Howsound

Who are all those people at the end of an episode of Reply All, given credit for putting it together? One of them is Jessica Yung. She's an Associate Producer. On this episode of HowSound we shine a light on Jessica's hidden work as an AP. 

When you have guests as famous and interesting at Tan France, Ramy Youseff, Wazina Zondon, Ryan Harris, and Alia Shawkat, why does the host  of Tell Them I Am start each episode talking about herself? Misha Euceph has the answer.  

NPR reporter Uri Berliner breaks from his usual approach to storytelling and finds interviewing his dad about growing up in Berlin in the 1930s to be incredibly difficult and rewarding.

Sewage pipes, a radio crime, and sound designing inner thoughts.... Must be another episode of Rob's fav sounds but this time with a twist -- a sound that annoyed Rob to no end. Clips from BBC 3 and Nathanial Mann, Bodies by KCRW, and No Feeling Is Final from ABC Radio.

Every once in a while, I think HowSound should focus solely on interviewing. To heck with sound design, writing, ethics, tracking, and the like. Just focus on “the backstory to great radio interviewing.” Why? Because interviewing is how radio producers mine. It’s how we collect the raw material for our work. The better the interviewing, the better the tape. The better the tape, the better the story. I mean, sure sloppy writing can kill stellar interview tape. Same with bad production.  Conversely a bad interview can be saved by rock solid writing. But really, if you nail your interview, the rest will come easy. Okay. Not easy, but easier. And the story the tape is based on will likely be more satisfying. Put another way, interviewing is the keystone of audio storytelling. That’s why it’s important to examine the work of the best practitioners and Cathy FitzGerald is just that — one of the best. She possesses an uncanny ability to capture “humans being” in her interviews. And she approaches it i

On this episode, the convention-busting production choices of "10 Things That Scare Me."

Sometimes, there's just too much good work to feature on HowSound. To solve the problem, from time to time I feature a slew of ear-catching clips on one episode. On this episode, work from Believed, 99% Invisible, This American Life, and Threshold.

At a school where I taught radio, in the mic booth, there was a photo of Studs Terkel hanging on the wall. Under it, someone wrote “Talk to Studs.” The picture was there to help with tracking. Narration will sound more conversational if you pretend you’re talking to Studs, the thinking went. After all, that’s the goal, right? To track like you’re just talking to someone. Hanging up a picture and talking to it may be a good (and slightly weird) first step toward tracking naturally, Sruthi Pinnemaneniof Reply Alltakes things a whole lot further because she’s driven to avoid sounding like she’s reading something written. She very much wants listeners to fall into a story because her voice sounds unaffected and genuine.  “(At Reply All) we try to track in a way that is closer to ‘I’m telling a story to somebody,'” she says. “When we’re tracking, we almost always have a producer or someone in the room where we’re trying to recreate that feeling of ‘I’m here and I’m feeling the excitement and joy that I

Since 2009, Julia Barton's edited a lot of radio and podcasts you probably listen to including Revisionist History. On this HowSound, Julia talks shop about her approach to editing.