Harry Potter and the Sound Designer’s Stone

Summer is when we share more time, more memories, and more photos. At AT&T, the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. Its center-stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. At AT&T makes sharing those pictures with everyone easy. Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in. Any condition requires trade-in of iPhone 15+ or higher. Excluding iPhone 16E and 17E requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit AT&T.com/iPhone or visit an AT&T store for details. You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. The stories behind the worlds. Most iconic and fascinating sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. In the past, there was a great scraping of chairs. And next moment, Harry found himself shaking hands with everyone in the leaky culture. I have three daughters. And I've been reading to all of them since they were born. Lately, I've been reading the first Harry Potter book to my nine-year-old. Doris Crockford, Mr. Potter, can't believe I'm meeting you at last. So proud, Mr. Potter. I'm just so proud. Always wanted to shake your hand. I'm all of them. But how do you feel when I read it to you? How do you process it in your brain? Since it's kind of like a mystery book, I try to stick all the pieces together as in clues and stuff and try to figure out what's just about to happen next. Do you see pictures and stuff in your mind? Actually, yes. I think, well, sometimes, not that many, though. Just like a few. I consume audiobooks all the time. And recently, I came across some new audio editions of the Harry Potter books on Audible. So I queued up book one for my daughter. I'm going to start with chapter five where you keep falling asleep. And I want you to tell me what you think about it. Give it a review. Then there was a great scraping of chairs. Oh, Doris Crockford, Mr. Potter. So do you want to hear this kind of movie-esque version or dead? Um, movie version. Sorry. I have been reading to you for nine and three fourths years. Hey, this has different voices and, like, sound effects. I guess you could add sound effects with these. I have actually real sound effects. Sorry. It could be like Hagrid's coat fell on the floor. Boy, you're literally- You can still, like, sit over there while we read. Well, we listen to it. My daughter's reaction stung a bit. And it's tough thinking that my time reading allowed to her might be coming to an end. But I can't say I'm too surprised. I mean, she is my kid. And these audiobooks sound awesome. They were produced by Audible and Pottermore Publishing. And unlike a traditional audiobook with just a single voice, these additions include a full cast of voice actors, original score music, and enveloping sound design mixed in Dolby Atmos. They're basically full-on movies for your ears. It's perhaps one of the first audio experiences which is of this scale that has applied that much detail to the sound design and immersion. That's Will Cohen. Such a new medium, this full high-production value world. People are still learning how to consume it. And that's Lawrence Kendrick. Will and Lawrence both work at String and Tens, the company that sound designed these new audiobooks. For them and their team, it was a massive undertaking. It's around about 130 hours of content for all seven books. And there isn't a moment in the sound where we haven't cut, for instance, the backgrounds. So it's like constant effects the whole time. Scope wise, everything is covered. Every movement, every location, the outside of those locations. If we're in Hagrid's Hut, I know where that is situated in the grounds. How close it is to Black Lake, how close it is to the Fibid and Forest, how much of those elements should bleed in through the windows, what time of day it is, what time of year it is. Every classroom, every bit of text was scrubbed through to see what details are in the classroom. You can't have a clock mentioned in book six and not have it in book one. So everything is totally canon to the books. At first, the sheer scope of the project was pretty daunting. We are used to working on shorter work and we have an expectation within ourselves to make it sound as great as we can. And to do that on such a scale has been really terrifying, actually. They were also intimidated, thinking about the millions of people who are obsessed with the series. And they know every inch of it inside out. Yeah, yes, I definitely was. It was a bit scary at the beginning. Listen to the steam fry version with my kids quite a lot. Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways. For one thing, he hated the summer holidays more than any other time of year. You know, steam fry is a part of British heritage. So to sort of be doing something quite different felt like a bit of a wrench, you know. But as soon as we heard the first passes of dialogue coming in and the narrator. These new versions are narrated by actress Cush Jumbo. When Cush Jumbo's first takes came in, I was like, "Oh, wow. This is a really good switch up, you know. She's got such a wonderful voice and her performances are amazing." So once we got into it, the kind of overwhelming nature of it passed. Compared to sound designing for a film or a TV show, the biggest difference for an audio book like this has to do with pacing. One of the challenges of an audio book is these moments can be very drawn out. So you're trying to make something that feels very naturalistic and like it's happening in front of you, but a moment could be described over a page. Right, you know, if someone says, "I'm casting a free spell." And then the narrator starts to talk about