‘Does it move your spirit? Does it stir your soul?’ Radio Lab’s Jad Abumrad on the nuances and power of audio storytelling

March 16, 2026

Jad Abumrad is a Peabody Award-winning audio storyteller and musician who is known for creating shows like Radiolab and More Perfect. Countless modern podcasts can trace their stylistic lineage to Jad: his ear for evocative music and philosophical subjects birthed a podcasting style that has had lasting influence on the American media and political landscapes.

In February, Jad joined SRL’s student producers for a Q&A session ahead of On Our Minds: Road Trip, offering guidance in crafting immersive audio stories and sharing his takes on the risks and potential behind good journalism.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity. You can watch the full, unedited Q&A with Jad Abumrad here.

 

How do you convey emotions such as love through audio?

I think conveying love is about all the moments before you want to convey love, right? It’s in how you build a character, how you built a relationship in a story, so that when you get to that moment where you want a listener to feel that connection, you’ve led us there. Conveying love is actually about leading people step-by-step to those moments. So it’s all the things you do before. Are you writing visually? Are you telling a story that’s vivid? Are you using music in a certain way, are you using sound to pull people into the world? All of that can help to convey the feeling.

 

How do you translate something that is visually hard to describe into immersive audio?

Ask yourself: “How can I use descriptive language to paint?” Literally, think about it as a painter. “How can I use words to be painterly?” And it’s always that thing where if you describe it too precisely, it’s hard to picture. But if you describe it too vaguely, it’s harder to picture. What’s the right level of detail to make somebody really picture it in their mind? 

For that, you just have to write it and read it to somebody, and watch their eyes. Watch how they’re listening. You can tell. If their eyes kind of get a little wider, they’re getting it. Or if they look at you with zero emotion, then you’re like, hmm, OK, maybe I need to try again. So trial and error, and use visual language.

Sometimes analogies and metaphors are the best way to actually be precise. Sometimes it’s not about being super produced, but translating how the thing makes you feel, and then finding language for that. But ultimately it’s trial and error.

 

When your focus is an event that already happened, how do you go about rebuilding a world that you can’t go back in time to, or doesn’t exist?

Sound effects can do the job. Sometimes the sounds I find are really literal. And if you think of music and sounds as a spectrum, words are these codes that mean something. Like this thing right here is a table. I’ll call it a table, but it’s not inherently a table, that’s just a word that we all have got together to agree means this thing. So it’s a code, and you have to sort of crack the husk of the code to extract meaning. 

On the other side is music, which is not a code at all. It’s just a feeling. Music doesn’t mean anything. The sad song doesn’t mean sadness, it just is sad. It’s in the body. But there’s all this middle ground between bodied sound and encoded sound. 

Try to find sounds that are somewhat musical and somewhat like a word. There are all kinds of those kinds of sounds. You’ll know it when you hear it. If you find sounds that are way too literal, those sounds are almost like words and won’t feel quite immersive enough. Immersive sounds give people space where they have to imagine their way into it. So find those noises that are a little bit music-y and a little sound effect-y. That’s always been my plan. You have the time. Dig around until you find those sounds.

 

In a typical production cycle, how many story ideas are explored and developed before one actually makes it to air? How many concepts do you flesh out before you commit to actually publish?

We kill a lot of stories. There’s a lot a murder in our editorial process. I would say you chase 10 stories to get five, maybe chase 10 to get three, sometimes.

Maybe you’re making four or five calls on each one just to see what you got. But you don’t really know if it’s gonna be a good story. And you’re waiting for some surprise and maybe it never happens. Or maybe the story that you thought you had isn’t true. Maybe it is true, but you can’t get access to interview the person that you really need to. Or maybe you can get access, but the person just isn’t ready to tell the story. 

A lot of the time, you’re like “what this is gonna be, I’m not sure.”You’re fumbling around in the dark a bit. And there’s no one there to pat you on the back and say “this is a great story.” You’re flying blind. And that’s okay, too. I feel like so much of this work is about asking “Does it move your spirit? Does it stir your soul in some way?” And if it does, then you grab it and you wrestle with it for days or weeks or months until somebody else can get that feeling too.

 

If you know you need to speak to a type of “expert” for an interview, how do you find the best subject?

It’s just about research. It’s committing to a little extra research than anyone else would do. I’m looking for who’s written about it, looking for who has been quoted. Doing searches in engines tailored towards specific disciplines. I think one of the ways that we get in trouble is we expect that it’s going to be easy to find what’s not. 

Before you go into the research, you have to breathe, slow down your heart rate, and just be like “this is going to take me an hour, two hours, but at the end of that, I’ll have 10 names.” You just have to commit to it. The internet has put everything at our fingertips, which is amazing, but also it means you just have to slow down so that you don’t get seduced by the first thing.

 

If you do get backlash, how do you deal with it? And what advice would you have for students with little to no resources to fight back?

Yeah, that’s a hard one.  I wish I could be super sunny and optimistic, but right now we’re in a situation where some of the constitutional protections that journalists used to have are being eroded. All I can say is, we all need courage. We often have to have the courage and the spine to do the work. With politics, I would say the best thing you can do is to be humble and to push beyond your own easy assumptions about the world. Look at the thing from all perspectives as best as you can, and then stand up for what’s right. 

Whatever it is that gives you a feeling of being brave, whether it’s a song, or whether it is a certain group of people, lean into it. And then just be brave. 

 

How do you decide when a risk is worth taking?

I do think you have to be strategic. There might be risks where you need to live to fight another day, so to speak. And that’s a thing that you’d have to gauge on a case-by-case basis – but I worry that if I tell you to be too strategic, that sacrifices a bigger thing. 

All risk is unreasonable, right? There’s a reason to not do everything. I think you have to reframe what it means for it to be “worth it.” Does it mean like you’re going to see someone get put in jail or you’re going to see a situation change? You might. But look at all the reporting on Gaza, right? Did that change anything? No, it didn’t change a damn thing. But was it worth it? I would say yes. Your work may not have the impact that you want right now, but it could have an impact later. And that’s the only way that this world changes, right?