wet-slop-plop.wav (Among Other Sounds)
Here Be Monsters
Here Be Monsters Podcast
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2017
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There are about 10,000 files in the Here Be Monsters sound library. HBM producer Jeff Emtman has been recording, synthesizing and downloading them since way back before this show started. And of these thousands of sounds, there’s a tiny subset of them that just keep winding up on podcast episodes.
On this interstitial episode, Jeff plays back some of these heavily-used sounds and asks whether they occur because of an inherent goodness, a force of habit, or some kind of weird nostalgia he feels for the early days of the podcast.
The site Jeff often downloads sound from is FreeSound.org (see Jeff’s download history). A big thank you to the many recordists there who volunteer their work to the public domain, especially Felix Blume, a sound artist and sound engineer who is responsible for many of the site’s best recordings.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters. You know, even before I started producing this podcast, I was recording sounds, right? |
| 0:19.2 | Like I was recording them and I was naming them and I was putting them in these folders on my computer. |
| 0:24.0 | And this was why I was pretty young and I really wasn't sure why I was doing this. |
| 0:27.0 | I was just doing this. |
| 0:29.0 | And then sometime thereafter I started playing around the synthesizers |
| 0:32.0 | and I was trying to figure out how those worked and started recording sounds from those and putting them in those folders on my computer. |
| 0:39.0 | And then it was 2012 and I started this show and I was doing a lot of learning on the job about sound editing and sound design |
| 0:45.6 | and I began mixing those recordings from those folders into these episodes. |
| 0:49.8 | And there were certain things that I wanted to put in the shows that I couldn't record or synthesize. |
| 0:54.0 | So I found those online on this great website where recordists can choose to sacrifice the copyrights on their recordings |
| 1:00.6 | so that the public can repurpose them for things like music or movies or silly |
| 1:05.5 | podcasts about Fear and the Unknown. Now all of these sounds both the ones |
| 1:11.6 | recorded by me and by others, they all wound up on these |
| 1:14.2 | massive folders on my hard drive. |
| 1:17.2 | And all along, these sounds have just been poorly categorized and keyworded. |
| 1:21.2 | They're just all kind of jumbled into one place. You know it's not an |
| 1:24.4 | elegant system but it's a system that works. I actually just took a look at this on my |
| 1:29.1 | computer and there's about 10,000 just nearly 10,000 sounds in those folders now. |
| 1:34.5 | And so here's the thing, though, is that I'm always trying to expand my repertoire of |
| 1:38.6 | sounds that I'm using on these shows, but usually I fail at that, |
| 1:41.9 | because in amongst all of those thousands of sounds is actually |
| 1:44.1 | this small and very special subset that I just keep returning to. I keep mixing them into the episodes. |
... |
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