Space and Time – The Possibilities of Sound
“The canvas that you are using is time”
As Kyla Brettle paced in front of the projector and my mind was suffocating in the overheated lecture room these words brought me back to consciousness. The concept piqued my interest and so I brought myself forward in my chair, attempting to reengage with the lecture whilst fanning my face in a fruitless attempt to attempt to circulate the stale air.
In sound, she claimed, “you get to create a space”; unlike film your narrative is frameless and your information is separated, not by cuts, but by time. I hadn’t thought about podcasts and radio broadcasts this way, but I drew my torpid mind back to the reading and begun the process of combining what I knew about music with what I knew about radio. I understood both were purely sonic mediums, but I honestly never conceptualised that they would both fall under the same production concepts. I never thought about creating a podcast in the same way one might compose a song.
As a child who went through piano lessons I am familiar with time signatures in music but I never grasped the true virtue of understanding time and rhythm until much later when I took to classical music to help me sleep. I found that sound could wash over me like waves and was perplexed by the fact that different compositions of the same song could completely change the way I interacted with it. It was like travelling across the coastline. It was the same sand, the same sea, but the waves were different; they’d push and pull at different times and with different intensities. Some could pull you under and others would simply crash against you.
A long time favourite of mine when it comes to classical music is Nocturne by Debussy but I have found that the climax was completely reliant on whose fingers were on the keys; the melody was utterly subservient to the rhythm of the pianist. I tried to relate this notion to podcasts, and narratives that existed outside of music, and found myself intrigued.
Filmic narratives must fit within the boundaries of the lens and the rhythm and pace of the story is dictated by editing. Sound has no such visual queues or limitations. Information finds you, seemingly out of the abyss, and it impact relies on how and when the two of you come into contact. This notion opened my mind to the depth of possibility within soundscapes. As someone who relies on visuals to conceptualise narratives this was the first time I found myself truely able to conceptualise sound as a medium. The idea of a sonic canvas made me understand that for our oncoming assignment I would not be turning a visual narrative into an auditory one. Instead I would be creating a narrative whose existence was determined by the medium itself… After all, I am facing an entirely new canvas and my narrative must not migrate, but be born there.
My narrative must not be born in space, but in time.