Electromagnetism: 'Radio Lab'

WANT TO KNOW why so many Chinese musicians have perfect pitch? Or how self-deception could be an adaptive trait? Or whether your Iron Maiden tattoo needs a numerical edit?

Only one show will take you there.

Now concluding its brief fourth season, the recurring miniseries WNYC's "Radio Lab" is the brainchild of sonic innovator Jad Abumrad. His highly processed storytelling has yielded the first genuinely distinctive public-radio template since "This American Life."

Thursday, he and esteemed science journalist Robert Krulwich will show a Koshland crowd how they make the magic happen.

» EXPRESS: Your narrative style involves a lot of looping, repetition, multiple voices, etc. It can be pretty jarring.
» ABUMRAD: We get a lot of nastygrams on the e-mail from people who don't like the style. They're, like [adopting kvetchy elderly voice], "Why the noises? Stop stuttering! Why do the people repeat themselves?"

» EXPRESS: And yet trickery serves the story. When you drop a conceptual bomb, there's a blinding flash that effaces whatever comes next — unless you linger on the point.
» ABUMRAD: It is a deeply musical act, this whole thing. One of the things that we do is, when you get to these points where you want to say something that bears repeating or you want to say something that will loom over everything else ... the beats need to change there. It's like meter. In the composerly sense, you create contours and cadences.

» EXPRESS: Jad, you studied music composition at Oberlin. How does that feed into "Radio Lab"?
» ABUMRAD: The thing that I carry forward ... are some of the musique concrete people, the Stockhausen/Xenakis kinds of people, who were trying to create an entirely new way of using sound, where sound had meaning.
» KRULWICH: I wake up every morning humming Stockhausen.

» EXPRESS: The other half of the "Radio Lab" sound is the conversation that unfolds between the two of you.
» KRULWICH: It's also about friendship, in a way. The thing that makes it safe for me is I'm doing it with somebody. And we don't always agree, and we bounce off each other. ... You can walk out into the world much more bravely if you've got somebody who will kick you or will carry on, who understands what you're trying to do.

» EXPRESS: "Radio Lab" seems to be advocating for the mainstreaming of scientific curiosity.
» KRULWICH: We are trying to explore what it's like to be a scientist, not just what they say, but what the experience of having that knowledge or seeking that knowledge does to you — and how it feels and how tentative and how boring and how exciting — and how religious or not or how tolerant or not or how fastidious or not you become.

» Koshland Science Museum, 6th and E streets NW; Thu., 6 p.m., sold out, 202-334-1201. (Judiciary Square/Gallery Place-Chinatown)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photo courtesy WNYC