Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Years ago, I worked with my friend Julie Shapiro at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. And for more than a decade, Third Coast hosted a competition for short-form documentaries based on a specific challenge. They were called Short Talks.
Chapter 2: What inspired the creation of AudioFlux?
We would invite people to make short audio stories inspired by a set of prompts, and we... Just trusted the fact that if you invite people to make something and give them a little bit of parameters to play with, you know, my mantra is like, it always works. You can always invite people to get creative and they will always respond in some fashion.
Over the years, I must have listened to dozens of short docs and hearing them gave me this jolt of inspiration. They were a reminder about what was possible with audio and how the whole medium benefits when there's a place for all kinds of storytelling. However, in recent years, the audio business has changed.
Long-form conversation-type podcasts dominate, and it's made it harder for documentary and short-form experimental audio to find a home, which is why Julie Shapiro and her creative partner John DeLore created AudioFlux.
We thought, you know, everything is longer and longer and longer and longer. So what if we could create some energy around a short form? So John and I decided to create Audio Flux, which is sort of a new version of the Short Talks Challenge, but maybe a little bit more for the podcasting age.
AudioFlux was recently recognized by The New Yorker as one of the best podcasts of 2025. And I want to share this project because I'm a big fan of what Julie and John are creating. And I want to expand your definition of what a podcast can be. We're going to play some AudioFlux stories in a bit. But first, I'm going to talk with Julie about how it all works.
So let's start off with a bit of an origin story here. How did you and John first arrive at the idea for AudioFlux?
Yeah, so we started in the spring of 2023 talking to each other. John and I had kind of known each other for, known of each other, really. We had a lot of people in common because we both had these long histories of working in public radio and coming into podcasting, you know, in its early heydays.
And so we were talking in the spring because he had just been let go from a job with a big podcast company. And I was in between positions. And we were just talking about how morale seemed really low, low in the creative audio corner of podcasting.
And in our community and amongst our friends, the people we kept talking to felt, I just like really could sense this industry fatigue, you know, at every turn. And we started thinking about what could we do in this moment together that might reverse some of that or give people something to appreciate, you know, audio for the sake of audio.
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Chapter 3: How does the AudioFlux challenge work?
But still, these days when she's reading or concentrating on something beautiful... When words turn into images in your mind, the tones come back. For her, the tones are still a sign that she's attained some mental quiet. She's paying attention to what is here, even if the sound that she's actually listening to is just the brain's song of grief for what is gone.
So that was The Sound of Silence by Gregory Warner. It's a beautiful piece. And what I love about it in particular is I know Gregory Warner's work from NPR. He was a longtime foreign journalist, did Rough Translation, the NPR podcast. And this allows you to get a different side of what he can create.
That is so important to us to give, you know, we want to give brand new producers an opportunity to do something, but also to give more experienced people the opportunity to do something else than they usually do. And we felt that with Gregory, too.
I mean, he is a masterful storyteller at all durations, but we really felt like he could get, you know, a little more personal with this and bring his like signature NPR style to this little flux work. And it's just so beautiful.
Yeah.
Yeah. So let's play another piece. This is from Circuit No. 2, and the theme is Listening With. Anne, can you describe this theme and how you came to it?
Oh, yeah. We were inspired by the film 32 Sounds by the wonderful filmmaker Sam Green. And in that film is a scene with Anaya Lockwood, who's this... very accomplished field recordist, sound designer, composer, sound experimentalists. And she has this theory of listening with the world instead of listening to the world or at the world.
So we grabbed that theme from Sam's film and invited producers to draw from that theme of listening with as they tell a story and also to think about everyday sounds in their environments.
And so what's this piece that we're going to listen to from this circuit?
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in the AudioFlux stories?
Stay tuned. And we're back with Julie Shapiro.
All right. So I have another flux work ready for you. This one is from Circuit Four. The theme was firsts or first times. Our partner was Jason Reynolds, who had written a young adult novel about a very special first time. And so we drew from that topic and invite people to tell us about first things or first times. And this is The Ghost on Side B by Caitlin Hale Wood and Alan Gafinski.
OK, I have not heard this one. So let's check it out and we'll talk about it on the other side.
It's on the radio now. Okay, hang tight here. It's five, four, three, two, one, you're off.
It's 2001. I'm 16, maybe 15, and I'm sitting on my bedroom floor in front of my ancient clunky stereo listening to my CD of the original Broadway cast recording of the 1990s hit musical Rent. I'm always listening to Rent. I'm always listening to Rent. Broadway stars fill my ears with lyrics of Bohemia.
I want to get out of the suburbs and make art and be a lesbian and not wear clothes from Kohl's. I decide that I must record this CD to a tape so I can listen to it in my mom's minivan on the way to school because we don't have a CD player in the car. So I take a blank tape I find in the living room. I put the cassette in my tape deck, I sync it with the start of the CD, and I press record.
The next morning, I hop in the passenger seat. I put the tape in the cassette player and I'm singing along and it's all bouncy and rent, rent, rent, rent, rent. Then without warning, the tape skips to the other side, the B side, and a man's voice comes on.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the three-minute format?
Good morning, 609 with Sid Wood. It's going to be a
And my mother says, where did you get this tape? And I say, what? What is this tape? Did you get this tape from the box in the living room? Who is this man on this tape? And she says, this tape is not a blank tape. This tape is your father. I'd never heard this voice before. Or if I did, I didn't remember anything.
On July 18th, 1987, Sid went to work at the country radio station where he was a DJ and then did not come home. I was two. He was 40. It was a heart attack. But here he was. Sid Wood on country 105 WFMB like he'd been hiding in the airwaves all along. Hearing my dad for the first time didn't feel like looking at a photograph. It felt like touch.
Tiny spools with reels of magnetic tape coiled into a plastic cassette. This was a portal.
There you are.
Here I am, at a sonic axis of space and time.
Nice to meet you. Wow, that is so good.
I often have to breathe a little bit after it ends before I can really talk. Yeah, this one, well, I'm actually curious, what's your first impression coming out of it?
My first thing is that there's so many hours of my recorded voice in the world. And I think about this a lot with my kids and how I don't have a lot of the previous generation, you know, of the sound of their voice or even photographs of them and how much more kids will have. And how rare and special this is to have this thing, especially radio recorded onto a tape is really something else.
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Chapter 6: How do the AudioFlux stories reflect personal experiences?
Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.
Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.
Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.
Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.
Daddy
So this one, like, you know, any parent who hears this just kind of loses it.
Yeah. Relatable. I mean, yeah, it's very relatable for anyone who's lived with kids learning language. Yeah.
You just miss those sounds. There's a lot of stuff that's documented. There's so many pictures. But I really do miss the sound. You know, the personalities that, you know, that, you know, there's still something there in, you know, my 19 year olds, but like, you know, express through that, the, the squeeze box of that tiny little voice, you know what I mean?
It's like, it's just something I actually, I miss it. I miss a lot.
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