Hi, it's Elise Hu with Ted Talks Daily. Ted is on vacation this week, so here's something a little different. It's a new addition to the TED family of podcasts called 20000 Hertz. Each episode reveals the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

Y'all, this one is awesome.

You know, those movie trailer voices that go into the world?

Well, there's a whole story behind blockbuster trailer sound design. And you're about to learn that history. If you like what you hear. Check out twenty thousand hertz wherever you listen to podcasts.

You're listening to 20000 Hertz, Dallas Taylor. When you think about how a movie trailer sounds, what comes to mind, does it sound something like this in a land of eternal blue? A legend was born, this is the trailer from the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In it you have all of the ingredients of a classic trailer, the story of a warrior, including the legendary voice of Don Lafontaine, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The only thing that could possibly take this trailer over the top is the classic intro in a world in a world without gas, in a world that's powered by violence, in a world of falafel.

This is the classic recipe for a movie trailer, right? Well, not really. Movie trailers don't really sound like that anymore. A booming voice of God is pretty rare nowadays. Trailers now really sound a lot more like this.

And you've got this sound that can only be described as the Buerge. You know, the boom, you usually hear it before or after the more obvious, blah.

And after listening to this episode, you'll start hearing the boos everywhere on. The bush is a term that I think we just made it up.

It's the term that we use for the subwoofer shaking, low frequency drops that usually happen at about the peak of some catastrophic event in a trailer.

That's Kraven Morehouse, cocreator of the Oral Nutt's. It's a YouTube channel that uses sound to make fun of and recontextualize films and trailers.

We like to make sound a little more transparent to the point of creating something comical, but also to highlight how important sound can actually be.

The booze can also be called a bass or a sub drop. Today you can count on The Boosh occurring in just about every suspenseful action movie trailer I'm going in.

She never. To us in the trailer, that's when you're seeing the biggest thing happened, this would be a planet exploding or a building collapsing.

So why do so many trailers use the Bush and other super aggressive sound effects? You have to consider that trailers are a form of advertising.

That's James Carville, a music professor at Carleton University. His project is called Trailor Morality, and it studies the effects of music and sound in movie trailers as a form of advertising.

They're convincing people of going to movies. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not so good, though, and people should be aware of the power of music and sound in trying to persuade them.

The movie industry brings in around 40 billion dollars a year, and that's in the U.S. alone. It's a giant, highly competitive business.

Every second of Sound of Music is maxed out to keep your attention. To really prove how much sound can change the tone of a movie trailer, you don't have to go very far. Simply searching for a trailer on YouTube brings up a ton of amazing fan made trailers. Some of these are serious, but tons are taking a film in one genre and making it seem like it came out of another.

Take, for example, this elf trailer where it's turned into a thriller. All right, let's get it over with my buddy, the. And here's a trailer for Dumb and Dumber, but with the score from the Inception trailer. I'm talking about a little place called ASP.NET. On the other end of the spectrum, here's a trailer that perfectly parodies Niños family drama trailers, but it's for The Shining.

Meet Jack Torrance. I'm outlining a new writing project. He's a writer looking for inspiration.

Lots of ideas, some good ones. Meet Danny.

He's a kid looking for a dad. Hardly anybody to play with. He was at that. These parodies proved just how critical sound is in a trailer. However, trailers obviously didn't always sound like this. So let's rewind and go on a journey from the very first trailers to the ones we know today.

The very first trailer in a movie theater came in 1913 in New York City. Interestingly, this trailer wasn't even for a movie. It was for a Broadway musical called The Pleasure Seekers. But this idea of creating a trailer quickly swept the movie industry. Soon, theater projectionists everywhere were adding them to the end of their film reels, hence the word trailers. They were traditionally at the end of the main feature early on, before Sound could be married to picture, trailers were accompanied by music with big lines of text appearing on screen between key scenes.

These giant lines of text were the early form of a narrator that gave all of the necessary plot points. Of course, this was mainly because films didn't have dialogue yet. But even after dialogue came to films, trailers kind of remained the same. That was because basically only one company was making all of the trailers. In the 1920s, even before sound, there was one company that managed to gain a monopoly by signing various studios to create trailers, the National Screen Services NSW.

