The Backstory to Great Audio Storytelling, hosted by Rob Rosenthal, for Transom and PRX.
The radio piece "If," produced by Sherre DeLys for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Listening Room in 1997, serves as a masterclass in experimental audio storytelling. Created in collaboration with a young patient at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, the work captures the imaginative, stream-of-consciou...
Personal audio storytelling thrives when producers capture intimate, unscripted moments within their own lives. Annie Cheney’s 1998 documentary, "Concerning Breakfast," serves as a prime example, using the ritual of morning meals to navigate the complexities of her family’s history and her past struggle with anorexia. ...
The Sonic Memorial Project functions as an auditory archive of the World Trade Center, preserving the history, human stories, and physical presence of the towers before and after the 9/11 attacks. By weaving together archival recordings, interviews with architects, construction workers, and survivors, the project captu...
Rob Rosenthal introduces "Old School Sound School," a new series within the Sound School podcast dedicated to showcasing classic audio documentaries and experimental sound works from his extensive personal collection. This initiative highlights the historical and artistic value of audio storytelling, featuring "deep cu...
Removing breaths from audio narration creates an unnatural, "chopped up" sound that distracts listeners and disrupts the speaker's natural cadence. When breaths are excised, volume shifts become jarring, and sentences often lose their intended rhythm, sounding like disjointed run-on phrases. Effective audio production ...
Audio storytelling relies on precise production choices to shape narrative truth and emotional resonance. Hard cuts, such as those used in the Half-Life podcast, effectively highlight the friction between a narrator’s preconceived family history and a subject’s contradictory lived experience. Similarly, the seamless in...
Elizabeth Arnold’s transition from a national political correspondent to an immersive environmental storyteller redefined the possibilities of radio journalism. Her work, characterized by visceral, on-the-ground reporting from extreme locations like the North Pole and the Great Bear Rainforest, moved beyond standard ne...
WBUR’s opinion project, Cognoscenti, has fundamentally shifted its production process to better translate written essays into compelling radio. Previously, editors adapted web-based essays by trimming text, which often resulted in stiff, unnatural delivery. By adopting a "voice memo" method, editors now ask contributor...
Audio storytelling possesses a unique, visceral power capable of evoking intense emotional responses, as demonstrated by the reaction of incarcerated youth who were overwhelmed by the vivid, clinical depiction of death row procedures in David Isay’s documentary, Witness to an Execution. This documentary provides a star...
The podcast series Fela Kuti: Fear No Man examines the life and legacy of the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer, framing his music as a potent, sacred tool for political resistance and spiritual healing. Producers Jad Abumrad and FayFay Odudu detail their three-year production journey, which involved extensive field reporting ...
This episode of Sound School explores the evolution of the Audio Flux podcast, examining the differences between its initial pilot episode and the format of its first official episode. It highlights the challenges the producers, Julie Shapiro and John Delore, faced in defining and explaining Audio Flux, a platform for ...
The podcast explores the journey of audio producer Will Coley's story pitch about public nudity, from initial conception to eventual acceptance by the podcast Articles of Interest. Coley's inspiration came from a story called Buck Naked and his own discomfort with public nudity as a teen. The story was rejected by seve...
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