Sleight of Ear: Behind the scenes w/ Dallas Taylor
What does a sound designer do all day? How do noise canceling headphones really work? And why do modern movie trailers all sound the same? In this follow-up to our 150th episode, Dallas shares the sec...
6 Jul 202224min
Breathe: My Unexpected Journey
What if you woke up one day, and found that you could no longer do the thing that gave you the most joy in your life? The thing that gave you purpose? The thing that defined your past, and was suppose...
22 Jun 202232min
Relearning Boléro: How our brains rewrite the sounds we hear
In the same way that optical illusions can trick our eyes, auditory illusions can trick our ears. This raises a serious question: what is hearing, and how much of it is actually made up by our brains?...
8 Jun 202238min
Ghosts in the Hit Machine: The secrets of musical ghostwriters
Many of today’s biggest songs are written and produced by people whose names don’t appear anywhere in the credits. They’re called ghostwriters and ghost producers, and they’re a huge part of the music...
25 Mai 202227min
Why Windows Got Rid of Startup Sounds
Part 2 of our series on the Windows startup sounds picks up when Microsoft made the radical decision to kill the startup sound in Windows 8. In this episode, we explore the forces that led to that dec...
11 Mai 202231min
Ta-da! The history of Windows’ classic startup sounds
Over the years, Microsoft has made at least ten iconic startup sounds for Windows—from the triumphant “Ta-da!” of Windows 3.1, to the ambient chime that Brian Eno crafted for Windows 95, to the orches...
27 Apr 202226min
The Waterphone: Hollywood’s spookiest sound effect
For nearly half a century, one eerie sound has been showing up again and again in movies and TV shows. It’s typically used when something spooky or mysterious happens—and it can be heard in Poltergeis...
13 Apr 202224min
Mind the Gap: NYC & London’s iconic transit voices
The voices of subway and train announcements are deeply ingrained in peoples’ lives. Many of us hear them every day, for years on end. And yet, hardly anyone knows who those voices belong to. In this ...
30 Mar 202232min
