It’s great to be back with this issue of Sound Off the Ground. I spent the spring and summer developing sound-design training programs for this fall. I made a video about sound design for narrative podcasts that will be included in a Penn State podcasting course. And I’m leading a workshop called Music for Non-Musicians: Create Music on Your iOS Device, which runs on Sept 27. Participants will learn how to compose songs on their iPad or iPhone with GarageBand and a $4 generative-music app. No musical skill required (really!). You can learn more and register here. I’d love to see you there!
My all-time favorite sound design of a narrative podcast is in “The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler,” an episode of Storytime with Seth Rogen.
It’s the most intense, incredible true story I’ve heard on a podcast.
In the episode, Colin Dowler tells us how he decided to “do the Doog” and summit the Canadian mountain named after his grandfather, Doogie Dowler. Colin was supposed to do the Doog with his brother but ended up going alone. And he almost didn’t come back.
All because he crossed paths with a pesky 900-pound grizzly bear who tried to eat him alive.
From the start, we know that Colin survives the bear attack. I mean, he’s alive enough to tell us the story himself. And yet, I was on the edge of my seat.
I credit Seth Rogen and Colin’s storytelling skills. But the sound design also creates suspense and tension, especially during the 22 minutes dedicated to the attack itself.
It has a percussive, instrumental, scattered Peter and the Wolf vibe. These sounds and textures amplify Colin’s emotions and illustrate the menacing actions of the bear. From a sound-design perspective, it’s not a literal scene. Yet those sounds got my heart racing and evoked Colin’s terror without a single “realistic” bear-attack sound.
It’s brilliant, and I wanted to learn how the sound for this scene was conceived. I reached out to Richard Parks III, who produced and sound designed the episode.
You may know Richard as the creator of Richard’s Famous Food Podcast, a documentary food show that is, as Richard says, “more like Pee Wee’s Play House than a normal podcast.”
Since the spring, Richard has also been publishing Dodger Blue Dream, which chronicles the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2024 baseball season. A gambling scandal broke out early in the season when it was revealed that Ippei Mizuhara, the translator for the Dodgers’ star pitcher, Shohei Ohtani, stole millions of dollars from Ohtani to cover his own gambling debts. He will be sentenced on October 25, which just happens to coincide with the World Series.
Dodger Blue Dream episodes “The Talented Mr. Ippei” and “The Complaint Against Ippei” cover the scandal.
Richard says the podcast is “a perfect primer for anybody casually interested in baseball and looking for a fun way to get caught up on some of the year’s biggest storylines in a tightly edited, sound-rich package.”
Sound Designing the Doog
Now, let’s get back to our topic at hand: The Doog! Richard and I spoke for an hour, so I’ve edited and condensed our conversation below. To get started, let’s look at some key points Richard made:
- Sound design is like writing and editing. With writing and editing, you’re arranging words in a particular order. And with sound design, you’re arranging sounds – music, narration, interview tape, sound effects – in a particular order.
- The informational and emotional meaning of sound is always a part of whatever piece of sound you’re using.
- The emotional tenor of the story overall, especially in the interview tape and what you know about the subject of the story, should drive your decisions about how you’re going to approach the overall sound design of the piece.
- For “The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler,” Richard decided that there would be no difference between music and sound design.
- An audio project is really a series of decisions – deciding what to put into a container, how big the container is, how much stuff you want to put in it, and the order in which you’ll put it in the container.
How would you describe your approach to sound design in general?
The first thing for me is that sound design is just a part of writing. I don’t see a line between music, sound design, or tape. The informational and emotional meaning of sound is always a part of whatever piece of sound you’re using. And so sound design is deciding what length and order that those things go in from zero minutes to the end of the piece.
And that’s also what writing is. Inevitably, what you’re doing is arranging sound in a certain order. The job is always the same, whether you’re writing, editing, sound designing, scoring. Those things have symbiotic, inevitable relationships.
The more you think of it as an integrated process, it opens up avenues for better ideas, in my experience.
In the bear attack scene, I expected realistic bear sounds, like growling and snarling. But you chose non-representational sound design. Why did you choose that?
It was a decision that came early on, and I think that it just made sense for the piece because it’s man and nature. And Colin telling the story of being alone, of being attacked by a bear, just happens to lend itself to that kind of sound design.
You have to use the emotional tenor of the story overall. In this case, the interview tape, the man telling the story, what he’s like, what his experience was, and what you know about him from your interactions producing the episode – taking all that into account, to make the first decisions about how you’re going to approach how it should sound.
