Twenty Thousand Hertz & TED Radio Hour: How the World Sounds Different to Each of Us

 Twenty Thousand Hertz continues its expanded fall season as part of the Ted Podcast Network. In the last three episodes, the podcast about sound has taken listeners on a historical journey to a 13th century funeral chant called "Dies Irae," then investigated the neuroscience of Perfect Pitch, and explored the real and synthetic sounds of dinosaurs in Tyrannosaurus FX.

In the latest episode, host Dallas Taylor focuses on how through the tiny receptors in our ears to the ways we were taught to listen and communicate. 

"There are a myriad of factors that make hearing the world a unique experience for each of us," Taylor says in the episode titled "Sound Of Silence."

Art by Brian Stauffer

This special episode shares a collaboration with TED Radio Hour that features four different stories of people's relationship to sound. To close out the episode, host Dallas Taylor discusses his career in sound design, eliciting emotions through various worlds of audio, and his quest to convince society to curate its hearing the same we do sight, touch, taste and smell.

In recounting his visit to an anechoic chamber, Dallas reveals the altered perceptions of sound and silence that led to his TED Talk on John Cage's 4' 33" - and the beautiful things you can hear when all is quiet. Earlier in the show, Mary Louise Kelly talks about hosting NPR's All Things Considered with severe hearing loss, neuroscientist Jim Hudspeth breaks down the sixteen thousand hair cells inside our ears, and Rebecca Knill - a self-proclaimed cyborg - explains her cochlear implant and growing up deaf. 

Listen to "Sound and Silence" Here: https://www.20k.org/episodes/soundandsilence

In November, Twenty Thousand Hertz will cap its award-winning year with more stories on the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds, shifting focus to sonic utopias, the future of space communication, the science of synesthesia and beyond.