During the early days in which The Fandom Prince would court the Fandom Princess would bring the Princess a special musical water lily every time he visited from his northern kingdom.

You see, the Prince was close friends with the sirens who dwelled in the northern waters and had the most beautiful voices in the entire world. Whenever he knew he would be going to visit the Princess, he would go to the sea where the sirens swam. The Prince didn’t have to exercise caution since the sirens were, to be honest, in love with him and would do anything for him, including giving him singing water lilies from their own personal collection. In return, he would tell them stories of his adventures and play his harmonica for them to sing along with.

The Princess, whenever she received a new water lily, would place it in the pond by the garden behind the castle. During times she found herself missing her Prince or wanting to muse over the day’s events, she and Ghost would go and listen to the sweet sounds of sirens fill the air:

Although sirens obviously are not a good mythical creature, this week they fit in with the audio storytelling theme that we’ve got going on in our class! For one, they sing (audio!) and two, they’re mythological (stories, yay!) But, I’m hoping to tie this all in with the idea of Audio Storytelling.

After taking a look at Ira Glass’ Series on Storytelling, I was able to come up with a few notes that I agreed with such as his philosophy with needing to have a sequence of action and a moment of recognition in your audio story. Your listeners will need a reason to continue to listen to the story that you want to tell them, so you’ll have to make sure you give them one! It doesn’t have to be anything super huge, but as long as it has some sort of concept and follows a structure of an actual story, it should work.

I did, however, relate more to Jad Abumrad’s take on radio/audio storytelling. He starts out by saying that he is more a television person, which I agree. I like to have a visual. However, not having one makes me just as happy because then I get to do exactly what Abumrad says, which is create my own sort of visual.

With radio storytelling, you have the option to have co-authorship, as Abumrad puts it, and allow the listeners to visualize a scene how they want to, filling in all the details that are left out to make it entirely theirs. The listeners are able to connect with the voice on the other end of the headphones and the recorder has the power to cause emotion when listening to their piece.

Ironically, in my Non-Fiction class, we’re actually doing a segment on radio essays! I had to write/read mine on the first day and I was a nervous wreck. My professor helped us out though by letting us listen to a few from this website. Great stuff, and I was able to connect their stories with both Glass’ and Abumrad’s points about audio storytelling. It kind of all fit very nicely!