Deep Blue Notes

Deep Blue Notes is a three part podcast, by wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson and Professor Tony Myatt a spatial audio sound artist, released through the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast. It follows them on their quest – at the start of the year – to record Blue Whales in the Sea of Cortez – off Loreto, Mexico – creatures whose sounds have eluded Watson throughout his long career as a wildlife sound recordist. The two of them are collaborating on a sound installation for Oceans 21 – a project on the fascination and endangerment of the oceans – called Seaphony, which premiers in Berlin in May of next year.

The podcast uses their quest for these very specific sounds as a jumping off point to talk to a variety of specialists about a variety of issues around sound and sea-life, from how sound carries through water, through the impact of climate change – both human driven and natural phenomena like El Niño – to how human noise – essentially sound pollution – impacts on sealife. It’s all fascinating stuff, and I always love listening to recordings from hydrophones – I definitely spent part of at least two of the episodes looking at hydrophones online and checking specs to see if a reasonably affordable one would be compatible with my new sound recorder – but it also made me want to introduce Watson and Myatt to the fine folks at the Lighthouse Field Station. I suspect, in these travel limited times, they could probably recommend some good marine life recording spots that are a little closer to home than Mexico.

One of the most interesting aspects of the whole podcast, to me, is that they made a three-part podcast about their quest to record Blue Whale vocalisations, and in the end they didn’t succeed in recording the Whales. They spent time among the whales, sometimes with them being almost in touching distance and the whales just, didn’t sing for them. Of course, that’s the reality of sound recording, especially when you’re recording wildlife. On a trip this summer to record a variety of other sounds, I came across a frog, sitting in the middle of the road. It seemed quite happy for me to crouch down beside it – making no attempt to hop away or otherwise escape – and settle my recorder close by, but while other frogs in the hedgerows nearby croaked away quietly, the one literally at my feet, remained completely silent. It’s one of the great frustrations of sound recording, that so often you’ll hear an interesting sound and the minute you get your recorder out and running, it will stop. So theoretically that’s actually the most likely outcome of any given recording trip, yet narrative documentaries have taught us to expect a final act triumph, and I was definitely expecting one right up until the end. Yet that simple unapologetic acknowledgement that these things happen, that they knew that was a likely outcome, and have learned a lot from the experience so that they’ll do better next time they try, was so very refreshing and dare I say it, quite affirming too.

March of the Podcasts

A couple of years ago I started doing a regular feature here, where I wrote about the sound-based content (whether sound art and installations, podcasts, radio plays or radio documentaries) I consumed that month or that I made that month. As well as being an enjoyable project, it was a great motivator to both listen to and create more sound-based content. There are far too many deadlines at my main freelance gig for me to enjoy them outside of it, but accountability is always helpful and motivating.

I’m breaking myself in gently this month with a review of my recent non-fiction podcast discoveries.

First up I’ve taken up yet another language based podcast. The Allusionist is a podcast that looks at the oddities and idiosyncrasies of the English language. Unlike the linguistics podcasts that I also follow, this podcast is less about the mechanics of language – the syntax and grammar – and more about the cultural and historical influences and impacts of the language. It’s a podcast that appreciates the essential weirdness of English and likes to pull those strange bits out and examine them.

I’ve been bingeing the entirety of 2017’s episodes over the last few weeks, and have been left with the desire to go back to the start of the podcast in 2015 and listen to every single episode, which I always feels bodes well for the staying power of a podcast. If it holds up to binge listening, it’s likely to stay the distance in my affections.

Next up there’s Twenty Thousand Hertz. I actually came across this podcast thanks to The Allusionist as they did a guest episode on accents. Though as I’ve been working through their archive I discovered they’d also done a guest episode of 99% Invisible on the NBC chimes. It’s one of those podcasts that I come across and have to wonder how I didn’t know about it before. I feel sure that someone I know who’s also into podcasts must have recommended it to me before, as it’s the most relevant to my interests podcast I can imagine existing. (Basically, if I were going to make a podcast, it would be this podcast.) However it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve left an interesting link open in a tab and forgotten about it. I used to use twitter as a bookmarking device for that sort of thing but there’s far too much content on there these days for that to be effective.

