Sounds for Soldiers

Earlier this year, Adams, the director of the Icebox Radio Theater, found a comment on www.audiodramatalk.com from someone who had just been on a tour in Iraq. The comment said soldiers overseas have very little distraction from the harsh conditions in which they are working. A suggestion was made that the audio community come together to create a gift of audio drama both for the nice thought and promotional purposes.

“As we started kicking ideas around and I sort of took point on the whole project,” Adams said. “The people that produce material on audio drama see it as more of a hobby than an actual job, I have more time being the director of such an entity. I see this as very important.”

Adams’ goal is to put together an MP3 CD and send it to each unit serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of the units have a laptop, and he hopes that the material would be distributed to each person who has an iPod.

After some research, Adams concluded that approximately 10,000 CDs need to be produced. However, in order for Adams to make this possible, he needs funding not only for the CDs, but also to ship them overseas.

“We decided we need to raise about $10,000 to make this happen,” he explained.

On the website for the project — www.sounds4soldiers.com — viewers can click a donate button to help the cause, but progress has been slow. Only about $1,000 has been raised, so far.

To push the project at little faster, Adams applied for the Pepsi Refresh Project. This project is a program sponsored by Pepsi that gives away millions of dollars each month to fund refreshing ideas that change the world. The ideas with the most votes will receive grants. Sounds for Soldiers can be found under the arts and entertainment category of the refresh project.

At the end of the month, the top 10 of the 100 in the category will receive funding. Sounds for Soldiers has been in the top 100 for the past three months and Adams hopes that enough people will vote to put it in the top 10 either by Nov. 1 or Dec. 1.

The disk with over 100 hours of “everything,” according to Adams, is ready to go, but needs the help of the community to be shipped.

“I’d bring them all home if I could,” Adams said of the soldiers, “but since I can’t, I can do this.”

Donations can be made by contacting Adams at jeffreyamn@iceboxradio.org or votes can be cast — up to 10 times a day — by logging on to the website at www.refresheverything.com/sounds4soldiers and/or text 101175 to 73774, standard texting rates may apply.