After seven years two hosts get back in the same time zone. Jack and David chat of all manner of things, No Sleep Podcast, The Audio Drama Convention of 2020, and what’s on their podcatchers for example! Please forgive the poor sound quality we are in noisy locations!
Virginia’s, New Vienna Community Center will help light up their 2017-2018 season with an evening of live radio dramas “In Living Sound – Back Home” for the end of October.
Check out the Connection article on the upcoming performance:
In its first show of the 2017-2018 season in the newly renovated Vienna Community Center, the Vienna Theatre Company is presenting the live radio drama, “In Living Sound – Back Home,” this coming weekend, Oct. 27-28, at 8 p.m.
#Directed by Patricia Kallman, the ensemble of six actors is performing four scripts from the Golden Age of Radio during the 1930s and 1940s – one humor, one crime, one sweet tale from the Depression and one horror. The ensemble cast includes: Stuart Fischer, Terry Mason, Jay T. Stein, Jocelyn Steiner, John Totten and Kathy Young.
#The first show, “Popeye – Visiting the Zoo,” which is replete with live sound effects by Sherry Kaiser and Roy Kallman, was an episode that aired in the 1930s. In this play, Popeye, Olive Oyl, Wimpy and Matey, the newsboy, visit the zoo in search of adventure.
#Kallman said she paid particular attention to the voices to get them down just right. “They are so distinctive for Popeye and they were so popular. So I thought that would be the interesting vocal part for this,” said Kallman, 70, of the Greenbriar community who co-founded the Alliance Theater in Centreville with Elaine Wilson in 2000.
#HER CHALLENGE was to make the sound effects interesting, she said. “We debated animal sounds. We tried a lot of different things. We tried all kinds of things for the hyena. It would be fun if there were actual animal noises but we did the best we could with them. There weren’t any in the original radio play; we thought we would add something to it.”
#The second play, “Boston Blackie – Blackie and the Fur Trade,” which aired in 1945, was created by Jack Boyle, a newspaper reporter and reformed opium addict while serving a term in San Quentin for robbery. Blackie started out as a jewel thief and safecracker, but then became a detective. The radio series spawned 14 films for Columbia Pictures. In this play, Janet and Harry are fur thieves, and are apparently getting assistance from Boston Blackie. But the hare-brained Inspector Faraday is in hot pursuit and we learn that crime doesn’t pay.
#Kallman said she was trying to recreate a film noir kind of feel to it – “the mystery and the grit,” she said. “I was really amazed when I started researching it; I didn’t know there were 14 Boston Blackie movies,” she said.
#The third play, “The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour – The Church Mouse” first aired on Dec. 19, 1935. Also known as the Rudy Vallee Show, it was a musical variety show on NBC from 1929 through 1936, and into 1939 when it was renamed The Royal Gelatin Hour. In its prime, it was second only to “Amos ‘n Andy” for popularity and showcased many stars of the future. In this play, a meek but scrappy unemployed secretary lobbies for a job in a bank in a creative and unconventional way.
#Kallman said she was trying for something a bit lighter. “It was three times made into a movie and it was on Broadway as a play first,” she said. “I guess it ends up being a love story. I forgot that people were desperately hungry in the middle of the depression. People were trying to get by, so it’s amusing to hear her talk about dividing up a sardine.”
#The final play, “Lights Out – Knock at the Door,” first aired on CBS in 1942. This tale begets the supernatural, when an overly protective mother is done away with by her new daughter-in-law. Arch Oboler took over Wyllis Cooper’s series in 1936 when it had 600 fan clubs. Rod Serling counted the duo as his inspiration for “Twilight Zone,” which was to TV what “Lights Out” was to radio.
#“We all said Halloween is coming and we ought to end up with something scary,” said Kallman. “We read a number of scripts and thought somebody coming back from the dead was interesting.”
#The Vienna Theater Company is presenting the live radio drama, “In Living Sound – Back Home,” Oct. 27-28 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $14. The venue is located at The Vienna Community Center, 120 Cherry St., SE, Vienna, VA. Visit the website at http://www.viennatheatrecompany.org.
It is no secret that I have always loved Orson Welles. One of the great compliments I had was back in Teacher’s college when someone saw me on the stage and remarked later that I would take this compliment too far but I had indeed resembled the great man in her mind.
