producer at This American Life radio program
Choose one of the pieces that Ben presented yesterday.
Describe what the piece was about, what the sounds and voices were and especially the story.
Discuss the importance of storytelling and the techniques Ben (or Ira Glass) used in their audio pieces.
Examples;
The Factory Piece
The Wisconsin Political Activist (and her hate mail)
The Right to Remain Silent produced by Ira Glass (about the NYC policeman)
Ben Calhoun's factory piece described the experience of three workers at an old factory that went out of business several years ago. Ben interviewed the three workers independently, on three different occasions. He asked them questions about the sounds of the factory, the atmosphere and interactions between the workers. He then asked them to replicate the sounds of the machines in the factory. Although the three workers were interviewed individually, Ben edited his interviews to make the three interviews flow seamlessly together, as though all three workers were talking together. Ben's storytelling was unveiled in a very sensory manner. By having the workers make their own sounds and editing their voices so that they spoke in a rhythmic manner, Ben helped gain the listener's interest. Ben layered the voices on top of each other at times as well, to create the idea that the workers were interacting with each other during the interview. When assembling his recordings, Ben also paid close attention to how the speaker's voice changed in tone, volume, and pacing. By paying close attention to these details, Ben was able to convey how the workers regarded the old factory and allow the audience to feel the emotions of the factory workers.
ReplyDeleteThe Factory Piece, presented by Ben Calhoun, was a very interesting look into radio production. Ben compiled the voices and sounds of 3 different former factory employees into a dialogue that explained what working in a Xenith factory - which was being demolished - was like. Ben interviewed the 3 former workers and extracted a lot of information on how busy it was on the line, the noises the machines made (which he had the employees imitate), and the contrast between when the factory was in full-swing and when there was nobody working. Ben used a lot of small fades for transitions that made the audio pretty much seamless. The transitional nature of the piece made it seem like each voice was echoing the voice before, progressing the story slightly by adding a small bit of new information each time. This technique was very successful because it gave the impression that all 3 interviewees were in the same room together, having a conversation when in fact there was 3 separate interviews that each lasted about 30 minutes. The "conversation" amongst the workers provided the audience with a stimulating story that really gave a nice feel of the industrial and busy nature of the factory.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite piece that Ben showed us yesterday was The Right to Remain Silent by Ira Glass. In this story the police officer was being interrogated by other police men about something as simple as leaving work an hour early. He had been secretly recording the corruptions within the precinct. They followed him back to his home and were questioning him about everything and when he wouldn't conform, they suggested he was emotionally distressed and arrested him. In this story the voices are Ira, the policeman, and his bosses. Storytelling plays a large role in this piece because it produces a gradual build up of excitement. If Ira had not used this technique it would have definitely not been as interesting and captivating to listen to.
ReplyDelete"Looping"
ReplyDeleteThe piece that attracted me the most was the one about the female who said "sometimes behaves so strangely" and realized that it had some sort of rhythmic harmony to it. She realized that the way she said it and the tones she said those words could easily be recognized on a piano, that the words were like music. Her words were looped and sounded just like a song and were catchy to the point that it would get stuck in people's heads, including mine. Storytelling is very important aspect of American culture and how the story is told creates an impact on others. Like Ben Calhoun stated "Time based works build moments and when the work is finished, the moment is gone." That's what separates time based art from 2D or 3D art. Ben likes to grab listener, create a moment with them, and leave them to think about the rest.
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Ben Calhouns presentation and various pieces. his pieces not only sounded extremely thought out and flawlessly constructed, but also kept the listeners interested. One piece in particular that caught my interest was his opening piece; the looping one (a piece which remains untitled.) I thought the way he presented the piece was so intelligent because he gave the listeners a short snippet of the lady, who seemed mysterious at the time, "sometimes behaves so strangely" in a repetitive manner where it almost sounds like a song. He then delves into the other recording which was an interview with her. She speaks about how the voice naturally tends to carry a tune when speaking. Within that conversation, she explains that sometimes when someone is speaking the tune of voice behaves strangely, hence where the repetitive, looping line comes from. An additional note, is that when he edits the interview, he edits some of her words so that they are stuttering or echoing, which helps to add emphasis to her voice, and the point she is making. When hearing the line "sometimes behaves so strangely," for the second time in context, it almost sounds as if she is going from speaking to singing, because since our ears were predisposed to hearing it as a tune, that is naturally what is heard, even if it is in the same sentence as words that sound like they are just spoken. I find it interesting that he chose those words to turn into the looped segment, because the words within themselves describe how he uses the segment to sound like a tune. I think this piece was really well thought out, and really kept me interested as a listener, especially because he used it to open his presentation.