So by the time sound comes, they're creating most of the trailers.

With the addition of sound and films, the census added an iconic element to trailers.

Voiceover narration Casablanca, City of Hope and Despair, located in French, Morocco and North Africa, the meeting place of adventurous fugitives, criminals, refugees lured into this dangerous swept oasis by the hope of escape to the Americas.

But the innocence was formulaic. The narration, music and titles all looked and sounded the same. There was a fairly strong uniformity across the boards and the kind of music that they would use starting in the 30s then tended to be very dramatic. But these were also tracks that would wander from one trailer to another. Everything changed when the NSA lost its monopoly, this was around the mid 50s when boutique trailer houses started popping up, this new competition pushed trailer editors to get more creative.

Pardon me, sir, but what are you looking at? Is that by any chance the picture called the Pink Panther, they would contract out sound and music from independent producers of music.

The trailer house then would license the music they need for the trailer. They would produce the trailer and then send it to the studio.

Fast forward to the 80s and suddenly the same booming. NARRATOR Voices are popping up everywhere.

There were two voiceover artists who had probably 90 percent of the market in the 80s and 90s and in the 2000s.

Hal Douglas and Don Lafontaine, I'm sure you'll remember these voices.

This is Hal Douglas, Men in Black, protecting the Earth from the scum of the universe.

And this is Don Lafontaine, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator two Judgment Day. This time he's back. These two voices dominated trailers for decades, but from the year 2000 to 2010, these Voice of God type of narrators pretty much disappeared. The movie industry had used this formula for so long, it was becoming so obviously cliche to both the public and the film industry. It was Jerry Seinfeld that might have been the one to finally kill off the classic movie trailer voice.

The trailer for his 2002 film Comedian basically made fun of the entire trailer industry. It started none other than Hal Douglas poking fun at himself in a world where laughter was king.

No, in a world, Jack. What do you mean, no?

In a world, it's not that kind of movie.

Oh, OK. In a land that no one land either in a time. I don't think so. In the land before time.

It's about a comedian, Jack. The other thing that killed narration and trailers was the Internet before YouTube, people only really saw trailers at the movies. They only had one shot. The narration helped audiences get the story in a single viewing. Today, we tend to watch trailers multiple times. There's a lot less need for narration. So now, because of all this, the sound effects and music started to take a more prominent place in trailers, for example, that iconic boire noise you've heard in every trailer since inception.

It has a ton of variations. Pair these epic effects with the cover of a well-known song, and you've got yourself some movie trailer magic. So. To get people on board with this trailer, we're going to recontextualized something to get you excited. So oftentimes people will do orchestral or symphonic, you know, trailer sized versions of a popular song and usually an unexpected song.

The cover song trope started becoming popular around 2010. Here's a Belgian girls choir cover of Radiohead Creep for The Social Network. That was perhaps the cover song that really started that revolution. This trailer was so popular that producers hired the same choir to do covers for many other trailers. Here they are covering Metallica's Nothing Else Matters, that was featured in the Zero Dark Thirty trailer.

And here's gang of youth covering David Bowie's heroes in the Justice League trailer.

And here's Destiny's Child survivor in the Tomb Raider trailered. Now, when I hear it, I think not again. These movie trailer cliches are so common that it's easy to parody and it's not just the booze or the Boire or the cover song, but it goes even deeper. I think what happened was we just started noticing certain tropes that were used so ubiquitously that it was becoming funny to us. Trailers have become so formulaic that Craven and his Arnotts partners that Koonce decided to pack them all into one glorious mega parody trailer.

In some ways, we're trying to make a commentary that does have some comedic value, but also gets people possibly interested in what the function of sound is.

In the 80s and 90s, trailers were dominated by deep, gravelly voice narrators. Now we're in a sea of Bois's and Bush's.

We just were thinking that people were leaning on that sound effect just too hard, but there is no denying how cool it can be when it happens, you know, you feel it in your core.

Our brains are wired to have a survival response to strong low frequencies, low frequency sounds, trigger fear responses like rumbling thunder or a lion roar.

But how exactly is the sound made?