I was humbled. Of course, there never was, and never will be a man like him. This interview was said to be his last, and perhaps even on the day of his death. What charm. What panache. What a man. Here on the anniversary of his death we remark his passing. 32 Years without Welles.
Someone wise once said, ‘If your life is worth living, it’s worth writing down.”
I think similarly if your audio has value to you, it’s worth preserving. That’s why when Gregg Taylor of Decoder Ring Theatre said in one of our interviews that he’s been uploading his shows to archive.org it made me consider that it’s probably time to do the same with the Sonic Society. It’s a large process to go back and even upload Season 12, but that’s been accomplished. We’ll go backwards and fill in the last couple years for sure.
There’s untold generations that should have a real understanding where and who started this amazing movement- the modern audio drama medium. And we’ve had front row seats in the past decade. Thank you everyone for your encouragement through the years!
The Pulse considers What We Listen to on Our Phones:
Jenn Webster considers how podcasts have leaped from the fringes to the mainstream in this piece.
Chattanooga’s podcasting—and whether you like noir radio drama, current events or geeky fandom, there’s likely local-focused audio out there for you. If you want to keep up with urban development and education politics, check out The Camp House.
The church/coffeehouse/meeting place offers a weekly long-form deep dive into community events at thecamphouse.simplecast.fm. Last week, they scored an interview with new Hamilton County Schools superintendent Bryan Johnson, Ed.D.
Like sports? The Chattanooga Football Club podcasts about all things CFC during the season (looks like they’ve been on hiatus a few weeks now). Or if you’re god(s)-fearing, it seems like almost every church in town has a podcast, from professional productions to simple playbacks of services.
A podcast is simply a digital audio program available as a download file; some podcasts are conceived and produced specifically for download, while others have a dual purpose as live audio on radio or another medium. More and more, radio programs are drawing listeners who visit their websites to download and listen to shows on their own schedules.
This is especially true with long-form audio or shows that air in installments, such as stories with multiple segments.
Tales of the City
One such tale WUTC’s “Operation Song” series, covering the Nashville-based nonprofit of the same name, which is dedicated to supporting veterans through songwriting. Featured on Around and About Chattanooga, the stories were popular radio broadcasts, but, as a series of downloads, spin a larger saga.
Listening to a segment of the Memorial Day special, I hear a choir singing, a woman speaking about the death of her husband in the Chattanooga terrorist attack, and different takes, from rough to finished, of the commemorative song “Chattanooga Rain.” The listener is immersed in the music and raw emotion. Around and About’s news director and executive producer Michael Edward Miller’s voice appears late and infrequently.
“I was there during the [song-writing process], so I have different versions,” Michael says. “Like any writing process, you make a way-too-long first draft, and then you play it for people, get guidance on what to cut out and rearrange, and then get guidance from more people, and just slowly winnow it down into something that makes sense without narration, and that flows logically and can tell the entire story without having to have somebody there to literally tell the story.
“And that is by far the most difficult kind of audio thing to do. Even with TV or film or documentary, you can do a lot with images…trying to do something like that without any narration…if you didn’t get the right sound bite you just have to figure out what you can do.”
To make that happen—an audio story told largely without a narrator—Michael draws on exhaustive on-the-ground research. Once interviews and sound files are collected, he creates a story just like a writer would.
Michael notes that podcasting is a continuum from amateur to professional. Around and About is designed as a radio program that’s also a podcast, but there are many similarities with home podcasters, such as delivery method. On the other hand, WUTC’s podcasts stay broad in topic rather than appealing a niche market, as would be more common for a hobbyist.
In another difference from live broadcast, a podcast’s biggest audience is at the beginning of a file, Michael says. People leave if they’re bored.
“Radio is much less linear,” he says. “People are tuning in and out all the time. You can never know for sure at what point in a radio story the most people are going to be listening. So, particularly in a long-form interview, you have to be careful to constantly re-introduce the subject and, for a feature piece, to produce it in a way that it still makes sense if somebody only caught the last half of it.”
Coming next: Radio drama Butter in a Lordly Dish
Where: Coach House Theatre at the Akron Woman’s City Club, 732 W. Exchange St.
