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Audio and Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting, Panel #2
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Robert Boynton
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to this special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities Vault Podcast. I'm Robert Boynton. On May 13, 2026, Princeton's center for Human Values hosted a day long conference titled Audio and Exploring the Possibilities for Schol Podcasting. It was co sponsored by Princeton's Journalism program and the NYU Podcast initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In the second panel, Chenjerai Kumanika led a discussion about the aesthetics of podcasting. Professor Kumanika teaches at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and is the host of the award winning podcasts Empire City Uncivil and Unruly Subjects. The panel included Vincent Cunningham, a New Yorker staff writer and the McGraw professor of Writing at Princeton, and Julia Barton, an award winning podcast audiobook and radio editor.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
All right, first of all, thank you to Rob, to Andrew, to all of you for really putting this together, to Adrian, who's helping us with the sound, and obviously to Ben. This means a lot to me. For at least the last half of my career, I have primarily conveyed my work through what we like to call audio documentary. Because podcasting has become a weird word and, you know, a funny thing has happened, Right. The reason why this is so important, why I think there's so much excitement every time we do this, is that, you know, I, you know, I made. I started out making a podcast called Uncivil, which was a people's history of the Civil War. When I first told people I got greenlit at Gimlet Media, they were like, you had me at Gimlet, you lost me at Civil War. But it turned out that there were millions of people, we got millions of downloads who really wanted that history, and they wanted to sit there and listen to history in a very detailed way. And all around my work in the university, by the way, I'm also on the National Council of the American association of University Professors, so if anyone wants to talk about what's happening with higher ed, we should talk about that. But I would notice that podcasts seem to be present. People were listening to them, they were studying, learning, they were teaching them, in some cases having their students make them. And yet, when it came to what actually counts as a scholarly contribution,
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Vincent Cunningham
I
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
found that podcasts were, you know, kind of like there was a little bit of a looking down the nose in a certain sense, certainly when it came. Yeah. And so I think. And the thing to me, beyond career considerations, why that's a shame, is that I just felt like we were missing out on the ways of what this kind of work can offer us in terms of scholarly work in a number of ways. And so it's really good to have a chance to slow down and really think about this. And I'm really excited with the, I mean, you know, part of why I got into this game is because what you have to do as a podcaster is listen. And hopefully you're listening to really smart people, but you're learning things from everyone you listen to. And I'm really excited mostly to listen. But I just want to say this panel is about the aesthetics of audio. And I don't have to say in this room, I know I'm in a room where people take aesthetics seriously, but in the popular sort of way aesthetics is talked about, it's a little different. And I think it's worth mentioning, you know, aesthetics is often something that is understood as relegated to the maybe not so substantive. Right. Supplemental to the actual substantive work. Right. In the realm of. And some people even consider art in that way. And I think that's relevant to thinking about podcasts, because that is one. I think that's sometimes how people think about this kind of work. Right? Like it's an aesthetic complement to the real research, as opposed to it being able to have. You know, I was trained to be skeptical of the claim, like podcasting is a method. I'm like, well, podcasting incorporates a lot of methods, but certainly it makes kinds of methodological, epistemological contributions. And so, you know, I want to think about aesthetics in the Kantian sense, about where sort of forms and our understanding and the wildness of our imagination kind of come together. We could think about it in the Hegelian sense, except that I feel like Hegelia was wrong and Hegel was wrong and racist about aesthetics, so he'll save us some time. But, you know, that particular idea of what forms have to do with. With interacting with our imagination and actually producing knowledge, I think is right at the heart of the kind of contract that different genres in podcasts, you know, form with the audience. Right. And with the listener. And with that, I want to turn to asking someone who I've been really just enjoying and learning from his work for a long time, Vincent Cunningham, about his work. So, Vincent, how you doing?
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Vincent Cunningham
Good. How are you?
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
Excellent. And we're going to hear some audio, too, which is great. So, Vincent, like, you know, you make. Among the many things that you work, that you make, you make a podcast called Critics at Large. And like, this podcast is a conversational podcast. Now, I don't know if y' all know some of the tea in the podcast world, but there's a lot of tension about what get called chat podcasts and whether or not they can be substantive. Right. Suddenly, no one thinks dialogue can be substantive anymore. But I just Am curious.
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Vincent Cunningham
Some thoughts.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
I want to play a clip from your show that I think really shows us a lot of things, but I want to ask, how do you think about the aesthetics of a show that is really about dialogue and criticism?