The fundamental of most boogers are made by some sort of basic wave, a common choice being a sine wave, which has no harmonics. Then you give it a nice, smooth pitch down. But you could also use a square wave. A sawtooth wave. Or a triangle way. But that's just the bones of Bush creation sound designers can make them a bit punchier by adding a kick. Bit more aggressive by adding distortion. Or you could add a chorus or double it.

The Bush possibilities are seemingly endless craven and Zach made a YouTube video called How to Make a Blockbuster Movie Trailer. In it, they explore all of the tropes you tend to see in a modern trailer. Of course, we have The Boosh, but as they do have deeper into these sonic tropes, they discovered more and more. So right out of the gate. We start with the single note trope.

Which feels like a good way to get the viewer on board with something that is possibly foreign to them. So right at eight seconds, we introduce another sound effect beyond the single note, which is the LoBue. Usually the LoBue is sort of the call and response to the single note trope dialogue has its tropes, too. So the thing that we're trying to juggle here, obviously, with adding dialogue is to give the viewer the impression that this template crosses many levels.

Have you ever wondered about this particular thing? Because it turns out that that thing is real at about this point in a trailer. Oftentimes the music that has been following the action thus far in the trailer then blossoms into what is a recognizable cover of a song that typically has not been covered before and.

Baby, right around where we landed on you spin me around because that song is so hyper ridiculous and awesome, the idea that it would be used as the most dramatic song for a trailer was about as abstractly ridiculous as we could get. It just immediately felt perfectly stupid. You get people hooked and then you you do some sort of tonal shift that introduces a problem or a bad guy or some sort of conflict. You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?

When you have a rhythm, a pulse going, and then it's dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, the triplet can be really effective. But for some reason in trailers, that's the hottest thing ever is a triplet locked to like visuals snapping in at the same moment. The climax of the trailer is punctuated by not one but two boogies.

I don't think I'm the one. I'm not the person who can stop this thing. You are that person. Now take my hand.

It's like, why a second Bujar, like, that's as ridiculous as it can get after the double bouchra. It's time to start bringing this trailer home. So, of course, everything has to build to a head. The music will pause, breathe for a minute. And usually within that breath, sonically, there's a character bite. There's an equal and opposite reaction. We went with the secondary statement from a bad guy. I am the reaction. And then give you that last single note smashed in the face for the title reveal.

One final iteration of the chorus, which even feels more stupid. While trailers are booming more than ever before, this certainly isn't the first time that they've all sounded the same. The 30s had many of the same overly dramatic music tracks. The 80s and 90s were dominated by two deep, aggressive voices. Today's trailers have the boire in the booth. With that in mind, what will future trailers sound like? I'd like to see more original music and music.

That doesn't sound like it's taken off of the shelf and reused.

Usually what happens is somebody does something way outside the box and then people latch onto it and then it just becomes the new thing that people are doing. I can almost imagine some movie trailer producers watching that video and saying, OK, these guys just blew it for the next six months for us.

And now here's how to make a blockbuster movie trailer by Arnotts in its entirety.

Have you ever wondered about this particular thing? Because it turns out that that thing is real. And here I am here right around like a rag baby, right round round. That thing I referred to earlier. Well, it's happening and it will destroy us all. And that someone is you. You didn't think it would be that easy, did you? I don't think I'm the one. I'm not the person who can stop this thing. You are that person.

I am the reaction. If you enjoyed this episode, there is so much more where that came from, 20000 Hertz is a lovingly crafted podcast that tells the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. And we're also the newest member of the TED family of podcasts over on our feet. We've done lots more shows just like this one where we unpack famous sounds like the Wilhelm Scream, the deep note, the NBC chimes, the Xbox startup sound, the Netflix Sonic logo, the sounds of Star Wars cartoons and so many more.

The stories behind these sounds are so fascinating. We also dive into subjects like brain science, theme songs, music copyrights, The Sound of Hamilton, Sonic Illusions, Sounds of the deep ocean and even the sounds of other planets. The podcast is also clean and appropriate for all ages.

So take a few moments right now and go subscribe to 20000 hertz, which is all spelled out without any numbers. TWC and you get the idea once you find our purple logo tab, subscribe and enjoy.

We'll meet you over there.