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A Podcasting Glossary

Written over many months while waiting for my computer to render and load files and stuff like that.

1/8th Inch - See “3.5mm.”

3.5 mm - The size of the plug for consumer headphones, but everyone calls it "1/8th Inch."

Actuality - Tape recorded on location.

Analog - Recording/processing without a computer. Often mytholigized by music producers, there is no “all analog” workflow in podcasting.

Audacity - Free audio editing software, a common first DAW. Audacity users either wish they had time to learn something more fully featured, or wish everyone would stop suggesting they learn a different DAW.

Audio Book - A recording of a narrator reading a book. The internet loves to argue about how many sound effects it takes to turn an audio book into an audio drama. The definitive answer is that all definitive answers are wrong.

Audio Engineer - Anyone who claims they know how to use sound equipment/software with lots of buttons and knobs. Examples include a sound recordist, audio editor, audio mixer, mastering engineer.

Audition - Adobe's DAW. Subscription only. Audition users love it and don't understand what everyone's problem is.

Automation - In a DAW, the ability to automatically change an attribute over time, such as dipping the volume, or panning a sound from left to right, or any other attribute you'd like to change. See "envelope."

Balanced - A type of analog connection that uses three wires instead of two to remove some types of interference.

Binaural – While all headphones are technically binaural, in the podcasting world it usually means a type of recording and/or processing that allows a 3D sound space to be conveyed over headphones.

Bit Depth -  How precise an audio sample can be. Because of [science], higher bit rates have a wider difference between the quietest sound they can record, and the loudest sound, and therefore allow you to record at lower levels. 16-bit is CD quality, 24-bit is preferred for recording, 32-bit float theoretically never clips, but uses lots of disk space. See “Headroom.” 

Bit Rate - How much disk space is used per second of audio, which are measured in bits, even though everywhere else we measure files in bytes (8 bits = 1 byte). In compressed audio formats like mp3, the Bit Rate is the best number we have to gauge audio fidelity, because the compression scheme causes phrases like “sample rate” and “bit depth” to lose all meaning. 

Blimp - A type of windscreen that entirely covers a microphone and looks like blimp. Sometimes called a Zeppelin.

Bongo Ties - A brand of cable tie. A really nice rubberband wrapped around a bongo-shaped piece of wood. Great for when you need to hold a cable in place with something grippy. See "Cable Tie."

Bounce - What ProTools used to call rendering. Back in the day, ProTools could only bounce files in real time, meaning you could spend $100,000 on a system that still required an hour to export an hour-long show. See "Render."

Cable - Multiple wires wrapped inside a single casing, used for connecting equipment to other equipment. Good cables are vital for reliable sound recording, and are almost always forgotten about when budgeting for new equipment. See "XLR," "Balanced," "Unbalanced," "Quarter Inch," "3.5mm."

Cable Tie - Usually made of velcro, these devices are the key to keeping your cables in good shape. See "Bongo Tie."

Cable TV - Remarkably similar to commercial podcasting, but with better pay.

Cardioid - A microphone pick-up pattern that is most sensitive to sounds in front of the microphone.

Channel - A discrete input or output. A four channel input can take four signals at once.

Clipping - When an audio signal crosses above the upper limit, the waveform has it's top cut off and it causes distortion.

Comb filtering - When two versions of the same sound play at slightly different times (measured in milliseconds) and certain frequencies cancel out, usually creating an undesirable effect. In podcasting, this is most common when two microphones record the same voice, such as when one guest is speaking and the other is listening, and can be fixing by lowering level of the listener's mic. Also called "phasing."

Compression (file) - Very different from sound compression. File compression reduces file size. Some formats need to be manually unzipped before you can use the files. Others can be extracted in real time, sometimes with a loss in audio quality. See "mp3."

Compression (sound) - Very different from file compression. See "Compressor."

Compressor - A device or plugin which automatically lowers the volume when the it goes above a set threshold. In music, it can be used to dramatically change the quality of a specific sound. In podcasting/radio, it's mostly used to shave off the loudest peaks of speech, but can also even out the loudness overtime. They do not make you sound like a DJ. See  "Macrodynamics" and "Microdynamics."

Condenser - A microphone that turns sound into electrical signals via wiggling capacitors (or something like that). Requires a small amount of power to operate, either from a battery or from the recorder, but output louder signals, and can also be small enough to fit into a lavaliere. Hated by podcasters with untreated rooms. See “Phantom Power,” and “Dynamic (microphone).”

Control Surface - Any device that allows you to make adjustments in your DAW using actual buttons and knobs, such as a Faderport. See "Interface."

Conversational Show - A show where the audience listens to a recorded conversation. Can feature revolving guests, or have the same people on it every week. People who don't listen to podcasts think all podcasts are conversational shows.

Copy (n) - Words that are written to be read outloud. A narrator's script is filled with "copy."

Copy (v) - To duplicate.

Copy (jargon) - A quick reply to tell your colleague that you have received their message. When they text "Hey, I'm running late," if you write back "Copy," you're being professional without actually letting them off the hook.

CPM - Short for "Cost per Thousands" (not millions, it's the Roman Numeral M). What advertisers will pay to reach a thousand listeners.

Creative Commons - A copyright designation where creators allow others to use their work for free, but often with some restrictions.

DAC - See “Digital Analog Converter.”

DAW - Short for “Digital Audio Workstation,” it's the software you use to edit and mix your audio. No one actually knows if it's pronounced "daw" or if you say the letters D-A-W, so it's best to avoid saying the word out loud until someone else says it first, then you can just say whatever they say.

Db - Abbreviation for decibel, but is also said out loud. Pronounced "Dee-Bee." Never pluralized, so it's "Three Dee-bee," and not "Three Dee-Bees." I don't know why. See “Decibel.”

De-Esser - Something that automatically controls sibilance in recordings, usually a plugin.

Dead Cat - A type of windscreen that has long synthetic hairs surrounding it and makes long microphones look like a dead cat.

Decibel - A measure of a sound's volume in a physical space. For convenience, "levels," "gain," and "LUFs" are also measured in/coorelated with db. A 3db increase in Gain will raise the Level by 3db, increase Loudness by 3 LUFs, and it will (theoretically) sound 3db louder when it comes out of the speakers. Can be pularized, "Three decibels." See "Db."

Decible – How I spell “Decibel” when I don't have spellcheck turned on.

Deck - See "Pitch Deck."

Diaphragm - The part of microphone that gets wiggled by sound and turns it into electrical signals. See "Dynamic" and "Condenser."

Digital – Recording/processing with a computer. Audio signals are broken into numerical values, the computer/digital recorder does whatever it's going to with them, and then the numerical values are turned back into analog audio signals for playback. See “Digital Analog Converter.”

Digital Analog Converter - DAC. A piece of hardware that turns an analog signal into numerical values, and vice versa. Anything that connects a microphone to any type of computer has a DAC, including Digital Audio Recorders, Microphones Interfaces, and even the USB port on your computer.

Double Ender - See "Tape Sync"

Downloads - A key metric for measuring a podcast's success. 90% of podcasts get fewer than 3,000 downloads/episode per month.

Drop - To publish an episode online. "The season finale drops tomorrow."

Dynamic (audio) - Audio that has wide variations between the quiet bits and the loud bits. See "Microdynamics" and "Macrodynamics."

Dynamic (microphone) - A microphone that uses soundwaves to wiggle a magnet to create small electrical signals. Because they are less sensitive to the higher frequencies, many podcasters use them to make recordings with less background noise. This may also be because they are quieter overall, and force a speaker to use better mic technique. See "Condenser."

Edit - 1) To help a subordinate producer make a better piece, typically on shows with a journalistic background. 2) To assemble an audio piece. This can mean simply cutting down for time, or weaving a narrative from multiple interviews, or anything in between.

Editor – 1) In journalism, the editor is the boss, who's responsible for deciding what stories go into the publication, and for giving a producer feedback and criticism on works in progress. 2) An audio editor, or a "podcast editor," is the person who assembles a show from raw material, and their boss is the producer. Both senses are used in podcasting, but no one seems to realize this but me.

Envelope - In a  DAW, this is the line you use to control automation. The term originated with analog synthesizers where it mostly made sense, but now it's just confusing. See "Automation."

FabFilter - A company that makes high-end plugins. People who use them talk about them constantly.

Feed - A digital document that only contains links to other content. In common podcasting parlance, this is your published episodes. See "RSS."

Fiction Podcast - A modern day radio play, but with a different name. Some people differentiate between "audio drama" and "fiction podcast,” but ugh, whatever.

Floating Point - An audio format which allows the loudest value to fluctuate, and therefore never clips. Common types are 32-bit float and, believe it or not, mp3.

Foley - Recording custom sound effects. In film, it strictly refers to a technique of recording sound effects in time to the picture. Audio producers use the term pretty loosely.

Gain - What is used to amplify/reduce an audio signal. Measured in decibels. Some DAWs call it volume. See "Levels."

Gain Staging - The order in which you apply multiple processes. EQ before a compressor can sound very different than EQ after a compressor. Important for music production, not as important for podcast production.

