Listening In

On April 23, 2007, Reid Stowe and Soanya Ahmad set out from New York harbor on an ambitious sailing voyage. Their goal was to sail for 1000 days without touching land, carrying all their provisions with them. Reid and Soanya set out to beat the world record of endurance sailing - sailing without resupply - which currently stands at 658 days, held by Australian sailor Jon Sanders. As of this broadcast, their voyage had lasted just under 540 days. In this installment of the "Listening In" series, I talk with Reid and Soanya to find out how music helps mark the time out on the open seas.

Mary Stack is an amazing athlete who has followed her prowess as a lifter all the way to the Beijing 2008 Paralympics, representing the US proudly. I spent the day with her as she went through her workout routine at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. She let me in on her playlist for powerlifting, which ends with a rip-your-face-off "So What" by Metallica. For Stack, this song means the waiting is over, therersquo;s no more getting ready, itrsquo;s time to get out there and go for gold.

Every morning on the Space Shuttle, a song is the first thing the astronauts hear. It is played by NASA Mission Control in Houston to rouse the astronauts from sleep. The songs are chosen for the astronauts by their friends and family, and played on days when they have a special job to do ndash; like take a space walk or pilot a rendezvous with the International Space Station. In the next installment of our ldquo;Listening Inrdquo; series, I checked in with some Shuttle astronauts (including Commander Steve Frick, pictured) to find out what they like to wake up to when theyrsquo;re orbiting the Earth.

Hear the original broadcast on Weekend America

In this piece, we meet Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethiopian jazz. A pioneering lsquo;global citizen,rsquo; Astatke became in 1959 the first African to ever attend the famous Berkelee College of Music in Boston. He played with Duke Ellington in the 70s and has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the US since Jim Jarmusch featured his music in the soundtrack to the film, ldquo;Broken Flowers.rdquo; Astatke is famous in Ethiopia for modifying the traditional instrument, the krar, so it can play jazz scales. American bandleader Russ Gershon calls Astatke ldquo;a conduit,rdquo; who has brought modernism and jazz to Ethiopia while bringing Ethiopiarsquo;s extremely diverse tribal culture to the world stage. As part of his constant ebb and flow between the US and Addis, Astatke is now at Harvard for the year, where we talk with him about specific contributions he maintains Ethiopian culture has made to jazz as a whole.

Hear the original broadcast on Studio 360

Indie rocker Kim Deal from the Breeders crooned from the iPod docked in the operating room where Dr. Atul Gawande and his team were performing a thyroidectomy. Wearing something that looks like a shower cap, and booties over my shoes, I felt like another member of Dr. Gawande's team, which is made up of several people: the senior resident, the anesthesiologist, the circulating nurse, a medical student and the scrub.

"Something of a myth about the way people understand the operating room is that it's not all about the surgeon," Dr. Gawande laughs, "or about whether my hands are shaking. Absolutely I have to be able to concentrate and know what I'm doing, but so does everybody else. And having a good operation for each of the patients I take care of in a day means making sure that we can all function as a team. And I find that having music helps us all perform well, as a team."

To the strains of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," Dr. Gawande's team busily prepared the area on the patient's neck for the operation. In this episode of Listening In, I got a chance to go to Boston and hear the playlist that Dr. Gawande plays in the OR, and talk to his staff about how it flows with their work.

Hear the original broadcast on Weekend America

Architect Daniel Libeskind listens to a solid block of uninterrupted music in the morning to start his day.nbsp; "Itrsquo;s not something of a luxury, itrsquo;s almost a necessity.nbsp; And itrsquo;s not background," says Libeskind.nbsp; "I donrsquo;t do it as the hustle bustle of domestic life and in the background therersquo;s music, I sit down, when I have time, and mostly I do have time early in the morning, just to listen to a piece of music."nbsp; In his downtown New York studio, Libeskind and I listened to the music that focuses him for the day, the music that "furnishes his mind":nbsp; Cab Calloway doing "St. Louis Blues, " Glenn Gould playing the Well-Tempered Clavier, the 20th organ music of Olivier Messiaen, and the free jazz improvisations of pianist Keith Tippett.

