After fielding feedback from Milo our tutor and our peers, it was clear to us that it was necessary to be more overt or arch in how we conveyed our narrative to the listener. However useful it was as a functional framework to help us create, it became immediately apparent that it was too opaquely drawn in that iteration of the draft.
A resolution we decided upon was narration, in keeping with the tone of the archival radio drama samples. In my writing and performance and processing of the narration passages, I drew particular inspiration from British Pathé news and documentary segments, as well as Leonard Nimoy’s “space, the final frontier…” opening monologue from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
The domestic, stolid, almost quaint narrative entry point of a kitchen proved extremely difficult to sonically render in a coherent fashion. I experimented with recording Foley of cabinets and dishes, a spoon stirring sugar into tea, and creaking doors and a gently ticking clock, in an attempt to capture the environment without words. To purely immerse the listener within the environment they may well already be listening within. However, despite these keynote sounds deriving from real kitchens, my own and the room tone from my girlfriend’s grandmother’s apartment in Korea, alone they were not enough to even suggest a kitchen environment. We had to lean further into transparency, even kitsch, to come close to successfully drawing the listener clearly into a kitchen in the radio medium. Sizzling bacon, could perhaps be another sound to include, or the toaster.
We agreed that guiding the audience’s focus and immersion through narration was a pragmatic way to centre the listener and prevent them from losing the narrative thread. I focussed my efforts on the final sequence set in space, because of its lack of keynote sounds and acousmatic nature, feeling that the kitchen scene as rendered was concrete enough for the listener to enter the space without
The way Nimoy’s voice has been treated is fascinating to me; it has a muffled, very close proximity effect, reflecting the suffocating acoustic dynamics within his makeshift naval coffin. Paired with this is a plate reverb or echo, adding a shimmering, cosmic colour. It’s as though he is talking through an interstellar cup and string telephone, an interesting contrast of muffled and expansive inspired my microphone and processing choices when recording the short section of narration leading into the final act of the piece.
I wrote the narration script in a florid, detailed style, drawing on Rod Sterling, H.P. Lovecraft and the mystery radio drama style:
‘Out in the expanse of space, someone, or something, listens at the crack in the door we breached. All of our minuscule, full-blooded voices teeming data on the solar winds. Like a great, celestial fly-fisherman, it, or they, attunes to the current, casting ringing electrons wide and reeling in our subatomic cacophonies. Learning about who these voices belong to.’
As stated by Crook (1999, pp. 162), ‘Radio’s fifth dimension of narrative communication, the listener’s imagination, is central to the cognitive, metaphysical and subconscious experience of the reader of written poetry and prose.’ In the purely sonic arena of radio, we have to be so much more gestural to convey the same density of information that the written word does. Enacting upon feedback and writing and performing this narration helps both imaginatively detail the world this story takes place within, while guiding the listener through a realm that was previously too obscure. In spite of that consideration, abstraction and experimentation also play a part in imaginatively shaping listener’s experiences. Balancing these concerns of clarity and abstraction will be a key challenge in successfully conveying our cosmic radiophonic narrative.
Bibliography:
Crook, T. (1999) Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London: Taylor & Francis Group. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=166120