What I like most about these narratives is, they are laced with the charm of fiction in their telling, even without being fictitious. The audio stories sound just as good as any short story would read, by performing basically the same functions such as etching characters (Penguin, Mary Poppins or Batman) and evoking scenes in the mind's eye. The background score, selected to match with the settings, moods and tones of the stories (comic or serious), sometimes doubles up as special effects (for instance, the sharp cling of the manual type writer in David Sedaris' narrative about a man talking on his cell phone while sitting on an airport toilet). In story number 17, narrator Richard Carey provides the special effects himself by vocalizing the sounds of a swamp: frogs, crickets et al.
Sometimes, the ambient sound is made of natural or actual everyday noises of a milieu — lashing waves and screeching gulls at Nantucket or cadets in a barrack or machinery in a factory — and sometimes, it is the sound of silence that impels you to converge your attention to the spoken word. Sometimes again, music is used as an interlude (like the comic Shakespearean interlude) to fill deliberate gaps between the spoken lines, to provide relief as well as to give the listener the chance to absorb and assimilate what (s)he has just heard. Such rhetorical tactics may not always register in the conscious mind, but they do work on the subconscious, quietly translocating you to the realm of the story. The interactive conversations among the interviewers and their interviewees, with their lively back-and-forth movement, pitch the narratives at an easily accessible and relatable frequency.
What contributes largely to the enjoyment is the fact that the listener — to an extent guided by the interjected comments of Ira Glass — identifies with some of the thoughts, feelings and experiences of the protagonists of the real-life stories. When Glass breaks the flow of a narrative with his remark, it is not to show his authority/control over the proceedings but to make it lucid for the listener. With his quick, crisp style of delivery, he brings you to the point right away (given the time constraints of the air slot) while at the same time picking his words to render the narrative in a humane, "it-happens-to-the-best-of-us" light so that we may share a laugh without being judgemental.
In A Little Bit of Knowledge, electrician Bob Berenz's brush with Einstein and Newton is not just hilarious but also a study of the whys and hows of the human psyche. It is by adding this depth to his narrative that the narrator, a journalist, manages to sustain the listener's interest for 16 and a half minutes in a man who has been summarily dissed by a Los Alamos scientist.
Berenz is one of several people featured in this hour-long episode which, like classical Greek theatre, is divided into Prologue and Acts I through IV, with the last Act acting as the denouement as it were. Though the Acts here deal with independent stories, they all work towards the same theme, making it a unified whole with the establishment of the idea that a little knowledge can be an entertaining thing at best, and embarrassing at worst. Every narrator has her/his own style of delivery, which brings variety to the listening experience. Remarkable among them is Dan Savage, who relates his six-year-old son's take on having two dads, homosexuality and marriage. The pauses and emphases on significant/strategic words or phrases again, have a rhetorical purpose.
While introducing the concept underlying the imaginary magazine, Modern Jackass, Glass uses the metaphor of a little-knowing person using a tiny bit of pigment to colour an entire canvass. This aural input triggers the mind visually the same way a bunch of written words would have. A dash of cynicism, a dollop of humor, and discreet use of light-footed music comprising sounds from different part of the world make it a well-rounded presentation. In fact, the use of background music is comparable to the Greek chorus sometimes, offering the audience the cue to react and also subtly reassuring them about the timeliness/appropriateness of the reaction. This is in sharp contrast to the crude use of pre-recorded laughter in some comedy shows we often see on television.
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3 comments:
The different types of sound in the episodes really add to the overall presentation. The absences of sound in these were just as important as the sounds themselves.
I also agree that these are stories are successful because they have a "real life" quality that listeners can identify with. I know that is why I enjoyed listening to them so much!
You identified so many "jobs" for music to do in your "listenings" for this week. It's amazing to me how it can help keep people on task, make people feel emotions, set tone, tell jokes, etc.
I like how you focus on the ability of listeners to identify with people through sound. I feel like I really responded to many of these stories in ways that I wouldn't have if not for the sound.
I think that you were able to listen closely to these narratives and capture much of what we sometimes let only our subconscious hear. As you point out, the ambient sounds and even the silences in these stories help listeners to develop a mental picture of the scene and to better understand the material being presented. The way Glass sometimes interrupts does, as you point out, help listeners to focus on key ideas or to re-consider a comment that may have slide by. Rather than being disruptive, this seems to call listeners back.
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