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Vincent Cunningham
First of all, thank you for that great sort of guiding sort of approach to the conversation. And thank you for everybody who made today possible. It's interesting because I do think, and here I do want to stand up for chat and dialogue discussion. Conversation as ways to not only transmit knowledge, but to in some ways create it. As we all know, really good conversations refresh something in us, and not just by sort of recycling ideas, but by making new ones kind of come to the fore. Maybe one way to think about the aesthetics of conversation, recorded or not, is to think about what kinds of responses it engenders. Often when somebody listens very often to a chat podcast, they develop what we all have known to sort of dread the parasocial relationship. And it's funny because I think this is not unlike perhaps the approach that we offer, not necessarily in written work. And one of my constant struggles in learning how to podcast is to put down the idea that it's going to feel anything like writing. It does not. But. But a lot more. What I've experienced in the classroom, that by opening a kind of space, a dialogic space between, in my case, three co hosts, actually opens up a fourth table, a fourth seat at the table where all of the listeners can come in. The sort of, if anybody's been to a Seder, it's like you kind of, you're leaving something for Elijah, right? And every person who enters that space, the space of the podcast as a listener, can kind of sit at the table with us. And so sometimes I think about that in terms of, okay, so what are the uses that we put that kind of dialogic space to in the classroom or otherwise? One, certainly I really enjoyed the last panel, and I was thinking about this thing of, okay, why. Why bring in subway takes? Well, reference is one way in which we sort of reference one. And on the other hand, recourse to the contemporary are two ways that we kind of bring ideas into a space and start to test them out. The other, of course, is the grain of the voice, the sort of contemporizing move that comes whenever you speak out loud. I am mortified every time I listen to my podcast because, and I've written about this in many ways, what I'm doing right now, like the sort of, you know, the thing Obama does before he. It's like, what is that, man? But what this does, just like we all know about in the classroom or when we are trying to convey an idea that we've already worked out but want to further work it out in public, is that all of these, again, spaces, even in our speech, are ways to say, you belong in this conversation as well. You know that our podcast is focused largely on culture and the arts, and often we are enlisting not only cultural objects, art objects, like novels and TV shows and works of cinema, et cetera, but sometimes scholarly text as well.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
Right. It's like the show is deeply intertextual in that way where you're bringing in other things, you're thinking about it. And I just want to say, I would agree that, you know, if you think about the NAR, sometimes you could think about dialogue in reference to certainly in terms of print. Right. Which has, like, such a powerful hegemony in scholarly world. But also in terms of the. Against the kind of documentary podcasts that I have mostly made with just one person, you know, talking to you, it's like, I do think that the dialogue invites you more to have thoughts, to feel like, oh, you know, imagine yourself. You know what I'm saying? So it's important. I'm curious, Julia, do you want to just jump in?
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Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
So I'm a story editor, and I work with a lot of writers who are new to podcasting. And so I find myself trying to explain, you know, just sort of like, where are you facing the audience and who is facing you? And this is all stuff I just gathered, like, folklorically from other podcasters as we were trying to figure out what we were doing when the medium was new. So I remember Roman Mars saying, like, I talk to the audience and the contributors talk to me, and I'm like, oh, my God. And like, now I give whole lectures on it and barely credit him. But it's just like, when you are in a chat, you're talking to each other, but there's an implied audience. And then the other thing that I'll get into more is just like, you can't see that audience, and they show up at any point now because it's not live broadcasting, so you don't even know when they're going to show up. And so the many, many different moves that both the hosts and the producers and the sound engineers all are doing, and literally, invisibly to make that audience feel included and not excluded, or some shows just don't do it, and people are okay with that. They're like, ha, ha, Those guys are so funny. I get to listen to them, but they don't. They never acknowledge me. And they. I do leave the room sometimes because it's kind of boring, you know, like that. That is a different kind of aesthetic. The wallpaper aesthetic, I call it.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
Yeah, that's right. And I mean, even from this. Yeah. It is. Thinking about how the Imagine audience is going to shape the aesthetic of the dialogue is really. Actually, these are what I want all my scholarly friends to be in the production room. Right. Because it's really productive in terms of how it shapes what's going on. So now, as an example of the kind of work that is happening. And by the way, folks, I'm just. You got to understand, part of my thing is I'm a cheerleader. I'm sorry. So you gotta go look up Vincent's work. You gotta look at every. If you're not familiar with Julia Barton's body of work, oh, my God, it's. Please look it up. But we're just gonna get one little taste of Vincent's work here. And could you. I think you know the clip we're gonna play. Cause I think it just captures a lot of what we're talking about.
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Vincent Cunningham
Sure. This episode. The episode from which this clip comes is. It's called the Case for Criticism. And so obviously, it's a very. Maybe it's a defensive gesture on our part. And one of my co hosts, I can't remember which one actually, Alex Schwartz and Nomi Frye, both wonderful writers and my co hosts in this venture, sort of asked me what my sort of initial encounter or sort of where the critical impulse was born in me.
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Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
What about you, Vincent? Do you have any early experiences of being a critic, a young critic?
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Vincent Cunningham
It's so funny. I have two sort of, like, almost sensory moments that I think contribute to my, I guess, ability to do this. I don't know if it's like, sort of my desire or whatever, but certainly my ability to do it. One was very young. My father was an artist. He was a church musician. But I remember being in a house listening to my father play and realizing. I remember the moment that I realized that there was a such thing as harmony. Like, that there was, like, this whole, like, sort of surface of a sound that was the song. But like, oh, wow. It's working vertically in this way, too. Like, if you pay attention, you can hear the different notes and, like. But you have to listen really closely. And I remember, like, being on the floor of our apartment and just like, sort of listening and Being like, wow, I understand why I, like, feel this, like this, hum this, like that something's happening, and I can, like, hum along. But there's another kind of depth that only appears out of listening.
