What I took away from meeting Jad Abumrad.

Tonight, April 29th, the Boston Museum of Science hosted a listening party of Radio Lab's production: "Space". The event took place in the planetarium. Following the event, everyone gathered in the blue wing for chocolate fountain, twittering performance art by Boston CyberArt and the chance to talk one on one with Radio Labs host and producer, Jad Abumrad.

After we (Salt Radio students) stole him away for a moment for a group picture, I got to ask him some questions...

(Gist): Since he interviews many highly technical people (ie scientists), does he have a unique way of eliciting clarity/brevity or excitement from the subject ("drinking the kool-aid" as he put it).

He confirmed that the "crackpot analogy" method is very handy but you need to be careful with it. You take a big risk of losing credibility with your subject.

Regarding the "kool-aid"...
"[paraphrased: I try not to lose the conversation... the moment we were in together. Much of what you hear on NPR is narration, narration, narration, quote, narration, and so on, ...I dont like that. After you upload the interview, you need to get out and take a walk around the block. You can get lost in the Word script and ProTools. Find the moments that excited you in the piece. Have others listen to those moments and watch their reactions. Those reactions will help you frame the conversation that you found exciting.]"

From this I took away that the excitement was not something to elicit from the interviewee but something to recover from the interviewer.

- Shane ... Radio



P.S. >> Field notes: there was a spaceship from the last Star Wars film hanging overhead in the reception area; one of the ladies from CyberArt, dressed in a black dress and carrying a laptop like a cigarette girl of the 1930's, had a bleeding blister on her heel that looked uncomfortable; the chocolate in the fountain tasted like melted Hersheys yet there were more people around the fountain than were talking with Jad; the cash-bar was $3 for a soda, 5 for a beer, and 7 for a mix drink; chatted with a scientist (Joanna?) about science journalism, she teaches at Harvard {cellular mechanics?};...

Interview inside a Trash Incinerator

Salt stories will take you to many places you may never expect to visit. While researching a collaborative story, Samuel Allison (Writing), Casey Atkins (Photography), and myself toured MERC (Maine Energy Recovery Company), a trash incinerator located in downtown Biddeford.

Photograph by Casey Atkins.

- Shane... Radio

Notes on Observations and Judgments

Here is a question to ponder...
At what point does an observation become a judgment?
What we choose to observe is a judgment as well as the choice in language we use to describe it. In radio we want to "paint" a visual for our listener. What happens when our description works so well because it may rely on certain stereotypes? I believe one of the biggest fears of a documentarian is confirming a stereotype.
Any thoughts?

Love,
Shane ...Radio

Our First Man-On-The-Street Interview

For our man-on-the-street interview excersize, my partners and I set out with the question, "Are you doing anything different to prepare for winter this year?" We were armed with facts and trivia about the high cost of heating oil, in addition to higher costs of food and gasoline, added to the fact that the Farmer's Almanac (a semi-reliable source, I admit) predicts a colder than usual winter this year. We got some interesting answers. One woman just smiled and said heat was included with her rent. Another guy refused to be interviewed saying he wasn't doing anything and didn't want to talk about it. I found a woman who had just moved here from Colorado and was facing her first Maine winter with oil heat. She gave me some very thoughtful answers in our 3-minute interview, and for a moment I was wishing I were in the radio track instead of photography (I've since come to my senses). But it was incredibly fun. The Sony recorders are beautiful pieces of equipment, and I've decided to impose myself on any radio student I can find who will show me something about ProTools. It can only be an asset to know this software in a multimedia world.

In this photo: Natasha Haverty, radio student 2008, interviewing a guy named Aaron, and Jenny Goff, writing track, 2008. Photo by me, Claire Houston.

Learning the Equipment or, How to Bake a Cake

A big part of the radio program here is learning to work with Pro Tools, a professional audio editing system. Prior to coming to Salt, I was using a free program called Audacity, which didn't have a lot of bells and whistles and was overall kind of clunky, but got the job done in a pinch. The best way to describe this editing upgrade is to say that I was fairly comfortable driving a Yugo and now I’m learning to drive a Ferrari. The first Pro Tools class wigged me out a little bit, but now I’m getting used to it, and there have been a few moments in the last week or so when I began to realize that Pro Tools is actually growing on me. Like, I might even want to ask it out and take it to the prom.

That’s not to say that Pro Tools is not without its quirks. During our first class the tutor told us, “once you save a file, don’t move it - you need to keep it safely within the file where it’s stored.” That is what he said.

What I heard was, “don’t do anything crazy, but once you save it you can keep copies of it wherever you like and nothing bad will happen.”