Anyway, the podcast itself is a delight to listen to, it’s beautifully produced and mixed – you’d hope so from a sound design podcast – and, while it took them a wee while to get into the swing of things, they manage to strike a good balance of being general enough to engage a non-specialised listener, but detailed enough to keep a more dedicated sound design geek like myself coming back for more.

Finally, we have the Hammer House of Podcast, which is a much newer series – it only started at the turn of the year. In which two writers – and sci-fi geeks – watch and review their way through Hammer Films backlog of horror films. As longer term readers of this blog will know, I have strong feelings about Hammer Horror films. (For newer readers, when I first graduated from university I spend some time writing academic film reviews for a now defunct film review website Montage films. As my specialism at university was sound in horror films, I ended up with all the horror films to review, and there were a lot of Hammer Horror films released on DVD in that period. As such, I know more about late 60s – early 70s Hammer Horror films than I ever wanted to.) I’m enjoying the reviews so far – very funny, and honestly I hadn’t realised how much I wanted more podcasts where someone has a Scottish accent – but I strongly suspect that as we get on to the ones I know best I will spend a certain amount of time shouting ‘you’re wrong’ at my computer. Which, in fairness was a considerable part of my enjoyment of the Wittertainment podcast – 80% nodding in agreement, 10% cackling gleefully, 10% shouting ‘you’re wrong, Mark!’ at my radio.

I Have Heard the Future: Limetown Returns

Back in the winter of 2015/16 when I was doing some data entry to get through the winter freelancing lull, I fell down a rabbit-hole of audio drama podcasts. It was Limetown that acted as my gateway into the genre proper. I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with Welcome to Nightvale since it started back in 2012, but it never made me want to go looking for other audio drama podcasts. But Limetown made me love, not only it, but also the genre and seek out other shows that I might love. I found some excellent audio dramas to enjoy, whether as short flings or long-term commitments, and perhaps equally importantly I found inspiration to write about sound and work on strange sound projects of my own again. Nonetheless, I would sporadically keep checking back on the show, hoping to find that the second season would indeed be coming soon.

This morning I refreshed my podcasts and for the first time since December 2015, there was something new waiting for me in my Limetown feed. A trailer for the Second Season. It’s short, creepy and intriguing, Lia’s voice speaking to us but not, it appears, actually Lia. I haven’t been this excited about a trailer for any series I like in years. And I won’t even be able to listen to the new episodes until at least the New Year!

We have received a message.

Limetown is coming back next year.https://t.co/upENe2VogC

— Limetown (@limetownstories) October 31, 2017

In these days of on-demand viewing and binge-watching/listening – which to be fair is my preferred form of drama podcast consuming – it sometimes seems that both creators and fans have forgotten the pleasure of anticipation. The power of having to wait between seasons/series often with nothing but hope for and vague rumours about the next season to sustain you. That peculiar satisfaction and relief when you’ve waited ages and then the new content is good. (I grew up being a Doctor Who fan in the 1990s; it may have had a formative impact on my relationship with fiction.) It’s been two years and I’d pretty much given up on finding out the resolution to Season One’s cliff-hanger, but listening to the trailer there, all the feelings I had about the show came flooding back. What did happen to the people of Limetown? What happened to Lia Haddock? Will we find out, or will we find out something much worse but equally compelling? On one hand, I can’t wait; on the other hand the anticipation that I’ll find out soon, but just not quite yet, is absolutely delicious. After so long, I’ll need to re-listen to the show to get myself back into the mood for it and make sure I haven’t forgotten anything that turns out to be significant. I’m delighted to have the excuse to do so.

Well played little podcast, I’m hooked once more.

The Sound of Learning

This year I’ve been spending a lot of time working on my language skills. I’ve been learning Gaelic off and on for most of the last decade and at the start of the year, that this would be the year that I upgrade my language speaking status from the plateau of Intermediate learner to the slopes of advanced learner. I would develop an accent in Gaelic.

