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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:10)
I'm Dallas Taylor.
Okay, I wanna 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 Twenty Thousand 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 Twenty Thousand Hertz episodes. Last year was so successful that we just decided we're gonna 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.

**Leonardo Barrios** (1:03)
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 Sonce, our band, was for us. Not a company, not a brand, just home.
Most people never even knew why we were called La La Sonce. It was just Saul's house number. But somehow, that house became the center of our lives. You'd pull up at like 6pm, 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 are Lalo Sansa, right? And the crazy parties? 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 Forty, and suddenly, everything started to feel bigger. Better visuals, studio sessions every week, actual opportunities.
I remember one of our first solo shows, ten 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.
Ah, 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 Passus. And Marco, one of our closest friends, had a burst in it. He'd been practicing that burst for weeks. One day, we get to the studio, Forty 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 big promises, nobody treated me like I was replaceable. And after living through the opposite, that meant everything to me. I'm grateful things worked 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.