We Do It For the Ears, Right?
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This is Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling. The Dreams.

We do it for the ears, right? We make podcasts and radio stories for a listener's ears. Yes, we make these things for our listeners' hearts and minds, for community, for the democracy. There are many reasons to tell stories in sound. But my hope is, and I think I can speak for PRX and Transom, the sponsors of Sound School, our hope is that regardless of motivation, audio storytellers have a listener's ears in mind as they write and produce work.

that they're creative in a way that's pleasing and ear-catching to listen to. Like this BBC documentary, first broadcast in 1964. I'm being followed and pursued by something. And I could feel that there was somebody behind. I was running and I was being chased. I'm running down the street, into a house, through the house. Down the stairs. Out the back. I was being chased. Faster and faster. And I ran for all I was worth. My clothes were dragging me back.

I was running away. I was running. And I run. So I run along the corridor and I run up the stairs. I keep running up these stairs and round the corner. I sometimes run down the stairs into the corridor and I keep running and running and running. My legs wouldn't go quick enough. I couldn't get my breath to call out. I was running away. I was running very, very fast.

Delia Darbyshire and Barry Bermage made this piece. Barry recorded the interviews. Delia assembled the music and sound design.

You might know Delia's work. She composed the theme to Doctor Who. She was highly regarded for her studio creations. She manipulated sound and tape and wrote music for the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. That's an experimental group of producers charged with creating sound effects and original music for BBC Radio and Television. The workshop operated for 40 years, from 1958 to 1998.

These excerpts we're listening to come from a series of four programs called Inventions for Radio, which, a bit ironically, I stumbled across on YouTube. We're listening to the first of the four programs, The Dreams. The episode was organized into several thematic movements, like running and color. Here's a clip from Falling. Slow twist, head over feet, stretching out.

Increasing in speed. Mouth open wide, but no sound. It's in space. A complete feeling of space and nothingness. Nothingness. Started off by floating. Held up by my garments, which had already held me back. Somehow I started to accelerate.

gather speed and I accelerated more and more and more. My head was down. I was speeding downwards into some great pit, accelerating all the time and increasing in speed, tumbling and falling, no more floating at all, just tumbling and falling and accelerating all the time, faster and faster. I felt as if I was falling forever. Not quickly, but

This meets the test for me. I find The Dreams pleasing to listen to, a kind of soundtrack for sleepwalking. The Northern Echo, a British newspaper, wrote at the time of the original broadcast that the editing was evocative of a dream state and approached poetry.

Now, of course, one person's pleasing and poetry is another person's noise. David Butler, a teacher at the University of Manchester in England, he published a paper for an academic journal in 2019 about inventions for radio. In the article, he says the radiophonic workshop was often criticized for the way they scored many BBC programs. One person called them horrible emanations.

As for the dreams, David Butler says the BBC canvassed listeners about the show, and one person described the piece as a pretentious mess, and someone else called it inane. The Guardian newspaper was equally biting. A reviewer wrote, But it did arrest the ear.

I love that line. Anyway, my guess is it's Delia's dissonant electronic scoring that arrested ears. There's a very large stained glass window through which the sun shines. The window takes up the whole of the wall and it's bright blues and yellows and reds, the colors that you see in churches. The sun shines through and provides the only light. But what the picture is on the window, I don't know. I just have this...

of the colors in it and the sun shining through. All colored. Yeah, that soundtrack, to be sure, it's an acquired taste. But aren't some dreams, many dreams even, aren't they unnerving, unsettling, arresting? How else should Delia have scored this? And my clothes were dragging me back as if I'd been in the water and my clothes were heavy and they're becoming heavier and they're being held by the streams of wind.

As I ran faster, I seemed to battle against it even more. And it seemed more difficult to stay on this edge. It was very dark all the way around and it was a very sharp edge. I knew that if I watched and kept breathing properly, I could keep on the top of this ridge. Then I sort of felt myself falling over the cliff. I was falling. Falling over the cliff. Falling over a cliff.

We've been listening to The Dreams by Delia Darbyshire and Barry Bermage. As I mentioned, it first aired in 1964. I'm not an audio documentary historian, but I always pegged the first mix of sound art with documentary to 1967. That's when Glenn Gould produced the idea of North for the CBC. This piece, The Dreams, it came three years earlier. So I'm curious, what else am I missing?

Listeners out there, can you refer me to pieces with a similar sensibility made before 1964? You can find me at LinkedIn or on X at underscore Rob Rosenthal. Okay, changing gears completely. Sometimes there is nothing more pleasant for a listener's ears than hearing an interviewer really enjoying themselves, being fully present, engaged, responding emotionally in the moment.