When: 7 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 1 p.m. matinee Sept. 23
Cost: $10 for show only, $35 for dinner and show
Information: www.coachhousetheatre.com/shows/118/ for Brown Paper Tickets order or call 330-434-7741
The live Agatha Christie radio play Yellow Iris made for a fun vintage evening as the drama played out in the elegant, wood-paneled ballroom of the Akron Woman’s City Club on Thursday night.
Yellow Iris was the second of three radio plays to be performed live over three weeks to open the 90th season for Coach House Theatre. The plays, directed by three young female directors, are classic 1940s BBC radio mysteries that were believed to have been lost.
Coach House now has the distinction of being the first nonprofit theater in the world to present the three plays, together called Murder in the Studio. And it’s the second theater, after a professional 2013 production in Clearwater, Fla., to perform the scripts live since their rediscovery in the archives of a London library.
The beautiful ballroom setting is a nice change of pace for the performances, which can be coupled with dinner or seen on a show-only basis. New artistic director JT Buck’s goal is to strengthen the partnership between the community theater and its parent organization, the Akron Woman’s City Club, as well as celebrate a longstanding tradition of producing Christie plays at the theater.
On Thursday night, those who came for the show only had some awkward seating choices, with chairs lined up against the side walls of the ballroom and dining tables in the middle. That left some obstructed seating and some hovering behind dining tables. Open tables left in the ballroom provided much more comfortable seating with good sight lines.
Yellow Iris, directed by Francine Parr of Akron’s Millennial Theatre Project, featured five actors bringing to life an enjoyable murder mystery with detective Hercule Poirot. The actors, dressed in vintage-looking skirts, jackets, suits and hats, walked around and mingled with the diners a bit before the show’s start.
One of the beauties of presenting a radio show, in this case, was that middle-aged actresses could portray young women. They included Michele McNeal as the sultry, deep-voiced Peruvian dancer Senora Valdez and Cathy Csanyi as the 20-year-old Pauline Weatherby.
Joining them were Ryan Dyke as Poirot, a strong actor with a good French accent; Molly Clay playing a waiter and Tony; and Luke Ehlert as party host Barton as well as his friend, Carter. The actors held their scripts and spoke into a stand-up microphone just as they would have in a 1940s radio show.
In this story, the American Barton has arranged a dinner party at the hotel Jardin des Cygnes under mysterious circumstances. A woman calls Poirot in distress and asks him to come help her, but doesn’t identify herself.
Detective Poirot shows up determined to get to the bottom of things, and with his sixth sense, starts sniffing out clues. The tension mounts heading into what appears to be a re-enactment of a tragic event four years earlier.
Most of the five actors created distinct characterizations, but it was at times difficult to determine whether Ehlert was delivering the lines of Barton or Carter, which created a temporary disconnect following the story elements. Csanyi also was guilty of speaking with unnatural-sounding inflection and sounding artificial when her character Pauline was distressed.
Adding to the old-fashioned ambience were Chalker Conrad’s live radio sound effects, including a ringing bell, phone and some drums. And Buck himself played the grand piano and sang a bit during lovely musical interludes.
Buck has created a fun concept, kicking off the season in this style at the club, starting with Miranda Dolson’s direction of Personal Call last weekend. The run will wrap up Thursday through Sept. 23 with the third radio drama, Butter in a Lordly Dish, directed by Rosilyn Jentner. In this story, prosecution barrister Sir Luke Enderby gets his comeuppance in gruesome Christie murder.
Arts writer Kerry Clawson may be reached at 330-996-3527 or kclawson@thebeaconjournal.com.
The BBC is taking a step back to make a splash in the audio drama world. Check out this article in The Verge about new interactive audio dramas:
The BBC is known for producing radio plays, but the format is about to get a high-tech twist: a new experiment by the broadcasting company will turn traditional audio dramas into interactive stories.
One new radio play — a comedy / science fiction story titled The Inspection Chamber — will work similarly to a choose your own adventure book or game. Listeners will hear a chunk of the story, and then be presented with a choice of what should happen next. It was developed by the BBC’s R&D division, which worked with an audio company called Rosina Sound. The piece is said to take inspiration from games like The Stanley Parable and Papa Sangre, especially in terms of exploring new ways to offer interactive fiction. You can listen to some of it now over at the BBC’s R&D blog.