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Julia Barton
Right.
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Vincent Cunningham
And the other thing, also connected to our life as a family, was sitting in church and being like. And this is, again, the presumption, listening to preachers and being like, you kind of missed it. Like, you should have said that instead of, like, you had a good line here and there was like, a next moment. And, like, my first actual acts of criticism were to myself about oratory.
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Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
Oh, I love that.
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Chronic Migraine Patient
So you were both a theater critic and a literary critic in that moment.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
Let's think about aesthetics. I mean, what aesthetic elements and layers stand out to you?
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Vincent Cunningham
Listening back to that, first of all, way too many likes for. That's one aesthetic judgment I have about that. Through it again. Yeah, the thing that. That actually brings to mind is my other observation about chat podcasts, which is that very seldom and one that worth anything is it just sort of turning the mics on and people speaking. Our producers do an incredible job of scaffolding these episodes. We have scripted introductions that we do takes of and say, could you brighten up your voice? Could you look away from the page now and say the spirit of the thing, but not be sounding like so much like you're reading from the page, etc. We have arrived very early on at a basically tripartite structure to our podcast. The A section, as we call it, is usually looking at one text of various kinds and first describing it and then doing kind of formal critique. What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? The second section, where we bring other texts in this sort of intertextual moment, often from scholarly sources, but also just cognate or parallel texts. And then the third section, where we kind of bring it all in and usually do this sort of contemporizing gesture. And it's funny because we're talking about the center here and the sort of religious aspect of your work. I really think about it a lot, this structural element as being a lot like the Puritan sermon, the structure of that sermon, where at the beginning, you just bring the text and you do this thing that's called the doctrine. You just. You talk about what this text is supposed to mean to this particular community of believers, this cohort of which we are a part. John Winthrop on the boat, everybody's dying. He's like, trust me, trust me, let's stay together. You know, this is what the Bible Says we should do the second, the reasons section that the. Those preachers would then shift into, which is all about, again, bringing in examples, other texts, sort of sharpening the sword of that doctrine. And then the final one, which is called either uses or as we would call it, like, the application section, where it's like, here's what this ought to mean to us. Now, how does this ancient text rub its grain against the contemporary? You know, and so things like this moment using, what are the tools of that kind of oratory, anecdote, personal history, all of these other ways of sort of ingratiating the listener, bringing them into the space where you can then make arguments as part of the hope.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
That's really powerful. See, I want all y' all to get a piece of that. You know what I mean? I want everybody to be able to engage in these forms of knowledge production. Also, I just have to point out that it was so powerful that it was literally you feeling sound with your body through the floor. That was part of how your critical self formed. So I think often what's happening, right, is that it's not just about thinking, like, how do we take sound and put it into these abstract ideas that never had sound? It's actually that I think our epistemological hegemony removes sound that was already present. And so there's a recapturing that has to happen.
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Julia Barton
Right?
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
Julia, you know, when we first started talking about aesthetics, I mean, I was deeply curious because of just the body of work that you worked on and also your writing on the history of radio. But you kind of came at the aesthetics of sound in an unlikely way. You were actually thinking about what I would term like critical political economy in a way, like how aesthetics are affected by who gets paid for their work. Could you say a little bit about that?
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Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
Well, that. And also just, like, how much time do you get? You know, which. So I started in public radio, you know, at local public radio stations, and then I became a features editor in radio. And, like, my main job in radio was like, get the piece to the time that the show director says. And that time can change as a show comes together on a magazine show. So you have a very strict clock. And then you. You know, this. The show director doles it out in little portions. And so, you know, I might get the directive, like, you gotta shave six seconds off this thing, like, now. And so I'd have to be going in and be like, yeah, that sentence is not that important. You know, like, let's get that. I've also had the experience as a reporter of having, like, just tiny words shaved out of my stuff, and it not really making sense anymore, you know, but it fit. And so then going from that to match the time to match the time. And these like, half hour shows are really 28 minutes and really like 17 minutes when you get away. All the sort of business of the standing features. And so every second and every microsecond was so precious. And then we go into podcasting and there's like, no clock, nothing. And so what the hell is that? That's weird, but also kind of great, but also potentially bad, you know, like, and then I got into just, you know, the commercial world. And so we were all just like these sort of, like, creatures living above the Arctic Circle who were suddenly, like, put into, you know, like, fertile climate. And we were just like, what? There's money. Money? What is money? You know, it was wild. But also, you know, just learning that the instability of the commercial model that podcasting adopted. So I was at Pushkin Industries, and, you know, we had our highs and lows. And also, you know, like, I was the freelance editor for Revisionist History. When it was first starting and that first season, we didn't have any ad breaks. And then we had to, like, retroactively insert them into the season because they sold ads. You know, it was the number one show. And so just being through all of those cycles, I was like, where did all this. What is this? Where did the clock come from? Where did this commercial model come from? You know, I had the good fortune of doing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and that was my goal, was to start understanding this. I mean, I knew it anecdotally, but I didn't really know it because I was in the business. I didn't have time to read books and stuff. So I just read all the books in the Ivy League about radio that I could find. And there's a lot I'm talking about, like, stuff that was written contemporaneously, also a lot of scholarship. And it's really interesting. Like, I think we're in a better position now to understand the origins of radio in the United States. Now that we've been through this business cycle with podcasting, I don't feel like I could have grasped it on a sort of, like, primal level without that experience, because it was very much like just what the whole podcasting world went through in the United States.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
I mean, your writing is. You bring out such great examples where, like, you read the clips that you're pulling from, you know, 30s or whatever. And it's like, it sounds like they're talking about today's.
