Klya Brettle, an experienced practitioner in sound design and radio, took over week 10’s lectorial and has explained the importance of structuring audio, the importance of layers and textures, and the effects that these have on the overall audio piece. Basically, she explained how to create an engaging audio segment. This all goes hand-in-hand with the weekly reading on Perspective by Theo van Leeuwen, and the perspectives and depth in which you can create through sound and image.
Brettle explained the importance of sound design in your audio story – or podcast, if you will – so that the audience receives the information that they need to know when they need it. This is all about structure. Be engaging at the beginning, but don’t put your best audio samples first, unravel the story and allow for the audience to stay engaged. When the end is near, let your the audience know it. Sum everything up and provide closure effect. Structure is key.
What else is a key factor to creating an audio story is space, and how to create the illusion of it. Leeuwen wrote that sound can “create relations between the subject they represent and the receiver they address”. Basically, you can use your audio in ways to provide distance between the audience and the person who is talking – this can create multitudes meaning and effects. Leeuwen then goes on to describe this distance to vary between perspective, which is foreground, middle ground and background, and social distance, this being intimacy, informality and formality. In creating this audio space, distance is not the only thing that matters, the texture does too. This is made through making voices or sounds seem muted, or even echoing. Texture allows for the audience to feel as though they are in the space that the sound designer has created.
It was really useful to hear about these aspects of audio design and the effects that they have on the audience when creating audio segments in film or radio, etc. Understanding how these aspects of audio are created and work will also assist in ways of deconstructing pieces to see how it is combined to create one overall piece. Combining these skills together will help in collaboratively creating an audio segment in Project Brief 4.
