Fred Newman
Sounding Off

Newman Photo by Dana Nye

Fred Newman remembers a particularly chilly HBS cold call. Completely unprepared to open a finance case, he used a different talent to get through it. Newman did his impression of a fly and buzzed out of his seat and around the Aldrich classroom until he hit the back wall.

Five years later, on a tour promoting his first book, MouthSounds: How to Whistle, Pop, Click, and Honk Your Way to Social Success, the same fly imitation landed Newman a job as the host of Nickelodeon’s teen talk show Livewire. Since then he has hosted The Mickey Mouse Club, created voices and sounds for dozens of movies, and helped shape and appears daily on Between the Lions, a PBS program that helps kids learn to read.

Newman, a Georgia native who came to HBS after a job selling carpets, punctuates ordinary conversations with scene-setting sounds: a stomach growl, a dog’s bark, a cellphone ring. He credits his MBA with giving him the courage to found Talking Dog Productions, his one-man operation in New York City that enables him to view his work as a business — “like selling shoes” — and inoculates him from the rejection that stymies many actors and writers.

For nearly three years, Newman has worked as the traveling “sound effects guy” on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion radio show, “doing what I used to do behind teachers’ backs.” He uses acoustic technology to enhance the art of storytelling. “Information is in words,” says Newman, “but all the emotion is in sound.”

— SY