Listener Stories 2026 (Silver): Keyboard Clicks & Singing Forests

Twenty Thousand Hertz

This episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz features listener stories from the Silver Collection, highlighting personal and profound connections t

Key takeaways

• Sound can serve as both a diagnostic tool and a deeply personal connection—like the 100-microsecond click that determines newborn hearing, with lifelong implications.

Main topics

• Newborn hearing screening using auditory brainstem response (ABR)

Notable quotes

"I'm grateful things work out the way they did. But sometimes, I still miss that house. I miss making songs until sunrise."

Conclusion

These stories reveal how deeply sound influences our lives—from medical

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) Hey, listeners. My favorite part of making podcasts and videos is shining a spotlight on the people and places that tend to go unnoticed. And the vast majority of our best stories come from you. So if any of these apply, then drop us a note. You have an incredible sound job or you know someone who has an incredible sound job. It could be in entertainment, science, engineering, or anything else in the sound and music world. You know an awesome sound story about a specific place, whether it's a company, a museum, a venue, a factory, or some other location. You know a surprising twisty-turny sound story that deserves to be a 20,000 Hertz episode, especially if there's a really deep human story behind it. If your idea involves a popular person, place, or thing that people have heard of, great. But if not, and it's just a really good story, even if it's obscure, that's also great. To send us that idea, visit 20k.org slash story. Again, that's 20k.org slash story. Speaker 7 (0:59) You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. Speaker 7 (1:12) Okay, I want to let you in on a secret. I also don't love the sound of my voice. And after 10 years of making this show, I get so tired of hearing me all the time. One of my very favorite things about 20,000 Hertz is when I hear other people share what sound means to them. So with that in mind, last year, we started a listener story competition where we play short, fully produced sound stories made by you, our listeners. In other words, there are many 20,000 Hertz episodes. Last year was so successful that we just decided we're going to do this every year. So this year, we received 34 incredible stories and collected the finalists into three episodes. This episode is from the second group, which is what we're calling the Silver Collection. The Gold Collection will follow in a few weeks. Enjoy. Story 1 by Leonardo Speaker 8 (2:03) When you start making music as a teenager, you're not thinking about contracts. You're thinking about who's bringing the speaker, who's staying up all night finishing the song. That's what La La Sonze, our band, was for us. Not a company, not a brand, just... Speaker 8 (2:23) Most people never even knew why we were called La Los Fonse. It was just Saul's house number. But somehow, that house became the center of our lives. You'd pull up at like 6 p.m., and suddenly it was 4 in the morning and nobody had gone home. Half of the room would be trying to make songs, the other half would be playing FIFA, ordering Uber Eats, arguing over dumb stuff. But somewhere in the middle of all of that chaos, a movement started happening. At first, it was just friends supporting friends. Then, random people started recognizing us. Not just online either, like strangers at parties walking up to us saying, yo, you guys Speaker 2 (3:08) are Lalo Sansa, right? Speaker 8 (3:09) And the crazy part is, people connected with us because we didn't feel polished. We felt reachable. Like if someone came up to us at a show, They weren't meeting artists, they were just meeting us. Then we met 40 and suddenly everything started to feel bigger. Better visuals, studio sessions every week, actual opportunities. I remember one of our first solo shows, 10 minutes before doors opened. Power died. And outside, it was absolutely pouring rain. I remember running through the back of the venue, trying to connect a generator in the middle of the storm. And the generator didn't even work. But somehow, people still came back the next day. That was probably the first moment where we all looked at each other like, okay, this might actually become something real. Looking back, that's also around the time things started changing. Not dramatically at first, just little moments. Conversations turning into decisions before everyone even talked about them. Questions getting answered with, oh, we'll see you later. I remember this one moment super clearly. We had this song called Pasos. And Marco... One of our closest friends had a verse in it. He'd been practicing that verse for weeks. One day, we get to the studio, 40 plays the updated version, and Marco's part is just gone. No conversation, no warning, nothing. And I think that was one of the first times where the room felt weird. Eventually, the group started splitting up. Some people wanted to keep chasing the opportunity, others started feeling like the opportunity was chasing us. And honestly, what scared me wasn't losing the project. It was realizing our friendships were starting to feel transactional. The last day we left the studio, nobody fought, but the energy in the room felt heavy. Like, everybody already knew things were never going back to normal. Not long after that, my cousin Omar told me a well-known music label wanted to hear my music, so I sent everything over. A few days later, I walked into their studio in my hometown, Guadalajara, Jalisco, and my Spotify page was already pulled up on the screens, waiting for me. And I'm not gonna lie, after everything we had gone through, that moment felt surreal. But more than anything, it felt transparent. Nobody dodged conversations. Nobody made vague promises. Nobody treated me like I was replaceable. And after living through the opposite, that meant everything to me. I'm grateful things work out the way they did. But sometimes, I still miss that house. I miss making songs until sunrise. I miss all of us being in the same room. I miss when none of this felt like business yet. So, if you're chasing music, protect your work, protect your name, but most importantly, try to not lose the people that made you fall in love with it in the first place. This podcast was written, narrated, and sound designed by Leonardo Barrios. You can find my music on there. Bardo. That's Bardo with a crossed O. On all streaming platforms. Thank you for listening. Speaker 7 (7:00) Story 2 by Ross This Speaker 5 (7:03) is the story of a sound, your response to it, and how that response, or lack thereof, can have a major impact on your life. The sound is usually referred to as a 100 microsecond click. The click part of that name is fairly obvious. The 100 microsecond part means it is really short. One-tenth of one-thousandth of one second. Speaker 5 (7:30) You may not have noticed or may have thought it was an audio glitch, but the sound has actually been played several times already in this story. Here it is, one more time, in all its glory. Why do we care