One thing that stood out to me instantly when hearing the audio essays was the fact that there was music in the background. In “The Bitter Fruits of Wakefulness,” a piano piece played in the background to capture the somber mood of the essay. But what really made it effective was not only the use of music, but the absence of that music. At 42:00, the music stops. This is the moment when Lovell saw the mother and the father having sex. Listening to the music the entire time, it’s become noise, familiar. When it drops, you feel an uneasiness, and emptiness, and you can only hear the words Lovell says, and those words feel have more impact because of the silence they’re said on. This strategy is effective to show which moment left Lovell with such uneasiness and left such a mark on him.
Another tactic in an oral essay is the use of dialogue. In writing, how dialogue is said and the voice each character has is left entirely up to the imagination of the reader. With audio, every little tone can be heard in speech, hearing two different voices interact, hearing the casualness of how they speak. It feels like an actual conversation, and by hearing it, you believe it, you become a part of it. In “NRA vs. NEA”, at 10:25, Vowell shows us a conversation between herself and her father. With the sound of the car in the background, it feels as if you are right in the car with them as they speak with one another. The laughter in their voice, the pauses, everything that’s so natural that cannot be captured perfectly in just writing. Also in this essay, there are pauses between scenes, where only music plays. One such time is at 10:15. A pause cannot be done in writing in this way. A reader can read through a line break as fast as they’d like. But in audio, they are forced to only know what is told to them, and must wait when there are pauses. At this pause, only music plays, showing the transition of a scene and using the upbeat music to set the mood.
There are just some things that cannot be captured in writing. Music, the sound of canons, or feeling the timidness in someone’s voice–these are things that sometimes can only be perfectly portrayed through audio, letting the listener in through completely new senses.