Garage Band - Music composition software that comes for free on a mac. Many have tried to use it for podcasting, almost all switch to something else.

Guest - Someone who appears on your podcast infrequently, probably only once. Usually only applies to a studio setting. See “Subject.”

Handling Noise - Undesired sounds cause by the recordist touching or moving the microphone.

Headroom - How many decibels you have until your signal starts clipping, especially while recording. E.g, giving yourself “12db of headroom” means that you set your recording levels so that the source is frequently peaking at -12db, and if it gets unexpectedly louder by, say, 10db, it won’t distort. If your gear is good enough, recording at a higher bit-rate allows you to turn down your recording and leave lots of headroom--good for unpredictable field work, but makes previewing the files from your desktop a pain in the butt.

High Pass Filter - A confusingly named audio filter that cuts out any frequency below a specified point (and lets the higher frequencies pass through.) In addition to being used in a DAW, it's often included in microphones and audio recorders and can help prevent plosives and wind noise.  

Hindenburg - A DAW that's specifically designed for documentary radio/podcasting, and not music production. Great if you don't need to get complicated. Hindenburg users are typically pros who don't understand why everyone's talking technical nonsense instead of story tips.

Hypercardioid - A microphone pick-up pattern that is most sensitive to sounds directly in front of the microphone, even more so than a supercardioid.

iLok - A proprietary method to regulate/license software. iLok used to require a physical dongle, which were known to break and shutdown ProTools until they were replaced, especially when you were under deadline. Still a pain when your computer dies, but at least you don't need to buy the dongle anymore.

Integrated Loudness - The average loudness across a given timeframe, most commonly an entire song or episode. Most streaming services use a program's integrated loudness to set/adjust the playback level of a song/episode.

Interface - Any piece of hardware that connects to your computer, but most commonly refers to hardware that allows you to record/output audio.

iZotope - A company that sells some amazingly cheap plugins and then sends you upgrade offers for the rest of your life.

iZotope RX - Software that repairs audio, doing things like removing background noise, distortion, mouth noises and other miracles. The cheapest version can be had for $30 on sale, the most expensive costs $1000.

Lavaliere - A tiny microphone, typically pinned onto the shirt of a speaker. Great for getting a mic near a mobile speaker, but at the expense of inferior positioning. Used heavily in film because they can be hidden. Not as common in podcasting.

Levels - The amount of signal inside your hardware, usually measured with negative numbers.  "-12db" means it could be 12 decibels louder without distorting. "Good levels" means the signal is loud enough to be clearly above the noise floor, but not so high it's distorting. See "Clipping."

Limiter - A really fast compressor, especially designed for reducing the level of loud peaks.

Loudness - A measurement of how loud audio sounds, as opposed to "levels" which measures how much energy is in the signal.

Loudness Wars - The trend during the 90s and early 2000s to master music on CDs so it was as loud as possible. The hope was that when radio stations would play the CD on the air, the increase in volume would trick listeners into thinking it sounded better, even though the tricks needed to make it louder actually make the audio quality worse. LUFs and loudness normalization by streaming services has somewhat made the Loudness War a thing of the past, especially for podcasts, but new producers often think those tricks for boosting loudness will make it sound more professional.

LUFs - Loudness Units Fullscale.  Units used when measuring loudness. See “Decibel.”

Macrodynamics - The difference between the loudest sections and quietest sections, over a longer time period. See "Microdynamics," "Short Term Loudness," and "Integrated loudness."

Magician - A sound designer who noticeably transforms the source material. Falsely implies that post production is so complicated, only certain people can create great sound design.

Masking - When one sound makes another sound inaudible.

Mastering - An often mythologized final step of audio post production. In music production, this refers to the process of taking multiple songs and making them sound good next to each other on an album, typically by adjusting the volume and using gentle EQ. In the podcasting world, it most commonly means adjusting the piece so it hits loudness targets, but there's no consensus beyond "The last thing I do before rendering the file." A "mastering plugin" is a bunch of compressors and meters wrapped together, often combined with fancy effects that you are unlikely to use in a podcast.

Microdynamics - The difference between the loudest moments and the quietest moments over a short timeframe, usually referring to transients. This is typically what you're reducing when using a compressor to help you hit a loudness target, and you can reduce microdynamics without a noticeable change in quality...to a point. See "Macrodynamics," and "Peaks."

Mid-Side - A type of microphone that can adjust the balance between the sounds in the center and the sounds on the side, even after recording. The same process can be used on material recorded in traditional stereo to allow some adjustments, although I prefer the less common name, "Sum-Difference."

Mix (v) - To combine multiple audio sources into a single finished piece, using volume adjustments, EQ, and other effects.

Mix (n) - How well you did your mixing. A "good" mix lets you hear all the voices easily, without the listener having to adjust the volume.

Monetize - To make money off your show. Typically this means allowing advertisers to place their ads in your episodes.

Monitor - Either "a computer screen" or "expensive speaker for audio mixing." This is the audio term most likely to lead to a "Who's on First" confusion, which is saying something. See "Studio Monitors."

Mono - Audio with a single channel.

Mp3 - A format that shrinks the sizes of audio files by reducing audio quality. At higher bit rates (124kbps and higher), the difference can be inaudible to a listener, but it will leave you less flexibility for processing.

Narrative Non-Fiction - A show that tells a true story. This American Life and Serial are prototypical narrative non-fiction shows.

Noise Floor - The background noise in a recording. Typically refers to the noise produced by recording equipment, but can also refer to the roomtone of a space.

Normalize - To automatically apply gain to audio, based on its levels. Peak Normalization will make the loudest moment match a specified target. Loudness Normalization will make the average loudness match a specified target, which in my experience means that the quiet parts will be too quiet and the loud parts will be too loud. Normalized material almost always requires some further adjustment, but it can be a good start.

NPR - “National Public Radio.” A national distribution network that provides shows to local Public Radio Stations. A podcasting powerhouse.

Omnidirectional Microphone - A microphone pick-up pattern that is equally sensitive to all  directions (mostly). Notable for not getting a proximity effect and being less sensitive to wind noise. An omni that's close to the speaker can record amazing sound.

Patreon - A website that allows fans to make monthly contributions to independent creators. Donors, or "Patrons" often get perks like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes features, and so on.

Peaks - Technically the tops (and bottoms) of an audio waveform, but this usually refers to the biggest peaks of an audio signal during a designated timeframe.

Phantom Power - A small electrical current that is sent from a recorder to a microphone. The power is sent through same wires that are transmitting the audio, which seems like magic to me.

Pistol Grip - A microphone holder whose base is shaped like the handle of a pistol. Overpriced, but if you're doing handheld work, it's worth it.

Pitch Deck - A powerpoint presentation creating for pitching show ideas. Typically designed to be part of an in-person presentation, but are often emailed around all on their own.

Plosives - A burst of air from a speaker's mouth that travels directly into a microphone's diaphragm, causing a moment of deep distortion.

Plugin - Software that can be added to a DAW. Plugins can be free, or can cost $1000s.

Podcast - An audio program that can be downloaded directly to a computer, smart phone, or if your gear is old enough, even an iPod. People who don't spend much time thinking about podcasting tend to think all podcasts are people sitting around talking to each other, but the format vary wildly. See "Conversation Show" and "Video Podcast."

Podcaster - Anyone who makes audio that isn't music and posts it online.

Popscreen - A screen that's placed in front of microphone to reduce the number of plosives.

Post Production - Everything that happens after you've recorded the audio. Editing, scoring, mixing, etc.

Pot - Short for "potentiometer," which are the knobs and sliders on a mixing board. A "pot" is also jargon for a channel, and "Pot it down" means to turn down the gain.

Producer - The person who makes a podcast. Can be responsible for anything, up to and including everything. At parties, producers are either the person who can't shut up about their podcast, or they avoid talking for fear of being that person. Producers like weekends because they can work without being interrupted as much.

Production - Recording the audio.

Profit - Making more money then you spend. Good luck.

ProTools - The accepted professional standard for a DAW, found in post production house around the world. Has the best hardware, best media management, the most bugs, the most annoying authorization process, the highest price tag, and is subscription only. Many ProTools users consider everyone else to be substandard. Others desperately wish to use something else, but can't afford to change all their equipment, or genuinely need a few unique features. See "iLok."

Public Domain - Intellectual property that isn't owned by anyone, and can used by everyone. Works based on Public Domain works can still be copyrighted, though. Peter Pan is public domain, but Disney's Peter Pan is not.

Public Radio - Non-profit radio stations that get a significant part of their funding from listener donations. They often air shows from NPR, but they are not owned by NPR, no matter what your angry uncle says.

Quarter Inch - A type of cable connector. Can be balanced or unbalanced.

Reaper - A DAW that's reasonably priced, endlessly customizable, and can be overwhelming to learn. Has a community of enthusiasts who add amazing features with interfaces that look like they were coded by your cousin. Reaper fans are often dismissive of every other DAW, and talking to one can feel like being recruited for a cult.

