What can sound do that words or visuals can’t?

Gareth Davies: 00:00:32

You can hear a story, you can watch it, you can read it. But what happens when sound is the story? What happens when you can't see the character and you still care?

When a world comes alive in your head and you're standing in it? When the silence hits harder than a jump cut and a voice alone makes you cry? Today we're asking, what can sound do that words or visuals can't?

Hello, sound maker. I'm Gareth and this is the Sound Session where creators explore how sound shapes our world and how we shape sound.

Each episode we talk to someone pushing the boundaries of what audio can do to discover what we can learn and or simply marvel at.

If you're enjoying the show, you can support it by sharing this episode with a friend tagging us online, or if you're able making a one off donation via thesoundsession.uk you can also submit your favourite sound there. We feature a different sound in each episode. Speaking of which, here's one of my favorite sounds.

My little spirit animal, Jack Russell terrier, Flash Gordon. He snores when he's tired. He's a real lap dog and loves to curl up on my lap or next to me on the sofa.

I love the fact that he's so comfortable that he goes into a deep sleep. So his snoring indicates to me that he feels safe. Which is all we want for our pets, isn't it?

He won't thank me for this, but here's Flash Gordon snoring.

My guest is audio drama director and producer Ella Watts.

Her work includes Doctor who, redacted for the BBC, the high octane superhero series Elixir and the myth infused post apocalyptic drama Kellian. She's also a fierce advocate for inclusion and one of the clearest voices we have on what makes audio drama matters.

We begin with Ella's favourite sound.

Ella Watts: 00:02:54

I honestly really struggle to pick a favourite sound because there are many, many sounds that make me happy.

You know, a few of the ones that came to mind were a sound effect that a friend of mine called Amber Daveraux made for a podcast we worked on, which was the sound of a violin bow being drawn across a sword, which is this really beautiful, harmonious sound that we use to create this kind of fantasy magical shield effect. And it sounds beautiful.

I think maybe my favourite sound to be found in nature is you occasionally see these videos of people dropping chunks of ice on frozen lakes and it creates this incredible kind of sci fi, wobbly, skittering sound, which I'm just obsessed with. I love it when there are sounds of nature that you would think could only be artificial.

And it turns out that they exist in the real world all the time and have done for many, you know, thousands of years. And then, honestly, it's a simple one, but it's a classic for a reason. I love the sound of the ocean. I love the sound of a wave crashing.

Gareth Davies: 00:03:54

What happens, though, when sound isn't just part of the story, but the whole of it? When Ella reflected on audio's unique powers, she reframed the very idea of immersion.

Ella Watts: 00:04:05

So I think that sound as a medium invites the listener to suspend their disbelief in a way that is more intimate and perhaps even more extreme than visuals can. In theatre, we have the concept of the proscenium arch, which is the archway framing the stage.

And this is kind of the formative seed that leads us to talk about things like the fourth wall, that there's an invisible wall between the actors and the audience. And that is where the proscenium arch is now, the fourth wall.

If we think about it, when we watch television, when we watch a film, the fourth wall is the screen that we are looking at.

We're constantly reminded of the existence of the fourth wall, which tells us that whatever we're seeing is, even if it's not fictional, it's something that has been deliberately constructed in a certain order or with a certain bias to be presented to us. The same is true when you're reading a book. If you're reading a book, physically interacting with the book, the book is the fourth wall.

But sound is invisible. It happens inside our bodies, unlike our other senses.

You know, light bounces off our eyes and is interpreted by our brain, but sound literally, physically happens inside our ear canal, inside our skull. And so, in a way, it kind of defies the fourth wall. It's really easy to forget that the fourth wall is there.

Often, radio and audio professionals talk about how intimate audio or radio is. And I think that that reason is twofold.

One of them is it's physically inside you, but the other is that people are just less likely to question their suspension of disbelief. They're less likely to remember that something isn't real. Another way that I like to think of it is like having one foot through the door to Narnia.

You're kind of just on the edge of actually going into the world of magic and imagination. And what I really love about it is that in a similar way to reading a book, you have full control over the visuals.

We talk a lot in audio drama about how, you know, in horror, you never have to show the monster in audio.

