About WATS

The World According to Sound was born out of a mixture of boredom and dissatisfaction, those two great movers of things.

After years in public radio making and mixing stories that all sounded almost exactly the same, we wanted to make a radio show that didn’t tell you a story or what to think: a show that is all about sound instead of language and narrative, where the point isn’t to hook you with a story, or to package up some quirky character you can admire, but to get deep into a sound and play a long, non-narrated stretch so you can really lose yourself. So we made a 90-second podcast for a couple of years. It was great. But we had bigger ideas.

The podcast evolved into an 8-channel, in-person live audio event; during the pandemic this morphed into a communal listening series built for headphones and designed to be listened to at home. Our latest project is Ways of Knowing, a new podcast series dedicated to humanities research and thought.

Chris Hoff began his career in audio as an engineer for public radio and later podcasts. Sam Harnett started as a reporter covering labor and technology. They first met as volunteers at KALW in San Francisco, where they invented games to pass the time like who could put the basketball through the metal triangle rafters of 1970s public school architecture.

Our Mission

We believe intentional, communal listening is a way to reclaim autonomy in a visually dominated world that is increasingly fracturing our attention.