Live show, dead dinosaurs 37:08

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Listen to our latest episode, Anna, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Noam. Recently, Unexplainable recorded a live show at On Air Fest, which is this great live podcast festival in Brooklyn. It was our first live show, and we wanted to go behind the scenes on one of our favorite episodes all about dinosaur sounds.

It was a super fun time. We had a slideshow of dino pictures. We played some movie clips. I even wore this dinosaur mask, at least for the beginning. It was way too hot in there. Anyway, we had so much fun, we wanted to share it with you all. So here's the first live episode of Unexplainable. So this...

is our first Unexplainable Live Show. Thanks everyone for coming. I'm Noam Hassenfeld. Appreciate you. Here with our supervising producer, Meredith Hodnot. Hello, hello. And we are a science show about everything that scientists don't know. We like to say that we go all the way up to what we don't know and then we keep going. We kind of try to embrace that space of the unknown.

We wanted to give you a bit of a look behind the scenes at the show about how we choose topics, how we make a show about the unknown without like kind of that core thing at the middle. And in order to do that, we wanted to give you something to sink your teeth into. So we wanted to give you a brief recap of one of our favorite topics we've done. It's all about dinosaur sounds. And it originally came from a question from Meredith.

Yeah, so last summer I went to the drive-in to watch a movie and the big blockbuster of the summer was Jurassic Park, World Domination, Dominion, the one with Chris Pratt on a motorbike all the time. And so as these like epic dinosaur roars were coming through my car speakers as I was watching through this movie, it made me wonder, how do we know what a dinosaur would have sounded like?

we have a sense of what they would have looked like, right? We have fossils, we have their skeletons, we can tell sort of vaguely their shape, their size, the diversity, at least a little bit.

But something as ephemeral as a sound, like you can't fossilize a sound. So I was curious, like, how would somebody go about recreating or guessing at what an extinct sound sounds like? Right. And it's a very tough question. But to start, we wanted to get on the same page. So if you can play that famous roar, this is from the first Jurassic Park. You're probably all familiar with it.

You probably are aware, but they didn't just go and record a dinosaur for that. They used a bunch of sounds of animals that exist now. So they used tigers, lions,

There was a great koala sound in there. There's dolphins. There's baby elephant. Classic. And there's like a couple other animals, but almost all of them are mammals, which is weird because dinosaurs are very much not mammals. They're reptiles.

And it sort of gets at this tension of like, okay, what is a sound designer supposed to do if we don't know what dinosaurs sound like? Do they go for accuracy or do you go for feels? And that's something, you know, we were talking about in making the show. Yeah. A couple of years ago, I went to this talk by the sound designer for the original Jurassic Park out of Skywalker Sounds and

And so what they did for like a pterodactyl cry, they actually took a box of floss and pulled out the floss real fast. So it made like a ski sound. And that's actually the basis of the pterodactyl cry. And they warped it and affected it. But obviously, like, I mean, a box of floss is even further from a T-Rex than a baby elephant. Right.

So if like these sound designers are going for like the feels, right? What is a scientific approach of thinking through what a dinosaur roar could have been? Right. So it's really, really tough, obviously. So what scientists end up doing is they look at the closest living relatives for dinosaurs. So does anybody have an idea of what could be the closest modern relatives of dinosaurs today? Yeah.

Birds. Birds, yes. You take off the giant T-Rex head. You take off the giant T-Rex tail. You let him keep his little arms or whatever. But it's similar to a modern day chicken, as you can see at the bottom of the slide. Definitely not to scale. That would be a terrifying chicken. But...

If you did, say, scale that up, the idea is that maybe dinosaurs just sounded like huge birds. And, you know, if you just take a chicken sound and you imagine what would just like a huge chicken sound like, it might get closer to a dinosaur sound. So we spoke to this paleontologist named Michael Habib, who you can see on the next slide. He described this sound as kind of like a honk.