Will this excerpt from an interview from an NPR news magazine blow your mind? No. But I just want you to note Michelle Martin's utter surprise and curiosity. And hang on, it takes a minute or so to get to the part I'm talking about.

That's Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto, one of the most difficult ever written. Joseph Hoffman, for whom it was composed, actually refused to perform it. He had smaller hands, which makes it especially challenging and can even risk injury if the pianist plays large chords where the keys are far apart. Hannah Reimann is on a mission to change all this by pushing companies to build more stretto or narrow keyboards.

The latest edition of her International Stretto Piano Festival starts tomorrow, and she told us what set her on this path. Unlike Rachmaninoff, who was 6'6", I'm 5'1", and I can't reach 10 keys. I can easily reach 8 keys. I can sometimes reach 9. If I wanted to play pieces by Rachmaninoff, I would need smaller keys. So did you even know that such a thing existed when you started?

I didn't know until my teacher mentioned Joseph Hoffman. He was actually a colleague of Rachmaninoff's, and he had several pianos made by the Steinway Piano Company because he was diminutive. So I had my Steinway piano rebuilt on my own to have narrower keys. My piano has two keyboards. One is the standard size. It was built in 1900.

And my second keyboard, which I had custom built, they're exchangeable. I can take one out and put the other one in. And the piano sounds the same. That's kind of amazing. It is. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. Why is this not more widely known? I find Michelle's tone not only pleasing, but infectious and so down to earth. I think it's fair to say she's my favorite interviewer on Morning Edition, the NPR news magazine.

Steve Inskeep, another host on Morning Edition, bless him, but damn, I feel like he's constantly in performance mode. By contrast, I don't sense anything theatrical from Michelle. She sounds like she just wants to make contact with another human. Why is this not more widely known? Oh, that's a loaded question. Well, part of the reason is because the piano manufacturing industry would have to take on a massive project to

Manufacturing has been standardized for a product that has thousands of parts. So what's needed is people playing concerts on the piano so that everybody knows that they exist. So are there any leading international concert pianists today who use a stretto piano?

Another loaded question. Well, why is that loaded? Is it a secret? It has been. It's been very hush-hush for many years. How come? I mean, I'm saying that seems so funny that it's a secret. Why is that a secret? It's not like it's cheating, is it? It's not at all. But what I just tried to explain is it will take a lot of time and energy

Michelle Martin with pianist Hannah Ryman on NPR's Morning Edition in May of this year. All right, here we go. I'm switching gears again. Madness. Well, for both of us, let me get it this way. My name is Harold L. Call, and I'm... You're running now. My name is Harold L. Call, and I'm executive director of the Mattachine Society, Inc.,

And your name is? Eric Marcus. Eric Marcus. Okay. Do you have any kind of an affiliation or whatever that I should know about? No, I'm an independent writer working for Harper and Row on a new book, which doesn't have a title yet. It's an oral history of the struggle for gay rights covering the period from 1945 to 1990. And you figure rather prominently in there, so that's why I'm here today to talk to you. Okay, Eric. Well, let's get going.

Interview with Morris Kite, Monday, August 21st, 1989. Location is the home of Morris Kite in Los Angeles, California. Interviewer is Eric Marcus, Tape 1, Side 1. You were talking about areas of oppression and I interrupted you. Universities, education, high schools, textbooks taught that our love was abnormal, deviant, variant.

Interview with Frank Kameny, June 3rd, 1989, Washington, D.C., tape two. We were sick. We were sinners. We were perverts. You have your long litany of pejoratives. There was absolutely nothing whatsoever which anybody heard at any time, anywhere, at all, which was other than negative. Nothing.

Interview conducted at Hal Call's office in downtown San Francisco. Did you think at the time that homosexuality was sick? Was that what the prevailing belief was? Did you believe that then? No. I never believed it, but I know that that was the prevailing attitude among the behavioral scientists. Psychiatrists and...

psychologists alike. And that was the doctrine they were teaching. Barbara Giddings and K. Tobin Lahoosen. At the time the movement started, which was the late 1940s, the early 50s, we were considered sick. People turned to psychiatrists for answers to the question of homosexuality. What causes it? What can we do about it? How can we eliminate it? So the sickness label infected everything that we said and did and made it very difficult for us to have any credibility for anything we said for ourselves.

