In this second blog, I’ll be doing the follow-up task for the first week.
I didn’t plan to do the follow-up task as I had enough to say in my reflection on the brief and lesson from last week, but after listening to some of the podcasts, I thought it would be a waste not to talk about them.
The first podcast I listened to was The Sound of Life Itself by Tim Hinman.
A general synopsis of the podcast is that it’s a semi-comedic documentary about the sounds of the world that acts as an introduction to soundscapes and general sound art.
Personally, I felt that at any point that there wasn’t speech, the podcast was practically a sound effects reel or demonstration. When there was speech, I did find it hard to focus on and take seriously because the content was not what I was prepared for or interested in.
The podcast is genuinely interesting in its own right, but it goes all over the place with its tone with it sometimes trying to be funny but then making it not comedic with its serious meaning and reaches in logic. One point made in the podcast talking about how we’ve become a visual culture was a really interesting point, as I did find it harder to focus on the podcast as there without a visual element. However, saying that society now is more focused on the visual than the auditory is like saying that we only developed our sight with the advent of civilisation, it’s just untrue. The fact that the sound ecologist Bernie Krause then goes on to talk about music soon after shows the incongruency in the argument he’s trying to get across. Sound has been and will always be important to the humankind at any point in their history because it’s one of our intrinsic senses. To say that we have moved away from what we hear is a premature take and one that has a contemporary bias.
Of course, that is just an example of how this podcast is reductive. It’s clear that this podcast has something it’s trying to say and it ignores everything else in service of saying that something, what that something is I have no idea because that’s not clear. It could be having an environmental message, a go to the countryside for your health message, a do what you want message, or could just be telling a very bad history of the world if you stop around the 10-minute mark.
This first podcast honestly was a disappointment in terms of answering what an audio paper is. It has a very unoriginal narrative and narrative style/structure and it lacks any real direction other than ‘interesting sounds’. It was produced immaculately despite a lot of the sounds in it sounding more like sound effects and stock ones at best, but I say it was produced well because I could see it being a segment in a BBC Radio broadcast, maybe.
The Sound of Life Itself is unfortunately forgettable, not because it is bad or not well done but because it is just another BBC Radio play, and arguably a lot less interesting than a BBC Radio play.
I understand that it’s more of a documentary as well; however, does not really fulfil that criterion and then it lends itself more as an interview. An interview is fine; however, it leaves the listener confused because they did not come for an interview but for a podcast about what was said in the description. Unfortunately, that description greatly exaggerates the podcast’s scope.
The second podcast I tried to listen to was the Crucial Listening podcast #95: Victoria Shen (evicshen) podcast. I say tried because the examples of Shen’s work or at least the random interjections of sound at the start I had to skip.
https://www.stitcher.com/show/crucial-listening/episode/95-victoria-shen-evicshen-90061814
These podcasts have a very different format The Sound of Life Itself podcast because the format is literally a podcast interview with audio bites of the interviewee’s work. The lower audio quality compared to the former podcast (as a result of it probably being a glorified zoom call during the pandemic) which is then juxtaposed with the high-quality audio bites makes me feel that it’s a very amateur podcast. The irony is that it’s made by sound artists, but I understand the restrictions that make that unavoidable.
I really enjoyed the interview section of this podcast, even if I could not understand a lot of it. It reminded me of the visiting lecture series we have on our course, but here you get to hear the real excitement of the artist when they talk non-stop about their work and the technicalities of their upcoming pieces and also how they feel about the things that have happened and are happening to them as an artist. It’s truly inspiring to see an artist nerd out about what they do.
Victoria Shen mainly talks about the technical aspects of her 3 albums and the context behind them, so if I was actually interested in the artist herself it would have helped me stay interested. The podcast is quite relatable as Victoria Shen is around one or 2 steps ahead of myself in an artist journey instead of the heights that I’m used to with the visiting lecturers.
Again, Crucial Listening podcast #95: Victoria Shen (evicshen) doesn’t really make me think “audio paper” as it’s just a pure-blooded podcast instead of a more obvious podcast/sound documentary hybrid like The Sound of Life Itself. This does mean that my understanding of what an audio paper hasn’t really been improved upon other than the fact that I have consumed more examples of what an audio paper could be.
Nonetheless, both podcasts were informative and interesting to listen to in their own rights, just with the amount of content one consumes in daily life I do wonder if I will even remember these podcasts at the end of this assignment.