The Sound Designer

Alexander Overington ’10 fell into podcasting through serendipity. After majoring in composition and TIMARA, he began working at public radio station WQXR in New York City, ripping compact discs for the classical music station’s library. While at the station, he cofounded and oversaw a podcast called Meet the Composer, which profiled living composers.

Overington had a lot of leeway to make the show his own. “As the producer and sound designer, I tried as much as I could to edit and feature the composer’s music in such a way that the episode itself was put together as an homage to their style and life,” he says. “Because it’s a show about contemporary classical music, you can add a lot of interesting sound design that’s in dialogue with the narrative.”

The second season of Meet the Composer won a Peabody Award, opening the door for collaborations with bigger names such as Paul Simon. But this success also laid the groundwork for Overington’s own expansive career. He did sound design for WNYC podcasts Dolly Parton’s America and 2 Dope Queens; has engineering credits on albums by Anohni and Damon Albarn; and developed content for Major League Baseball. Overington also composed the seven-second audio logo that’s still heard today before WNYC’s podcasts.

Earlier in his career, he also worked at Radiolab alongside Jad Abumrad ’95; among other things, Overington became technical director for More Perfect, the podcast about the Supreme Court. “When [Radiolab] called and asked me to work with them, it was a ‘pinch-me’ moment,” he says. “Stepping into their office really felt like going home to the TIMARA studios and to Oberlin.”

To this day, Overington keeps finding parallels between his career and college. When he gives a talk, he references a John Cage piece called Williams Mix that he learned about from Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts Tom Lopez ’89. Famously, the score shows in detail how Cage edited the magnetic tape to create the piece. “If you listen back to the piece, and you have the score and you're following along, you can see everything happening,” Overington says. “When I look back at this ten years later [after I saw it in class], it occurs to me that that's exactly what my ProTools sessions look like in podcasts.”

Overington also cites his academic experience at Oberlin as integral to giving him a “really great crash course in collaboration and what makes you a great collaborator”: “As an acoustic composer, you’re constantly in dialogue with musicians, conductors, and your peers. As an electronic musician, you’re constantly in dialogue with technology, as well as other artists, dancers, and writers and composers.”

And Oberlin also prepared him well for the nimble world of podcasting. “Working with the dance department and the theater department, learning how to solve problems on the fly, and bringing your creative practice to a larger, multifaceted problem was great training for the podcast industry,” Overington says. “Every day is a negotiation with a journalist, a musician, a fact checker. You’re out in the fields, and you’re face-to-face with human stories and narrative. It really feels like an Oberlin creative disciplinary course come to life.” 

This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine as part of the feature "A Pipeline to Podcasts."