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Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
It's really kind of incredible. So I started a newsletter because I just didn't know what to do with all this material. And like, I'm not writing a scholarly book and like a commercial, like again, it's a commercial business, publishing. I don't understand it, but I just wanted people to know some of these stories. So it's called Continuous Wave. And I have some cards up here just to be crass, but because it was explaining my experience to me in this parallel universe. And so one of the things that I wrote about, I actually wrote about this for Nieman Lab as well, is that the choice to be commercial in the United States, which is a very unusual choice, by the way, Most audio cultures around the world did not go this path for reasons that, I mean, maybe they're frustrated with the sort of monopoly of state broadcasting and other audio cultures. But we had none. For 50 years, we had no state support for. There was a few educational stations and those became public radio. But that was like 1970. So it took a long time, but that was a choice. And they actually, there was a contest in 1924, so more than 100 years ago, because nobody knew how to pay for broadcasting. And it was a competition. It was a prize of $500, which is equivalent of about $9,000 now, for the best idea how to fund broadcasting. Because there were no ads, there was no state support. So like, how are we going to do this? It was about 2 years old at the time, and this was a major problem. And so they picked a winner. The winning idea was a tax on vacuum tubes, like a $2. Because the more vacuum tubes you had in your rig, the better reception you got that you were super user. And guess what though, just to finish the story. So they picked them. They printed it in Broadcasting magazine. The next issue of Broadcasting magazine was just tearing that idea apart. And I don't mean like the editors. Well, they weighed in. I mean like the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, the head of the national association of Broadcasters. They were all like, never going to happen. Never going to work. Here's why. Bad, bad, bad. And this poor guy who won the prize, he was never heard from again. My editors were like, what happened to him? And they were like. I was like, I think he had a bad life. He had a good idea. He won a prize. But so like, this is our legacy. And I just think, like, we should know more about it. We should be talking about it agree,
- [25:32]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
especially because, you know, again, your insight that this is actually underneath some of the aesthetic boundaries and limitations that we just take as normal or given. And it explains why they also have a particular cultural expression here in this context.
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Vincent Cunningham
Right.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
And I think that's, you know, time, like you mentioned the form, how the host appears to us, all these things. So you have a great clip which kind of captures some of this. Could you set this clip up?
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Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
Yeah, I went vintage because when Chenjerai asked me. This is also a clip that shows sort of some of the magic that was in radio that I think we also. It's like a usable past for us in the business. This is a clip from the end of a 1939. I don't know, he called it a verse brochure. It wasn't really a radio drama, but it was sort of a love letter to radio by Norman Corwin, who was one of the great sort of like prose stylists of radio. It was on the Columbia Workshop, which was a sustaining program, meaning it didn't have any sponsors because they couldn't sell time at that spot. So they just kind of let the writers go wild. And CBS wanted a bunch. It was, I think they just turning 10 years old or something. Anyway, they wanted a bunch of material about radio and how great it was. So he's like, I think radio is great. I'm gonna write this whole thing. And this is the last couple of minutes because it's. It talks a lot about what, you know, the last panel was discussing, which is like the ability to kind of annihilate time and space that we have in audio and the imaginative connection with the listener. I do have to warn you, this recording is warbly. The music sounds weird. It's, it's. It was all delivered live. But I think you'll be able to understand. And it's just like wild. So
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Julia Barton
do you Grant radio is here to stay. Then grant this further that the mystic ethers were established well before the first word passed between two men. It's only latterly we've seen that speech is buoyant in these waves. A puff or two of years, that's all it is there may this very moment be as close to us as one discoverer away. Whole firmaments of stuffs awaiting comprehension that we'll see about. Meanwhile, some homage to the High Commissioner who first assigned these frequencies to Earth, who marked these air lanes out. He is the same who fixed the stars in place, who set afire the sun and froze the moon and dug the furrows wherein oceans flow. He holds the formula for genesis and death. His hand rests on a dial bigger than infinity. This microphone is not an ordinary instrument, but it looks out on vistas wide. Indeed. My void commingles now with northern lights and asteroids and Alexander's skeleton with dead volcanoes and with donkey's ears, its swimsuit with minnows. And it's in the sphinx's jaw. It drifts among whatever spirits pass across the night. Here is a thought to fasten to your throat. Who knows who may be listening and where?