One of the less talked about difficulties of language learning, particularly when it comes to a minority language is the difficult hinterland of being an intermediate learner. There are – relatively speaking – tonnes of resources for beginner learners and increasing amounts of content and literature suitable for the fluent or native speaker of the language. But for the intermediate learner, there are few resources and even less classes, most of which are aimed at younger learners. As it is, I mostly read poetry and comic books in Gaelic. (One day I’m going to track down whoever it was that had the genius idea of translating Tintin and Asterix the Gaul into Gaelic, and buy them a pint.)

As part of my efforts to increase my fluency I’ve been slowly working my way through the backlog of Beag air Bheag, which is a programme expressly aimed at Gaelic learners. There was talk for a while about refocusing the programme on beginner Gaelic learners, because it was felt that the programme was getting too advanced. To my great relief they seem to have tackled this problem by dedicating a section of the programme to beginner learners. The programme as it is – both as a radio show and as a podcast – is one of the few resources that feels aimed at those of us caught in the middle so it would be a great loss.

Speaking of its podcast incarnation, during the season break in the show last year they produced a special mini series revising the Grammar points of the previous series. Oisean a’ Ghràmair is my favourite part of the show, so to have a mini-series dedicated to collecting it together is perfect for me. The series in general, uses examples from Radio nan Gaidheal programs, so unlike the stilted fake conversations of so many language learning courses, instead we have extracts of documentaries, news reports and interviews with poets, musicians, politicians or just people who’ve lived interesting lives. The extracts features colloquialisms, jokes and regional dialect variations, the natural use of the language, full of the nuance and detail that the learner can easily miss or misinterpret. To have those explained – along with their grammatical consistencies and inconsistencies is incredibly helpful. There’s something reassuring having these things treated as an aspect of grammar, as much a key to comprehension as recognising that a particular verb is irregular in certain tenses. There’s something delightful to listening back to the extract with your extra knowledge, and understanding all the things you’d have missed before.

Otherwise, I’ve been indulging my love of languages and linguistics more generally with a couple of excellent podcast series.

I’ve been listening to The World in Words for a while now, having come across it at the height of the Standing Rock protects, via an article about the protest that referenced their episode about the Lakota language outreach work that was going on alongside the protests. (The Standing Rock Sioux’s Other Fight.) The series is a companion piece to PRI’s The World focusing in on language issues, sometimes spun off from issues and stories covered on the parent program others by tangents their reporters have stumbled across while reporting other stories entirely. It mainly focuses on minority languages and diaspora languages, the cultural and political impacts by and on languages and the hows and whys of who speaks which language and where. It’s a really interesting series if you’ve ever wondered about how and why language – particularly minority language – is political.

The episodes are quite short and as such are more short introductions to the issues raised than in depth analysis but the show notes are often extensive and helpful if something piques your interest and leaves you wanting more.

Lingthusiasm is a more recent discovery, and very much more of a podcast about linguistics than about languages. It’s about the mechanics of language, how and why they are constructed and work. It’s actually really useful – in an abstract way – for someone like me who loves learning languages but struggles with a lot of grammar constructions because they don’t actually know what the equivalents are in English. I’m going to learn a lot of useful things as the series progresses.

It’s presented by two linguists, one Canadian – Gretchen McCulloch – and the other Australian – Lauren Gawne – and it’s of the genre of podcasts where you’re essentially listening in on the conversation between two very smart people geeking out about something they both love and are very knowledgeable about. It’s unashamedly geeky and enthusiastic about its topic, but really quite accessible for enthusiastic amateurs or non-specialist listeners.

It’s a lovely, intriguing little podcast and while the production values are a little…amateurish…to start with, it’s worth bearing with them. (For a while the next reward level on their Patreon was ‘lets buy Gretchen a decent mic’ and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in being delighted when they made it.) This particular audiophile finds the content well worth the occasional wincing.

I suppose the best review I could give it is this: when I first started listening there were 9 episodes available and I listened to them all – including a 3 and a bit hour special episode – over the course of one weekend.

