“A quirky voice, some music, a few sounds, a spoken text”
This is the “improbable formula” Porter describes for the radio essay that is holding together many of the This American Life stories. There is Sarah’s young pitchy voice, marked with diegetic sounds of a creaking canon and the smooth transition from one scene to the next with some mood inducing music (When The Saints Go Marching In?).
I like the idea of the radio essay being a conglomeration of drama, sound, and reporting. A medium throughout history, picking up and tying together various genres asking to be listened to and to be powerful against the din of a million other voices. The radio essay’s meaning lies not only in the literary words, but in the way they are spoken (sarcastic or deadpan), in the way they are layered together to produce a whole symphony of sound, and in the way they are recorded (the clear crisp quality of the narrator’s voice versus the over the phone sounding interviews with Sarah’s family members). The one thing that I imagine has to happen in the conversion of a textual essay to a radio essay is a more distinct show of persona and character from the narrator.
We’ve talked about the persona of an essay early in class, and you can see the different characters created as you read any of the essays. David Foster Wallace cynically looking around at the fair, Annie Dillard watching an eclipse swelling with thoughts and emotion, Leslie Jamison going through a confusing moment sorting feelings at the hospital. But in a spoken work, there is now more than just the way you word things, but how your voice sounds and what that sound expresses. There is the authenticity of your voice, but there is also the possibility of coming off disingenuous.
From the audio essays we’ve listened to this week, they seem to be more like a drama unfolding or a musical performance thought out and composed, instead of this incidental “thought in action” or “mind at play” that I’ve come to associate as a characteristic of the essay. All these various sounds: a human voice, some music, a few noises, would mean nothing if heard separately, but the way they are strung together with this persona at the center guiding you along, creates a story.
“The voice of the narrator, rising and falling from panoramic heights to close up intimacy, is the strong force that contains and unifies all the disparate parts of the play.” I found that to be true in the NPR audio pieces. This is also why “The Idea of North” was so interesting and confusing, with the exception of the clear narrated introduction. While I was listening to the string of voices, I was trying extremely hard to find connections between them. Instead of having a narrator to orient me and guide me along the story, and make connections for me, I was trying to create order among the disparate sounds. It was like listening to many people speaking in a crowded room, catching a few sentences from different groups, and attempting to make sense of what was going on in the whole room.
I’m excited about composing an audio essay, and the different options there are of bringing sounds together, but I am also most concerned about how to introduce certain topics through sound. Should I conduct interviews with people? What parts should my voice carry? And at what moments should I leave it up to other pieces and sounds to anchor the essay?
