Long read: my thoughts on The Tower, by Tin Can Audio

https://www.tincanaudio.co.uk/thetower

Here is a link to the audio drama mini-series, The Tower, by Tin Can Audio. It was also described by its producer, David Devereux, as an experimental ‘audio drama concept album.’ I worked alongside David very briefly at Rusty Quill – the end of his time as editor of Stellar Firma coincided for a month or two with the start of mine producing the same show. But I enjoyed his approach to sound, and so I vowed at the time to check out some of his other work.

I was interested enough, as a musician and sound designer with an interest in psychological storytelling, to want to go deeper into this particular show, and I share my thoughts about it with you.

Kiri makes a decision. She’s going to climb The Tower.

As we follow the protagonist, Kiri, on her journey of discovery about herself and about humanity, we are tacitly invited to look back on our own recent past of listening within the drama as we do. There is some kind of symmetrical co-experience as we observe Kiri’s own retrospective reflections and mental growth.

It is deeply introverted and full of symbolism (though it works equally well at face value, as a kind of a daydream). Typically, in audio drama and other media, it’s expected that audiences will have to invest attention and careful thought into the quieter, more introspective stories; it’s kind of part of the deal. But here it’s different: the internal, psychological drama and careful narrative pace are made more compelling by the chiselling of music, sound and words, and by the performances. Not a moment is excessive or wasteful, and I didn’t need to concentrate really hard before I wanted to listen on.

By the end, I think I understood this: we’re exploring what it may be that makes us lost, without identity, and desperate to ‘escape,’ and how it may be far more to do with the way society consumes us than it is about our own shortcomings. David puts it like this: ‘a lot of The Tower is about wanting to fix things, but not quite knowing what it is you’re trying to fix, let alone how to go about it.’

In the earlier part of the season, we become aware of some unknown agency or power that’s observing Kiri in, and is in charge of, The Tower, but we don’t know what it is. But the final chapter has us asking fresh (and livelier) questions, about the fabric of The Tower itself. Read on to learn what I think they are.

Prelude and The Staircase

Kiri speaks to people on telephones along her journey. They are, obviously, a natural-sounding way to narrate in audio. Their rings, filtering and static become a signature sound of the series very quickly.

I like to think that there may be symbolism even in this – something about connections: reaching out. In that light, it is significant that the series begins with the ring of a phone. When I remarked on this, David told me that during recording, he ‘had the actors face away from each other so that they only had the other’s voice to bounce off. Exploring ideas of isolation, both imposed and chosen, was a big part of what went into the story.’

The first music cue is introduced at the apex of Kiri’s row with her friend Chris (chapter 1, 1:34), when she announces her decision to climb The Tower. At the height of their discord, the music is immediately interesting, because the theme has a calm, pacific quality to it. Do we hear the reaching out for escape in the music even as she shouts – an impulse which Chris himself, we hear later, fully understands?

This decision is the first step on her journey. All of the music in the whole mini-series implies perpetual motion. David says that he never properly considered this piece of musical semiotics, although he did deliberately use the repeated notes D/C/G/A as an underlying motif. All the same, I do wonder if there might have been a subconscious intent there. He mentions that he took a lot of influence from Ryuchi Sakamoto, who has been so influential in the electronic music world. (I know him best myself from the score to the film The Last Emperor, in which the music concentrated the kind of sad, rather empty, expansiveness for me.)

In any case, as Kiri restates her determination, she is already on her way, mentally. The music is always walking, always climbing. The rhythmic character is gentle, with quavers bobbing along, and no strong, overt beat. It is so hypnotic that after sustained listening the music sits somewhere in the semi-conscious, playing out even when there is no underscore; it feels like the series is whispering it under its breath.

I think the music also has a slightly mystical quality.

The second cue arrives when we learn that Chris has been reading about the Tower all day (chapter 1, 5:19). For me, this introduces The Tower as a ‘character,’ gives it personality, with the cementing of the connection between the main theme and The Tower.

The music wanders on the pentatonic scale, largely – David says ‘you could say this about literally all of my music’ 😊 – but the expression is different here. The homophonic chords are a little more decisive, solid – there is more of a definite voice. I found no definite resolution in this consonant sound-world – it is more like we are floating, exploring, there is no real dissonance or sharpness. There is always a chance there could be a resolution to a final chord at any moment, but it is infinitely held off, which occurred to me may be a way of drawing an apparently infinite tower (or one, a least, where the ending is unseen). David confirmed to me that this was a deliberate choice, and something he had in mind to experiment with when he began scoring The Tower.

