The Influential Power of Audio

Doug Downs (00:07):

My dad passed away in 2011. He was nearly 80, and of course I wish he'd lived much longer, but nearly 80 means he'd lived a reasonably long life. He was the first of my parents to pass, so it was my first time dealing with this kind of loss. I'm sad and I'm a little embarrassment. I cried a little, which I don't do very often, but this was my dad. The night before his funeral, I sat up in bed and called his voicemail several times just to hear his voice, and I don't mind telling you how much that shook me. I'd flown back home out east for the funeral and spent time with family and found both sadness and solace in the event. And when I flew back home, I guess a part of me was resigned to just getting on with my life. I'd parked at the airport.

(00:54):

So when I got into my vehicle, I turned the ignition and a song came on the radio. "I woke up this morning and I prayed to Gypsy Rose Lee." A kind of obscure song really by Canadian David Wilcox called Breakfast at the Circus and the Tears as I sat alone in the vehicle, this came streaming down my face. I mean, full breakdown. My dad had never heard that song. We'd never talked about it. I doubt he even knew who David Wilcox was, but I remembered this was a song I first heard when I was in college in my teens and had moved away from home for the first time. That move hadn't gone all that well and I missed my parents. I guess somehow hearing that song, which isn't a torch song at all, made my brain make all the connections and flood me with emotion today on stories and strategies, the power of audio helping brands hit the right emotional notes.

(02:21):

My name is Doug Downs. Hey, just as we get started, last chance here, I want to give you $50 for five minutes of your time. We've launched a listener feedback series. I've got one spot left. I created budget for 10 of these spots. I've had a chance to interview nine people, so I've got one spot left. It's you and me on a Zoom call. I just want to know a little bit about how you found the podcast, why you listen, what you like, what you don't like, all that stuff. And I want to pay you 50 bucks for that. It'll take you all of five minutes. My email, there's a link to it right at the top of the show notes. My guest this week is Dallas Taylor. Hey Dallas.

Dallas Taylor (02:56):

Hey Doug.

Doug Downs (02:57):

And how's your day going so far? You're in this beautifully lit kind of. If I were to put a music theme to it, I would say it's like a lo-fi kind of room with full of purples and blues. Is that the mood you're setting?

Dallas Taylor (03:09):

So to paint the picture, I'm in my studio, which in front of me has a nice mixed board and it has very good lighting, and I have a diffuser behind me that looks very textured to scatter sound in every direction. I have absorptive material to where everything I hear in this room sounds nice and clean and tight, and it

Doug Downs (03:28):

Does Dallas, you're the host and creator of the podcast, 20,000 Hertz, revealing the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. If you haven't checked this podcast out due, it is huge and there's a reason for that. You're also the creative director of Defacto Sound having led thousands of high profile sound design projects from blockbuster trailers and advertising campaigns to major TV series and Sundance Award-winning films, and you're a Ted Main stage speaker who's been featured in the New York Times and NPR. So it's awesome to have you on our humble podcast. Thanks for being

Dallas Taylor (04:05):

Here. Thanks. When you put it that way, it sounds very overwhelming, but yes, I think that some of those things are accurate.

Doug Downs (04:11):

Yes. And you're still one foot at a time, right? One leg at a time, one foot

Dallas Taylor (04:15):

At a time.

Doug Downs (04:17):

We are visual creatures. I mean, that's just a scientific observation. Vision and sight is our most powerful sense. There's plenty of neuroscience that's showing that we live in a world where all the rage in marketing right now is YouTube got to be on YouTube. If you've got YouTube channel, YouTube shorts got to be there. It's taking over apparently. But audio, audio has remarkable hidden powers,

Dallas Taylor (04:43):

Right? Yeah. I mean, we are visual creatures, but there was this time in human history before we had cameras, and actually interestingly enough, it's 99.999% of all of human history where much of the information that we transmitted from one person to another was all through oral history and through storytelling. And so while we are looking at the shiny new thing in our human journey together, audio is one of our very earliest senses, and our brains love stories and loves hearing people talk.

