Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.
Radio’s mighty percussionists
Have you ever attended the symphony and decided to focus on the percussion section in the back? It’s kind of wild to watch these musicians, who often spend most of the concert with their hands folded, suddenly spring to action with mallets upraised, waiting until the exact moment to hit something with absolute precision.
This is what radio sound effect artists did all day long in network studios during live broadcasts: their instruments might be special doorbell buzzers belonging to each family in a soap opera, or a shallow box filled with gravel for footsteps. The notion that radio was a “theater of the mind” is largely thanks to its live sound effects; and indeed, some of the earliest sound effect artists came to broadcasting from theater or silent movies, where they punctuated the action (or jokes) with sound.
The best sound effects artists got to invent whole worlds: they chewed on wooden berry boxes to evoke a horde of rats attacking a light house; they slowly turned a cast-iron lid to create the sound of an alien spaceship door. Sound effects teams had their own subculture at radio networks, prone as they were to stress and boredom and demands from show directors to create impossible sounds on a moment’s notice.
I had been intending to write a post about all that (working title: Radio SFX Are Lit) — but on the way, I tripped and fell into an adjacent rabbit hole, one in which the world-building power of sound effects bled into the “real” world and affected our understanding of a danger that threatens us all.
Sound “sweetening” comes to TV news
I fell into this rabbit hole while reading Radio Sound Effects by Robert L. Mott. If you’ve watched US network TV from the 1980s or earlier, you’ve probably heard a sound effect produced by Mott. He worked on everything from the soap opera Days of our Lives to the kiddie show Captain Kangaroo, back when a lot of television was basically live-to-tape. He had to be quick on his feet and responsive, a skill he got from doing effects for live radio dramas at CBS like Gangbusters and Perry Mason.
No doubt that’s why, early in his career, Mott was assigned to be the sound effects guy for the CBS Six O’Clock News.