Radio, live transmission

I was watching a behind-the-scenes special on the ole tube of You about Flight of the Conchords the other day, because yes, that's what you do when you're the wrong side of 25 in Manchester during Freshers Week. And I noticed something very interesting. Well, other than that Bret and Jemaine are stone cold foxes. I've been noticing that for years.

When they were talking about the television programme's genesis, they forgot to mention something quite important; that they made a BBC radio series similar in style and content to the television series.

In this way their rise to mainstream success of sorts is similar to that of the Mighty Boosh. Both started as a comedy act, then went on to make a radio series, which then lead to a television programme. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Not many are familiar with either radio series, and I think it's a shame. I've made a radio play and I've done some stuff in radio as part of my studies, and you begin to fall out of love with the visual image when you have aural storytelling. As someone who adores the image and filters her entire life through a screen, it sounds weird saying that sometimes I prefer a good old radio play. If it's done well, that is.

With any piece of art you rely on the spectator to interpret the information and literally piece it together to understand. When you watch a film you're essentially making sense of thousands of still images and creating a meaningful narrative.

And even with a book, you don't have images in front of you to make sense of to create a narrative, you have words that you piece together to create an image in your mind (and it's always better than the one filmmakers give you, right?). But listening to a radio play or a soundscape is different, because when you listen to a soundscape, when you're engaging with it, you think you're hearing familiar sounds when you're probably not.

For example, the soundscape or production I made was a radio show being interrupted by a zombie attack. The sound of people bashing zombie brains in was actually us throwing a watermelon against a brick wall. The sound of girlish screams was actually my male friend sucking in his breath and making weird screeches.

That's why everyone is rubbish at Secret Sound - it could be any bloody thing! It could be bread popping out of a toaster, but it could sound like something completely different. It's like asking someone to be a sound designer or a foley artist in order to win at that thing.

But I digress. There was this dude, a dude, named Lev Kuleshov. And he devised a series of experiments designed to show that audiences can interpret images simply by the way they are connected to another image. In one of his experiments, he used the same medium close-up of a man and connected it with different images. The idea was that people would make assumptions about the man's state of mind based on whatever the next image was. So if the man's face was followed by a bowl of soup, a spectator would say that he was hungry. And if it was followed by a shot of a child, the man loved the child.

Now, I hear these experiments didn't really work, but it's an interesting idea. Kuleshov must have been pretty important, because he also has an effect named after him; the Kuleshov Effect (cool, right?). Essentially, the Kuleshov effect is when the filmmaker manipulates spatial relations in a particular way. Usually, the filmmaker infers a space with the use of limited shots; two or three, and no establishing shot. Classical Hollywood cinema and its continuity system would have you believe that in order for an audience to understand spatial relations, each new shot had to have an establishing shot before going in for closer shots of the space and the characters within it. Kuleshov's experiments and such reveal that the audience really doesn't need that much visual information in order to do this. The easiest example I can give you is when a television show or film changes location from an exterior location to an interior location (Friends: ext shot of Monica's building, then int shot of her apartment). Kuleshov's affecting us all over the shop, basically.

And the Kuleshov Effect works so well in radio, too. The spectator imagines a space based entirely on what they hear. If you can hear dripping water, an characters' dialogue has an echo, you probably think they're in a cave, right? Or, you hear the sounds of birds and trees and such, you assume you're in a forest.

And sometimes, you forget that humans, deep down, kind love the sound of their fellow mammals' voice. I have a friend who finds Noel Fielding's voice very soothing. For her, The Mighty Boosh radio series is both relaxing, and hilarious. What a lovely review.

There's something so irresistable about creating a space or a world relying only on one sense. In a lot of interviews, Julian Barratt seems to prefer creating soundscapes to that of the a visual space. I find it really enjoyable, even though I haven't done it in a while. And there's also the fact that I really know nothing about sound and sound production. All I know is, I can record sounds, shove them onto a track or many tracks on Protools and make them sound cool. I was recently asked to do sound design on a student project and I was a little scared...but then again, it could be really fun. Provided this uni I'm at has Protools, I guess.

But if you get nothing out of this post, do try and track down the Mighty Boosh radio series and the Flight of the Conchords radio series. You will not be disappointed.