Jack Palmer unit 3

We organised a group call where we discussed and deligated tasks beyond our attributed roles for this project to allow more leeway and balance the workload more, highlighting parts of the script to designate particular sound effects to different members of the group so that we can work more efficiently. We decided on setting the deadline for our final project to be the 1st of April, as we all have other responsibilites to prioritise during the start of April and would like to not have to worry about this project so much at the same time.

We discussed me renting Zoom H5 over the easter break to start accumulating recordings to use for this project to gather field recordings for the sound beds and foley sound effects while the others get started on their voice work. Because of my role as the Editor, we also discussed backup plans of what we could do if the editor workload is too much to handle and the practicality of each DAW we could use to make the project files accessable by all, since my preferred DAW is FL Studio which is not used by any other members of the group. We decided that if it were the case that the editing workload was needing assistance that we would be happy to just work with a bounce of the master track and layer on top of that in whatever DAW is preferred, rectifying the need for any other software to be used.

With our script finished the next step is to go forward with recording all the voice and the described sounds and scenes, and then from there I can start treating and organising the sounds in a way that feels the way that I find appropriate or that I find to resonate with me emotionally, which might be a lot of work in the forthcoming weeks and maybe an unrealistic amount for the April 1st due date but I’m happy treating that date as more of an ideal to work towards rather than a set and stone fixed time period, but its nice to know that as a group we all know what needs to be done and that we all trust in eachothers abilities.

For the preperation task of finding and listening to a radio station I like, I went about an exploration of the stations around London using the Radio Garden site, writing down any I found of any interest and deciding on a favourite. Of these were a few fun Rave oriented stations and one station that had attrociously bad mixing (Future Drumz), the presenter being barely audible and the music randomly getting boosted until clipping which I found entertaining. My decided favourite though was Aaja Channel 1, which while listening seemed to reject any genre classification for the programme, drifting between Glitch, IDM, Post Punk, Japanese Pop Rock, Chinese Folk, Liquid DnB and whatever else the curator likes.

The main attraction of this station I feel like is that the selection flows organically despite being so drastically diverse and yet so consistent in the quality, I don’t think throughout the entire hour or so I spent listening that I disliked a single track. Another nice feature of the station is that the interludes aren’t so horribly long and obnoxious, with the time I was listening having these sparse and extremely short text to speech voice interludes that served more as a reminder you’re listening than to sell you something you don’t want. If there was a station I would regularly tune into, I think this would be my choice, but ultimately I don’t think I will be doing that very often as I prefer controlling what I listen to and listening to albums in their entirety.

For the preperation for this lesson, Vic drafted up a baseline script to work from for this project that will now be the basis for what sounds I should be collecting and what I should be thinking of. The script gives sound descriptions that are quite particular to a space, and I’ve started considering what sounds would benefit from being recorded myself or what could be best used from a sound library, such as the bike sounds and ringtones appearing more appropriately cartoonish and emphasised if they are less natural to the environment. Drawing from the script as well, I’ve started to consider what non-diagetic sounds can be included to exaggerate the situation in a more exciting way than our piece being too literal to be engaging, and how that seperation can be made through sound alone that the sound is not in the environment, but more of an internal thing for the character that is focused on.

From this session, we started to discuss the script as a group, giving input on how we could interpret what we had and how the concept could be stretched to have more of an impact, talking about notions of Realistm and Surrealism as well as forcing a state of tired listening, which is an observation from a previous preperation task. The overall takeaway from this was that the script shouldn’t be seen as so strict, and that diversions (within reason) are more than welcome as long as the outcome is entertaining and the group is informed on it. This helped give me a bit more freedom with how I approach this project, with a lot of pressure being put on me because my work is ultimately to present everyone else’s work in a way that brings out their hard work, so having more freedom feels like less pressure to doing what I feel like I’m expected to do, and more just doing what I would like to do.

The Flicker Man piece intrigues me mainly as I have some familiarity with the ARG format and how advances in communications technologies has created a new form of storytelling, whether through playing characters on image boards or blogs or the like, as well as through video uploads and video games or whatever tools available to create art that blurs the line of fiction and reality, and most importantly includes the audience participation in its existence.

With the flickerman, the medium it took was that of radio primarily, and then would continue through social media, as a lot of ARGs did during ther inception, with Lance Dann explaining radio’s relationship with its audience;

“Audience is the commodity that contemporary radio produces, a commodity
that is sold to advertisers or, in the UK, exchanged for the right to demand a
licence-fee. Station content is produced simply to attract that audience,
programming is programmed and risks are rarely taken.”

With the Flicker Man’s concept being to direct listeners to Flicker images on their site using the tagging feature, he would engage the audience in a different manner than usual programming, not entirely demanding audience participation, but working best with the audience digging through the information provided by Lance to follow him to Facebook conversations and Google Maps locations in order to tell a narrative this way.

With the ARG concept being interesting already to me I am interested most by what he has to say at the end, that “for radio what really matters is not sound, it is the act of broadcast”, describing radio as a “precise and direct communication with a listener at a particular moment in time. This is why ‘live’ radio is so appealing, because you as ‘listener’ know that there is someone out there talking to you at that precise moment.” This had me think about what the appeal of our pre-made pre-recorded and assembled work could have seperate from the ideal liveness, and how to tune into this idea of radio as a direct communication to the listener, and involving them in a similar sense that the ARG idea does. While I don’t think this exercise will shape the idea of the project, it is something to think about regarding how to go about including the audience beyond the appeal of liveness through familiarity and honesty, or perhaps feigning liveness to remove the need for anything greater. All things to take into account further into this project.

