Over the Transom | 07.10.26
Tiny radio documentarians, celebrating slowness, and Chill Beefs
Hello! One reminder:
Hub & Spoke’s next deadline for the Sounds Like America project is next Wednesday, July 15th! Submit your work — selected pieces may also wind up on Transom!
What’s new on Transom
The Sound of a Red Car Passing by Annie Rosenthal
In the small town of Madrid, New Mexico, local kids ranging from 8 to 12 years old are becoming tiny radio documentarians. For the second year in a row, Signal Hill editor and correspondent for High Country News Annie Rosenthal is leading a summer camp with Madrid local Stella Linder Byrne, who started the community radio station KMRD-LP 96.9FM, and their friend Ian Lewis. The trio is handing the kids the microphones and teaching them to tune into the world around them. “Little activities helped us prep for the big project,” Rosenthal writes. “A sonic scavenger hunt got everybody out walking around Madrid with TASCAM recorders, hunting for something hard, something slow, something old — all to help the kids start thinking in sound. They wrote PSAs, did stand-ups on the porch, and practiced interviewing each other with open-ended questions.”
The goal was to make an audio postcard from Madrid. And today on Transom, as part of The Listeners, the 15 minute non-narrated tour of the town is available to listen to. You can also hear it in the latest issue of Signal Hill, along with other fantastic audio stories. Listen at the link below, and enjoy this Q&A with some of the tiny documentarians:
What advice do you have for other kids who might feel shy about doing interviews?
Zander, 10: If you’re feeling nervous, kind of just try your best to just go for it instead of, like, waiting a long time and missing your opportunity.
Frances, 9: You should just, like, know that you can do it and it’s all right to be scared. Cuz, I mean, I think we all were a little bit nervous at the start of our documentary, but we just kinda got into it and, we just were, like, having fun. You should just have fun.
Charlie, 11: You gotta gather what you know about the situation, and you gotta build off from that. Ask, like, “I know you do this, but how do you do something else?” If you’re confused about something, add a follow-up, like, “How does that work?”
More to explore on Transom.org
Listen to the latest from Rob Rosenthal annd Sound School, all about how to communicate awe in a radio story.
Tip of the week: celebrating slowness
Multimedia artist and sound designer Ariana Martinez is a master of rich soundscapes. One of the things they prioritize in the pieces they make is slowness — letting things breathe, easing the listener into a new world through the airwaves. Martinez writes in their manifesto for Transom that they are “trying to get audiences to access a state of being, a process of observing, rather than a complete and prescriptive narrative.” Slow down and read more from the manifesto below about how to celebrate slowness and incorporate it into your work.
Audio is a time-based medium, but how often are we actually invited to explore this dimension — either as creators or as listeners? Slow audio leaves room for audiences to witness the processes of observation, interpretation, and synthesis that went into making the work and, at its best, encourages audiences to engage in these processes themselves. As artists, as audio makers, as people, we can model Slowness for each other and guide each other to this state of being.
From the archives
What Nice People Do by Andy Raskin
Chill Beefs is Andy Raskin’s podcast in which he records minor annoyances, small arguments, and petty complaints. Because sometimes, it’s fun to hear people complain. Listen to this conversation with his sister about how irritating it is when people are rude to service workers.
The best complainers, I’ve learned, give you lots of details, not only about their frustration, but about their lives: you get a sense of who they are through the complaint. A friend said to me, “Your sister comes across in this piece as the world’s most thoughtful, caring person. Is that who she really is?”
Yes, that’s who she really is.
Community corner
This week’s question: what’s a petty complaint you’d talk about if you were featured on Chill Beefs?