Silver Podcast Network Silver Sound

In East Lansing, Michigan, an outburst of violence at the local high school, and the discovery of a gun, leads to a community reckoning over school safety, racial equity, and the role of police in schools.
This three-part documentary series asks big questions about school safety, policing, racial equity, and what it’s like to be a teenager in an era of school shootings.
Follow Violence Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Producer and Host: Emily Reeves
Sound Engineer: Cory Choy
Original Theme Music by Regan Sprenkle
Additional Music from Blue Dot Sessions
Cover Art by Cole Witter

In winter 2024, Silver Sound hosted our first-ever Biannual Sonic Dash. This competition gave dozens of audio makers from all over the globe 48 hours to create compelling audio pieces completely from scratch - no preexisting audio allowed. For the inaugural competition, all submissions revolved around a secret theme: 'left turns.'
Silver Sound hosted the finalists and judges of the inaugural Sonic Dash at a special live-feedback-and-winner's-ceremony in the heart of NYC. In this episode, join us as we celebrate the craft of audio storytelling.
Today’s episode features our top three entries: 
3rd Place: Oil World (Amber Devereux and Ross MacFarlane), "When You Hit Anniesland Cross"2nd Place: Sarah Dalgleish and Nic Neves, "The Ocean Line"Grand Prize: Jacki Huntington, "Azcapotzalco"
The next dash will take place in June 2024.

Credits:
Produced and engineered by Christian Cuciniello
Festival Directors: Mark Blumberg, Cory Choy, Emily Reeves

Aisha is running from The Woman In The Blue Hijab. What will happen if they reach the water's edge?

Winner, Tribeca Festival 2023 Independent Audio Fiction

Director's Statement: "I am a Jewish American. Every Passover I am unfortunately compelled to think about the genocide that the government of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people. My religious ancestors were forced to go through tough times and were oppressed because of who they were and what they believed. It breaks my heart that now, today, a government made up of people who identify as Jewish are somehow not learning from and embracing the lessons of Passover, but are instead, unfortunately, themselves oppressing and attacking and dehumanizing. Things seem to be accelerating and getting worse.

I can safely say as a proud Jew that what the Israeli government is doing goes against my moral and religious values.

I strongly believe that art and storytelling are profoundly powerful and important tools in the effort to start to bring understanding, empathy, and hopefully peace to Palestine and Israel."

Series Description: Aisha, a Palestinian girl in Gaza City, longs for freedom and safety - without having to give up her cultural and religious identity to the Israeli-American aid worker that wishes to "save" her. Deep below the surface, in a smuggling tunnel, a new Underground Railroad, she dreams of another path, another way.

This piece could either be standalone or the first in a series. If it were to be a series, it would follow Aisha and her family as they navigate the cultural genocide and human rights violations currently being inflicted on the Palestinian people. They are working on a smuggling tunnel both to get desperately needed basic supplies into Gaza, and to help some families and children leave Gaza - without having to give up their culture and faith. Told via a series of narrated dreams interspersed with non-narrated verite scenes, after the tunnel is collapsed by the IDF, who claim that the tunnel is being used by "terrorists", Aisha's family is trapped and she is forced out to the surface and into a mad dash for her life. Aisha's desire for freedom manifests itself in the literal ability to levitate. She uses her newfound powers to escape, and returns with a vision to help stop the ethnic cleansing and hopefully set Palestine on a course for eventual self-determination and peace.

Credits:
Creator / Director: Cory Choy
Sound Designers: Feyiṣayo Aluko, Cory Choy
Cast: Feyiṣayo Aluko
Associate Producers: Mark Blumberg, Emily Reeves, Harry Bainbridge
Art Director: Zach Shukan

This concept/show is ready for development and Silver is currently seeking creative partners. Contact us at info@silver-nyc.com if you'd like to get involved.

Silver Podcast Network
www.silver-nyc.com/silverpodcastnetwork

When a technocratic society living underground employs eugenics to ensure humanity’s survival on a devastated Earth, a biologist and a software engineer have only one hope of raising a child of their own: upload their fetus to a computer simulation.

Series Description: The Ark is a 10-part scripted audio series about a family formed in the wake of a global calamity, and how their only hope of sticking together lies in a total reconception of their world (figuratively, and literally). It’s a dark, viscerous hard-scifi about grief, hope, parenthood, and survival, and balances theological undertones and solarpunk discourse within the tragic, funny, loving, and brutal moments of family drama.

