← Twenty Thousand Hertz
Twenty Thousand Hertz
Yahoo! The Yodel Heard Around the World
00:25:39
How a cowboy’s yodel became Yahoo’s signature sound.
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This episode was made in partnership with Riverside, the best tool I've found for remote recordings in studio quality. You can use it to make audio or video podcasts, webinars, and even go live directly on YouTube. Riverside works right in your web browser with no complicated setup, and records each person locally in up to 4K video and uncompressed wave audio. I'll go into more detail in the ad break, but you can sign up for free right now@creators.riverside.com 20k and if you upgrade to Riverside Pro, click I have a coupon and use promo code 20K to get 20% off your subscription. There's also a link in the show notes.
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This is 20,000 hertz with Dallas Tay.
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The voice you just heard is one of the most famous pop culture voices of the last 30 years, thanks to this. But to tell his story, we have to rewind about 500 years to the wild and crazy world of the beautiful Swiss Alps. Back then, the Swiss Alps looked pretty much exactly as you might imagine snow, little wooden houses, plenty of sheep, and of course, yodeling. Here's a Swiss yodeler named Amede Parig doing a traditional yodel. Musically, yodeling is defined as rapid changes between your normal voice and falsetto. It started as a way for Swiss shepherds to call one another across the mountains, but not only was it a practical way to communicate, people just loved the way it sounded. Over the centuries, yodeling made its way into other European countries and then started to show up in early popular music. Here's a tune from 1911 called Emmett's Favorite Yodel by British vaudeville performer George Watson. When Europeans started migrating to America, they brought yodeling with them. As a result, a bunch of early US Records feature yodeling. This includes many songs by country artists like Jimmie Rogers, one of the genre's first superstars, that Gal that Made a.
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Wreck out of Me.
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In the late 40s, Hank Williams continued this tradition with songs like Lovesick Blues Lord, I Don't.
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Know what I'll Do, All I Do Is Sit Inside. Hold on.
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Since then, yodeling has continued to pop up in surprising places, like a recurring segment on the Price is Right, called Cliffhangers, as well as tracks by Jewel and even Gwen Stefani. Which brings us to yodeling maestro Wiley Gustafson. Wiley grew up on a ranch in Montana with three brothers and a sister. Their father was a veterinarian for farm animals and also a musician.
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He had a really unique repertoire of old folk songs and obscure, funny, humorous songs, skiing songs so we grew up in the family living room, singing along with all these funny old folk songs.
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Once in a while, he'd play an old cowboy song that included yodeling.
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My dad would yodel whenever he was happy. And being on a ranch, we were horseback all the time. That was one of his favorite places to yodel. He also was a great snow skier. So when he was up on the ski hill, he would let out a yodel. So, you know, I just adored my father, so I always tried to mimic him. So when he started yodeling, I tried to start yodeling. And I think I was 12 or 13 when my voice broke enough to where I was kind of in my adult voice, where I could yodel pretty good.
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In high school, Wiley started playing bass in his older brother's band, and occasionally he'd sing, too.
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One of the songs that I learned how to sing was a song called she Slid down the Mountain. And her words are she slid down the mountain on her little lady her little old lady her little old lady. So I could do that song in our set, and that always got a chuckle out of the people listening.
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In his 20s, Wiley moved to Los Angeles to pursue music. He formed a band called Wiley and the Wild West Show. But they weren't interested in playing what was popular on country radio at the time.
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In the 90s, I think there was a lot of horrible music out there, and I was almost embarrassed to call myself a country music artist because people would automatically think of some of the bad country artists at the time. So we always called ourselves, like, traditional country or western swing. We chose that path of, okay, we're not going to write commercial country music.
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But to really set his band apart, Wiley needed something more than just a vintage sound. Then one night at a bar, he got on stage and belted out a classic yodel. Everyone put down their drinks and listened close. And from then on, yodeling became his signature.