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Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
Isn't that wild? That was on the radio, like, nationally. So great.
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Chenjerai Kumanyika
What else do you want to say about that? Like what? You know, in terms of aesthetics, like, what kind of tools can you give us to hear the knowledge in that?
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Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
Well, just the pacing of it. You know, radio was all live on these networks, and so they developed this culture of just, like, I know when to pause, but also it was directed like a symphony. That music was live, the narration was rehearsed. But then that pacing, I feel like we inherited in podcasting more than in radio. Right. So when I was cutting, like, those microseconds from pieces, we didn't really have the luxury of aesthetics in terms of pacing. And so now a lot of scholars, like Neil Verma at Northwestern have written about how shows like this American Life and Radiolab especially, really inherited this much older kind of like, aesthetic tradition that involves scoring, pacing, just like these mic drop moments that are daring that I know you guys were doing at Gimlet a lot that was not, like, the version of public radio. It would happen occasionally, these beautiful, like, you know, Kitchen Sisters or radio Diaries kind of moments. But those were rare. It was mostly just, like, chockablock, like, didactic delivery of information with, like, a little bit of stuff around the edges. And now I feel like these are our colleagues that we can learn from, although they had. There was a lot of problems with radio. And you and I have talked about this like it was one of the most segregated, exclusionary workforces in the country at a time when there weren't a lot of good jobs. So that was bad. And that's another legacy that we unfortunately, I think, inherited. But, like, if you're not conscious of all of this stuff, then you can't talk about it or learn from it. So that's why some of this stuff is like, the soap operas. You guys are so bad. But, you know, like, it's also worth learning from the bad stuff. So I just think fascinating to peek in there.
- [32:02]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Thank you so Much. Vincent, real quick, before I jump and do the last thing, any thoughts you did this brings up for you?
- [32:09]
Vincent Cunningham
This. I mean, it's just brilliant. I wish I had that many tones in my voice.
- [32:14]
Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
Oh, my God. I know, right? These were pros, man.
- [32:17]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, but I mean, we. It's funny because even in the sort of texture of chat pod podcasts, we do a lot of, okay, so how can we introduce or say something that gives us fair use to use this, whatever Justin Bieber clipper, whatever it is, trying to sort of enliven the texture of the surface of all that sound? And we're constantly getting notes from our producers about, okay, like, you know, you gotta pass the ball of conversations. We've been shown the waveform of our conversations. It's like, okay, here's where somebody else comes in, and it's more exciting to listen to when we're going back and forth. So all these. That sort of. I totally agree about that sort of sonic thing.
- [33:05]
Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
I'm so glad that you brought up the sermon, because once, you know, I started editing podcasts, I'm like, oh, I think these are sermons, you know, and that even older form than radio. Right. Is present in so much of the long form stuff, the essayistic stuff that's out there. And this is clearly, like, in that same tradition, more poetic, but, you know, like, it's not a play where, like, people are, like, yelling and screaming and, like, slamming car doors with the sound effects and stuff. This is just a poem. It's like a poem that's meant to move people. And I feel like that tradition went through radio and then it kind of died out in the United States, and now it's like, back in a different way.
- [33:47]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Thank you for that.
- [33:48]
Neil Verma
That's.
- [33:48]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
I really appreciate that. I've taken up a lot of space as moderators, so I'm not gonna say my little piece too much more. There's a piece of audio we have to play, and you'll be glad we did. And then I'm really interested to hear what you all are thinking. I will say this, that I was trained in sort of critical media studies and mass communication, which in a way I think of as cultural studies. And I started to convey my research and to work on these on podcasting projects. And during that process, I came to feel that audio is the superior form of journalism. I say that because just the mic can go places that the camera can't, and it can bring modalities in that. And I'm a huge. This is not. I mean, I'm a gigantic consumer of print. You don't make a limited series, you don't make a history of the NYPD that starts in the 19th century without reading a ton of work, right? So I read, and I'm a big. I'm a consumer of big scholarly work and a producer of terrible scholarly work. But, like, didn't know, you know, but, like, the thing is, is that I also started to realize beyond journalism, right? Like, audio is a really. It is a really crucial component of knowledge production. And I don't think that its place in the academy, the fact that it doesn't circulate sufficiently is a result of any kind of real serious evaluation of what's the best way to produce different types of knowledge. It's just history. We're just. This is just a historical problem, right? And so I think that, you know, in the course of making audio, you know, if you. If you see, you know, just the people in the room, right? You know, Vincent, Julia, if y' all have not heard, not all propaganda is art. When I. That was part of the genesis of this, in addition to conversations we were having, because I heard this and I said, rob, you're making some scholarly interventions. I'm going to have to kind of prepare you to intervene in some scholarly conversations. But if these people hear this, because the archival work, right, but there's the kind of understanding that emerges in the production process, and then what is revealed is something that you just can't contribute in another mode. That's the best way I can say it. But it's also interesting to think about what is being contributed. That can't be. That can't happen in another mode. And one of the best examples of that is a piece of audio I'm about to play. It was very hard for me not to try to go into Empire City and play that, because I always want to share that work that I put so much into. I gotta shout out Ellen Horne, because she was at Radiolab, and you'll hear from her. But, you know, they were really among the people who were innovating and carrying on these traditions. And what the clip I'm about to play, I feel like, is a part of the Radiolab tradition, even though I don't believe it was not Radiolab that made it. This is a piece from the podcast about Fela Kuti, maybe some of you all have heard, is a scene in which, just to quickly set it up, is which Dele, who was a musician who played with Fela, but was also a young person who was being Mentored. He's gone through extreme tragedies in his life. Unimaginable violence and tragedy that he's experienced. And he's talking about how the music helped him get over that. So this is this clip. We're gonna listen to it, and then I won't even summarize it. We could just go to Q A
- [37:06]
Podcast Producer/Interviewer
after that, and it would go on for well over an hour. Just that song, which meant after the opening, after that, Dele would settle into one riff that he would just have to keep playing.
