Part 6

Ok so I’m not entirely done with the whole ages of Audio Drama, however its getting kind of boring at the moment so I want to talk about something else…… I went to the Conclave at Salt River Community House on Saturday and it was amazing. We got to see raw, natural talent and young people being enthusiastic about performance. The performances were brilliant there were performances in English as well as in Xhosa, some used both. The groups that performed also used the aid of music, and sound. It was absolutely fantastic. We (Jonas, Tammy, Amanda; Jonas’ Girlfriend, and I) got to be part of one of the performers’ piece.
It was so cool to actually do it with an audience and all, it also really helped with figuring out what my individual piece was going to be about as well at the type of piece it was going to be, the kinds of sound elements I can incorporate and the like. I got to meet awesome people and be part of something outside of varsity that I never thought I’d get involved in….. Way cool.
Ok I’m really really over the essay for now (as interesting as it is….. no sarcasm again, it is rather …… enlightening) so I’m going to go…..

Wow its been a while since I’ve blogged, life has been rather intense and varsity is actually getting the better of me at the moment. I’m really beginning to get Audio Drama though which is awesome. I’ve opted to stop at the 4th age of Audio Drama and continue with information from a different author for 2 reasons. The first being that I think the 4th stage is as interesting as Cook gets with his whole theory and im enjoying the other book I’ve been reading just a little bit more than I’m enjoying Cooks book (no offence to Cook of course).

Jumping now to the 1950’s and 60’s we see how less audio drama’s were being created due to the advent and rapid growth of television productions (thank God for this). In the USA this decline was way faster than in other countries in the world and went right down to practically zero. It was only really in British Commonwealth countries that audio drama sort of continued. In the 1960’s Audio Drama made a sort of come back as had been in the few years prior to this; the late 50’s “comedy record” is what it was called. Particularly the audio drama “The First Family” which was a comedy strip about the Kennedy’s. this came to an abrupt halt with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Some have said however that these comedy strips were not part of the audio drama genre and were in actual fact spoken-word audio, which is, as mentioned earlier in this blog, simply story telling or recorded sound as opposed to dramatic expression. Anyway, whatever it was it seemed to be popular and these ‘performers’ continued to have an audience.

In 1967 Firesign Theatre was signed by Columbia Records to broadcast their “comedy records” and it was here that it was felt that scripts were an essential part of audio drama. With this realisation they made 2 noteable contributions to the art form we know today and these were:
1. The use of Multi-track recoding which included, mixing sounds, overdubbing and giving them the freedom to edit and polish sounds to have a very clear and ‘perfect’ overall performance.
2. The realisation that this media was to be heard primarily from material that had already been recorded. This gave the listener the chance to listen to the recording in pieces and as many times as they wanted.

Fish then goes on to talk about the rate of presentation. Which is the transmission to the audience and how fast the audience gets the required information from the different types of media. Audio drama falls between print and visual media. Audio drama is said to have the highest rate of presentation as it provides the largest amount of information in the shortest amount of time due to the of the aid of music and other sounds transmitted.