— Stephen D. Smith, “Living History,” Reality Radio (2010)

by Garrett Tiedemann

I’ve never let go of a piece by Charles Maynes called Symphony of Sirens, Revisited that 99% Invisible released back in 2013. The piece is a wonder of sonic gymnastics made from narration, interview tape, sound design and music. It tells the story of a long-ago Soviet “composition” — a composition made up of the sounds of Moscow itself, back in the year 1923.

I consider Maynes’ piece a composition, too — one of the great sound pieces of the twenty-first century. And it’s what made me first consider expanding from my work in film to add podcast production.

I’d been working in film for more than a decade as a writer, producer, director, cinematographer, editor, sound designer, and composer. I’d gotten a media studies degree in college and followed the idea of learning how all the pieces worked to all allow one to be more thoughtfully creative and better work with a crew as a director once on set. 

But with Symphony I could hear an entirely new type of creative exploration — one that was not cinema and not radio, but something else entirely. A new art. 

I wanted to make things like it. I wanted to figure out how you could utilize the intimacy of this form without pictures to take people to places in a way no other medium could fathom — the same way I was transported to Moscow in 1923 when I heard Symphony of Sirens. 

Part of the experience of listening to 99% Invisible, still a new show then, was the way we heard it. The show demanded close listening. This type of listening had become more and more popular as streamable audio entered our increasingly smart phones — and then our ear canals via the tiniest speakers.

Right around this time, I started seeing disclaimers on social media posts, and in scripts, that something “should be listened to on headphones” for the best experience. I liked this idea. The isolation of it. The detailed work an engineer could put into a mix, knowing people would take the ride with you. 

Taking that time to build a world requires hours of careful timing and compositional arrangement. In this capacity, the sound designer (or engineer) is not just cleaning up the audio so it sounds its best — we’re also putting together pieces of music and sound in a way that feels right, that feels properly timed and pleasing from a musical and sonic perspective. 

The goal is to carry the audience through a story so the narrative arc hits its moments, and you feel satisfied listening all the way through. In this regard it is much closer to composing a piece of music, or sound art, or a film than it is cutting together an interview. It has much more to do with the feeling of the piece, and the rhythms of the elements to get an audience to feel things and understand ideas that are not necessarily stated aloud in narration or tape. 

The audio design allows for layers of subtext and meaning that otherwise may be presented a bit on the nose, if at all, and without any poetry to it. This is where the art and craft comes in. It’s what can take so much time, but is also so satisfying when it’s pulled off. 

And with audio increasingly pumped into well-made headphones, for the first time, audiences could hear all that craft and art in new ways.

That’s the work of sound design I now do in podcasting as an engineer, composer and sound designer. I’m proud of the work I’ve done on narrative podcasts including Here Be Monsters, Wild Boys, Suspect, Dr. Dante, Devil in the Ditch, Go-Boy!, Noble, Where is Daniel Morcombe? and Darknet Diaries.

I believe these shows resonate with audiences not just because of the stories, compelling as they are. Compelling stories deserve compelling sound, because we know that sound is what elevates a story from just information to an experience that our imagination helps to create. 

But now, in a familiar pattern, the podcast “industry” is telling both audiences and creators that the power of sound means little to nothing.

I understand the value of a moving image. I have studied it, love its gestures and its power. That’s also why I understood what was so powerful about the headphone-enabled intimacy of podcasting that began to take shape in the early 2010s. 

A certain punk-rock sensibility blended the radio’s technical prowess and storytelling craft into a new medium altogether. Over the course of a decade, it had a monumental impact on how we tell stories, as well as what we understand about the value of good storytelling.

As I write this, podcasting is a few years into an identity crisis. In the US, podcasting has collapsed from the initial post-Serial capital investment. Now companies and investors desperately search for the next way to turn a profit. 

It turns out, we are all now supposed to be making video (along with using AI to streamline production and reduce staff needs, or replace humans entirely). 

This is all framed as a discoverability argument: that to be found, podcasts need to be on YouTube. But to say every podcast needs a video is to flatten the entire medium into a standardized understanding: that all podcasts and radio are the same — that they are just data transmission: data that audiences extract from conversations and clips, and data that companies gather from their attention. 

I hope posterity will call this pivot what it is: a technological fix to a problem that didn’t exist until investors realized they weren’t going to make their money off the industry the way they originally thought. 

And to serve this fix, producers have been shoved into a framework that our medium was never made to fill. 

A lovely history of radio, produced by the UK’s Falling Tree Productions, starts this way: 

Tech gurus want us to believe radio is not at all radical but simply a utility, something that delivers a resource like water or electricity, something they can control, something they can flatten and redirect as capitalism dictates. 

