Soulthrum Underlight

About
Soulthrum: Underlight is a voices-only public humanities audio atlas about women who author inside or against constraint. Each release is a curated audio essay built from verbatim witness and careful description: no narration, no archival film/TV clips, no gossip. Only lived voices, true silences, and careful editing.

The project is built to be studied, cited, and taught, not consumed as entertainment content. It prioritizes ethical recording, primary witness testimony, transcripts, and durable access through partner institutions.

Release structure (Cycle I: Underlight)
Pilot (1976): Karen Black establishes the listening method and editorial ethic.
Season One (1959): a tightly curated global cohort (7 episodes) built for adoption and teaching.

Each episode is paired with a portal package hosted alongside the audio:
 Transcript and captions
 Citations and source trail
 Year Marker context card (work, context, sources)
 Teaching notes and discussion prompts

Audio stays clean. Context lives beside it.

What your support funds
Donations directly support:
Primary interviews and contributor coordination
Ethical editing and audio engineering
Transcription, captions, and accessibility layers
Permissions and rights workflows
Year Marker cards, citations, and educator materials
Durable hosting through partner portals and preservation planning

Method and ethic
Voices-only: sessions are recorded remotely or with local engineers; in the final cut, only the guest’s or reader’s voice remains.
Contributor agency: participants can review their transcript and their own sections before release, and request changes for accuracy, care, or consent.
Rights-respectful: no clips-as-spectacle; permissions are contributor-centered. No ads or sponsor copy appear inside the editorial audio.
Editorial guardrails: no gossip; biography appears only when it illuminates craft and emotional architecture. Music, if used, appears briefly between sections and never under speech.
Access: transcripts, citations, and teaching materials publish with each release.

Where it lives
Episodes release via a free public podcast feed and project site, and are designed to be hosted through partner university portals for long-term citability and preservation. Selected pieces are also suited for listening contexts at universities, libraries, museums, cinematheques, and festivals.