Reinvented Medium - What national news calls any fiction podcast with famous actors. "Filmmaker reinvents the radio play."

Render - Outputting your session into an audio file (or sometimes multiple files) that other people can listen to.

RMS - Root Means Squared, whatever that means. A short term average of audio levels.

Roomtone - The sounds of a space when the subject isn't making any sound. In the physical world, our brains filter this out, and we are usually unaware of it. When editing recording audio, having the roomtone upbruptly cut out (or change) during an edit can create a bad edit. Recording 30 seconds to a minute of roomtone can make editing way easier.

Royalty Free Music - Music that can be used without paying royalties. Still requires a license, and it often has strict usage restrictions so you often can't use it anyplace that would actually pay royalties.

RSS - Really Simple Script. A feed format that was initially invented for blogs. Podcasting was born when someone realized you can embed a link to an audio file instead of an article, and it's still the favored way to distribute a podcast.

Sample Rate - How often a recorder takes a sample of a sound wave. Counter intuitively, sample rates above 44.1 don't increase audio quality for a listener, although they may increase flexibility when processing audio.

SFX - Abbreviation for Sound Effects. Can mean physical sounds like footsteps and doorknobs, as well as music-like elements like whooshes and slams. Sound editors who put both musical SFX and physical SFX on the same track are terrible people.

Shock Mount - A microphone mount that tries to minimize handling noise by using shock absorption.

Short Term Loudness - The average loudness of the last four seconds of audio, measured in LUFs. Best measurement to use when trying to even out your levels.

Sibilants - Sounds like "sss" and "shh." Are prone to becoming unpleasantly loud in audio recording.

Sound - Vibrations in the air that our brains can decipher into a staggering amount of information, including speech, music, and an understanding of the physical world around us.

Sound Design - Creating soundscapes. The specifics of the job can vary wildly, and may include composing music, adding library music, adding sound effects and reverb treatments. In music, it typically refers to making exotic sounds with a synthesizer.

Sound Designer - Someone who creates sound design, usually by sitting in front of a computer for endless hours. Sound Designers spend their lives thinking about how hollow core doors sound different than solid wood doors, how long reverb takes to cross a thirty foot room, and how to justify buying more equipment and/or plugins. A conversation between Sound Designers is largely impenetrable to others.

Spectrogram - A visual representation of audio that shows both the frequencies in the audio and their relative intensities. See "Waveform."

Spotify - A music streaming service that is trying to take over podcasts by taking money from investors and giving it to Joe Rogan and Alex Blumberg.

Stem - An output of a specific part of a mix. The narration stem has just the narration, the music stem has just music, and so on.

Stereo - Using two speakers to create a sound field. Stereo recordings use two microphones at the same time. A stereo file/channel will have two signals, but they are linked together and can share processing.

Studio Monitors - Speakers which are designed to accurately playback sound, as compared to consumer speakers which are designed to "sound good," often by emphasizing, minimizing, or smearing frequencies. Studio Monitors help an engineer create a mix that sounds good on many systems.

Subject - The person being interviewed, usually in the field. See “Guest.”

Subscriber - Someone who receives automatic updates for a podcast. It's an oft-touted statistic, but no one actually knows how many subscribers they have. Because this is the internet, subscribers don't actually have to pay any money.

Sum-Difference - A way of processing stereo signals that can create fun stereo effects that are usually not needed in podcasting. Commonly called "Mid-Side Processing."

Supercardioid - A microphone pick-up pattern that is most sensitive to sounds in front of the microphone, even more so than a cardiod.

Tape - Recorded audio, almost never on tape anymore.

Tape Sync - A way to record a phone interview but with better sound quality. The interviewer records themselves in their own studio, while a local producer records the subject's side of the phone call with professional equipment. After the interview, the Tape Syncer sends the recording back to producer, who combines the two recordings.

Track (n) - In the analog world, a track is where an audio signal is recorded. If four channels are fed into one track, you can adjust the channels individually before recording, but after recording, they are married together. If recording to four tracks, all four tracks can be manipulated after recording. DAWs use "Track" as an analogy for their interface, and a basic track is a lane or layer of audio, that will be mixed with the other lanes into a final mix.

Track (v) - To record pre-written narration or copy.

Transcribe - To write down what has been said. Can apply to raw tape or completed piece. This used to be a common first job in the documentary world, is quickly being replaced by computers.

Transients - Very short sounds, such as the beginning of a drum hit.

True Crime - Any show that discusses non-fiction crimes, often murder. Can be well-researched documentaries, or can be two people opining at each other about an article they read.

True Peak - Another boring sound spec. You very probably don't need to worry about this, unless you have a boss who care about these things. If you really want to know, Google "Inter-sample Peaks."

Unbalanced – A simple audio connection with just two wires. Almost all professional audio cables will be balanced, except for headphones.

Video Podcast - Video of people sitting around and talking to each other.

Vocal Rider - A plugin that claims to automatically level your audio. Some people love it.

Volume - How loud something is.  Usually "turning up the volume" means "turn up the speakers," but it can also mean to make something louder within a mix, make the mix louder, or perhaps add more bass. Avoid the word when possible, it gets confusing and might invoke a lecture from a cranky audio engineer. See "Gain," "Levels," and "Decibels."

Waveform - A visual representation of audio which graphs the recorded audio signal. When there isn't processing afterwards, it mostly coincides with the movement of the speaker/soundwave. See “Spectrogram.”

Waves - A formerly pioneering plugin company that today sells their software for dirt cheap during sales and has a terrible upgrade plan, especially if you're on a mac. Also great for clearing out any embarrassing internet ads that follow you around...simply visit the Waves website, and for the next week every ad you see will be from Waves.

XLR - A type of cable connector, very common on microphones. Are usually balanced connections, but can also be used for unbalanced stereo connections, as well.

Zoom (company) - A brand of audio recorders. Their H-series handheld recorders are a very common first recorder for podcast producers.

Zoom (video) - Video conferencing software. Zoom and other similar software is often used by podcasters to record multiple people in multiple locations. Not the best sound quality, but sometimes that doesn't matter.

[fingaudioart]

Remembering Erik Kristopher Myers

Erik taught me more than he probably ever realized.

I met Erik my freshman year of high school. We played in a garage band, I was one of two bass players. Now, a rock band really, truly doesn’t need two bass players, and after one long jam session, where I basically had nothing to do, he wanted me out. I mean, he was right. But I wanted to be in a band, the other members argued to keep me in, so I stayed, and eventually it worked out until the band broke up (as they do). But he was the first person I ever met who was serious about being an artist outside of a classroom. He showed me the way.

Erik didn’t ask permission to create art. He didn’t wait to be shown the “Right” way. He researched and read books about the various crafts, and got down to making stuff.

He was also the first person I met who took filmmaking seriously. My senior year, we became quite close, and his filmmaking rubbed off on me. For my final history project, I needed to make a video presentation. I decided to be ambitious and make a movie with editing and a score, and without a second hesitation, Erik took the lead as we spent the week driving around town and shooting my movie, and then cut it together using two VCRs (this was the 90s) and a consumer audio mixer. And then after an all-nighter, and mere hours before it was due, I erased it by pressing record instead of play. This was my first movie.

We drifted apart after I graduated High School and had a dumb argument about a miscommunication. But two years later, I'd transfer out of my college and go to Film School. Today I live in Los Angeles and support my family by editing TV. Without Erik’s influence, my life would look very, very different.

Decades later, Erik and I reconnected on Facebook. One day, he asked a question about how to debunk a paranormal video, and I had worked on some TV shows that did that very thing, so I answered in detail. He responded by asking me to be in a movie to debunk Gavin’s “film.”

The movie is called Butterfly Kisses, and it’s quintessential Erik, probably in ways he never intended. My hunch is that Erik loved Nessie and Bigfoot so much because he deeply understood the attraction to those “mysteries,” and I think Gavin was his chance to believe in something. And the film hits on the conflict of any artist, where you want to devote yourself entirely to making things, but you have loved ones who need you. It’s like Gavin is doing all the things Erik wished he could, and then dealing with the consequences (which is why Erik didn’t do them). I’ve always been glad I was a small part of it, but now even more so.

I think if Erik could see the damage he’s caused by ending his life, he would quickly regret it.

Erik taught me one other thing, that is both practical and philosophical: While he was editing Butterfly Kisses, he sent me text out of the blue, telling me how wonderful he thought I was in the movie. He didn’t wait for an opportunity to say it, like if we were chatting or when the movie was about to come out. And because it was outside of our normal rituals for these things, I believed him. Ever since then, I’ve made a point that, when I am working on a piece and I see a good performance from an actor, or composer, or anyone, I send them a message telling them that right away. Be generous with your compliments.

The world will miss you, Erik. You should be here. I’m glad you were in my life.

[fingaudioart]

Hill House, and Audio Horror vs Film Horror

I got to thinking about this when an audio producer on Twitter asked what people thought the scariest parts of Haunting of Hill House, other than the jump scares. What struck me while reading the responses were almost all things that depended on the visuals, and would be very hard to move into the realm of audio.