Doug Downs (05:20):

And from what I hear, audio is the last part of the human body to go. I've heard that sound continues for whatever length that people can hear you after the pulse is stopped and all that. So it's a very powerful sense for us.

Dallas Taylor (05:34):

Very, very powerful. I would say out of all of the senses, it tends to be one that doesn't get the spotlight as much as some of the others.

Doug Downs (05:44):

So how can audio help shape a brand?

Dallas Taylor (05:48):

Well, when we think about being human, we have these five core senses, and of course visual is a very strong part of that. When we think of branding, we always think of a logo or something to that regard, or a great website or colors that are the brand that are in the brand guidelines and the typeface and all of these things that look like the brand. But there are a few senses that are pretty hard to market with and that smell, unless we all get mitz on our phones to sprays sense at us, which would be weird, but kind of cool at the same time, sense of touch. It's very rare that a brand can find you and give you a hug. Could be a little creepy. That's all I'm saying. But the thing that a lot of brands just completely forget about is that we have two core human senses that even through phones, you can still stimulate. And I always find it interesting that we lean so heavily into one when there's one sitting there just waiting to be tapped into all the time. And some great brands do that really well, like the BA for McDonald's.

Doug Downs (06:58):

Exactly,

Dallas Taylor (07:00):

Or the NBC chimes or the Netflix to do and the Apple TV plus logo. These are great sounds that can really tap into something deep into our mind and represent a great brand. Now, a sonic brand isn't the brand. The brand has to fulfill its promises, but the sound is a good reminder.

Doug Downs (07:23):

You had an episode with a sound engineer from Apple, and within the episode you were playing all these little jingles that I get on my phone, some of them all the time, others I haven't heard for years. And as I was listening to your episode, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And I had visions of my kids when they were younger. That's the brain. It's all intertwined and that's how sound really works. And other parts of the brain, it's how sound intertwines that way sound creates and conjures up memory that you thought you'd forgotten,

Dallas Taylor (07:58):

Right? Yeah. The great thing about Apple too is they vary instinctively choose a lot of their user interface sounds for something like their iPhone to be very human and organic, to really offset how technologically advanced these devices are. So if you hear a lot of those things, they're actual organic a lot of times like a Glock and spiel or a thumb piano or just all kinds of organic sounds. And in the case of an Apple watch, the notification sound from a watch, the sound designer went and got the empty housing of the watch itself. So if you just think about the part that doesn't have any electronic guts in it, he hung it by a string and then he just hit it with a mallet and that he pitched up and it turned into the actual notification sound. So something that's very organic and tactile being the sound of that product.

Doug Downs (08:53):

And audio could be long form spoken word, for example, podcasts. But in any form, when people consume audio, they're willing to go 30 minutes, 45 minutes, sometimes an hour if it's good conversation, good narrative. But ain't nobody reading your newsletter for an hour, Dallas. Ain't nobody watching your YouTube video for an hour. Why audio? Why does audio work that way?

Dallas Taylor (09:19):

It goes back to the idea that our brains love stories. Nothing brings me more joy than connecting with another human. And in text form, it's very difficult to get context and meaning, but with every word I'm saying right now, I'm intentionally whether I might be unconsciously singing every word to where you get so much more context than the transcript of what I'm saying right now, you can glean a lot of my personality and how I want you to feel comfortable and you are talking to me in a way that I want you to feel comfortable. So we glean kindness from the same words. And I think that that's a big part of connection. And a lot of times people use podcasts as a companion when they're lonely or they don't have someone in the car with them or they're just going on a walk or just doing dishes around the house. It's nice to have someone just telling you a story along the

Doug Downs (10:16):

Way. Well, and to that, let's say someone listens to this podcast every day during their drive in DC to get to work, and let's say the drive is 40 minutes as the commute or every evening as they walk their dog. How is it that the podcast as audio accompaniment while I'm doing this other stuff, why does that make it more sticky?