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I'm the yodel hode holdee hey yodel o de YODEL A In 1992, we got a record deal and had our music videos playing on Country Music Television and the Nashville Network. Country Music Television was. It was like MTV of its day. It was 24 hours a day music videos. And so we had a few songs that became really popular on Country Music Television, and it kind of catapulted our career to a different level. I want to pearl handle six guns the kind that really shoot A saddle trimmed with silver and some rock and buster boots I'll carve my name upon my Belt line my sad seatbelt. Cause I'm gonna be a cowboy Essery.
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While Wiley and the Wild west were gaining traction, a brand new technology was taking the world by storm. It spans the globe like a superhighway. It is called Internet.
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The Net is made up of some 12,000 individual computer networks.
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Back then, the Internet was a pretty different place. YouTube, Spotify, Instagram and TikTok were still years away from existence. Amazon was for buying books. But one thing the early Internet did have was search engines. Lots of them. There was Archie, Veronica, Jughead, Windex, JumpStation, AliWeb, WebCrawler, ICOs, InfoSeek, Site, AltaVista, OpenText. Now there's one big name missing from that list. And no, it's not Google. That didn't come along until 1998. The real MVP of the early Internet was Yahoo. Yahoo was founded in 1994. One year later, it was the world's second most visited website. And I say website because Yahoo wasn't really a search engine, at least not at first. It was actually a curated directory. That sounds fancy, but it actually just meant a list of websites that were safe to use. This was important because back then it was pretty easy to hack into a computer, which helps explain why hacking was a central part of so many 90s movies. That's encoded.
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Gigabyte of RAM should do the trick. We're in. Access granted. Hotel Beijing selected.
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So Yahoo made the Internet feel safe and friendly, rather than scary and confusing. Even the name Yahoo sounded playful compared to the techie names like Infoseek or WebCrawler. Here's Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David filo in a 1995 interview with CNET.
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We consider ourselves a couple Yahoos. And it was pretty fitting to I think the site and the Internet in general.
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Yahoo wanted to convey that fun, playful attitude in their branding. Meanwhile, yodeling was having a bit of a resurgence. There were the famous Ricola commercials that featured people singing the brand's name on a Swiss hilltop. Even though they weren't using any falsetto. It was clearly meant to be a yodel Jell O advertised their new Jello yogurt by claiming it would make you yodel.
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New Jello yogurt.
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In Wisconsin, Shore West Realtors ran a popular commercial set to a chicken yodel by yodeler Kerry Christensen. Down in Australia, there was a country techno song called Tighten up youp Pants that reached number three on the dance music charts. And with his yodeling chops, it wasn't long before Wiley got in on the.
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Action in that era, I was doing lots of commercials yodeling. I think I was one of the only yodelers in LA at the time. That's when I was doing the Taco Bell commercials and Miller Lite commercials yodeling.
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Sadly, most of these ads have disappeared into the mists of time. But if I had to guess why yodeling made a mini comeback in the 90s, it's probably because the whole decade was obsessed with repackaging old cultural quirks. For example, there was the swing revival, which included hit songs like Zoot Suit Riot. There was also a single surf rock revival. It was a trend that Quentin Tarantino helped spark by opening Pulp Fiction with a classic surf track by Dick Dale. And when that 70s show launched in 1998, it was a throwback celebration of all things 70s hanging out.
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Down the street.
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Plus, a yodel is just instantly recognizable. It cuts through the background noise of regular ads, just like it once cut through the natural sounds of a Swiss mountainside. So it wasn't too shocking when Yahoo decided that yodeling would be a great fit for their quirky brand. And in 1996, the production company who had been booking Wiley's commercials gave him a call.
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Hey, we have a little Internet company. I don't know if you know who they are, but they're Yahoo. And I said, oh, yeah, I know who Yahoo is. They said, the company thought it would be cool if you could yodel the Yahoo name. And I said, yeah, I think I can do that.
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By this time, Wiley had moved up to his wife's farm in Washington state. So he hopped on a plane back to Los Angeles.
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I flew down to la, went into.
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The recording studio, within five or ten.
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Minutes, whipped out a bunch of yodels for Yahoo.
