I’m not really sure what my reaction to this was.  I listened to Radiolab’s piece on “Words” and I felt cheated.  An odd reaction to a piece of radio, but it was just odd to me.  I’m not used to listening to radio in this manner, and by that I mean how the whole thing was put together.  Normally, when I think of radio show, I think of a group of people sharing some weird story on 99.5 in the morning.  However, in this there was only, as it seemed to me, one person talking at a time the whole time.  They just took clips and pieces of people talking at seperate times and edited them all together, which gave the appearance of a continuous story, but it wasn’t.  It just kind of stuck to me as being cheap and not very well done.  Which makes me feel worse about actually doing something like this because I don’t expect to be as good as the people here.

The sound effects did add an interesting layer of sound to the story, which was cool.  Also the background music added another layer, which was nice, but I couldn’t get over the feeling of being cheated.  It was kind of like corny special effects.  Now we’re used to seeing crazy things like the special effects of Avatar, so when we go back and look at Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it looks really bad, just the same as looking at the graphics of Super Mario 64 (not even that old) and look at something like God of War now, there’s no comparison.

Also it made me think about the Ira Glass and that guy from Radiolab‘s videos on storytelling, advising us on how we should be ourselves on the radio.  Adding in all these sound effects and music and whatever else, isn’t really yourself.  I feel that they are contradicting everything they said before.

Another interesting thing they did is use sound effects to influence how someone should interpret the story.  One quote from the thing was, “the most interesting piece of a story is the part that you can’t put into words.”  I think that the sounds, in the case of the radio, is what she was referring to.  An odd thing to think about in an enlightening way.