It’s Got Knitsonik On It

I accidentally gave myself a bit of writers block last week, as I had two more posts I wanted to make about the Inverness Film Festival but wasn’t feeling at all inspired to write them. Therefore I couldn’t write anything else until I’d written them. Completely logical.

Yesterday, I finished catching up with a really interesting sound-related podcast, Knitsonik, so I decided to write about that instead – and hopefully kick the writer’s block to the curb while I’m at it.

Approximately a year ago, at a friend’s birthday party, I got into a discussion with someone about my twin passions of sound design and knitting. Now the relationship between these two things is completely clear to me, but is not something that is always obvious to other people. In fact, until that point the only person I knew who really shared these as twin, interweaved passions, was my former tutor from my masters course Gary Hayton and he’s now a Textile Artist who applies Fibonacci number sequences to knitted fabric. So to casually meet some in everyday life who not only didn’t think it was an odd combination of passions but did in fact tell me they knew someone who had done their PHD in that sort of thing and that they had a podcast about the subject. The idea that there were enough people into both of those things to sustain a podcast was both surprising and delightful.

(The exception is generally if you’re really into maths. Maths geeks – and occasionally engineers – who knit will nod understandingly and talk to me about Fibonacci sequences and the golden ratio and then be horrified that I’m not only not a maths geek but that I don’t actually like maths. Most sound designers seem to come from either a maths/engineering background or a music composition background, I’m neither, I’m first and foremost a craftsperson. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I was altering a knitting pattern the other week – I didn’t have any graph paper to hand so I used an excel spreadsheet – that I realised that I visualise knitting designs the same way that I design soundscapes. Interchangeable blocks that layer and interweave to create something new and unique.)

Having spent the early months of this year clearing out my backlog of podcasts, I was able to justify subscribing to a few new ones and Knitsonik was naturally among the first to be chosen back in March. Why did it take until now for me to work my way through the backlog? Certainly not because the podcast isn’t interesting. It’s not even that the episodes are long, though that does mean I need to carve out time specifically to listen rather than sticking them on in short periods between other things. The problem with the podcast is that it’s…well…too interesting and inspiring. I couldn’t binge listen to it, because I came out of each episode really wanting to go and do some field recordings or make some sound art. Around 50% of my sound recording field trips this year, were as a direct result of listening to this podcast. I’d sit down with a pot of tea and some knitting on a Sunday afternoon intending to have a binge listen and a couple of hours later I’d be standing somewhere unexpected wearing my giant headphones, recording an interesting bird noise or weird echo and wondering vaguely how I’d got there.

I keep forgetting how much listening to other people be passionate about sound design and sound art stirs up my own passion for the work. (You would think that the exponential increase in my sound production work when the hospital radio station I used to volunteer with had an artist in residence would have clued me in but apparently not.) Sound is, in many ways, quite a solitary pursuit. Anti-social even. You spend a lot of time listening really hard to your environment; it’s quite hard to do in company unless you’re working on something that specifically needs another person to achieve. (The idea of embedding sound in a place, or in objects of the place the sound originates from, is increasingly important to me, especially since I relocated to the Highlands.) It is, therefore, quite easy to feel isolated in your work. Especially, if you don’t live in a large metropolis with an established community of sound artists. Even having an outlet like this blog, it can feel a bit like no-one’s listening.

Therefore, it’s been great to have this window into someone else’s sound projects, their passions and quirks, especially that rare confluence of viewing sound design/art as a craft with all that that implies. And oddly comforting to know that someone else finds sheep noises just as compelling and comical as I do.

Perhaps, if this year’s project was to write more about sound, then next year’s project should be to send more sound out into the world. Not just the stuff that I get paid to make, but the little projects that I make just for the joy of making soundscapes too.