But it's not exactly a honk that I would have been familiar with. Yeah. Unlike any honk you've ever heard. Yeah, you can play this. It's a honk, but it's like a tuba honk. A tuba honk. So it's like a pulse of very low sound. Like just sort of like... Yeah. Yeah.

very different. Like that, yeah. One of my favorite moments in an interview is when a paleontologist starts imitating a potentially huge bird that sounds like what a T-Rex might have sounded like. But it's not just, it wouldn't just sound like a big bird, right? Because birds are a lot weirder than you think. They don't just make a sound. We normally make, we make sounds with our larynx, which has one opening. Birds have something called a syrinx, which you can see on the right, and that has two openings, which allow them to make sounds

two sounds at once. So if you listen to a songbird, you might hear it's almost like harmonizing with itself and it can create some of these really weird textures. Here's how Michael thought it could have sounded. Get two tubas and have them play two different notes as loud as they can. It's just this kind of war rumble. Okay, so it could be a big bird.

It could be a really big bird with this really weird two sounds at once thing. But there's kind of a problem, right? Yeah. So obviously, modern birds have been evolving for millions of years since dinosaurs went extinct. And like we know that they're direct descendant, but we also don't know like what could have evolved in that intervening time.

So we do know that there was a ancient duck that had the vaguest shadow of an impression of a syrinx in this fossil. So we do know that these syrinxes, these double windpipe anatomy, goes back decades.

really, really far, but we don't have that like missing fossil of like a dinosaur that has a searing. So this is sort of like the end of the road of like following this bird as the modern descendants. What, does anybody have any other guesses about what a different kind of modern relatives of dinosaurs today? Lizards. Lizards. We're getting there. Yeah. More.

Do we got it? Did somebody say crocodile? We got it? Crocodilians? We'll go for someone said crocodile. I mean, like, yeah. They look like they're already dinosaurs. As you can see in this video we have queued up, it's basically a dinosaur already. He's doing the water too. I want everyone to look at the mouth and the stomach area. The stomach area is kind of underwater, but the mouth is closed, and then you see the vibration coming out of the water where the stomach would be.

So if a dinosaur is more like a crocodile, it probably would have made its sound with its mouth closed, which is very different from how Jurassic Park depicts it. It wouldn't like go up to you like we saw in that video. It wouldn't open its mouth and roar and have the sound that way. It might keep its mouth closed and it would emit this kind of like huge rumble.

And we spoke to this sound designer who worked on this show, Prehistoric Planet. And he said he actually used a crocodile sound to sound design this scene of a Carnotaurus mating call, which we've got queued up here. And pay attention sort of to, again, the stomach and the mouth. And this actually...

When you make the crocodile sound so deep and low, it gets beyond the range of human hearing to an extent to something called infrasound, which I know you're a fan of. This blew my mind. Your ears wouldn't vibrate, but your chest would, your legs would, your whole body would reverberate with these deep, deep bassy, bass notes, bass tones. Yeah. I mean, like what Michael said to us was like,

the sound is too deep for your ear follicles, but just imagine your leg as like an ear follicle, right? Your leg is going to vibrate. That doesn't allow you to hear it, but it vibrates and you feel it. And then when you think about that, it's like, okay, even if we went back in time, tens of millions of years to when dinosaurs were around and we actually heard an actual dinosaur sound, there still would be just a ton of that sound that we wouldn't actually be able to hear. It still would be unhearable to an extent for us, which is kind of wild because like,

It's unknown if we were there in the past, but it's also, as we can see, it's still unknown right now. Like if we were going to get kind of as liberal, as creative as we wanted, we might go to big, two sound, war rumble, tuba honk, huge bird sound. Right. If we want to get a little more conservative, we could imagine it kind of in this crocodile realm, which is what they're doing in prehistoric planet. Right.

But ultimately, like, we haven't found that fossilized syrinx in a dinosaur. And so we still really don't know what the actual sound would have been, even if we're maybe, like, closer. Yeah. And, I mean, we could have ended at the episode right there. We could have just had this collection of sounds and best guesses and approximations. But I don't know. I think, like, we tried. I think we wanted to end it there. There's just something... I just...

I just wanted to make a dinosaur, you know? Like I wanted to know what it would be like to put all of these pieces together and make an unexplainable version of a T-Rex. So I made up this little sonic sketch trying to like bring together all these elements. I mean, we can cue it up.