Dallas Taylor (10:40):

Well, it's like having a friend walking with you, but you don't have to do the brain power of interacting on the other side. It's a pretty interesting perspective from my side because I went from a place in my life where I was not doing a podcast to a podcast that got a lot of traction. And now when listeners come up to me, there's a look I that I can now recognize that I never saw prior to having a podcast. And it's a look of you are my friend, but you don't quite know who I am yet. And it's a really neat experience to share my passion and joy for all things sound and design and brain science, and people just walk up to me and we can talk for days immediately because they're all up to speed on all the stuff that I love. And so what I love to do in those situations is just ask them a lot of questions and learn about them. But yeah, it's a really neat, yeah, it's like having a companion in your pocket,

Doug Downs (11:41):

Okay, down to the dark side of audio. It's not immune to deep fakes. I don't know if you notice, but James Cridlin, who writes an extremely popular newsletter in the podcast worlds put one of his newsletters on how to interpret podcast statistics through Google lm, and it created voices and created an eight minute podcast to it. My goodness, the voices were really good. If you had just played that for me, cold without me knowing anything, I'd say those were human beings, man, and a woman interacting with one another. The opportunity for deep fakes exists in audio as well. That's the darker sier side here.

Dallas Taylor (12:22):

Yeah, we did a whole show on this called Deep Fake Dallas that we should probably go up, go and update, because this was prior to the 11 labs stuff. And what I had to do was I had to send three hours of my raw voice from the podcast to this person I didn't know in some other country, and they were like, I'm going to do my thing and then I'm going to make a deep fake voice of you. And it was fairly successful. And then about two years later, suddenly now, these are things you can do yourself on your computer. So I've cloned my voice at least three full deep times where we've fed three hours of my raw mic into some programs and then got that back. We use that actually for when we're putting our shows together. We put a fake voice of me in it.

(13:13):

Now, in my case, even with all of that data, it still sounds really weird and uncanny. I've also heard voices that can be very convincing, but I think recognizable voices is very difficult to pass off. You can certainly, if you are trying to do something to hurt someone, you can futz it up. So what I mean by futzing is make it sound like it's on a telephone or there was a little dropout where it gets a little uncanny. So if somebody wants to do something terrible, they certainly can, but for me, much of what I'm hearing in the audio deepfake slash voice cloning space sounds like the person, but it sounds like a soulless, uncanny valley version of that person. And I believe that getting inflection and these, the sing singsongs of speech is going to be much more difficult than getting the 95% of the way there.

Doug Downs (14:09):

Awesome. Now, within all of your episodes, you play a little game where you play a sound and it compels the audience because they know it from somewhere, although it may not be bleeding obvious and they have to guess what the sound is. And we've sort of devised a little variation of this, and I think my job is to try to guess which each is, do I have the game?

Dallas Taylor (14:30):

So within our show, in our ad break, in the middle of our ad break, so you'll hear about some product right in the middle, we put a little micro story where we play a sound, we ask the audience to guess that sound by submitting to a web address, and then the next week we announce the winner, we give them a free T-shirt, and then tell the little story behind that sound. And so it's a great little fun game that at the end of the year play, we get a group of people to almost do a game show of it. So we're going to do a little mini version here with five sounds.

Doug Downs (15:03):

Okay. Alright. I'm ready. I'm ready to play the game.

Dallas Taylor (15:06):

Alright, so we'll go with sound one.

Doug Downs (15:09):

Shh. My goodness. And I know it. It's at the end of a TV sitcom and it plays as the transition to the commercials before the next sitcom comes on. I can't tell you what network though.

Dallas Taylor (15:30):

Yeah. Any wild guesses?

Doug Downs (15:40):

I want to say I've seen it the end of Cheers.

Dallas Taylor (15:42):

So I'm going to start with, this is a sonic logo from a company that started in the late eighties. And I'll give you another hint, and you might've heard it after an animated cartoon.

Doug Downs (15:54):

Does it play at the end of the Simpsons?

Dallas Taylor (15:56):

That's right. Ding,

Doug Downs (15:57):

Ding, ding. It does. So it's Fox, is

Dallas Taylor (15:59):

It? So that's the sonic logo for Gracie Films, which is the production company behind the Simpsons.

Doug Downs (16:06):

Oh, Gracie Films. Okay.

