I’ve been thinking about the elements that make up audio drama for me, whilst also considering what I can do that is different in the medium, what does it look like to experiment audio drama? One idea I’ve considered is inspired by a story that Milo mentioned in class where The Flaming Lips would take stems of all their music and have hangouts where different people would each play these stems on different players in their respective cars.
Something like this in an audio drama context is extremely interesting to me. What if I were to create an episode with the intention of each element (voice, action sfx, and ambience) is released as a separate element, so a listener can hear just the narration and dialogue, hearing the story in a more traditional ‘audio book’ style. A listener could also lisen to just the action sound effects, something in the style of “The Revenge” by Andrew Sachs, the story is guessed and inferred. More abstractly a listener could just hear the ambiences and scores of different settings and scenes, in a style of an ambient or mediational track. There are a few combinations of ways that a listener could experience and re-experience the story.
One way it might be slightly antithetical to the nature of audio drama is that logistically, a decent demographic of people listen to audio drama on commutes or whilst doing chores etc. this experience would require time out of someone’s day who might not have it. In that respect I feel like each element would have to be done as if they could stand on their own, you should be able to listen to each part and have a full and complete experience.
Another idea I’ve been toying with is one that comes off as slightly more theatrical but still with an intention of story telling. What you would do is have a system where you set up a line of pedals proceeding from an instrument including various synth racks etc, anything that can add to or change the sound that goes through it, each of these is controlled by an individual, in the process of doing this one would gain a knowledge of the things they can do with their element, working with as much or as little as it gives them, whilst also bulding upon the sound given to them by the previous person in the line. You then feed all of that into a mixer controlled by someone. On top of this you have 1/2 people reading out a text, this acts as a guide for the people controlling the the sound that scores the words, each person adding their own part and attempting to work with other people in the line to try and emphasise the words.
I think this project would work well live, but it could also be interesting to see it done as a series of repeated experiments, if the same text is used, it would be very curious to see how in sync and familiar with the text the participants become.
One idea that has also been something I’ve been thinking of is doing a significant episode of my audio drama in 5.1, I talk about it in depth here in a previous entry into this blog. But I will also provide a quote that gets to the heart of me feelings on the matter
In the spirit of this I’ve started to consider how I could incorporate surround mixing into Chain of Being, the season finale of the show is on the horizon and I’m thinking about how I can make it special. For a while now I’ve been thinking about how to make it different, in terms of content and actual sound design. However since the possibility of surround mixing has been introduced to me I have been theorizing another way to make it unique. When the time comes to it I think I might mix it in 5.1 and hold a live listening, not everyone has a system capable of handling 5.1 and it would make for an interesting experience to have a live version. To make it slightly more accessible I could release an encoded file for those that have such systems at home, releasing it alongside the regular episode.
I think doing an actual live listen along would be really interesting, the idea to creating live spaces for audio drama to be experienced should be done a lot more and is something I would love to try and do it myself.