But radio and podcasting are built on craft and human experimentation. They’re meant to give you experiences: experiences that inform, experiences that delight, experiences that bring about wonder. These experiences happen between your ears as your mind wanders and explores. 

And these experiences don’t just happen. They’re accomplished by the time and commitment of artists. 

All of the most memorable audio storytelling exists because sound designers, engineers, musicians, writers, editors, voice artists and more come together to craft out the details of moments — specifically for an audio experience that makes you feel things and experience ideas in a way you didn’t know you needed. 

Like anything of value, this work costs money. The question for me, as someone devoted to sound design, is why does money want to flee audio again and again?

Many of us who understand and believe in audio craft have spent the last couple years on the back foot, always having to defend its relevance. Meanwhile, those pushing processes like video integration and AI have rarely had to justify their claims. 

We can hear audio quality decline as industry leaders actually utter the words “we don’t need to prioritize audio anymore.” And we know that companies seeking the easiest way to jump on the video bandwagon are not making something for the audience, but for the algorithm. 

This is an era of stress and of funding drying up. Many creators have had to give up. A lot of podcasting, especially American podcasting, has devolved from thoughtfully crafted shows into “content” chat that is especially easy for video production to package into clips — clips that all seem to look and sound the same. 

A copy of a copy of a copy; this is what many of us still employed are asked to make. We are to limit ourselves, to minimize our ambitions. We’ve watered down the medium, turned the creative volume down, and with this we’re losing the reason for doing the work altogether. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Here I think, as befits a project like Continuous Wave, it makes sense to look at radio’s past — especially when it was first threatened by the rise of television.

Back in 1952, critic Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times: 

Broadcast radio did not take Gould’s advice; at least not right away. But in a real sense, all of us making narrative podcasts much later understood his sentiments in a visceral way. 

And people are still making the argument that audio matters. I’m heartened by pieces such as Doubling Down on Audio by Benjamin Cannon in Good Tape; or Luciano Banchero’s essay The Enshittification of Podcasting (on LinkedIn). 

You hear the argument demonstrated in sonic form with the work of audio production houses like Falling Tree Productions. The best producers continue to push audio-only work for the life-affirming brilliance it brings to listeners. 

But we need more. Radio is an art form, not mere data transmission as the tech industry pushes us to believe. 

Here is what I want future generations to understand about our work: Every aspect of it is art. A voice on a mic is art. The person dialing in the levels is an artist. The person who wrote the script is an artist. The person mixing and sound designing is an artist. 

Radio and podcasting is a craft, a skill, an art. The best work, the material that sticks with you, does so because human beings came together and creatively told a story and only thought about what was needed to tell a good story. If they also created some good IP, or saved the CEO some extra money off the top, then fine — but that is not the only point.

Video can be a creative force. If video is something you want to make, then go for it — just know you are doing something different. You are making something that has a visual component.

Be intentional as you do that, and respect what that is. Know your history. Research other visual media of the last 20 years on the Internet. Understand what it means to put a camera in front of someone, and how that is different from a microphone. 

Because making video changes your interview and changes your story. And it’s worth figuring out this new space, the same way podcasting did with radio, and lean into it. Be experimental. Break the format. Try new things.

I promise you’ll be more satisfied with the process, and your audience will appreciate your efforts to make something worth their time and attention.

We’re admittedly in a weird place right now, where podcasting no longer means audio only, and the early days of narrative podcasting are starting to be talked about like the “Golden Age” of radio. 

But why do people talk about a Golden Age of radio at all? It’s because a lot of our audio ancestors loved radio for what it was, and many continued to stand up for the art and the work they did. Even if you can’t go back to the way things were (briefly), you still have to fight for the art. Stand up for it.

Making anything worthwhile is hard; it should be hard to a certain degree. It should take time and effort. You should feel like you are climbing some creative mountain, to get at something real and substantive, rather than something that simply satisfies the money hands and tech gurus. 

Also: You can say no to video. You can honestly say no to anything that feels antithetical to the craft. Together we can change the balance of the conversation that has currently pushed the craft people, the artists of this field, aside. 

Storytelling is a human endeavor — it is the most human endeavor. Since we could tell our own stories, we have put them on cave walls and gathered around fires to share tales. And while it’s harder than ever to do it well right now, as we balance against all the ways in which storytelling is being delegitimized for profit, we have to believe in the craft and the artistry of it all. Because if we lose this, if we lose the human at the center of everything, what exactly is the point?

The epigram at the top of this piece is a quote from a piece on archival tape in the wonderful essay collection Reality Radio. Here is the whole paragraph:

That essay was first published in 2010. Sound has the same power as ever. The only thing different is our incentive to use it.