Universal Goat, Frankenstein’s Castle and Other Overused Sound Effects

I’ve been catching up on my podcast backlog this week and I came across something that struck a chord, but that has also come up in the general zeitgeist a few times over the last wee while. Over on the Knitsonik podcast – a podcast about knitting and sound art/design, it’s a niche interest group, but not as niche as I would have expected: I blame the golden ratio – there’s been an on-going discussion about ‘wrong’ sound effects in films, that was started off by a listener who keeps goats bemoaning the use of stock goat sounds that to her were really blatantly not belonging to the goats in question. What she termed ‘universal goat’. This in turn has led to lots of interesting stories and sound recordings of sounds in the wrong places and what the correct sounds should be. (Artic wolves in hill country that would actually be full of coyotes, tree frogs native to the Hollywood hills that turn up all over the place, and explain helpfully why I’ve never heard a frog go ‘ribbet’ in real life.) Additionally, last winter, there was a thread of conversation on Radio 4’s Film Programme about sound effects in the wrong place (Great Northern Divers are something of a short hand for frozen wastelands – shame they’re only found in the Artic and not in the Alps). Ammunition, if ever I heard it, for sound designers everywhere, when faced with a director insisting on their using a generic stock sound rather than hunting down an accurate one, to refute the ‘who’s going to notice’ argument. Clearly, not just us sound geeks.

My own personal version of the universal goat comes courtesy of the BBC Sound Effects Library. That glorious collection of CDs that lurked in the media departments of practically every university or college in the UK, courtesy of those fine folks at the Radiophonics workshop. The point towards the end of my Masters when I could actually pick out sound effects that I recognised in not only student films, but also actual commercial television and film, has probably shaped my attitude towards location recording, Foley and using library sound effects. Once you tune into a ‘wrong’ sound effect that is in common circulation, it becomes practically impossible not to hear it. Nearly a decade on, I’ll be watching an old Hammer Horror film or a Jon Pertwee Dr Who serial, there’ll be a storm and there it’ll be: ‘Frankenstein’s Castle (Rain, Thunder etc.)’. It’s a really good thunderstorm, nicely atmospheric, but by goodness does it get used a lot. It even turns up occasionally in modern low budget British horror films. I really hope that’s because sound designers are using it ironically – a knowing nod and a wink to genre savvy geeks in the audience – but I doubt it.

Part of the problem is, that sound is very powerful, it often completely bypasses our conscious brain, to press buttons in our brain we don’t necessarily even know we have. Particularly fear, it’s really, really good at fear. (Trust me on this. That was my dissertation topic; I could talk about it all day.) So we often come to associate particular sounds with particular emotional states when it comes to movie watching. Which is fine, but when it comes to making movies, both audiences and filmmakers come with a whole plethora of pre-conceptions – both conscious and unconscious – about how things ‘should’ sound. As a sound designer its very easy to get drawn into that trap, it would be very easy for me to forget, if I were recreating the sound of a forest at night that the sounds I associate with the woods of my childhood – deciduous woodland in the Lowlands of Scotland – aren’t necessarily going to be accurate to a pine forest in the Highlands. Because those sounds are familiar to me, they won’t sound obviously ‘wrong’ – the way a 1960s ambulance siren would sound out of place in a modern drama – because I expect them to be there. So it is with sounds that we associate with particular locales because we’ve only seen them in movies and they always have a certain soundscape. Audiences will sometimes find the ‘correct’ sound unconvincing because they’re so used to stock effects that are ‘wrong’ or over emphasised. Some directors will vehemently resist the use of a sound that is factually correct, because it doesn’t conform to their expectation, with their mental soundscape for how that location should sound. And still other occasions the actual sound just doesn’t sound dramatic or evocative enough – flesh tearing is actually a really quiet un-dramatic noise, you need to layer it with various other elements to actually get a sound with the right impact. Flesh is really good at deadening sound, meaning that punches mostly have more of a solid dull sound with very little echo, rather than the crisp neat bam of a lot of movie punches.

But, as with so much in sound design; the sign of really good sound work is when you don’t notice its there. If this discussion proves anything, it’s that audiences only really notice us, when we get it wrong. Which arguably, is how it should be.

Sounds Like March

This month we’re going to attempt to move away from the slight podcast fixation that this section of the blog has developed and look at other interesting sound projects that I’ve discovered lately.