And for that reason, our monsters are often much scarier and much more interesting, much more imaginative, because they go through the refractive prism of the imagination of every single person who's ever listened to that story, which can be millions of versions of the monster, which is amazing.

So I think that there is an absolutely intoxicating and enchanting power of audio to completely sort of bring the listener along for the ride, to generate empathy and imagination in a really radical way that visuals, for example, can sometimes be limited in.

Gareth Davies: 00:06:31

Where does audio hit hardest? Ella pointed to a single drama episode that still moves her to tears.

Ella Watts: 00:06:38

My fictional example of an emotional moment in an audio drama is an episode of the Truth, which is a really sensational anthology podcast that ran for about a decade with individual drama stories, each episode with different writers and casts. And there's an episode called Have You Seen My Mum?

And it's from the perspective of this little girl, and she's in a hotel and she's lost and she can't find her mum. And so she's kind of going up to the concierge and being like, do you know where my mum is?

And everyone's being really weirdly hostile to her in a way that kind of implies, you know, you're not given very much context when the episode starts. So you're not sure if maybe this is a kind of racial discrimination thing, if it's ableism.

There's something about this little girl that is making people respond to her with, like, disgust and rudeness rather than helping her. And it's really strange for you as a listener, because she's a child and you want the child to be okay.

And then eventually, these sort of quite spooky people turn up. They sound very official. These are like guards and nurses. They're like, you need to come with us. You need to get into this dark car.

And the little girl really starts freaking out, and again, no one helps her. It's really strange. So at this point in the narrative, you think, okay, this is some kind of supernatural thing.

Like maybe she's sort of an X-Man type situation and she's being detained or something.

She gets taken to this facility and, you know, everyone's telling her how special she is, and she has to stay here in the facility for her own good, and she shouldn't have left it in the first place. And she still hasn't found her mum.

And so, you know, at this point, as a listener, you're really worried about her and eventually they tell her to go play the piano because that'll calm her down. So she's playing the piano and someone comes in to visit her. This is a new person.

And this person at least is speaking to her with a level of compassion that other people haven't been really. And this person's telling her how wonderful she is and how well she's playing. And the little girl's like, thank you very much.

This person is like, can I take a video of you? Because I'd like to show you the video of you playing. The little girl's like, okay. And the person takes a video and the little girl watches.

And as she watches, the sound design transitions and you hear the little girl's voice get older as the older woman with dementia, who she has been the whole episode, sees herself in the video and remembers briefly who she is and the person she's talking to is her daughter.

And yeah, it's a really, really moving, powerful moment that does, I think, what audio is so good at, which is really gives you a lot of compassion and a lot of understanding and really radical understanding for why, like, this woman is so confused and so frightened. And it really makes you relate to her. And yeah, every time I listen to that episode, I cry.

Gareth Davies: 00:09:12

Ella builds soundscapes like they're living architecture. Here's how she shapes space, tone and movement.

Ella Watts: 00:09:56

As an audio drama director, I think constantly about how incredibly spatial and three dimensional dimensional audio drama is.

I think that often people who are new to making audio of any genre, fictional or non fictional, sometimes make the mistake of thinking that because it's invisible, it's essentially paper cutouts, it's a shadow show, it's two talking heads and it doesn't need any space. But actually space informs and provides so much additional information and also gives the listener so many subconscious cues about tone and theme.

Like, I think it's as important or even more important than choosing like, you know, the setting or the backdrop where your film is.

If you have even a standard interview show, but the backdrop is the milling about of a pub, it's immediately a very different tone of conversation to one where if you have the background of a hospital and if two people are moving as they're talking in the hospital, that's a very different conversation to if two people are sitting quite closely and sitting still. Hopefully. The idea is you avoid telling them explicitly what's happening.

So instead of saying, and now we are in a big castle with dragons, you hear echoey footsteps on a stone floor and sort of distant monster ROARS. And that's all you really need to do. Like, they can figure it out from there.

They don't need a character say, oh, and we've entered the castle with the dragons. Dragon roar. Did you hear that? Dragon roar. That was very scary. Like, you know, we don't need to do that.

Gareth Davies: 00:11:20

She also believes audio can dissolve boundaries of perception, of bias, even of identity.