However, I discovered at the very end of this season that there is eventually a change to this irresolution, and it comes right at a climactic moment in the plot. I’ll mention the conclusions I drew about this when I get there! But this is one really good example of the audience being shown something of Kiri’s panoramic self-discovery within the musical (and, symbiotically, the narrative) structure that we listeners ourselves trace as we listen. By “panoramic self-discovery”, I mean, looking back and forwards in time, looking inside herself at times while also forgetting all about herself at other times, looking down to the ground and up to the unfolding structure).

Note – in terms of audio production choices, the dialogue is heard in Chris’s point of audition at the start of this exchange. When we segue to Kiri’s point of view, the music ends and the mist sounds – alien, slightly dwarfing, intimidating – begin. Why? “The person you are trying to reach is unavailable,” it says, a familiar message to anyone from the UK… The music seems to be about connections quite a lot – Kiri is reaching outwards, or perhaps reaching backwards in time – and the absence of it here perhaps feeds into this.

The “calling mum” music feels slightly less stable (chapter 1, 7:40). David says it’s his favourite bit of the score.  In his correspondence with me about this section, he concluded that

‘they’re inverted m11 chords but phrased weirdly: for example, the first chord is F# and C# on the left hand, and G# and D# on the right, so it’s a G#m11/F#… I think? It’s an ambiguous, cinematic chord sound that I really like.’

As ever, there is a rather unstable tonal centre; when I listened, it felt like we were heading for C#, but then it settled as seeming to have an F# tonic. Then we shift sideways to Eb6 as Kiri hangs up. All of this, to me, suggests uncertainty, irresolution in the character, as she wrestles homesickness for childhood.

When talking to the mysterious Ike at the end of this first chapter, both points of view in the dialogue are filtered for the telephone. We sit between them – on the wire, as it were! The music returns to the F centred key world, which for me helps to bookend and shape the episode. David pointed out that F is ‘very much the central key’. This is absolutely something that I felt strongly as I listened.

There is lots of the white noise in this episode – the tower mist, the phone crackle. It sandpapers the ear regularly! It seems like David is setting up the discomfort to help us inhabit Kiri’s, and, of course, also setting that up so that the moment it clears, the absence of a sound has as much impact as possible.

The Little Church

This section explores doubts, low self-esteem, and the feeling of a lack of progress.

The opening chord D5 (9) comes into focus during the arpeggiation, in a music box-like patch.

Then we hear a C chord underneath – then B – then A…

These chords feel a little circular, which I imagine is mimicking the (apparently futile, or at least dispiriting) walking around with little or no progress. Kiri tells about her dispiriting experiences via her phone calls, but we experience them ourselves via the music (and sound).

David said that he was least pleased with this this section of the score, overall. However, as a media composer myself, I know that when the narrative is depicting staleness, wilderness, lack of progress, I invariably find myself feeling stale, uninspired and mopey in my scoring! I would even suggest that it is a sign of being well-attuned to a story. Perhaps I am making excuses for being an artistic parasite there, though! Regardless, I think that the circular function of the music in this section carries meaning, even if it wasn’t that satisfying to compose!

The music returns just before ‘How’re you holding up?’ (episode 2, 3:16): an F9 chord here. And there are some parallel harmonies. David told me that he loves chord extensions and suspended chords… you and me both, David!

I notice a lot of descending bass in these cues. It’s like she’s reaching back for the ground in her moments of anxiety about her decision – but then the bass moves up again, like there’s a kind of balance over a pivot between her resolve and her trepidation. If you are listening as you read, one example is when she says ‘I really appreciate it’.

“What are you doing?”

Towards the end of the episode, the narrative turns darker. Kiri’s misgivings are manifested and concentrated in an intrusion on the phone line by a voice that challenges her in an alarming way: “what are you doing?” repeated again and again (episode 2, 5:50).

The “what are you doing” moment is the first time I feel that we have some really prominent transdiegetic work, and I love that! The loud static has a ping pong delay placing it on the beat, which makes the psychological space, as depicted in the music, get invaded by whatever external forces are there in her journey, depicted in the sound design.

This is so fascinating in this context, because there is surely one level of meaning that has The Tower be an aspect of Kiri’s psyche. If we follow this particular thread (but I don’t think this is the ultimate point of the story) then she climbs inside an aspect of herself for a journey, but there is also something hostile in there (possibly the internalising of experiences of a hostile society). So the music is her, but is invaded by the sound of a space that may in one way be shaped by her, which becomes fashioned into something musicalized. And so there’s a kind of ‘blood bond’ between the music and sound – and it becomes irrelevant to try to find the function of each independently.

David confirmed that it was an intentional choice to keep slightly abstract any notion of what the tower actually might be. And that the listener’s experience is very much with Kiri throughout this and future seasons, meaning that there may always be an interpretation of events that has some of it coming from her.

