HowSound

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.