There are 44 sounds in the English language, made from 26 letters (most often A to Z). 44 from 26.

Years of slow, but steady, progress has paid off. 44from26 is our family owned and operated media experiment. Our first project is Return of the Birds, a serialized audiobook podcast of Wake-Robin, by John Burroughs.

Working with the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, we’ve woven dozens of bird songs into the narration to give Burroughs’s book a whole new depth of experience.

Just in case you were interested in our grand little experiment. You can find (and subscribe to) Return of the Birds on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast and Stitcher. You can also click here to listen to the first episode.

Turns out I had one more thing to do. I built a sound booth.

On the occasions I wasn’t in a studio, I’d had been using (intermittently) a janky set up in a spare bedroom clothes closet. Not ideal – the sound was OK, but the setting was uninspiring. Preparing to read Wake-Robin I wrestled with the decision to squeeze into the space to read for an unknown number of days.

After some hemming and hawing, I asked the family and they agreed – particularly my two teenagers, it would be pretty cool to have our own sound booth and recording studio. Six month’s later, we’re all set.

If I never have to hang a slab door again, I’ll be happy.