Left to Right: Frank Lockwood; Jim Anderson - Toronto AES - April 27, 2017
A podcast can be more than a monologue or an interview; it can be a rich environment for using sound to tell your story. One can use sound in many ways, whether it's to set the scene, illustrate a concept, or enliven a journalistic endeavour.
The talk took the audience on a journey from the 'hollars' of Kentucky to the streets of Grenada in search of sounds. With his deep background in broadcasting, Jim Anderson demonstrated the power of sound to illustrate and enrich a podcast.
He spoke about the importance of setting the scene (when making a radio or pod-cast production) through the use of ambiances collected at the location where the event or subject of the piece, takes place.
Later he showed how to develop a story line by the careful shifting of background sounds to convey the changes being described by a reader or narrator. Several examples were played, along with pictures showing how the sound collection was performed.
He described a few different production scenarios, from a straight news-type story, with pertinent ambiance placing what's being discussed in context, through to a situation which is much more abstract, such as a poem which has no clear, concrete meaning, yet nevertheless benefits from having some kind of suggestive sound track accompanying the reading.
Afterwards, there was a lively question and answer session with the appreciative audience.
