“Radiolab is a show about curiosity. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience.”

If there’s one thing that gives me a huge amount of inspiration for our upcoming assessment it’s Radiolab. I’ve listened to every single one of their episodes and have been keeping up-to-date with everything Radiolab for years now. Obviously, I find their podcasts extremely entertaining – they are informing and engaging and cover such a wide range of different issues such as “worth”, “bliss”, “colours” and they’ve even made really simple breakthroughs in modern science sound incredible – it’s all about the perspective they present on issues and their use of sound to engage the listener. Obviously, I’m going to try to employ every aspect of what makes Radiolab’s podcasts SO good in my own in an attempt to create something super engaging. The best part is that so many of Radiolab’s podcasts seem as if they are so fun to create, because as they are researching topics and speaking to industry experts they are learning and meeting new people whilst piecing it all together. I hope to have a similar experience that will shine through the final piece so that it can also be fun and relatable – too bad I don’t have a charming American accent.

Here are some of the features of their podcasts that I’d love to try and include:

• Expressions of disbelief – “That can’t be true”, “Wow!”, “Now this blew me away..”, “No way” – Their podcasts are always somewhat conversational, and they structure their stories as if one of the hosts is explaining it to the other so that the exclamations of shock and excitement from the host being taught in the podcast ends up being similar to the way that we react to the issue as we’re listening.
• Involvement of expert opinion and industry professionals
• Humor! Even in some of the blandest stories they can always have a laugh about some part of it, the entire thing always feels very down to earth
• Back & forth conversation – again, the episodes are very conversational which is a more engaging way to present information rather than one person simply reading aloud, it gives the opportunity to include more ‘human’ things like humor, emotion and excitement about topics to stimulate interest.
• On field recordings – “Okay, so here we are at Facebook headquarters with Mark Zuckerberg”
• Compilations of recordings such as news readings or people talking, layering of sound
• Build up and music/SFX that create suspense or emotion
• Sound repetition
• Posing questions, and then answering them. “Why are we all so attached to our phones?”

Everything considered, and our the prompt of Project Brief 4 being ‘attention’ – this podcast is a great example of the different ways our attention is manipulated by the staff of Facebook, or as Radiolab describes them – the Trust Engineers.