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Wiley recorded about 20 takes with a few melodic variations.
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The first version was Yahoo. Just three simple notes. The second version's Yahoo. It's kind of four notes.
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At the time, Wiley had no idea what an impact those four notes would have on his life, especially because this yodel wasn't intended for wide usage.
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It was for a regional commercial. They were just going public. They were doing regional commercials in the Los Angeles area, and that's what they needed me to yodel for. Usually these commercials run six weeks or eight weeks, and it's a different form of payment when you do a regional commercial versus a national commercial.
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If this had been a national ad campaign, Wiley would have earned residual payments every time one of these commercials aired. But since it was supposedly just a single local ad, he accepted a one time payment of about $600. So Wiley's commercial played in the LA area for a couple months and that was it. A few years went by and Wiley mostly forgot about his Yahoo yodel. He kept playing with his band and even appeared on the Cartoon Network talk show Space Ghost coast to coast. Hey, Wiley, how about doing a yodel for me?
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He did the space Ghost yodel. And then in 1999, I was watching the super bowl.
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During the ad break, a Yahoo commercial came on. The ad showed a dorky dude with a bad comb over who gets on Yahoo and types in hair. In the next shot, we see him proudly walking down the street with an enormous afro. Then it played Yahoo's tagline, do you Yahoo?
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And at the end of the advertisement was my Yodel. And Yahoo by that time had grown huge.
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In the three years since Wiley recorded that yodel, Yahoo's market cap had jumped from a billion dollars to 115 billion. And apparently Wiley's yodel was part of that explosion.
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I said, that is so cool. But at the same time, wait a minute, nobody called me, nobody checked in with me to use it and to get the royalties. Because for a national commercial on the super bowl, the royalties, you know, a good thing.
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And it turned out it wasn't just a Super bowl ad. Unbeknownst to him, Wiley's yodel had become Yahoo's signature sonic brand, appearing in tons of commercials. And even the site itself, they also used it.
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Like when you got an email, you would hear the Yahoo yodel. It was all over the place. And so I started writing letters to Yahoo saying, hey, I'm the yodeler that yodel your name. And you're using it as kind of an audio icon now at the end of all your commercials, we need to talk. And they ignored me and ignored me. And finally, through my manager at the time, we hired a copyright attorney.
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And so the Yahoo yodeler sued Yahoo.
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And that's when we got their attention.
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That's coming up after the break. Riverside is one of those tools that you might try for one reason and then realize that it can do so much more. Because in today's digital world, remote recording has so many uses. You might need to capture work, meetings, training videos. You might be recording interviews for a podcast, YouTube series, or documentary. You might be live streaming to your dedicated followers or even saving family stories for future generations. With Riverside, every person is recorded on their own device and the files upload to the cloud while you talk. So if anyone's Internet lags or drops out. You won't lose anything. Once you're finished, Riverside's AI editor can fix eye contact, polish the edit, and even create highlight clips with captions that are ready to post on social media. It's almost like having a full production studio right in your web browser. Try Riverside for free at creators.riverside.com 20k to unlock the full set of features. Upgrade to Riverside Pro before you check out, click the I have a coupon button and use promo code 20K for 20% off your subscription. There's also a direct link in the show notes of this episode. Congratulations to Sean Elfstrom for getting last episode's Mystery Sound right. That's the start of the song YYZ by the prog rock band Rush. Rush is from Toronto and the Ringing Bells. In this intro, spell out the letters YYZ in Morse code, which is the airport code for Toronto International Airport. And here's this episode's Mystery Sound. If you know that sound, submit your guess at the web address mystery.2000. Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft 20,000Hz T shirt. In business, there's an idea that when it comes to better, faster and cheaper, you can only pick two. But what if there was a way to get all three? With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or oci, you can. That's why companies like Cohere, Thomas, Reuters and Specialized Bikes have already made the switch. OCI is the next generation of cloud technology. It supports everything from infrastructure and databases to AI and application development. And it runs it all in a high availability, high performance environment for less than you might expect. So what makes it faster? OCI's block storage delivers more operations per second. What about cheaper? OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking. And as for better OCI, customers consistently report lower latency and higher bandwidth than the competition. This is the cloud built for AI and for whatever your business needs most. Try OCI for free Right now, with zero commitment, just head to oracle.com 20k that's oracle.com 20k starting a business can feel like juggling while riding a unicycle on a tightrope. You have to think about your branding, your inventory, your marketing, your customers, and somehow still have time to sleep. That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. If you see that purple Shop pay button on any website, that's how you know it's Shop. Shopify has hundreds of beautiful templates so you can launch a web store that matches your style with no coding required. Their built in AI tools help you write product descriptions, enhance photos, and even craft entire marketing campaigns. And behind it all, Shopify is your business partner for everything from managing inventory to processing returns. Turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com 20k that's shopify.com 20k shopify.com 20k by the late 90s, Yahoo was well on its way to becoming the most visited website on the planet with a television ad budget to match. These iconic commercials showed people using Yahoo to find something on the Internet that changes their life. And they ended like this. But the voice behind that yodel never signed on to this global ad campaign and hadn't been paid for it. At first, Wiley tried his best to get in touch with Yahoo.