"Itrsquo;s the equivalent for the soul what running and jogging would be for the body.nbsp; Itrsquo;s not for the body, itrsquo;s for the soul.nbsp; But the soul also needs to be fed.nbsp; Otherwise itrsquo;s empty.nbsp; And that music, when you fill your mind with it, your mind isnrsquo;t empty during the day.nbsp; Itrsquo;s furnished."

I went to China to see what kind of musical culture I would find among the migrant workers there. I had heard that there is a floating population of over 100 million migrant workers there, mostly from the south and west, mostly coming to work construction jobs in the booming east coast cities. Every year, they ebb and flow, almost to a person returning to their hometown for Chinese New Year. Then, they head to another place, wherever the work is. It is well known that this is a hard, hard life, and hard lives often result in some special form of music - a melancholic complaint, a crying out. In the US, the hard migrant life was acknowledged in the books of John Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie, to some extent in the songs of Bill Monroe and the bluegrass songwriters who wrote about their lost home and life in a big, unforgiving city.

Was there something like this going on in China now, now that migration is happening there on an unprecedented scale? I tried to find out, by walking cold into construction site after construction site in Beijing, with my fearless translator Flora Wang. These migrant workers downloaded bootleg mp3s onto their cell phones, and they would listen at night in isolation in the grim little shacks that sat right on the construction site. The name "Chen Xing" kept coming up - his songs, many of the workers said, spoke directly to their experience. I sought out Chen Xing, and had a chance to record some of his songs in a casual, acoustic setting. This piece for Studio 360 is the result of those sessions.

Visual artists listen to music in their studios to get their creative juices flowing, to lose themselves in their world, to focus their energies. Natalie Frank, a great young painter (a mere 27 years old!) let me into her listening process and her creative process in her studio. It turned out to be quite structured and complex and cool. She listens to blues and solo singers and songwriters - like John Lee Hooker, Dylan and Nina Simone - in the personal, imagination-trawling phase when she's conjuring up the characters for her paintings. When she's composing her paintings - thinking in the big picture sense - she listens to opera and classical music, like Beethoven's "Kreuzer." Music is an intricate and orchestrated part of her creative process.

Painting above by Natalie Frank, "Portrait," 2007, Oil on canvas, 18 by 16 in. 45.7 by 40.6 cm.

Music is a phenomenal way to control your environment - to make a room "yours".nbsp; More and more expectant mothers and fathers who want to make the delivery room feel more like home are bringing their music with them. Birthing clinics are starting to feature iPod docks as standard equipment, and parents come in with their "giving birth" playlists ready to plug in.

Many fathers who get involved are in charge of the technology - and so we find the new role of "DJ Daddy Doulah" - who is doing what he can to set the right mood in the room. In this piece, we speak with Eric Wallach and Belinda Blum about their experience of giving birth to Ruby (pictured) and how Eric spun the tunes. They gave the idea to Emily Conrad and Jeff Galusha - who take us through their Baby Pumpkin playlist, a week before the birth of their daughter, Blue.

We also put a call out to Weekend America listeners to tell us the songs that worked for them during childbirth. The Weekend America "Giving Birth" Listener-Generated Playlist is here.

When you go to a major league baseball game these days, it is a highly mediated affair, with video and audio woven seamlessly into the live action. Recently, players have taken to personally selecting their "at-bat" song, that booms through the stadium as they walk out of the dugout and up to the plate. Players get real specific about what they want to hear - often sending a CD up to the control room before the game with a note: "Queue up track 3, 20 seconds in." I got to speak to some of the Boston Red Sox about their favorite walkup songs. Mike Lowell, Alex Cora, Coco Crisp and All-Star slugger David Ortiz (pictured) all weighed in on the tune that gets them psyched up to hit. Megan Kaiser, the Sox music programmer, was my guide to the soundtrack of a baseball afternoon on the fabled field at Fenway.