10 May, 2017

Media Lecture – 10

This week’s lecture was hosted by Kyla Brettle, who is the radio feature maker and lecture in media production at RMIT. The topic she focused on was audio drama, documentaries and features. ‘Writing in sound’ was the title for the lecture.

I think this lecture is helpful for us to do the Project Brief 4 because Kyla gave us some valuable perspectives. We may encounter different types of sounds and then use them in Project Brief 4, such as listening to some audio recordings or podcasts and trying to notice the different types of sounds in those recordings.

We have been focused on reading and speaking at some layers, when we watching movies and watching any forms of photography, we can easily view the layers, pick the foreground, the middle and the background naturally. The audio does so.

I read the sentence before, which is ‘Nothing is original’. The completed production of the audio work is just a mashup or a remix of different layers of sounds and voices. When listening to audio, we can turn off some layers, such as the background noise. For example, walking on the street, cars in the street and the general buzz. The audiences will not pay attention to these background sounds, but they are necessary. This feeding of the audience is clearly displayed by the radio. When it is heard, it is like the host or the narrator who speaks to us in person when they are “close-up” or “foreground” to our audience. It is just like the introduction for the article, the film need to create surroundings, scene, feelings and audios to let the audiences know what they want to express.

Kyla played some audios and let us wrote down something we heard in these audios. There were three key words, which are ‘voice’, ‘sound’ and ‘music’.

These are crucial points because all the audio layers are related to each other, the remix of these voices could create a completed story or message. It gave me a sense of Project Brief 4, which is that maybe we could use different voices, sounds in nature and combine with our voices, so that lead to the audiences know what we want to express. Not only express by speaking to the audiences, but also convey the message by using some more voices and sounds, so that it would not be boring or unobtrusive. Moreover, the spaces for the listeners is also necessary. It is important to tell people that they need to know when to need to know it rather than giving them all the things, so we should leave time for the audiences to determine the ideas of the story without any explanation, but to use the voices, sounds and musics in the audio.

Overall, all ideas Kyla mentioned in the lecture are useful for the preparation of Project Brief 4 and also make me have some fresh ideas about it.