Just kind of triangulating the dinosaur. Where's the chicken crocodile? Maybe somewhere. Not really sure. Yeah. So gave this assignment to our sound designer extraordinaire, Krishna Yala, who we have here today. He's going to come join us.

Hi, everybody. So Christian had the privilege of sound designing a potentially more scientifically accurate T-Rex sound, and he's going to walk us through exactly how he made this sound, which you're going to get to hear at the end. Christian, how did you...

start thinking about this process of just sound designing a more scientifically accurate T-Rex? Yeah, so I, in a sense, I wanted to do the opposite of what we talked about the sound designers did for Jurassic Park and even what I usually do for some of our other episodes where I have to sound design, you know, sounds from things that don't typically have sound that we think of, like the end of the universe. For this one, I really wanted to keep it as physically plausible as possible because

And just to preface, the technical things I did to all of these sounds, and I'll go through each of the layers in order, is really simple. All I did was stretch them out to make them slower,

bring them lower and EQ them, which is bringing up and down certain frequencies. And I did this because I wanted, you know, to only do things that would physically happen to something when you made it bigger. So for example, a chicken becomes a big chicken. And if we look at the next slide, we can hear what a chicken just normally sounds like. And here it is processed with all the things I just explained earlier.

that's just stretching it out and making it deeper. - Just to be clear, like that's the sound we just heard, the "puk puk ka," right? You just, you didn't add anything else. It's just the same thing. - Nothing. That's just raw chicken. And I think it's really like kind of a testament to like how directly descended they are from dinosaurs because like just this is already kind of close to like what we think of as a dinosaur.

It's scary, but it's not quite there. But once we knew that we were adding, you know, bird sound effects to something, there was only one bird in our heart. And you can see him on the next slide. And that's Sunny, our producer, Mandy's pet pigeon. Joins us for many a Zoom call. True. And this is what Sunny sounds like being needy. Did the same thing, process that in the same way. And this is big Sunny with pants.

You can hear there that there's a little bit of an echo. And I added a reverb so that it would kind of feel like the sound was reverberating within the T-Rex's, you know, chest cavity and through all of its tissue. And I just really wanted to bring that physicality of a dinosaur through some of the sounds. But moving on from birds, we also had to incorporate alligators that we learned of. It's already pretty much there. Yeah. For sure.

I still needed a little bit of texture. And so I was tracking my brain. What is a big bird that I could use? And I found this sample of an emu doing something called booming. And it's a really interesting sound. And I added it in. And this is what it sounds like. It really feels like a huge diaphragm reverberating back and forth within the T-Rex. And I wanted...

to affect the other sounds and make it feel like the rate of air going in and out was being affected by this diaphragm. And so I did something called side-chaining. And what that is, is I basically make the other sounds quieter in time with the peaks of this sound. So here is an example of that with the emu and the alligator side-chained together.

What I love about what you did here, Christian, is like it's not just layering up these sounds and like sort of putting them in a giant stack. You're actually like thinking about the chest cavity and what reverb that would do. You're thinking about this diaphragm and how that would affect the other sounds that are going in within this like one creature so that they're more than the sum of their parts.

Yeah, I think it's really important in all sound design to kind of, you know, give context to the sound, whether that's like putting it in a room or making sure that it sounds like it's coming from a singular creature or where it is in sonic space. And after I layered all these together, I had to think about the behavior of how sound

the T-Rex would actually make these sounds. And so for that, I deferred to what Michael said in the episode. They might be doing open mouth sounds with two different tones and then could also do closed mouth sounds via rumble, which means that they could rumble and while your body's still shaking from the rumble, they can open their mouth and blast you with two non-infra sound but still very low notes over top of each other.

while things are still kind of shaking from the rumble, it would be... it could get real interesting. - Real interesting. - Yeah. That's exactly what I did. I made a war rumble first with some inspiration from the tubas and with some tubas that he described. It takes a deep breath because, you know, you need air to make more noise. And then it open mouth roars at you. And so this is what that final sound sounds like.

Quick break from the live show. We'll get to that final, more scientifically accurate T-Rex sound from Christian in just a minute. And we'll also answer some questions from the audience. Support for Unexplainable comes from Greenlight. People with kids tell me time moves a lot faster. Before you know it, your kid is all grown up. They've got their own credit card.

