The Earworm Podcast - Episode 8 Audio Sushi at The Murch Table SOUND DESIGN

In this episode of The Earworm Podcast, Patrick Cloud and Bryan Clark explore the fascinating history of sound design in film, from the era of silent movies and live theater musicians to the invention of Foley artistry and the groundbreaking work of legendary sound designer Walter Murch. Along the way, they examine how humans interpret sound and music through learned “codes,” discussing everything from language and cultural influences to the psychological and emotional connections that shape our musical tastes. The conversation also dives into the revolutionary impact of films like Star Wars, which pushed sound design into new creative territory and forever changed how audiences experience cinema.

The episode closes with a deep dive into the relationship between musical influence and creativity, challenging listeners to explore unfamiliar genres and uncover the “source code” behind great art. Featured listening selections include Frank Zappa’s “Night School,” an introduction to the ancient Indian Carnatic tradition of Konnakol, and Kraftwerk’s pioneering electronic classic “Numbers.” Through these examples, the hosts encourage listeners to broaden their musical vocabulary, sharpen their listening skills, and discover how innovative sounds continue to shape modern music and media.

https://transom.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/04/200504.review.murch_.pdf

https://monoskop.org/images/6/6d/Chion_Michel_Audio-Vision.pdf

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sounds_of_Star_Wars

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Welcome to Earworm Episode 8. I'm Patrick Cloud. I'm Brian Clark. And today we are here to discuss something that I didn't really understand or really think of as a topic before, because it just wound up being so interesting to find out about a couple of people in history in sound design and foley and uh the impacts that they've had on film and uh a lot of the films that have come out in the last few years. So today is really about codes, we would say.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Yeah, codes of perception, encoding, embodiment. We're gonna be riffing on an idea by the great Walter Murch.

SPEAKER_04 0:36

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Now, Walter Murch is a guy that I and this is gonna sound stupid, I've never heard of. And then as we did research about the episode, it it was like unbelievable the depth of knowledge that this guy has. For sure. The ideation that he has put forth, all of the different programs that are being used. Uh he created worldizing for sound design and in film. He's a contemporary of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, Michelle Schion. Yeah. Michelle Xion. It was really interesting to do a deep dive into this guy because it was really I'd never heard of him, and apparently a lot of people have.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Yeah. Yeah. Well, same. I mean, this is not a field that we're both usually in, right? Um, sound design and and being able to do audio mixing and so on and so forth for major motion pictures. I mean, you know, THX 1138, right? And then, of course, Apocalypse Now and you know, The Godfather, and many of his other, you know, illustrious artistic endeavors that he's has won world renowned fame for. So um so we're not talking about an obscure individual.

SPEAKER_04 1:44

Right. There's hundreds of hours of his lectures on YouTube.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Yeah. That's true. That's true. But I thought it'd be cool if we just sit down and we go, okay, let's take apart this idea of the relationship between dialogue, and particularly within a uh a motion picture medium and music, and then the sound effects in between. And what at what point did we start putting sound to film? And when did we make a transitional leap between Foley and sound design?

SPEAKER_04 2:37

Well, come to find out, it was like a really three-year period in the 20s. I mean, we're talking of pre-World War II. We're talking about the time where pretty much the boom happened of film and the transition from you know silent films to talkies and then into sound effects, right? So uh I, you know, I always think of when I think of an old film, I think of The Wizard of Oz, right? Okay. Old film, yeah. It's about 12 or 13 years after this boom that I'm talking about. And when you look at The Wizard of Oz and you watch it today, even it still holds up in all of the sound regards. It's just a beautiful sounding film, beautiful looking film, obviously, but a beautifully sounding sounding film. But there are films before that that were that were doing it. So let's talk about the advent.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

The advent of that. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, set your tape backs. We're gonna hit the rewind button. It was exactly a hundred years. 1926. 1926, we have Don Juan, which was really uh the first featuring John Barrymore. And Mary Aster. And Mary Astor. Um, those two in this film were unique in many ways, of course, from their acting, but more importantly, because it was the first film that actually had synchronized music to it. And what does that mean? Well, it basically means that, for example, uh what we would normally find if we went to go and watch a movie in the day is that there was an organist up in the balcony that was actually doing live accompaniment to each show. This was synchronized, and it wasn't just an organ, it was a full symphony orchestra, which had never been heard before. So imagine going from like, if you if you're thinking like a rock band or something, imagine going from an acoustic guitar to a whole five-piece band with horns. You know, you'd be like, wow, this is amazing. Now imagine an organ going to an orchestra. You have just, you know, a hundred times the power.

SPEAKER_04 4:34

And what was cool, I thought, is because I went and watched some of the film, and it was just cool to be able to capture the emotion of what was happening on film with the music that was synchronized to it. Like when it was when it was a fun part of the movie, there was fun music that was happening. It was, and it was still before people were talking in movies.

SPEAKER_02 4:51

So exactly. There was still it was still a silent movie. It was just music. There wasn't even any foley, which is what we'll kind of get to next. But in 27, in 1927, a year later, we had the first talkie Al Jolson jazz singer. Yeah. Right. That was sort of like the monumental, you know, now, okay, things have changed.

SPEAKER_04 5:09

Yeah, people just don't dress that way anymore.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

No, they don't. They don't talk that way anymore.

SPEAKER_04 5:15

They certainly don't. Where did that voice come from? I have no idea. This is Hollywood, left, right. What are we doing here? Get the papers, get the papers.

SPEAKER_02 5:23

Right. It's not even an accent that's unique to a particular region, really. Right.

SPEAKER_04 5:27

It was made up for a TV. I think it was.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

It's kind of like um, you know, like the same thing that happens with Gary Cooper, you know, and just all of those, you know, just that it's a peculiar way of speaking. It is. You know? Anyway, okay, so yeah, uh 1927, we have the jazz singer, and now we have motion pictures that actually feature dialogue and music, but there is no foley, meaning the sound effects, right? Like the sound of footsteps or wind or whatever, you know, and there's a there's this relationship. So for me, I think it's kind of cool if we kind of help uh the listeners establish a parameter for appreciation of this, which is that there is a an inherent relationship that we have and a juxtaposition to, um, where our experience is in life, and then when we go and sit in a dark room and watch film flicker past us on a screen, how much of the outside world do we bring in with us when we're looking at a film that is projecting something that was clearly meant in the outside world, like maybe it's two characters walking through a park or going to a zoo or being in an office building or and all the sounds that we inherently associate with uh with those were devoid of that. It was just the dialogue, and then there was the music. So there would be this weird, almost abstract nature to it where we might hear in the theater, we might hear the sound of the film projector running in the back and people munching on popcorn and some ambient whispers and stuff, you know. It's like that becomes the bed for us to to go on the journey because the the film is the journey. Sure. And the music is just sort of the the sort of the the the the the ebulent waves that keep the the float, you know, that keep the boat afloat on the journey.

