Comments on: On Radio: The Truth, and Other Jeopardies

By: Neil Verma

Neil Verma — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:17:48 +0000

Discomfiture is a great term for it! It’s a quality that’s rediscovered and reinvented often. Thanks, Jason.

By: Jason Loviglio

Jason Loviglio — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:54:28 +0000

Thanks Neil for this wonderful analysis of The Truth. You’ve helped me understand why these little “movies for your ear” are often both compelling and discomfiting. There’s something so disorienting about these intense shifts in audioposition. It’s suddenly easy to understand why so many old-time radio shows veered towards suspense, horror, and gothic themes and with such success.

By: Eric Dienstfrey

Eric Dienstfrey — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:35:17 +0000

These are good points. While I very much disagree with Chion’s conception of a “point-of-audition” (as its function and value in the cinema have less to do with its relation to the restricted narration of a “point-of-view” and more to do with its relation to the omnipresent sound designs that are more typical of diegetic construction), I like your observation about there not being an analog to the word “shot” in radio discourse.

By: Neil Verma

Neil Verma — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:34:03 +0000

Thanks for the question, Eric! Yes, the term points to the properties you enumerate (and others), but I chose not to use “point of audition,” as well as others in the literature on radio – “focalization,” “sound perspective,” “point of view,” “sound vectors” – in part because many of them use metaphors of vision that are not always helpful. As Michel Chion points out, “point of audition” only exists as a companion to “point of view,” and it works best when discussing relations between those two properties in sound films. Since radio plays have no “point of view,” I felt it was better not to adopt a frame of reference that presumes one.

There was also a more practical concern. I wanted readers to notice is how audiopositions are composed and shaped – they are selected, developed, complicated, maintained and broken. To explain how that was done, I needed a term that I could easily use as a verb (i.e. “the audience is positioned” and “William Spier positions the audience”), which is much harder to do with “point of audition.” That’s not to say that point-of-audition sound isn’t also a deliberate choice in filmmaking (far from it), only that it’s such a pressing issue in radio that I needed a term I could use extensively and adapt into different parts of speech more readily. To put it another way, I wanted a term that behaves a little like “shot” in film studies.

As a rule, I think it’s bad form to coin words unless you really need to. In this case I felt that I did, since there is no common touchstone term for the phenomenon, and it seemed better to create one than to pick one over another another, when each has merits and deficiencies. Thanks again for reading! nv

By: Eric Dienstfrey

Eric Dienstfrey — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:20:28 +0000

Thank your for this interesting blogpost, Neil! After reading your book, I’ve been meaning to ask you about the distinctions between your newly coined term “audioposition” and the alternate “point-of-audition,” a term previously used in both film and sound recording scholarship. The way I understand it, both refer to the way in which the volume, timbre, and exclusion of sounds can imply that audiences are hearing a scene from a physical location inside the storyworld. Are there differences between these two terms?