ReplyDeleteHearing Ben Calhoun speak was a real treat. I listen to this American life on a regular basis and am fascinated with different story telling methods, so hearing Ben speak was really fascinating to me. The Right to Remain Silent was particularly interesting to me. The story itself was absolutely astounding . The corruptness of the legal system caught on tape makes for such a wonderful audio piece. The story was riveting and well as terrifying. It was delightful as an audio piece however I could not help but think that It would make an excellent feature length film.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that it is an audio piece makes every word, every muffle of the microphone and every breath that much more important. The moment in the piece that really shocked me was when the police chief told the man that he had to go to the hospital for his own safety. The words being said were so good because you really can't make that stuff up. It's the absurdity of real like caught on tape, and it makes for a wonderfully entertaining piece.
Editing is also a large part of the story telling process. One can have great material, but it is the manner in which that material is strung together that can be the difference between good and great. There is definitely a certain level of manipulation in story telling, however there is a certain level of manipulation in all art forms. The artist must decide what they are trying to say, and do whatever they can to make the viewer see of feel it. Art is manipulation
The first sound group we heard in Ben Calhoun's lecture was quite interesting. It was my first experience hearing anything related to looping and thought it was very interesting. Diana, the woman speaking throughout the piece starts out with a distinctive voice that begins at all one tone. As the piece continues the repetition of her voice speaking the same line adds a satisfying rhythm that the audience is immediatley drawn to. The repetition and voice overs allow the piece to come full circle as a composition. Towards the end of the piece background music is added to the work and it begins to alter the brain in a different way. A line that this woman repeated over and over along with some background music made the audience believe she was now singing the line, when she was clearly not. It was the same line spoken the same way but with a quiet melody playing in the background, the audience began to think of this line as a verse from a song. This form of editing is very successful in taking a spoken excerpt and turning it something much more complicated. As a member of the audience, it was interesting to see this piece from beginning to end because it is easy to see where Diana's voice is unedited, to when the same phrase is put in a loop on repeat.
ReplyDeleteThe piece that I found most interesting to listen to was the looping piece. In this particular podcast, the host of the radioshow Radiolab, Jad Abrumad, interviewed a sound editor who had a fascinating experience while working. While editing, she left a phrase (which was 'sometimes behaves so strangely') on loop, and observed how this phrase gained a rhythm from simply being on repeat. Well, it had a rhythm before it was on loop, but she didn't notice the melodic quality of it until it was repeated over and over...and over again. The way this woman's story was told was amazingly put together, as it allowed the audience to come to the same realization as she did. They did this by playing the phrase on repeat in a sort of muted fashion behind her words. This gave the audience an opportunity to listen to what she has to say, as well and understand what she is talking about. The timing was also essential in this piece. As I mentioned before, the phrase was played in a quieted fashion while she was telling the story. However, when she had finished talking, the phrase was brought to the foreground and it clicked with the audience. It seemed so ridiculous that it actually made everyone in the lecture laugh. If it wasn't timed just so, the humor would not have been so obvious.
ReplyDeleteThe first audio piece (The Loop) that has the woman keeps saying the same phrase with the rhythm. This piece tells how people tend to speak with the rhythm when they hear or say a certain phrase with the rhythm continuously. Even though this piece did not have a continuous storytelling with the narratives like other pieces that he created, this piece still tells clearly the story or the point that he or the woman is trying to say. I found this piece interesting especially because I just hear the rhythms of the voices and words of other languages that are not Korean. Especially when I am not trying to understand or focus on the English-speaking person speaking, the words would be just the rhythms to my ears.
ReplyDeleteThe Wisconsin Political Activist (and her hate mail)
ReplyDeleteBen Calhoun went to interview a Democratic senator about the Wisconsin governor recall that occurred in early 2012. Ben’s piece immediately set a scene through his descriptions of the location he was in, recounting boxes and boxes and papers and envelopes inside her house. Ben told his story in order of actual events, slowly leading up to the climax. The climax was his reading of hate mail on the senator’s refrigerator. Ben explained him trying to use the clip of him reading the hate mail without explaining its use beforehand in the show, but he admitted to having to explain this material to listeners in order to stay in correct context. Of course, the mail sounded pretty hateful. This goes to show that sometimes in storytelling there is a specific context in which all the material must be placed in order to achieve a desired response from an audience. Though Ben had to explain it, his intonation and rhythm in revealing the story was very poetic and captivating. Through this method, he was able to keep the audience in the story until it was over. All storytellers, whether audio, video, or both, must assume a way to lead up to a point, as that is what stories are all about. There is a point to the story that connects all the events together. These types of artists must know their craft well in order to enthrall the audience.
