In order to to fully realise the ideas I want to convey in my piece, it has been necessary to do some research into the wider world of storytelling through Sound Art to understand different perspectives and perhaps even fundamental truths of working with this medium.

In one my earlier blog posts I alluded to a research paper I intended to read by Mariana J. Lopez and Sandra Pauletto from the University of York titled ‘The Sound Machine: A Study in Storytelling through Sound Design’ (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1859799.1859808). I have since got round to reading the paper and what it told me about the idea of storytelling through sound has made me further consider the kinds of techniques will use when I continue to make my piece.

The paper essentially outlines a research project in which two variations of a previously existing story (Roald Dahl’s ‘The Sound Machine’) were made into sound works – one attempted to convey the whole story through only non-verbal sound (i.e. footsteps, breath, external landscape sounds, etc.), whilst the other was more in the form of a radio drama where speech was also allowed to help develop the plot. Each version was played to a separate group of respondents who then had to explain what they think had happened in the story and recall sounds that they had heard.

One concept I found in the paper that captured my attention was a phrase originally coined by Michel Chion, which is that of ‘Vococentrism’. Vococentrism, as Chion puts it, is the idea that “There are voices, and then everything else… in every audio mix, the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception’ – what this essentially means is that when speech is used in a radio drama, for instance, it places every other part of sound design into the background as the listener pays the most attention to what is being said as there is usually more information to be gained from it.

Without knowing the term for it at the time, I think this is why I shied away from doing a radio drama when it came to starting on my piece. I felt that I really wanted to focus on building a soundscape and that having a script that runs through the piece would detract from the world-building through sound design I am attempting to achieve. Of course, I am still using clips from news reports and interviews, but these aren’t really used to tell a story in a linear fashion in the traditional format that a radio drama might, and I am layering them on top of each other to the point where a lot of what is said is sometimes unintelligible.

At the end of the paper, the researchers found that in the version of The Sound Machine with no speech “aspects of the story… were not conveyed successfully”, which led to the group of respondents for this piece not properly understanding the plot. This was mainly because the plot had elements that would be very difficult to convey without having further context as to what is happening, and it would be very difficult for someone to tell with speech or image. Then again, the respondents who listened to the version with speech also had some difficulty working out the plot, so it might have just been a poor choice of story to use for this test.

To me, what the results of the research displayed in this paper show is that if one is trying to tell a story solely through the use of sound, it should perhaps be a bit more abstract so that the general themes are easier to follow. The sound designers who created these versions of The Sound Machine were attempting to literally reconstruct the story’s plot points just using sound, which unless it is a very simple story is always going to be a challenging task without the help of visuals. This is because they were trying to develop their own idea of producing an audio film, which is essentially supposed to replicate the experience of watching a film by hearing it instead. I feel that this would be a challenging task, as there are certain plot points that will be difficult to get across without visual clues, as the researchers found for themselves. Whilst I will be working with visual cues when it comes to making my final piece, for this prototype project I want the sound to be able to stand out on its own without necessarily having the need for visuals, so that when I begin to transform it into a spatialised piece for the final installation, the concepts behind the sound are already there.

For this reason I am going to try and say what I want to say through my piece in more abstract terms, whilst still attempting to tell a story and present a narrative. I will detail my experiments with this in my next blog entry.