This week I had the pleasure to sit down for a drink with writer and podcaster Peter Frick-Wright, who is the producer of Outside Magazine’s new podcast series, The Science of Survival. He’s thought a lot about writing and sound design and how to use both to serve an audio story. Below are a few takeaways from our conversation. (Note: I use terms like “radio” and “podcasting” interchangeably here, which I have no regrets about.)

Walter Murch is an audio master. Frick-Wright cited Murch as his dream sound design mentor. This Transom article that Murch wrote is a metaphysical journey through some mind-blowing new ways to think about audio. Among many amazing insights that Murch shares, one concrete tip is this:

At any one moment (for practical purposes, let’s say that a ‘moment’ is any five-second section of film), five layers is the maximum that can be tolerated by an audience if you also want them to maintain a clear sense of the individual elements that are contributing to the mix. In other words, if you want the experience to be simultaneously Dense and Clear.

But the precondition for being able to sustain five layers is that the layers be spread evenly across the conceptual spectrum.

You’ll have to read the article to find out what Murch’s “conceptual spectrum” is. For even deeper Murch-diving, Frick-Wright recommended the book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. His real-life mentor, Tom Bissell, called it the best book about being an artist that he’s ever read.

Different formats require different approaches. For the Outside Magazine podcast, Frick-Wright is reinterpreting some of the magazine’s most popular articles into audio narratives. His approach is not as simple as reading the original stories out loud and adding some soundtrack music. Frick-Wright essentially re-reports each story with the audio format in mind from the outset.

Recording high fidelity interviews with sources is one obvious reason for this approach, but there are other considerations. The best writing style for radio is often totally different than the voice you use when writing for print. Ten-dollar words can serve a written piece well, but may sound pretentious when they are read aloud, where a conversational tone can be more appropriate and easier for the listener to follow.

Not losing your listener is obviously an important goal. For one of the Outside stories, the magazine’s print version followed five different characters. Frick-Wright quickly realized that wouldn’t work for radio because listeners would not be able to track that many simultaneous narratives. Instead, he and his co-producer Robbie Carver made the decision to choose just one person’s story that best exemplified the narrative.

Avoid phone interviews. It sounds obvious, but Frick-Wright pointed out a specific reason to remember this, especially if you are producing for radio. Phones cut out all the highs and lows, leaving you with nothing but midrange frequencies. People do most of their listening to audio stories in the car and the white noise of the road competes directly with those middle tones. For this reason, some radio shows, such as Marketplace, don’t allow any phone recordings unless there is absolutely no other way to get an essential interview.

Do you have any tips on sound to share?