Las Vegas, NV (March 8, 2023)—Hot on the heels of final week’s information that podcast listening has reached record-breaking heights after a startling 2022 post-pandemic drop, the third-annual Ambie Awards have been held final night time in Las Vegas. The occasion, introduced by The Podcast Academy, honors “excellence in podcasting and elevate consciousness and standing of podcasts as a singular and private medium for leisure, data, storytelling and expression.”
New York’s Defacto Sound’s long-running Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast received the Best Production and Sound Design Award. Meanwhile, Jake Brennan, Matt Beaudoin, Ryan Spraker and Bryce Kanzer of Boston-based Double Elvis Productions took house the Best Original Score and Music Supervision trophy for his or her work on Disgraceland.
While the overwhelming majority of the 26 award classes give attention to style—Best Comedy Podcast and so forth—solely a handful give attention to precise podcast manufacturing, highlighting writing (fiction and nonfiction) and reporting in addition to the 2 audio-related awards for unique rating/music supervision and manufacturing/sound design.
Created by Defacto Sound—a sound design home that has labored with Tesla, HBO, Discovery and lots of extra—Twenty Thousand Hertz is a podcast centered on the histories of modern-day sounds and the way we expertise them. Hosted by Defacto’s artistic director Dallas Taylor, the present appears to be like at every thing from the origins of the Netflix “Ta-Dum” and Seinfeld’s signature slap-bass riffs, to extra technical matters just like the Loudness Wars and the way NASA communicates with astronauts.
Interviewed for Pro Sound News in 2020, Taylor defined the present’s ethos, noting, “I needed to make one thing that began to carry the enjoyment to sound itself, virtually like a chef’s desk really feel, however for sound, to hopefully get tradition extra in tune and extra aware about their sense of listening to.”
He added that educating the general public about sound and audio advantages each medium, from podcasting to movie, as he defined, “If the business itself—the place we solely have visuals and sounds—nonetheless has a tough time figuring out sound as a very artistic storytelling instrument, then I believe the remainder of the world in all probability nonetheless has a tough time with this.”
Winning the Ambie for Best Original Score and Music Supervision was Double Elvis Productions’ podcast Disgraceland, a long-running true-crime present that appears on the dramatic, typically troubled pasts of musical icons like Led Zeppelin, Sid Vicious, Mac Miller, Chris Brown and others. As the present’s senior producer Matthew Beaudoin instructed Pro Sound News in 2020, “[We are] very a lot centered on, ‘How can we get music to help this narrative that we’re telling? How can we get the music to work in live performance to help that narrative, and make the expertise as immersive as attainable?’”