SPEAKER_04 7:16

Right. And you know, when when they were transitioning into having these types of things in film, it's not like there was multi-track recording, and they were not gonna go mic every door and every footstep and every they couldn't, it was unreasonable. Yeah. So but radio had figured it out.

unknown 7:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 7:32

Radio figured it out. They were like, we're gonna have a guy making these sounds live in the studio. And if you go back, I I always think of uh uh the Little Chop of Horrors when John Candy's playing the radio DJ and he's like pulling the things and blowing the horns and stuff to try to make it like the car is going by and he blows the horn, et cetera. And I always thought that was really funny, but it is the reality of where this actually kind of came from for film to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

That's right. That's exactly right. And it started happening with uh a particular individual whose last name actually becomes the discipline and the genre and the whole industry behind sound effects in films, which is Jack Foley.

SPEAKER_04 8:15

Right. I mean the Foley stage. The Foley Stage. It's the Foley team because it's usually a partner. There's usually two people on a Foley team. Sometimes you get the Foley Trinity, as we saw, uh, where there's three. Yeah. Um aptly titled hilariously.

SPEAKER_05 8:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 8:29

Um but yeah, I mean, and you know, flash forward, we could jump around a little bit, but flash forward, you know, Foley becomes one of the most important parts of the development of sound design for film. And, you know, digging into these guys, Walter Murch and Ben Burt, there is this. I am totally fascinated with the way that they that they have produced these things. When you go in and you see some of the the playback of Star Wars when they're in the Foley stage and they're making the sounds, you just can't even believe how creative these people are to make these sounds that really that engage us with the film so much better.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

Well, and then you know, so we might just go, all right, when did Foley start to happen? It was 1928, right? That was when he started to work. And the way that they used to put sound effects on is fascinating because that was a one-take thing. You know, they you were the the picture was being scored in real time, and the Foley artists were performing in real time. And then any voiceovers that needed to happen were done in real time. So there wasn't this like um massing up of multi-takes to create this dense, dense, dense text.

SPEAKER_04 9:43

That came way later.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:44

And that's it's actually still practiced now.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

Oh, absolutely. I mean, where you have you might have hundreds of dialogue tracks and hundreds and hundreds of Foley tracks, and then you've got your your score.

SPEAKER_04 9:56

So wouldn't it be fun? Side note, wouldn't it be fun for somebody to do that with a a modern movie where they do the Foley live on stage? That would be cool. That would be kind of a fine.

SPEAKER_02 10:07

That would be a very Arthur, you know, kind of thing. I would go. I would do that. That's a criterion collection request. But like if we if if you think about it, that's to me, that's really fascinating. Because now you're getting to the point where um this discipline evolves. And so there becomes this point, and this is the thing that's fascinating fascinated me, which is the line of demarcation that happened between 1928 and I'll just use rough numbers here, but like 1976. That's where it took that long for Foley to be established, for a practice to evolve, for the films to widely adopt it, and the art to get better and better and better. And then the idea of as we get into multi-tracking later, where you can start to now layer multiple foley extravaganzas for whatever the film is, you can put it in there and it becomes this dense and dense structure. And so there's this disconnect um between what some of these folks are saying, particularly Walter Merch and Michel Schion, who um who talk about this, and they're saying, you know, if you use too much sound uh then it defeats the purpose, it becomes overriding and it pulls people out of the narrative and the journey that the film is on. Right. Um so there's this there's this thing that he talked about, which is the impetus of the whole show for us, which is this concept of codes. You know, his concept is that language is a code, it's an encoded information and that it's learned to be deciphered. I've and then he talks about on the other side, he he c uh contrasts it with this sort of like um uh embodied code or embodiedness, which is essentially what he feels music is. In other words, the meaning of music is is already there. There's nothing to unpack. It's the meaning is inherently obvious. I slightly disagree with that, just being a composer and a musician, um, because I think music is a language and it is encoded, and maybe we'll shed some light on that as we go into our wacky playlist that Patrick and I have assembled, and we have to sell you in in advance. Um You're not ready for it. Right. You're not there it is. Wow, what a gauntlet that just got thrown back. You're not ready for it. Did you hear it?

SPEAKER_04 12:25

I heard you are not coded for all of these this music. You you haven't learned the code to appreciate it, right? And we talk about codes quite a bit in preparation, and one of the things that code is everywhere. Everything we do is a code. There's a code to playing this keyboard, there is a code to cooking a dish, there is a code to training an animal, and they have their own codes that they that we teach them, right? When we tell them to sit. It's just another code, right? So, and there's ways to that we get code delivered to us. Now we could seek out code, right? If we want to find a genre of music or a new band, right? We talked about authoritative authoritative bias in our episode, and maybe there's a band that we like that took a band on tour. Like maybe Dream Theater took ArchSpire on tour. It's like that I will go to Dream Theater to say, hey, tell me about a band that I like. So you have a pursuit, right? You're going after the code.

SPEAKER_05 13:20

Right.

SPEAKER_04 13:20

But then you have the code that's just inherently learned around you in your environment, culturally, yeah, environmentally. I think there's a lot of different subsections of that, but those are the things that happen around you. Like if you live in a French-speaking house, guess what?

unknown 13:36

Right.