- [37:20]
Vincent Cunningham
It starts with that bass line. Then I go,
- [37:28]
Audience Member
This one.
- [37:30]
Podcast Producer/Interviewer
He played it for us backstage in London before a gig with his quintet. He had this little electric piano that he demonstrated on can you imagine me
- [37:38]
Blinds.com Advertiser
playing
- [37:40]
Vincent Cunningham
for 40 minutes, not stopping him?
- [37:46]
Podcast Producer/Interviewer
Fela took repetition to an extreme. We talked to one person who told us that he once made his band record one song for 24 hours straight, an entire rotation of the earth. And he had a policy that every musician had to play their loops exactly the same each time. And if they didn't, you just get fined. You get fined, we get. Wait, how much?
- [38:12]
Vincent Cunningham
If he find you more than twice in a night, all your wages gone.
- [38:16]
Can you imagine?
- [38:17]
Podcast Producer/Interviewer
So we asked him. Playing that one thing over and over again for hours with all that pressure hanging over you, doesn't that make you nuts?
- [38:24]
Julia Barton
Oh, no, no, no.
- [38:25]
Vincent Cunningham
No way.
- [38:26]
Podcast Producer/Interviewer
No, he said, actually, it was the exact opposite.
- [38:30]
Vincent Cunningham
That repetitive thing just keeps me. Oh, take another breath. Keep it going in no matter what. Just like the heart pumping up, pumping up every minute, every second.
- [38:59]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Because the kick, kick of the drums.
- [39:18]
Podcast Producer/Interviewer
Walk me through what happens in your mind over the course of those repetitions.
- [39:23]
Vincent Cunningham
It's like, it's gonna be okay. It's okay, It's okay in it. It's okay. There's more to coming in over. It's okay, it's okay.
- [39:45]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Imagine. Imagine, by the way, producing that and then being told, you need to write a book about it if you want to get tenure. Anyway, go ahead.
- [39:58]
Chronic Migraine Patient
Thank you. I have several questions. I'll try to narrow it down, but one is I've noticed a lot of podcasts now are also on video. And I guess that happens more with the chat style podcast than like a documentary style. But I'm curious if you all have any thoughts about that. If you feel like there's pressure to turn your audio podcast into something video and is that a trend that's happening where sort of everything is going to eventually become video? Or do you think, no, there's always going to be A place for just audio. And the other thing is I teach a class for grad students here on public scholarship, and I would love to know if there's any sort of resource that exists, whether it's like something written or some video that exists of people talking about this that we could go to, to kind of point to people who have thought about the aesthetics of audio before and like, where they can kind of learn that.
- [41:01]
Vincent Cunningham
Thank you.
- [41:01]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Great questions
- [41:04]
Vincent Cunningham
as regards the video thing. It seems our podcast is recorded, almost video recorded almost every time we do it. And it's. It's not. This is a quirk of, I think, Kanye now, I don't know. I don't know. But it's not released as video. But sometimes they release clips of our conversations, visual, visually. And I think part of the reason for the video podcast is precisely this. It's like attentional value that it, you know, you see a clip of a podcast on name your platform and it sort of gathers an audience. But also I think for attentional reasons, you know, podcasts are now, I don't know if you've seen on Netflix. You can watch many podcasts on Netflix now. And the idea being, I think that the sort of total sensorium of it, listening, watching, et cetera, keeps people, keeps people in. But it's also part of a trend that I think the everything is TV sort of media trend, which I don't know necessarily how to make sense of, but I think it just has to do with like a sort of flattening among platforms that all sort of want to do a little bit of everything and everybody else's, I don't know, attempts to overthrow YouTube's hegemony and podcasts, etc.