The transdiegetic device leaches into that final chord (which I heard as a version of Gm11 but with a beautifully unstable voicing, but David corrected me on – it is Fm9/11 – in his words, “vaguely unsettling”!). The chord uses the same ping pong delay. The arpeggiation bouncing around in there is in the middle of the voicing (A – Bb – F) puts more emphasis on the neutral harmonies – 4ths, 5ths, 9ths. This makes for a definite progression from the pentatonic mood in the opening – far less of the cosy consonant intervals snuggling together – and the voicing of the chord accentuates this effect. It feels like the first time The Tower is reaching into her mind’s space, the way it invades the music.

The Ruined Watchtower

We find Kiri answering the unknown, scary, voice with her doubts. What does the church represent? What does the ruined watchtower represent?

I like the footsteps at the end of this sequence. They have a great texture, right in my ears, and are very vulnerable-sounding. And I love how it leads into “you’re still alive!”

Ike then calls. His presence is a temporary exorcism, but who the hell is Ike?

Apparently, this is a ‘good question…’ 😊

As they talk, we hear more of chords iii and ii in Kiri’s music than we did before (episode 3, around the 3:00 point). These chords are more emotive than those that previously dominated, and the whole impression is a little more sombre as a result. Meanwhile, the mist sound effects nicely emphasise the desolate feeling when Ike breaks it to her that the journey ahead is impossibly vast. This section is personal, vulnerable, sad. It sets up beautifully the arrival of Kiri’s mum – it’s just lovely storytelling.

(episode 3, 5:22) The Kiri’s mum music moves through a chromatic descent towards F. Once we reach home, in F, we’re also definitely back to the pentatonic sound world. The highly consonant pentatonic scale is associated with blissful desert islands, heaven, safe spaces and David’s intention is quite clear there.

At the same time, the sound design is dancing with this progression towards comfort that we hear in the score. I really love the change of tone in the ambiance as mum comes on. Somehow, it makes the same space, same fire, which was at first acting as a sound to interact with vast space to remind us of it, sound like a cosy fireplace temporarily. Very clever. Then a fire crackle is once again given more reverb at the very end, which brings us back to the vast, desolate space, and also feels slightly super-real, moving into emotional space for the end of the episode. This was so nicely done!

The Fog Clears

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/john-bartmann/how-i-make-music/e/70147042

Do listen to this episode of the How I Make Music podcast, for a more in-depth discussion of this section from the composer.

To me, this is our first distinctive melody. It feels to me like it has by far the strongest sense of identity that the music has had so far. It is as though Kiri doesn’t know it yet, but she’s already progressed beyond her state of mind where she began, and developed more resilience as she takes her past (her mother) with her.

It feels like a descending leaf or feather. Can the fog descend towards the ground/the past, like a falling leaf? There is a feeling of shedding as it gathers energy. The repeated quavers entering at 2:06 are the most overt rhythmical gesture we’ve had so far.

It is as though the music is her resolve gathering momentum as she climbs: as the circular harmonies move down, she’s letting go, as they move up, she’s ascending too, leaving the ‘fog’ behind.

The View

Like The Little Church, this opens in D, with perfect intervals initially – the emptiness – which becomes filled as the f# appears. Her music feels more grounded, with that tonic pedal, the simple major chords. The bass sound is lovely (some kind of warm, fairly simple sine-based thing). I always adore a I – v progression. So bittersweet, always!

“There was nothing wrong with me. I was just very small,” says Kiri, remembering weighing “too little” as a child. This ties in with her previous observation about electrons, and how they only exist under certain conditions, and wink out of existence quite easily.

To me it is interesting that these observations about being made to feel insubstantial coincide with the music shifting to (and remaining in) the subdominant chord of G, and being stabilised in that key by alternating between that and F (new chord vii). To me, a move down the cycle of fifths towards the subdominant key feels more solid. The shift also coincides with the with the bass entering, to ground the music further.

Is this the music disagreeing with – Kiri rebelling against – what she’s telling us about being ‘too small’, barely able to be registered by gravity? Or is it trying to create that weightless feeling – the gulf between the bell-like treble floating and the distant ground below? Are we thinking about the distance she puts between herself and gravity as she climbs? She speaks of gravity just after this musical development.

For me, this monologue hits hard, emotionally. It is a privilege to listen to this, and be allowed into this intimate world. “Dancing and shouting as loud as I could, but felt smaller for it”. The Tower is big. “I don’t have to shout anymore; I just have to climb.” This is like a complex introvert’s mantra!

