Global News: An Auditory Space.

Making an interesting sound recording which can grab the listeners attention with only using their hearing sense is a difficult task.  Within a group today we published a spoof recording of a news report for the class to peer review. Using the theme of news readers, myself and two others recorded a topical news report on Audacity.

This fun, hands on learning tool allows the learner to record themselves along with other sounds relevant to the theme that the learner has chosen.

This requires many skills including team work, communication, organisation and it also builds confidence.  During the lesson there was a learning buzz with laughter and team discussion as each individual organised and got into character.

On reflection of this activity I was interested to research further how sound in animation can change a viewers perspective of a character.  During our attempt at becoming newsreaders we instinctively changed our personas to become the characters that we were playing.  We became professional, clearly spoken with a tone replicated from what we hear of newsreaders on the television and radio attempting to make our characters credible.  This has made me realise that sound has a profound affect on the listener.

Collins (2013) explains how the use of sound in film and animation influences Identification, and Psychological Role-Play, where we understand, empathise and feel that we become the character on screen, in equal extent as the visual aspects of film and animation. The author argues that especially within animation, sound brings reality and credibility to the animation allowing the viewer to identify strongly with the characters.  The visual representation is also argued not to be the only space where a viewer identifies and experiences the story, but auditory space is as important when representing a the stories and characters of film. However, sound must be organised in a way that a camera would be and is a scientific process of auditory space.  Cleverly, sound, can create difference in scenes by using placement of microphone and speaker set up allowing a sense of distance, to make the viewer turn to view another aspect of the film, to create mood and develop auditory proxemics: volume to create empathy and identification.

Sound in film is a scientific and technical process that surprisingly has many strands. In the case of our topical news, many of the aspects of auditory experience were intuitive, however on reflection many of the different components that Collins (2013) argues could have been used to improve the quality and deliverance of our Global News coverage.