By Robert Barron, Staff Writer

Editor's note: This online story has been edited for corrections.

“We don’t have earlids, because our ears are too important,” said Fred New-man, a master of sound effects.

Newman is probably best known as sound effects designer for “Prairie Home Companion,” the National Public Radio program featuring Garrison Keillor. Tall and slender with a shock of white hair, he doesn’t look at life, he listens to it.

“It’s a scam to get paid for doing this. I’m paid to do what I used to do behind the teacher’s back,” he said.

Newman is part of “The Wonderful Life of George Bailey,” an adaptation of the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The play was performed by Lyric Theatre at Enid Symphony Hall. It is done like a radio drama, with New-man doing the sounds. The program was sponsored by Contin-ental Resources and closed Wed-nesday.

Newman did a demonstration Wednesday afternoon of sound effects, including a five-minute rhythmic rendition of many sounds he does himself. He told the audience human hearing is better than a dog’s. People can sense, feel the energy of an animal on the other side of a wall because of our astounding hearing, he said.

Sound is produced by vibrations he described as “touch at a distance.” A lot of our culture is built around sound. Old forts were built the same size because people had to be able to shout across them, he said. During his lecture he suddenly became a housefly, flitting across the stage to land on the wall.

He told the audience how important and under-rated sound is. A movie has all the information on the screen, but all the emotion is in the sound. As a youth in Georgia, he became fascinated with stories he heard told around him. His grandfather would put a finger on Newman’s lips and tell him to listen to the sounds around him.

“If the wind was blowing he would tell me to hear the whisper of the sound,” he said. “If the wind blew through a pine tree it would whisper, if it blew through an Oak tree it would clatter and if it was a willow tree it swished.”

He had the audience, composed of both adults and children, acting like children, trying to make the sounds he made, from water dripping, to a trumpet to the sound of a Hawaiian harp. He played “The William Tell Overture” on a picnic spoon.

Newman learned to tell stories using sounds from the culture around him in Georgia and grew up during the period when radio was king with its intimate style and sounds.

“Culturally, sound defines our tribe,” he said. “If you turn a radio dial you can tell wherever it stops the demographics, if they go to church, the kind of car they drive. It tells about you.”

There are other types of tribe sounds, like accents and regional sou-nds, he said. It isn’t just the words, but how they are spoken. He once sold carpet in Oklahoma City and Texas and recalled stopping at gas stations along his route learning from the type of characters who would be there and the things they would say.

Sound is not thought about as it should be, Newman said. People spend thousands of dollars on plastic surgery, but 99 percent of communication is voice. An experiment found that city accents are more harsh and clipped than rural and that affects the way we work with each other, he said.

One experiment had a man carrying books, and as someone approached he dropped them. Nine of 10 people stopped to help him pick up the books, Newman said. But if he was mowing the lawn, fewer than one-third of people stopped to help him when he had trouble. That is because people redefine their space when sound assaults them.

“There is so much more sound today than there was 20 years ago,” he said.