Other Storytime episodes we did are these kind of psychedelic multimedia collages, as opposed to the stark-landscape oil painting from, you know, 1898 that this piece was. It just made sense for this piece.
How did you create the specific sounds for that scene – the boom-boom of a drum (was it timpani?), the scratching and clicking sounds …
I worked with a composer named William Ryan Fritch, who I’ve worked with for eons. I come from a documentary film background, and Will contributed music [for some of those projects].
When we worked together before, he gave me music, and then I wrote and scored and sound designed with that. That’s how I like to work. I like to start with music a lot of the time.
With Doogie Dowler, because of what the story was, I came up with comps [musical examples] that I knew I wanted to talk to Will about. It was like dirty, pulsing, synth things. I put in something with a sort of acoustic, eerie Americana vibe.
I knew that he had this in his palette, because he lives in a barn and has all these antique instruments. He’s always playing and recording things. He sent me a bunch of files that were like sound effects. For example, he was making little clicky sounds with an instrument, basically. A bass clarinet.
Then I got to bounce off of the rhythms that were in those files and mess with them. And I realized the music and sound design were the same thing. I immediately took that as a rule for the piece. I’m allowed to change the rule later on, but for now, that’s the rule, and I’m going to see where that takes me just to create forward momentum.
There were a couple times that Colin made noises himself. I’m sorry, this is pretty gory stuff – but he talks about the bear chewing on him sounding like a lab chewing on a cow bone.
He also describes the bear’s nails on the gravel, and he goes like this [Richard makes scatching noises]. He even had a rhythm to it. So, I took those and they became another piece of the sound design.
Then I had a new variation to my rule, which was to use any nonverbal sound that Colin made.
You didn’t want to use realistic sound effects?
In Doogie Dowler, I think that a man’s voice, along with the kind of texture and musical elements in the palette that Will gave me, is hyper-real in someone’s mind.
To me, it feels like reading a good book because it’s only descriptive to a certain point. And that really engages the mind’s imagination. And I think that’s what people refer to as cinematic in audio.
This story had a beautifully simple version of that. I had played with a few sound design pieces [realistic sounds], and I realized that it was taking me out of the cinematic world a little bit.
So I decided wouldn’t go into my sound design folders [of sound effects]. That decision indicated a philosophical approach to how I would work on this thing.
Richard’s Famous Food Podcast has what you’ve called a maximalist sound design. Doogie Dowler leans more minimalist. How do you know when to pull back?
It’s good to think about it in terms of decisions. That’s what every creative project is like – you just need to make decisions.
That’s what editing is. You have to decide to cut, cut away. It’s like we’re deciding what to put into a container. How big the container is, how much stuff you want to put in it, and the order of it.
The whole idea of the music and sound design is to help transport you. It puts you right there. It’s like creating a proscenium for the storyteller to be heard. There’s a spotlight, it’s in the right place, and you know that the person wielding it is being intentional about it. And, so, sound design just doing a lot in order to get out of the way.
The episode is 59 minutes long, and the bear attack scene is 22 minutes of that. It’s incredibly suspenseful, even though we know Colin is going to survive.
There’s no comparison to Man Fights Off Bear. It’s the perfect distillate of high stakes, live or die. And we know that he lives, but also, we’re not thinking about that if it’s told right.
It’s hard work. And it went incredibly fast. Working on that episode was one of the most intense things I’ve done.
The attack probably lasted only a few minutes in real life. Why did you decide to slow time down?
It all comes back to how Colin told it. I think when you go through a physical trauma like this, it’s not uncommon to have time slow down.
And Colin had all this detail. Sometimes I try to work around exhaustive detail or length. But in this case, I realized it was just part of the fact that we were talking to someone who fought off a grizzly bear, and it means that we’re gonna sit there and we’re gonna hear all about that moment because it’s embedded in his memory for very good reason.
Any final sound design thoughts?
I think it’s important to just remember that the job is different depending on what venue your work is going to be in, and what the purpose is, and what the emotional and informational value of the interview – and therefore the piece – is going to be, and to whom.
You need a lot of context, so I wouldn’t want to prescribe one thing or another. But each piece is its own movie, and this one was kind an outdoors action-horror-real-life thriller movie. So, I made decisions around that.
In terms of like how to approach things, I think the last thing I would say is just make me listen and make me care.
You can follow Richard Parks III at @reechardparks on Instagram and X.