- [42:18]
Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
I have so many thoughts, but we can't be here all day. But I do think again, like, having studied history of when, you know, network TV consciously, network radio consciously gave itself over to television and forced all the talent to get on tv. That like, it's like a money move in many ways. I mean, you can charge a lot more for an ad on a video than an audio platform. And so. And then it's also really interesting to see the streaming platforms think about, oh, they're thinking about daypart now. Like, they didn't used to care about that stuff. And now they're like, oh, we want to be the pipe to people's home that's on all the time. What if we just stuck podcasts in there, in that hole? You know, which is what happened with a lot of forms in radio. Like the soap opera and the chat show, which was, you know, only radio only dared to do that because they thought no one was listening because chat shows were not scripted. And that was like a taboo at first. So it's just a weird cycle that's repeating itself. And many people, like Norman Corwin, who we just heard was just like, so pissed off about it and traumatized, really, because they didn't want to be in tv, you know, And I think they. They feel like a lot of narrative podcasters feel now, which is like, it's not. We're not making narrative documentaries, visual documentaries. If we wanted to do that, we would be doing that. So the only show that I've seen and the only sort of, like, outfit I've seen that's really, like, solved that problem for narrative podcasting is the Big Dig. If you go to their web YouTube channel, because it's produced at a television station, WGBH, that cover, and they're pulling from GBH archives, they're able to make kind of a cool slideshow where they swap out some of the clips that were pulled from television originally and put. But it's expensive. So there's no solve for narrative podcasting in this YouTube world. That's practical, right?
- [44:17]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Especially business wise. But I just would add real quick, and I want to get to the next question, that there's definitely pressure to make everything video. I make a weekly show called Unruly Subjects, and I remember talking about it with some other podcasters and they were like, wait, you're not doing video? That's so courageous. I was like, wait, I wasn't. Wasn't thinking about it as courageous. I just like audio. But I also want to shout out a friend of mine named Andrew Calloway. I mean, there are some people, and in fact, I know Ellen and some of our folks in here have done some work about what does it mean to think about adding visuals in a way that still centers the audio? And Andrew Calloway did an incredible presentation on Audio Fest about this. So, you know, one question is like, what about just audio? But there's another question is like, why does all the visual have to be sort of like, you know, chat dudes with their hat back with the mic, you know, beanie or whatever.
- [45:07]
Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
Not everybody, like, a lot of women don't want to do video because they get harassed.
- [45:10]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [45:11]
Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
It's not okay, so. And guests do not open up in the same way. So there's a lot of problems with it, a lot of issues with it in terms of resources for teaching.
- [45:19]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
I mean, there's so many. I want to. Please, let's exchange info. There's. So there's like, I think a lot, and including a lot of good school scholarly work that is sort of wildly dispersed across disciplines that can be gathered. But definitely gotta shout out sound studies. You know what I mean?
- [45:34]
Vincent Cunningham
So.
- [45:35]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Yes.
- [45:37]
Audience Member
Hi. This is great. This is a question for Vincent, but anyone can answer it. So when you were talking about, you made a face when you had to play the clip, and it was like hearing your own voice back. Because everyone does that. I think if you have ever heard. It's like when you hear yourself on an answering machine and everyone's kind of like, oh, that's just hit stop. So when you hear yourself back and you talked about your likes and your ums, and you said the thing Obama does, right? Is that. So there seems to be a balance between. In chat shows where you want some of that, because it's like you're listening to live thinking. Right. And if you didn't, if you edited all those out, you'd sound like AI and that would sound really sterile. Right. So can you say more about like the. I never thought about this before today, like the authenticity of that and how this is as an aesthetic. Right. I never thought that chat shows, they lend themselves to an authenticity of like live thinking. And what do you think they appeal is of that?
- [46:21]
Vincent Cunningham
It's a great. A great point. And I think this even extends beyond audio in certain ways that in the age of a certain kind of soulless perfection, the fear that we need not speak of AI, you see it in the way that people have started to. The bad picture has come back in certain ways, et cetera, et cetera. The assurance that you actually are witnessing intellection in the moment is riveting to people who, when you read a text, you look at a photograph. The question is, how planned, how staged, how xyz and how can I know the authentic processes through which this knowledge, this thought came into being? I do think that there is some something there. Sometimes when I talked about the absolute necessity for producing. Sometimes when our producer says something like, you sound kind of like you're reading. Sometimes I put in intentional or whatever to sort of jolt myself back into the way that I actually speak. You know, it's a balance. I think I've gotten better at it. I think it was. This is from pretty early in our podcast run. This isn't even a year into our doing it. I've tried to get a little better with them, but my goal Isn't to sort of excise whatever. One of my favorite quotes from literature is in Henry James, the Bostonians. At a certain point someone speaks up and says a voice, a human voice is what we want. They're waiting for this orator to come to the stage. And that hunger for reality and hunger for the human, I think remains.
