The actor is engaging young audiences again with “Sound Detectives,” a comic mystery podcast that teaches the art of listening. [...] a new podcast for audiences of elementary-school age that is part whodunit, part science exploration and part comic adventure.

Link to podcast. It'll be ten episodes long. The first episode came out Wednesday, with a new one each week until early next year.

“Sound Detectives” visits places like Yellowstone National Park, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the streets of Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India. When creating the missing-sound mystery for each half-hour episode, Smith and Sokolowski said in a video interview that they sometimes started with a site they found intriguing, and at other times with a sound. The sounds they chose can be challenging to identify; one example was recorded on Mars.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Many adults recognize Burton as the actor who played Kunta Kinte in “Roots” and Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” More recently, fans pushed for him to be named the host of “Jeopardy!,” a role for which he very publicly campaigned.

Although the podcast industry is undergoing retrenchment, “Sound Detectives” is entering a children’s market that seems nowhere near saturation, said Megan Lazovick, a vice president at Edison Research, an analytics company in Somerville, N.J.

Sokolowski, who has a background in documentaries (among them, the films “Ovarian Psycos” and “Very Semi-Serious”), and Smith, who has experience in comedy (including the podcasts “Judge John Hodgman” and “Bubble”), are both parents who wanted “Sound Detectives” to be as layered as possible.

In addition to investigating physics and acoustics, the podcast includes information on auditory biology (even most adults probably aren’t aware that the ears influence taste) and one episode that examines how deaf people experience sound as vibration.

They sought actors with improv experience, and Vinny Thomas, who voices Detective Hunch, proved to be an authority on animal characteristics (like the fact that whale sharks lead solitary lives).

Jessica McKenna, who portrays the ever-curious Audie, improvised song interludes as well as lines, using her skills to collaborate with the composer Adam Deibert on the jazzy “Sound Detectives” theme.

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