Kyla Brettle’s Lecture

I am so glad to now have access to Brettle’s document on tips to putting an audio piece together. Looking through it, her advice seems mostly like common sense, but I never would have considered it without seeing the words in front of me. There are obvious things like using different kinds of music to emphasise a certain story element, or not being too obvious and cliche with sound effects such as using a passing train sound over someone’s narration of a train. However, what she calls the ‘Kyle Brettle’ method of laying out your full audio recording, listening to its entirety, and then cutting out the ‘juicy’ parts is definitely an editing process I will implement into my future audio works.

It truly was an awesome experience to hear from Kyla Brettle this week. Having little to no knowledge of the world of radio, she talked of her career with such experience and knowledge like it was air to breathe and this truly motivated me to delve deeper into the potential of radio. Similar to reading a book, audio pieces leave the audience much more room for imagination than content of a visual medium. I didn’t realise this before, but after listening to the various audio pieces during the lecture, I had a sudden understanding of the appeal to books and audio pieces; it is the lack of a human sense or senses that leave the audience room to make up for that absence with their own imagination. And a true genius at these mediums will use that to their advantage to create really amazing, mind-blowing pieces of work. We can have stunning visuals and CGI of magical words in feature films, but I believe that when they are laid out before our eyes, us as greedy human beings often don’t find that enough. This may sound very cheesy and cliche, but I believe this is because our imagination is infinite; we can dream worlds and come close to recreating them with our hands, but we won’t quite ever completely print our imagination onto tangible paper. Thus, when we as audiences are given an audio piece to listen to, we naturally close our eyes and let the audio simply guide our imagination into creating our own individual worlds. And I think that truly is a special moment all media practitioners should strive to contribute to our audiences.