I should quite

You're listening to Radio Lab, the podcast from New York Public Radio,

Public Radio, WNYC, and NPR.

Hello, this is Jad from Radio Lab.

While we work on season four of Radio Lab, which we hope to release sometime in the new year,

very soon in the New Year, we thought we would play you some excerpts from a talk that Robert

and I gave at the Apple Store in Soho. They asked us to come talk about the show, and we ended up

talking about the thing that we never actually address explicitly on the air, which is how we use sound,

which we do a lot of on Radio Lab. This is the one time we actually got to talk about it.

About 250 people showed up to hear us. I fired some clips from my laptop. They had this big,

beautiful sound system and a very fancy screen behind us. And we started the whole presentation

with a piece of tape that got stuck in our heads as we were making one of our programs.

It's a little clip that became the basis for the musical language show, and we played it for the crowd.

It happened during an interview with a developmental psychologist by the name of Anne Fernald.

She was talking about how moms talk to their babies,

and she said this thing. Well, you know, I think it's more, we're used to thinking of sounds like

that as being about something, because speech is always about something. But it feels to me

more like touch, where touch isn't about something. If you whack me on the arm in a sudden sharp way, I'm going to be startled,

or a gentle touch has a different effect.

And I think, you know, actually, sound is kind of touch at a distance.

Sound is kind of touch at a distance. For some reason, that phrase just

stayed in the air. Sound is kind of touch at a distance. And it just didn't leave. And I thought,

...