Sound School Podcast

NPR foreign correspondent Anthony Kuhn on the risks involved reporting at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Michael Raphael of Rabbit Ears Audio talks sound effects recording: winter scenes, rockets, cityscapes, and the soul destroying typewriter.

Producer Will Coley and editor Viki Merrick offer HowSound listeners a gift by talking about their editorial process, a working relationship that is usually not shared publicly.

A painful reminiscence about preserving old reel-to-reel tapes by baking them. No, that's not a typo. Baking.

NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg finds on-scene narration canned and phoney and she says ambient sound often gets in the way of a story. Yet, her recent report on buffer zones around health clinics proves otherwise.

On this edition of HowSound, a 2005 Third Coast Festival award-winner from Long Haul Productions about a transracial adoption.

Tight budgets, technological advances, and the impulse to experiment are leading some producers to record "not by the book." Does it work?

Laura Starecheski should win a radio endurance award. Laura tells the story of her decade -- ten years! -- of research and production on "The Hospital Always Wins."

Three radio greats -- Chris Brookes, Paolo Pietropaolo, and Alan Hall -- explore the sound of England 400 years ago along with our modern soundscape.

Julia Scott says "participant observation" is a valuable reporting tool, even if it means climbing into an "iron lung" which looks like something only Dracula would lay in.

Headphones are mandatory for this episode of HowSound. Kathy Tu's second radio story ever will set your ears ablaze.

Mary Helen Miller encourages station-based producers to "Sneak out the back door with the tape recorder and make something good."

David Schulman usually produces non-narrated stories on music. Recently, he stepped out of his usual style to produce a narrated science story focused on the acoustics of reproducing the sound of a Stradivarius electronically.

Yowei Shaw amassed 325 pages of transcripts for her This American Life story on Eritrean hostages and the reporter who uncovered the story. And that was just the beginning of Yowei's long, grueling production process assembling the story.

"Hafid is Free" is a solid example of what a story needs when it doesn't have a narrative hook.