SPEAKER_04 13:36

You're gonna learn to speak French. That's not your pursuit of learning French, right? That is the culture that you're in and in the environment that you're in coding you to speak French.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

Yeah, I think I think that's true. And the same thing happens with uh with context in the sense of within that culture, there are different levels of context that give us protocol, that give us nuance, they'd give us that idea of expectation and what is a cultural norm within that, you know? Like, for example, if we if we think about let's think about some music genres just real quick. Think about like if death metal, right? Okay, if and you're getting- which genre of death metal? That's right, that's right. That's a man, what a future episode that this is gonna be. It's gonna be fun. But okay, so like let's just say that we're in um, you know, burnt death metal. Okay. Okay, that genre. Okay, all right. And you get the blast beats, right? With like the 64th notes on the kick drum, this is that brrrrrrrr, right? Super, super fast. If you compare that kick drum, if we just isolated the kick drum just by itself, like you that's you can mute everything else in that track except the kick drum, and you did the same thing with, say, um, a Gladys Knight record from you know the mid-70s, and you just heard that, they're radically different sounding. The latter is gonna have very little attack, lots of low end, like a very pillowy type of a, you know, it's gonna be this beautiful, just like almost like a heartbeat kind of a sub kind of a thing. Whereas if we compared it with, you know, the the this this theoretical death metal example, it's gonna be all attack and hardly any low end because the guitars are gonna take up that thing. So this is the idea of like the norm, the the protocols and the expectations of what should happen within this coding.

SPEAKER_04 15:22

And I think similarly, and also on the flip side, but similarly, the same way that I'm sharing molecules with this microphone, right? There are songs, there might be a Gladys Knight song and an Archspire song where that piece of code is exactly the same, where they share the same bass sound or they share the same frequency of note, isolated in a very small way. And that shows like the connective tissue about the universal language of music.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. So these are the kind of esoteric, you know, sort of alleyways that we get to travel in this type of episode, especially when we're looking at the writings and the the speeches that you know Walter Merch has made and Michelle Chion, who really starts to extrapolate this idea of of vision and sound and the relationship between the two. So for those of you who've seen The Godfather, there's there's a scene where um where Michael Corleone's daughter dies, right, and he's he's screaming uh about it, but in the movie it's dead silent. Right. Now, in reality, he was screaming, but he just muted it, right? For the s express effect of being able to just pull people in to that that language. Now, my stepbrother uh is 90% deaf, totally in one ear and 10% in the other. And so uh and he had a fever when he was a young child, and so he's been that way his entire life. And it was so fascinating because when I when he and I would talk about things, we could talk about things from a football field away because we were able to communicate visually with each other. And by doing that, it was I'll tell you, Patrick, it's some of the loudest conversations I've ever had. It was like me talking to you, but he was on the other side of the football field, and we were just communicating just visually. We could communicate with each other just like we're communicating now.

SPEAKER_04 17:17

And that's an encoding that you share. Yeah. So very cool. And you you really put me on the spot when we were talking, because I hate your favorite music. I just don't understand it. I have a I have a I don't loathe it. It's not fake. It's not that, but well, something that you're studied and code and you've learned the code of this electroacoustic freeze, don't even bother. Um I'm I'm kidding, obviously. Uh but it was it took time to understand it and to unpack it to be able to appreciate it. So be able to code, like you've learned this code. So when you hear it, you hear it totally differently than I do. It's like that South Park episode where all the music sounds like farts.

SPEAKER_03 17:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 17:56

Um but you gave it back to me and you said, Well, did you like sushi the first time you ate it?

SPEAKER_03 18:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:02

And I was like, I don't know. I don't I can't I can't think of it. But then you you went on to say that nobody eats sushi for the first time alone. Is there some kind of an influence that has brought you to that point? And I say all that because you have influenced me in showing me different kinds of music, and I trust your bias. So I do my best to try and unpack that code. Some codes are lengthier than others. And for me, that road to that type of music is a very lengthy code for me to learn.

SPEAKER_05 18:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:36

And that's why I think I have such a visceral reaction when I hear any of it. Yeah. Like songs that are just all snaps and clapping, dude. I just don't get it. But I understand that your code is different and you've accepted and learned that code to be able to get it.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

Well, that's the heart of what we're talking about, because by the same token, you know, you appreciate music some that I may not resonate with, like the like Archspire or some of the other bands. I mean, I appreciate what they're doing, but there's a part of me that's like, okay, there's the emotional aspect that when, you know, ask yourselves this, folks, you know, why do you like what you like? What what what basis of factual evidence mixed with pure emotion, mixed with whatever timeline that you're willing to travel on to get an appreciation for it? How how long is that? I mean, it's a very complex and uniquely human thing. Yeah. Like AI can't compete with this on this. Right. It's just gonna be, it's even though it's a code, it is. It's gonna it's gonna be able to extrapolate all the parameters within a microsecond. But for us, we're gonna have a totally different relationship that takes years to develop or minutes or a second. It we we have that type of of level of assimilation. And I think that that's so fascinating because there's certain types of music that when we listen to, we go, no, not for me.

SPEAKER_04 19:55

Not for me. Or there's those those moments where you hear a band the first time and you're like, I mean, it's okay. But then as you listen to it more, the code unravels more. Yeah. And you start to go, oh, this is awesome. I can't tell you how many times I heard a band the first time, being like, that's not really my thing. And then all of a sudden, a year later, it's like one of my favorite parties. Yeah, it hits you. Yeah. But then at the same token, you know when you don't like something.

unknown 20:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:19

Like if you hear it, like everybody's had that feeling where you're listening to music, you're like, this is not for me.

SPEAKER_05 20:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:24

And whether that's a taste thing or a code thing, it could be either. But uh kind of an interesting way to think about how we come to determine our playlist.

SPEAKER_02 20:33

And I wonder, you know, this is a behavioral question that I don't have an answer for, but it's like how much of that is hardwired, you know. So I'm thinking about food now, and I'm just thinking, like, you know, kids, like, first time you put broccoli on a plate for your child, probably has a 90% failure rate. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 20:49

It's pretty high.

SPEAKER_02 20:50

Right. It's really high. But but if you put uh uh a cookie on the plate and they've never had it before, you're gonna see everything light up. Like there's a part of us that's hardwired that way too. So and sound is the first sense that really gets developed.

SPEAKER_04 21:06

That's uh the part of Walter Merch's uh his whole concept, you know, he's got this big concept of things that he he teaches, and one of them is he created the sound of being inside the womb. And that was one of his effects that he built for forgot what movie it was for, uh, but that was like one of his things, is like the first thing you hear, the the first thing you have is hearing, and all of the the uh uh disorganization of being inside of a womb and the way that you get coded to those different things.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

Yeah. Because you're you're hearing the blood flow, you're hearing the heartbeat of the motherfucker. The mother eating, yeah, talking. Yeah, the intestinal tracts, you're you're hearing everything there, and no other sense, you know, you you have um hearing capabilities at four and a half months. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:52

Right.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

Four and a half months. Yeah. So that's fascinating, right? That's like that is the it and at that point, that is the only sense. Sight is not there. You know, so touch and feel is just sort of nascent, right? Until all those get jump started the minute that we get ripped out, you know, um if you're born in the 70s by forceps or whatever, you know what I mean? Like but you know what I'm saying? Like um in that sense, you know, the the birth passage is is is a a huge upheaval to what sound has been relative uh to a kingdom. This was this was it. You know, this was the highest the the highest office.