Beep Trailer from Ehtonal on Vimeo.

Alright, so our first item isn’t technically a new discovery, but it is one that’s finally seeing the light of day. I’ve talked before about supporting documentaries on Kickstarter, and this is one of them. Beep is a documentary about computer game sound, both the music and the sound design. It’s a subject that I find absolutely fascinating even if it does exist at a tangent to the kind of sound design I do. For a while there, with the rise and dominance of blockbusters and their heavy-handed, turn-it-up-to-11 school of sound it seemed that all the interesting, subtle work happening in sound design was happening in computer games. While we’re certainly seeing a more nuanced view in cinemas these days, computer game sound design continues to set a high bar for the rest of us. (Perhaps because games designers appreciate the importance of sound and aren’t under the impression that it’s an easy job that anyone can do?)

Anyway, this is one of the documentaries that I supported on Kickstarter and they released a trailer for it recently so I wanted to share the excitement with you. Doesn’t it look good? I’m really excited to see it – see it if you get the chance!

Next up is the latest project from Cities and Memories. I’ve been watching their work with interest – and occasionally submitting field recordings of my own to them – as they do interesting things with field-recordings and remixes that have a very specific sense of place. The latest project was created to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dadaism as an (anti)art movement. It really takes their wider work right to its logical extreme. As always with their projects you can explore the works in Dada Sounds either via a conventional playlist or by navigating a map of the pieces that illustrates the variety of places and locations that the field recordings (and artists for that matter) originate from. There are some beautifully weird and fascinating pieces in the collection that are well worth giving a listen to.

It should probably be my new sonic resolution to get more actively involved with one of their projects – they always look such fun.

My third choice for this month does sort of lead up back to podcasts, but the Cities and Memories project meant I couldn’t quite forget about it. Alan Rodi’s excellent music for the Wolf 359 podcast has been a subtle but gorgeous element within the show since the start. As part of the wider soundscape of the podcast, I was aware that the music was, fitting and evocative, but it wasn’t until I was listening to the music on its own (everything’s up on the soundcloud page) that I realised just how beautiful it was in its own right. Most of them are themes and cues that are used at various points in the show but I’d recommend in particular the ‘Am I Alone Now’ suite as a more traditional score suite. And why, you might ask did Dadaism make me think of this man’s gorgeous work? Well, because the latest theme to be posted is called ‘Please No Dadaist Poetry Beyond This Point’.

February Podcast Stars

The end of this month has somewhat snuck up on me. I did fully intend to track down some interesting and different sound projects to talk about this month but it never really happened. But what this month did involve was a lot of podcast listening, so having talked about my favourite new fictional podcast discoveries last month, I reckon its high time I talked about some recent non-fiction podcast discoveries.

99% Invisible.
For years people have been trying to convince me of the joys of This American Life, but I’ve been resisting it. When I first got into podcasts the best part of a decade ago, I really struggled with American podcasts – I found them really disconcerting, something about the accent or the subject matter, I just couldn’t get into them. Listening to podcasts from here in the UK was fine; perhaps because I was used to speech radio as the BBC does it and much of their podcast content is essentially the highlights of their arts and current affairs output. While podcasts from other UK providers in the early days of podcasts, were heavily influenced by – or reacting against – the BBC’s speech radio output. Over time my antipathy to American podcasts has faded – probably as a result of podcasts in general getting more adventurous and coming into their own more – and with my continuing fondness for Welcome to Nightvale and Serial – more about the latter later – I tried This American Life again. I fully accept that this will be considered sacrilege to many podcast fans, but I just don’t feel the love for it. I don’t hate it, it doesn’t annoy me, if I listen to an episode I generally find it interesting, but it just doesn’t compel me to listen to episode after episode.

