Sound Off: Siren Calls, Medical Melodies & Missing Frequencies

You're listening

to 20,000 hertz.

The stories behind the world's most iconic and fascinating sounds.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

A couple of months ago, we announced a competition called Sound Off, where I invited listeners to submit a fully produced short story about sound that's around five minutes or less.

Essentially, their own mini 20,000 Hertz episodes produced entirely by our audience.

Now, I was expecting maybe eight or 10 submissions.

The hope was to get enough to make one full episode out of the winning stories.

And for a while, that's about how many we got.

But right before the deadline, the submissions came flooding in, and our whole team was shocked to see 57 entries.

When I saw that response, I was so moved by how many people were willing to put themselves out there and share their story with us.

It turns out there were so many incredible stories that we decided to make three entire episodes.

And this still doesn't include everyone we received.

So I want to deeply thank everyone who submitted, regardless of whether your story was chosen.

We all enjoyed every second of every submission.

So what you're about to hear is the first set of stories.

We'll call these the Bronze Collection.

The silver and gold collections will follow later in the summer.

Enjoy.

Story one, 2,000 Hertz.

You're listening to 2,000 Hertz.

I'm Steve Welhef.

My name is Justin Lawrence, and I was born with a hearing loss.

That's my cousin, Justin, and I'm here to tell you his story.

My loss is subtle enough that for most people, communication between us probably seems fairly normal.

Justin was born with a hearing hearing loss and didn't know it for years.

We found out I had a loss in second grade, and if we hadn't found out then, I would have gone through life really struggling to recognize the challenges that I was facing.

As an audio guy and a musician myself, it was crazy to hear how Justin struggled with not being able to hear certain frequencies from the time he was born.

What I find to be really interesting about a hearing loss is how much of a mystery it is, even from the subjective perspective.

Our language doesn't describe sounds very well.

And so, for us to even discuss what we're hearing, not hearing, and hearing incorrectly is a humongous game.

So, what exactly was he missing?

My hearing loss is unique in that it's primarily around the 2000 hertz range, which in human speech is the vowel to consonant change.

So, it's not that I do not hear people making noises when they're communicating, it's that I don't hear them clearly.

And this is where it gets pretty interesting.

The brain actually develops a skill where we'll fill in words in an attempt to make things work for you on the fly.

So sometimes I'll hear people say things that I absolutely know they did not say.

And I'm able to ask them then, hey, can you clarify this for me?

But it's not that I didn't hear them.

It's actually that I heard something completely wrong.

Now, we're talking about this in a time where cell phones didn't exist, where the internet was still in its infancy, and the technologies of today's world, like voice to text and vice versa, simply did not exist.

This makes growing up in a world full of sound incredibly difficult.

What I got my hearing aids at 37 years old.

Wait, did he just say 37 years old?

Yeah, you heard that right.

When I got my hearing aids at 37 years old, the first thing that I noticed, the most apparent thing to me, was the amount of energy that I had been spending to keep pace in a world absolutely brimming with sound.

The cost of paying such fierce attention without even realizing you're doing it day in and day out is really quite extensive.

And this is where the story gets really interesting.

What I didn't mention before is that Justin has been playing guitar and singing with this hearing loss for over 15 years.

I had been a musician for over 15 years when I got my hearing aids.

So I was pretty excited to get home, plug in my guitar, and do some singing.

And I was not disappointed.

I was able to hear so much more of the guitar work, the vibrations of my diaphragm, the changes that my tongue makes in my voice.

I could even differentiate the strings of my chords better.

And really, it allowed me to relax into the music in a way that I had never done before.

For those who don't know, 2000 Hertz is a pretty important frequency when it comes to speech and guitar.

So for Justin to develop and fine-tune these skills without being able to hear 2000 Hz is pretty incredible.

And on top of that, I was doing things that if I had been doing them before, I couldn't hear them.

So I have no idea if I was doing them before.

And to be able to experience them was like, it was like meeting myself for the first time.

Now, life isn't all about music.

Well, for some of us, it is.

But in Justin's case, his hearing age changed his whole perspective on the world.

And the best part, though, is feeling more connected to the world around me.

I can hear birds that I didn't know were chirping before, the leaves rustling underneath my feet, and the textures and the voices of the people that I love.

These are little things that when you experience them all together, it actually makes me feel more alive because we truly do live in a world just completely filled with sound.

Justin's journey through hearing loss inspired me to create this.