SPEAKER_04 22:28

And you know, in in youth too, as you're young, you know, the neuroplasticity is is a lot different than it is when you're older. So when you come out the womb, everything for the first few years, that coding is like hard coated into you. Yeah. And a lot of the things that happened as a child, that's why there's these people have traumas and all these different things that have happened. A lot of that happened in the first seven years that you're alive. I remember eating Brussels sprouts, yeah. And my mom just really fed up Brussels sprouts for me.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

Was it traumatic?

SPEAKER_04 22:55

No, it wasn't quite traumatic, but she was so bad at cooking Brussels sprouts. Shout up, mom. The uh so so bad. Right. And then in my 30s, I think I had Brussels sprouts again, and I was like, okay. Yeah, it was because they were so poorly prepared for me when I was a child that it coded me my whole life for saying I don't like Brussels sprouts. Well, the truth of the matter is I actually did.

SPEAKER_02 23:18

Yeah. You just didn't like hers. I didn't like hers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:22

Just like steamed. What were they doing with Brussels sprouts?

SPEAKER_02 23:25

Man, okra is the same way for me. Like, there's a there's a certain way to fry okra, and for me, it's gotta have cornmeal in it. And if it doesn't, if it's breaded and it's too heavily breaded, I'm not a fan. I want the gritty part of the cornmeal. I understand that. And that's because my grandmother used to fry her okra with cornmeal. Okay. And it tastes so good and it's dry and it's not slimy and spongy like okra can get. Anyway, so yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:48

That is okra was the one thing my mom got right. Let me tell you something. My mom used to figure out that if you slow cook okra, it becomes that stickiness, and she would use that in gumbo to make the consistency. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 24:02

Yeah. That makes sense. Pretty genius. Yeah, absolutely. Well, okay, so on the music side. On the music side, though, when we think about it and you you get into this sort of 1970s with THX, right, 1138. Um for those of you who are.

SPEAKER_04 24:17

Which was also Walter Murch working. Doing the sound design. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

That's that is that is definitely Walter working. Um for those of you who don't know about that, uh, this was uh George Lucas's student film when he was at USC and Robert Duvall's in it. And the whole THX uh concept, uh, when when we think about theater sound and used to have the big THX, right? That amazing thing that would just make your skin, you know, just like you get shivers. Um that actually comes from this student film. And when I was at USC, I could go into the film archives there, which is the biggest blockbuster store you can ever imagine. It's like the Library Congress, but for movies. Not just worldwide releases, but also all the student films. It was fascinating to be amazing.

SPEAKER_04 25:03

And all in physical media. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

Yeah. Just it cool. And I could watch a copy of uh of THX. And it was it was really, really fascinating to watch it. So but that when when Merch was trying to come into it, to me, this marks a pivotal time. And this kind of comes back to our narrative, which was at what point did just like WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, and you know, you see it, you hear it. So if we're walking down the street wearing, you know, um, you know, dress shoes, we need to hear the heel clap and we need to hear a little bit of the grit of the leather, you know, just grinding into the the sedimentary part of the pavement.

SPEAKER_04 25:43

Or walking in front of you. Right.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

If it's on screen, yeah, if it's on screen, we should see a rep a sonic representation of it.

SPEAKER_04 25:50

Right. Without it getting like totally mud.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

Yeah, without you covering up the dialogue and getting in way of the journey, but it needs to feel like we're immersed in it. But when we get into the 70s, all of a sudden we start getting sci-fi starting to come onto the screen that's not just bleeps and bloops, like, you know, sort of uh danger while track lost in space, yeah. Which is which is just basically early synthesis. Yeah. Right. This is the Raymond Scott episode, right? That we kind of talked about, you know, just early, kind of like early synthesizers. Um but now we're getting into this thing where it's like, no, it needs to sound like something because these characters that we're creating have a more complex nature to them. They have movement, they have a speech, they have a a way of that they're they're they're you know, their robotics move back and forth. Think of like Darth Vader and his breathing, right? Or this is Ben Burt, which we'll you know, which we'll get to um in a minute. But but the idea is this is like, wow, this is incredible because now we're moving into developing sounds that need to impact us in a visceral way where we have an emotional relationship to it.

SPEAKER_04 26:56

But which previously we were looking at American Graffiti, where it's like you have a bunch of kids dancing in a dance hall. Yeah. How do you control all of those sounds, right? And it was a really well-done sound design. It's a beautiful, beautiful movie, obviously. But um, and then the cars, uh American Graffiti was such a great sounding movie, but it was real. It was real things, it's things that everybody can associate to. I've never heard of a lightsaber, and you know what is a lightsaber? What is a droid? All of these things are new, yeah. So we had to create instead of uh recreate.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

Yeah. Right. And how does a Wookiee sound? Yeah. You know, I mean, what what are the things?

SPEAKER_04 27:30

We had a British accent, I think, uh uh originally. Well, really. Because it was Peter May who delivered this.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Well, but or think about what does a Jawa sound like? You know, a new teeny. Yeah. So but like all of those, like um all of those characters, not only that, but just the sounds of the lasers, the the thruster engines, you know, the blaster ports, you know.

SPEAKER_04 27:49

And we're not going to discount Star Trek. We know. We know that was can we discount it? We can. It wasn't the sound wasn't great.

SPEAKER_02 27:56

Well, I didn't grow up in that era where that was the that was the new kid on the block. You know, to me, Star Wars was like it. I was seven years old when it came out, you know, and I watched it probably 30 times in the theater when ticket prices were like 75 cents for a matinee. You know, I literally went like, you know, every weekend. Yeah you know. Um but it but I love that. I mean, that's my favorite movie, as we've discussed. But we won't talk about no I'm kidding. We'd like Chad the Bird, but we're not gonna talk about Star Wars. Right. So I think that that's the moment, right, not necessarily Star Wars, but in that time period where things started to make a transition between just fully what you see is what you get, and this new sound that's coming into play. And it's not just um monsters' voices or or the sound effects of a laser or a fire breath or what it's also atmospheres of places that are new.

