Listen: WBUR's New Music Podcast STYLUS Releases Four-Episode Series

Stylus is a new podcast and radio show produced by WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station and distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. The first four-­episode series premiered on WBUR and has been released for further broadcast through PRX. Through January, we'll be promoting the podcast on iTunes and online here: stylusradio.org/series­1.

Stylus investigates ideas in sound, music, and listening through themed, hour­long programs. We explore each idea through original reporting, essays, storytelling, sound collage, poetry, music, and archival sound.

You can find individual episodes and information below:

- Episode 1: Silence

- Episode 2: Seeing and Illustrating Music

- Episode 3: Songs of the Earth

- Episode 4: The Sound of Science Fiction

Why should people care? This is deeply engaging content-pardon the buzzword-for the new year. Over the course of the series, listeners will walk through great works in classical music, including Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and Feldman's Rothko Chapel. We'll hear absolute quiet in an anechoic chamber, field recordings in an Arizona desert, and "filk" music at a science fiction convention. We'll learn about music and memory, we'll hear poetry and essays about silence, and we'll get a brief history of the waveform. We'll hear stories about important sound people like Sun Ra, Leon Theremin, and John Cage.

Some of our bigger­name voices include Pico Iyer (travel writer), Pauline Oliveros (American composer), Bernie Krause (pioneering bioacoustician), Eric Wahlforss (CTO of Soundcloud), Nicholson Baker (writer) and Richard Brody (columnist for the New Yorker). We feature music by Laurel Halo, Ryoji Ikeda, and some originally scoring by Blevin Blectum. Artwork by Robert Beatty.

How is Stylus different and new? It's a rare format: non­narrated, long­form documentary radio. No single voice leads the show; rather, it draws together many different voices. Stylus is a collaborative production by about a dozen public radio producers from in and around Boston. The program delivers a sound that's new among other arts­and­culture public radio shows, too-variegated, meditative, subtle, unpredictable. Our reference points are Radiolab, music documentaries one might hear on Radio 4, and early NPR.

Where can I find Stylus, and how is it licensed? You can find all episodes of Stylus on iTunes (search Stylus Radio under podcasts or go here), at stylusradio.org, or at prx.org. All work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution­ Non Commerical license, intended for public use.

What's this podcast trend I'm hearing so much about? "According to Edison Research, over about 39m Americans, 15 per cent of the over­12 population, listened to a podcast last month, up from 12 per cent in 2013 and 9 per cent in 2008" (Financial Times). Also see Slate's massive 10th­ anniversary­ of­ the­ podcast issue. We are totally energized by the audio renaissance that seems to have sprung up around This American Life's podcast Serial and see the format as the next broadcast medium for public media makers. The two worlds are converging and we like the idea of something that works well in both.

How was the show created? Stylus began as an independent project in spring of 2013 by producers Conor Gillies and Zack Ezor, who sought to make their ideal radio show: a non­narrated program about listening. Gillies and Ezor made a pilot about "Silence," which eventually became the first full episode of the series. The pilot was chosen for development by WBUR's iLab during the spring of 2014 under the direction of Lisa Tobin, a senior producer at WBUR who served as Stylus's supervising editor.

We're also accepting future show ideas and inquiries at our general email: stylus.wbur@gmail.com.

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