Producers and analysts of audio narratives have identified several characteristics that make audio particularly suitable for narrative storytelling. But as we will see later in our lesson, they also pose new problems – both for understanding and establishing the narrative effects that sound helps to produce.

This becomes evident in the following example, titled "FOREST (For a thousand years...)" by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's FOREST (for a thousand years...) (2012) during installation at Glenstone in May 2017. ©Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. Photo: Glenstone Museum

This fragment is part of a 28-minute sound installation, which was originally commissioned for documenta 13 in Kassel. It is the artists' attempt to create a sound piece that did not have a direct narrative or narrative voice driving it. In that sense, it may challenge some of the pre-conceptions we have of narrative, and which we have begun to deconstruct on the previous page. But exactly this helps us to consider the power of audio for storytelling too.

Ideally, this piece is experienced outside, in a forest. Listeners arrive in a clearing populated by tree stumps, sit down and listen to the piece. You may be listening in different surroundings, but do try to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a forest.

Let us first consider the sound piece:

  Fragment 1

(placeholder: all of these are right, sound affects us all differently and emotionally)

1. Listening is an ongoing event

Wherever there is sound, there is time passing. This is not just a matter of clocks ticking or bells tolling. Think of a tuning fork ringing, or an engine revving in the distance, coming closer. Sounds unfold in and with time. They are constantly changing, emerging, or fading.

A sound is also always a disruption of a status-quo. This is why sound is often (but not always!) used to make listeners experience the passing of time. In film, for instance, auditory cues provide ways of adding progression, even where the image itself is halted. This is much like narrative itself; meaning is acquired gradually, as plot events evolve successively and progressively, as they come to be perceived and experienced (Lutostanski, 2016, p. 76).

In Forest, by Cardiff and Miller, sound clearly moves the narrative forward, even when nothing much seems to be happening. Whether it is through snapping twigs, airplanes disappearing in the distance, or a vague rhythmic sound turning into a wave of men attacking, the listener is pulled in and pushed forward, as individual sounds become patterned and gradually acquire meaning.

2. Listening is a spatial experience

Sound itself is a deeply spatial phenomenon. Hearing is not only attuned to direction of a sound and possibly the position whence a sound originates. But through echoes and reverberation, it also cues us in on the size, shape and materials of the rooms or environments in which it was produced (or subsequently reproduced).

Whereas, in visual terms, space is often reconstructed on a two-dimensional plane in front of us, existing technologies of auditory reproduction may allow for a spatial immersion within a narrated situation. Sound may thus contribute a sense of presence, situatedness and, quite literally, position.

In Forest, by Cardiff and Miller, sound is clearly a spatial phenomenon. Even when we do find ourselves surrounded by the forest where this narrative seems to take place and our headphones never fully replicate the surround-effect created by the duo's technical masters, it is clear from this track how much sound may transport us to a different place and situate us in the middle of the action.

3. Sound can have affective power

Stories are accounts of what happened to particular people, and what it was like for them to experience this. Audio is ideally suited to convey this. In addition to linguistic information, performative aspects also affect how we perceive a message. This is particularly clear for the human voice. Anyone who has listened to poetry read out loud knows that its experience can differ markedly from the experience of reading it yourself. The tone of voice, its range and dynamics as well as tempo and images of the speaker that the voice evokes all can change our interpretation of the reading. Listening to someone speak to us can also heighten a feeling of intimacy.

How did you feel, listening to Cardiff and Miller's Forest? Although the piece makes use of barely any linguistic or even verbal information, there is clearly a narrative unfolding. We may be affected because changes in dynamic range, tempo and frequency gradually unfold their meaning, or because even despite our cognitive understanding, we feel we become part of a scene evidently dangerous.

4. Monomodal or multimodal?

Audio narratives may make use of sound as a sensory modality onto itself (for instance to provoke a particular aesthetic or emotional experience that affects the listener in particular ways). But it may also be used to supplement or augment other visual, textual, spatial or other interactive modalities. Audio narratives may thus off-load some of the narration (otherwise presented in written or visual form) onto an additional (acoustic) channel, which frees up the listener to employ their visual sense in other ways.

A note on ‘essential characteristics’

Above, we listed several characteristics of sound that are often used to full effect in audio narratives. Such characteristics have often been identified as natural, and thus essential and unchanging aspects of sound (as opposed to vision). According to such views, hearing immerses us in the world, while vision (which is consistently associated with perspective and distance) removes us from it.

However appealing such dichotomies may be (which media scholar Jonathan Sterne (2012) describes as an ‘audiovisual litany’), it is important to realize that they are also powerful cultural prejudices about sound. Any such characteristics are also culturally and technologically mediated. For instance, a sound can be recorded to provide a sense of spatial awareness or not. Whether we listen to a speaking voice via a pair of headphones or via a tannoy on an open square will also influence our experience of it.

 Announcement on Barceloneta

 Mandarin whispery walla

The key point to notice here is that many of the assumptions that we have about sound are not essential per se. Sound can be both expansive and intimate, close and far away. But the fact that we can use it to these different effects, does make it an excellent narrative medium.

Regardless of its intended purpose, it is also important to realize that the experience of listening to an audio narrative always overlays listeners’ already existing, situated experience.

References

• Sterne, J. (ed.) (2012). The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
• Smets, K. (2019). Narrative and Voice. In: T. Bonini, M. Oliveira & G. Stachyra (eds.). Radio Relation: Policies and Aesthetics of the Medium. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Lutostanski, B. (2016) A Narratology of Radio Drama: Voice, Perspective, Space. In: J. Mildorf & T. Kinzel (eds.). Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter. (PP. 117-132).