SPEAKER_04 28:51

Yeah, like the the space dog fights.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:54

Right? Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:55

Like all of those kind of things are just so fascinating as we as we move forward um to this idea of now we've got a third element. We have the dialogue, which is the journey, and it has to be sacrosanct, right? I I was would say this to my and I still believe this uh whenever you hear words in a song, the words are the most important thing. I don't care what you do. You could just go, oh no, listen to this virtuosic piece of an instrument that's going on, but it doesn't matter. The words are there, that is the first primal instrument of humanity. Every one of us has a voice. And so we are used to encoded into that biologically to be receptive to that frequency range, even more than others. So just to kind of throw in a little weird bit of trivia, there's the Fletcher Munson curves, all right. Now, this is not a racetrack outside of Stuttgart, right, and where they test portions. This is not that. It's not that. I don't know how I made that up, but there you go. This is the Fletcher Munson curves, they're named after two audiologists, but basically employed by Bell Labs. And what they were trying to do is figure out what part of the frequency spectrum, because we know and our listeners know from the past episodes that we basically hear from 20 hertz to 20 K, 20 kilohertz. That's a general great range for the human ear. All right. Um, what part of the frequency range when we're talking on the telephone lines need to be preserved over long distances so we don't lose clarity and intelligibility? Right. So they started to figure out and they mapped out this whole idea of like, well, if this frequency range is X loudness, what does that do to the ear? And as they mapped it out, they figured out that the ear does not hear in a linear way. So let me just sort of give you the spoiler on this. Okay. We are the most uh sensitive to frequencies that are around 800 hertz to about 3K. And why the frequency range when we have so much below that and so much above that, it's because that's generally where an average human, male or female, falls within that frequency range. Okay. So we're in crazy.

SPEAKER_04 31:01

So that's what we generate when we when we move our vocal cords around.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

Yeah. And so that's what they were interested in preserving. But it turns out as we get louder, like music, like you think, why are rock concerts too loud? Part of is coverage, right? They just need to fill up in a giant, you know, two million square foot, you know, space. Uh but but the reality of it is that at a certain point, and it's right around a little over 100 dB, which is loud, um, but when you get into like 105, 108, 109, our ear actually starts to hear slightly more flat, meaning that we hear more equally across all of the frequency spectrum. So uh this is not an excuse for everybody to go out and start listening to music at 110 dB.

SPEAKER_03 31:44

Please don't.

SPEAKER_02 31:44

Yeah. But um but y that's what our ear does, and it's just part of the way that the mechanisms our inner ear actually works. So um I think that that's kind of an interesting part about the Fletcher-Munson curves, right? But when we look at that trifecta between um dialogue and sound effects and music, we have to be able to balance that, which is a very good thing.

SPEAKER_04 32:06

And figure out where that intersection is.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:08

And um really that's when, you know, it it was all of that to be said with the Star Wars and everything, is that it created an I mean, it's another category at the Academy Awards, is sound design. They have teams of people that are that are on it, and it's incredible.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

And it's so dense.

SPEAKER_04 32:24

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Like layering so many different sounds to get essentially one composite sound.

SPEAKER_04 32:28

Right. And I w I wanted to go back to the uh the vocal part. I we were one of the things that uh we were reading about is uh the relationship between the pitch and the the depth of of the sound that is being made, regardless of what language it is. Like you can be bored by Stephen Hawking, even though he's saying tremendously intellectually and cool things because of the tone of his voice, but you can be highly entertained by R2D2, and there's only two people that can understand him in the entire world. Right. 3PO and Luke, for some reason. Right.

SPEAKER_02 33:00

Uh well the the rest of the cast could do it after a while.

SPEAKER_04 33:03

Yeah, they started to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:04

You know, so Han and Leia and everyone else started to understand him.

SPEAKER_04 33:08

And I think they understood understand him through through his tones, though.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Yeah, yeah. So well, okay, so that kind of gets us into that sound design. Right. That's it. It's the sound design. And and who if we're talking about Star Wars, there's really one man, and that's Ben Burt. Ben Burt. Right. And his contributions were so fascinating to me. There's an entire book called The Sounds of Star Wars, which we have, and if you've seen some of our socials, you saw me kind of sampling out of it. But um but Patrick and I have always been way into that and just sort of having fun with it. But you know, how did you come up with the idea, or I'm saying this, you mean him? Um the idea of the of the the lightsaber, you know, and uh well, what was it? It was an old film projector, and then there was a microphone that was causing interference, and then he would swing the microphone around, and that's what give you this sort of Doppler effect, and all of these kind of cool things. And you think about the the growl of Chewbacca, you know, sort of being a a hybrid um crossfading between walrus and a, you know, I think it was a lion or or someone will fact-check me on this, I'm sure. But uh but I'm just going off of basically.

SPEAKER_04 34:12

Somebody do a violent comment at Brian about it.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

Please. Yes. So but you know what I mean? Like that kind of stuff to me is really cool. But the ARP 2600, when our great synthesizer episode from last week, that one is um it was used quite heavily in the childlike nature of R2D2 and how it throws its tantrums and you know, he sort of gets snarky and sarcastic and you know, all of talks back and everything else. That's all I think.

SPEAKER_04 34:40

The only one that swears in the Star Wars universe. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

That we know of. That we know of. Yeah. Um but yeah, I mean, I think that that's to me, that's the really cool part. So when we think about how do we how do we understand things, how do we get to the point where this new element can kind of come into it? And here's the next phase, I think, which is how do we move from sound design and sound effects, how much of that can be translated into music back into music with no timed synchronous visual relationship to picture? Like, what about that? Is that possible? You know, and for me, I think yes, it is. It's something that I always try to do, you know, in in my Magicals for Mongrels records, you know, where I'll I may come up at the beginning of the song that's like just as much of a sound design as it is setting the mood for the piece. Because there are certain there are certain sounds that we hear that we naturally have an emotional association.

SPEAKER_04 35:42

Yeah, we've got it we've been environmentally coded. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 35:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:45

Like we were talking about culturally and environmentally coded, it's just where we get things that are around you to become to be able to understand them in any kind of way.

SPEAKER_02 35:54

Yep, that's right.

SPEAKER_04 35:55

So coming up with a theme is where you start. You just come up with a sound, a design, or a thematic build out for your song first, and then you work backwards from there.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

That's one way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many cool ways to approach it.

SPEAKER_04 36:12

Well, I was talking about for the magicals for mongrels.