For me, 99% Invisible fulfils the promise that so many people made me about This American Life. Perhaps its because the podcast started out in its presenter’s bedroom before being pulled into the public radio realm, it retains an idiosyncratic and charming quality that I prefer. (Maybe my interests just align better with that of their production team?) Maybe its because the episodes are shorter, I’m not sure, but somehow they manage to give just enough information to satisfy your curiosity so that even if the subject isn’t fascinating to you, what you learn is still interesting and you don’t have time to get bored. To me they’re little snippets of insight into unfamiliar worlds and the oddities and eccentricities of American life that I would never otherwise have considered.

Gastropod
I love food. My other blog is a food blog. Cooking is my go-to form of stress-relief and I recently became a vegetarian. I have lots of feelings about food.

I’ve been consuming Gastropod irregularly for a while now. Someone recommended it to me and I looked up the website, listened to the soundcloud imbed of the current episode, enjoyed it but had too much of an existing podcast backlog to subscribe. However, I never did close the tab it was in, so over the last year I would occasionally discover it in a tab, browse the latest episodes, listen to one and move on again. I only recently subscribed because I figured that something I kept coming back to and enjoying was worth making time for. It’s the history and science of food and while its not necessarily life-changing, it is certainly perspective changing. The episode titles are quirky, the science is interesting and the hosts are funny and likeable. They get in a whole range of interesting experts and passionate amateurs, and they seem really interested in each topic which I think really helps in terms of making it interesting to the listener.

Serial
Weirdly, given my antipathy towards This American Life, I love this podcast. The same team makes it and the story that kicked it off was at one point intended to be an episode of that show that grew arms and legs. And perhaps that’s the reason that it grabbed my attention. It wasn’t just an interesting real life murder mystery; this story had taken over the reporter’s life for an entire year. (There’s a passion there, that fantasy of the passionate crusading journalist you’re sold as a kid.) There’s something about long-form journalism that I adore. Between the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle we live in, there’s such an overwhelming volume of constantly changing and shifting news. Thousands of tiny sound bites, too much for any one person to take in. Long-form, investigative journalism is expensive and its hard work. Given that the prevailing narrative since I was a student, has been that the internet is killing this kind of journalism; I do take a special pleasure in the fact that actually, the internet has made it much easier for me to find new and varied sources of this kind of journalism and for this kind of material to find an audience. Serial is almost the perfect storm of this, it’s a podcast, its long-form – episodes are anything between half an hour and an hour – and its serialised. The pieces come out week by week, but they aren’t set in stone; the story might branch off in a new direction as new leads come to light. It takes its time, it goes in to detail – in the case of the current series, it will stop and diverge into the history of particular events, places or groups to give the audience backstory that sheds a new light on events in the story, or makes seemingly inexplicable events make perfect sense. It’s not patronising, it assumes that its audience is smart and has a decent grasp of current events, but that this is not their specialist subject. It’s smart, intriguing and compelling listening. Also the presenter/reporter Sarah Koenig has a really listenable, compelling voice. That helps too.

If this month’s listening had a theme, then I think its enthusiasm and passion. They’re all podcasts by people who seem – whether or not they actually are – genuinely interested or intrigued about the subjects they talk about. Whether they’re passionate about discovering the truth or just about learning something new and interesting, they talk to the audience like we should be fascinated too. As though they’re saying to the audience: “You’re smart, but this is complicated, bare with me, this is interesting/important, we’ll get there together and all will become clear.” I like that.

Podcast Adventures

Back at the start of 2014, I made a blogging resolution to write more about sound. About the projects I was working on and the sound based media that inspired me. 2014 was a good year for me professionally, but it was also quite a disruptive year and one that saw a lot of changes personally and professionally that meant that something as relatively minor as that challenge fell by the wayside. It needed to, there were a lot of things more important than blogging going on. However, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a good idea or one that isn’t worth coming back to now that I’m somewhat more…settled.

With that in mind I would like to institute an end of month…habit. Reviewing the sound-based content (whether sound art and installations, podcasts, radio plays or radio documentaries) I consumed that month or that I made that month. That may mean that I spend a fair amount of time during the last weekend of the month listening to new material or frantically editing, but that’s no bad thing.

January has been the month of the podcast for me. I’m subscribed to a sizeable number of podcasts and I pretty much always have a backlog.