I feel like many/most people think of horror movies as a template to build off of for horror audio fiction...which is fair, because for many of us, horror audio fiction wasn’t a thing we could find to listen to until recently (myself included). And it’s not uncommon to hear a successful, talent audio producer say something along the lines of “An audio drama is like a movie, without needing a million dollar budget.”

I agree with the thought, generally: audio fiction does have many similarities to film, but if you stretch it too far, it can be a dangerous approach. And it can be especially dangerous for Horror.

Let’s think about how we could move the Bent Neck Lady into audio (spoilers ahead). Except for one scream, she is silent and unmoving. To move it into audio, we’d either need a narrator (or someone to tell us what’s happening), or to make Bent Neck Lady move around. The first option would keep the nature of the ghost intact, but we would be robbed of having it happen in front of us. The second option would change the nature of the ghost entirely. This is before we even talk about the twist, that hinges on Bent Neck Lady largely being a silhouette, which obscures information without feeling like anything.

Horror is a genre that is especially dependent on craftsmanship, regardless of the medium. It’s a genre where--and you’re going to murder me for saying this--you don’t need a good story to be scary. You need a scary situation/scene, told with skill, but even if the scenes/plot/characters around it are terrible, you can still make the audience feel afraid (Looking at you, Argento).

That’s not to say the story doesn’t matter. In fact, a large part of what makes Haunting of Hill House so good is that it’s part horror, but also part family melodrama (and it actually spends more time on the melodrama than the horror), blended together so the ghosts have meaning. Bent Neck Lady is disturbing the first time you see it, but it’s the story behind it that makes her stay with you long after you’ve finished the show.

But if we set aside the story, and focus on the scary moments...they are pure filmmaking. Every aspect is working to create fear: the sets and art direction, the creature design, the pacing, the blocking, the editing, the sound design.

The same way a horror movie uses every weapon of filmmaking, a horror audio drama should use every weapon of audio to create dread/fear/suspense. But the flip side is, just as Haunting of Hill House isn’t using the tools of horror literature, your audio drama shouldn’t try to be a movie.

But I think we also need to own up to something: many of us (most of us?) have more experience watching horror movies than listening to horror audio dramas. So let’s get analytical here. What are films strengths? Audio’s strengths? Weakness? And how do these work in service of horror? Any tips for the audio drama producer?

Filmmaking’s Unique Gifts

Before I get into the list, I want to be very clear: I’m not to saying you can’t do versions of this in an audio drama. In fact, when these are successfully used in audio, they can be outright amazing. But they take a lot more work, either by carefully setting up signature sounds*, or by having narration, or some other creative way no one has done yet. The point of this list is that film does these things easily.

There are some obvious things, like, ya know, visuals. I don't think there's any amount of words or sounds that would allow me to imagine Giger’s Xenomorph. Some things just need to be seen.

One of film's special talents is it gives the audience an understanding of a location without even trying. I don’t mean the layout of a house (that can be confusing), but present an audience with one shot of a bedroom, and they’ll instantly understand where the bed is, the window, the door, the closet, the bedside tables. Films communicate small spaces so easily, they don't even need to stop to do it…a character walks in the room doing whatever, and as long as the space is seen by the camera, the audience gets it.

In horror, this is vital when the fear you're trying to create is that of a physical threat. Where is the killer? Behind the bookcase? Walking towards you from across the lawn?

Related to this idea of a physical space, films also have the ability to makes things appear--and disappear--quickly and unexpectedly. This is moments like Mike Meyers appearing in the closet in Halloween, or later, when Dr. Loomis looks over the edge of the Balcony, and Michael Meyers has vanished.

Perhaps film’s most famous strength is the montage. You can easily cut between different scenes and settings, without the audience ever getting confused.

There is one tool of film that I am very frustrated won’t work in audio: the Title Card. I don’t mean the title of the show, I mean those cards that say things like “Burbank, CA” or “CIA Headquarters” or “3:23pm.” Text on screen is a painless way to give the audience information without tripping up the storytelling.

Finally, let’s talk about one of film’s most powerful tricks...patience.

A film can stretch moments out, sometimes with slomo, but often with editing between close-ups. You can also have moments where nothing happens, you just linger in the mood/ambience/characters reactions. 

A great example is the “Spielberg-Face”, those shots when the characters are reacting to something the audience hasn’t seen yet. In Jurassic Park, we spend a full 30 seconds watching jaws drop before we see the first dinosaur. This is pretty nuts, when you think about it. The true stars of the movie aren’t introduced with a speech, or a title card, or a curtain pulling back, but by the characters just staring in the distance for half a page.

Pausing the action, or even just stretching it out, is one of the fundamental tools of horror movies. It’s a way to create the mood: Show the spooky location, play the spooky ambience. It’s a way to create suspense in a scene, think of the long POV shot scanning the room for that noise. End the moment with something suddenly appearing, and you have the basic recipe for a jump scare. Even if you decide to be an artsy horror story, like Haunting of Hill House, silently drawing out the action is your primary weapon. Done well, the audience will be rapt, knowing that something could be about to happen any moment, even though as far as the plot goes, we haven’t moved much at all.

I’ll be honest, if I could go back in time and tell the younger version of me who hadn’t made an audio drama yet that you can’t draw out a moment the way you do in film, I probably would not have believed me. In my work as a TV Editor, it’s been one of the tricks that has really elevated my pieces...it feels like magic. But I’ll never forget editing my first audio piece, having a character fumble with a doorknob while trying to escape someone who was chasing them. They grunted at the door as the footsteps got closer and closer, and it was lousy. It felt like the manipulation it was.

Audio’s Unique Gifts

The thing that audio does better than any other media--and this is controversial--a narrator feels like they are talking directly to you, the listener (a narrator in a film feels more like they are talking to an auditorium). Now, here are people who find that narration is jarring and takes them out of the story. They aren’t wrong--you can’t argue someone’s experience--but that’s certainly not what happens to me. If you are one of these poor souls, I hope you take some time to listen to some narration and reprogram your brain, because you’re missing out on some magic.

The other great thing about sound is it activates the imagination. Films can also do this, of course, but audio does it be default.

Sound is also very good at evoking a sense of touch. Texture. Clothing. Almost anything you can feel in your hand.

While sounds is great at telling us about what’s very close, it also tells us about the world in the distance, i.e. ambiences. The sound of a forest transports us to a forest that exists in all directions. Distant traffic can tell us if the city is awake or asleep.

Audio also does an amazing plot twist that I’m gonna call the “Pull Back to Reveal” twist (yeah, that’s a film term). This is when, deep into a scene, something is revealed to the audience that the characters understood was there the whole time. While a movie can usually only sustain this for a minute or two, audio dramas can push this for a really long time. The Truth’s classic “The Dark End of the Mall” is a great example, as is the episode “Have You Seen My Mom?” It’s use in horror is more limited though...suspense works the best when the audience knows as much or more about the situation than characters (a.k.a. Audience Superior), and this is a twist that is Audience Inferior.

And, not for nothing: It’s way cheaper than a film. That’s not say the money doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t matter in the same way. 

Film’s Failings

The hardest part of film is the flip side of its strengths: it’s so easily grounded in reality, it’s very hard to step out of it. That’s more of a problem than you think.

Take the sentence, “Andy called his sister-in-law.” While it takes just four words to write in a book, in a movie, you are going to be contorting dialog or some other clever trick, to get the audience to understand “that’s his wife’s sister.” (Non-narrated audio dramas also have this problem with exposition.)

Same goes for backstory. In the middle of a scene, a book can say things like “She’d been working on this for ten hours now, and was ready to scream.” One sentence. A film would have to lay out exposition, or clues for the audience to put it together.

Film also has a hard time conveying senses other than sound or sight. During scenes where a character walks into a place and says “Ugh, what’s that smell!”, I never really imagine the smell, I just see an actor pretending to smell something.

Visuals can be too intense. Gore or nudity are the first things that come to mind in this category, and are often alluded to in a film for exactly that reason. But even if they are merely hinted at, the film audience may spend a scene wondering “Are they going to actually show it?”, which knocks you out the movie a little. 

Films are complicated to make, at every level. Casting is tougher---the actor needs to both sound and look the part. There’s the expense of sets and lighting, the effort of just getting a crew to a location can be monumental. And once it’s all shot, film editing is more complicated and time intensive than audio editing, and not just because it involves audio editing.

Audio's Weakness

The biggest: There's a big Blindspot right in front of the audience. Without some careful context, raw audio recording from real life is disorienting at best, intelligible at worst. Most sounds that come from the blank spot are descriptive, they generally tell us if someone’s shoes are wet, but they won’t tell who is walking around the room in wet shoes.

This blind spot can be especially dangerous to a producer, because in real life, our brain attaches sounds to the objects it sees, and when you understand what a sound is, it’s easy to place it. Because a producer knows what sound they are placing in the piece, it’s easy to think your sound design is intelligible. Sounds we don’t understand are also hard to place in the space. I personally find that while stereo and ambisonics can help make the sounds be more distinct from each other, they don’t really locate them precisely.

