The Fandom Princess had many close friends, but one of her closest, dearests, and best friends was her own darling younger sister, Courtney. Princess Courtney still lived at home in the King and Queen’s castle, but would frequently send owls to The Fandom Princess about her daily activities. One day, the Princess received an owl from Courtney describing how she had had the worst day at her lessons because she was so tired of merely listening to her instructors. She wanted to actually do something. The Princess could relate, and sat down in between her Forest Studies and Mineral Grains lessons to write back to her younger sister:

So, part of this may sound like a little bit of a rant, but I shall try to keep it as critical as possible (with the addition of a little bit of princess flare, of course).

For the audio story that we had to listen to this week, I chose to listen to Doppelgangers on This American Life. It stared Fred Armisen with his guest star Ira Glass and discussed the idea of doubles/look-alikes from food to actual people. Ben Calhoun wrote the narrative for the hog rectums portion, and this was the one that was the most interesting of the two.

I’ll go over the positives first, so that when I get to the negatives, hopefully it’s less of a blow. (Sorry!) Firstly, I did like how, with audio, you are able to get the sense of the environment that you are in because of all the different sound effects. Whenever Ben was in a restaurant discussing the dish, I could hear silverware and the chatter of other people in the background. This helps to successful set the mood of the piece as well as helps the listener to get an understanding of the surrounding that we’re supposed to be in. Another thing that was great with the audio storytelling was the actual music that was played at different parts of the narrative to emphasis the story. The tone and diction of the narrative also plays into how listeners will take the audio piece. In this case, I thought that the reader did a great job with keeping his voice even and easy to understand.

Now onto the negatives (which are all just a matter of opinion, of course). While the topic of the story was somewhat interesting, I found it hard to focus on such a long piece of narrative, especially since all I had to go on was the audio. To me, this narrative would have been much better if there was some sort of visual. It was almost like I was merely listening to a documentary, but no sort of visual focus for my eyes to put the two sources of material together. As stated, it could be that audio is not my thing, and about 20 minutes in, I found myself opening the transcript to the audio so that I could follow along with the sound, just because my eyes needed something to read or do. For me, it helped me grasp the story better because then I was able to use the audio and the visual to form my own picture in my head. Maybe next time I’ll try closing my eyes and listening to a story to see if that works, or maybe it was just the subject matter that I couldn’t get into, thus I found it lackluster to listen to. Either way, I think everyone has their go-to when it comes to storytelling, and audio needs to be paired with something else in order for me to appreciate it more.