Figure 1. Number of Peabody Radio/Podcast Award entries, by media form. 2016 represents the dividing line after which a majority of entrants begin to classify their work as a podcast rather than a radio show. By the author with data compiled by Alex Knapp.

Figure 2. Podcast listening neighborhoods. Each dot represents a popular podcast, and each line how the Apple algorithm recommends other podcasts to that podcast’s listener. The circles identify “true crime neighborhoods” and the rectangle shows the mainstream of the most popular podcasts. Image courtesy of Pacific Content.

Figure 3. A typical obsession podcast, with a listener linked to a host through a perceived intimacy, a host linked to an object through obsession, and a listener therefore linked to the object of obsession vicariously. Diagram by the author.

Figure 4. A surrogate obsession podcast showing how a listener feels intimacy with the host, who vicariously experiences obsession with an obsession object through a surrogate. This double mediation produces what I call “mimetic obsession” in the listener. Diagram by the author.

Figure 5. The pitch contour of Adnan Syed’s first lines from the first Serial episode, “The Alibi.”, with pitch represented logarithmically on the y-axis scale, volume represented by the waveform at the bottom along the x-axis. When Syed says the word “exist,” we see a vocal crack in the form of a drift upward. Decoded using Gentle and Drift. Image by the author.

Figure 6. A graph of Adnan Syed’s vocal cracks, by episode

Figure 7. Spectrograms of the first few minutes of Serial (season one), In the Dark (season one), and This American Life’s “The Right to Remain Silent” episode. Decoded in Izotope RX6. Screen capture by the author.

Figure 8. Spectrograms of the openings of Death in Ice Valley, Lost in Larrimah, and Someone Knows Something. Decoded in Izotope RX6. Screen capture by the author.

Figure 9. Still image from Brendan Baker’s 2021 Reaper tutorial with the Reaper session for Love+ Radio’s “Doing the No-No” session in background. Screen capture by the author.

Figure 10. Still image from Brendan Baker’s Reaper session, dialogue track detail. The colors and segmentation indicate edits and crossfades being formed using many separate raw interviews compiled to create the final track. Screen capture by the author.

Figure 11. Still image from Brendan Baker’s Reaper session, showing relationships between dialogue items (top section), music (middle tracks in orange) and sound effects (lower section in pink).

Mini Digital Audio Workstation, for illustrating podcast mixing. This tool features stem tracks from Love + Radio’s “Doing the No-No,” allowing you to trim dialogue, narration, music and sound effects as you wish, to move them relative to one another, and to adjust their volume and to place in the left/right stereo, then play the result. Programmer: Russell Gillespie. Audio stems courtesy of Love + Radio.

Figure 12. Prosodic measures of the pitch and speaking rate of two versions of Ben on the phone to Erica in The Truth’s “Tape Delay.” The first version of the utterance is what we hear in the beginning of the scene, the second from the supposedly “objective” tape on his phone of that utterance.

Figure 13. A spectrogram of episode 5 of Homecoming, with the waveform minimized. I have identified and labeled 8 separate sections. Decoded in Izotope RX6. Screen capture by the author.

Figure 14. Diagram illustrating radio art and transmission art on the electromagnetic spectrum. Copyright Galen Joseph-Hunter. Image courtesy of Galen Joseph-Hunter and Wave Farm (Acra, NY).

Figure 15. Three still images from the video portion of the web stream of “The Gold Line” by DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult. Images courtesy of the artists.