David Isay knows how to get people talking. He is the founder of StoryCorps, a singular contribution to American storytelling. By the time it’s run its course, it will represent the largest oral history project ever undertaken in this country.

In an 8-by-10 soundproof recording booth in a corridor off Grand Central Terminal (near the entrance to track 14) StoryCorps is getting Americans to speak out – and, at least as importantly, listen. The project’s aim is to bring the radio station, in the form of a Story-Booth, to the people. Open seven days a week since last October, the first Story-Booth hosts a steady trickle of visitors (1,400 so far) who interview loved ones, usually older relatives. Trained facilitators take reservations, help draft interview questions, and oversee the recording process.

Recording sessions last 40 minutes and cost about $100, of which participants are asked to cover only $10. The rest is covered by StoryCorps. For their contributions, participants take away a CD recording of their interview. A second copy goes to the StoryCorps archives at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

“Almost everybody enjoys it,” Mr. Isay says. “They like the fact that someone cares about what they say. They are honored by that. There’s a hump to get over when you get in the booth, an emotional investment you need to make, but almost universally, people are very glad they did it. There are barriers to intimacy, but the booth is sort of magical.

“We had a couple come in that was together for 60 years, and she had never seen him cry before he did during the recording session.”

A past MacArthur “genius” grant winner and a longtime documentary producer for National Public Radio, Mr. Isay envisions the StoryCorps archives as the basis for a national oral history. To broaden its scope, the group will open seven permanent Story-Booths in major American cities over the next 10 years. At the same time, three mobile StoryBooths will trawl for tales around the country. StoryAnnexes will open another front at town libraries. All the branches will partner with local public radio stations; New York’s WNYC and NPR’s Morning Edition already air excerpts. Interview selections are also available for listening at www.storycorps.net.

“We’re also going to have StoryKits, so if someone is in a hospice, we can FedEx them or their family a kit, including a microphone, recorder, and tape. They can do an interview, send it back to us, and get a CD. With all these collection points, we hope we can gather around 300,000 interviews over the next 10 years. My hope is that we as Americans can relearn the skill of listening, which our culture seems to be lacking right now. There’s too much screaming at each other. Just to sit and listen can be an amazing experience.”

A sensitive ear by profession and instinct, the 38-year-old Mr. Isay proves an able narrator of his own story.

“I was a fat. unhappy kid growing up in New Haven, watching a lot of TV and eating cheese doodles. I wasn’t shy, but I also wasn’t athletic. I spent a lot of time by myself, had a hard time relating to my peers, but I always was good with old people,” he says.

His gift for listening to elders and his dedication to do so may have been inspired by a family party when he was 12.

“It was a gathering of my mom’s side of the family with all these members of her parents’ generation. Someone gave me a little tape recorder and microphone and I recorded hours of them discussing their memories of growing up together.”

A shadow flickers across Mr. Isay’s brow as he calmly explains that the tape has since disappeared. He’s searched his parents’ house from basement to attic, but it’s lost. He reckons StoryCorps may have something to do with making up for the lost tape.

No surprise, then, that Mr. Isay intends StoryCorps to focus on older Americans in hopes of reviving a culture of communication between generations.

“Older Americans offer us whole lifetimes of experience and wisdom. They are compelling and interesting. And they are ignored.”

The son of a psychologist and an editor at Harcourt Brace, Mr. Isay seems to have synthesized his parents’ professions, getting people to talk and editing the results.

“There are lots of psychologists in the family. I was meant to go in that direction. I was a pre-med psych major at NYU, but I took a year off and was tutoring math. One day in the East Village I saw an ad for a proposed museum of addiction. I went in for a look and met two HIV-positive recovering heroin addicts. They were very soon to die but had a dream of creating this museum. They had blueprints of the proposed floor plans and a model made out of tongue depressors. It was courageous…but impossible. I felt the instinct to tell their story.”

Mr. Isay called the progressive news radio station WBAI in New York, where a producer loaned him a tape recorder and microphone. “I pressed the play and record buttons and I knew I would be doing it the rest of my life.” The story ran locally that week and nationally 48 hours later.

“It’s a great story. My life took a total turn. I’d never listened to public radio before. I learned fast and I fell in love with it.” Starting as a freelancer at WBAI, he learned the daily journalistic grind.

Within a year and a half, he won a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “It gave me space to breath, to do longer-form, higher quality stories. My beat was to record stories and do profiles of diverse characters from around the country – oddballs, firsts and lasts, and visionaries. Great voices.”

Mr. Isay next formed a nonprofit production company, Sound Portraits, which recently moved to Brooklyn from Chinatown. To support Sound Portraits and now StoryCorps, Mr. Isay has secured the good graces of a number of sponsors, including the CPB, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and some corporate donors.

StoryCorps will open its second permanent booth at the World Trade Center site in March . Mr. Isay foresees it as a place for families of those lost on September 11, 2001, to come and remember their dear departed. It will also be open to the general public.

In February, StoryCorps will launch the first two Mobile Story-Booths on yearlong journeys. With them will ride Mr. Isay’s grand experiment in democracy, history, and memory in the digital age.