their emotional state. You know, you've already cast the free spell, but then five or ten seconds later, the thing happens. And so somehow we have to work out how the pace of that works. To deal with issues like this, they developed a rule of thumb. You need to lead the narration. Meaning the sound of something should begin before the narrator mentions it. I think it just feels more natural. Something that I and the team were very keen was to ensure that it didn't feel too formulaic. So like a radio play, this isn't a radio play. He opened the door. Pap, pap, pap, pap. Yeah, exactly. You'll tell the thing before you hear it, then it's breaking the spell. But hearing the sound, a beat before you're told what it is, helps immerse you in the story. Here's a quick example. Notice how you hear the egg start frying before the narrator mentions it. His hair simply grew that way all over the place. Harry was frying eggs by the time Dudley arrived in the kitchen with his mother. It becomes this woven experience where it's unfolding in the background, but the narrator and the performances are always right at the front. Something came whizzing down the kitchen chimney as he spoke and caught him sharply on the back of the head. Next moment, 30 or 40 letters came pelting out of the fireplace like bullets. The dursleys ducked, but Harry leapt into the air trying to catch one. While Harry Potter is filled with magic spells and fantastic creatures, audible and Potter more made it very clear that they wanted these sounds to feel organic and believable. They were quite strict on how organic it would be. Like, if it steered too far into anything synthetic or something that didn't feel attached to what the script says, broadly speaking, the rule was that it needs to feel like it's really happening in front of you. So if a wizard casts a spell, it's not sparkles and tinkly-ness. The physicality of what's happening in front of you is what drives the sound design. Here's an example from book one, when Hagrid makes a passageway magically appear in a brick wall. Right, stand back, Harry. It's at the wall three times with the point of his umbrella. The brick he had touched, quivered, it wriggled. In the middle, a small hole appeared. It grew wider and wider. A second later they were facing an archway large enough even for Hagrid. But finding a jiggling brick sound that would last for that entire moment was harder than expected. This quite long periods of narrative. And I'm like, oh my god, I don't have the sound in my library that's even long enough. So Will had to do it himself. I was in the middle of a renovation project at home. So I fortunately had some piles of bricks and offcuts of stuff in my back garden. So I just went out there and record a load of jiggling of bits and bobs. So you can hear that I had to jiggle for a really long time because the rate is chatting away. So yeah, there was a lot of jiggling. In the book Harry steps through the hole into Diagon Alley, which is a bustling marketplace for wizards. This is the first time that we move from the muggle world through to the wisdom world. So there was a lot of discussion upfront about the Wizard of Oz was a nice example of black and white initially and then transitioning into color. Toilet? Have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. And we wanted to make the muggle world kind of colorless in a way. There's this difficult, hide to tread where you want things to be detailed, engaging and interesting, but also have this feeling of something missing or something a little beige. On a very basic level, we go from the muggle world of, you know, you're lucky if you hear a milk float. For listeners outside the UK, milk floats were electric milk delivery trucks that were common for decades. To Diagon Alley that's full of potions being boiled just on the side of the road. The sun's on brightly on a stack of cauldrons outside the nearest shop. And ours, squawking and squabbling in cages. A low soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying, "Ilobs Owl in Poryam." And all these people babbling away. He turned his head in every direction as they walked up the street, trying to look at everything at once. The shops, the things outside them, the people doing their shopping. Suddenly there's a huge pallet of potential that we can plice out onto and this is the opening of that gateway. Ando stacked with barrels of batsplines and eels eyes, tottering piles of spellbox, quills and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon. A scene like this has tons of sonic layers in it. Some came from sound libraries, while others had to be found out in the world. So the team carried microphones around with them. Just in case they stumbled across the perfect sound. Most of us at Strington's keep mics in the backpacks anyway, but definitely I was pulling out and grabbing things whenever the opportunity rose that reminded me of a moment from the books. For instance, crowd sounds, also known as Walla, are pretty easy to find in sound libraries. But for Diagon Alley, they specifically wanted voices of an old-fashioned stone street. Then one day, Lawrence and his family visited Stratford upon Aven. It's a medieval market town, which is famous for being the birthplace of Shakespeare. So I was in Stratford, the Boenayven, walking down the cobbled street and then ditched my wife and child to go and record this proper, authentic, oldy-worldy street with all of these excited people from all over the place. For Will and Lawrence, one of their most exciting days of recording came when they captured sounds for the Hogwarts Express, the train that takes students to the Wizarding School of Hogwarts. For