Jad Abumrad was talking about “tension” —the tension between the certainty of science and mysteries that inspire wonder; between authenticity and artifice; between a sound that feels carefully constructed and one that feels anarchic and alive. “You want to seduce people,” he said. “But you also want to disturb them.” Abumrad, who is 37, is the co-host and producer of “Radiolab,” a public radio show that breaks from public radio sensibilities, not least in its striking sound. “I put in a lot of jaggedy sounds, little plurps and things, strange staccato, percussive things — people don’t like that so much,” he said. “Some people don’t, anyway.”
On ‘Radiolab,’ the Sound of Science
Peter Yang for The New York Times
RADIO PLAY Robert Krulwich (left) and Jad Abumrad at a rehearsal for a live taping of “Radiolab.”
By ROB WALKER
Published: April 7, 2011
Multimedia
We were in Abumrad’s small and ambivalently decorated office at WNYC. I had spent a few days hanging around as he and his co-host, Robert Krulwich, and the show’s half-dozen or so staff members worked long days to finish an episode for the latest “Radiolab” season, currently being broadcast on several hundred public radio stations around the country. Jaggedy plurps and all, “Radiolab” has since 2005 developed a devoted following for its unconventional approach to both the medium and the message of radio. Its five-episode seasons now attract about a million listeners who hear them over the air, and 1.8 million who, significantly, listen via podcast. Abumrad, who planned on a career as a composer, not a broadcaster, has become a star among producers for his creative sound design. “Radiolab” fans, who tend to be younger than typical public radio listeners, are rabid, selling out most live events in hours. Ira Glass, the “This American Life” creator and progressive-radio hero, has become an unabashed booster, declaring that the show has “invented a new aesthetic for the medium.”
A relevant question to ask at this moment is: Why would anyone bother to invent a new aesthetic for such a retrograde form? This is an exciting time for innovation in new media: interactive forms for active consumers. Radio, in contrast, just washes over you or drifts by in the background. It seems ill suited to an audience that multitasks, demands to react or contradict in real time, insists on controlling information rather than receiving it. Yet “Radiolab” — which just won a 2010 Peabody Award — has responded to all this by designing a show for sustained and undivided attention. It wrestles with big, serious ideas like stochasticity, time and deception. It ignores the news cycle completely. And it expects you to stop checking your inbox, updating your status or playing Angry Birds and spend a solid hour listening.
An episode from the current “Radiolab” season titled “Lost and Found” begins with a woman named Sharon Roseman describing her childhood discovery that she was afflicted with a bizarre condition that scrambled her sense of direction to the point of nightmarish dysfunction. We hear from the doctor who gave the diagnosis, an expert on the brain (who illuminates the mechanics of location cognition) and finally from Roseman, again, on how she found she was not so alone as she had believed. The segment lasts 19 minutes, a long time to keep listeners interested in a condition we’ve never heard of, and likely never will again.
On first listen, the bantering tone struck by Abumrad and Krulwich, and their palpable chemistry, stands out. They joke, challenge, openly admit to not fully understanding their expert guests and give the general impression that they’re having a ball. They don’t sound like an obvious match, and when I met them in a WNYC conference room during the production of the “Lost and Found” episode, they didn’t look it either. Abumrad is trim, bespectacled; his parents, a surgeon and a biologist, emigrated from Lebanon to Syracuse, where he was born, and then moved to Nashville. That’s where Abumrad grew up and discovered the solitary pleasures of music and composition. His earnest, thoughtful demeanor in conversation is a quieter and more polite version of his on-air style.
Krulwich, who is 63, reminds you of your favorite college professor, full-blown and voluble, unable to go more than four minutes without making everyone in the room laugh. Probably best known as a network television correspondent, he is also a storied figure in public radio history and dreamed of being a broadcaster since childhood, when he would listen to a transistor radio under his pillow. (“Really?” Abumrad asks. “No, you would not.” Yes, Krulwich insists; he’d pretend to sleep when his parents peeked in on him — a scene he punctuates with a theatrical snore. “That’s insane,” Abumrad says, laughing. “I never had that relationship with radio.”) What they seem to share is a blend of curiosity and skepticism, a willingness to be convinced — and a delight in convincing.
Of course, from “Car Talk” to any number of drive-time zoo crews, informal banter isn’t exactly a new formula for successful radio. But to focus on the “unscripted” elements of “Radiolab” misses the point. This is an elaborately constructed show. The initial interviews for the Roseman piece took place weeks earlier and were edited into a draft that included mostly improvised voiceovers and commentary. When I was in the studio, the pair sat down with Soren Wheeler, a producer, and spent an hour and a half debating various phrasings and cuts, mostly focusing on three or four passages. That afternoon they assembled again to rerecord their chatter, improvising some bits a dozen times in a row. It took another hour to agree on a minute or two of usable sound — some of it later rejected and recorded again.
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