Alfred Hitchcock said that every scene needs a metaphorical bomb under the table, so the viewer feels the tension of what could happen. That’s the conflict, the problem we present in each episode, the reason the episode needs to exist. But sound design—adding music and maybe even sound effects—gives us the ability to be brazen or subtle, to foreshadow what’s coming, or even surprise and delight our listeners.

So how do we use conflict to hook new listeners and convince them to stay with us?

We’re including two episodes in this week’s module because we wanted to share with you two very different approaches to using sound design to respond to two different kinds of challenges.

Let’s start with Rage Road, which was a season 2 episode that our Kasama Collective trainees Clara Smith pitched to us. The episode is about the open streets movement that happened in Brooklyn during the pandemic, but it was also a very personal story for Clara.

We’ve talked a lot about putting the conflict up front, dropping our audience right into the action, and from there drawing them deeper into the story, which is the approach we took with this episode. But it’s not where we started. Clara had written a script about the open streets movement that came about in response to traffic-related deaths, but when she read the script to our team, it was clear that something was missing. There was no urgency and tension—even though the topic was clearly an important one that meant a lot to Clara.

It wasn’t until we started asking Clara why she cared so much about this story that she told us about the angry driver who tried to run her off the road. She hadn’t realized how important that anecdote was until she saw how our reaction to that story. We were immediately engaged. We wanted to know how she responded in the moment, and how it changed her. It was the conflict that the episode script had been lacking. We learned that it was really that moment that made Clara so passionate about getting involved with the open streets project, the thing that made this bigger topic personal both to her and to listeners.

From that point on, the episode came alive. We knew we’d put that conflict up front—but we also knew we had to be careful, because that moment had the potential of feeling traumatic. At the time, it was traumatic for Clara. She could have died. The experience shook her up enough that many months later she was still thinking about it as she was creating this episode.

Samantha Skinner was the audio editor on that episode, and we talked a lot about how to do this well. Where we landed was to open with my own story about a bike incident that wasn’t quite so clear cut about who was at fault. The story raised one of the central questions we were exploring in this episode, of what it means to create streets that are safe not just for cars, but people.

Then we transitioned to Clara’s story, but instead of continuing with the suspenseful serious tone that you hear reflected in that initial scene, we made a conscious decision to bring humor into the story with music and sound effects.

We wanted to let our listeners know that yes, we were dealing with some serious stuff in this episode, but we would take care of them, and would even make the experience enjoyable. We went over-the-top in some moments, like when we used the clown horn to bleep out swearing, and circus music during the part where we talked about the police force’s attempts to manage Brooklyn’s open streets.

Returning to the principles of design we mentioned in this week’s audio tutorial, we used contrast in music choices to alternate between playful and serious, both to give our listeners some reprieve and to highlight the serious moments, so we could make sure our listeners were paying attention when it mattered most.

We also used contrast by recording an actual soundscape of Barry Street, so that we could bring listeners inside the setting and give them a break from the intensity. Here’s Clara talking about that recording:

So let’s talk about another, slightly different approach to sound design that had very different challenges.

Everyday Magic is also a sound-rich episode with a lot of different music and sound effects—but unlike Rage Road, the conflict isn’t dramatic. The story is a quieter one. It’s a series of stories within a story, where the arc of each narrative is the journey to beauty from loss. Because this episode is at its heart about the everyday magic of being present and appreciating the beauty of both the natural and creative world, we thought a lot about creating a soundscape and soundtrack that would reflect those feelings. We wanted the experience of listening to feel like its own everyday magic for our listeners. But we were also working with a lot of different voices and stories, so one of the main challenges was figuring out how to ground the listener in the story so they wouldn’t get lost. We also had the added challenge of working with interview tape was less-than-ideal audio quality.

Let’s take a minute to go back to those principles of visual design that apply to sound design as well: hierarchy, repetition, contrast, and alignment.

we used hierarchy to establish the order of the stories, starting with Cathy as the bigger story that would anchor the rest, and then from there introducing our listeners to Meridian’s related story, and then to Eddie’s story, which served as inspiration for Cathy and Meridian, and finally to Karim Wasfi, whose voice isn’t in the episode, but whose story was a key part of what brought resolution to the story’s central conflict for Cathy and Meridian. My own story is relatively minimal in this episode. It’s just there to frame this larger story structure and to let listeners know they’re in the right place.

One of the ways that we grounded listeners with all of these stories was to use contrast and repetition in music. There’s a piece of music you’ll hear whenever Cathy is in Paris or referring back to that time in her life. It’s sort of a Cathy theme song, to cue listeners both to who they’re hearing and the mood that is being evoked.

But there’s also another Cathy piece of music to give her character—and Meridian’s by extension—some contrast. You hear this music when the mood has changed and the characters are starting to make their way toward resolution.

We also used repetition in music as a marker for setting and emotional tone. Each of the different locations and characters has its own sound, and we spent a lot of time choosing music that would capture the emotional tone of each character and scene, but not tip over into being cheesy or saccharine.

Since so much of the conflict in this episode is directly tied to setting, and there are so many different settings—Paris, Washington, D.C., South Carolina, and for a brief moment even Iraq—we wanted to bring those settings to life as much as possible not just through music, but by creating soundscapes that would immerse our listeners. In Paris, you hear the sounds of people moving through a museum. In Iraq, you hear the bombs dropping. In South Carolina you hear the crunch of gravel and spades digging in the dirt. The soundscape we spent the most time on was in D.C., when Meridian has that pivotal moment of facing her own central conflict and finding the beginnings of resolution in an unexpected way.

We thought a lot about how to engage all five senses in our soundscape—not just the obvious ones like footsteps walking on pavement, but children laughing, glasses clinking, the whoosh of a passing subway, the feeling of being anxious or breathing hard or seeing something in a brand new way. We’ve included a video of this scene in this week’s module so you can see where we faded the volume levels in and out, and how many tracks we used to layer all of the sound effects and music you hear in this scene.

We always think a lot about alignment with music, mostly paying attention to what’s happening in the audio when a piece of music starts and stops—or often, fading out music to the moment where we want it to stop. Sometimes in that process you’ll find that alignment happens with a happy accident, like in this moment of Everyday Magic where the acoustic guitar comes into this piece of music right at the point where Meridian starts talking about someone playing a guitar from a balcony above her.

We didn’t notice that guitar when we initially picked that piece of music, but as we were doing the final editing for the episode, we realized that we could shift the music on the track so the guitar came in right at the point where she mentions it. Our happy accident became part of that sound-rich scene.

We also used alignment in this episode to deal with our poor quality audio that had a lot of static and echo. We did a lot of layering music beneath those parts to make them a little easier to listen to, and we made sure that their clips were short enough that our listeners could get a break from them often.

Creative constraints can be frustrating—but they often spark inspiration. I hope you’ll give yourself permission to spend a few minutes conducting our trailer experiment this week, that you give yourself permission to experiment wildly. Set a timer for just fifteen minutes and force yourself to work as fast as you can. Push yourself beyond your usual music choices. Get a little silly with it if you want.

If thinking about contrast, hierarchy, alignment, and repetition feels a little too cerebral, then I encourage you to put that way of thinking about sound design aside for a bit, plop some music on your tracks, and see what happens. Let it be another creative experiment that you give yourself permission to try, and worry about the results later. You may just discover in that process that those principles of design are finding their way into your decisions anyway, and the more you do it, the more intuitive that experiment becomes.