SPEAKER_02 36:14

Oh, for the magicals for mongrels, yeah. I mean, everything, yeah, everything's a little bit different at how I how I try to do it, but I try to do that, or on the on the most recent record, which is uh the seven secret lives of Lucian Midnight, that's one of the ones, you know, where I kind of do that. Um there's a piece on there called Ronin. It's about a uh uh an Ronin, uh Samurai, who is masterless, and he's in the middle of um this deep, heavily bitter winter, and he's lost in the Japanese wilderness, and his fro his horse is already frozen to death, and he's sort of drinking whiskey dregs just to kind of and he's contemplating this idea of like he says, heaven and earth are said to be far-ranging, and yet they've become too narrow to fit me in. And and but I start with this real cluster part on the guitar, and then I knock it, but but for those of you that want to listen to it, there's a lot of sound design in here where I systematically transform just an acoustic nylon string guitar, and by the time you get into three-quarters of the way through, it sounds like traditional Japanese instruments like shaman suns and kyotos, and then it moves back in. And then there's parts where I'll transform the the um the campfire that's crackling in the back to a dusty record. And if you're not paying attention, it's gonna go right by you. But that's the kind of stuff that's the that level of just sound morphing and things moving into the other things and these transitions that and it goes with this idea of reincarnation, you know, everything is kind of coming. But it was important to me to go, I just want to take all my source sounds from one source, and then I'm gonna treat that interesting and go further.

SPEAKER_04 37:50

So would you say that when you're going to write, and I think a lot of us do this if we're songwriters or musicians, it's you take you try to analyze your source code, which is like everything that you've coded yourself to like, right? Whether it's been imprinted by the Beatles or Nirvana and Metallica, and or I'm just speaking on my end, where that's where my source code is for music has become. So when I create code, or I am coding, if you will, yeah, it's going to have those influences surrounded it there. And I think taste and influence and all of those things are part of this general code that we're talking about, that um seems to be something that I'm learning about now. It's like something I didn't really know or understand. And it's after reading all this stuff and looking at Walter Murch and all these different things that we that I've looked at in research, it's it's just kind of blowing my mind, to be honest with you. Right. To see all of those things related to each other so closely.

SPEAKER_02 38:53

Yeah, there's such a long tradition, and I know this is kind of treading on uh thin ice for you in the sense of the electroacoustic genre, but this is one of the main things that electroacoustic uh media has always been about. It's always about this idea of the relationship and how can we bring in a new source code and to use our parlance in this episode. How can we bring in something and establish it with the same type of narrative uh invitation that people can actually enjoy it? You know, like Accessibility.

SPEAKER_04 39:24

Yeah, like how do we make sure how do you familiarize the codes between everyone? Right.

SPEAKER_02 39:28

Okay, so case in point, like for most people, um, and I I can say this being a jazz musician and playing it for as long as I have, um, that's sort of where my source code ended up being because when the first time I heard Alan Holdsworth play, I was like, holy shit, what is this? This is absolutely amazing. I had no, I didn't even know, I didn't know any theory. I didn't even know what a major scale was. And I was hearing Alan Holdsworth the first time, and it was like, okay, there's a long road before you. But I loved that sound so much that I wanted to figure out how it did. And that was obviously the jazz path. So I went way, way, way, way, way, way down that rabbit hole and still continue to do it.

SPEAKER_04 40:10

So far down it that you became a doctor at it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:12

Yeah. And you come out the other side and then you realize there's another rabbit hole. You know? So but the the ideas, because I don't think I've mastered anything. I don't think I don't believe in mastery. I just believe in the journey. But um, but as you as you move into it, you gain all of these disappreciations. But for the most part, I could play my favorite solo by any jazz artist on any record and go, this is why this is an amazing thing. And if I just played it for someone who's not really encoded into the jazz canon, they're gonna go like, I don't know, man, it sounds like noise. Yeah, just sounds like a bunch of people just playing a whole bunch of notes. Jazz is a long road, man.

SPEAKER_04 40:47

That was it, it took it took me a long time to really understand that code and be able to break it down. Like it took me forever. I mean, as Barry said, the things that impressed me were Dream Theater's dumbest song, you know.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

So Right, right. But people like Louis Armstrong. They can get into Louis Armstrong.

SPEAKER_04 41:05

Very accessible jazz, though.

SPEAKER_02 41:07

Right. But that but as we move, the code changed. It moved it moved from the song and the 10 pen alley stuff, like, you know, Cole Porter and Gershwin and Irving Berlin and you know, all the Rogers and Hammerstein stuff in the show tunes. It moved away from that into faster tempos that people couldn't dance to anymore. And then the crooners started to fall off, and then it became about this virtuosity of these players that were so accomplished that now they were kind of playing to themselves and other people in that community that were encoded and they were like, oh, cool, this is amazing. And that's why you had, you know, Miles and Byrd and Coltrane and you know, Bill Evans, and I mean I could go on with hundreds and hundreds of artists, but the idea is that that canon starts to become cool. But when you play modern jazz for most people, if it's truly modern jazz, you know, that's not a Bebop throwback, they're gonna have a hard time with it.

SPEAKER_04 41:59

You know, it's not very accessible because it's no invitation, there's no basis. It's not in the environment. It's like you don't turn on TV and there's new jazz introducing the Chevrolet Silverado. You know what I mean? It's just it's it's not an environmental thing. So in order to be able to get that accessibility, is that's a pursuit of code that you have to really be going after. Because it's not going to be around you. Right. It's not like that culturally or environmentally processed code.

SPEAKER_02 42:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 42:25

You know?

SPEAKER_02 42:26

And I and we're just using jazz as an example, but you could sub it's an X quotient. Look, you could sub in any genre there.

SPEAKER_04 42:32

I mean, you could even say that Rush was an example of that for a long time. You know, like they were they were your favorite band's favorite band. You know, they were not like anybody's favorite band. It was over their head. Yeah. Well, you had a 12-minute song about Xanadu. What's what's going on? Like that wasn't it didn't make sense to a lot of people, you know. But then later on, you know, people's code starts to unravel a bit and you know, you're right.

SPEAKER_02 42:56

You're right. So okay, let's so let's let's um let's play some music. Let's play some music for you guys, and we're gonna challenge your code. We're gonna we're gonna offer you the opportunity to to code things in a perhaps a different way. So the the list that we've put together is in the show notes.

SPEAKER_04 43:13

Go ahead and listen. Right.