There is a really significant harmonic progression when she says this. It has been a musical cloud around G9/F6 – lots of very pretty stuff – but then we hit that Bb chord, which moves to Am.

This is, then, further into the F major world, but these chords are unambiguously emotive, perfectly reflecting that moment when, having been thinking on something, we come to a point of realisation, of arrival: that significant idea or recognition that brings the tearful feeling. Of relief, in this case. “I don’t have to shout anymore.”

I love the cascading triplets at this moment. They pick up the triplets that appear when she says “dancing and shouting as loud as I could”, but this time we’re emphasising the pivot in the harmony – and, again, underlining this simultaneous ‘surging upwards but throwing burdens downwards’ mood.

The organ sound around the edges of the mix, dancing around the notes a, e, and d, is an interesting sound, as it merges with the ambiance in The Tower, far more than do the bell-like patches in the foreground of the mix.

Kiri sums up to Chris what the music and monologing has already told us in the next conversation. There is a variant on the opening of the ‘Fog Clears’ music, and that bittersweet alternation between chords I and v once more. Chris is sort of saying what she was saying. But then he moves on to his own insecurity and she can say “other people don’t validate your existence; you do”.

The validating music gets quieter when Jessie is mentioned! At the beginning of this post, I speculated that the perpetual motion in the music could reflect her continuous journey; at this moment she stops ‘walking’. The music cuts suddenly as she feels what he’s not saying about her running away. (episode 5, 7:47) Who ‘Jessie’ is, and what happened is only implied and not further explored at this stage, but it was included, and so it seems important to note.

And then we reach a door… Above it reads “stop, for this is the land of the dead” (which David tells me is borrowed liberally from the Paris catacombs!) The music makes a new statement, in, for the first time, the Aeolian mode (episode 5, 9:22). There is a sparser texture and a new patch.

The Tomb (Part 1)

As Kiri enters the tomb, the steps feel more prominent. The crackling sounds close to the ears. I noticed that my ear pricked up at the sound of a flame torch at the opening, a thing that becomes significant to the story soon – I like how the sound dangles a fair way before it is mentioned in dialogue. This is a good example of one of the many devices in this series that force the audience to look back, and make our understanding of what’s going on mirror that of Kiri.

We have the same barer, G Aeolian music. It seems to be painting the trudge; the journey continues, but it’s slow and heavy. The maze she described is maybe reflected here. When she shouts “I stopped seeing the bones?” at 3:32, David introduces a new sound, a choir preset which he says sounds ‘very Nintendo 64, but there’s something haunting about it’.

When we hear the words “then I guess you throw it down the pit,” at 5:18, the audience’s point of audition (with the telephone filtering) is moved from Chris to Kiri, in preparation for her shock, and to indicate the space she’s about to see. She thinks that the pit is just space all the way to the ground. In a different way, this what it actually transpires to be: an apparently infinite sight of death, which is a different kind of void.

I love the repeat of the “what are you doing” music after she observes that the torches have been lit for her. There is a pleasing symmetry drawing together these unsettling moments of awareness of being observed by something.

Ike calls… again, who is he? (lol!)

The new patch there with the “what are you doing?” music was added (in David’s words) ‘to add an extra level of being haunted and just generally creeped out’! We return to Kiri’s point of audition right at the end there, with the sense of the space around her. I do love how long the fire (torch) sound goes on, reminding us of another presence.

The Tomb (Part 2)

Kiri’s steps open the chapter once more. The steps, and the torches lighting as she reaches them, for me, are part of the ‘score’. Maybe, or maybe not, significantly, the music in this repeat is not in time with the steps, though. The dark thoughts that Kiri is articulating seem at odds with the rather hopeful tone in the music (and there’s a new chord sequence – see below, re. Pink Floyd). Is this in tune with her carrying on, progressing through the waste, the loss, rejecting the hubris, stating her determination to remember the sacrificed workers? An affirmative political statement. (Also, I do love a good bass slide…)

I’m told that during the recording, actor David Pellow remarked that this was the author at his “most Doctor Who”!

There is a bonfire that burnt out, and Kiri says that people have “funny ideas about eternity.” That scared/sensible people don’t tend to be in charge. This feels, also, really affirmative, proud, and it is absolutely significant that it coincides with the return of the ‘The Fog Clears’ melody (episode 7, 3:30). I agree with what’s being said, too!

The symbolism of re-lighting the bonfire (4:42) and the sudden fierce blaze is about respecting the working classes, the unnamed dead, treated as disposable in the name of the vanity of arrogant king. And this leads to…

The musical climax

The new musical gesture at this climax is redolent of the chord sequence from ‘Breathe in the Air/Great Gig in the Sky’ by Pink Floyd, and this becomes more apparent as she lights the bonfire. I spotted the similarity straight away, but now I see that David spoke of Dark Side of the Moon as an influence. He also says that he was ‘definitely trying to make my own Great Gig In The Sky’.