Ella Watts: 00:11:27

What I find really, really interesting is that in audio, we've done a similar number of experiments and what we found is that people cannot hear race or class or even sometimes gender. They think they can and they cannot.

They really are quite certain that they can tell whether it's, you know, a brown person or a white person talking, they cannot tell.

And that means that when you meet a character, like, let's say, a detective, and you spend half an hour with them and you find them really charismatic, and maybe they're a bit like, romantic, maybe you're a attracted to them, maybe you think they're really cool, they solve the murder, they're the hero of the story. You are now really compelled by this drama. You want to listen to more of it.

You really empathise with them, but you only find out in the last minute that they're a black person using a wheelchair, because that was something that you were not told up front.

And that means that there's this kind of radical opportunity to generate compassion and encourage people to realise that they are completely capable of empathising with people that they might not think they're capable of empathising with.

Very, very often people assume, based on visuals, that they could not empathise with someone of a certain background because that person is disabled, because that person's a person of colour, because that person's trans. And sometimes, I think it's more often ignorance and even anxiety and fear.

It's discomfort, it's awkwardness, it's embarrassment, more than it is active malice. I think that malice is actually pretty rare. But the great thing about audio is it's can be so private, you can listen to it in your headphones.

And you also don't have to know at first, so you don't have to overcome that stage fright. You only find out once you've sort of befriended the imaginary person in your head who is someone like you.

And I think that that is an incredibly powerful tool.

Gareth Davies: 00:13:07

Audio, she argues, can be radical.

Ella Watts: 00:13:09

I think that audio absolutely opens access for different audiences in a world where visuals are so dominant.

First of all, straight up, just on a simple accessibility reason, there are a lot of blind People and people who are visually impaired who really enjoy aud and it is valuable for that by itself, if for nothing else. Audio files are just smaller than video files, means audio is literally cheaper to access and easier to access in a way.

That means that if anyone is having any trouble accessing the Internet or even having electronic devices or devices that can access the Internet, audio and radio are often much, much easier to access than television and film.

Gareth Davies: 00:13:45

So what's next? Ella is most excited by boldness from sound designers, from young creators, and from those historically sidelined.

Ella Watts: 00:13:54

I think what excites me most about the future of sound storytelling is that it feels like finally, you know, I'm an audio drama expert, I'm an audio drama fan, I'm an audio drama maker.

And it feels like finally the sort of global, at least English speaking world, because I think non English speaking worlds have all been on very different timelines for this and many of them are far ahead of us.

But the global English speaking world is lining up understanding what radio drama is and what radio drama has done before, and the tools of how to make radio drama that people have spent 100 years figuring out and aligning that with some of the fun, quirky, kooky discoveries that happened when for 20 years, Americans tried to reinvent the wheel in audio drama and mostly were unsuccessful, but occasionally came up with some cool, interesting way of storytelling that the old guard of the 1st century of audio drama hadn't ever tried because these kids were coming up with digital media and hadn't been brought up on a legacy where editing radio drama required you to literally use a razor and some cassette tape.

So I think that it's really, really exciting seeing those two things align because it means that what I'm seeing now in the world of independent audio drama is just better and better dramas getting made that are more and more confident with their medium, that have a stronger and stronger understanding of their medium, that are more excited to play with it in interesting ways, and are no longer feeling restricted to exclusively found footage storytelling, exclusively sort of fictionalized versions of documentary shows, because all they listened to was documentary shows, like they're starting to actually play around with it.

One of the places where I think that you can really see audio drama and independent podcast fiction starting to find its feet, which I find incredibly endearing, is that even sort of, you know, the most low budget, no budget bunch of 18 year olds making their own little audio drama, they've all started making their own customers theme tunes. So like previously it was a thing where, you know, Most people were sort of using Kevin MacLeod and library music.

But more and more and more they're starting to understand how important music is to their drama. And of course this is a basic beat. Again, this is what I mean when I say they're reinventing the wheel.

But it's really nice seeing them all kind of coming out with these really bold musical signatures and starting to experiment more and more with the idea of actually scoring their dramas and genuinely working with like often again, sort of 18, 19 year old composers who've never composed anything before. But they're like, okay, I'm going to score an entire audio drama. This is going to be how I learn how to do this. And it's wonderful. It's so creative.