- [47:54]
Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
You know, one of the crazy things about studying audio history in the United States is that authenticity is like this completely like it goes all over the place. So because radio was live, it wasn't like authentic unless it was live. But because it was time bound, everything had to be scripted, scripted and rehearsed. And so you were in a situation where you had so many shows like March of Time and then later on these documentaries where you would just, you know, you would write a script based on true events or semi true events. And then you would script it and rehearse it. And actors would reenact public figures. They would imitate their accents. It was like Saturday Night Live, cold opens, but serious, like taken totally seriously. And then there were these journalistic documentaries after the war that were, you know, really expensive to make. And they, they hired actors to play all the people that were interviewed because that's, that was authentic. And then the introduction of tape caused a lot of anxiety because they were like, well, yeah, I know those are real people talking, but they don't sound good. Like actors really get at the real feelings. And now we would just be like, that is corny and bad. Like people pretending to be public figures unless they're just for a joke. But that was, it's just like completely different. Like so the ideas of authenticity, that's one of the things about audio that like we don't even scrutinize it that much. We think it's always been that way. And it's like totally not true 100%.
- [49:23]
Chenjerai Kumanyika
I mean authenticity, the voice, those are also like, you know, good categories to unpack. Also I feel like Sam Altman was just like chatgpt, add more fillers in the voice. But okay, well, we're about at time. Maybe one more question.
- [49:36]
Neil Verma
This just follows on this conversation and it is about the aesthetics of the voice and how it's very hard to describe how the voice sounds in time. I mean, I know Neil, I work with Neil and I've worked a lot on the history of the radio voice for this time stretching project. Because the first audiobooks came out of transcription records that RCA made, which were records of radio shows. That to me sounds like a transcription record. I'm oh, it is. Okay. Yeah. And it sounds like it was being played back with one of those old phonograph machines. That wasn't electronics. It's just messed up. But the. So audiobooks developed their own vocal aesthetic, which eventually was what was called a neutral voice. That's a political and very charged term. But it was because the first users, blind people, wanted to speed them up. And having a voice that was unembellished, not elocutionary, not theatrical, could be sped up more quickly. But in the 30s, my sense of radio history is that Norman Corwin's those voices were theatrical voices. A lot of the radio broadcasters were coming off of Broadway or even British theater, people like Tom Terrace, and they had trained in elocution. So even if it wasn't scripted, their posture was so rehearsed and they were so good at it, they had to
- [50:51]
Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
cut through all this AM static, which was so bad.
- [50:54]
Neil Verma
Oh, right, yes. And women's voices. There was a bias in the technology against voices that were higher pitched. So it wasn't that women's voices couldn't be transmitted, but they couldn't with the technology as it was. But then a radio voice starts to emerge, and Susan Douglas has written about that. But then. So I've been trying to trace how the so called neutral voice in audiobooks emerges, and that's been really hard. And I guess between your two projects, like what? But do you see patterns in the podcasting voice, even in dialogue, like where you're trying to get people to just talk in an unrehearsed way? Is there mimicry? Is there? I mean, we have decades of radio where people are studying, they're getting trained to speak. Even audiobooks, there are handbooks, like historical. Even the telephone operators, you're very, very trained to speak. But I'm assuming that doesn't happen now. But I'm just curious what you see as patterns of the podcasting voice, whether it's in narrative or just in chat. Even just in chat. And how to get away from that if what you're aiming at is authenticity and conversation and how to get people not to jump into some headspace of what they think the podcasting voice is.
- [52:01]
Vincent Cunningham
It's a really instructive thing. I can't wait. This really instructive thing. Back in 2020, I was the sort of host of obviously the pandemic had happened and there couldn't be Shakespeare in the park. And therefore we did an audio WNYC version of Richard ii. And it was actually a total revelation to be interviewing. So we did this whole program of it. Yes, there was a recording of the actual play, but then there were. I was interviewing the actors and also Jim Shapiro, the Shakespeare scholar at Columbia, who is. Has like sort of had a second career as an advisor to Shakespeare productions, specifically at the Public, but also elsewhere. And it was fascinating to hear actors be interviewed because they bring all of their technique, you know, And I'm being like, so what do you think about. Well, it's just a whole different thing, you know, and so just like that sort of. And also the texture of hearing real actors do Richard II and also be bringing the great themes of that play, political authority, where does it come from, et cetera, into the context of a worldwide pandemic. It was fascinating. And the texture of those voices, I thought was really kind of a symbol for how strange. But I think public radio has a huge part to play in this because our producer is from a sort of public radio lineage, the New Yorker Radio Hour. All of our producers are WNYC people and we all know, like people with beautiful names and how they speak. And it definitely, like, is a kind of trope in my head, even though I did not participate in that necessarily before I got to the New Yorker.
- [53:43]
Podcast Story Editor (Julia Barton)
But everyone should go to Transom and look up Chen Jurai's piece on the Voice because it's foundational and also, you know, unpacking so many of these assumptions about how you're supposed to sound on the microphone. That stuff goes back 100 years and it goes back to who wasn't allowed to be on the microphone and who was impersonated on the microphone. And yeah, there's a lot.
- [54:31]
Julia Barton
Foreign.
- [54:35]
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Neil Verma
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