These words from that song sprang to my mind:

Run, rabbit run

Dig that hole, forget the sun

And when at last the work is done

Don’t sit down

It’s time to dig another one

For long you live and high you fly

But only if you ride the tide

And balanced on the biggest wave

You race towards an early grave.

The machinery sounds are amazing, and slightly terrifying. This piece of sound design is very nicely timed! “The Tower is awake.” In his PodUK talk on sound design, David talked about where he got the sound from (it is a good story and, as someone with an interest in sound design, I recognise the magpie-like sound hoarding instinct that he clearly also has!).

This moment is one answer to my constant question on audio drama: “instead of looking for alternatives to visuals, there must be more stories out there that can be based around what you hear, not what you see… but what are they?”.

It is even more interesting than that, though, because there is ambiguity in the sound, at the moment of onset. It is jarring, formidable, slightly alarming, and makes me think of how people must have felt in the first industrial revolution, to find themselves dwarfed by somewhat nightmarish machines. And then the subsequent dialogue paints it as being impressive in a more uplifting way…

The sound is dark in tone, then, but the sight, we learn, is alight. This is a wonderful exploitation of the ambiguity of sound. In nature, we hear things and we are alerted to their presence, and then we look for them. But the initial moment of hearing, the alertness, and whatever feeling the sound independently makes us feel, is in itself an experience, before there is any reference to the visual answers. This makes the narrative experience in audio drama more complex and, I think, often more visceral, than visual media. It exploits that underbelly of unease we feel when any powerful or uncontrollable thing happens, no matter how magnificent or revelatory.

I really like the way the score sort of gets subsumed into the machinery, but then rises out from it again, which, to me, concentrates the effect of this alarming sonic onset. I was told that this was a difficult section to mix, but David also told me that he is proud of this moment, and loves the chaos in it.

The music here is wonderful – the most dramatic moment, of course, for the end of the series. The chord sequence starts by invoking Dark Side Of The Moon again (Gm – Gm/F – C/E) but then it circles round and we seem to use a ii-V-I sequence! This the first really prominent use of dominant function and, because of having been held back till now, feels really different to the more floaty, exploratory, irresolute harmonies we’ve had so far – strong, determined. Something in Kiri – and something in humanity – is responding powerfully to being heard.

(Regarding the use of the ii-V-I chord sequence, David says ‘I was going full prog rock finale here, not going to lie.’ 😉 )

The piano figuration, the first ever use of drums – which, by the way, were sampled from the opening of Pink Floyd’s Time! – the duplets against triplets (which always feels like fluid machinery to me), all of this is so very visual. We see the awakening in the music.

And with the energy in that music, I find a sense of wonder and a hint of triumph there, which overcomes the dark foreboding that was built in the majority of the final two chapters.

The final few bars – the rippling of the music box, bell-like arpeggiation – are also really visual for me at the very end. They give me an image of looking up and seeing all those mechanisms pass the energy up, start moving one by one, into the sky. There are many little twinkles of light, going up and up.

All of this, and what it brought to mind, moved me. It led to the thoughts that I alluded to at the beginning.

This, it turns out, is about the fabric of ‘The Tower’ being of the people who actually built it, just as in society, when you pay attention. I had assumed that the personality of The Tower was about some scary, unseen power. And I think we were supposed to! But it is way better than that.

Or perhaps… is it both? Are they in conflict? When is season 2? I have it on good authority that they are working on in. 😊

So for me, at this point in the tale, this a story about alienation. The conflict between societal constraints/repressions, and our selfhood, and how that links to smothered identity and subsequent mental illness. How much can our identities ever not be part of ‘The Tower’, can The Tower not be part of us? But as I said at the start, at face value, as a simple fairy story, or an atmospheric dream, this story totally works.

Finally, I have a quote from David as a response to my observations:

The intent with The Tower was that it would be standalone, as I wasn’t sure the idea of an audio fiction concept album podcast would work in practice. All the things that I wanted to talk about with this series and all the themes and meanings are there in the first six episodes, and will continue to be explored as we make more (and we are making more).

As much as I have my own meanings and interpretations of what it all represents, I’ve found it much more interesting to hear what other people took from the series as I think that’s honestly more important to me. One of the things I love about music is that everyone filters it through their own experience to make their own connection to it, and I think that’s what I was trying to do here.

Images are artwork from Tin Can Audio, and from the following users at pixabay.com:

Peter Dargatz, Felicity_Kate11, geralt, StockSnap, barthelskens, Ichigo121212.