The Factory Piece was edited from the interview Ben Calhoun did with three people. They were talking about the working experience in a plant where it has a lot of noises. What made this piece different from other recordings of interviews is that Ben edited the responses from three people together. And it just made it more interesting for the audience to listen to when it sounds like one dialogue by one person. Ben would ask them the same questions so their responses were similar and easy to put together. He also cut the dialogue down into small sections and put them back again to mimic the noises in the plant. With these rearranging techniques, the piece become so much more interesting to hear.
ReplyDeleteThe piece about the Wisconsin Political Activist was about a woman who was involved with the governmental recalls in Wisconsin. During the piece, Ben traveled to her log cabin home to interview her. By meeting her at the place where she worked, he was able to get a much better sense of what her work was like than if he would have met her in a different location. Entering her kitchen, he saw hate mail letters which she had hung up on her fridge. Ben thought these were very interesting and decided to read the letters out loud. Ben felt extremely awkward reading such awful things in front of her, and so he mumbled and sped through the letter. Because of this, the recording was almost unusable. Still, he felt that it was a major part of his story that needed to be included. In order to work it into the story, he preceded the recording with a confession of his discomfort. By being honest and offering up a small explanation, he was both able to infuse the story with a bit of humor and include the hate mail that he found so vital to the piece's effect. His experience reminds us, as storytellers, that our audience is, in ways, just like us, and that being honest about our thoughts and feelings can be an effective way to make a human connection that can enhance a story's effect.
ReplyDeleteIra Glass's piece called The Right to Remain Silent was about a police officer in New York who believed that whatever was going on in his department was illegal. He was not okay with this because it is the very thing he works to maintain-the law! He decides to record his time spent in the office and his boss gets suspicious. What ends up happening is he goes home early, the SWAT team shows up at his house and tries to arrest him or anything they can to get him to do what they want. He has the whole thing on tape. It is a great story in itself, and the editing makes it more exciting for someone who wash't there. The sounds in the piece are the talking being done of both interviewer and interviewee, the narration of the producer, and the sounds of the police officers recordings. The technique that Ira Glass used was editing out the pieces of the story in the recordings that didn't matter. Ira also left out the most exciting piece of information- the second recorder on his shelf- to the very end. By doing that, the story became exciting and allowed for a climax in the story. It was a great tool to use because that is how people tell stories to each other. We like to leave the most exciting piece to the end. Storytelling allows us to bond with one another and allows for a form of entertainment. It is also a way to pass down history and also keep culture and tradition.
ReplyDeleteThe Right to Remain silent was an engaging, thrilling piece that wrapped the listener up in a story. Schoolcraft, an NYC policeman, begins recording the corrupted goings-on in his department but begins to be suspected and when things are about to come to a head, he flees to his apartment. However, when he arrives he finds an entire SWAT team there that tries to bring him out of the house under the false pretenses of him being ill and needing to get to a hospital. When one of the big police bosses starts rough-housing him, a recorder from his pocket falls out and we think it is over for Schoolcraft. Then, when prompted by the interviewer to explain why we are still hearing the tape of it, he reveals that the entire time he had another recorder set up on his shelf.
ReplyDeleteIra Glass orchestrated this piece with several different types of sound-- an actual recording from the time, complete with the sounds of handcuffs and battery, an interview with Schoolcraft himself, and a narration by Glass. The narration and the actual recordings helped the storytelling aspect, making listeners feel as though they were listening to a crime drama unfold. The clanking of handcuffs, the gruff police boss's voice, and the sounds of physical action all brought the listener directly into the scene. The narration allowed us to follow the story in a sequential manner. But the interview was intstrumental in giving this piece its final storytelling kick-- through the interview only, it was revealed that Schoolcraft had another recorder the whole time. This realization really brought the sense of anxiety and then triumph to the piece.
Kit Trowbridge
Zoe Allen-Wickler
ReplyDeleteThe Factory Piece
This audio piece consisted of a series of clips from separate interviews of three people who once worked for many years at a the same factory that had been recently torn down. They were all asked the same questions about the factory, and their responses were interspersed and overlaid together to create both a sense of continuity and cohesion, as well as the illusion that the three of them were in the room together, playing off of each others words. Because of the use of this technique, the speakers' thoughts became a record of a place that had disappeared. There were two male voices and one female; they sounded a little dusty, worn with time. They recalled the repetitive nature of their jobs, the noises, questions about the product they were building, and their own thoughts about what was going on within the factory. They recreated the sounds of the building, and described it's strange silences. The voices recorded the memory of the factory, in a way that even walking through it in full work-mode with a video camera would not have been able to capture. They defined the place, gave it character and even charm.
In "The Right To Remain Silent", a New York police officer was instructed to make more arrests, give more tickets, etc. With these orders, he began to feel uneasy and decided to start recording (through tape and written journal) all meetings, interactions, and time on duty. When heads of the department became suspicious, they looked at his work log without comment, gave it back, and seemed to let him go on his way with the suspicious details dogeared in the journal. He ended up saying he was not feeling well and went home only to have officers of even higher rank come to his home and harass him. Per usual, he had the recorder in his pocket and recorded the whole altercation. The recorder fell out of his pocket, but in the end he revealed there was another sitting on the shelf in plain view.