Nora and Rafael live in a Shelter, one of many underground refugee cities formed in the wake of a global cataclysm that rendered the Earth’s surface uninhabitable, and obliterated all natural life upon it. This scientist duo have tasked themselves with preserving the memory of that nature through an elaborate computer wildlife simulation. They are also expectant parents, and have just received a dire prognosis: the Shelter’s authorities have denied them the right to bring their pregnancy to term, or to ever have another child again.

With their marriage tearing at the seams, they must choose whether to comply and abort the pregnancy to protect their simulation, or risk everything to have their child in secret, that is until an outlandish compromise sets them on a path towards parenthood neither of them are ready for.

Over the course of the season, we follow the couple as they navigate raising a digital child from toddler to teenhood. Nora will struggle to reconcile between her grief, identity as a mother, and idea of what makes a human. Her reluctance to parent her child, named “Han”, leaves Rafael to play single-father while navigating a prickly reacquaintance with his sister Alison, who’s genius skill with computers made Han’s transfer from physical body to digital bytes a reality. Alison has obliged Rafael to return her favor by licensing their simulation to her military employers, a Faustian bargain, but the only way to ensure the processing power to keep his child alive.

We’ll follow Han (they/them) at different stages of childhood and adolescence, navigating latchkey detachment from their parents’ chronic absences, curiosity and danger when Rafael forbids them from exploring ecosystems throughout the sim, and their own ontology as the sole “digital person” in existence. Their world is thrown open when, in the sim, they find a backdoor to the internet, and learn the truth of what happened to the Earth outside. And when Nora admits she cannot accept Han as a real person, Han will find a surrogate mother in Gale Fellows, a kooky, middle-aged web personality who turns out to be the leader of a dangerous doomsday cult preaching the “ascension” of all humanity into the metaverse.


Credits:
Created & Directed by M. Louis Gordon
Written by M. Louis Gordon & Adriana Campoy
Produced by Cory Choy, Harry Bainbridge
Starring Amalia Mark, Sean Edward Evans
Recording Engineer: Tom Fama
Sound Design: M. Louis Gordon, Luke Allen
Music: OGRE Sound
Art Director: Zach Shukan


Silver Podcast Network
www.silver-nyc.com/silverpodcastnetwork

Sophie is the best dang babysitter in Hatfield, New York. Tonight seems like it's going to be a breeze. But there's something different about little Leo Brown…

Series Description: Little kids have been disappearing all over the country. The only thing linking the cases to each other is that all of the kids were watching a popular cartoon show called Dimo Duck when they disappeared.

We’ll meet journalism student Lori Lane, who is trying to prove herself at an internship with an online news outlet -- and who seems to be the only one who has connected the dots. Her bosses have shot down her Dimo Duck investigation (“QUACK QUACK QUACK”), calling it a crazy conspiracy theory. And then, one of her little sister’s babysitting charges goes missing while watching the show.

When Lori goes to talk to her sister, Sophie, something is clearly wrong -- she seems like she’s hiding something. Dimo has said to Sophie: Your sister’s coming, lie to her, and if you don’t, I’ll take another one of your kids. Sophie tells Lori to check teacher Anne Pumphrey.

Anne has been on the case longer than Lori, and she shares some valuable information: kids Sophie’s age have started receiving blackmail App messages from someone claiming to be Dimo Duck himself -- a very warped, terrifying version of Dimo. Anne suspects that her students are at risk as well.

Lori rushes to warn her sister -- but she’s too late. Sophie has disappeared.

Over the first season, we’ll follow Lori as she tries to rescue her sister and build toward a terrifying finale -- Lori’s showdown with... TWIST... Dimo Duck himself. Instead of a human, Dimo is a supernatural being, spawned by the internet, collecting children to his “flock.” Lori sees her sister, but can’t save her -- and watches her follow Dimo into the abyss.

Ultimately, Dimo will lose, but not without a body count. And we will learn something about ourselves, society, and the internet.

Credits:
Producer: Cory Choy
Project Creator/Director: Cory Choy
Associate Producer: Gareth Hobbs
Music: Nico Soffiato, Charlotte Littlehales
Cast: Bailee Bonick, Cole Bonick, Aubrey Scruggs, Joseph Almgren, Vanessa Johansson, Emilio Acosta
Art Director: Zach Shukan


Silver Podcast Network
www.silver-nyc.com/silverpodcastnetwork

ASMR? Murder? Podcasts?! Think Dexter meets Only Murders in the Building and imagine where we could go.

Created by: Cory Choy
Written by: Mary McDonnell
Trailer Cast: Heather Hurst, Mark Blumberg
Trailer Engineer: Owen Patridge
Sound Design and Mix: Silver Sound