Howsound

A breath may seem like the most insignificant detail in an audio story. But, Rob says breaths are incredibly important when you're editing. All you have to do is listen to stories where the breaths are cut out. They sound weird and off-kilter. Rob offers suggestions for preventing that problem, starting with, "remember to breathe!"

Vermont Public Radio reporter Angela Evancie says with the decline in trust of the media, the best way to build back that trust is with listener engagement and podcasts like the one she produces: Brave Little State.

Silence is often viewed as a no-no on the radio and in podcasts. Silence sounds like something's wrong — the radio station went off the air, the podcast paused. But, what if a story is about silence?

Audio producer and sound artist Kristina Loring was walking the beach with her dog when she stumbled across an actual message in a bottle. That moment led to an unusual audio installation involving bottles, and a telephone hotline with messages for a Covid-weary world.

Al Letson set his sights on true crime storytelling in an unusual way — with a covenant for listeners in the true crime series he reported for Reveal, "Mississippi Goddam: The Ballad of Billey Joe." Rob asks "Why go after true crime like that?"

When the story is about a family (and also not about a family), but the parents are divorced, and the kids and their father haven't spoken for years, how do you, as a reporter, navigate those tricky waters? Aviva DeKornfeld of This American Life artfully made it work.

Producer Nina Porzucki is giving audio producers a gift on this episode — she's sharing a work in progress, a first-draft pilot for a podcast. Nina lays out how she got to the pilot stage and now, what needs to happen next.

Erica Heilman's story "Finn and the Bell" is the best I’ve heard this year. It's a painful, graceful story about a young man's suicide in rural Vermont. Erica's heart is in the piece; you can hear it in every production and editorial choice. The story of how she made those choices is enlightening.

Rob offers darts and laurels for stories he's recently heard — what's good, what's not so good. On the list, productions from "Kids Short Stories," "Nice Try," "Demented," "The Skewer," and others.

Cat Jaffee and her team put community first and foremost at House of Pod, a local podcast hub in Denver. But, after four years, House of Pod will be without a house — a loss for Denver and podcasting in general as community-based podcast facilities are few and far between. Cat explains what happened on this episode of HowSound.

On this archive episode, a fascinating minute of audio — the sound of war and peace reconstructed from the exact end of World War I. Even more fascinating, the producers conjured the sound using audio shadows captured on film. 

Headphones on for this one. Rob marks the passing of the groundbreaking composer and sound ecologist R. Murray Schafer with his colleague and fellow composer, Hildegard Westerkamp. This episode will crack open your ears and, hopefully, spark new ways of thinking about the sonic environment and your work as an audio storyteller and producer.

Ruby Schwartz pitched a story to Snap Judgement based on a memoir. They gave her the green light. And then she had to figure out how she was going to squeeze a 320-page book into a short radio documentary. How Ruby did it on this episode of HowSound.

Don't just interview to grab a bunch of information, interview for story and make your work a whole lot stronger. Alix Spiegel of Invisibilia and This American Life explains how.

Megan Tan produced a story about dating during Covid but she didn't record any of the dates. So, what did she do to create scenes? The answer is an unusual production choice that worked incredibly well.

Good producers hide the difficulties. They make it all sound easy. Cariad Harmon's "Record Booth" is an excellent example. She seamlessly weaves together narration, interviews, scene tape, music, and archive tape -- like it’s no big thing. Wellllll, not so fast. Cariad shares the backstory on this HowSound.

On this episode of HowSound, a wide-ranging chat about writing for audio with one of the masters: Jonathan Goldstein of the Heavyweight podcast from Gimlet. From the importance of feeling what you write to Jonathan's penchant for courier font and a maneuver we jokingly dubbed "The Goldstein," you're bound to pick up a solid tip or three about writing.

Narrating a stand-up on location as events unfold in front of your mic is no easy thing but reporter Robert Smith makes it sound like it is. He's a master of the stand-up and he explains how he makes them work oh-so-well on this rerun episode from the HowSound archives.

Rob Rosenthal has stepped away from teaching the Transom Story Workshop on Cape Cod. To mark the occasion, Rob's put together a fireworks show of great stories from Transom students over the years. Wear headphones!

Shapearl Wells says the truest form of journalism lets others speak their own truth. And that's just what she did as host and the main character for "Somebody," a podcast that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. "Somebody" traces Shapearl's search for the truth in the murder of her 22-year old son. On this “HowSound,” she recounts what it took to produce “Somebody” as a distraught mother with a (sometimes hidden) microphone.