The Music of the Thing

Making audio features is a lot like composing music – only your scoring for an ensemble of sound textures rather than instruments.

I’ve found music-based techniques and approaches very useful when feature making… Music is a master medium at crafting on the canvas of time – it also has many subtle and varied ways of giving abstract sounds meaning… music has a lot to give, especially in terms of articulating the structure of a piece. I guess I’d say to students – ‘think about the musical elements - good composition can make a strong program great’.

A couple of notes or things to think about…

ORCHESTRATION – what instruments will you use - sounds or textures are you going to use to tell the story. When I say sound texture I guess I mean it’s sonic an associative qualities – i.e. Studio, field, phone, archival, atmospheres and spot sound, etc are distinct textures – modes of address also have a different texture – like the difference between someone speaking directly to you, or to someone else, or reading from something, talking off the cuff or in a measured way etc.

(COMPOSITIONAL)TEXTURE – how are the different voices interacting – is it counterpoint, polyphony, monody etc – I guess it’s about the relationship between the different voices

RANGE/FREQUENCY – how high or low are the sounds and how much of the possible range do you use – tip: if you want to mix lots of layers of sounds and want each to ‘carry’ and not get too ‘muddy’ – make sure the different sounds have their own space in the frequency range – as in, they are not all low or not all high etc.

SONIC INTENSITY/DYNAMICS – in broadcast radio we can’t do much creatively with dynamics or volume – it’s impractical. But you can achieve a similar effect through manipulating the sonic intensity of the sound… how dense or sparse the sound is. For example, a single naked voice feel ‘softer’ than ten voices all sounding at once - even if the volume level is the same.

RHYTHM AND PACE – think structurally as well as the beats from moments to moment

TIMBRE/ARTICULATION – again, this is all nature of the sound stuff.

PHRASING – how do your story phrases work with your sonic phrases – and does it leave time to breathe.

MOTIVIC DEVELOPMENT – this gets onto the whole business of establishing a sonic framework for a piece… too much to discuss in a blog post