that, they recorded a real steam train that was built in the late 40s. It was like this little private railway called the Spar Valley Railway and we got to go and record there for the day and took a team out and recorded every bit of this amazing steam train that we could, including a whistle. We're setting up a audio in this amazing old early 1900s steam train warehouse, just full of bits of steam trains. Everyone hit record and then they kicked off this thing and it was probably the loudest thing I've ever recorded. And yeah, just gushing steam. Then they recorded the train running down the track from every possible angle and distance. Because there's so many points when you're cutting perspective, sometimes we're following the train from the flying calf from above it. Sometimes we're within a carriage we recorded the ambience of every carriage. Yeah, we stuck some clip mics underneath the train so that we could pick up the clacks and mix that into any background we wanted. And then we had someone down the track. Our colleague George took this microphone out into a field and recorded some distant tubes. Once they had all of that material recorded, it could be woven together into scenes like this. The train began to move. Harry saw the boys mother waving in their sister, half laughing, half crying, running to keep up with the train until it gathered too much speed. Then she fell back and wave. Harry watched the girl and her mother disappear as the train rounded the corner. How's this flashed past the window? Harry felt a great leap of excitement. He didn't know what he was going to, but it had to be better than what he was leaving behind. At Hogwarts, one of the most important settings is the Great Hall, where the students eat and socialise to create that environment. They recorded at a real school. They had amazing big hall and we managed to borrow a load of eager kids for a whole day and captured them in their natural habitat, you know, being kids and it was just so authentic. The best moments were those when we weren't directing them when they were just left a mic running. So we kept capturing all of these kids being their true selves in schools and then getting all of these songs or moments reactions. Here's that same moment in the book. Someone standing outside the Great Hall might well have thought some sort of explosion had taken place, so now was the noise that erupted from the brick and door tables. Harry, Ron and Hermione stood up to yell and cheer as never white with shock disappeared under a pile of people hugging him. At one point in the books, the slithering kids make up a song called Weasley as our King to make fun of Ron Weasley and that was one of the songs they taught the kids. Yes, so they're all being themselves. Did an amazing job. The kids that's sort of struggling to keep focus that just adds authenticity. Weasley is our King. Weasley is our King. That one kid who sings it a lot safer than everyone else is just hilarious and just so true. Many of these scenes in the books were built around grounded sounds like these, but of course there were also lots of magical elements that came with their own sonic challenges. Their mythical creatures, to spells and curses of every kind. That's coming up after the break. You know why I love summer? All those plans we made finally make it out of the group chat and into the real world, because there's more time to fit everyone in. Whatever you've gotten stored this summer, capturing those memories with your crew is a must. The iPhone 17 Pro from AT&T helps you do just that. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. That means no awkward cropping or asking strangers to take it. Just the perfect group selfie every time. And AT&T makes sharing those moments with everyone easy, because you have to share the picture or it didn't happen, right? Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone Trade in. Any condition requires Trade in of iPhone 15 Plus or Higher, excluding the iPhone 16 E and 17 E requires eligible plan, terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit AT&T.com/iphone, or visit an AT&T store for details. Congratulations to Mara Smith for getting last episode's mystery sound right. That's the signature barking sound of an Airbus plane before takeoff. The sound comes from the power transfer unit, also known as the Ptu. Basically, it helps balance the pressure between two hydraulic systems when only one engine is running. As it quickly switches on and off to even things out, it makes that noise. And here's this episode's mystery sound. If you know that sound, submit your guess at the web address mystery.20k.org. Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft 20,000 Hertz T-shirt. When I started 20,000 Hertz, all I really wanted to do was tell stories about sound. But pretty quickly, I realized that running a show meant starting a whole new business, which needed a logo, a website, a merch store, marketing, on and on. If you could use help with any of the above, then you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, and it's also how we started selling our super soft 20,000 Hertz T-shirts. It's a great way to build a. Web Store, but it goes so far beyond that. It's really like having a built-in business partner, because Shopify has world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns. And when it's time to get the word out, you can run email and social media campaigns right from inside the platform. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. (bell dings) Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com/20K. Just go to Shopify.com/20K. Again, that's Shopify.com/20K. (bell dings) For any successful business, good communication is crucial, because if your team's communication is messy, customers feel it. Mist messages, dropped threads, slow replies, it's one of the easiest ways to lose momentum. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. The business communications system built so you never miss a call. More than 90,000 businesses from solo operators to growing teams rely on Quo to stay connected. With Quo, your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number. That way, there are no more mist messages or forgotten conversations. Everyone sees the full thread, replies are faster, and customers feel taken care of. When you sign up, you can keep your existing number, add teammates and minutes, and sync any CRM software you're already using. Then, you can let the call routing handle itself as your business grows. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com/20K. That's Q-U-O.com/2-0-K. (upbeat music) While sound designing the new Harry Potter audio books, the team at String intends were obsessive in their attention to detail. For example, they gave every door in the story its own unique sound. - There's the authenticity about what these places sound like and what the acoustics of that space sound like, making them all unique and iconic so that you recognize it. And then also, even thinking emotionally about what each location evokes. - For instance, each house in Hogwarts is represented by an animal. For the Brave Gryffindor house, it's a lion. - So, there's elements of roaring baked into the Gryffindor common room door. - For the cunning slither in house, it's a snake. - There's a hissing snake texture with the slither in common room door. - Here's the door to Harry's vault in Gringot's bank, which is filled with gold. (gunfire) - That's a rare example of some sparkles there. (laughs) - I think there's cash right shifting around in this. - Oh yeah, sorry. - Now you're right, that's the shifting cash. It's not a broken bowl. - Then there's the door to vault 713, a high security vault used by Dumbledore. - Yeah, a little more mysterious 'cause it's a more mysterious vault. (air whooshing) - This level of detail and considerations been given to literally every single door. It doesn't draw your attention to it, but it does something to you emotionally, I think. - One set of sounds that involved a lot of this emotional layering was the spells. - There's such a critical part of the wisdom world, of course, so a lot of care was taken into the approach of them. Also, within the book, like we were saying earlier, there's this multiple beats approach to the way that books unfold in front of you. So there's a casting sound where the spell is manifested. Sometimes there might be a traveling element that's bell and then there's the action of it. So if it unlocks a door, then it's the sound of a door actually unlocking, it respects the size of that lock. It might be a big clunky sliding gator. It might be a little intricate box or something. - Hello, one more. - The lock clicked and the door swung open. - Lawrence and Will wanted there to be some kind of sonic relationship between the various spells. - I initially had this idea of making different spell castings for jinxers, curses, countercursors, and giving them all an individual flavor. I must have done 40 different options for spell castings, but it was just turning into quite a complex, it was becoming distracting, basically. - So they ended up dividing the spells into just two categories, positive and negative, basically. - Whether it has a positive or negative intent. - So I'll give you a little blast of the positive spells on the run. - As you can hear, these positive spells all have a kind of electric shimmer to them and they're even a bit musical. - I've set out this idea of striking a match. I thought it's kind of the closest that I can as a muggle come to casting a spell in my mind, like that strike and the flaring of it. So I definitely, in terms of the rhythm of it, that was always in the back of my mind. - No more. - Harry muttered, and the light appeared at the end of his wand, almost dazzling him. - By contrast, the negative spells have an animalistic snarl to them, along with a sinister, breathy layer. - There's definitely animal layers in there. - Feels a bit vocal, rather than it. - Yeah, I'm a big fan of seeing a bunch of my mic and making noises and then whippling them about, especially because we're making something organic based in the real world. Vocal things are real and alive, so that felt relevant and cool for this run. - One of the most famous spells in Harry Potter is the Patronus charm, which conjures a magical guardian creature that's unique to each person. Harry's Patronus is a stag, and for the scene where he first conjures it, Lawrence crafted a whole ethereal soundscape. - It's literally an abstracted stack call. There are coral layers. Look at a layer called Throbby Swirls. A trick would like to do quite often is drawing sounds out with granular tools, and then using the textural elements that come out of it to make something that feels wide and all-encompassing. This is a particularly musical element. Generally, we've always did well-clear away from music. This is a dedicated scoring team, but this one needed it. There's an element of, I want to say sadness, but it's melancholy or something. It definitely makes me feel something. In the book, Harry conjures his Patronus to fight against the Dementors, which are evil-hooded creatures, sort of like the ring-raiths and Lord of the Rings. - They've got to be terrifying because everyone that is within the vicinity of them has all the happiness drained out of you, and so