Pushing the Edge of Sound
On Air Fest looks outside the podcast world to highlight the artistry of audio.
There are a lot of ways to frame a podcast conference or festival. Some are constructed around legacy media, with an emphasis on journalism. Others are constructed around indie media, with an emphasis on fans and personalities. Some are about fiction, or non-fiction, or education. On Air Fest is built around sound.
“We hedge against calling a ‘podcast festival’ because we think we can transcend podcasts a little bit. We always think about it in terms of story, and creativity, and people, and big ideas with a heavy emphasis on audio storytelling,” Scott Newman, creator of On Air Fest and founder and creative director of work x work, the storytelling and branding agency behind the festival, told me.
Conversations about podcasting don’t generally focus on the medium of sound; they focus instead on materials used to make a show. In narrative nonfiction podcasts, the materials are text, music, and tape (interview, scene, ambient noise, etc.). Interview or conversation podcasts use spoken word and sometimes music. Scripted fiction podcasts generally use text, music, and sound effects. It’s a subtle but important difference.
But for all its talk of sound, sound isn’t even the main focus at On Air Fest. “We’re thinking about sound as a mechanism for talking about culture more broadly,” Jemma Rose Brown, senior producer of work x work and On Air Fest, told me.
At last year’s Werk It!, WNYC’s festival for woman and nonbinary podcast makers, I saw a short talk by By the Book host Kristen Meinzer in which she discussed the need to find new inspiration in podcasting. In short, she argued that while public radio is great, audio makers need to model their shows off of other media. A key part of her argument was that podcasters have already tapped the public radio market, and if we want to find new listeners, we need to emulate the kind of media that potential listeners like most.
That’s a great way to look at it if you’re optimizing for listenership, but I don’t think we should always strive toward audience growth. Too often, audience growth is the default outcome we optimize for, and it raises the stakes of risk-taking to an unmanageable height. If the aim is to grow, then it makes sense to model yourself after a blockbuster success. So what if there were a different aim?
I wrote a reaction to this talk in the Bello Collective newsletter, including my desire “to see more people on stage who optimize for artistry, not audience growth. I want to see more people who drive toward impact instead of engagements. We can’t create a fertile landscape for experimentation if industry leaders consistently emphasize building an audience.”
On Air Fest optimizes for artistry better than any other podcast festival or conference I’ve seen. It situates podcasting not just within the history of radio or journalism, but within the history of sound — the human voice, performance art, cassettes, music, music radio, radio journalism. This opens up the view of both where podcasting came from and where it might go.
“We really want to stand for the creative edges [and] see podcasting recognized and elevated as an art form. We program the festival in similar ways that a film festival might be programmed, or if you think about art critiques. We feel that audio storytelling and podcasting should be thought of in the same way,” Newman told me.
There’s a practical layer to working in sound — the ability to record well, to edit files, to know how and where and when to put music, etc. There is some of that practical, technical information at On Air Fest, such as this year’s talk on “Worldbuilding Through Audio,” and a “conversation on practical sound design for narrative non-fiction“ with Radiolab’s Dylan Keefe and Simon Adler.
But there’s also a philosophical level to making sound work, and that is the primary level on which On Air Fest operates. There’s a lot of mention of the word “art.” There’s an Art Suite, where Love + Radio’s Nick van der Kolk will set up an interactive installation that sounds a lot like Postsecret. There’s a talk called “The Art of the Audio Archive.” There’s a conversation in which Tina Brown, “an advocate for the artist’s journey,” will talk to comedian Rosebud Baker about “cultivating craft and how to sustainably nourish creativity.” Artforum’s editor-in-chief David Velasco will talk with frequent contributor Tobi Haslett about “the history, opportunities and responsibilities facing thinkers today.” Artist duo James & Jerome will debut an excerpt of The Conversationalists, “a piece of theater, a cinematic event, a concert, a radio play, and a story.”
The festival also features the On Air Audio Residency. Two residents get a five-night stay at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, where the festival takes place, $500, a three-day festival pass, a critique with an industry mentor, and the chance to showcase their installation or performance at the festival. According to the website, the residency “empowers storytellers and artists reimagining what an audio artwork can be […] We support projects across poetry, narrative, sculptural, performance, fiction, ambient, interview, documentary or something we’ve never heard before.”
When thinking about how to create the audio residency, the organizers took their cues from the art world. Brown told me, “We want to create a cultural event that really provides more opportunities than what already exist in the audio space. […] There’s a lot of residencies out there that support musicians, visual artists, but not so much folks who do really experimental work in sound.”
This brings us to a challenge podcast conferences and festivals must confront: how to elevate new voices while also bringing in popular podcasters who have a lot of wisdom to share (and attract a bigger audience). Newman and Brown addressed this in part by focusing on how they paired speakers and shows. For example, Ashley C. Ford, a celebrated writer and the host of the BuzzFeed News video series Profile, will perform an episode of the indie podcast Animal Meditations. “That’s a really fun way to move that show into bigger prominence. We try to make bookings that will shine a spotlight on smaller shows, smaller producers, in that way,” Brown told me. “Elevating new voices is part of the joy of our job.”
Brown and Newman achieve this mission in part by going out to performance art and music shows in New York to find new talent. “Last year, we went to a house show of an artist named Jerome Ellis, and then we were able to have a piece recorded by him for our podcast [Last Sounds of the Day] that was distributed to all of the hotel guests. And we’re going to be working with him again this year,” Brown said.
Last year, the festival gave people in the music industry a lot of space, focusing on music makers for one of the three days. This year, they’re weaving music throughout; for example, they’ve programmed a talk titled “New Trends in Music” between performances by van der Kolk and Omari Soulfinger, one of the On Air residents. There are still distinctions between the days, but they’re more subtle, with Friday focusing on podcasts, Saturday highlighting performances, and Sunday focusing on the culture of audio.
Along with finding current sound-makers, the festival aims to draw in an audience of makers outside of the audio world. “We’re very interested in helping artists from other mediums activate audio. So how are filmmakers potentially using audio, sound, podcasting, to tell their stories. Artists, visual artists, designers, even chefs and food?” Newman said.
Part of the beauty of podcasting is that podcast makers come from all different disciplines. There are documentary filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, radio journalists, print writers, just to name a few. But these experiences too often get lost once we’re talking about someone’s podcast. All that other-media work might have helped them get to podcasting and make their podcast podcast so good, but now they’re just a podcaster. In focusing on the medium of sound, On Air Fest seems to be breaking down the walls between media and saying, Sound can be part of a sculpture. Sound can be part of a symphony. Sound isn’t just the page a word is printed on; sound is the word itself.
“Like any good artistic medium, I think we need to challenge the convention,” Newman said. Later in our conversation, he put it another way: “We’re not really interested in what everyone’s doing. We’re interested in what’s next.”
The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.
Subscribe to the Bello Collective weekly newsletter for more stories, podcast recommendations, audio industry news, and more. Support our work and join our community by becoming a member.
