Radiolab - Making Radiolab

In spring of 2006, Jad and Robert took the stage at the SoHo Apple Store to talk about the making of Radiolab. Jad geeks out on the nitty-gritty of digital sound editing, and Robert discusses the editorial questions raised in creating imaginative soundscapes. And film editor Walter Murch weighs in on the components of storytelling.

Duration: 34m
Broadcast on: 09 Nov 2007
Audio Format: other

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3D Lab is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in, any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life so you can turn this deal into a long lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, an eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, and visit an AT&T store for details. Hello, this is Jad from Radio Lab while we work on season 4 of Radio Lab, which we hope to release sometime in the new year, very soon in the new year. We thought we would play you some excerpts from a talk that Robert and I gave at the Apple Store in Soho. They asked us to come talk about the show, and we ended up talking about the thing that we never actually address explicitly on the air, which is how we use sound, which we do a lot of on Radio Lab. This is the one time we actually got to talk about it. About 250 people showed up to hear us. I fired some clips from my laptop. They had this big, beautiful sound system and a very fancy screen behind us. And we started the whole presentation with a piece of tape that got stuck in our heads as we were making one of our programs. It's a little clip that became the basis for the musical language show, and we played it for the crowd. It happened during an interview with a developmental psychologist by the name of Anne Fernald. She was talking about how moms talked to their babies, and she said this thing. Well, you know, I think it's more, we're used to thinking of sounds like that as being about something, because speech is always about something. But it feels to me more like touch, where a touch isn't about something. If you whack me on the arm in a sudden, sharp way, I'm going to be startled, or a gentle touch has a different effect. And I think, you know, actually, sound is kind of touch at a distance. Sound is kind of touch at a distance. For some reason, that phrase just stayed in the air. Sound is kind of touch at a distance. And it just didn't, I thought, well, you know, I said to him, well, you know, actually, that's literally the case, because if I'm making the sound, particularly through this enhanced device, air is pulsing, and it's going into your ears, and actually, you know, we could do a journey that way. There's another reporter in our group named Jonah Lehrer who's up and living in Concord, New Hampshire. We called him. He began sending us notes. He had a notion, which we'll explain in a bit. But this is then what we made. And I'm going to play it to you first, and then we're going to dissect it. And you'll see what a genius I'm working with, actually. All right, so this is an interview with Robert and Jonah, which we embroidered, shall we say. More like touch. It's just waves of vibrating air.

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