In the past year, Brittain Fellow Lauren Neefe (2014-present), librarian Alison Valk, and a cohort of Georgia Tech undergraduates have been working on a podcast called 4:33@Tech. Inspired at once by WNYC’s Radiolab, Lauren Neefe’s multimodal composition class on sound, and the Georgia Tech community, the podcast focuses on the soundscape of Georgia Tech. The 4:33 in the title references John Cage’s famous silent musical piece, in which a pianist sits at a piano and does not play music for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. In the absence of intentional musical sound, ambient sounds the audience otherwise wouldn’t notice take center stage.
The two inaugural efforts of the Brittain Fellow podcast committee, 4:33@Tech and Flash Readings. Georgia Tech student Yongmin Kim designed the logos for both podcasts.
Each episode features an onomatopoetic title; the first episode, “Drone,” which explores a Tech student’s drone and a Tech professor’s bees, will soon be followed by “Crunch,” which will combine the sounds of garbage and recycling with the sounds of football culture on game day. Another yet-to-be-named episode will feature an interview with renowned podcaster Jad Abumrad, founder and co-host of Radiolab, who recently visited Tech’s campus.
During her tenure as a Brittain Fellow, Rebecca Weaver (2012-2015) began a series of podcast interviews hosted on TECHStyle. Starting this year, TECHStyle hosts Flash Readings, and 4:33 can be found at this site. TECHStyle will feature added content related to the production of 4:33 and document the ways undergraduates, postdoctoral fellows, and librarians are working together to produce this engaging podcast.
4:33@Tech officially launched earlier this fall at an event on the roof garden of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, the site at which Valk and Neefe first began recording sounds for the first episode.
Brittain Fellow Lauren Neefe (2014-present) clicks the button to officially launch 4:33@Tech. Podcast co-founder Alison Valk holds the laptop.