So this is what I did: I finished my project and saved it to the main file drive, where it had been since it was created. THEN I thought, but what if something happens to this file? I should open up the file again, click ’save as’ and save a second copy to my desktop. I am nothing if not cautious.

Now, a single finished Pro Tools file has lots of bits within it - it has not only saved your finished piece, but it has saved every change, every cut, every deletion, and (this is the beauty of Pro Tools) it will allow you to go get that information back if you ever decide that you really want that bit of audio after all. All of those ‘bits’ are saved within a larger file, of which your finished piece is just a single tiny bit. In order to allow your finished piece to stand on its own you pretty much need to export it out of Pro Tools as an .mp3 file or a .wav file or whatever, and then you can save it wherever you like. (I could be wrong on that, but I’m just a fifth week radio student, so you’ll have to forgive me on this one.)

When I took just my finished piece and saved it to my desktop, I did something bad. Here is the best way to explain it:

Go into your kitchen. Bake a cake from scratch. Mix together all of the ingredients and stick it in the oven. When it’s done, take it directly out to your guests in the living room and endeavor to serve it. Now imagine that when you put this cake down you discover that you no longer have a beautiful finished cake….now you have a cup of sugar in the living room, two cups of flour in the bedroom, a dollop of frosting on your nose, and three eggs somewhere else. Maybe in the bathroom or at the end of the driveway, it's hard to say for sure. OH NO.

When I clicked on the saved file on my desktop Pro Tools said something like, “wow, all your files are now completely scattered, you really screwed yourself on this one, would you like me to fix this by baking your cake back up again, and do you promise never to do this again?”

I said yes, Pro Tools re-linked all my files, and I got my cake back. It was all just a wee bit stressful, however, and while I’m not going to let this interfere with my growing crush on Pro Tools, it does mean I might wait another few dates before endeavoring to get to third base.

The streets get salty...

We radio people have been vox poppin' the streets of Portland.

Basically, we approach strangers and ask them to answer a question (a question we have undoubtedly labored over for hours and hours). Once the tape is gathered, we load it into the trusty Macs and chisel away. One minute and thirty seconds later, we've got a beautiful piece of radio. Well, I could not be further from that point. Pro-tools still scares me but I'm hoping to overcome my fears within the next 24 hours. I'll keep you posted...

Taking it to the Streets: Salt Mini-Ethno Spring 2008

My name is Jessica and I'll be blogging quite frequently. Not only do I find it cathartic, I love remembering events through writing. It is a true form of processing, brutally honest and exciting all at the same time. I'm studying radio here at Salt. I've dabbled in audio for quite some time, in the process gathering voluminous amounts of oral histories. Despite my love for recording, I always hit a block at second base. How do I edit? How do I tell a story in sound? How do I pitch? What keeps someone hooked and what makes them pick-up a magazine and block out my voice?

Salt will answer these questions and so much more. It is the first time I am surrounded by many people who love documentary as much as I do. We sat silently through our first group film-screening. I could tell this was a special audience...and I was very happy to be sitting among these people.

Well what do we do, you may wonder? Thought I'd write about our crazy first weekend as students....where faculty chooses a random town in what our radio director Rob Rosenthal migh call "East Jesus." Luckily it was a beautiful town with a lot of potential. Gardiner is about 50 minutes north of Portland nestled near Augusta. I arrived with the other women in my group (two photogs, one writer, and me bringing up the radio end) and we hit Main Street after two strong cups of coffee at the local A1 Diner. Looking for something a bit darker, we drove to the funeral parlor and knocked on the door....for 2 minutes. No answer. Sadness. I was truly interested in the person who does make-up but from the tire tracks in the driveway, it was obvious someone had departed earlier that morning. From the funeral parlor, we drove around.....outside of town and past a working farm, within town and past a home-based beautyshop. Very Steel Magnolias. Unfortunately she was closed and uninterested in speaking with us.

We went to Reny's at the suggestion of Gen, the writer in our group. A Mainer born and bred, she explained that we might want to speak with someone who had been working at Reny's for quite some time. Bingo. Sounded good to the rest to us. As we waited for Lurena, the 75yr. old who spent the past 20 yrs at the shop, we went to the community board and started making phone calls. A canine behavioral specialist. Environmentally safe pest control. Hypnotherapist. While these were potentially alluring subjects, either people were not home or were not able to accomodate four ethnographers for the day. The pest man said we wouldn't fit in his truck. Another strike.