Becoming the character you’ve met

One great use of binaural in audio fiction is the type of experience made by the production company run by Michel Lafrance, The Owl Field.

The format is, perhaps, as close to gaming as audio fiction will get, following to an extent those interactive books written in the second person, where the reader chooses where the story goes, or perhaps live action role play games. That said, the aesthetics of their productions are perhaps closer to the cinematic – the scoring, in particular, follows that route, I think. Their recent innovation is an audio escape room, which out of interest I volunteered as a beta tester for – and it was great fun!

This way of using binaural fully utilises the listener-is-in-the-centre mode, and, as proposed by the expert at the Goldsmith’s festival, keeps them there throughout. You are being the camera, the eye, the ears; you, personally, are there.

I am interested in a use that combines this experience of being the one seeing and hearing with more traditional “camera pointed at” storytelling. To me, what is interesting then is that the listener has met and got to know a character and therefore when the hop into their head is made, becomes the character for a while. Or, alternatively, starts off being the character, but then at some point learns things about them that themselves do not know – at which point the recording becomes third-person.

When could this be useful? The first of many thought-experiments about this got me thinking about how cleverly this is done audio-visually in the film A Beautiful Mind. I am afraid about spoiling it, but it’s an oldish and well-known film, so I think I’m mostly safe! Don’t read if you want to avoid the spoiler!

It follows the mathematician John Nash, who devised game theory and who also suffered from schizophrenia. During the first half of the film, we see him recruited by a shady branch of the CIA to use his particular talents for espionage, but he starts to be in danger as a result. It is only when he is eventually sectioned and treated that we, the audience, realise there never were any CIA agents, or baddies, and it was all along the schizophrenia manifesting itself.

Depicting this kind of story – exploring mental health problems, or perhaps neurodiversity (more on that!) – in audio could also be effective, I think. By starting the production in the first person perspective of binaural (I imagine particular use of the sounds coming from behind could be useful for building the portrayal of paranoia) and then as all becomes clear, moving to more traditional production, you could enhance this kind of plot. Having established these two points of view, it would then be shorthand to tell the audience when we are in John’s head, and when the paranoia is returning, by moving to binaural once more.

Later in these musings I’d like to talk about the role of music, and how to compose and mix it, taking into account what kind of perspective we are inhabiting, and how much it mingles with the story. Also very interesting to consider! In this case, I think music could assist and mingle with the production techniques in establishing perspective as well as emotional/philosophical sympathies. This is one instance when being into sound design as well as composition is useful. 

More tomorrow!

My first binaural kit!

The title picture is supposed to represent ‘immersive sound’!

The reason? Because I am a Very Lucky Girl, I have been given an early wedding anniversary present of this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003QGPCTE…

Which means my followers are now going to get ‘treated’ to a series of ramblings on binaural recording and how we could use it in narratives that flick between character perspectives! If you don’t already know about it, binaural is a recording method that reproduces human hearing to a degree that can feel positively trippy if you’re not used to it! It uses a dummy head with mics in the ear canals.

People who collaborate with me will be able to tell you just how much this is my thing!! I simply love to nip in and out of the heads of characters to see how things feel inside there.

If you follow the Hidden People, you will hear this from time to time. The producers use multi-mic studio recording, so there are limits to how ‘first-person’ it can get, as the dialogue will not always match the surroundings enough to pull it off, but all the same I have pushed that 3-dimensional, surrounded-by-sound feeling, where it is appropriate, as far as I can.
The scene linked below is one example. I introduce it with a particularly intimate, melancholy musical transition that uses close-miked humming vocals. This hopefully helps set up a mood for moving in closer to the characters emotionally. We then move to the protagonist (Mackenna) in bed. At this point I was recording the Foley close-up but still from a third person perspective – the audience is standing next to her bed watching (or the ‘camera’ is pointed at her in a close shot).
Events then happen around Mackenna and we move into the first person perspective, portrayed by close-recorded rapid breathing from behind a single mic to place her in the centre, then recording all the other sounds around a stereo mic pair. It is not as vivid as a binaural recording but goes some way to showing that kind of perspective, particularly with background noises added, which gives a further layer of sonic texture – distant noises behind the close noises – more 3D.
This was justified here as it was written in a way that the audience’s emotional point of audition is with the character’s, who is wondering what the hell is going on! In this case the writer (Chris Burnside) was also the director and liked this approach as much as I did.

There are spoilers in here, so if you haven’t listened yet but plan to, maybe give it a miss!

Go to about 6 minutes in and listen to about 10:30!

I hope to do this kind of thing more, using my new binaural mics.

