An audio logo for my podcast

My Dutch news podcast used to run straight from one story to the next, and when I was half listening, I’d miss the change. Now a cue marks every break, and a short theme opens and closes the show.

Finding a sound

An AI coding agent first built every sound in code, with numpy. Even a cello came out robotic, so the agent switched to the recorded instruments in Logic Pro on my Mac. The Rhodes stayed, with a soft kick, real hi-hats and a glint of glass bells.

A leitmotif

Every instrument still sat on the same major chord. The cues needed one idea to vary, and the Wilhelmus, the Dutch national anthem, came to mind first. It’s on the nose for a Dutch news show, which was the point: a jolt to knock the model out of its default.

I didn’t want the listener to hear the anthem plod along as written. It was only a jumping-off point, so I tried it backwards, over jazzier chords. After a few rounds of listening, that sounded right.

Mood

The pipeline tags each story hard news or light, and each kind has four cues that take turns. Two rules sit on top:

• No repeats until the whole pool has played.
• No shared notes with the break before, themes included.

It also judges the day’s mood. After a disaster, the show opens on a slower, darker theme:

After the first episode

Hearing the set between real stories led to two fixes.

Fuller openings and closings. The themes grew into short pieces with a loop under the hosts, like NPR’s Up First. The opening is at the top of the page. Here’s the closing:

A stranded breath. The pipeline cut each recording at the next story’s first word, which left the host’s breath stranded before the music. I heard it in the first episode, and the agent moved the cut back to the quiet before the breath:

Where it landed

The final set, without the hosts:

They play between the stories in every episode.