WNYC's Radiolab is breaking new ground with its innovative audio storytelling, with each episode tackling sprawling topics such as music or morality from various scientific and anecdotal angles. Co-hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the radio program is broadcast regularly on NPR stations; its newest season — with episodes on lies, laughter, and more — can be heard either on the air or online. Boldtype's Toby Warner spoke with Abumrad about how telling a story is like composing music, what makes for a good science read, and why Orson Welles was an evil genius.

Boldtype: You have a background in musical composition. How has that influenced your approach to storytelling?

Jad Abumrad: I got into storytelling very much through music, not through journalism. I was never good as a pure composer, but doing it in the service of storytelling somehow makes it so much easier. When you've got hours and hours of raw tape, it becomes a compositional exercise. To figure out what the story is, you try to approach it in terms of sound and texture. With musical composition, you want certain parts to be dense and others to be sparse. You're thinking in terms of syncopation, beats, and rhythms. It's very gestural, and it applies almost exactly to storytelling. Sometimes, you feel like a story is too regular, too metronomic. You can change a story's "time signature," so to speak, by creating little surprises and altering the rhythms on a micro level.

BT: What are some of your favorite stories told with sound?

JA: Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds radio adaptation would be one. There are particular This American Life stories that get stuck in my head — like that one about the best answering-machine message ever, about the mythology of a hilarious voicemail that got forwarded and forwarded and forwarded. It's one of those stories that's about nothing, but it's awesome. Through pure happenstance, I listened to part of Wagner's Ring cycle for a documentary I made a while back. I can't say I'd actually listen to the whole thing, but I was really into what he was trying to do musically with storytelling. I also think film composers as a group understand something about storytelling at a very basic level that a lot of storytellers miss.

BT: You wrote about film scores recently for the Morning News. What do you think film composers get right about storytelling?

JA: I love the way film composers use leitmotif as a way to tie the music to the characters, moods, and objects within the film. A character walks onto the screen, and they have their own motif. So Toby walks in, and he's got a "dun-dun-duh-dah"; then as you begin to change emotionally and mentally, so does your leitmotif. It'll start to invert and retrograde.

BT: Everyone must secretly imagine what it would be like to have their own theme music.

JA: What would your theme be?

BT: Maybe a nice drum break.

JA: Like a "funky drummer" kind of thing?

BT: Sure.

JA: That works.

BT: You mentioned The War of the Worlds, which you covered this season in an episode of Radiolab. Welles' broadcast caused mass hysteria when many listeners actually believed that aliens were invading Earth. What do you admire about that famous broadcast?

JA: Stories have very simple, but deeply embedded architectures. The War of the Worlds is a tall tale, but it begins simply with the sense that something's happening. Is that a meteor? Wait, no, it's a spaceship, and the top is unscrewing. There's an alien coming out. Wait, the alien has a heat ray! The step-by-step narration draws you into a completely absurd place, but because it's so careful, you're pulled into a universe that you never would have stepped into yourself. For me, one of the cool things about doing that show on The War of the Worlds was hearing Welles talk about it in retrospect. My sense is that he wasn't quite aware at the time just what he was doing, but then he became very aware of it all later on. As a storyteller, you have to wonder about your own power.

BT: What is it about radio that can draw a listener in?

JA: There's an advantage to radio being an incomplete medium, with only sound. The pictures, which are the most important part of radio storytelling, exist only in your head. If I describe something with enough vivid detail, you can paint that picture yourself. It's an act of co-authorship in a way. I think that there is something about radio that gets into you very deeply. It's a very active medium — you lean forward. Whereas with TV, there's so much coming at you that you lean back. Because radio is just sound, you have to be a part of the experience. Good radio storytellers can exploit the way the images and the ideas enter your head. Welles was a master. You listen to the way he uses his voice as an instrument, and you're like, "God, this guy is an evil genius."

BT: What are you reading now, and what do you want to read next?

