Jad Abumrad

Jad Nicholas Abumrad (born 18 April 1973) is a Lebanese-American radio host, composer, and producer. He is founder and co-host of the syndicated public radio program Radiolab.

Early life and education

Abumrad was raised in Tennessee where he attended the University School of Nashville and where his father, Naji Abumrad, is a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Abumrad attended Oberlin College, where he studied creative writing and music composition with a special interest in electronic and electroacoustic music, receiving his B.A. in 1995.

Career

Before choosing radio as a career, Abumrad composed film scores.

Abumrad has reported and produced documentaries for a number of local and National Public Radio programs, including On the Media, PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Democracy Now!, and WNYC's "24 Hours at the Edge of Ground Zero".

Since 2005, Abumrad has produced and co-hosted the nationally syndicated program Radiolab. His background in music has influenced the sound of Radiolab. The 14 December 2009 Radiolab episode In C includes a musical piece by Abumrad remixing the Terry Riley composition In C.

Radiolab

Radiolab is a radio program produced by WNYC, a public radio station in New York City, and broadcast on public radio stations in the United States. The show is nationally syndicated and is available as a podcast. In 2008, Radiolab began offering live shows.

Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show focuses on topics of a scientific and philosophical nature. The show attempts to approach broad, difficult topics such as "time" and "morality" in an accessible and light-hearted manner and with a distinctive audio production style.

Radiolab received a 2007 National Academies Communication Award "for their imaginative use of radio to make science accessible to broad audiences". The program has received two Peabody Awards; first in 2010 and again in 2014. In 2011, Abumrad received the MacArthur grant.

Although Radiolab is a "limited run series", 12 seasons of five to ten episodes each have been produced. The thirteenth season is currently airing.

History

Having majored in experimental music composition and production at Oberlin College, Jad Abumrad worked for New York City Pacifica affiliate WBAI before landing a job freelancing for National Public Radio (NPR). In 2002 he produced a series of post-9/11 radio documentaries called 24 Hours at the Edge of Ground Zero, and regularly contributed material to Studio 360, both for WNYC. The first weekly episodes of Radiolab aired in May 2002, and each compiled two hours worth of NPR stories around a particular theme with between-story commentary from Jad Abumrad. These themes were not necessarily science-related, but tackled issues such as the death penalty, religious fundamentalism and politics in Africa and the Middle East.

Short film

A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. Although no consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits". The term featurette originally applied to a film longer than a short subject, but shorter than a standard feature film.

The increasingly rare term short subject means approximately the same thing. An industry term, it carries more of an assumption that the film is shown as part of a presentation along with a feature film. Short is an abbreviation for either term. Short films are often screened at local, national, or international film festivals and made by independent filmmakers for non profit, either with a low budget or no budget at all. They are usually funded by film grants, non profit organizations, sponsor, or personal funds. Short films are generally used by filmmakers to gain experience and/or prove their talent in order to gain funding for future films from private investors, entertainment companies, or film studios.

National Geographic

National Geographic or NatGeo may refer to:

See also

In C

In C is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964 for an indefinite number of performers. He suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work". A series of short melodic fragments, In C is a response to the abstract academic serialist techniques devised by Schoenberg that dominated Western university composers for many decades and is often cited as the first minimalist composition (though La Monte Young's drone compositions preceded it by several years, In C had a greater impact on public consciousness).

Technique

In C consists of 53 short, numbered musical phrases, lasting from half a beat to 32 beats; each phrase may be repeated an arbitrary number of times. Each musician has control over which phrase they play: players are encouraged to play the phrases starting at different times, even if they are playing the same phrase. In this way, although the melodic content of each part is predetermined, In C has elements of aleatoric music to it. The performance directions state that the musical ensemble should try to stay within two to three phrases of each other. The phrases must be played in order, although some may be skipped. As detailed in some editions of the score, it is customary for one musician ("traditionally... a beautiful girl," Riley notes in the score) to play the note C in repeated eighth notes, typically on a piano or pitched-percussion instrument (e.g. marimba). This functions as a metronome and is referred to as "The Pulse". Steve Reich introduced the idea of a rhythmic pulse to Riley, who accepted it, thus radically altering the original composition by Riley which had no rhythm.