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I wrote them for at least a year, wrote several letters, tried different angles of contacting people with the company. And at the time they were just too big to look back and say, ah, we made a mistake. Unless rectify this mistake.
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At one point, Wiley actually ran into one of Yahoo's top lawyers at a seminar about Internet music.
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I was on a panel and he was on a panel. I said, hey, we need to talk. And I think he gave me a card. And then I wrote him a letter and he never responded.
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This radio silence was especially frustrating because at the time my initial offerings were.
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I didn't want much. I said, you know, maybe you can help us promote my band, promote my music. Yahoo was in a position to do that easily. And they just, there was no responses whatsoever. And here I was, the small guy, the yodeler, that kind of was a big part of their marketing that they had just totally forgotten about and totally ignored. And so I started getting angry.
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At that point. It was time to get a lawyer involved.
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We had to file a lawsuit through the Los Angeles Superior Court. And that's when we got their attention when we started talking to their legal department saying, hey, there's something amiss here. Foreign.
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Not only did this lawsuit get Yahoo's attention, it also got the media's attention.
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It was a crazy time because we were getting so much attention through these national news outlets and whatnot, that I thought, okay, this is a good thing that the story is getting out there.
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Most people who heard about this case were very sympathetic to Wiley's situation, but not everyone.
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I remember getting some very angry Emails. People were mad at me because I was suing Yahoo. I don't know if they were fans of Yahoo or they just thought that there was too much litigation going on in the world, and I was part of the problem. I remember that. And that kind of took me aback. It was like, am I doing the right thing? You know?
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But Wiley persisted, and the story kept picking up steam.
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Fox News in New York called me and said, hey, we realize you have a lawsuit now and we want to talk to you about it. And I was going to fly out to New York and be on Fox News.
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But shortly before his trip, he got word that Yahoo had finally seen the light.
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That's when Yahoo decided to settle with me to make up for all the uses of the yodel. I think it just had to go up the flagpole a little bit to the right people. And they came up with a fair settlement that I thought was fair.
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And so in the end, there was no dramatic courtroom showdown, just a company who messed up but ultimately did the right thing and a yodeler who got what he was owed. And that led to even more collaboration between them.
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They said, we want to use you for other promotions that come up later. And I said, yeah, that sounds like a great deal. So not only did they settle with me, but I've been working for Yahoo, gosh, you know, for a couple decades now. Every couple years, they give me a call and say, hey, we have a new promotion we'd like to hire.
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Here's Wiley being interviewed for an Internet segment called Yahoo. On the Road. Where else have you done the Yahoo.
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Yodel? It seems like every venue that I go to and perform with my band, Wiley, in the Wild west, we probably do 100 shows a year. And I do it at least once a show, let people know that that's my only hit that I've ever written. Yahoo. Yodel. People want to hear it, and it energizes them and it makes them smile. It's amazing the power that the Yahoo Yodel still have.