SPEAKER_02 43:14

There's a parental warning, you know, not so much for the lyrics except for a couple, but like but um There's some extreme things. Yeah, in genres, in expectation. Let's start them off. Let's let's start them off with this. Okay, so most people, and you turned me on to these guys, which is Archspire, and uh this is how would you classify them, genre?

SPEAKER_04 43:35

It's hard. It's it's definitely dark metal. It's definitely metal. I mean it's it is as metal as metal can be, I think. If that was a genre, metally metal, I I don't know. It's almost in that death metal range, but it's not as I don't know, it's but it's not Black Sabbath.

SPEAKER_02 43:51

This is not classic metal. This is not like, you know, no, no, this is not Aussie, this is not Metallica, this is a whole different type of genre sub. Genre.

SPEAKER_04 44:00

And this took me time to understand as well. The only reason that I got into the band is because my friend, who I respect, his father wrote the PGA theme. Right. He turned me on. He's like, this is incredible. Okay. And the first time I heard it, I was like, there is just no fucking way that I can listen to this.

SPEAKER_02 44:17

Right. Okay. So now let's with that. You I'm gonna you guide us through this.

SPEAKER_04 44:21

I can't. It's a lot.

SPEAKER_02 44:23

All right. I'll offer my it's fast.

SPEAKER_04 44:26

It's like whiteboard metal.

SPEAKER_02 44:28

Yeah. Okay. Now this is called um drone corpse aviator.

SPEAKER_03 44:43

So it's a lot. Oh yeah, I'd say.

SPEAKER_04 44:46

And and for anybody that's never heard any of this kind of music before, this could be like that overwhelming, like we were talking about the the film, like a film scene of walking in the streets of New York.

SPEAKER_05 44:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:57

If every if the pigeon's too loud and the paper's too loud and the the steam is too loud and the footsteps are too loud, it just sounds like mud. Right. And the first time I heard this, that's what I heard. It sounded like mud.

SPEAKER_02 45:08

Right. Well, and the it doesn't, it it's hard to decode because the the voice is sort of like in that I I call it orc rock, you know what I mean? Where it's like you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 45:17

Cookie monster a little bit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:19

Yeah, like it's in that sort of ballpark.

SPEAKER_04 45:21

Right, but it matches so closely to the music that it almost gets lost. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:24

And he's saying, I mean, those are real words that he's saying.

SPEAKER_04 45:26

You know, I had to pull up the lyrics. And it's almost kind of some of the topics are almost silly, too. That's what's funny. Right. It's interesting about the about the band, is because they they take it so seriously that I think it's a joke.

SPEAKER_02 45:38

You know, okay. So when you listen to it, like first, I've heard more kick drum blasts right there than I think I've heard in like all of Stevie Wonder's albums combined. Yeah. Just in them. I mean, that's a lot of kick notes. Yeah. Right. That's a lot of kick drum. But if you check, if you try to like put your head around it, let's listen to it again and just sort of like I'm gonna pick up where we left off, but just try to put your mind on it just for a second and just go, okay, listen to the guitars, listen to the other things, try to pick out some individual elements and then see if that sort of interests you.

SPEAKER_03 46:19

That's got a group. You can feel this. Yeah, yeah. Right? It's that quarter note cult.

SPEAKER_02 46:32

Okay. We'll leave that up to the audience. But now, if we pivot, okay, and we go and we go into something else, like let's do um, let's do how about this one? This is a classic one from Zappa. Is that the la la la guy? Oh, uh we can pull him up. We gotta pull that up. But okay, so we're gonna do um one of my favorite guys and yours, Frank Zappa. This is off of Jazz from Hell, which you want a Grammy for um called Night School. All synclovir. You can hear the decade with the gated snare drum. For audio nerds, that's the AMS RMX 16 reverb. Love the Lydian flavor.

SPEAKER_04 47:23

So cool.

SPEAKER_02 47:25

Nice fifth ascending.

SPEAKER_04 47:33

So glad.

SPEAKER_03 47:34

Yeah, very love the big stem pads. Yeah. Big string stem.

SPEAKER_04 47:47

And that's the zap of the serious phase, I feel like.

SPEAKER_02 47:51

Yeah, that's the zappa being a composer, like going, you know, this is not, you know, burnt weenie sandwich. Which is no eating yellow, hot rats. Yeah. Right, which are amazing songs. Absolutely. I miss him so much, dude. No one had the snarky we need that back in music.

SPEAKER_04 48:06

Yeah, nobody's doing that.

SPEAKER_02 48:08

No. Politically snarky, calling a spade a spade. You know, Zappa was such a cultural force. I think people loved him.

SPEAKER_04 48:15

I think a lot of it is selling records and putting asses in seats. It's just you get away from you know great bands, legendary musicians.

SPEAKER_02 48:23

You think about all the great people that were coming out of his band from you know, George George Duke, Terry Bozio, Steve I, Balou, Adrian Balou. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, it's just we just like we're just scratching the surface of it. Okay, so you know, that to me, much more listenable um immediately. Why? Because it resonates with tones that we've heard before. The chordal structure was a little bit more open, we could get into it, it wasn't quite as densely typed.

SPEAKER_04 48:50

Kind of like uh anthemic movie score type listenable.

SPEAKER_02 48:55

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um okay, let's do uh let's find another one here.

SPEAKER_01 49:01

So this is a this is one. I'll tell you what it is in a minute, but just check it out.

SPEAKER_04 49:31

It sounds like a buddy rich.

SPEAKER_02 49:34

Right? So this is this is conagal, which is sort of the Indian before you learn to play tabla, you actually have to learn the syllables, the strokes, and each finger stroke on the tablas is what they call a bowl B-O-L. And and the bowl is the the stroke, and it all has like a very specific syllable. So if you're really going into this classic Indian carnatic music, you actually learn to speak what you s what you're going to play on the drum first. Which is a fascinating way of thinking about it. Talk about a different way of encoding the image.

SPEAKER_04 50:06

Yeah, I think Jenny Carrey learned how to play drums. He went through that whole process.

SPEAKER_02 50:11

Right, and that's you know what I mean? And so, I mean, this is an ancient kind of a tradition. How cool is that, right? You know, that's Sheila Chandra. Just amazing. Uh now I wouldn't listen to that. Like, that's not on a playlist. It's not on your like Saturday morning playlist.

SPEAKER_04 50:26

Like, I'm not coded. I do not possess that code.

