COMMUNICATION: A Breakdown
Style: CONFLICT
Description: This podcast serves as the only remaining record of a relationship, sped up to a 2 minute, 30 second time frame between two individuals who never met.
Running Time: 2:30
Some Sounds: An answering machine message [Pre-recorded voice], a bass line [rhythmic noise], and WHAT?! [an exclamation].
As for the contributors of these sounds:
Voices: Megan Telligman [me], Justin Egge, Amanda Gartman
Pre-recorded voice: Apparently a girl named Kallie found on the website http://freesound.iua.upf.edu and posted by user NoiseCollector.
Music: Nick, Dan, Ed, and Bobby of NATIVE
My response:
For my Oulipian podcast, I created a dialogue (in the loosest sense of the word) between two individuals. For whatever reason, they continually call and miss each other. The technology they depend on for communication eventually fails them. My concept for the story was a full relationship, sped up into a two minute and thirty second podcast. The couple begins lighthearted, not dependent on one another in the least, but the dependency grows as the individuals need the attention of the other for their own self esteem. Stereotypically, the male resorts to anger, while the female expresses self doubt. The relationship, if it can be called that, ends as most do and the individuals never even met.
I worked directly from the constraints for my podcast. When I read about the pre-recorded voice constraint, I immediately thought of and found an answering machine message. I created my story based solely on this constraint, and I think it worked out fairly well. I didn’t have to do a lot of searching, I worked with what I found initially and it gave me more time to work on the podcast itself as opposed searching for obscure clips to fit a pre-written story. As for the other choices I made, I chose the music for the bass line that lends the rhythmic noise to the podcast. The music builds as the tension does, and in that sense it was the perfect song for the subject matter. Plus, my best friends are in this band, so it made getting permission to use the song particularly easy. Finally, I used my friends’ voices because they were accessible and flexible. The exclamation, “What?!” is foreshadowing of the “fight” to come. I would continue to work on this story line if I had more time. A lot of questions are left unanswered, and I would like to make a more cohesive story if I had more time.
I think the technology both enabled and inhibited my creative process. It inhibited my creative process by constraining me to what I could actually achieve via podcast. I had to make sure my “actors” were able to pull off the emotions that I wanted to express. I couldn’t show “angry,” it had to be heard. I think the music helped me pull this off. It created a sense of tension and building until the eventual breakdown. At the same time, the constraints created by both the assignment and the medium forced me to think creatively about the space in which I was working and the amount of time I had. Like I said, my story was completely based on the constraint, and I know that if I had been given the assignment “make a podcast” it wouldn’t have been nearly as good as the one I have created. The constraints helped me come up with something “outside of the box,” ironically.
I’ve already mentioned that the new attention I paid to the emotion in people’s voices, but I also became more attuned to the subtle importance of volume. I learned that the podcasting genre can be a lot more than a guy recording his voice in a basement, instead can be a thoughtful dedicated process. It took me the better part of a week to compile my podcast, so I can’t imagine the amount of time true podcasters dedicated to the genre. I like the genre for the ease and my ability to incorporate music and writing, two things I love.
December 9th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Megan,
You’ve articulated well the overall effectiveness of your podcast: the technology of communication failing in its very purpose, the price (perhaps) that we pay when we substitute technology as a tool for the thing itself. I found it interesting the way you conceived of this in terms of gender as well.
You’re certainly right about the music helping you show rather than tell. In fact, if you were to return to this podcast, you might rethink the ending, find some way to edit the music so that it’s not a fadeout (or have your buddies make the song to order). Because I had come to trust the music as an emotional cue, I was startled that the actual narrative was suddenly over.