This week’s lecture was from Kyla Brettle, a radio/ documentary producer of seventeen years. Since our new assignment is audio this week’s lecture was a great way for me to get motivated and begin to wrap my head around what I needed to do (especially considering I’ve been away for two and a half weeks!).
I enjoy listening to podcasts and am thinking of starting one soon with a friend from Monash Uni so it was useful to break down audio creation and realise how certain sounds are made and what their effects are.
Some notes I took in the lecture:
WRITING IN TIME –
As content creators we need to make sure that there is space for people to breathe whilst listening. We need to tell people what they need to know, when they need to know it and prepare the audience for the end of an episode. Podcasting is all about exploring the moment and I know that I love getting lost in the story and creating a scene in my head. If you don’t warn the audience with a winding down tool it can become quite jarring and unsatisfying.
CREATING SPACE:
There are ways to create space within audio creation. Kyla said one of the reasons she likes audio rather than film is because you can work in a frameless space. There’s no black square around the perimeter. It’s free for the audience to create a space in their minds. For this topic we were shown ‘Affairs of the Mind’ and how within just a few minutes we heard many spaces and locations. From a narrator sitting in a studio recording, to driving in a car, you can tell what the producer is trying to convey and make you feel within the space.
THE SPOKEN WORD:
The spoken word topic from Kyla was about how there are so many textures to peoples voice on radio and this voice can tell us so much about a person. It can convey a moment perfectly and if you tried to recreate it, it wouldn’t have the same impact. The voice is a door to the soul and it can create some quality content.
MUSIC:
DON’T SLATHER MUSIC OVER EVERYTHING! It’s easy to have someone talking about a plane trip and think, “I know I’ll put a plane engine behind the audio”. Whilst it can be effective in small doses, it can also easily be overkill and become obvious and boring. It’s also useful to not use music that has lyrics in it as that can sometimes detract from what is being said and also not give the audience a break when trying to take in information.
KYLA’S TOP TIPS:
- Record at least 2 textures.
- Forget about ideas of what idea was before you started
- Identify best bit and second best bit
- Lead w juice
- Work through rushes
- Keep an open mind – No preconceptions
- Copy/ paste anything that’s nice
- Break voice up into chunks
- Use sound and time as way to punctuate voice
- SAVE DRAFTS!
Overall this was an intriguing lecture and got me super excited for the assignment and hopefully assist me in learning how to create this podcast with my friend!
READING WEEK 10
Perspective by Theo Van Leeuwen
The reading this week was interesting and gave us a deeper look into sound theory. One theory I took from the reading and that we spoke about in the workshop on Thursday was Murray Schafer’s definitions of figure, ground and field sounds. It’s not until you can define varying types of sounds that you notice them more. Here are some definitions of Schafer’s theory.
Figure – Focus of interest: Treated as the most important sound, sound which listener identifies with and react upon. e.g. Person talking to you.
Ground – Setting or context and field: Still a part of the listener’s social world but only in a minor and less involved way. Context we take for granted but notice if it is no longer there. e.g. Music playing softly in the background.
Field – Treated as existing not in listener’s social world but in their physical world. e.g. Train horn a few blocks away every twenty minutes.
The ‘three-stage plan’ means dividing the sounds which are hear simultaneously into three groups and then hierarchizing these groups, treating some more important than others.
The reading also mentioned the difference between hifi and lofi sounds which I was unaware of.
Hifi soundscapes allow discrete sounds to be heard from a great distance due to the low ambient noise level. e.g. Someone picking up a pen in a library.
Lofi soundscapes the individual sound gets blurred, perspective is lost and amplification becomes necessary.
What is figure, ground and field can vary from individual to individual and depends on your environment and these definitions were useful knowledge to have going into Project Brief 4.