🎶Aural Immersion
Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Other Second Wave Digital Theatre > Aural Immersion
Shifting drama to radio broadcast led to during the mid-20th century; podcasts today . : ‘The dialogue can carry the scenery and the costume within it and the human voice can powerfully suggest human appearance. Radio, thus, must be regarded as a perfectly adequate medium for the performance of dramatic works’.
Musical soundtracks have also remained immensely popular across almost a century. on the Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, which started on TikTok, ruminates: ‘Is musical theatre an event, a sound – or something else?’. Aural immersion became one of the more popular forms digital theatre makers turned to, though there are many different approaches to creating audio dramas from traditional narrative podcasts to choose-your-own-adventure style immersions to GPS-triggered sounds to audience-created works.
One example is the re-creation of Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, originally released in 2007 with bespoke digital devices, but re-released for smartphones in 2021. ‘a location-based game for cyclists, was developed by Blast Theory … [that] encouraged participants to cycle around a city in order to record personal memories and make statements about their past, present and future that were associated with particular locations in the city’. Although the was part of several performance festivals which sometimes involved groups of riders, ‘encourages a single spectator to cycle alone through the city with a small computer attached to the handlebars, finding "hiding places", recording messages in response to questions from the computer, and listening to the recordings of others who have explored the performance’. There are interactive, gamified elements to this ever-evolving performance, but the predominant experience involves immersing a cyclist-audience in both the physical experience of their city through movement, and . ‘By constructing a partial, partially occluded intimacy from the distance and devices that co-constitute the performance, it subtly gives the lie to any notion that feelings, sensation, or intimacy itself is allergic to the intervention of media, or more pointedly to the ubiquitous digitality of a postdigital environment’. While Rider Spoke creates a fully subjective performance that is unique every time, to every listener, the audio immersion lends a sense of being together as a community despite distance, transcending location while simultaneously changing the listener’s conception of the physical world around them.
Several theatre makers I interviewed experimented with audio dramas in some way. For example, Morgan Green told me that The Wilma Theater, now known for its high quality cinematic and televisual theatre streams, tried the audio format for Alicia Harris’s Is God Is in 2020: ‘We condensed the season, we made two digital pieces, one radio play …’. Though not the medium best suited to that company’s overall digital methodology, Green believed that specific play was well-suited to an immersive listening experience. Brendan Bradley, who predominantly works in film and virtual reality theatre now, ‘started a [call-in] radio show from my closet’ the first day of lockdowns in New York City. ‘I put a phone number on my computer monitor, and people from all over the world called in, and we chatted'. Bradley arguably brings this dialectic performance into his current touring show, Non-Player Character: The Musical, which is described in more depth in the Virtual Reality Theatre section.
Know Theatre’s Andrew Hungerford led the company to develop audio experiences that were interactive or responsive, because he knew that listeners would be using their phones to engage with the work, and took advantage of the digital immediacy available: ‘we were excited by the idea of these audio-walks and ways of engaging with audience members through the phone that they have with them all the time, but also engaging with the architecture of the city’, a similar approach as Rider Spoke. Inspired by the ‘audiowalks of Janet Cardiff’, Hungerford and his team picked scripts by local playwrights and pulled from their Serials! program: ‘we did a geo-located walking tour, using the Echoes app … it was actually branching, depending on which direction you went’. Hungerford said they chose an underworld mythology springtime story, not only inspired by the daily constitutionals that became immensely popular during the peak of the pandemic, but also inspired by the 17-year cicada brood that emerged in 2021. When the listener went one direction, they could engage with a Persephone-based branching narrative; in the other direction, they could hear a story about Mesopotamia’s Inanna/Ishtar. Both mythological goddesses have similar stories of travelling to their Underworlds and reemerging with new knowledge.
Carmel Clavin kept a podcast before the pandemic called ‘Glamour Hobo Field Notes’, which she said taught her a great deal about audio engineering and quality for digital devices; this likely made it easier for her to create an immersive listening experience titled Journey to the Kingdom of Hypnos. Akin to Know’s mythology-based listening journey, Clavin drew on Greek mythology to bring the listener into their imaginations and, auditorily, into the Underworld:
November / December of 2020, and January of 2021 is when I developed Journey to the Kingdom of Hypnos, which is an immersive listening experience with 360 binaural sound. It came out of a different project about the Kingdom of Sleep and Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of Memory, and I started designing it and conceptualizing it and writing some music for it; and it took until July 2021 for that to be finished, to actually find a sound engineer and get them to actually engineer it and build in all of those things.
Although Hypnos has evolved a great deal since its initial production, the original audio-only version is available for free on Clavin’s website; the currently touring version, which an in-person multisensory experience, also relies predominantly on the original audio’s solitary listening immersion. Clavin’s passion for sensory immersion informed her choices, too: ‘I love listening to things. I've always enjoyed that. I have a really strong sense of smell and a strong sense of hearing. I love immersive things that consider those senses because they're often ignored in exchange for visual …’. For the Adelaide Fringe 2024 tour, Clavin has added some scented oils, a hand fan for tactile sensations of wind, and a large rippling, bright LED image wall (in the ILA space, this was three-quarters surrounded by mountains and photography, and an opposing wall that was a cave entrance); these additional medial layers demonstrate that audio creates a strong emotional foundation for narrative.
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