Twenty Thousand Hertz

David Jeffers has always understood the world through sound. As a kid, he bounced beats between tape decks and built speaker boxes from spare parts. After college, he founded an underground hip hop la...

23 Feb 27min

What happens when a podcast about sound gets into video? In this special behind-the-scenes episode, producer Grace East flips the script and interviews Dallas about his leap into visual storytelling, ...

9 Feb 37min

What does a time machine sound like? Or a magic carpet? For the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, that was just another day at the office. For 40 years, this oddball collective of engineers and composers push...

26 Jan 38min

The theme song to Reading Rainbow has been delighting kids (and nostalgic grown-ups) for over 40 years. But how did this instantly iconic track come to be? In this episode, composer Steve Horelick rev...

12 Jan 27min

Every New Year’s at midnight, we raise our voices to sing a song that few of us understand: “Auld Lang Syne.” So when and why did this become the anthem of the holiday? In this episode, our friends at...

31 Des 202522min

For our sixth annual Mystery Sound game show, we’ve invited three guests from our video series to test their sonic knowledge on 18 sounds, including production logos, video game FX, bird calls, strang...

17 Des 202546min

Behind Fallout’s apocalyptic sci-fi and retro nostalgia is a masterclass in sound design. In this episode, we explore how the audio teams behind both the video games and the TV series built Fallout’s ...

3 Des 202541min

In movie musicals, the vocals are almost never recorded live on-set. Instead, the actors pre-record their songs, then lip sync to those recordings while filming. But on Wicked, they threw out the rule...

19 Nov 202532min