Soulthrum Underlight

Soulthrum: Underlight is a voices-only public humanities audio series about women who author inside or against constraint, primarily from the 1960s–80s. Each episode is a crafted oral history that treats voice and language as the primary instruments: no archival film or TV clips, no host monologues over music—only lived testimony, careful description, and sourced paraphrase.

Cycle 1, Underlight is a 12-episode season of core studies (with an optional short coda) tracing how women turned confinement, typecasting, and erasure into new cinematic force. Each episode centers on a single axis of craft—how pressure produced a tactic, and how that tactic altered the emotional or aesthetic weather around the work (for example: Improvisation as Architecture, Silence as Blade, Endurance as Method).

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 receive a full transcript and finished audio for review and can request changes or veto material.
– Rights & usage: licenses are non-exclusive and rights-light; no ads or sponsor copy appear inside the editorial audio.
– Editorial guardrails: no gossip; biography appears only when it illuminates emotional and artistic architecture. True silences are retained; music (if any) appears briefly between sections, never under speech.

Episodes are released via a free public podcast feed and project website, accompanied by transcripts/captions and a short educator one-pager (learning goals, 2–3 discussion prompts, and citations). Selected pieces are also designed to function in listening contexts at museums, libraries, cinematheques, and festivals.