Lurena arrived at 9:30am and suggested we speak with her cousin, the 80 yr. old cook at A1 (where we had breakfast). She called, he wasn't home. We trudged down the street feeling a bit dejected (at least I did). We walked past a pawn shop and almost walked in....but spotted fellow Salties in the window. I peeked around the corner and saw a tiny sign "Kennebec Tailoring: Locally Owned and Operated."

We walked in.....

A Face for Radio

This semester, a bunch of us radio students have been abusing the cameras on our fancy computers. Here are some of my favorites, swiped off facebook.





Speaking of facebook, you should join our group! And, while you're at it, become our MySpace friend! Otherwise, you might not really exist... or, something.

Ahhh! Last week at Salt! Ahhhh!

"A Nightingale Among Ye": Behind the Scenes

Salt radio alum '06, Sam Greenspan, offers some advice on how to do a non-narrated piece up on PRX's youthcast livejournal.

I bet you're wondering where we've been.

Yeah, the blog's looking a little sleepy lately, but don't let that fool you. Sleep definitely isn't in our vocabulary these days. With all the really substantial due dates, pieces to produce, radio tours and group critiques, I don't think I've really slept for days. Well, slept on purpose, at least. There have been many nights in the past few weeks where I wake up face down in a pile of my transcripts and wonder where I am for a minute. Sometimes, thankfully, it's in my own bedroom. On other, more merciless days, I wake up at a coffee shop or drooling on my desk at Salt.

What do I dream about? Well, have you ever fallen asleep after playing Tetris, only to dream that you're playing more Tetris? Well, that's kinda what happens when I work in pro-tools. I spend hours and hours tweaking regions, cross-fading dialogue with ambient sounds, cropping and moving and copying until, finally, all I can see are the brightly colored regions behind my eyelids. Sometimes, as I fall asleep, I actually HEAR the quotes I've been playing with all day. And in my sleep, I dream about how I can edit them in pro-tools to make a better piece. I once dreamt my subject called me back and told me the story I've been dying to hear from her all semester. Then I dreamt I edited it together, only to wake up and realize I was still on my first draft.

I talked to a couple of other radio students about this phenomenon, and they said they'd dreamt about pro-tools, too. A lot of them see the regions and waveforms in their sleep. One of them said she'd talked about her story so much that even her boyfriend was dreaming about her piece.

Sometimes I think that if our subjects only knew how much we thought about the time we spend with them and how long we stare at and analyze it, they'd appreciate us more. Maybe they'd even let us into their lives a little further. Other days I think it's best they don't know. If they realized I was hearing and seeing our interactions in my sleep, they might not ever let me come back.

What is Salt?

You should all check out the Third Coast Blog on Transom.org. On this blog, short doc award winner, David Maxon, tries to answer the question we've all asked outselves at one time or another: What is Salt?

Also: Who's this guy?

Blogoween: An Audio Post

Here's a brand new audio blog post for your Trick or Treat playlists. In it, I try to answer the age old question: what happens when you dress up a room full of documentarians (and some of their teachers) in costumes? Also, I want to apologize to everyone who isn't a current student-- there are a bunch of things in here that need a whole lot of context. To listen, all you need to do is click on the link below to download the file.

"Blogoween" by Andrea Silenzi

Radio Heaven

This weekend comes as a much-needed relief for (many, if not all of) the radio kids, who are in the throes of script-writing mania: Third Coast Audio Festival, woo! The majority of us are headed out to Chicago for the next few days to simmer in the company of radio aficionados, and, with any luck, absorb some of the talent and skills of the Greats we so admire...

So simmer we shall.

I'm hoping Third Coast will help me navigate some murky genre waters— namely, the ambiguous line between sound art vs. documentaries. Is it OK to bend some rules if it makes the piece more artistically catchy? Can we create a sound to supplement for something that is "soundless," as we know it (i.e.,dreams, flashbacks, etc)? To what extent can tape be sonically manipulated before the meaning of the original content is lost, making our story "misleading?" This conversation has arisen more than once both inside and outside the classroom, so it'll be interesting to discover the approaches of other producers... Especially since some of us are itching to dive into sound art... One radio undertaking at a time, though.

But lately I've been second-guessing my decision to participate in this conference. After all, it'll be my first foray into the larger radio society, and I'd like to do it with poise and grace. I hope I'll be able to suppress my urge to behave like a 13 year-old girl at a Backstreet Boys, but my fear is that my giddiness will render me a simpering idiot... Will it be too much to ask to meet Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva in person (!!!) and leave with some integrity still intact?

I guess we'll find out.

Boo!