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The settlement also allowed Wiley to ease up on the relentless touring he'd been doing.
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I've always been a struggling musician that's had to tour. There were several years of my career where we were out a couple hundred days, 220, 240 days a year. And it was the grind of trying to be a musician and make a living. So when the Yahoo settlement happened, it was an amount that changed my life at the time. It allowed me to get off the road a little bit, to focus more on my Family and to get back to the ranch life a little more, enjoy things like roping horses and doing those events that I'd missed out on over the years.
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And when Wiley did go back on the road, he found that his Yahoo yodel connected him with people all over the world.
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That yodel was heard worldwide, and there's a generation of people when they find out I am the Yahoo yodeler, it's like I'm a rock star, you know, it's like I'm just the Yahoo yodeling dude, you know, it was really nothing. But we've been lucky enough. Over the last 30 years, we've toured in China, Japan, South America, Australia, parts of Europe, Russia. We've done a Russia tour. So it's kind of interesting, all the touchstones because of the Yahoo. Yodel. A lot of people had heard me before, and it really is kind of fun. And meeting people like that, they get so excited about that.
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Wiley got so well known that he even gave Conan o' Brien a yodeling lesson and then performed a yodeling duet with him. Amazingly enough, it's likely that Wiley is the most widely heard yodeler in history.
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I'm lucky and blessed to be able to have a yodel that was picked up by one of the biggest Internet companies of its time. You know, a time when so many things were changing in the world with communications and media. It really did make a difference for Yahoo at the time. I mean, they ran with it, and it was just part of their culture. The quirkiness and the weirdness, that's what they wanted to be in. This yodel fit what they were doing so well.
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These days, Wiley splits his time between life on the ranch and life on the road playing music. And in both places, there's always lots of opportunities for a good yodel.
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In fact, just last week, I was at the elementary school teaching my first grader and his class how to yodel. That's where I know that the power of the yodel still exists. And kids light up and the teachers light up when we teach them how to yodel. And. And that's the thing about yodeling. A lot of people, it has that effect on them. They smile. So there's something about the yodel that hits the certain parts of our brain that give us a little bit of joy for a little bit of moment. I think that's part of the secret of why the Yahoo yodel was so well accepted and so loved. It was heard up on the streets, in the alleys, and the bars. The boys that rang so true. Well that lucky little duck, he earned a million bucks from that Internet giant Yahoo.
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20,000 hertz is produced out of my sound agency, Defacto Sound. To hear more, follow Defacto Sound on instagram or visit defactosound.com this episode was.
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Written and produced by Andrew Anderson and.
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Casey Emerling with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Colin Devarney. Thanks to our guest Wiley Gustafson. To hear more, search for Wiley in the Wild west, wherever you get your music. He also has a book called how to Lessons to Tickle your Tonsils and Funny Bone, which includes an instructional CD. Subscribe to my YouTube channel Dallas Taylor MP3 for video exclusives including my behind the scenes trips to the sets of Jeopardy. And snl, Disney Imagineering, Cirque du Soleil, and more. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok under that same name. Dallas Taylor MP3 thanks for listening. Before we go, I want to tell you about the latest videos over on my YouTube channel. This week we released one of my incredible trips to Meow Wolf's Houston location. If you're not familiar with Meow Wolf, they create these wild multimedia exhibits experiences. The best way I could describe it is like a psychedelic Disneyland beamed in from another dimension. I was there to learn about Meow Wolf's sound design and music, which are just as amazing as the mind blowing visuals. Before that, you'll see videos where I take you inside two different sound installations that my agency Defacto Sound helped create. One is an immersive nature exhibit at the historic Ozark Bathhouse in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The other is a theatrical mix inside a museum in Washington, dc. In that one I also tell the story about recording inside the White House in the early days of 20,000 hertz. To see these videos, just head to my YouTube channel, Dallas Taylor MP3. You can also find clips on Instagram and TikTok under that same name. All of these links are in the show Notes. Thanks.