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Hey, unexplainable listeners. Sue Bird here. And I'm Megan Rapinoe. Women's sports are reaching new heights these days, and there's so much to talk about and so much to explain. You mean, like, why do female athletes make less money on average than male athletes?

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Could you do that ogre roar of yours for my son? Do the roar. We're back with more of the unexplainable live show at On Air Fest. And our sound designer, Christian Ayala, is about to finally play his full, more scientifically accurate T-Rex sound. It takes a deep breath because, you know, you need air to make more noise. And then it open mouth roars at you. And so this is what that final sound sounds like.

I feel like I really hear the chicken. Like, I hear that, like, stretched chicken. Yeah, the chicken is kind of, like, the core of the sound. I felt like it...

You know, like when you think of a dinosaur without feathers, you think of like the classic Jurassic Park sound. But then when you like try and break out of that and be like, OK, the dinosaur has feathers. That's in my head what that sounds like. Right. Yeah. So, you know, Christian, I'm curious, talking about this being more scientifically accurate. Right. But Meredith was saying like, OK, you're not just layering these things on top of each other.

And when we think of what a dinosaur would sound like, it wouldn't just have like every one of these elements, right? It wouldn't have a crocodile and a bird and an emu, right? Do you think this is actually what a dinosaur sounded like? Oh, no. Yeah. I don't think anybody could say what a dinosaur actually sounded like unless like we make some huge scientific discovery. But I think my goal here is kind of like, you know, as I said before, it's like the opposite of...

Yeah.

rather than kind of trying to make you feel scared, although it's kind of scary. You can do both. Yeah, you can do both. It's interesting, like a sonic representation of theory. Yeah, I think the end goal and the process of it was very different than what other people were able to explore. So zooming out a little bit past the dinosaur episode, just to our show in general, this is one example of some of the things that we do of...

taking on questions that maybe don't have very clear answers. We go on the journey, things like that. You know, Meredith, I'm curious for you when we're thinking about how to design a show about the unknown, what do you think are...

challenges with that type of process and what are maybe unexpected benefits? Absolutely. I mean, I feel like this is the thing that we wrestle with the most editorially on the show is like, how do you make a satisfying narrative journey around something that isn't there, like around a blank space? And I think what we found over the last two years of making this show is that

a clear motivating question is a journey in and of itself. We have a drive, right? There is a blank space to explore. And then there's everything that we do know along the way. So we learn about crocodiles, we learn about chickens, we learn about dinosaurs and what those best guesses would be.

And then sort of looking towards the future, there's something inherently optimistic about everything that there is left to discover. And I feel like finding that hope and optimism and the idea that knowledge isn't fixed, it's something that's continuing to evolve and change.

is a really, I feel like one of our core values on the show. Yeah, I mean, and when you say optimism, I mean, another one that we come back to a lot is humility. Absolutely. The idea that there isn't an answer is probably a value that people should be more comfortable with. You know, we were piloting this show in the first year of the pandemic and it was at a time when

science was rapidly trying to handle like things that were just moving really quickly. There were all these debates about like, okay, do masks work? Do they not work? Everyone's like on one side, we definitely know this. Oh, here's a new study. It definitely doesn't. But like, if you are saying, okay, like science is about not knowing science is about trying to be humble about what we do know, being a little patient,

not assuming that everything has a clear answer. Like it allows you to be open to the process of science. Yeah. One of my favorite parts about this job is how much the premise of our show speaks

resonates with the scientists that we reach out to. They are excited that we're basing a show off of questions because that's what people on the forefront of discovering new things, they don't know what they're going to find. And it's really satisfying to be able to share that and see that resonate with the scientific community. You know, Kristen, I want to ask you a question about sort of this like relationship of sound design to the unknown, right? Like,

When you are approaching sound designing something, does it get you more excited to sound design things that are sort of unknown and mysterious? Or do you kind of like to be reined in a little bit? Like, where do you where do you resonate? You know, I really enjoy sound designing, you know, stuff that doesn't have a set sound. Yeah.