So thank you, Justin, for allowing me the opportunity to share your story with the world.

My name is Steve Wellhaf and I recorded, edited, produced, mixed, and mastered this episode.

Check out my website at emberstudios.com.

That's embrstudios.com.

Once again, my name is Steve and thanks for listening.

Story 2.

Firecrackers in the sky.

Have you ever been really close to a lightning strike?

You know, so close you spill your drink or involuntarily yelp.

When a thunderclap happens really close, it's also really short, like a real clap.

But most of the time, when we hear thunder, it's from a lightning strike that's miles away.

Sometimes so far you don't even see the flash.

In the case when the source lightning bolt is far away, we hear thunder as that familiar rumbling sound, which is both quieter than the sound of a nearby thunderclap and lasts longer.

If the actual electric discharge is very fast, why does the sound of thunder rumble on so long?

First, it helps to be reminded what thunder actually is.

Just the sound of a lightning strike.

Lightning is an incredibly high voltage discharge during a storm and while the real mechanistic details of how it works are surprisingly poorly understood, only a few well understood facts are important to our story.

Lightning bolts are long and skinny.

The ionized channel of plasma carved in the air by lightning is about as wide as a ping-pong ball, but it can be miles and miles long.

In some extreme cases, they can get to be several hundred miles long.

The World Meteorological Organization reported a lightning bolt that was over 477 miles long in 2022, crossing from Mississippi all the way to Texas.

Another extreme thing about lightning is its temperature.

It's hot, thousands of degrees, in fact often several times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

When you heat air, it expands, like how the flame in a hot air balloon expands the air inside the balloon, lowering its density and causing the whole thing to float.

When you heat air to several times the temperature of the sun in a fraction of a second, it expands so fast and so hard it essentially explodes.

So, from a sonic point of view, think of a lightning strike like a several mile long string of firecrackers all exploding at once.

The speed of sound seems fast, but when you're dealing with distances that long, it's actually quite audibly slow.

If one end of our firecrackers is a mile away and the other end is three miles away, It'll take about five seconds for sound from the closest firecrackers to reach your ears, but it'll take 15 seconds for the most distant sound to get to you.

With a bit of rough math, we can imagine this particular stroke to have thunder rumble on for about 10 seconds.

Add to that the fact that lightning bolts are oddly shaped, squiggling all over the place.

Throw in some echoes off of cliffs or skyscrapers, toss in multiple lightning strikes happening over a wide area at various times, and thunder can smear from a sharp clap into a long rolling rumble.

That was written and recorded by me, Ralph Crew, and I'm a writer and producer at Practical Engineering, a YouTube channel all about exploring and appreciating the large-scale built world around us.

I also do various little projects like sending in three-minute podcasts to one of my favorite big podcasts, 20,000 Hertz.

Story 3: The Siren's Call.

So listen, I will give you good instructions.

Another God will make sure you remember.

First, you will reach the sirens who bewitch all passers-by.

If anyone goes near them in ignorance and listens to their voices, that man will never travel to his home and never make his wife and children happy to have him back with them again.

The sirens who sit there in their meadow will seduce him with piercing songs.

Hi, welcome.

I'm Martim Ikulik.

What we just heard was an excerpt of the famous conversation between Odysseus and the god Circe in the epic poem The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson.

Written around the 8th century BC by Homer, the book, and the story about the sirens in particular, has resonated deeply and sort of made a splash, if you will, with audiences everywhere.

Since then, this half-fish, half-woman mythological creature has inspired many other works of art, from Disney to Pearl Jam songs and even the Starbucks logo.

But it also inspired the French inventor and aristocrat Parón Charles Cagnier de Latour in the 19th century to christen a new sonic invention.

In 1819, Cagniard published an article titled Sur la Siren, or About the Siren.

In it, he describes a mechanism that produces sound by blowing air through a moving sloaded disk.

The emblematic wailing is a consequence of the way sound is produced and a key feature of the siren since the very beginning.

Another invention that produced sound in a similar way had been proposed 20 years before by the Scottish natural science professor John Robinson, so the claim of the invention is disputed.

The name, though, is certainly Cagner's idea, and as he writes in the article, he comes up with it because when testing the device, he was able to prove that it could also produce sound underwater.

In the Odyssey, our hero is urged to avoid the sirens when sailing close to them because their beautiful singing would otherwise enchant him and cause the ship to wreck.

Indeed, one of the first known uses of the device was a long foghorns to prevent ships from getting too close to the coast when the normal operation of lighthouses was impaired by fog or inclement weather.

