BEHIND THE SCENES with Jesse Hardman and Lucho Hernandez

How did Tur de Lima come together as an audio story

JH: Lucho came and worked with my journalism class in Lima. Our goal was to write and produce a series of radio shorts to educate the public on issues related to the blind and visually impaired. "Tur de Lima" was an idea Lucho had for a while. He wanted to create something that could show off his town through the unique sounds that he encounters

Lucho Hernandez: I was interested in recording sounds around the village where I live, considering that each sound could be expressing something

Why is Tur de Lima especially well-suited for the audio medium

JH: Walking around Lima with Lucho is an experience. He is picking up on things that I would never have caught, and using these sounds to orient himself, entertain himself and in many cases stay safe. As somebody who has spent ten years working in radio, I was excited to hear a whole new layer of sounds that I had been missing

I think public radio does an increasingly good and creative job of introducing and utilizing sounds to its audience. You almost never hear radio here in Peru work with sound. There is a real lack of understanding and in some cases interest in the possibility of sound on the radio. For somebody like Lucho, who relies on the radio for information, this reality is frustrating. So we set out to create an example, in both Spanish and in this case English, of the possibilities of sound. LH: Because it gives the listeners an idea of the characteristics of the environment where I live

What challenges did you face in making the story

JH: The challenge in recording "Tur de Lima" is that traffic dominates the city. It is everywhere, loud, fierce, and dangerous. It was a bit of a challenge to record some of the subtleties that Lucho picks up on with the traffic always in the background. I switched between a shotgun microphone and a regular mic depending on the environment

It is also a bit of a risk to walk around Lima with two microphones, headphones, a tape recorder, and in my case, red hair. You are a bit of a target. Thankfully nothing happened. In deciding what content to use, we recorded for over three hours, and it was hard to decide what to use. Our goal was to edit the peice so it sounded like a short but complete story. We had to cut a lot of things that were fun, but not as instructive

LH: We had to find some special moments to record certain sounds which are non-permanent. For example we have to wait until the dogs barked so we could record it

What's your favorite moment in the story and why? JH: It doesn´t come through as perfectly as I would have liked, but Lucho's encounter with a Peruvian woman was a good moment. I had been asking what his favorite sound was as we were walking and he said a woman's voice. Along came a senorita, we asked if she would talk to us, she said yes and Lucho's face just lit up. One of my students here in Lima, Jonathan Hunter, came along to help with the recording and take photos. He does a nice job of capturing Lucho's movement and expressions

LH: When we went to a market place where we could record a combination of sounds which would express a rural kind of culture and the occidental culture on the other hand.