I realize that a thread running through this episode of Sound School is the idea of pleasing to the ear. Of course, hearing the angst and anger in those voices about their experiences with homophobia is not pleasing. And homophobia is probably not the right way to describe what they experienced. It's much more than that. A damaging diagnosis.

the opinion among psychiatrists in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that LGBTQ people were mentally ill. During my childhood and early adolescence, American psychiatry said that my attraction to other boys was pathological, a disease that required treatment, a disease that could in some cases be cured. The first diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, the DSM-1, was published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952.

It listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance.

That's Eric Marcus. He's the host of Making Gay History. Eric and his team have produced dozens and dozens of episodes about the history of the LGBTQ civil rights movement in the United States. The show draws most of its content from Eric's vast archive of oral history recordings, recordings he made in the late 1980s and 90s, like the interviews we heard in the first clip I played.

Eric, who's a journalist, was commissioned to conduct those interviews for a book initially published as Making History, The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945 to 1990. An updated version with new interviews was renamed Making Gay History. His cassette recordings were eventually digitized by the New York Public Library and the podcast launched in 2016.

I've listened to Making Gay History from time to time over the years, and I have to say the most recent season, season 13, which came out at the end of last year, is maybe the most impressive I've heard.

It's a miniseries of three episodes called "Dismantling a Diagnosis." In essence, it traces the history and impact of the American Psychiatric Association's designation of homosexuality as a mental illness in the DSM. We're releasing this Making Gay History miniseries exactly 50 years after the American Psychiatric Association passed a resolution stating that homosexuality was not a mental illness or sickness.

You're going to hear some of what that madness, the madness of the sickness label, meant for the lives of gay people, how that label fueled the fight for change, and how the legacy of that label and that fight filters into our lives today. What I found so pleasing to the ears about the series is how archive tape was put to work in the telling of the story. I think it stands as an excellent example of how archive recordings can be cleverly presented to the public.

Case notes: Morris Kite, confirmed homosexual, born November 19, 1919 in Comanche County, Texas. Involved with the movement since the 1950s, becoming a key organizer of early protests in Los Angeles, including Barney's Beanery. Universities, education, high schools, textbooks taught that our love was abnormal, deviant, variant.

When I enrolled at Texas Christian University in 1937, being bookish, I right away got a book pass, a stack pass, which was hard to get, precious thing to have. And I rushed to the books to find out more about who I was. And the handful of books I found me called Sixth Sinful Deviant Variant, Aberrant, Abnormal, and so on.

You look yourself up in little sections in the book on abnormal psychology. And it's me they're talking about, but it's not me at all. What did they say?

It was very clinical. It didn't speak of love. It didn't have very much humanity to it. They were talking about some kind of condition, an alien condition that was a departure from the norm. And it was something strange and it was something odd. And it was possibly treatable, possibly not. Case notes, Hal Call, pornographer and homosexual.

Born September 1917, Grundy County, Missouri. Resided in San Francisco. Keen proponent of sexual liberation. There were things by Dr. Albert Ellis and those psychologists and behavioral scientists and therapists, you know, of that era. Who were very critical of gays. They were both of them, yes. But gay people bought those books. Well, yeah, I had to buy them and read them because we had to see what the sons of bitches were saying about us.

what we had to fight against. You see? That's the way we knew. One book on abnormal psychology was 950 pages, and at least half those pages had to do with us. Could you imagine anyone in the world being so clever as to write 450 pages of drivel, shit, nonsense, pseudoscience?

Religion called education. Could you imagine? 450 pages of case history. Interviewed Mr. X, a 31-year-old bachelor, celibate person, obviously abnormal, polymorphous, perverse, schizophrenic, with strong homosexual tendencies, very strong mother, weak father, and on and on and on, and that was 450 pages of that. So that was fairly oppressive, that education.

One aspect of that montage that I found satisfying is the voice saying case notes, then the name of the person who'd been interviewed, followed by notes that may have been written in the therapist's notebook. At first, I didn't know what was happening. Why is he saying that? It's a question that wasn't resolved until the last voice in that series spelled it out.

I like when a kind of sonic theme is introduced but not fully explained. It's a fine line between creating something that's confusing versus intriguing, but I think this maneuver definitely falls on the side of intriguing. A very clever approach.

The other aspect of the recordings I so appreciate is the audio quality. So often, too often really, oral historians paid, at least during this time period, the 1980s and before, they paid little attention to recording quality. They'd often just place a mic or a recorder in the middle of a table in a noisy room like a kitchen. The sound quality, to put it politely, was not good.

Eric, however, made decent recordings. He told me in an email he was working at CBS Television in the 1980s. He was working alongside Jay Kernis, who was one of the people responsible for developing NPR's Morning Edition. Eric asked Jay for his advice on how best to record, and Jay told him to use a Sony TCM-5000 cassette recorder, a workhorse of public radio back in the day.