SPEAKER_02 50:30

Right. Okay. Well, fair point. I mean, I wouldn't.

SPEAKER_04 50:33

Just like nobody listens to Archspire. I'm kidding, people do.

SPEAKER_02 50:38

They do, yeah, they do. Okay, but okay, let's look at this one. This is a classic. The classic archetype. Progenitor of electronic music, craft work. From the album computer world called numbers, and that's all they're doing is saying numbers in different languages. That's a sample and hold thing which is randomly locking onto frequencies from white noise. That's what's causing this bubbly.

SPEAKER_04 51:16

I would definitely say this is white noise. I like it.

SPEAKER_02 51:24

No, I love it. Right? So interesting, right? And this was a big part of hip-hop. This is where a lot of the early hip hop stuff, the early Africa Bambata record, came from a craft work, right?

SPEAKER_04 51:38

Yeah, that you told me that. I had no idea that that's where the origins were. That's it.

SPEAKER_02 51:43

Planet Rock.

SPEAKER_04 51:44

I mean, but you listen to this right now, and it sounds like old school. If you take the sit arpeggiation out, it sounds like a hip-hop beat. Yeah. Like an old, like an 80s.

SPEAKER_02 51:54

And I'll play it just a little bit longer, but just check it out. Now, is this music to most people? Some people are like, no, this is not music to me.

SPEAKER_04 52:01

This is music.

SPEAKER_02 52:01

I think it's music. I mean, it's a very listen to this. You hear the so you hear the the Texas instruments vocal thing, like the Stephen Hawking thing. This is that.

SPEAKER_03 52:16

But that hi-hat it's so crafty. That's nasty.

SPEAKER_02 52:19

It's so beautiful. It's a pinpoint. It's like a little just a tip of a pin. It's just poking through the phone.

SPEAKER_04 52:25

And then the other thing too is this code gets passed down to generations of musicians that take it in. Like we were talking about our influence and our source code. Yeah. That made its way into so many different and I mean Trent Reznor would not be there without this. No, I mean there's so many. Rommstein would not be here. I mean, there's uh pop will eat itself. Clint Mansell. Yeah. Probably not. No. Like that's that's super cool.

SPEAKER_02 52:53

I mean, yeah. I mean, even that I think it even goes over into um, you know, sort of like the Japanese side of it. Like, there's a band that I've been listening to lately called Poly6.

SPEAKER_04 53:01

Oh, play some. That's just crazy.

SPEAKER_02 53:03

And and man, I really love these guys. And it's just a wild ass, crazy ro ride, but I dig it. And um, so we'll listen to that. Is this weird?

SPEAKER_04 53:12

We did this to we really just did this episode to give you our recommendations on crazy music.

SPEAKER_02 53:17

So Or to turn you on or turn to turn you on onto music that you probably would never come across in your life. I've got Peking Opera on here, we've got traditional Japanese court music on here.

SPEAKER_04 53:27

I mean, we cowboy bebop theme song.

SPEAKER_02 53:30

Yeah, we we have hand selected just sort of like a sampling of just to kind of get you started. I've got early, we'll play we'll play some. Kendrick Lamar is on this right, of course. And you know, here we are with let me do let me do this one quickly, which is the Pariton. This is early Notre Dame organum. I think it's really beautiful. Um this is before counterpoint, folks. So this is this is Middle Ages. People are singing two notes here at once, but there's these little melismas which are like little riffs, if you want to think about it, coming up here.

SPEAKER_04 54:00

And I'm only saying one or two words. Two words. Videron omnis.

SPEAKER_02 54:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 54:06

That's crazy. What does it mean? Life or something?

SPEAKER_02 54:10

I think it means the life of God is all, or right? Sounds appropriate. It's religious, of course. How gorgeous is this? I just love this. And there's this pedal point that's underneath. But basically, that he's saying the and they're holding this tone, and then the others are doing these melismas, this they're doing that over the top, and then you'll hear when it moves to deh, the second syllable of the de rund, and it moves in. But this whole piece is nothing more than this. Now, this was new. This was like avant-garde way back in the Middle Ages. And it kind of cadences, there, now we're at deh. And you can hear the change in the phonetic resonance, right? Now, why are we doing that?

SPEAKER_03 54:55

When was that recorded? Oh, that's the Hilliard.

SPEAKER_02 54:57

No, that's the Hilliard ensemble. That would have probably been in the 80s or whatever. Yeah. Um, fantastic recording. But if you if you think about it, um what I think is important is that we have a tendency to get siloed in our appreciation for human culture. And if anything, this playlist, in a way, is that's why we called it, you know, the merch table and audio sushi, right? Because this is audio sushi. This is like you going in and getting the chef's choice. And you don't know. Yeah. It might be a little sashimi, it might be a little Nigiri, you know what I mean? You're getting it all right here. We're kind of laying it out for you in a in a really cool way to just invite you in to not only different cultures but different time periods within them to appreciate the richness of of who we are as human beings.

SPEAKER_04 55:43

And I think all of that to say is take a chance, try sushi, you know, and go about it. And and and you don't have to take our word for it or our recommendations. Go find it yourself. If there's something that you want to find in music, go search for it. Go find it. Enrich your soul, do better, yeah, enjoy it, yeah, and help communicate with each other.

SPEAKER_02 56:06

Yeah. I mean, that's what it's all that's what it's all about. Let's end on um let's end on the polysix. We'll end on this is a really cool tune uh called Get Back to 8 Bit. It's a wild ride.

SPEAKER_03 56:19

Oh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:33

It's so video game. Yeah. Like like, but not like Red Dead Redemption soundtrack. I'm talking about like like Pac-Bang.

SPEAKER_02 56:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Early Nintendo. Yeah, yeah, Activision.

SPEAKER_04 56:44

Yeah. Metal Mario.

SPEAKER_02 56:46

But that the vocoder, again, it's just and then that's like television from the 70s. Um, early punk, top of the punk. Video killed the radio star. Yeah, yeah, a little CBGB kind of era.

SPEAKER_04 57:01

Meets little Primus, but it's also got like a Sex Pistols thing going on. Totally, man.

SPEAKER_02 57:05

Yeah, and the little Devo in there.

SPEAKER_04 57:11

Episode eight, y'all.

SPEAKER_02 57:13

Yo. We'll see you next time. You're worm out. You're worm out.

SPEAKER_00 57:19

On the floor. Can't get it out this time. You're worm stuck in the modin.