I also think there might even be a larger purpose possible, that sound designers could even assist with developing empathetic responses to unfamiliar perspectives, to people who have different lives to our own.

Binaural recording isn’t new tech, but I understand, from people who know about these things, that it’s now getting a lot more attention and investment because of increased headphone use with the podcasting explosion and, in particular, VR gaming.

The good thing is that it doesn’t require fancy playback systems, just a pair of headphones – and if you listen on normal speakers, while you don’t get that immersive sound so much, it just sounds like a normal recording so you can still listen.

There are specific, interesting reasons why binaural feels so real, raw and immersive when compared with a normal mic pair. My fellow student at UH, Adam Wood, did some cool research last year and might chime in, but it’s stuff like sound travelling round the head and arriving later at the other ear in a specific pattern. Or that high frequency noises coming from the side straight into the ear canal register disproportionately loudly. I feel that a basic knowledge of this is probably useful to a sound designer so, despite not being a sound engineer, I’m going to do a bit of reading.

At the Goldsmith’s College audio drama festival, the guy leading the fascinating production and tech panel asserted that one limitation of binaural audio drama is that once you’re binaural you have to stay binaural. I think I disagree!!

So over the next week or so I’m going to explore interesting ways that flicking between recording techniques, from binaural to traditional stereo and back again, could be an amazing form of story telling… if we are telling the right story!

Immersive Sound

I recently came across someone working in radio who has similar preoccupations to this blog.  His name is Oliver Morris; we also share having a psychoanalyst as a parent, so that’s fun!

Oliver has written an article all about what he terms ‘immersive sound,’ as it applies in particular to podcasting and audio drama, which is a very interesting read! His phrase for it is ‘putting on a mind like a hat’ – which is a great summary of this practice, I think.

I should like to read more from him: perhaps I can persuade him to do some some follow-up that delves into analysing more examples.

Here it is!

A few points I took from his thoughts:

I really need to start owning the term phenomenology (understanding through direct experience and consciousness) regardless of the fact that I can’t even say it when I’m sober…

I have been introduced to the term Qualia – which is, as I understand it, the step before we even arrive at anything phenomenological (and if you can pronounce that you get an instant PhD): one’s pure experience, pure consciousness, and seems to be dominated by sensory experience.

This relates to my explorations of sensory issues related to autism, where neurological differences lead to a dramatically different Qualia.  Now, I have found that autistic people say again and again that the sensory challenges are the cause and not the effect of other defining characteristics of autism, the social and communication stuff.  Try focusing wholly on someone’s question and giving an immediate answer when every sight, sound and smell is coming at you thick and fast and you have no way of switching off the irrelevant ones.  I bet I couldn’t!  It always seemed to me that the fact that typical-brained people tend to ignore this is not only arrogant, but also places more weight on the parts of autism that affect us, the neurotypicals, as it is when we find we have to adapt our communication style that we are affected by autism ourselves.

One of Oliver’s teachers, David McNiell, described Qualia as ‘…raw experience.  It’s Brute Feel.  The experience in your own mind. Whether that’s the subjective experience of seeing the colour red or the pain of stubbing your toe!’

If we work outwards from there, to what extent are our higher functions – reason, empathy, expression, etc – moulded by and rooted in Qualia?  To what extent is the processing that happens next a servant of the Qualia, even as we seek to control our experience though language and labels and commonality of experience via social and collective mechanisms?  These questions seem really important.

I would also like to point out the connection between this concept and the musical one of Absolute Listening, as defined by Pierre Schaeffer, which we have already speculated might be an easier process to undertake if you have autistic neurology.

The article moves from this first notion of raw experience to Carl Jung’s concept of collective unconsciousAs a fellow child of a therapist, and as a spiritual kind of being, this notion has always fascinated me too.  I would like to have further discussion about how it can be represented or alluded to via sound design; it seems it would be a difficult thing to do to me.  Any thoughts, Oliver? 🙂

Oliver goes on to discuss the application of these ideas to audio and audio-visual media.  His own podcast drama, Kane and Feels: Paranormal Investigators  makes plenty of use of them, to interesting effect, allowing him to draw on his philosophical ideas via them.  The ‘larger than life’ mood to the show allows for more sonic play, which I think is a very good call.

I love the texture of having sounds irrelevant to the focal point of the drama, personally – if we understand the deviation from tradition of the listeners’ attention being highly directed.  You never know what a sound will do to a drama until you try it out.  I recently went out to record outdoor footsteps and was getting irritated by the denser than usual traffic, but upon playback, the passing cars added depth, texture and atmosphere.

