while she cried and tried to figure out where she could borrow money to buy groceries. Now it was 1999. I was an insecure husband, but we kept playing, and the celebrities kept dancing and cheering. The weird thing is things started to go wrong when I stopped feeling that way. In 1999, I thought that my career had ended.

Yeah. My mom had died of cancer. I was battling substance abuse problems. I was battling panic attacks. I'd lost my record deal. And I was making this one last album. I was like, okay, I'll make this album, I'll put it out, I'll move back to Connecticut,

I'll get a job teaching philosophy at some community college, and then all of a sudden, the world embraced me. I handled fame and wealth really disastrously. It was so humiliating. I wouldn't trade any of it. For more from Moby, including how he bounced back from a 400 drink per month booze habit, check out episode 196 of the Jordan Harbinger show.

Now, if that doesn't peak your interest, what will, right? Make sure to check out Dallas's podcast. It's called 20,000 Hertz. You'll find it wherever you get your podcasts. And you'll also, of course, find it linked in the show notes as well. There's a couple episodes I found particularly interesting. There's one about the Netflix sound effect and the McDonald's branding episode. of course, the da-da-da-da-da-da-da that we talked about today, and the L-Rad sound weapon, right?

Those dishes that you can aim at riots and it like blasts sound at them. Really, really fascinating stuff. There are a lot of good ones to explore. Those are just off the top of my head. Big thank you to Dallas for coming on the show. Please do use our website links if you end up buying a book from any guest on the show. Transcripts are in the show notes. Videos go up on our YouTube channel.

Advertisers, deals, and discount codes all at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. please and thank you once again for supporting those who make this show possible. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or connect with me right there on LinkedIn. Speaking of connecting, I'm teaching my skill set in terms of networking and relationship building. I know the word networking is gross. That's what I'm talking about right here. In our six-minute networking course, it's nothing like what you've heard from throwing business cards in people's faces. It's all about building relationships and digging the well before you get thirsty.

And it's free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I don't want your credit card information or your money. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you can find it. And most of the guests on this show, subscribe and contribute to that course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

This show is created an association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into sound or into music

and jingles. Share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format, Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like

why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.