Yeah, yeah, it's Halloween today. Candy, costumes, soaping windows, hiding rotten eggs in my roommates' bedrooms...same old, same old. But for the radio kids, today is the beginning of a much more exciting holiday: Third Coast Eve. This is a time when we pack up all our best minidiscs, forget about the last two weeks of script rough drafts, and jump on a plane to Chicago for the annual Third Coast International Audio Festival. It's better than a bag full of those rock hard orange and black Mary Jane candies. And it's much cooler than that really humiliating picture you'd get of you in a cat costume with your arm around some guy wearing a refrigerator box that's supposed to serve as some witty double entendre, but really just looks like a dude wearing a refrigerator box. Not that I'm speaking from experience.

Some of us are headed to Third Coast to pitch our stories to the big names. Others have audio doctoring sessions with some of radio's heavy hitters. A few of us are hoping to get a better handle on what this whole industry is like. All of us will be listening to sessions on how to make our documentaries better. I'm just praying I win the free audio equipment from this year's raffle.

This comes for our group at a great time—I think we're all a little burnt out on our stories, and we all need some new scenery and fresh air (no pun intended. Ok, a little bit intended). So I can't wait to see what happens. Maybe it'll inspire me to make my story a whole lot better. Maybe I'll make some cool friends. If nothing else, this conference will keep me from eating way too much Halloween candy and dressing like a character from Lord of the Rings. And that's really all I can ask for.

Oh My Aching Arms

I woke up this morning feeling like I'd just gone twelve rounds with Muhammad Ali. Muscles I never knew existed burned up and down my arms. All day long I've been trying to figure it out. Was I pumping iron in my sleep? Hypnotized by an overzealous gym coach? Nope, just doing radio. Holding a mic up to someone's face is surprisingly aerobic. Move over Tae Bo, lifting mics will give you the firm, lean arms you're looking for. Now if I could just get a pack of minidisks to tone my abs...

What is Documentary: An Audio Post

Here's another edition of the audio blog post. This Vox Pops project comes to us courtesy of students, staff and faculty from the Spring 2007 semester. I found this really comforting and terrifying all at once. Towards the end of the piece, you'll here an interview with Professor John Grady. Enjoy!

"What is documentary?" by the Spring 2007 Radio Program

"Hopelandic" is the thing with feathers

Some of the radio kids have been quietly watching the progress of The Bryant Park Project to see how it will fair in the NPR market. The new morning show, named after the part of NYC where the studio is located, is NPR's latest attempt toward identifying with listeners in their 20s and 30s. Color me curious, and a little skeptical.

The best thing I've seen on the site so far? This disastrous interview with Sigur Ros. The onus for this interview's fate rests mostly on the shoulders of BPP co-host Luke Burbank, who asks some really amateur questions and then hates on himself for the rest of the interview in hopes of winning self-deprecation points with the band. (Hey, it's happened to the best of us. No need to get smug about it.) Rather than burying the ill-fated interview, BPP aired its dirty laundry last week by posting the piece on their blog, taking some pretty nasty hits from their Icelandic fan base—a surprisingly large base, as it turns out.

Well, BPP took it a step further this morning by posting a play-by-play commentary with music journalist Jancee Dunn about how Burbank could have improved his interview. For those of us hoping to break into the biz at some point, this is a pretty helpful breakdown of how NOT to interview your favorite band. I really learned a lot. I especially loved Dunn's suggestion about interviewing the eager drummer in order to get other band members' egos a little piqued. Check out the clip here.

Learning opportunity aside, what the heck is BPP hoping to achieve here, exactly? Do they think that by airing this we'll think they're hip for being so forthcoming? It reminds me a little bit of Kentucky Fried Chicken's move to rename themselves KFC to identify with a younger demographic. Do you guys remember the "cool" cartoon Colonel with the skateboard who thought buying fried chicken was "sweet"? Have you seen him around lately? Yeah. Me neither.

Blogfire: An Audio Post

Here's my very first audio blog post. I made it just for you. All you have to do is click on the link below to download the file.

"Blogfire" by Andrea Silenzi

I met Andrea de Leon, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt...

...actually, I didn't even get a t-shirt.

BUT, she did give our class her contact information in case we want to pitch her something once we're alums. Oh, yeah, and she listened to our story pitches and — OK, wait, lemme back up a bit.

See, Andrea de Leon is kind of a big deal in the NPR world. She's the Northeast Bureau Chief, which means that any stories pitched to NPR on this side of the U.S. go through her. She literally hears story pitches all day long, and then she picks out the ones she feels will work on the air. There have been a few Salt alums whose pieces have made it to Andrea's desk and then, wonder of wonder miracle of miracles, onto national airwaves. Oh, and did I mention Andrea's on the board at Salt? This means that not only does she understand what we do, but she really appreciates it. Which makes pitching to her that much better.

