Part 2 & 3

Last week turned out to be quite interesting. One of the things we’re doing is an audio recording about another person in the class, so we had to find out things about them, sort of like an interview which was pretty cool and then we’re doing a class piece which is set in a restaurant and we have to make up scripts for our assigned characters.

I must say that I still don’t know the exact definition of Audio Drama yet but by the looks of things I am on the right track in my thoughts. I did get as far as ‘googling’ it and the first thing that caught my eye was that it was ‘Radio Theatre’, so a basic and rather unacademic definition if I must say so myself is its acting over the radio.

I did not read further than this as I was multitasking researching for something else and my internet got ridiculously slow so I got over it. I will get round to actually finding an academic definition as well as where it originated and the role it serves as a ‘genre’ of media. Until then however I’m going to work on something else.

Class this week was rather interesting and I think I can attribute a lot of this to Max (thank you for that) who I find rather entertaining. Well we wrote out our scripts for our collective piece and then read our partnered pieces to the class. Other than doing this I cannot say I remember what we actually did for the rest of the lesson but I have done some research now and know a bit more about Audio Drama.

It is considerably new as being an art form if we take it in a historical context being approximately 100 years old. No one actually has a set date as to when it started but it has been estimated that it was around the second half of the 19th Century. Audio Drama, also called Audio Theater can be defined as:
“A theatrical presentation intended solely for the audio medium, using voices, music and other sounds” (Fish, R.L, (1998), Genesis and Renaissance: A Brief History of Audio Theater p. 1)
So my very unacademic definition of Audio Drama turned out to be pretty accurate I think, just missing all the important bits in it that it is solely for the audio medium and uses devices such as voice, music and other sounds. Other than that I’d say I was on the ball. Now that I actually know what audio drama is I suppose I should find out where it originated and so on and so forth?

Anyway as I continued reading up a bit more about audio drama, it is apparently not the same thing as an audio book. I thought it was one in the same thing, but according to my findings reading a book, and recording it as an audio piece of work does not qualify it as being audio theater. This kind of makes sense but at the same time it doesn’t really. Anyway after trying to comprehend with this notion I concluded that audio books are not the same as audio theater because just reading a book and recording an audio story does not necessarily mean that it is a “theatrical presentation”.

So what makes something an audio drama, is when a piece of work is acted out, as it would be on stage with the use of live and recorded sound, music, and other technical devices that bring the story to life. I think that’s it for now as I see it I may run out of things to say if I say everything I know right now so until next weeks blog…..