Darin Atwater is a composer, conductor, and pianist best known as the founder and leader of Baltimore's groundbreaking ensemble Soulful Symphony. As an educator, he now serves as Distinguished Visiting Faculty at The Peabody Conservatory.

In this conversation, we'll discuss how a severe hand injury he experienced last year which forced him to reassess the relationship with his music, audiences, and students. We explore how personal and artistic identify are affected by one's ability to perform and engage with their instrument and creativity, and how recovery has informed his work moving forward. He gave a moving talk at the Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA) conference in 2025, putting a human face on the topic of work-limiting injuries and medical care for performing artists. Needless to say, his invitation to Talking Ears was sent within minutes after this address, and we are confident you'll hear why in this episode.

For your listening pleasure, we’ll be hearing selections from the Soulful Symphony’s 2009 release, Song in a Strange Land. We cannot stress this enough: stop everything and go listen to Soulful Symphony's incredible body of work.

Welcome back to the office hours with Juan and Frank! We just put on a fresh pot of coffee, so come on in, pour yourself a cup, and grab a seat. In this brief episode we'll discuss a workshop we co-hosted at the American Academy of Audiology 2025 conference in New Orleans. We focused on the value of continuing education for audiologists on the topic of music audiology, and how musicians and audiologists can collaborate to meet their mutual goals, but mostly this episode is an excuse to bring you the music of our in-session house band. They absolutely ruled and that is an evidence-based fact.

The band was Ari Teitel (guitar), TJ Norris (bass), and Trenton O'Neal (drums) of the 2x Grammy nominated band The Rumble. They played for about an hour and brought a party atmosphere to what would otherwise be a dry but informative hands-on hearing protection and SPL meter activity.

And we're not done with support audiologists who want to care for musician patients in the best possible manner. If you're attending the National Hearing Conservation Association, come join our 3 hour hands-on workshop Thursday February 5th, 2026 (just make sure you watch the 3 hour on-demand didactic portion so you're fully prepared). We cooked up something truly unique for this conference and I can't to see if it actually works!

After a brief fall hiatus, we return with Tom May of the Philadelphia-based punk rock institution The Menzingers! They've been touring and putting out critically-acclaimed records since 2006, so the obvious first question is how four high school friends from Scranton can keep the same line up and energy going strong for almost 20 years. Retrospectively, it seems obvious that the answer was "democracy". (Editor's note: this interview was recorded in early 2024)

Besides a deep dive into guitar tone, we stay on topic and focus our conversation on in-ear monitors - including the active-ambient system Tom uses on stage, the Sensaphonics 3DMEs - and live event safety.

Music heard in this episode is from The Menzinger's 8th and most recent studio album "Some of It Was True".

Content Warning: this episode contains profanity. We challenge the sensitive listener to try talking about punk rock without the use of George Carlin's famous list of 7 words.