Another example of Janet Cardiff's classic work, her audio walk titled The Missing Voice (Case Study B) can help us to better appreciate these aspects.

The piece was commissioned by Artangel in 1999, an independent organization based in London. "Part urban guide, part detective story, part film noir, this audio walk transports individual listeners on foot through the streets an alley-ways of Spitalfields, a historic part of London next to the City. Intimate, even conspiratorial in tone, it entwines the listener in an elusive narrative that shifts through space and time, confession, conjecture and dream."

Starting at Whitechapel Gallery (formerly the library), the audio walk is designed with a specific urban geography in mind. We will come back to this aspect in our next unit.

For now, it is important to listen carefully to the storyline and how it unfolds, as it can teach us how audio mediates narrative in particular ways.

Janet Cardiff | The Missing Voice (case study b) | Artangel | 1999

Quiz: Focalization

Who is focalizing in this story? (In other words: whose vantage point or perspective mediates the events we encounter in this particular storyworld? Please select multiple answers:

This narrative nicely illustrates how audio can support the peculiar immediacy of narrative storytelling in its own ways.

Experientiality
This audio narrative makes us a direct witness to both the events and how they are perceived. We become privy to the strength of the female main character's imagination. When she is reading a paragraph from a book in the library, we get to witness a film-noir scene. While walking on the street, broken windows and barbed wire surrounding a derelict building prompt her to imagine a war-zone. In both episodes, we get to experience the character's imagination and become affected as she is.

Temporality
There also is a temporal immediacy to this narrative, because it unfolds in time (as in life) in a variable tempo, just as the main character's thoughts swirl. Clearly, the listener is not as much in control of the narrative.

Situating
Even though we are listening to a single audio track, we get to hear the story from a multitude of vantage points. Figuratively, through the eyes of various characters, in the past or present: while the female character instructs us, we hear her statements played back on a Dictaphone, as well as the detective reconstructing her trajectory at a later point. The relation between these perspectives – occasionally repetitive or contradictory – is not made explicit, adding to the mystery.

Positioning
But this also works because literally, those perspectives are presented from different spatial and acoustical positions. The storyline is complexly layered, but we manage to disentangle each because of differences in sound quality and acoustic profile: while the female character speaks to us within the acoustical ambience of the library or the street, we hear her ruminations through the analogue hiss of a Dictaphone, or the clear-voiced recounting of the detective, just as occasional readings and citations are distinguished through background music. Each of those qualities signals us important cues about how we should make sense of a particular fragment.

Location
One of the strengths of this particular narrative is that it also positions the narrative clearly in a geographical location and space that the listener also occupies. This way the fictive narrative starts to overlap with actual events in the non-fictive world, and listeners come to envision themselves differently as their environment is destabilized and becomes part of a fictional setting.
We will learn more about the use of audio to reinforce, overlap or challenge our experiences of actual physical locations in the next unit.



Further Reading

• Gorman, S. (2003). Wandering and Wondering. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 8(1):83-92.
• Pinder, D. (2001). Ghostly Footsteps: Voice, Memories and Walks in the City. Ecumene 8(1): 1-19.