As I was not able to attend classes this week due to illness (with only Ruben from our group being able to attend), but I was able to get a run down from what I had missed so that I can catch up. I had missed a Radio Workshop, where I would have been able to trial broadcasting to a DIY radio station set up in the session, which was broadcasted to and listened to in groups to apply previously discussed ideas of radio’s aesthetic qualities and what effect that the medium has on the voice of the broadcaster.

As I was not there in person, I got some videos from the session from Jude which gave me a good idea of the listening experience, the acousmatic nature of the sound being seperated from the source adds more of a dramatic nature to what is being said, turning conversation into a performance through the disconnected nature of listening without being able to engage. In a later session (going back to this blog post later) I got to see a transmitter being used by another group to see for myself how this would be done, with it being suprisingly straightforward to broadcast music to a radio using one of those devices.

The naturally dramatised nature of radio can be something to take into account when developing our piece, thinking about how that idea can be exploited to make more impactful art and ways more banal sound sources and topics can be made more dramatic, with the basis of our piece being focused on the banal anyway, using radio conventions to our advantage of exaggerated vocal delivery and near cartoonish sound effects.

With the accessability of this technology seemingly being near trivial, it also opens up some opportunities to experiment with buying a transmitter myself and seeing what can be done with my own personal work using the medium, maybe as a means of blending controlled sounds with those controlled elsewhere and how that could be used as a technique later. It also brings into mind that there are many different ways to listen using the radio, and through broadcasting you are playing to an audience that might be listening passively, intently, through a small cheap radio or a hi-fi system, through headphones on a web-player, through car speakers, all of these being uncontrollable by the broadcaster, which might make attaching suggested listening methods for the audience to have more control a nice idea, or possibly just rolling with the indefinite nature, either way is nice.

I listened to the Knock Knock: 200 Years of Sound Effects programme as preperation this week, which I found to be an interesting insight into sound effects creation and how sounds can be replecated and crafted using household objects and objects that have very little relation to the sound it’s related to, whether that be because of its size or material. In the sound design section a few key ideas that stood out to me where that “What sound effects can and must do is reproduce noises not as the necessarily are but rather as they are usually noticed by the ordinary person.” I found this mostly of note because it connects to something mentioned by Dr Carrie Giunta in her guest lecture where she talked about how she designed the sounds for the desert scene of whatever film, saying that ” The problem is that if you record the actual sound that goes with that space it has nothing to do with the emotion of being there”, which justified her unrealistic use of howling wind in the scene she showed.

Further on this idea, in this section the sound designer states that “When I am crafting a sound, I am not seeking realism, but essense,” which gets to the core of this idea of more exaggerated and often unrealistic interpretations of a sound or a space can have more of an emotional resonance with the listener and ultimately more connection with that sound than if it were recorded, which to me makes me appreciate sound design as not just an art form but more of a science (and maybe think about sound design’s possible deceptive creative uses).

With the prompt given for the preperation tasks having to “Turn on a Radio and Take Notes” and not currently having access to a radio of my own at the moment I decided to stretch the prompt a little to take some time to go through some London based radio broadcasts. taking notes on anything I found interesting.

My first choice of station was Smooth Radio, which I listened to for around 10 minutes, catching an ad break, a short news programme and some music. From what I noted, all of the speaking in the adverts and talking from the presenters have a homogenous tone of feign glee in their voice, which I found incredibly irritating and mildly hypnotic, as well as finding that there seems to be an aversion to leaving even a second of empty space, with each advert bleeding into the next rather than stopping and starting, which created a near delirious state of listening. On that line of thought, beyond the advertisements the need to have music be playing as a soundbed behind the voices is also another method to avoid any second of silence, and the sound ducking in and out when they talk is strangely tiring. The overall experience leading up to the actual music playing was insufferably dull and I found no joy in it, the music was not so good either.

My second choice of radio station was the Christian Radio station called Premier, which started with a plea for donations to play before connecting, before going to adverts which I found to be quite entertaining, they had the same kind of radio pacing and tone in how they would speak but they cared less about leaving gaps, and would have little patches of empty space between ads about whatever service they were offering (maybe it is more of an amateur or genuine approach than what Smooth was depending on if having no silence is benefitial). When the ads ended I noticed the host of the program had no sound bed which gave him speaking more of a serious demeanour dispite the same kind of radio voice forced demeanor as the last station. It seems I tuned in at a good time because he was repeating that “It’s going to be all over tomorrow, we just need 15 people to donate £100”, appealing to faith for donations stating “Will you be the first to donate £100? What you’re doing then is guiding more people to Jesus”. They then played a caller who talked about how much joy she got from being a patron to their radio show, with the host saying “she was fulfilling God’s plan for her and also for Premier” which I found funny. By the time the music started fading in (some kind of Christian Pop seemingly made to grift money from people with faith) I was ready to tune out, this excercise has given me a brief idea of what popular radio is structured as but it hasn’t instilled a lot of love for the format for me I must admit.

I liked this experience with the Christian Radio station though because of the seemingly purpouseful use of radio conventions to kind of decieve an audience that might be more perceptible to donating into doing so, elevating and dramatising his presence with a lack of sound bed and using the radio call in as a way to further instill the need to donate into an audience’s brain. I want to further explore how radio can be used to manipulate an audience and exploit the medium in a similar way.