Then he met Krulwich, with whom he had WBAI and Oberlin in common. They hit it off, and lively discussion over breakfast became a regular ritual. Krulwich was part of NPR back in the 1970s, when its informed-yet-conversational style represented an earlier “new aesthetic” for radio, and he was praised for his creative coverage of business and economics, including, famously, a radio opera about interest rates (“Rato Interesso”). He left in the mid-’80s to work in television, specializing in complex topics. At first, he gave his young friend a lot of mentorish advice. Until, he says, “I realized that he knew things that I really didn’t know. There were beats in him I didn’t have and had never heard before. And that’s pretty intoxicating.” They collaborated on a piece for “This American Life” — which Ira Glass cheerfully describes as one of the worst things he has ever heard, and which did not air. But by 2004, “Radiolab” had evolved into a one-hour show with a tighter focus, and Krulwich started joining in as a regular guest. This eventually led to a five-episode season with the pair as co-hosts.

While working with Krulwich loosened up Abumrad’s on-air presence, and he learned the ropes of professional journalism, Abumrad never really stopped thinking like a composer. That is, he thinks like someone interested in how sound makes a listener feel. When he talks about influences, the most prominent name is Walter Murch, a legendary film editor and sound designer.

Listen more closely to a “Radiolab” episode, and once you get past the cutting up and the jumpiness, you’ll notice just how intricate the underlying soundscapes are. Consider the second segment of the “Lost and Found” episode, about pigeons’ freakish sense of direction. In its most sciencey passage, Tim Howard, the reporter, presents an explanatory theory from an expert described as “a heavy hitter in the pigeon world.” It goes like this: Churning iron in the center of the earth throws off lines of magnetic force; a pigeon flies through the lines and can perhaps “feel them” by way of particles of magnetite in its beak. During my visit, Abumrad listened to a minute-long edit of this passage with Howard and Wheeler. “Do you know Alvin Lucier’s ‘Music on a Long Thin Wire’?” he asked Howard when it ended. “I’ll play it for you.” He had an idea for the sound — not a sound effect, and not music, but a “musical gesture” — to play against the dialogue. “The sound’s going to be going bruup bruup bruup,” he told Howard, advising him to take the pigeon’s point of view. “It’s moving — fhewm, fhewm — through bands, some are thick, some are thin. You know? That’s the part where it’s gonna feel very visual.” Ultimately, it took him and Howard hours to construct the track, using the audio-editing program Pro Tools, and a bunch of audio filters.

I asked Abumrad what a traditional radio producer would make of his meticulously constructed bruup bruup fhewm fhewm. “They would say it’s insane,” he said. Early on, he had to deal with “radio people” who thought he was wasting time on “artsy-fartsy namby-pampy” technical distractions. “But do you want to know why ‘Radiolab’ has worked beyond public radio?” he asked. “Because it sounds like life. You watch TV, and someone has labored over the feel. Look at ‘Mad Men’ or ‘The Sopranos’: the mood, the pacing, the richness of it, comes from those fine, quote-unquote technical choices.”

THE FINAL SEGMENT of “Lost and Found” revolved around a young woman hit by an 18-wheeler, and it largely concerns her boyfriend’s stubborn refusal to believe that she will never return from the semicomatose state into which she has disappeared. The 20-minute piece is “sort of a love story,” as Abumrad says in the final cut. Emilie, the woman, could not see or hear, but her boyfriend, Alan, was determined to “figure out how much of her was actually there, and maybe even prove it to the doctors.” At one point he uses his phone to make an audio recording, narrating as he tries to communicate with Emilie by finger-spelling words onto her hand. For more than 10 minutes, we’ve heard only Alan and Emilie’s mother talking about her. So when we finally hear Emilie’s voice answering his questions — “I don’t know where I am,” she says — it’s electrifying.

The piece is about the boundaries of the conscious self, and how medical science grapples with that mystery. But the question of what science can tell us and what we can only wonder at with awe is not so much settled as dramatized. The piece practically works as a radio play. You could listen to it again and again, now or a year from now. Actually, that’s the goal: Abumrad has often said that he edits with the fourth or fifth listen in mind.

This approach — a smaller number of shows, painstakingly assembled and treated more like small movies than like regularly scheduled programs — addresses a different tension, around new habits of media consumption. That is the tension between relevance and disposability. Discussions of technology and media tend to focus on speed — what’s the fastest way to break the story, consume the story, influence the story? After all, media consumers today seem like info-rats chewing through heaps of micro-facts and instant-expiration data points.