Dallas Taylor (16:11):

Okay. The chatter you hear at the beginning is actually the voices of the composer and the CEO of Fox duplicated to make it sound like they're in a crowded theater. And the Shush was recorded by actress and comedian Tracy Ulman, her show, the Tracy Ulman show was where the first Simpsons short aired before it was spun off into its own series

Doug Downs (16:31):

Back in the late eighties. 89 I think was when the Simpsons first started. That show has been, Bart has been 10 for so long,

Dallas Taylor (16:39):

Right?

Doug Downs (16:40):

That's awesome.

Dallas Taylor (16:40):

Since I was 10.

Doug Downs (16:42):

Yeah, same here. Good one. Okay, ready for number two? I might have heard that somewhere, but that's not sticking for me at all. Again, it sounds like a stinger that's transitional between one piece to the next, but that one's not sticking for me.

Dallas Taylor (17:06):

So it's a startup sound and it's also created by someone who's partly known for his collaborations with David Bowie. It's a very famous sound. Oh wow. Okay. What I love about this game is that you have half of your listeners going, oh my goodness, I know that sound. How do you not know that? Okay, for the

Doug Downs (17:25):

Other half, I'm going to do that. No, I don't. If I've heard it, it doesn't stick. It's not there.

Dallas Taylor (17:37):

Okay. So that is the Windows 95 startup sound. It was created by ambient musician, Brian Eno. And Eno said that Microsoft gave him a letter saying that the piece of music should be inspiring, sexy driving, provocative, nostalgic, sentimental. It went on and on. And at the very bottom it said not more than 3.8 seconds long. And so he ended up making 83 different versions, and that's what Microsoft picked.

Doug Downs (18:05):

Was there a reason why it had to be that tight, that short?

Dallas Taylor (18:09):

I bet it had something to do with loading resources. Every time I find out startup sounds, especially back in the day, usually it meant that it had, some things had to be running in the background and that kept you a little occupied for 3.8 seconds.

Doug Downs (18:23):

Okay, that's bad that I missed that. Okay. There's number three. Okay. That one I have heard, but okay, now you got me thinking about how my computer starts. Oh boy. Again, it feels like I'm opening something up. That one, and maybe it's because you influenced me with sound number two. That was when I was firing up Windows 95, but that sounds like I'm opening something. Sounds like the beginning of something, not a transition or a closing, but I can't pinpoint that.

Dallas Taylor (19:08):

You probably heard it and it was fairly annoying in the context of where you heard this.

Doug Downs (19:15):

If they played that while I was on hold on the phone, I wouldn't have stayed on hold. But

Dallas Taylor (19:20):

That's exactly where it came from. That's the really famous Cisco hold music. It's known as Opus number one. And it was created in 1989 by a 16-year-old named Tim Carlton using a drum machine. And a synthesizer years later, Tim's friend got a job at Cisco and programmed the track as a default, hold music for the company's new phones. And so it just flew into the world from that. And there's also a really great episode of this American Life all about that one little piece of music.

Doug Downs (19:55):

So while I would be Hold on the phone, that piece would just keep playing

Dallas Taylor (20:00):

And it'll loop. Yep.

Doug Downs (20:01):

Oh God, yeah. I'd been annoyed. My association with the brand would not have been good piece of music, but cannot be listened to on repeat. There's no way.

Dallas Taylor (20:09):

And it's kind of like back when you had a physical phone systems that Cisco would install too. So now it's something that most of this stuff is digital now and they pick their own hold music, but that was listened to millions and millions of times a day. Well, I dunno about a day, but a lot of times,

Doug Downs (20:28):

Well, I can say each of those is sophisticated, elegant, and effective because they all felt like they had a purpose for me, whether it was to open something and to begin something or whether I felt it was the transition from one thing to another. They served a defined for me.

Dallas Taylor (20:48):

And many of 'em people maybe put hundreds of hours into it. And then a couple were real quick.

Doug Downs (20:55):

Awesome. Dallas. In our previous episode, our guest dean, human of Focus communications in Edmonton, he left a question behind for you.

