Hey if you’re involved in podcast production, especially one with heavy sound engineering like an Audio Drama, please please please keep in mind your neurodiverse listeners.

It’s real shitty to have to do the calculus of “how much pain am I willing to endure to listen to this?”

And I do mean actual pain. Some of y’alls sound effects feel like a stab or jolt of pain directly to my head, some of it causes headaches even after I stop listening, some of it triggers panic attacks, and more.

Some even cause multiple of the above.

And usually if I have to choose between avoiding pain, or continuing to listen to your show, I’m gonna choose the former, no matter how much I love it.

Even once is enough to sour my experience, but after twice, I’m always on edge while listening, waiting for the next trigger.

It’s also not just the usual triggers like gunshots or sirens for panic attacks. It’s the overstimulation caused by a loud static that overtakes the words. It’s when someone yells suddenly and now I’m yelping in pain myself.

It’s a mix of factors like volume and effect choice.

I wanna end this thread with a shoutout to a podcast that I think does a phenomenal job of this. @TheFarMeridian is fantastic in more ways than I have words to describe, from writing to acting to everything, but I specifically want to call attention to the sound design.

This show has never once triggerd a negative sound related response, despite deliberate invocation of anxiety, and frequent use of sounds that can often cause that. One of the most common ones is the distorted music from Season 2, which cuts off songs with a rising pitch effect.

On the surface, that sounds like everything that would overstimulate me. However, the show makes sure that the whine never overtakes the foreground of the audio, nor does it exceed it in volume. You hear and feel the tension the ringing creates, without your own head ringing too!

Also the show frequently warns you that this sound effect is coming by starting it quiet, giving at least my brain a chance to accommodate for it, or skip past it if I need to.

It’s a perfect use of audio cues to warn me in a medium that lacks visual cues.

One episode that encapsulates how this show exceeds in handling this is “The Abandoned Olympian,” which handles it on a few levels.

First, there’s a CW up front for a starter pistol in the audio, which serves to help folks triggered by gun sounds and to help folks prepare.

Also aside: if you have CWs include them in the audio, not just the show notes, so folks can hear them with ease. Anytime a show tells me there are CWs but to look in the show notes, that’s an accessibility barrier now to have to get to those too.

In the actual episode, there is a setup to the gun noise. The first time it’s prefaced by a count and “kaboom,” which warns my brain in advance.

This works similar to how visual cues help me process aberrant audio. The second time there’s a count down, and you know what’s coming

Secondly, the gunshot is loud and distinct, but not louder than the dialogue volume. This is crucial as it means my ears aren’t in pain from the volume alone, let alone the stimulation aspect.

The episode also features clapping, the loud beating of a heart, and cheering that manages to not overwhelm me, because the volume is perfectly managed, and the dialogue and narration in the front grounds my focus.

So yeah, if you want a good example this is the place to look!

That’s all I’ve got for now. If you’re looking for a new show please give The Far Meridian a listen. It’s about a young woman with a magical travelling lighthouse and a good amount of anxiety trying to navigate the world in search of something lost, and I adore it deeply.

CWs: anxiety, overstimulation, and events that depict those happening and evoke the feelings of it. It can be a lot but for me at least it always allowed me to engage with those experiences without triggering them in myself, which is magical to me.