The current landscape of radio, podcasts, and audio story-telling often prioritizes the meaning found in spoken dialog at the expense of the intuitive, gut-level, poetic meaning to be found in sound itself. How do we challenge expectations for legibility and allow space for subtler meanings to rise to the surface? When we look to other mediums—visual arts, performance, and beyond—we can adapt processes from other fields to add spontaneity, play, and complexity into our audio work. This session will share ways to cultivate a creative practice in audio that borrows from multiple disciplines and places experimentation at the forefront. We’ll explore some big-picture concepts for developing our distinct creative voices as a sound designers and some technical strategies for giving each thing we touch its own signature sound.