It seems that someone took the story about the sirens and the name of the invention quite literally.

By the beginning of the 20th century, news articles reported that sirens were replacing gongs in ambulances in New York City.

Their sound signaled people to stand still and wait for them to pass.

During the Second World War, sirens had the particularly big task of alerting people of bombs being dropped on their cities.

Like Sir Seward Warren Odysseus, if you listened to the sirens' chant, you were in danger.

The wailing of sirens still plays a key role in our lives today as a soundtrack of our modern emergencies.

Ambulances, police cars, tornado sirens, car alarms and more.

So much so that some studies are starting to

raise the alarm about the overuse of its sound and the possible fatigue that city dwellers may be experiencing.

In these 200 years since its invention, the siren has shaped our communal soundscape.

But unlike in Odysseus' tale, sirens have helped us avoid life shipwrecks to find our way home safely.

This podcast was written and produced by Martin Mikuli.

It was recorded in the city of Chicago in April 2025.

After the break, medical melodies and a whale song unlike any other.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-liter jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

Congratulations to Tim Davies for getting last episode's mystery sound right.

Those sounds came from a 1976 Mattel game called Auto Race.

Auto Race is considered the first fully electronic handheld game, meaning it had no mechanical components other than the controls.

In the game, the cars are represented by red lights that flash by as you avoid collisions and try to earn a high score.

And for sound, you get some good old-fashioned beeps.

And here's this episode's Mystery Sound.

If you know that sound, tell us at the web address mystery.20k.org.

Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft 20,000Hz t-shirt.

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Story 4: From the Gramophone to Chapel Roon.

Just how long is the age of recording?

How many generations have lived through it?

We take it for granted that sounds can travel through time and space, probably can't imagine a world otherwise.

But maybe that hasn't been possible for as long as we might think.

Let's take a few minutes to underline just how new recording is.

This is the first of Buck's cello suites.

It's being played in the new Abbey Road studios in 1936.

by the Spanish-born cellist Pablo or Pao Casals.

Casals and his third wife Marta have a unique place in the history of recording, one that reminds us just how early we are in our journey with sound.

Casals discovered a battered copy of the Bach sheet music in a second-hand store in 1890 when he was just 13 years old, and he practiced them every day until he was 26.

He performed them all over the world, but this is the only recording he made of the full set.

It's widely agreed that no other performance of the Sweets comes close.

I first heard of Casals when talking to a NASA astronaut, Pinky Nelson, who flew three shuttle missions and took that recording into orbit.

Casals was called the greatest musician ever to draw a bow, but he withheld his talent to protest the fascist Franco regime in Spain and apply pressure to its supporters.

This is a quote from him, read by an AI trained on his voice: A musician is also a man,

and more important than his music is his attitude to life.

You hear when a note is false, the same way you feel

when you do something wrong in life.

Casals was born in 1876,

before anyone on earth had recorded and replayed a sound.

When he was born, sound evaporated in the moment.

The human voice was as insubstantial as thought.

A year later, Thomas Edison sang Mary Had a Little Lamb, and moments afterwards, listened back as a younger version of himself, younger by a couple of minutes, recited the nursery rhyme.

This is Edison recreating that moment in 1927, when Pablo Casals was already in his 50s.

The first words I spoke in the original pornograph.

A little piece of practical poetry.

Mary had a little lamb, its face was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.

Casals played for Queen Victoria in 1899 and John F.

Kennedy in 1961.

He was 39 when Frank Sinatra was born, 77 when 18-year-old Elvris Presley walked into Memphis Sun Studios to make a record for his mother's birthday.

And he was 93 when the Beatles split.

He lived to hear men speak from the surface of the moon.

Remember, when Casals was born, sounds couldn't survive the here and now.

And yet he heard voices across 240,000 miles of space.

And we can hear them too, six decades later.

But that's not the most amazing part of this story.

Pablo Casals married his third wife, Marta Montañas Y.

Martinez, in 1957.

Marta was artistic director of the John F.

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for a decade and served as president of the Manhattan School of Music until 2005.

As of April 2025, she's still alive.

She still lives in Washington, D.C.

Our entire recorded history, from Edison to Elvis, the gramophone to Chapel Rhone to an AI clone, fits inside the lifespans of one married couple.

Pablo and Marta Casals.