Another weakness of audio, characters are hard to tell apart. This can especially affect women's voices, who don't tend to have as much variation. This isn’t as true if the audience has seen the face of the actor talking, something about that seems to lock in our understanding of a voice (video though, not just a headshot). But without a face, it’s tough. EDIT: So I wasn’t very clear with that last point. To be clear, it’s not that you CAN’T cast people who sound different, or that you can’t direct people with similar voices to give different performances. It’s that you need to make a point of doing so. And while I have personally found that women’s voices are more likely to sound alike, that’s not the main idea. We remember face’s very easily, and names relatively easily (unless you’re me, I’m terrible at names). Voices without faces are easily confused.

This character confusion especially applies to large casts...I have a hard time imagining an audio only version of OCEAN’S ELEVEN, for example. Put twelve characters in a room for an audio drama, and it’s gets confusing for the listener really quickly.

If you aren't using a narrator, making time pass can be hard. A Rocky montage needs to be carefully setup.  "Cut To: Five Minutes Later" is damn near impossible without narration.

Sound Effects need to be more meticulous. THE AVENGERS can sweeten a superhero punch so it hardly sounds like a punch at all, and the visuals on screen will lock it into place. Without a picture to give a sound context, they need to be much more realistic for them to be understood correctly.

So let’s put this all together.

Lets turn it into an “approach,” and design some scenes that work easily in the medium. 

Ambiences are a strength, so we’ll pick a setting that has an interesting one, and avoid things like quiet rooms. We’ll have a small number of characters, let’s say four or less, and to make it easier for audience to remember who is who, we’ll cast actors with clearly different voices, and we can help on the script level by making sure they all have different motivations/goals/emotional states. To get that intimacy of the voice, we’ll have at least some of the characters close to each other (and the mics), and not shouting across the room.

The physical setup of the room will be straight forward, and our characters’ movements though the space will be clearly motivated and direct (“Does this key unlock this door?”), if a character has busy work that moves them through the space, the details won’t matter (like they are doing dishes). We’ll also want to have some moments that play on that sense of touch. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll want to paint some clear visuals for the listener to imagine.

For a horror scene, you really want to work your ambiences to make them add to the tension, vs just adding realism. We first want the monsters in the distance, say on the other side of a door or outside the house, or somewhere in the woods. Make our scared characters really close to the listener, play the sounds that you only hear when you are right next to them, like their breathing, swallows, adjusting the clothes or their make-shift weapon.

When the monster enters the room, have it spend as little time as possible in the blindspot, so avoid things like fist fights and fast-paced footchases. Instead get the monster right inside our character's personal bubble. If you’re aiming for a startle, instead of having it leap out in front of the hero like in a movie, you’d want to skip the blindspot, and have the monster pounce onto the hero--using those touch sounds that are so intense.

To me, that sounds like a scary scene.

It’s Not a Formula, and All of This is Nonsense

In fact, you probably wouldn’t want every scene in your piece to follow this, because a) it’ll get repetitive, and b) when you go against the medium, you’re more likely to make some magic (if you pull it off). But I do think it’s important to realize when the big moment of your piece is resting on some of the weaknesses. When this happens, you may want to make sure you’re leaning on something really strong to carry the weight. Other times, you may want to toss around some other ideas, make sure that it’s actually working, and to see if it could be improved.

Also, even though I’ve written a lot of words here, I fully expect someone has already proven every one of these rules wrong. But I also think it’s a good exercise to go through this and figure out why I’m wrong.

The medium matters. And I hate writing conclusions, so I’m ending it here.

*Signature Sound: A sound that the audience understands to mean something specific, such as a doorbell or a gunshot.

[fingaudioart]

How to Franken-bite Dialog

“Franken-bite” is a term from reality TV: to cut up several lines of dialog in order to create a brand new sentence. 

In other words, dialog editing.

So you need to edit some dialog, be it for a movie or podcast or to create incriminating evidence against someone you don’t like. It can be maddening, like trying to figure out one of those wooden puzzles they sell at rustic gift shops int he mountains.

Here are some of the strategies that I use when cutting up speech.

The Broad Strokes of Good Dialog Editing

A dialog edit sounds bad when the two pieces you are putting together don't match in some way. A lot of the common problems include:

-Background noise/Roomtone doesn't match -Mic placement doesn't match -Volume doesn't match

These can often be fixed rather easily, by adding roomtone, adjusting levels, tweaking EQs, etc. Others are a lot trickier, like:

-The speaker's energy doesn't match -The pace of the speech doesn't match

A clear example of this is how you can’t intercut a sentence where the speaker is sad with one where the speaker is happy. These “performance” issues are something to be aware of, and I avoid trying to make these kinds of mis-matches work.

However, there is one quality that sinks a lot of dialog edits, but it can be fixed with a little bit of care:

-The “music” of the sentence doesn't match.

And that is really what this essay is about.

Let’s Talk About How We Talk

Try humming a sentence. Seriously. Think of a sentence, and then try saying it with your lips tight together and without moving your tongue. Your instinct is going to be over emphasize everything and move your eyebrows a lot. That's fine.

Done? Nice work, that was very brave of you.

What you’ll notice is that when we speak, we don't speak in a single note, but we vary the pitch though out our sentences. In American English, the pitch usually starts on a note, rises in the middle, and then it comes down again. If the speaker pauses in the middle of a statement, perhaps to think of the right phrasing, before the pause they will keep their voice in that higher pitch...it’s signal to everyone listening that the speaker wasn’t done yet.

I think of this as the “music” of language. In the flow of a conversation, this music gets vastly more complicated. Questions have their own music, as does interrupting, changing the subject, disagreements, and so on.

But don’t panic. Even though it’s complicated, if you’re a native speaker of English, you already know these rules. When it comes to editing dialog, it’s as simple as listening to an edit and knowing if it sounds “right.”

So here’s the big advice: When you make your edit, you need to make sure the edited sentence follows the “music” of a normal sentence.

In other words, don't just look at the meaning of the words, listen to how it flows. This is trickier than it seems, because when frankenbiting, you’ll naturally be focused on the meaning of the words. You’ll need to take a moment and listen to the flow of the language. I literally press play and roll my chair back away from the computer--I’m not preparing to make any editing decisions, I’m just letting myself respond to it.

There are a few tricks that can cover a lot of editing crimes. In my experience, the beginnings and endings of sentences are the hardest to move around, and it's unusual for a word taken from the beginning of one sentence to work as the middle or end of another.

For example, on paper, it's possible to edit the sentence "I went to the house to find Andrew and ask him if he was ready," into "I went into the house to find Andrew." But when editing the spoken line, it’ll likely sound clipped.

To help this, know that beginnings are usually interchangeable with other beginnings, and endings can swap with other endings. You might be able to save it by finding the end of another sentence to tack onto it. "I went to the house to find Andrew//but he wasn’t there."

Hiding Edits

So you’ve found the segments you want to edit together, and it all sound pretty good...except for the moment when you actually make the edit.

Again, I like to think of it in terms of the music of speech. What’s happening here is that while the two phrases are very close to matching, the exact moment of the edit doesn’t match. What you need to do is find a break in the music, a moment where the song of the sentence doesn’t have a note.

In text, there is a space between words. In speech, wordsarespokenmorelikethis withpauseshereandthere butmostwordsareslammedtogether. This can make editing a bit tricky.

So the easiest edits to hide are the ones where the speaker takes a breath between phrases. "After I cleaned the kitchen, um, I was tired. So, uh, I went to bed," should easily turn into "After I cleaned the kitchen, // I went to bed." Cutting phrases together is the usually the first thing I try.

Hiding Edits the Harder Way

But what if you need to interruptaphrase? If we go back to the humming exercise, cutting into a phrase is like cutting into the middle of the hummed sentence. The pitch would just jump from one note to another. What you need is a break in the pitch.

Well, fortunately, we don't use our voice in every moment of a phrase. There are certain sounds of speech where we don’t use our vocal chords at all, and that’s the place to put your edit.

Fair warning: this is going to get denser than your typical internet tutorial. But I find it very useful.

Voiced Sounds vs Voiceless Sounds

Voiced Sounds are any sounds we make by using our vocal chords. "B", "M," "D," "Z" are some examples, as well as all of the vowels.

Voiceless Sounds are any sound where do NOT use our vocal chords. Some examples are "P," "T," "S," and “Sh.”

One way to tell if a sound is voiced or voiceless is to say the sound, then do again while whispering. If the spoken version sounds the same as the whispered version, it's voiceless. For example, if you whisper a “Z” sound, it will sound like an “S.” (You can also put your hand on your throat while you say the sound...if you’re vocal chords vibrate, it’s voiced.)

It’s important to note that the spelling of a world isn’t always accurate. A lot of words that are spelled with "s," for instance, are actually pronounced with "z." ("He's" has an "z". "It's" has an "s".)

