You're listening to 20,000 Hertz,

the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

This is the story of how theme park designers use sound to shape our experience.

The modern theme park owes much of its origin to the world's fairs of the late 1800s.

They were designed to celebrate the successes of industrial innovations by mixing entertainment,

engineering, and education.

In 1895, Sea Lion Park, one of the first fixed location amusement parks,

opened its doors at Coney Island in Brooklyn, and shortly after, hundreds of amusement parks

were up and running across the country. In the 1950s, the concept of theming was introduced to enhance the amusement park experience.

The aptly named theme parks began weaving the art of storytelling into the visitor experience.

They did this through elaborate landscaping, architecture, and a whimsical cast of characters.

While the rides, games, and attractions of ordinary amusement parks certainly maintained their allure,

the immersive quality of theme parks produced an added layer of wonder.

In these wondrous places, sound plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion

designed for the guest. Often overlooked, the music and sound design of park areas and attractions

work endlessly to help tell the story by setting the mood, weaving together plot points,

and seamlessly transitioning the guest from one

story to the next. And when it comes to designing the soundscape of a theme park, it's hard to top

the work being done by the Imagineers at Disney. We set out to control what you see and what you hear and what you smell and what you feel emotionally.

That's Joe Harrington, a Walt Disney imaginary media designer. Joe has been working with Disney since 1981

and has worked on almost all of the major park attractions since then.

...