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What can we achieve with just audio? Turns out a lot, actually.
In a lecture delivered by Kyla Brettle we were invited to “see in the dark” – the idea of creating content with depth and texture without visuals. The young media practitioners among us are primarily focused on the visual spectrum. Thinking of audio as merely an accompaniment and occasionally an accent in their works.
If I was not already keen on experimenting more with sound, this may well have been a turning in my career. In stark contrast to the film cliché of, ‘good sound design is rarely noticed’. Sound production for podcasts, radio drama and its kin are built on an essential basis of engaging compositions built with atmosphere, voice, music, and spots.
Brettle opened our ears to emotionally evocative, richly textured soundscapes set into motion by seamless narrations. We were reminded, that words do not necessarily dictate stories in this space. Scenes could change signified by any number of cues at the discretion of the producer and what is available from the topic at hand; varying from doors, books, transport, or clocks for example.
Sounds without the support of visuals were amplified, hyper-detailed even. For comparison’s sake, the cadence in the narrator’s voice holds more weight proportionately to that of a screen actor’s vocal delivery in order to communicate their character’s thoughts and intentions. The screen actor, in turn, has more options their arsenal of visual signals to play with – all of their body language, facial expressions and movement.
We as humans take listening for granted – we learn so many sonic signatures over our lifetime that we can metaphorically, ‘hear from a mile away’. While listening to the many examples during the lecture so many things were clear the recording that we were never told. For example, we as listeners knew or at least had an inclining if a recording was say being done from inside car, from another room or in a soundproof studio – no one had to tell us that, we just had recognised these elements from our body of experience and assumed. Brettle even prompted us to listen closely, and see if we could figure out if a person was standing still or moving; lying or sitting.
Audiences are smarter than we give them credit for, in this context anyway.
But of course, our brains can be fooled in a number of ways. Just as in film, multiple and scripted takes can come into play. For more make-believe content, there is the art of Foley. Even purely in the assembly of everything, the order of the composition and the layering of its components obviously can be manipulated – they were not necessarily recorded in that order.
There is so much nuance in a recording and listening in for an audio producer. Which reminds me of the media audit we did so early on in the semester, only now we are looking actively deeper into the processes that go into making content rather than content’s arbitrary placement in the physical space – which in itself can affect a recording.