you want to try and get that feeling with the listener as well. - To create the sound for the Dementors, I had a very clear brief and idea initially, where I watched this YouTube video about inhale screams, which is like a metal singing technique where you literally inhale as you scream. We felt thematically right because the Dementors are inhaling your soul, and it just sounds rad, and it sounds very dangerous. - Can you do one? - Oh. - I definitely need to try to. It makes me cough quite a lot. - Can I try one? - Oh yeah, go for it. (crying) - Oh, that's good. Oh, God, yeah, it's a real throat tickler. (laughing) So that was, yeah, an initial idea, which I love having something to go on to start rather than staring at a black page and just throwing a thing at it. - But then their colleague Phil Lee took things a step further. - Phil gargled egg whites because it has that sort of sticky textual thing and clings to your throat and sounds particularly bubbly and gloopy. (crickets chirping) - So he took off the team and did some global, blah, blah, blah, blah, with egg whites in his mouth. (crickets chirping) Add some modulation and pitch shifting and you end up with this. (crickets chirping) Here's a Dementor in the audio book. - The hand was suddenly withdrawn into the folds of the black material. And then the thing beneath the hood, whatever it was, drew a long, slow, rattling breath as though it was trying to suck something more than air from its surroundings. - Now the Dementors don't talk, but there are plenty of other creatures that do. And for those moments, they'd often use the actor's performance to trigger other sounds. That way, these extra layers would dynamically shift with the actor's pitch or volume. - So this, it feels tied together like it's a singular item. - In Book Two, for example, Harry encounters a giant talking spider named Aragog. Notice the clicking sounds underneath Aragog's voice. - I was chained. - We're friends of Hagrid's. His heart seems to have left his chest to pound in his throat. Click, click, click, when the pinces of the spiders all around the hollow. Aragog paused. - Hagrid has never sent men into a hollow before. - There's lots of elements to clicking, but the main one that I wanted to play along with I just wanted control over it. So I think it's just me going, and then putting that into a sampler through a bunch of effects, using an emitter to trigger that kind of like kind of pitiator, but with some random elements to it. - In other words, he made those clicks into a digital instrument. - And then I could just play that along with the voice. So obviously it sounds a little pitch, so you'd find something tastier down lower. And then as Aragog was performing, then I could dial that in and perform it so that the more angry he gets, the more I'm able to bring them up. - Along with these mouth clicks, they layered in leathery sounds and shifting hair sounds and having them all dynamically move along with performance. - In trouble. - Set the age at spider. But why has he sent you? - So yeah, a lot of our creatures are tied to keys on the keyboard or even just a knob to twizzle. Being able to perform along with the story just lets you dial into those little nuance storytelling moments. - Both Will and Lawrence have been Harry Potter fans for decades. For Lawrence, he grew up with the books. I stayed up late reading all the books. I got them as they came out. I won Harry Potter quizzes and stuff back in the day. Yeah, huge fun. - Whereas Will was more familiar with the movies. - I've watched the films, I love the films. And so recreating something that has been part of our upbringing is kind of cool. - After 18 months of intense work, they completed the sound for all 130 hours of material. Then they waited to see how people would respond. - We love it so much and we've been so excited about it. But you don't know what anyone else is going to say, right? It's very close to people's hearts. But the first review started coming out and they were calling out specific moments that you remember putting in there and the reception was so positive and I was so very proud and very pleased. - Yeah, they really were flagging how cool the sounds like most, which is immensely great for sure. - For them, this was the rare project that even people outside the sound world could understand and appreciate. - It's not very often that all my friends are listening to this stuff and my friends are proud of me for what making because they all grew up with it as well. - And unlike the endless stream of commercial work that comes and goes, they know that this will be remembered. - There are very few mediums like this, which just stand, exist and get played again and again and again and are valid forever. I'll still be proud of this when I'm an old man. (soft music) - 20,000 Hertz is produced by my sound agency, De facto Sound. Here more at de factosound.com or by following De facto Sound on Instagram. - This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerlin. - With help from Grace East. - It was sound designed and mixed by Colin Devarny and Joel Boydard. - Thanks to our guests, Wil Cohen and Lawrence Kendrick from String and Tens. - Wil and Lawrence wanted to make it clear that this project was a team effort. - Whose birth sang we just had a really awesome team, Pete Doggert, Phil Lee, Kevin Langhammer and Damien Pace with our most excellent tech George Hinson. We love you very much George. - Finally, take a moment to think of the biggest Harry Potter fan you know. Then tap the Share button in this podcast app and send this episode to them. I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening. (soft music)