(I should stop at this point to explain that I was a reasonably early adopter of podcasts and have developed a rather eclectic selection of subscriptions, some brand new, some that I’ve been listening to faithfully for ten years, others have come and gone over the years. By and large, until recently they’ve been current affair and arts related, essentially my own personal speech radio station made up of BBC, NPR, NHK, Al-Jazeera and Guardian output. I’ve only recently moved into fictional podcasts and it’s been…enlightening.)

For a variety of reasons, this month I’ve had plenty of time to catch up on my podcast backlog, so I’ve been trying out some new podcasts, getting round to ones that I was recommended but hadn’t listened to.

Limetown was recommended to me as a ‘if you enjoyed Serial you’ll enjoy this’ podcast. But in the interim between finding out about the podcast and finally getting round to listening to it, not only had all the episodes come out but I’d completely forgotten everything I’d known about it. Therefore I spent quite a bit of the first episode uncertain as to whether or not it was fictional. I have since read an interview with the series’ creators where they talked about what a huge influence Welcome to Nightvale was to them, and while I can see that, stylistically, it appears to owe a great deal more to Serial. I don’t actually consume massive amounts of NPR output, so its hard to say if its just an NPR style that they’re riffing off of, or if its specific to Serial, but my goodness I was glad I wasn’t listening to the new series of Serial at the same time. I think I might have started to lose track of which series was fact and which is fiction. (The tone is so similar, the style, even the adverts! It’s the same company sponsoring both podcasts! Excellent work Squarespace getting in on the freaking out the audience game there!) The great strength of Limetown, I feel, is that it plays it absolutely straight. It’s a piece of long-form audio journalism and our guide in this world Lia Haddock takes her work seriously too. By turns curious, excited, scared and a little paranoid, she treats her subjects with respect, warmth and a healthy dose of scepticism even – perhaps especially – as her cold-case story that has unexpectedly warmed up, takes turns further and further into X-Files territory. It’s a testament to the actress playing her that you trust her completely, follow her willingly down this rabbit-hole into the ever increasing weirdness. You feel safe travelling with Lia, distanced from the dangers she faces by the radio format, its not until after the podcast is finished that the downright creepiness of certain events really hits you. It’s a testament to the excellent sound design that at various points you feel both like you’re listening to an actual live radio programme and like you’re right there with Lia listening to those frankly horrible voicemails and audiotapes. Also? That was one heck of a cliff-hanger to end on.

I picked up Wolf 359 after I finished Limetown. It’s taken me a good few episodes to get into it properly, largely because I had to get over the previous series first and it suffered by comparison a little. Wolf 359 is a much more traditional style science fiction radio drama. It’s very much a chamber piece, with our four-person crew stuck on a space station orbiting and observing a red dwarf star (the eponymous Wolf 359), and apparently slowly cracking under the pressure. The series lulls the listener into a false sense of security with gentle episodic tales in which the crew’s strengths and foibles are established and our preconceptions about the archetypes that they represent are thoroughly played with. However, as the series progresses, little weird things keep happening about which our guide through this world – Doug Eiffel, Communications Officer and general disaster of a human being – gets at turns really irrationally paranoid about and then gently reassured that there’s nothing to worry about. Events swing wildly from the completely mundane to the utterly absurd. (To continue our 90s TV comparisons, it’s a bit like Red Dwarf with more girls and subtler jokes.) There’s some cracking use of sound in this podcast, managing to create both the vast sense of scale involved with being on a big empty space station a very long way from Earth and also the very claustrophobic nature of being stuck in a small office, on what is essentially a big tin can in space. Almost everything we hear is Eiffel’s personal logs, so they’re necessarily skewed and subjective, but everything we hear outside of his logs, suggests that actually he could stand to be a little more suspicious of his crewmates than he actually is already.

Time will tell if the series can maintain its sense of intrigue and perhaps bump things up to properly tense and compelling. I’m only three quarters of the way through the first series so far, but as things stand I’d thoroughly recommend it as a good old-fashioned sci-fi radio drama.