Colourless and Colourful: A Love Letter to Sound Stories
I was an audio geek during my time as an undergrad. While most people were shooting short films, designing cool graphics, and recording bands, I spent my four years creating sound stories. That has always been my passion, and something I felt was seldom explored in both RTA’s curriculum, and the creative industries in general. Simply put, it is one step beyond writing a novel, but one step removed from crafting a motion picture.
As a child, I remember discovering Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio play, in which he fooled his audience into thinking that an alien invasion was actually occurring. That hour of content, produced by the Mercury Theatre on the Air, is still more thrilling than many of the visual projects I have seen. Why? Because it requires imagination — sound effects, vocal timbres, and the right ambience that creates a tangible environment. If you close your eyes, you can actually see it, and it forces you to push the boundaries of your mind. It doesn’t rely on big budgets or expensive sets, and most importantly, it transcends racial divides. It can be both colourless and colourful, depending on your choice of sound design.
Recently, I have been entertaining the thought of exploring this medium further. I have been contemplating the idea of recording a full-length sound story, around an hour and a half of audio, and renting out a movie theatre for the experience. It would be fun to hand out night masks, and tell people to sit back and relax as the audio surrounds them. Maybe you could use hall effects to enhance the environments — similar to aspects of 4D films, if there’s a scene in a windy place, you could utilize fans to make people feel the chill physically. Or perhaps, an interactive setting could be fitting. The audience could walk around an environment such as a house, and try to solve mysteries in relations to the dialogue cues and scenes played in specific areas.
Yet another alternative is satellite radio, which is an untapped, potentially lucrative business! Right now, SiriusXM has just one sound story channel, which consists of older broadcasts from the mid-twentieth century. Imagine listening to an episode while you’re stuck in traffic, or riding the subway. Famous actors could record audio versions of famous films, similar to how celebrities do script reading events for TIFF. I would love to hear Bryan Cranston as James Bond, or Sir Anthony Hopkins in the King’s Speech. The possibilities are simply endless.
Sound stories were abandoned after the advent of television, and its full potential was never properly realized. Because of these reasons, it would be very refreshing to revisit the medium in 2017, and re-establish it as a viable alternative. People are often too busy to catch up on television shows and films, but you can use your ears almost anywhere — while you’re working, and while you’re traveling. Sound stories are both efficient and imaginative, and the time is right for their re-popularization.
-Julian Muia