That's how new recording is, this almost magic that's given us a common vocabulary of the Beatles' one giant leap, I have a dream, and Pablo Casals' extraordinary performance of Bach's Cello Suites.

Thank you to Joe Bryant and Nova Shires of Mercer Island High School's award-winning radio program for their production help.

Thank you too to Asura Sole at the Pablo Casals Museum in Spain for help with audio rights.

I write on sound, music, and technology at matthew-quinlung.com.

Story 5.

Melodic Medicine.

My name is Erin Seibert and I'm a medical music therapist.

I think about sound all day.

As a music therapist, I usually play the guitar, sing, and use other portable instruments to do my job.

In the medical setting, the music I play competes with a lot of other sounds.

The hospital is made up of artificial sounds that aren't heard anywhere else.

These sounds can include machines beeping, loud staff conversations, supply carts rolling by, trash cans being emptied, monitor alarms, and emergency codes.

Hospital noise isn't usually an issue for people until it impacts them personally.

These sounds can be scary, jarring, and overstimulating.

Hospital staff become immune to these noises, but for patients and families, these sounds impact their experience.

Growing up, my musical training emphasized using silence to balance the emotional power of musical expression.

I practiced using musical rests to make an audience lean in for the music to begin again, and to use that pause to affect the listener's experience.

I'm a quieter musician.

I can't belt my voice with the power needed for the stage, and I could never effortlessly play the piano loudly.

But by playing and singing quietly, I've learned how to draw people in in to listen more closely and soften themselves in the process.

I now use this musical quietness as part of my therapeutic presence.

While the auditory environment isn't the only thing I think about when doing my job, It's an underlying factor that informs my music therapy decisions.

When I walk into a hospital room, it's a quick assessment of the sounds that are necessary, like medical equipment, and what can be removed.

I might turn off the TV or sound machine, adjust my own voice volume,

and non-verbally shift everyone towards a cadence of calm.

Only then can I begin to envelop the room with music in a therapeutic and healing way.

In a way, the auditory environment is another instrument I'm trained to play.

Often, medical music therapy can help mask sounds that are scary or traumatic.

Music can help transition a hospital room from chaos to calm

or fill it when the quiet is no longer peaceful but painful.

Music can easily celebrate life, joy, and love,

but it can also mirror grief, pain, and loss.

The goal of healthcare is to promote healing and reduce suffering, and music therapy accompanies this purpose.

But sometimes, a healthcare journey can come to an end.

It is during these times when my job shifts to support the absence of sound.

The silence.

The space where sound should be present, but no longer is.

Eventually, a point comes when there is no longer anything more to say or play.

Honoring the musical rest affects the hospital experience and reveals our humanity.

In the moments where silence is more important than the sound, it is a privilege to honor how that piece of music was written.

This podcast and accompanying music was written and performed by me, Aaron Seibert, with editing and production help by Nick Seibert.

If you're interested in learning more about my work in music therapy, check out my website, musictherapytime.com.

Thanks for listening.

Story six: Fifty-two Blue,

Blue, Blue, Blue, Blue, Blue, Blue.

Move, move.

They say the ocean has a voice.

That's somewhere, deep below the waves, something is always calling.

There is a whale, only one we've ever heard like this.

It sings at a frequency no other whale can hear.

52 Hertz.

A lonely tone.

Too high.

Too strange.

Unanswered.

Scientists call it the 52 Hertz whale.

But I wonder,

what does he call us?

Maybe he's not lonely.

Maybe he's curious

or patient

or just

different.

He's been calling for over 35 years

through storms,

through silence,

through time.

Always there,

singing his song no other whale can hear.

Hi,

my name is Hannah Peck.

What you just heard was a short interpretation of the story of 52 Blue.

This piece was written, produced, edited, and recorded by me.

A special thank you to my dad for letting me do this.

You're truly the best.

And thank you so much for listening.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of my sound agency, DeFacto Sound.

Hear more by following DeFacto Sound on Instagram or by visiting de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by the the incredible listeners of 20,000 Hertz.

It was story edited by Casey Emmerling.

With help from Grace East.

It was sound design and mixed by Justin Hollis.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a story for our sound off competition.

I am so honored by how many people poured their hearts into these unique, thoughtful pieces.

Stay tuned later this summer for the silver and gold collections.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel, dallastaylor.mp3, for video exclusives, including my behind-the-scenes trips to some of the most amazing audio locations around the country.

You can also find me on Instagram and TikTok under that same name, dallastaylor.mp3.

Thanks for listening.