What’s Your Story? Write, edit and record your own Berlin Story Original (in English) and upload it to our SoundCloud group by the end of June. The winners will be broadcast on NPR Berlin and Worldwide.

Your story should be about a personal experience or something that happened at a specific Berlin location. 500-600 words of prose, or 3 mins 45 secs spoken. Read aloud by you and only you. The more personal, the better. The more specific, the better. For this round, please no reportage, no poetry and no musical pieces. We have uploaded some examples from our archive to Soundcloud here as a loose guide.

Recording directions available here on our website. When you have the Mp3 ready, you can upload it to our SoundCloud group here.

You will need to have or create a (free) SoundCloud profile to participate in the contest. You do that here. Questions? Email us at BerlinStoriesforNPR@gmail.com

Those of you with sound or music experience will probably have microphones, earphones, special software, even access to a proper sound studio, to record your Berlin Story. But even if you are a novice, you can easily learn to do it on your own using the “voice memo”function on an iPhone.

1. Practice reading your piece until you feel confortable with it. Make sure to ennunciate clearly, but do not feel like you have to come off like a BBC announcer. Just be yourself, express emotion where you feel it, and speak in your own natural reading voice.

2. Pick a small space, such as a closet or small room, ideally padded with clothes or curtains or something to muffle sound. The high ceilings in alt-bau Berlin apartments can have a lot of reverb. Bathrooms work, but sometimes tubs and other slick surfaces can create a tinny atmosphere so cover them with towels.

3. Make sure there is something behind your head as you are speaking: a wall, a pillow, etc.

4. The techinical side of things is clearly explained in the two videos below. Watch either, or both, to learn how to turn an iPhone voice memo into an uploadable Mp3.

THIS VIDEO and/or THIS ONE

Good luck! We can’t wait to hear your pieces.

To accompany all our podcasts on the website this season, we are thrilled to be running a series of photographs of the city taken by Nick Simpson, a British photographer.

Since 2006 Nick has been building his own cameras, shooting on 4×5 large format film. No two identical photographs can be taken. Following an interest in forgotten and overlooked places, Nick plays with the notions of objective and subjective, between mechanical reproduction and aesthetic origin. His latest projects include a typology of Berlin’s U-Bahn stations and most recently, photographing the soon-to-be closed Berlin Tegel Airport.

Nick studied at Leeds College of Art & Design, the Narafi Hogeschool (Brussels) and Nottingham Trent University, graduating with a BA in Photography in Europe (2007). He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2008.

A Seated Craft with instruments, in the courtyard of Schade's studio.

The new season of Berlin Stories for NPR begins next Monday, May 20! This season was made possible by Jan Tilman Schade who graciously donated his recording studio and his time as sound engineer. We really enjoyed the days we spent in the studio with him and sitting in the verdant courtyard of his building, on what must be one of the most beautiful blocks in Schöneberg.

Jan Tilman Schade is a Berlin based composer, musician, music-therapist, actor and artist, who is known for composing the scores of many films. He is also currently establishing a seminar centre close to Berlin with the support of the European Union.

Schade’s company, “artwaren”, uses the word <art> in the German way: art signifies “the species”. It also refers to a sinister historical fact: The Nazis used this expression to persecute several movements within the arts and in 1937 held an exhibition in Munich called “entartete Kunst” for the works they considered degenerate, including, of course, work by Jewish artists.

The company “artwaren” hosts all kinds of human cultural output that is not production-orientated, since this is the main capitalist influence on art.

We applaud the launch of the Buenos Aires Review, an online literary magazine curated by fellow storytellers in Argentina.

We are happy to present the first in a series of podcast collaborations with the Mädels with a Microphone, exploring different expat communities in Berlin.

The Mädels with a Microphone is a podcasting series by local journalists Tam Eastley and Jennifer Collins. Together, they strive to create informative and quirky long and short podcasts about the hidden side of Berlin. The podcasts are entirely self-produced using Audacity free software and little zoom recorders.

Suckers for community and sharing, the friends use Creative Commons music from SoundCloud and make all of their podcasts free to use and share. Additionally, they translate their own interviews, and are entirely self taught.

To date they have reached over 10,000 followers on SoundCloud and were awarded the coveted title of SoundClouder of the Day in June of 2012. Podcast topics include love, ghosts, protests, Weimar Berlin, Club Mate (which proved to be very popular), Spreepark, and the Rixdorf Christmas Market.

More about Tam and Jen here. Check them out on SoundCloud for many more podcasts about Berlin. And follow them on facebook for regular updates.

If you missed our Summer episode on the air, click here to listen to it now at NPR.org!

Photograph by Elizabeth Skadden

Tasha Walters—an illustrator, writer, and occasional back-up singer—lives in Berlin and currently has no cats.