ReplyDeleteGlass kept the audio in the piece relatively simple. There was not a lot of extra sound other than narration and the actual recordings. This kept the story from feeling like just another radio piece, but rather something more personal, extreme, and real. There was a little narration by Glass and the police officer to tell the main setup of the story and give key details. The actual recordings really brought the piece to a believable and physical light.
As Ben explained, most stories are told in a sequential fashion. There are details and explanations that all lead up a moment that evokes emotion or a reaction, and "the Right To Remain Silent" did so in the final detail of the hidden recorder and apparent 'victory' for the police officer.
Ben Calhoun is a producer at This American Life radio program. I believe Ben's success with The Loop piece derives from his ability to break down everything the woman was saying and pull out just one important part of her interview. Calhoun shows us when we begin focusing on the small things, the tiny moments, sometimes a small clip can be distorted so much that it becomes something else. When Calhoun showed us through repetition that the small clip he focused on turned from words into music (as first noted by the woman) , he took her story and made us actually experience it ourselves. We all were able to have and share that moment of understanding because of the way Calhoun edited his piece, first by repeating her words over and over until we could all hear the music in them, and then finally by repeating her whole sentence in which we collectively heard those same words, just words before, suddenly turn into a burst of song in the middle of her sentence.
ReplyDeleteliz mccubbrey
The piece that caught my eye the most was the factory piece. In this audio recording, three retired workers shared their fond memories of working at the Zenith factory in the northwest part of Chicago. What made this piece remarkable was its superb editing. Each worker's story was sliced up and joined in a cohesive manner, offering a wide range of memories, views and opinions. One great part of this piece was when they were asked to imitate the sounds of the machinery. All of their noises were then pieced together to form a scratchy machine like sound. The background music during this piece also set a tone that flowed perfectly with the story.
ReplyDeleteIn the factory piece, Ben interviewed different workers describing what it was like working in the factory. They way he presented the story was by using sound bites of the different people speaking about the factory. It kept changing from one voice to another, creating a fast rhythm. Sometimes he repeated the same word that people said to make it significant. He also wanted the workers to make sound effects of the different machines in the factory. He mixed in these different sound effects with the different people talking in the interview so it blends voice and sound. This fast paced rhythm of the different people talking interchangeably along with the sounds that they made, kept the audience listening to the story.
ReplyDeleteThe Right to Remain Silent (NYC Policeman)
ReplyDeleteThis piece was done almost in a newscast kind of way. Ira Glass was leading the discussion, and had previously been talking about stories that showed individuals using what they had to speak out against things they felt were being done or handled wrong. The piece was titled "Is That A Tape Recorder In your Pocket or are you Just Happy To See Me"
Adrian Schoolcraft went around and decided that he would tape record his life as a police officer. This turned out to become a great scandal, as people heard things that were unusual for officers to do, which resulted in people losing their jobs, and a bunch of investigations within the department. The important sounds in this piece were mainly the voices who were within the interview. There were no additional sounds that really effected the story. It was all about the interview and getting the story.
Storytelling is important because it not only informs individuals about certain situations and topcis, but its a form of communication. A language. We us storytelling to draw people into different topics, and inform them of things, in a more relatable fashion. Ira Glass, uses his interviewing skills to tell a story through his radio show.
As a radio journalist, Ben documented three workers in the factory in his "The Factory Piece." He interviewed each one of them, and asked them about how life in factory is, and the sounds machine make. I think it was successful because the interview was edited very nicely, and approach he made to the ending was interesting. I also think his transitions to another interview or sounds was successful, because he used small section of the noise of the factory that was well edited.
ReplyDeleteIn Ben Calhoun's Factory Piece, he interviews three different factory workers with the same questions. He does this so their responses sound similar and he can group them together to have a similar feel. This factory was shut down years ago, and the three interviewees would answer Ben's questions about life working in the factory and proceeded to try to elicit sounds that the machines make. Ben is focused on the storytelling process of audio and video, which is exemplified through this piece. He does successfully portray a story, but not in the typical beginning to end. He combines the answers to the same question so the explanation of the factory naturally seems to flow. This is easy for the audience to then compare and contrast the different peoples' answers right away. I also am fascinated by the use of repeating a selected clip [as a record player would do when it sticks] and create a sound from the tone of voice. I subconsciously have done that before, because i have a very good ear for music and can sound out the notes. i really want to incorporate this idea (more complicated than the version we listened to by Ben) into one of my pieces for this class to create music.
ReplyDelete