Voiceless sound are the key to making edits in the middle of sentences, because in the music of speech, they are a break in the melody. "I got up to do the dishes" and "I like to drink coffee" has decent shot of becoming "I got up // to drink coffee" because "p" and "t" are both voiceless sounds. In fact, it has a better shot than "I got up to//drink coffee," because in this example, the edit is between the vowel of "to"  (which is voiced) and the voiced “dr” of "drink."

I'll wait while you read that again.

As you start experimenting with edits like this, you’ll find that some voiceless sounds work better for edits than others. But hands down, the best sound to edit on is an “S.”

“S” is magical. It’s a sound that’s usually lingered on for a (relatively) long time, extending the gap in melody. Also, the pitch of an “S” is constant. Say an “S” now, and say one in five hours, and they’ll be mostly identical. This makes it one of the few sounds of speech that can be crossfaded.

If you can find a word that ends with an "s" and another word that begins with an "s," your edit will almost always work. “I hate staying up late, but I love sleeping in,” can almost definitely become “I hate s//sleeping in” -- just cross fade the “s” from “staying” into the “s” from “sleeping,” and away you go.

In fact, the S is so good, you can sometimes make an edit in the middle of a word. “I found Cassandra in her room” and “I bought Cassandra the perfect car” can likely become “I found Cas//sandra the perfect car.”

Editing on “Stops”

If you can’t find a good Voiceless sound to use for your edit, you next best bet are consonants known as “Stops.” Stops are consonants that briefly stop the air flow. Examples are "b" "d" "g." (BTW, there are such things as “Voiceless stops.”)

An easy way to tell if a sound is a “stop” is by trying to draw out the sound. So you can say “Zzzzzzzzzz" until you run out of breath, so it is not a stop. "Tttttttttttt" just doesn't exist, and is a stop.

The principle is the same as with the voiceless sounds--you’re editing during a momentary rest of the vocal chords. It takes a little more luck than the voiceless sounds do, but you might be able to turn “He grabbed Wyatt’s wallet and Rick’s wallet” into “He grabbed//Rick’s wallet.”

If the sentence were “He stole Wyatt’s wallet and Rick’s wallet,” that’s less likely to work, because there won’t be a clean break between the “L” of “stole” and the “W” of “Wyatt.”

An Order of Operations

Here's my personal priority when it comes to finding edit points:

1. Between phrases, on naturally occurring breaks.

2. Two Ss.

3. Two Sh's

4. Two Unvoiced stops. p, t, k, ch*

5. Two voiced stops. b, d, g, j

6. Whatever the hell else I can figure out.

One Final Thing...

These “rules” make editing dialog easier, but they aren’t a formula, and I am often surprised by how often edits that don’t follow these rules can still work out. And plug-ins can cover a lot of sins...if you have the cash and know-how to use them (which I generally don’t). And, as always with art, if it sounds like it works...then it works.

[fingaudioart]

About Being Suspenseful

I was recently on a message board where someone was asking about using suspense. Dozens of people chimed in, and while they were all kind of right, I felt they only were getting part of the picture. So today, let's go deep in what is suspense, what’s its rules are (and aren’t), and how you can use it in your work--even if it’s not in a genre that’s typically “suspenseful.”

What is Suspense

So when you think of suspense in storytelling, you probably think of a specific kind of scene, usually found in horror and thriller genres. But suspense isn’t genre-specific, by any means. My favorite definition of suspense is the one William Martel (of scriptsecrets.net) uses:

“Suspense is the anticipation of a known event. “

That's it. It's simple. The audience is expecting something to happen, and waits in rapt attention until it does.

So the suspense of the babysitter investigating a noise in a horror movie is functionally the same as the nerdy kid deciding to go in front of the whole school and do a dance he just learned.

Now as the audience, we experience these scenes quite differently. And suspense can be used in almost any kind of scene. You can tease out an impending murder, an embarrassing moment, the boy and the girl getting together...basically anything. But under the hood, it's the same thing.

This versatility also makes it a fundamental tool in a storytellers toolbox, whatever story you’re telling.

Creating The Known Event

If you want to the audience to know/expect something to happen, it means you, the storyteller, have to tell them something is going to happen. There are a gazillion ways to do this.

Most simply, you straight up tell the audience "We've switched their coffee with Folger's. Let's see if they notice." Less meta, but just as direct, is watching someone set a timer on a bomb.

If you want to get more complicated, you can give the audience a cause and effect, and let them put together what's going to happen. Say your character is climbing a rope, and the rope begins to fray. The audience knows it will eventually break...boom, suspense.

Another method is when the storyteller uses nothing but the conventions of storytelling to tell the audience something is coming. One example of this is putting creepy music into an otherwise innocuous scene--no actual story/plot information has been revealed, it’s just that the audience knows creepy music usually equals bad things happening, so they now suspect something bad might happen.

Similarly, if the hero chases down the killer in a setting that has lots of hiding places, you know he's gonna get jumped at some point, but only because we know that’s what happens in films. One of my favorite examples is in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. A bunch of punk rockers are hanging out in a graveyard, and there’s no reason to believe zombies will come out of the ground other than the movie being titled RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. And yet, it created suspense for me.

These kinds of tricks can get pretty complicated. For example, if the hero trusts a character that the audience knows will probably turn out to be a bad guy, it only works if the audience knows enough about the genre to know that that’s common plot twist, and if the storyteller know enough about the audience to play with those expectations.

Anyway, there is no recipe, here. There are millions of ways to communicate to an audience, and perhaps this is one reason the idea of Suspense seems more complicated than it is: you can create the Known Event in complicated ways, so the moments feel complex. But it’s the same priniciple through out: The audience is expecting something to happen.

The Rules of Suspense

There's a moment in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN where a soldier is in the middle of ferocious battle, and he's trying to attach a bomb to the tread of an enemy tank. The soldier spends many seconds standing right next this tank--no cover, he's not looking around for enemy soldiers--he's just fixated on trying to light the fuse for this bomb. It's horrible...you just know this guy is gonna get shot.

I bring up this scene not just because it's really effective, but also because it contradicts many of the commonly held beliefs we have about how to use suspense. There's no music. There's hardly any editing. And, most importantly, the guy is anonymous--we have no connection to him at all, he could be a rapist asshole who happened to get drafted. And yet, it's an intensely suspenseful moment.

Another great example of a suspenseful film is APOLLO 13. If you haven't seen it (which you should), it's the true story about a failed mission to the moon. The spacecraft breaks in flight, and all of NASA goes to work trying to figure out how to bring the astronauts back home alive. The final scene is when ground control is waiting to hear a radio call from the astronauts saying that they've survived re-entry...and it's tense as hell.

This blows my mind, a little. When the movie came out, everyone already knew how it ended. Yet, it's still suspenseful. Apparently, surprise isn’t the key ingredient of suspense.

In fact, for every bit of advice I've ever heard about creating suspense, there is an exception to it. Anonymous characters. Bad characters. Characters we hate. Known outcomes. Terrible plots. Cliche situations. Low stakes.

The only "rule" that I can't find an easy exception for is that the known event must be interesting...which is kind of the universal rule for storytelling. Make it interesting, any way you can get there.

Film vs Everything Else

Movies have a unique advantage for suspense, compared to both books and radio plays. Our eyes can see things happen gradually, and while our ears can detect changes in the world, they can’t really place them. Imagine, for example, a glass filling with water. Your ears can tell you that the glass is filling, because the pitch of the sound rises, but your ears won’t know how much more there is to go until it’s full. Your eyes, however, will know exactly how full it is.

What this means is films can draw stuff out in ways the other media can’t. The example of the fraying rope is easier to use in a film than a radio play. The audience can see that the rope has a single strand left, in a radio play you’ll have to stop the action to tell them.

Micro Suspense

Suspense doesn’t have to be the central structure of a scene. You can also use it in small ways, throughout almost any kind of scene, to add some interest. Think of how the detective explains how the murder was committed before naming the killer...it’s drawing out the suspense. You can go for even shorter periods of suspense, like stretching the time between when they start to open the treasure box and when we learn what’s inside. Even subtler changes, like moving the important part of a punch line to end of the sentence, can enhance a moment.

Obviously this can be overdone, and there's a fine line between letting a moment of suspense sink in and being boring. But when done well, it’s a powerful technique that makes the audience lean in. Honestly, it’s one that I think separates top-level storytelling from stuff that’s, ya know, pretty good.

At the very least, when you go moment by moment, looking for opportunities for micro-suspense, you are asking yourself “What is my audience expecting to happen in this moment?” That’s always a good exercise.

Wrapping up

So we’ve gone all over the place in this article, but let’s bring it back to basics here:

Suspense is simply when the audience anticipates something happening. It feels more complicated because it’s a versatile tool, and it can almost be draped over a story, so a suspenseful scene that’s hung on a complicated plot makes the suspense also feel complicated.

But it’s usually pretty simple: tell the audience that something is likely to happen, keep them engaged while you tell your tale, and they’ll start connecting dots that just happen to be there. Maybe add a few red herrings for fun, or explain away an upcoming plot twist, whatever.

