EP42
Urban ecology
The trees were listening before we were
Dr. Mira Ohta on what city trees actually do all day, and why our street design forgot to ask them.
Season 4 · Now streaming
Static is a weekly podcast about the things that get lost in big systems — human attention, ambient noise, signal integrity, the way a city forgets to listen to its oldest trees.
This season
New every Tuesday. Roughly 42 minutes — the average time of a focused human attention span, if the topic is right.
Dr. Mira Ohta on what city trees actually do all day, and why our street design forgot to ask them.
Architectural acoustics researcher Yuki Brand on the invisible choreography of office noise, HVAC hum, and why your meetings always sound muffled.
Why the most popular recommendation engine in the world has spent five years trying to be less loud.
What a working server room sounds like at 3 a.m. — and why engineers keep returning to listen.
A conversation with a novelist who deletes every first sentence. On ending things before they begin.
Voices
Two producers, four engineers, one studio above a ramen shop. No algorithm touches the editing.
Co-host · Field & ecology
Urban ecologist turned producer. Records ambient sound in places humans forgot to listen. Lives in Kyoto with two cats and a piano she can't play.
Co-host · Systems & code
Distributed-systems engineer who left infrastructure to make a podcast about why infrastructure quietly shapes everything. Records in a closet in Brooklyn.
About
Static started in 2022 with a question: what does the world sound like when nobody's listening? Four years later it's still the same question, just bigger.
"The opposite of silence isn't noise. It's listening."
— EP 12, "What is quiet, really"
All major platforms. No ads. No tracking. Just the bench and the microphone.