Listening In

In the Summer of 2008, I decided to finally put together a piece about my mom and her singing. In 2003, she was struck by a massive stroke, which took out her language. My mom’s loss of language rocked us all, especially because she was an acutely verbal person all her life, acing us in [...]

On April 23, 2007, Reid Stowe and Soanya Ahmad set out from New York harbor on an ambitious sailing voyage. Their goal was to sail for 1000 days without touching land, carrying all their provisions with them. Reid and Soanya set out to beat the world record of endurance sailing – sailing without resupply – [...]

Mary Stack is an amazing athlete who has followed her prowess as a lifter all the way to the Beijing 2008 Paralympics, representing the US proudly. I spent the day with her as she went through her workout routine at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. She let me in on her playlist [...]

Every morning on the Space Shuttle, a song is the first thing the astronauts hear. It is played by NASA Mission Control in Houston to rouse the astronauts from sleep. The songs are chosen for the astronauts by their friends and family, and played on days when they have a special job to do – [...]

In this piece, we meet Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethiopian jazz. A pioneering ‘global citizen,’ Astatke became in 1959 the first African to ever attend the famous Berkelee College of Music in Boston. He played with Duke Ellington in the 70s and has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the US since Jim Jarmusch [...]

Indie rocker Kim Deal from the Breeders crooned from the iPod docked in the operating room where Dr. Atul Gawande and his team were performing a thyroidectomy. Wearing something that looks like a shower cap, and booties over my shoes, I felt like another member of Dr. Gawande’s team, which is made up of several [...]

Architect Daniel Libeskind listens to a solid block of uninterrupted music in the morning to start his day. “It’s not something of a luxury, it’s almost a necessity. And it’s not background,” says Libeskind. “I don’t do it as the hustle bustle of domestic life and in the background there’s music, I sit down, when [...]

I went to China to see what kind of musical culture I would find among the migrant workers there. I had heard that there is a floating population of over 100 million migrant workers there, mostly from the south and west, mostly coming to work construction jobs in the booming east coast cities. Every year, [...]

Visual artists listen to music in their studios to get their creative juices flowing, to lose themselves in their world, to focus their energies. Natalie Frank, a great young painter (a mere 27 years old!) let me into her listening process and her creative process in her studio. It turned out to be quite structured [...]

Music is a phenomenal way to control your environment – to make a room “yours”. More and more expectant mothers and fathers who want to make the delivery room feel more like home are bringing their music with them. Birthing clinics are starting to feature iPod docks as standard equipment, and parents come in with [...]

When you go to a major league baseball game these days, it is a highly mediated affair, with video and audio woven seamlessly into the live action. Recently, players have taken to personally selecting their “at-bat” song, that booms through the stadium as they walk out of the dugout and up to the plate. Players [...]

I was watching poker on TV, and I noticed that the players, many of them, had headphones on. I was, like, “Really? You can do that? You can listen to music at the table?” And then I was wondering, “What would a professional player listen to during a high stakes game?” So I went to [...]

In this episode of Listening In, we put out a call to Weekend America listeners: “What is a good song for falling asleep to?” In the conversations that ensued, we heard about many different kinds of songs that worked – it wasn’t all Pachelbel’s Canon and whale songs. I sat with sleep specialist Dr. Gerard [...]

I will be giving a talk at Xerox PARC next week: Active Listening: Social Identity in the New Music Economy BayCHI: March 13, 2007, 7:30PM, George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA The line between music consumer and music maker is blurring; in this middle space are design opportunities to improve the ways [...]

Sketch by Bill Verplank A piece I produced for Studio 360′s Design for the Real World series airs this week: Thinking Outside the Mouse. It features Bill Verplank, a seminal interaction designer who comes out of the tradition of human factors engineering. Bill worked at Xerox in the seventies as part of the team that [...]