If you only take one thing away from this article, it’s that there isn’t a formula for it. You can imply the impending event, or you can directly say it. The character can be anonymous, your favorite person in the world, or even the bad guy. The stakes can be small, large, or even non-existent.

All that matters is that audience expects something to happen. Whatever you can do to get there, that’s what you do.

[fingaudioart]

Quiet and Loud, at -16 LUFS

One of the great tool of cinema is “dynamics.” Some scenes are loud, some are quiet, and the contrast makes the story world feel even bigger.

This is a harder to do in a modern audio drama. After all, audio dramas are very rarely listened to in a quiet room over a nice sounding sound system. The “best” listening experience for your typical audience member is going to be over a pair of headphones while they clean their house, and often people listen while driving in a noisy car.

If you decide “Screw those people who don’t listen in quiet places, I’m gonna mix it so it sounds best!” and create quiet parts and loud parts, I have bad news for you: Your audience is inches away from the volume control. They’ll likely turn it up and down on their own, keeping it at their own personal sweet spot as it plays, getting a little annoyed every time they do.

But, still. Dynamics is a powerful tool. It’s a shame to walk away from it.

Well, luckily, I have a theory.

Sounding Loud and Sounding Quiet

In our everyday lives, we spend time in quiet places, and we spend time in louder places. Unless the sound is outside of a certain range--unless it’s exceptionally quiet, or painfully loud--we don’t notice these volume changes. When we talk in these different places, we naturally raise the volume of our voice to be heard by the people we are talking to, or lower it so we don’t disturb the people we aren’t talking to it. This is done by pure instinct.

So Note #1: In our lives, the volume of the world changes from place to place, and our ears automatically adjust.

Note #2: When we change the volume of our voice, it’s not just the volume that changes, but also the *quality* of our voice.

This is easiest to see at the extreme ends of our voices, with whispering and screaming. You can turn up the volume on a recording of a whisper, and it’ll still sound quiet, and a scream will always sound like a scream, no matter the final output level. This also applies to more normal ranges of speech. We speak differently on busy street corner than we do in our living room.

Which brings us to Note #3: No matter the level of the final piece, the volume your actors use when recording will essentially calibrate the listeners and tell them how loud other sounds are. So if an actor is yelling at the top of their lungs, but the club music is drowning them out, the listener will understand that the club music is fucking loud. If the characters are talking in hushed voices, the scene will feel quiet to the audience, even if you’re hitting -12LUFS.

But we have to be reasonable, here. If the actor is whispering, but is still audible over the loud club music, it’ll sound canned.  The trick to seamlessly adding a noisy background is to make sure the actors raise their volume to the appropriate level when recording. In fact, this is one of the spots where a lot of audio dramas get into trouble...the actors speak at a normal volume in a noisy airplane, and it just doesn’t match. (This is also one of the dangers of recording actors remotely: they each read at a different volume, so their conversation doesn’t match.)

But the big take away here: you can make your piece feel loud and feel quiet, even if the final mix is all at roughly the same level.

Dynamics Are a Story Choice

While the majority of this article is going to be about production techniques, it really begins in the script. A scene that’s set in the middle of the night wants to be quiet. A scene that’s set in a night club wants to be loud. More to the point, if all of your settings are in similar places, your piece is going to want to be at the same volume.

If you’re going to embrace dynamics, you need to write them in. Consider changing the setting of a scene to create more contrast with the previous scene. Design the drama in a way where characters will need to be quiet for some parts, and loud for others.

Recording Loud Scenes

Sorry to belabor the point, but the key to dynamics is in the actors’ performances. To make a scene sound loud, the actors need to speak loudly, and the background ambience needs match in both quality and in the mix.

In my experience, it is very hard for an actor to speak louder than the environment. If you are recording in a quiet room, they tend to trail off to quieter level. Often the actor will be so concerned about their volume, it will hurt their performance. Other times, one actor will maintain and the other drops off, making the conversation feel very unnatural.

So a couple tricks.

Record on location. If it’s a scene on a busy street, go out on a street and record it. The actors will naturally adjust their pitch, and will even interact with the environment (when the traffic gets louder, they’ll talk louder). Use a shotgun mic to reduce the amount of ambience, if needed. And make sure to record room tone/ambience. This only works where the noise is steady and constant, like freeway traffic. It won’t work with music.

Bring a recording of what the intended space will sound like, and play that for the actors before recording. It sounds goofy, but it really helps. At the very least, it’ll help convince the cast that you aren’t insane when you remind them to keep the volume up.

Have the actors sit further apart from each other than they normally would. For instance, if it’s two people sitting at a table in a noisy club, have them move to opposite sides of the room and talk to each other. They’ll naturally raise their voices to make themselves heard.

Yell at the actors. More precisely, raise your voice to the volume you want before beginning a take. “OKAY, THIS IS YOUR VOLUME. SCENE 4, TAKE 2. AND...ACTION!” The talent will usually bend their voice to match yours, at least at first.

Shorten long takes. As we said, people naturally adjust their volume to their environment, and an actor may gradually bring their voice back to the normal range over the course of a scene. Break the scene up into smaller pieces, if you need to, AND KEEP TALKING LIKE THIS.

Give the actors earplugs or earmuffs. I haven’t actually tried this, but I’m 95% sure it would work great.

Most importantly, whoever is directing/producing needs be aware of this choice, and to not give up on it. It can be a struggle, but I think it’s worth it in the end.

Recording Quiet Scenes

It’s a lot easier to “bring your voice down” than it is to talk loudly, and your actors will probably do it easily. But quiet scenes have their own difficulties. Specifically:

Silence is a myth. It doesn’t exist.

If you go into a very quiet space, you’ll still hear something. Maybe the ventilation system. Maybe your breath. Your heartbeat. A slight ringing in your ears from that absurdly loud concert you went to years ago (Too Much Joy at the 9:30 Club and it was totally worth it). If you put pure silence into your audio drama, you aren’t telling the audience that it’s quiet, you’re telling them that you, the storyteller, have taken a break from the story.

So while your actors will have an easier time talking quietly, to make it feel quiet, you actually need to add the sounds you only hear when it’s quiet. Wind blowing. Breath. A clock ticking. Footsteps, which are usually problematic, can actually work better in a very quiet scene.

Recording very quiet sounds can be difficult. Unless you are using very expensive equipment, it’s hard to get levels above the noise of your recorder. Bringing the mic close to, say, the clock you want to record, may give you better levels, but may also bring out the mechanical sounds of the clock that you wouldn’t hear in the room. And the quiet nature of the scene means that imperfections in the recording can stick out more.

Plugins can really help, here. A noise-reducing plugin (such as Izotope’s Dialog De-noiser) can be magic. “Convolution Reverb” is kind of plugin that uses reverb impulses to recreate a physical space (such as Altiverb, or Reaper’s ReaVerb), and these can help more than adding a more traditional reverb effect. Adding a subtle layer of tape-hiss can also help, believe it or not.

Using Dynamics to Create Motion

One of my favorite uses of dynamics is *inside* of a scene. Remember how people generally adjust their speaking volume to be just loud enough to be heard? By having your actors change the volume of their speech, you can create movement in the scene without narration. Consider:

[Andy enters the room] Andy: Bob! How are you? Bob: Andy! It’s been forever. Andy: You look terrible, Bob.

If you have Andy and Bob raise their voices at the beginning, like they are talking across the room, the audience will understand they are far apart. If they lower their voice over the first few lines, the audience will know that have come together. If Andy whispers “You look terrible, Bob,” the audience will know that Andy has moved very, very close to Bob.

And now, you have one of film’s most powerful tools at your disposal: Blocking. As the drama in a scene unfolds, the characters can physically move to reflect the story, or perhaps counterpoint the story. In the example above, if Andy is whispering “You look terrible,” it’s become a character moment--Andy and Bob apparently aren’t close, and Andy is invading Bob’s personal space.

If Andy quietly professes his love for Bob, and Bob is moving to the other side of the room as he responds, we might understand that Bob doesn’t return that love, even if he says he does.

To me, that is the true power of dynamics in audio drama. It’s a way to add subtext to a highly restrictive medium.

One Last Time: It’s Not about Output Levels

If we get philosophical about it, dynamics is not about volume at all. It’s about people interacting with the world, trying to make themselves heard in a noisy environment. People trying to be just loud enough to get what they want.

One of my goals in telling any story is to make the audience feel like the story exists in a larger world, without boring them with exposition. There are a ton of techniques to help this happen. Have things happen “off screen.” Have characters with motivations that aren’t on the nose of the plot. Start scenes in the middle, not at the beginning.

Varying the dynamics is another way to do this.

See, when you start making your character change how they speak, you are forced into paying attention to the things the audience may not consciously notice, but that they will feel. It’s no longer “restaurant ambience,” but “a quiet restaurant where waiters almost whisper,” or “a crowded, noisy sports bar.”

It’s not a particularly complicated concept. It’s not that hard to implement. But the impact it can have on a piece can feel like magic.

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Making Complex Sound Design that Isn’t a Mess

I think there's something many radio producers are reluctant to admit: we humans are, at heart, visual creatures. It is far easier to navigate our world without sound than it is without sight.