But at the same time that freedom is kind of paralyzing, you know, end of the universe. Recently, I had to sound design, you know, Jupiter moving. That was really good. Yeah. But I'm like, at some point, I'm like, where do I start? How do I do this? And so what did you end up using for Jupiter moving? I ended up using some cellos groaning.

And some ship wood creaks. But like being reined in also, it feels more like a puzzle to put together. So like I got all these sounds, the chicken, the gator, the...

And it's my job to kind of make it cohesive and find different ways with like either doing physicality or like very technical things with like trying to make sure that the frequencies aren't masking each other. And it just felt like a puzzle that like needed to be put together in the right way. Yeah. Absolutely. Our editor, Brian Resnick, talks a lot about trying to inspire research. So if we sort of like...

paint the limits of the unknown. Like if this is the empty box that we don't know, then maybe someone else can come along and solve it. And I just sort of feel like there's this cool relationship between like, okay, if by sound designing, we can maybe like inspire more research and maybe we end up

inspiring the person that like finds the syrinx fossil, right? Yeah. Like not only do I like hope that I would inspire somebody, but what I really want is like for some dinosaur researcher to be like, wait, you're doing completely wrong. This is how it's done. And actually make something that is like,

actually based on a research and that would further like research in general. So, yeah. I mean, what I love so much of being such a sound driven and sound design driven show is that I feel like it does give us the grounding of exploring the unknown. Like we're inviting listeners to sort of create these worlds in their heads with us.

Maybe Jupiter moving across the solar system doesn't sound like a cello creaking, but we can take you there in a way that I feel like is very cinematic and engaging and can help you sort of embrace the epic scale of these unknowns. If anyone has any questions, we'd love to open it up for questions about the show, dinosaurs, end of the universe, whatever, whatever. Past episodes, yeah. Yeah.

Are there topics that you really want to get to or you've been meaning to get to or you've tried to get to but you haven't quite cracked the storytelling yet? And what are those topics? I mean, for me, I...

I am dyslexic and I feel like a large part of how I view my role in sound design and working in audio is influenced by that. Something that I'm really excited to tackle is the idea of neurodiversity and creativity and how viewing the world from different perspectives can actually be a superpower rather than a learning disability. In the ASMR realm, what's your favorite sound?

Christian. Intriguing. ASMR. I think, you know, just the classic, like, flicking brush teeth. Like, yeah, it's, yeah.

It's funny, we just did an episode all about the hidden ecosystems in our homes. And our direction to Christian was to actually make anti-ASMR and make it as creepy as possible. Yeah. Creepy and close to your ears. That's what it means.

Hey guys, great show. This is my first time hearing it and I love it, so thank you. Two things. One, had you heard of someone trying to replicate a... I think it was the alternate human species, Neanderthals. The one where it's very nasal? Yes, it's very unpleasant. Yeah, there was one thing that was just like, rah! Was that it? Yeah, that sounds a little bit like the Chupahunk. Yeah, exactly. It just was very reminiscent of what you did here. But the second question is...

I've read a lot about autism, like pretty extreme autism for children in particular, because you were bringing up the neurodiversity aspect. And I've heard that their experience is a lot of static, like actual visual static, but auditory static as well. And I was wondering if you've investigated that area of things from a kind of neurodivergence standpoint.

Yeah, we haven't come across that, but I think that's really fascinating. And something that we do talk a lot about is the benefits of metaphors as a tool for understanding and then also the limitations of metaphors. So the idea of static being a metaphor that we can use to understand these perspectives, but also I'm curious, what are the limitations of what we associate with static? Also, just on that note, we did this series recently

on the senses. We did like six episodes, you know, because there are six senses. Spoiler. Our producer Mandy did this great episode on aphantasia where people in their minds, I don't have images. And she spoke to this like wonderful artist who was investigating like, okay, what is what are the possibilities that are opened up in my art if I'm not actually restricted by images in my brain? So we're we try to definitely go down roads like that. Hello.