It's really nice to see. And the other side is also, it can be a little unintentionally self segregated.

Something that I've really enjoyed seeing is black creators and people of color around the world becoming much more confident. And now there is really like a canon of, you know, international English language black audio drama, audio drama being made by people of color.

And I think I'm seeing like less hesitancy from new creators in coming in to actually make that, which is really, really nice.

And also I'm starting to see, you know, shows that might be made, created or co created by white creators having more diverse casts and making an effort to cast more diverse actors or actors from more diverse backgrounds. That's also really exciting. Just because I think it's completely necessary to have a healthy medium.

And I think one of the few ways in which I think you can meaningfully critique radio drama of kind of the early 21st century. A lot of people make lazy critiques of radio drama of the early 21st century by making assumptions about what Radio 4 is based on.

You know, maybe they once listened to one episode of the Archers and they don't understand that, you know. Each year Radio 4 releases over 200 independent dramas. And many of them are really experimental in covering perspectives that you don't realize.

But I think one of the few valid critiques you can make is that they were overwhelmingly white. And I think that that's something that Radio 4 has really been working on.

But it's really nice to see that happening in the independent space as well.

Gareth Davies: 00:17:49

Before we wrapped, I asked Ella what she'd urge a first time audio storyteller to focus on.

Ella Watts: 00:17:55

There is the basic thing which is that if you want to make an audio first story, you should listen to audio stories in the same way that if you Want to write a book, you should read books. It always surprises me how often people want to make podcasts and don't listen to podcasts.

It's sort of like, you know, I mean, honestly, it will help, but no more immediately and practically, I'd tell them to think about rhythm.

I find it fascinating that some of the best sound designers in the world are drummers, and I think it is often, because if you're a drummer, you've got a really good sense of rhythm, and rhythm is absolutely necessary to audio storytelling.

You have to understand when there needs to be noise and when there needs to be silence and how long the silence needs to be and how fast a scene is going to move or how slowly. And when directing, we talk about a couple of different broad strands of directing. So generally speaking, I direct with intentionality.

I think about why a character's doing something.

But it's also very easy, especially in audio, to direct musically, to talk about crescendos and being staccato and to talk about pauses and silence and that kind of thing.

In the medieval period, we had eisteddfods in Wales, somewhat similar to the eisteddfods we have today, but they were competitions for poets, and the poets were judged on different categories. And we know this because we have a manuscript with the judging categories written on it.

You know, one of them is like, how many references do you make to other poems? One of them is like, how many rhymes have you got in there?

One of them is, like, how many syllables have you got in each word, et cetera and so forth. But there's one category which is my favourite, and I think about it endlessly with audio drama, which is cynghanydd. That's a medieval Welsh word.

It doesn't exist in modern Welsh. It essentially means the singing of the words.

And it's a word that by itself kind of assimilates every single word that we have in English for the musicality of language. So assonance, sibilance, rhyme, what does the word sound like? And I think that that's really important in audio drama.

You see this in, obviously, Dylan Thomas's work, but a lot of kind of poets and playwrights of the 20th century, which is, when you're writing your piece of audio, are you thinking about how it sounds? Are you thinking not just about conveying information, but how musical it sounds? What is the rhythm of your writing? How many syllables are there?

How are you varying the syllables? And then when someone's reading it, what are they thinking about their cadence?

Often, audiobook narrators end up kind of looping into the same cadence again and again and again because they just get into a rhythm. But the problem with looping a cadence, as any musician will tell you, is that it's really repetitive and it puts people to sleep.

You have to vary your cadence, you have to vary your pace and your rhythm. You have to include moments of silence to let people think.

And I think that all of those things are really important, but they can just be summed up as, think about the rhythm of your writing. Think about, you know, you're writing for a sonic medium. Sound cares about rhythm. Think about rhythm.

Gareth Davies: 00:20:39

My thanks go to audio drama director Ella Watts for a rich and inspiring conversation. If you've been moved by anything in today's episode, let me know.

And if you'd like to support the sound session, you can donate or share the show via thesoundsession.uk Every share helps more sound makers find us. I'm Gareth and this has been The Sound Session. Until next time. Stay curious, stay creative and and as Ella says, sound cares about rhythm.

So think about rhythm.