A Walkman Busting, iPod Jacking spree in the vast open spaces of Philadelphia’s 30th Street train station, the day after Christmas. Roaming among the crowds of holiday travelers, each tuned to their own holiday music, I tapped into the personal soundtracks of Trevor Keal and David Montañez. Both Trevor and David are Philadelphia natives; their [...]

This October, I got a chance to go to Floyd, Iowa and meet Maurice and Pam Johnson, a fifth-generation husband and wife farm team. I rode with them and their sons, Ben and Andy, while they were bringing in the corn harvest. I went to a field they call Kupers 80, climbed in the cab [...]

Breezewood, PA is the intersection of two interstates, making a small city in what is otherwise the middle of nowhere. I tapped on trucker Fran West’s cab door at 9PM and asked her for an interview, and she waved me off – her chihuahua, Pinky, in hand – but not before inviting me back to [...]

Airing today on Weekend America, my “Listening In” interview with ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes. Dean is now out on the North Face Endurance 50 – he’s running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. I ran with Dean in early September in San Francisco’s Presidio for a solid hour as he prepared for the [...]

Airing on Weekend America, “The Art of the Mix” is look back at the CD Clubs we launched a year ago with Weekend America listeners. The piece focusses on members of one of the clubs, the Penguins. After spending a year together sharing music by mail, members of the Penguins meet each other for the [...]

I met Pete Muncie at Bobby’s Idle Hour on Music Row in Nashville. I had heard that you scratch the surface on just about anybody in Nashville and you’ll find a songwriter, so I wanted to test out how true that was. Pete had worked that whole day as a carpenter before getting up there [...]

Rich Kassirer did a great story about the CD Clubs that were launched by last year’s broadcast of “Pass the CD” on Weekend America. Rich is good friends with Jamie Barth, who joined one of the CD Clubs this year and has been an avid member all year. Check out Modern Acoustic for regular stories [...]

Writer Jennifer Kabat did a great piece for the Adobe Design Center on the potential for interactive technology to stoke public dialogue: The People Will Be Heard: Interactive technology in public spaces. It includes a look at interactive projects I have been involved in at ESI Design, as well as work by Jake Barton, David [...]

“LISTENING IN WITH STEVE GRABLE, TRUCKER: WHAT MAKES A GOOD ROAD SONG?” to air Saturday, July 29, 2006 on Weekend America. Hear the Original Broadcast LOCATION: TA Truckstop, Breezewood, PA – intersection of Interstates 76 and 70 on the old Lincoln Highway, near the Maryland border — In this piece, we’re in the cab with [...]

The CD clubs that were launched by the “Pass the CD” segment on Weekend America are going strong. The idea is that a group of 12 strangers (who met through the radio) share music for a year together. Each month, another member of the club is up – they put together a mix, burn 11 [...]

At his Nashville studio, John Prine and I listen to the recordings that first gave him the idea that he might be able write songs of his own: Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol,” Roger Miller’s “Dang Me” and Hank Williams’ live radio broadcast, “The Health and Happiness Show.” The piece ends with Prine’s [...]

On Saturday, April 8, 2006, my recent “Listening In” interview with John Prine will air on Weekend America. We listened to the recordings that he was listening to when he first got the idea he wanted to make up songs of his own – Mississippi John Hurt, Hank Williams (Sr.), Roger Miller, Bob Dylan. In [...]

“Music and Mardi Gras” begins in New York with Tom Piazza, author of “Why New Orleans Matters,” playing recordings that show us why New Orleans matters to him. Next, we are transported to New Orleans, listening to the same songs with Gregg Stafford on his porch. Stafford is a staunch proponent of New Orleans’ traditional [...]

On commercial music radio, it seems Wolfman Jack has been replaced by just… Jack. Features Bruce “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, who went to Sirius after WCBS’s controversial flip to the Jack format. Gideon D’Arcangelo reports. Original Broadcast

I want to know what you’re listening to. I also want to know when you listen to it, how you found it, what you are listening to it on and, most importantly, why you are listening to it. How does music fit into your life? Why does it move you? I am constantly searching for [...]