The reservoir, not the treadmill
Far Wide Radio is built to be re-aired, not to be fed. That single programming rule decided nearly everything else about it.
Most audio projects are treadmills. You publish weekly, the archive becomes backlog, and everything you made six months ago is functionally gone. The rule we programmed Far Wide Radio against is the opposite one: the reservoir, not the treadmill. Every program is built to be aired again.
This is not a scheduling preference. It changes what a program has to be.
A treadmill episode can be topical, can assume you heard last week’s, can be slightly under-made because next week will cover for it. A reservoir program cannot lean on any of that. It has to work cold, on a listener who arrives with no context, at an arbitrary point in the future. So it gets made once, properly, and then it sits there being available.
The first collection, Before Birth, is three programs of roughly two hours each. That length is a consequence of the rule rather than an ambition. If a program is going to be re-aired indefinitely, the economics of making it change: the fixed cost of producing one is amortised over an unbounded number of airings, so it is worth spending far more on each than a weekly schedule could ever justify. Two hours stops being extravagant and starts being obvious.
The material is sonification — James Webb Space Telescope and allied data, tuned into hearing. The premise underneath the collection is that most of this light has been travelling longer than the Earth has existed. These are not compositions about space. They are the data’s own shapes, made audible.
What we did not anticipate is how much the rule would protect the work from us. A treadmill generates pressure to ship something. A reservoir generates pressure to make the thing good enough to keep. Only one of those pressures points in a direction we actually wanted to go.