Jad Abumrad Interview from Andy Sternberg on Vimeo.

It’s not often that you get to see your favorite radio show or podcast produced and performed before a live audience. Granted, there are more opportunities to “watch the radio” than you’d imagine and I’ve seen my fair share of Buzz Out Loud and TWiT podcasts live in person. But I digress.

I posted some of my favorite Radiolab episodes right here a few months ago. Soon after that it was announced that the show was going on the road. A typical hour of Radiolab is likely to contain some of the most incredible, cerebral and aurally tantalizing radio you’ll hear. And it was just as fulfilling and entertaining as I could have expected live. Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich were brill as usual — the 5-part show was built around the theme: Symmetry (I’ll post it after it airs). And a big bonus was live cello machinations by the incredibly talented Zoë Keating.

Thanks WNYC for taking the show on the road and especially for giving me a few minutes to “geek out” with Jad about everything from writing to production to sequencing the Novation Launchpad MIDI controller for Ableton Live.

A shareable and fully embeddable 720p version of the above video interview is available on my Vimeo and YouTube channels.

The most recent episode is titled “Words“:
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Radiolab is a workshop in the aural experience – it is, at its core, a program that explores the essence of radio, from story arc to research to interview to post-production and mixdown. Any given episode will surprise you in its clarity, weirdness, and attention to detail. My first reaction to listening — I became a regular listener to the podcast (you can subscribe here for RSS, xml, or iTunes) in 2005 — was amazement at how much effort, creativity, and likely attempts at perfectionism went into the editing and remixing of the audio. An hourlong Radiolab is without fail a stimulating and thought provoking experience, rooted in the great voices, delivery, and smartypants adeptness of hosts Jad Abumrod and Robert Krulwitch.

My love affair with this program is capped by how well it uses the latest technology – since the early days of podcasting, Radiolab has been made available in multiple formats for download and streaming as well as across many NPR member stations nationwide. We’ve come to expect this from NPR programming since the grand ol’ days of RealAudio streams. But this show stands apart in that it takes the story and the sound and the experience to extreme levels, show after show.

I don’t have a TV nor do I care to watch one. I listen to programs like this. Stock up your music-playing receptacle with multiple episodes from the archives before your next road trip and you will not be disappointed. Even P Diddy listens to Radiolab twice.

One of my all-time favorites is “Numbers” (mp3:

Other faves include Memory and Forgetting (mp3). Listen to the segment below on amnesia and Musicophilia with Oliver Sacks:

Finally, music… Musical Language (mp3) just reading the first graf of the show notes is mesmerizing as it is:

What is music? How does it work? Why does it move us? Why are some people better at it than others? In this hour, we examine the line between language and music, how the brain processes sound, and we meet a composer who uses computers to capture the musical DNA of dead composers in order to create new work. We also re-imagine the disastrous 1913 debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring…through the lens of modern neurology.