Sound is Everything.
One of my great loves is sound designing documentary podcasts. I specialize in crafting immersive auditory experiences that emphasize storytelling and listenability. Choosing and integrating just the right music and just the right audio "posts" is my forte.
Below, find a few of my favorite episodes of podcasts or individual features from radio news shows that I feel most proud of or most connected to. For each one, I was given raw tape and a script. I chose sound from that tape, music (and where and how the music should work in each piece), and I also content edit everything I work on, up to and including the narration itself.
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Southlake: Home of the Dragons
My favorite part: 00:00: The opening scene is pretty crazy, given it's a school-board meeting. I wove the sounds of chaos with the reporter's studio narration, such that it sounds like the reporter is giving a rundown of the scene as it's happening, in realtime, and loud things "just so happen" to occur between sentences of narration. |
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Crosscurrents: Making a Book With One of San Francisco's Last Remaining Bookbinders
My favorite part: 5'18: "...a lot of glue." The sticky glue sound + the plucked strings music go great together, if I do say so myself. |
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Crosscurrents: Program To Save The California Condor From Extinction Is Making Strides
My favorite part: 3'18: "...it's a magical experience." I just love the vibraphone + wind + the single wingflap. |
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VoiceBox: How Auctioneers Turn Selling Into An Art Form, And A Sport
My favorite part: 3'33: The chant, coupled with the drums, which is music I chose specifically and then laboriously edited to make it sound effortlessly in-sync with the auctioneer. |
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VoiceBox: How Singing Cures Stuttering
My favorite part: 2'20: "...When I change the rhythm of my speech." You can hear how challenging it is for him to speak until this point, but then he demonstrates talking 'like I have a metronome in front of me', and it's just kind of...magic. I couldn't resist putting a beat behind that part, and I love the result. |
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The Specialist: Cane Trainer
My favorite part: 0'00: Tons of traffic. Crossing busy streets. OMG. We stay with Cat and Marco -- sightless and roaming through perilous traffic -- for a loooong time. |
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MindShift: Teaching 6-Year-Olds About Privilege and Power
My favorite part: 4'06: A first-grade class enthusiastically discussing Congress's gender inequality is a sound to behold. I'm pretty pleased with the music, too. |
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Sapiens: A Story of Icelandic Skulls
My favorite part: 2'11: I created the sound of being on a freezing, windy passenger ship, in the North Sea, in 1905. |
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Sapiens: Finding Mrs. Jackson
My favorite part: 8'52: I just love the sound of the music behind Anya's descriptions of the photographs from long ago. It evokes mystery, and magic, and melancholy, all at once, somehow. |