But I’ll go a step further, and say that without sight, it’s also harder to hear.

Let me explain.

I think anyone who has produced an audio story of any kind has had the experience where you go to record something in the field, and while you knew there was some noise, you could hear what the subject was saying and figured it was fine. However, when you later copied it into your computer and listened to it, you instantly realized it was terrible. The difference is that while you were recording, your eyes were telling your brain what sounds to focus on, and once that visual information was gone, everything became a mess. It's kind of like listening to two conversations at once.

Here's the lesson here: When you are producing audio, you need to really limit the amount of information (i.e., sounds) in the piece so the listener can easily discern what is important.

But sound design is the opposite of that. It's adding sounds to enhance the experience. So the question becomes, how can you add sounds to a piece to enhance it, without it becoming a jumbled mess?

The following is an approach that I use, and I think it’s served me well. It’s not hard and fast rules, and it’s not hard to come with example of pieces that violate it, but it’s a good way to begin wrapping your head around complicated sound design. Also, just to be clear, we’re just going to focus on foley-type sounds. Music/swells/stings are for a different essay.

Three Types of Sounds

First, let’s spend some time analyzing how our brains use and interact with sound in our everyday lives. Not all sounds are the same, and I put them into three categories.

For the first category of sound, I’m going to borrow a term from Walter Murch, “Encoded Sounds.” These are sounds that our brains decode into direct information. The most common form is language: we hear words, which our brains turn into facts and statements. Other sounds do this as well, such as a phone ring, a knock at the door, a kitchen timer beeping.

Most of your audio drama will be composed of Encoded Sounds.

On the opposite end is “Ambience”. In our day to day lives, we are rarely aware of the ambience around us. In fact, if you stop reading this right now and start paying attention to the sounds around you, you will almost definitely notice some sound you hadn’t noticed before, like a trash truck outside or the dishwasher running. We do tend to notice ambiences, however, when they change, like the air conditioner clicking on, or when you turn off your computer.

I like to think that this kind of sound is your brain’s way of reaching out into the distance. This is the part of your subconscious that is listening for on-coming cars as you walk down the street. It’s listening for the tiger in the woods, or the deer coming up the valley. Along these lines, ambiences are a great way to build out the world of your piece. These tell the audience what is happening twenty feet away (or more) from the action.

In between these two are the hardest sounds to work with in an audio drama, what I call “Half-Encoded Sounds.” These are sounds that aren’t distinctive enough to carry complete information.  An example of this is if someone puts a box on a table, and we hear the thud. That sound is not an especially distinctive sound, so if you don’t actually see the box as it’s placed on the table--more pointedly, if you aren’t given the information that a box is being put on a table--that thud is hard to understand. Half-Encodes don’t recede into the distance like Ambiences do. Add too many of these into your piece, and they’ll turn your project into a noisy mess.

It’s also worth point out, you can turn a Half-Encode into a Fully Encoded Sound by naming it inside the piece:

[Metallic creak.]

“What was that nosie?”

“That suit of armor just moved!”

Now every time the audience hears that metallic creak, they’ll understand that the armor is moving.

But Half-Encodes do have a power all their own, though. These sounds can give the world of your story a physical dimension. The thud of a box being put on a table can tell us lots of information: Is the box heavy? Do the contents rattle? What’s the table made of?

If there’s a character bush-wacking through the jungle, the sound of snapping twigs not only conveys how thick the jungle is, but it suggests the feeling of the branches on your hands and arms. If a character falls to the ground, the sound of their hands sliding on asphalt makes you imagine the pain. When done right, these almost sounds tickle your spine.

One More Concept

Before we get to how to integrate these different kinds of sounds, let talk about “Story” vs “Aesthetics.” At it’s simplest, “Story” is what’s happening, and the aesthetics are how you dress it up.

A good analogy is in photography...imagine your typical tourist photo of Half Dome in Yosemite. It’s not a great photo, but Half Dome is impressive anyway, and moment or two of study can make you long to be there. Now, when Ansel Adams took a photo of Half Dome, he used aesthetics to make it so your heart aches the moment you see it. You can also imagine a photo with the same aesthetics of Ansel Adams, but of a bunch of stick in the woods--this can be good. But it’s not the same as when the photo has Half Dome in it, and most people will prefer the plain photo of Half Dome to the pretty photo of nothing.

In this analogy, your story is Half Dome. It should be impressive on its own, you should go into production thinking “I can only screw this up.” Your sound design is the aesthetics, and it’s going to take your awesome story and amplify the affect. And while I never say “always” with anything artistic...your story is always the most important part.

Or put another way: Don’t let your sound design fuck up Half-Dome.

Putting It Together

This is going to sound more mathematical than it actually is. But here’ goes.

Step one, build the story using only Encoded Sounds. Your dialog, your narration, and any storytelling-sound effects are how you tell the story, so do a pass using only these elements. This isn’t to say you are plowing through as if there won’t be any sound design...go ahead and leave empty spaces where you anticipate having pauses, pockets of ambience or sound effects, or music swells. But let the performances and story have a moment to stand on its own. Build your Half Dome.

Next, add the Ambiences. Ambiences can add so much to a story with comparatively little work, and a good ambience can replace a lot of detailed foley work. But it’s also important actively work your ambiences. Remember how ambiences are generally ignored, except when they change? So change them up. Make different rooms sound different, even if logically they’d probably sound the same. The goal here is to set your story inside a larger physical world, both by adding detail and by using ambience to add more places.

Last come the Half-Encodes. The goal is to communicate the things that are hard to put into words, and if you’re playing to the strengths of audio, most of the Half-Encodes are going to be sounds that work on our sense of touch. But regardless of which sense you invoke, make sure every sound conveys a feeling or texture.

Half-Encodes need to be used judiciously and deliberately, or they will compete with the story. Don’t feel the need to be literal with your sound design...we don’t need to hear every door squeak on its hinges or every footstep in the house, because we aren’t aiming for literal realism here.

The good news is that a well-chosen Half-Encode can happen alongside the story information without competing. The same way an underscore can play under dialog without creating confusion, well-done sound design can enhance a scene without interrupting it.

To recap: First tell the story, next fill out the world, and then activate the senses.

If only it was always so straightforward.

Fighting Against Footsteps

Let’s do a quick case study on one of the trickiest sounds to use: footsteps.

It has been scientifically proven that footsteps suck in audiodramas. First, the standard pre-recorded footstep from a sound effects library doesn’t actually sound like a normal footstep--it has two click per step, when most of the time in real life we only hear one, and they are recorded in a way that makes them sound really close to the listener--but even so, they are percussive and cut through the mix, and are generally distracting as hell.

To put it into the terms of the essay, they are Encoded Sounds that probably don’t forward the story, and can muddy the information that does forward the story.

So if you have a scene where a character is walking and talking, how do you deal with the footsteps?

The first option I’d suggest is seeing if you can lose them entirely. Again, we aren’t aiming to be literal here, and we are rarely aware of the sounds of footsteps in real life. So get rid of them, if you can.

But let’s say you ditch the footsteps, and now the scene feels dead. Another approach to try to replace the literal sound of the steps with another, softer sound that isn’t as distracting. Maybe you can use the movement of clothing, or a backpack bouncing slightly. Those two sounds are Half-Encodes that can find a magical sweet spot...the audience won’t know exactly what they are hearing, but they understand them enough not to worry about it. As an added bonus, they are very tactile sounds. It may now even be possible to add back in the footsteps, now that the rustling clothes has taken the edge off of them...but you probably won’t need to.

This would be an example of sound design that works almost like an underscore--it’s enhances without interrupting or confusing.

Avoid Scenes in Sonically Boring Places

It’s also worth pointing out: If you’re the one writing the script, you have the ability to find a better setting than a hallway. Put them in a park. In stadium. “Homecoming” put their characters on a ferris wheel during one scene, and I assume the location was largely chosen because it would sound cool.

But if the characters need to walk and talk, and it needs to be in a loud hallway, and one of them needs to be wearing heels...craft the scene so the walking is part of the drama. So have one character catch up to the other. They stop to talk, and one gets mad mad and walks away. The other one chases. You get the idea. Make those footsteps no longer just a sound to fill in the realism, but a device to communicate the drama.

One More Thought

More than almost any other storytelling form, audio drama is a battle for clarity. We’re omitting our most powerful sense, and it’s so hard, it’s not uncommon to get cheesy lines like “Are you point a gun at me?” (No, he’s just happy to see you.)

But that void of information can make audio drama unexpectedly powerful. The audience will bring their own visuals, which they will probably like better than what you had in mind, anyway. Plus, the narrator sounds like they are talking to you, to you personally,  and you feel like you are friends with them. And the ability to talk to their sense of touch is so intimate. Two things audio drama does really well: Torture and sex...situations that are so intense, people are nervous about doing them (myself included).

I think a key ingredient in almost any art form is in implying, and audio drama has it by default. If you do it right, a couple of decisions can build entire worlds.