For sonic doing and thinking I read an extract from Arnheim Rudolphs “Radio”, and I must say how incredibly gratifying it is to be reading about what it is that you have been waiting so long to learn about and to develop your skills around. It’s not that it has opened up my eyes to entirely new thoughts (though in some aspects it has done that) but it has solidified thoughts I’ve had about my medium and explored them in ways I hadn’t fully considered.
Take, for example, the intention of doing sound editing for audio dramas. Radio brings up the question of if in a broadcast the sound should be supplementing the “missing visual image,” or if it should exist on it’s own and that we as sound designers should not encourage the listener to see with their “inner eye” as it is “a great hinderance to a real appreciation of the real nature of wireless,”. I have often considered this when doing Chain of Being, it takes an audiobook style, and so do I do every sound that happens in a scene? every clink of very glass and all minor details? I began considering doing only what was key, only what was significant, zips and rustles were not necessary. However recently I have indeed tried to encourage the imaginations of my listeners images and scenes and ‘visuals’. To what degree of success you would have to hear for yourself. Doing Chain of Being in the audio medium does have it’s merits, yes, but I always feel like it could very easily be supplemented by visuals, in the distant future I would like to work with various animators and artists to do such a thing, but I also feel that if I were to defend my opinions and decisions to Arnheim I would point out that, the sound does work on it’s own, it is not made as if it had been pulled from a visual element but instead, the visual element would only emphasise the sound, I have always made Chain of Being with sound in mind, and so I do not think, in any way, that it would be cheapened somehow by the addition of visuals, or that it does not fully appreciate the medium in which it exists if it encourages the listeners use of their imaginations.