Dean Heuman (21:05):

I have a question that I always have in my mind, and it comes from being around a lot of new media and social content and those kinds of things. And I always hear, Hey, this Beyonce commercial was shot on an iPhone or a Pixel or a Galaxy, or whatever your latest, greatest thing is. And I wonder if it's not a bit of a disqualification of the quality. And here's my problem, it may have been shot on an iPhone, but the sound wasn't recorded, the voices aren't recorded. The sound is something that I believe brings credibility and I want to know if anyone sort of has an opinion on what level of engagement you get by providing better sound and video combining the right really sort of level of media, including those both components, does it exponentially affect the quality of engagement and the amount of response that you get?

Dallas Taylor (22:11):

Yeah. So the idea of shot on an iPhone, what's interesting about that is that is marketing. It's really Apple showing what the capabilities are and the democratization of being able to create content with the piece of equipment in your pocket. Now they're being absolutely correct by shot on an iPhone, but it's not saying all of the other things like coloring, like sound like mixing all of those things. But to be fair, the most expensive IMAX cameras also don't have sound capabilities. And so if you ever hear the shoot from an IMAX film, that thing sounds loud. So it's really no different than a 35 millimeter camera or an IMAX camera or a red digital camera or any of these because the camera doesn't do sound. I mean, you can collect sound in it, but it doesn't do sound design mix and that whole sense. And so it's really no different, but it's just a great way of marketing.

(23:07):

But absolutely bringing, there's a lot of reasons why sound matters on videos. I remember back early, I was doing this music touring thing back when the Blair Witch Project came out, so I had no idea that it wasn't real. So when I went in, I was like, oh my goodness, this feels so real. And it was raw, and this was a movie that was shot. People had little camcorders and it felt so raw and real. But immediately once we got into it, I went, this sounds way too good to be real. While most people didn't realize that, so sound me when I think about sound as being magic, I love magic. And what magicians do is they show you something. That's the visuals, they show you all this beautiful clean stuff that's happening. If you want to vanish a coin or if you want to pick a card or any of that stuff from their vantage point, they're doing some dirty work that they can see and they can feel. But from your vantage point, because I'm very specific on the angle that I want you to watch this trick from, you just see the trick and you just get wowed by it. Sound is the magic trick in video and films and TV and games. It's the thing that no one just naturally thinks about, but it's the thing that is the dirty work to cover up the fact that to suspend your disbelief and engage you and wrap around you and bring you into the reality of that story. And that's why sound is super powerful. Hearing

Doug Downs (24:36):

Is believing.

Dallas Taylor (24:37):

That's

Doug Downs (24:38):

Right. Your turn. Dallas, what question would you like to leave behind for our next guest?

Dallas Taylor (24:42):

I wanted to tell a story about the question that I ask at the end of every one of my interviews, and I figured I would ask that oftentimes we're trying to get in 20,000 hertz. It sometimes can be challenging to get an emotional response from someone. And so we have a series of questions that we ask at the very end of our interviews to elicit a response that maybe someone has never been asked before. But it's a very loving question. And it also, I'd also say that many of our episodes go out on the response to this question. And that question is, out of all the things you could have been doing in your life to maybe make more money or do this or that, or you could be an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor or start a business, why have you devoted your life to, or at least this period of your life, to insert the pursuit that you're on right now? So if I'm talking to a sound designer, why have you devoted your life to sound or why have you devoted your life to auditory processing issues? And then what you hear is a big pause and then poetry usually because no one's really been asked why they do what they do.

Doug Downs (26:00):

And it is a choice. I mean, even if someone feels like they've fallen into it and here they are, you and I are somewhere cut from the same cloth. I really appreciate your time today, Dallas. What a thought provoking episode. Appreciate it.

Dallas Taylor (26:13):

Thank you.

Doug Downs (26:15):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Dallas Taylor, we've got his contact information in the show notes. Check out his podcast. If they search right now, Dallas, should they look up 20 K Hertz or 20,000 hertz, what's the best search term?

Dallas Taylor (26:29):

Typically if you put in TWE, it will probably autopopulate, but if it doesn't, just spell it all out without any number. So TWEY, et cetera

Doug Downs (26:40):

Stories and Strategies is a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies podcasts. Thank you to our producer Emily Page. And lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.