Eric also used a lav mic, maybe not the best choice, so some of the recordings sound a bit hollow and have noise in the background, but at least Eric tried to get the mic in close. Kudos for that. One more thing to note about the podcast. Eric says at one point in the series, archives are my love language.

I'd say listeners are better off for it. Eric and his team not only draw from his audio library, but other archives as well. And the show seamlessly weaves them together for compelling storytelling, like in this clip from episode two of the miniseries, which takes listeners through the story of how the APA eventually removed the mental illness diagnosis from the DSM in 1973. Act five, you're making me sick.

Since I've joined the gay liberation movement, I've come to an unshakable conclusion. The illness theory of homosexuality is a pack of lies, concocted out of the myths of a patriarchal society for a political purpose. Honolulu, May 1973.

The young man on stage at the APA's annual meeting was Ron Gold, a member of the Gay Activists Alliance, the Gay Liberation Front, and the brand new National Gay Task Force. Psychiatry, dedicated to making sick people well, is the cornerstone of a system of oppression that makes gay people sick. To be viewed as psychologically disturbed in our society is to be thought of and treated as a second-class citizen.

And being a second-class citizen is not good for my mental health. That isn't the worst thing about your diagnosis. The worst thing is that gay people believe it. Nothing makes you sick like believing that you're sick. Take the damning label of sickness away from us. Take us out of your nomenclature.

Work for repeal of the sodomy laws, for civil rights protections for gay people. Most important of all, speak out. You've allowed a handful of homophobes to tell the public what you think. It's up to you now to get on the late night talk shows and write for the news weeklies as they do. You've got to tell the world what you believe, that gay is good.

Ron Gold's plain-spoken, proud, defiant speech brought the voice of gay liberation to the APA debate stage. Seven months after that speech in Honolulu, four and a half years after the Stonewall uprising, ten years after Frank Kameny turned his attention to the psychiatrists, sixteen years after Dr. Hooker presented her landmark study in Chicago, and twenty-three years after the Mattachine Society was founded,

the American Psychiatric Association changed its guidelines in the DSM and, with a stroke of a pen, cured millions of gay people who were no longer ipso facto mentally ill. One of the people who say, and I've had this said to me, that the only reason the psychiatrist made the change was that they were strong-armed by a bunch of gay activists, and in fact it wasn't a true assessment of the feelings of the psychiatrist,

that they were forced into doing it. I wouldn't say that's a fair assessment. I do think that we raised the issue publicly within the association. Frank and I did it, and then others joined us and also did it.

If we hadn't made some noises, I think it would still be locked in committee. I think we moved its work much faster and much further. I would not say it's fair to say that we strong-armed them. That's not fair to the psychiatrists. They are not going to be strong-armed into something. But if they know— There's a time for radical chic, and you could get a certain—you could get ahead on certain radical tactics.

But not when it came to making basic decisions like the Board of Trustees vote to remove us from the DSM manual. They're never totally immune to... I think what really happened is that they knew they were wrong. In their hearts, they knew that this was not right and not fair. And that sooner or later they would have to abandon the old position on homosexuality.

That's from the miniseries Dismantling a Diagnosis. It's season 13 on Making Gay History. You know that old saying, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Well, I would say to you that if anything you heard on the episode today grabbed your ears, you should imitate it. Don't steal it. Just let it inform your thinking on how best to make stories for the ears.

I have one more story to tell you about, The Place That Thaws. It's a six-part series from APTN News. That's the Aboriginal People's Television Network in Canada. They also make podcasts.

Danielle Paradise produced the show. It's about climate change in Resolute Bay and Grease Ford, the most northern communities in Canada, who in the 1950s and later lived through a profoundly disturbing relocation by the Canadian government. Despite the heavy subject matter, the series manages to approach the storytelling in a very laid-back, folksy manner.

Like in this clip, during an interview in a home, when a neighbor just walks in without knocking. The roads are so bad here now, now that most of the good operators resigned or retired. I've heard that in the north people just walk into people's homes. Is that true? Yeah, yeah. You just walk in? When people knock, we think it's the cops.

You can find my thoughts about The Place That Thaws at transom.org. WCAI and Woods Hole graciously lets me use their studios to record my narration, even after I left a mic unplugged one time. It was years ago, but I still feel guilty every time I step into the studio. Genevieve Sponsler and Jay Allison review my scripts. I produce sound school for PRX and Transom. This is Rob Rosenthal. Thanks for listening. From PR.

and transom.org.