The sonic characteristics that we discussed are clearly suited for narrating stories. But they also challenge conventional notions of narrative. Narrative theory, for instance, has largely been developed for narratives in textual or visual forms. In comparison to such textual transcripts, sounds’ ephemeral character seems to offer hardly a substantial basis for narratology. However, in recent years, some authors have begun to call for an “acoustic turn” in narratology (Mildorf et al., 2016)

This requires not just a vocabulary suited to discussing sound, but also a re-examination of the forms and functions of sound in relation to narrative structure. This changes our perspective on some key premises in narrative theory, some of which you were introduced to in previous lessons. It also allows us to consider how stories are shaped by the medium in which they are transmitted.


Quiz: A quick refresher

From mediated to immediacy

As Mildorf and Jamila (2016) point out, audio changes our understanding of the workings of these narrrative elements. Importantly, whereas many written or visual narrative texts are mediated, audio adds an element of immediacy (p.15).

Just as in text, auditory storytelling may help a reader/listener to focalize in different ways, and thus assume different vantage points. The prime focalizer in audio narratives is the microphone, which reconstructs for listeners the soundworlds as they are experienced by narrators and characters respectively. However, sound allows for a degree of experientiality (Fludernik 1996). Because storyworlds are not mediated through a textual medium but through an aural medium, we can experience events as they would be in sound. Hearing, in other words, seems to make us a direct witness to the events recounted.

Even more so than with text, listeners need to make sense of what they are presented, filling in the missing information by making assumptions and drawing inferences from auditory cues. Positioning of audio (voices, events) in a reconstructed auditory space provides some such cues, for instance about the proximity or movement of characters or objects. It also enables us to hear from a specific vantage point. A distant or muffled voice has a different effect, for instance, than a close voice-over, indicating a memory or thought rather than direct speech. Sound, in other words, helps to situate the listener within a narrative. (As we will see in lesson 2, however, audio reconstructs space differently inside a narrative than textual or visual media do).

Finally, audio also affects the temporality of a narrative, both inside and outside the story. Since audio unfolds in time, it also takes time. We hear, in other words, narrative elements as they play out (rather than in the elongated time of a narrative text). But crucially also, because of its technological mediation, the listener is no longer as much in control of the pacing of the narrative (e.g. by re-reading a sentence, scrolling back or forward) as they are when listening.

Like audiences of any narrative, listeners thus need to make sense of a story recounted (its structure, sequence, story world, narrative perspective by drawing inferences form the (auditory) signs provided to them. Like any narrative, audio narratives thus draw upon and activate listeners’ previous associations and memories. But audio’s affordances for sorting and providing such signs differ in important ways from those of written, visual or web-based texts.




References

• Herman, D. (2009). Basic elements of narrative. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Ryan, M.-L., Thon, J-N. (eds.) (2014). Storyworlds across Media. Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• Mildorf, J. & Kinzel, T. (eds.) (2016). Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Bonini, T., Oliveira, M. & Stachyra, G. (2019). Radio Relation: Policies and Aesthetics of the Medium. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.