A couple of other questions that arise: how do we make it clear to the audience that what we are perceiving is a character’s consciousness?  I have talked previous about the trick of alternating between points of experience and altering sound worlds to portray this.  In visual media, like the example Oliver posted (scene from Sorkin’s movie The Social Network) much context, information and atmosphere comes from what we see… but how do we do the equivalent in audio media, where information has to be provided through sound and words only?

 

My second ‘Points of Audition’ interview

This interview with Lynn Dowsett is about different forms of dialogue between people, drawing in her experience of hearing loss and practising Gestalt psychotherapy and social work.

Again,  I have tried to reflect the mood in the conversation with  music, and drawn some of the effects of hearing loss that she described with sound.

I am NOT happy at all with my audio editing in this, which was rushed and it really, really shows!  I also want to do another mix of the music, too, with more in the way of dynamic shaping and less in the way of clarinet.  However, this will have to wait for a quiet moment and it would be a shame to take it down and lose Lynn’s insights in the meanwhile, so I ask you to put up with it as it is for now!!

Points of Audition episode 2: Lynn

The next interview is with Church of England vicar, Rev Alan Stewart.

Reading #3 – neurological differences in sound processing

Auditory Processing in High-Functioning Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (DePape et all: 2012)

This was a ‘write-up’ of six separate tests conducted on groups of teenagers, some on the autistic spectrum, some with typical neurology.

They looked at the following:

  • The ability to filter out sounds in noisy environments – ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) people needed a higher speech to noise ratio when picking speech out when there is a second speaker than did the neurotypical (NT) group.
  • Whether people with ASD at the age of 1 year could discriminate between speech sounds in their native language when compared to foreign sounds as could the NT peers.  Typically, by one year, a child has already pruned synapses to allow them to discriminate the language spoken by primary carers but the researchers found this to be a less developed process in children with ASD.
  • Whether ASD individuals were less fazed by being shown faces making sounds other than those they were synced up with as they listened than were the NT group.  They were.
  • Whether ASD people are more likely to have absolute pitch (they are).  This is a rare and useful musical ability but also shows that sound processing is more absolute and less contextual for ASD individuals, which has implications for communication in a speech-dominated world.
  • Whether ASD individuals were slower to develop the discrimination of Western music-specific meters (regular, simple-time patterns) in infancy.  Essentially, they found that ASD people retained the ability to hear rhythm in a more absolute way that is less governed by the kind of music they hear where they live, beyond the age where NT peers have pruned their synapses to pick up on native rhythms and meters.
  • They did the same with harmony as they did with the Western rhythms they looked at in test 5 – did ASD individuals retain the ability to hear harmony without a bias to the music that their culture saturated them with for longer?  In this one, there was no big difference between the ASD subjects reactions and the control groups.

This research was clearly geared towards the hypothesis that the neural ‘roads’ that sound travels along and the way sound is organised and interpreted by the brain are different in autistic people and that this affects spoken communication.  However, I found it interesting to note that while the tests seemed to show that it was harder for autistic people to train their brains to hone in on the ‘right’ sounds to be sociable, it could be looked at from the other direction too: what listening benefits does this neural difference bring?

We have discussed in our electroacoustic music sessions Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of reduced listening, in which an audient attempts to detach a sound from its context, meaning, origin or connotations and hear only its sonic properties.  (Schaeffer, 1967) Could I, for example, manage to hear a dentist’s drill, gun shot or moan of pleasure without responding to my knowledge of what makes that sound, and only hear what is in the noise?  I am interested in the concepts of referential versus abstract sound, how much each has respectively on our experience as listeners, and how much we would find them to overlap.

(As an aside, it was also mentioned in lectures that Pythagoras liked to teach from behind a screen.  His theory was that his audience would concentrate better on his words if they were not distracted by his face and body language.  My autistic 8-year-old gets terribly distracted by people’s faces when they speak to him and will often look away in order to hear, whereas I would say that it is more typical for people to find that information is added by the non-verbal parts of communication.  To ‘listen’ to someone’s animated face or body language along with the words can make information easier to absorb and more memorable for me.  I wonder if Pythagoras himself was on the autistic spectrum?)

This research seems to suggest that autistic people ought to be able to practise reduced listening more readily and effectively than neurotypicals, as the neural road along which an autistic’s sound processing travels lends itself better to pure experience of sound than it does to picking out the social (or maybe the referential) meaning within the sound.


DEPAPE, A.-M.R., HALL, G.B.C., TILLMANN, B., TRAINOR, L.J. (2012) Auditory Processing in High-Functioning Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder. PLOS ONE 7, e44084. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044084
SCHAEFFER, P. (1967) Traité des objets musicaux. Paris: Seuil