JA: I'm reading Persepolis . It just ended up on my desk somehow. I picked it up and was like, "Oh, this is a movie? I've heard of this." It's great. It might actually be a coming-to-comic-books moment for me. I'm a little ashamed that I'm reading the book after the movie came out. I feel like a sucker when that happens. I also read No Country for Old Men after seeing the movie — so I guess I'm "that guy." I just read The Road , and I was about to start What Is the What . I don't read a lot of fiction, though. Mostly, I read books about the brain that I probably wouldn't read if I didn't have to.

BT: What science books would you recommend?

JA: For me, a perfect one is Robert Sapolsky's The Trouble with Testosterone . It's perfect because there's not a lot of hard, statistical data in it — it's purely anecdote-driven, but deeply scientifically informed as well. He goes to the Serengeti, where he's been watching this particular troupe of baboons for about 30 years. He knows what their personalities are, how their society works. He tells these beautiful, heartbreaking stories about their trials and tribulations. They're very human stories. I also read a book recently that wasn't really about science either. It's about Leibniz and Spinoza — The Courtier and the Heretic . Completely fascinating. A friend of mine who was a philosophy major told me that it got everything wrong. I was like, "Of course it did! That's why it's good." How else could it be a page-turner about the most esoteric metaphysics?

BT: What's been your favorite sound on Radiolab?

JA: My favorite sound in the abstract is the knocking on doors, the walking down halls, and the shaking of hands. That kind of thing — that sense of movement, of going somewhere and discovering something. We always embed that into everything. It's becoming kind of a mannerism at this point, but I still love the artifacts of meeting and discovering a person. It's like, "Ooooh, what's behind this door?" On a pure audio-geek level, though, I'm in love with the low-pass filter. It's a very simple EQ filter that strips out all of the high end, and it creates this real Loch Ness Monster sound. For me, it's like the sound of the subconscious. I like to run everything through it.

BT: Every episode of Radiolab is titled after its central theme — "Deception," "Time," "Pop Music." How do you choose an idea and then go about building a show around it?

JA: Our shows seem to evolve in a Darwinian process, where the science and the story mesh together until you have two completely opposite explorations of the same thing. To give you an example from one of our latest shows, we had this crazy-ass story of a con woman running around New Orleans destroying people's lives. It was just a really interesting, human story. Her story raised an interesting question: "What makes someone act that way?" Well, maybe it's their anatomy. So we found a scientist to take us inside the brain of pathological liars. When you put the two together, you have a humanistic, yet empirical exploration of the world around you. The human side of things doesn't collapse everything into an answer. It gives you a sense of wonder and infinity. At the same time, the science gets you out of that pot-smoking-in-your-dorm-room kind of thing. When you put both angles together, and they vibrate, you can say, "That could be a show."

BT: How important is the potential for interesting sound when you're choosing your stories?

JA: You know, it used to be the first or second thing I would ask about a story, but now maybe it's number... four. These days, I find myself wondering, "Does the story have a surprise? Does it have a character who's interesting? Does it have unexpected turns? Does it have an idea?" If you answer those three to four questions to your satisfaction, then you ask, "Well, does it make good radio?" The fourth question will negate the first three. At the same time, we don't do sound for its own sake so much anymore. Densely textured radio is just a part of the grammar of the show now. Questions of sound and texture are like the background to everything. They're always there, but they're never something that we stare at.

BT: A big part of Radiolab is the conversation between you and your co-host, Robert Krulwich. It's very casual, and it sounds like you guys are having fun, but how much of that is scripted?

JA: There's a lot of overlap between us, but I'm more the composer, and he's more the jazz improviser. Put me in a cave, and I'll order things until they're exquisitely composed and lifeless. If he's left in a cave, he'll vamp his way into a frenzy with tons of energy, but not a lot of structure. We both do everything, but there's always a tension between having a plan and being able to throw that plan away at any second. You create a story map, but it's like a driving map. I know that I'm going to go north, that I'm going to make a certain number of stops, and that I want to go at a certain speed. You have basic ideas about pace and attitude, certain phrases and story turns you want to use, and you've got your bullet points. You improvise on those and cool things happen — happy mistakes. Then you start to script around the improvised moments, and in the process, you improvise more. It does become very scripted as you stitch in the live elements in post-production. If something bizarre happens in the booth — which it does, often — we'll throw out the outline and just follow it. So it's a tug of war, and a healthy one.

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