It was good to hear Andrea's perspective on story structure, and to see how a professional outfit views a piece. After talking with us, she even gave each of us 10 minutes to pitch our best idea to her and the class. I won't lie, it was frickin' intimidating. You know those nightmares where you show up at school in your underwear and you have to give a speech in class and you lose your book bag and you're trying to write the speech but your pencil has turned into a carp? It felt a little like that. But instead of it being like the part in the dream where people laugh and point at me and the carp swims away, my pitch turned out to be pretty good. I told her my idea and she actually liked it and she gave me a little "good game" sort of speech and I felt a whole lot better. No mocking, no running from class crying...and I was fully clothed. Success!

But I don't want this whole post to get too romantic, because there are some other things to consider when you're dreaming about pitching your piece to NPR. This may come as a shock to some, but there are actually a few differences in what NPR looks for and what we are learning to put together here at Salt.

For instance, even if a Salt piece has a universal theme, we tend to make our stories more specialized to the region, specifically Maine. I think that makes our aesthetic a little more in-depth and personal, because we're not necessarily tailoring the piece for a broad national audience. Mostly we're thinking of what we're doing in an artistic and socially responsible way, not in a marketing-to-the-media-outlets way. I know that seems indulgent, but we're here primarily to tell good stories, and national publication isn't always the end goal. Of course that can come later, if you're interested in sending your story out nationally. But national publication can mean subjecting a wonderfully thoughtful piece to some serious hack and slash editing, just so it can fit the tail-end of All Things Considered. And that can be depressing, especially when we're in such a nurturing environment at Salt; an environment that keeps telling us that the untold stories need to be told. If that doesn't fit NPR needs, does that mean we shouldn't tell them? Does it make the story less legitimate if you send it to a smaller market? Does that make what we're doing unimportant or insignificant, even if we're not selling our pieces after this experience?

I don't know, can anyone else here sound off about what they think is the purpose of the stories they're producing or photographing or writing here? Are you all hoping for national publication, or do you have different goals? Do you think you can make a piece here that is both thoughtful AND perfect for national publication, or do you think the two are mutually exclusive?

Geez, everything I do here turns me into a penny philosopher. I'm gonna go work on my story ideas.

(and no, this is not me in the photo. I wish I could say I'd caught a fish that big.)

Transcribing

Today I spent an hour transcribing six minutes of an interview with my subject T during which we had traipsed through the woods skirting his home. While in the field, we stopped intermittently for T to point out a landmark here and there, but we were on the move most of the time, his three year old son either running downhill ahead of us or tugging at his father's arm to go someplace new.

Due to all the walking, there are times on the tape when T steps away from me, and--in the middle of a conversation about felted props in the shapes of giant mushrooms--his voice becomes gravelly, distant, and completely incomprehensible. At these moments in the tape, despite multiple rewind and close-listening attempts on my part, I am left to transcribe our conversation as follows: "[unintelligible]." There are a lot more "[unintelligibles]" in this transcription than I would like (a reminder that I have to get closer to the speaker while interviewing).

Because he is not the primary subject of the interview (what with being three years old and all), T's son (C) is generally noted as speaking in the background. I have noted most of C's comments, when not directly a part of the conversation at hand, as follows: (C talks in background), (C yells), (C talking), (C yells again), (C repeats a phrase over and over again), (C unintelligible), (C mumbles and laughs). I did however include a specific discussion he and I had about big and little Leggos, as well as multiple instances of him instructing T that it is time to leave.

At one point, while his father is explaining to me the properties of a piece of foam sprayed in gray and flouresent paint, C insists on telling me that "it got crashed!!!" C tells me this in a high pitched squeal four times while I hold the microphone a useless five feet away from his dad, who is waxing on "unintelligibly" in the background. Finally, I look at C and respond to his repeated phrase: "what happened?" I ask, pointing at the broken piece of foam. T interjects, "can you say 'an ogre at it'?" C says, "o-er aoow in CRASH!" C shines his flashlight on the piece of foam and explains to me that it resembles a big Leggo.

Even though his voice registers ten thousand decibels higher than everyone else's on my tape and nearly blows my eardrums each time he screams out that it's time to leave, I really like having C on the tape and in the record. There's something about his incessant badgering that has begun to strike me as downright funny. At least, it seems that way when I'm typing it up.