This is a sound design question. Something that I watched recently that I found really fascinating. It put words to something I had never thought about but felt. It was a YouTube documentary about liminal spaces in sounds. Things like advertising bumpers or jingles or the Disney Channel theme. Like, oh, we have to create this little in-between sound bumper in order to fill that space. And there was logistical reasons as to why that existed. I was curious if there are

either things that you've created or things that you enjoy in sound design of that sort of liminal space-filling nature that you think about or that you're proud of having created. So we were... Bumpers? Yeah, the bumpers. If you listen to our show, after the mid-roll ad break, we always come back with a little radio static bumper.

And that's our place to put jokes or like little references that we like want to put in the episode that we, that is like, would not be appropriate anywhere else in the episode. Cause we're trying to teach things. And, and so like, it almost is kind of like a meta piece of furniture that's sitting right there. And,

You know, it's just really fun to like have developed a space, you know, editorially and in the sound design wise, um,

to just put random stuff and like personality into there that wouldn't be able to go anywhere else. And I'll just add, this isn't sound design as much, but we've started over the last couple months, um, sneaking in a story about our producer, Bird Pinkerton in the credits. Uh, so somebody called it a love craft horror. Yeah. It just, it gets like every episode. I just put a little sentence about bird and she found like a spinning penny, took her into a hallway. Then she fell into a hole and like,

Once in a while, listeners email us and they're like, oh yeah, what's going to happen to Bird next? I don't care about the rest of the episode. We kind of over time add things in that little way. What is your favorite unexplained fact and why? My personal favorite thing is that we don't know how bikes work.

And the reason I love this is because I did not know how to ride a bike until about three or four years ago. And I was like really embarrassed about this my whole life. I finally learned. I feel great about it. It's fun. Everyone should do it. But then when I learned that like, oh, scientists have no idea how bikes work. We know that they do work. But like mathematically, physically, there's like this theory of like a gyroscope. That's wrong. There's this other theory of like the wheels following the steering axis. That doesn't really explain it.

So ultimately we don't know and that just makes me feel a little bit better about my lack of biking ability. Yeah, my favorite episodes that we do is something that we like take something that we take for granted and then realize just how much awe and wonder there is in that we don't actually scientifically know how it came about or how it works.

So I reported this story all about how we don't know how the moon formed. Like we actually have a very, very weird moon and it has affected every age and eon on this planet. So now ever since having reported that episode this summer, every time I look into the sky and see the moon, I just feel like I have such a deeper appreciation for the celestial body. Yeah.

I always go back to like how we don't know how we smell. - No, like how we don't know how smell works. - Oh yeah. - We do know how we smell. - Yeah, we don't know how smell works. - Yeah.

It's also funny because that's one of the only episodes I haven't worked on. But yeah, I think it always just gets back to me like something that we do every day and that's like integral to our experience. We still don't know how that works. And I think that's also why like the Sense series also like resonates with me and like with other people so well because like there's still unknowns about like the way that we're perceiving every second of every day. Well, thanks everyone for coming. Thanks so much to On Air Fest for supporting us.

Thank you.

All right, that was our first unexplainable live show. It was produced by Meredith Hodnot, Christian Ayala, and me, Noam Hassenfeld. We had our incredible sound design from Christian, music from me, and fact-checking from Zoe Mullick. The original non-live Dino episode was reported and produced by me with editing from Catherine Wells, Brian Resnick, and Meredith. Richard Seema checked the facts. Mandy Nguyen kindly recorded her pigeon Sunny for us.

And Bird Pinkerton made it to the central room of the octopus hospital. The small doctor she'd been following turned to her. I have to be honest with you, he said. I'm just an intern, but the octopus is ready to see you. Special thanks to Michael Habib, Julia Clark, and Johnny Crew, who spoke to us for our original episode. And thank you to On Air Fest, Jenny Mills, Gemma Rose Brown, Brandon Santos, and Marika Ball-Damburg for their help with the live show.

And just a quick note, Jurassic Park actually used floss to sound design pteranodons, not pterodactyls. Both pterosaurs, but pteranodons don't have teeth. The more you know.

If you have thoughts about the show or ideas for more episodes, let us know. We're at unexplainable at Vox.com. If you feel like leaving us a review or leaving us some stars on your way out, we'd really appreciate it. And if you want us to do a live show in your area, let us know. We had a blast. We'd love to do more. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week. ♪