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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Now, probably you can tell that I'm not in a professional studio right now. I hope that you can't, but maybe you can, because currently, I'm speaking into a microphone set up in a hotel room and if you're a devoted public radio listener, you might already have heard about the at-home setups that many hosts switch to during the pandemic.

The goal of these closet and bedroom studios is to record high-quality audio and make the listening experience seamless. Because of the hard work of engineers everywhere, the sound of public radio has not changed too much as a result of the pandemic, but the way that all of our environments sound has been dramatically affected at various parts of the pandemic, especially in those early days of stay-at-home orders. I wanted to hear from two other astute listeners on the sounds that have stood out to them during the pandemic.

Brian Lehrer: This is Brian Lehrer, host of The Brian Lehrer Show, which is 10:00 AM to noon Eastern time weekdays on WNYC in New York.

Austin Cross: I'm Austin Cross host of Midday All Things Considered on KPCC in Los Angeles.

[sirens]

Brian: I live near a hospital and occasionally I hear a siren go by in normal times, but in the early days of the pandemic, I was aware of hearing the sirens much more frequently, and it was chilling because I knew what it was. For me, it also eerily reminded me of 911. WNYC was just a few blocks from there in lower Manhattan and many of us evacuated the area on foot. One of my enduring memories from that day is walking uptown and hearing the constant sirens, taking injured people from the scene and the early days of the pandemic reminded me of that.

Another sound I remember from the early days of the pandemic was the incongruously joyous noise of people banging drums and playing other instruments out our windows at seven o'clock every night to thank and celebrate the healthcare workers. I was part of that when one of my apartment windows faces a courtyard that four other buildings also look out on, I played my flute many nights in a row there, and many other neighbors were playing various instruments and it was joyous and mournful at the same time, and I will never forget those sounds.

Melissa: Both Austin and Brian were affected by the sound of silence in their typically bustling cities.

Austin: LA sounds often like heavy traffic. LA sounds like the street life and street vendors. LA sounds like a lot of outdoor gatherings. The weather is great here, so there are a lot of get-togethers and yet all of that went away.

Brian: The eerie quiet, maybe that's lack of sound. The first time I went to Midtown Manhattan after the pandemic started with people staying home, it was very strange to be in Midtown Manhattan, in the middle of the business district, in the middle of the workday for an appointment I had one day and have it be so calm, a calm that masked the turmoil and emergency that it represented.

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Melissa: Amid that silence, both recognized how much the stakes were raised in the relationship between radio hosts and listeners.

Brian: I actually wondered if this is what it was like during World War II, before television, and everybody would huddle around their radios wanting to know what the latest developments were in that different everyday, mass life and death period. Here we were another one. That was really different in anything from all my years hosting radio shows.

Speaker 4: Alight Armies in Normandy, push closer tonight is our immediate objectives. The port of Cherbourg and the railway town of [unintelligible 00:04:27] 10 miles inland. An American flying wedge of parachute troops and infantrymen has cut the main line of German communications to Cherbourg by capturing the town of Ste-Mere-Eglise., 19 miles away, and sweeping on across the main peninsula railway and the highway that runs parallel to it.

Austin: I kind of went in with this, I want to say a wartime mindset, so stick with me on this one, but I love old radio. I love the sound of old radio, the crackle of old radio and something that stood out to me during World War II is that you would be talking to people who were in bunkers. You would be talking to people who are really hunkered down. They can't go outside and they were turning to their radio for all the news to know what was happening on the outside.

[blasting sound]

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Melissa: Austin also has distinct memories of what it sounded like after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. It led crowds of people to emerge from their homes and raised their voices against police brutality.

Austin Cross: You could hear the energy and you knew in the moment that you were experiencing a moment that we would never forget because in all the days and confusion of COVID and masking, there were people who finally had the time to tune in and to think about the lives of other people and the experiences of other people and they got mad and we could see it and we could hear it.

[chants]

Melissa: Today, both Brian and Austin say that the sounds of New York City and Los Angeles have largely returned to normal for better or worse. Car horns sound out across the downtown streets and tourists buzz across Times Square. Austin did say there are sounds that have yet to return to radio specifically what he sorely misses.

Austin: One thing that is unique to public radio is the shotgun microphone because when you go out into the field if you're going to go to a donut shop like I had before, you take this microphone and it's directional, you could point it at a thing and you would hear what that thing sounds so if somebody's mixing the dough, you hear the dough sloughing. That was one of the great things about being in person and being able to be out and about and about sound collection, in general, trying to build that soundscape that I really hope returns.

Melissa: Our thanks to Austin Cross from KPCC and Brian Lehrer from WNYC for speaking with us.

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