The BBC says it has developed a “story engine” that makes it easy to release the same story on multiple platforms, so The Inspection Chamber will be available on both Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices when it releases later this year. The company is also exploring the possibility of expanding to Cortana smart speakers or Apple’s HomePod when those devices are released.
FUTURAMA, Leela, Bender, Fry, 1999-present. TM and Copyright (c) 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.
If you’re a huge fan of Futurama and of course we already know you’re a fan of audio drama you’re in for a massive treat. The iconic cartoon from Matt Groaning and David X. Cohen is returning! For a single episode on The Nerdist Podcast Frye, Bender, Leela, the Professor, Zoidberg, Amy, Hermes and the gang will all be coming back into the world of audio! Entertainment Weekly gives us all the details of the incredible return with a forty minute audio extravaganza on September 14th! Set your time capsules for the future! Heck, you don’t even need to wait until New Year’s Eve!
The incredible Tanja Milojevic from Lightning Theater of the Mind passed on this gem of acting tips. Gravy for the Brain provides for the voice actor anything they need to know in Secrets of Preventing Mouth Clicks:
This article aims to help voiceover artists with the much-complained-about problem of mouth clicks on voiceover recordings.
People think that mouth clicks are the same as having bad looks – you just have to deal with them. But it’s not true! Very, very few people have physiological problems which affect their mouth noise. The vast majority of people are just not doing it right!
You can edit mouth clicks from voiceover recordings after the event quite easily once you know how, but this is time-consuming and a pain in one’s posterior.
So, I’m going to show you how to get rid of mouth clicks, once and for all.
Mouth clicks are often referred to as clicky mouth, dry mouth or mouth noise in the voiceover industry. They can occur for a number of different reasons. They are also incredibly off-putting.
Having bad mouth clicks can stop you getting hired at auditions and can most definitely stop you getting re-hired.
“I myself have even re-recorded an entire 5-hour session with a new voiceover artist …because the original lady was too noisy. It would have cost us more to edit her than to pay another VO. That’s the detrimental effect mouth clicks can have. “
Mouth-clicks sounds like little clicks or pops that are during, before or after speech. Almost all human beings have some kind of mouth noise when they talk. It’s caused by the tongue, teeth and saliva creating little bubbles, clicks and pops as the speech is made.
Normally when we talk to people we don’t hear their mouth clicks, unless they are exceptionally prevalent or they are very dehydrated (usually hungover)! Our ears tend to filter out the little clicks that we do hear as irrelevant.
Typically, smokers of 200 Marlboro’s a day are more clicky than others, but then so are those who drink a lot of coffee in the mornings. Again, this is all down to being dehydrated; both cigarettes and caffeine are diuretics, meaning that they effectively sap the water from your body!
In point of fact, the reason that being dehydrated makes you clicky is that your natural saliva is less wet. => Less water in the mouth means your mouth is drier and stickier. => Sticky saliva means mouth clicks.
So that’s being dehydrated. But it’s not all just about dehydration. Ironically though:
How unfair!!!
Of course, this isn’t actually true, but it isn’t as silly as it sounds. Voiceover artists who are dehydrated tend to gulp down as much water as they can in a short space of time. Having lots of water in the mouth is going to make the action of the tongue just as likely to make mouth noises as a sticky mouth.
Answer?
Mouth clicks are emphasised as part of the recording & post-production process.
The audio signal is recorded and then the post-production process of compression is applied to the voiceover recording.
“Compression effectively reduces the ratio between the loudest parts of the speech waveform and the quietest parts of the speech waveform. You can think of compression like putting the waveform in a vice and squashing the loudest bits closer to the quietest bits.”
This has an interesting net effect: the overall volume becomes quieter so you need to turn it up for it to be as audible as it was when you delivered it into the mic. (Normally done either through volume increase or normalisation)
(It’s imperative to understand here, that all vocal recordings must be compressed or they cannot be mixed with any other audio. So before you say it, no you can’t miss out the compression step!)
Take a look at this image of a speech waveform with a click in it (highlighted in white) before compression is applied:
Now take a look at it after compression – the click is the same size, the rest of the waveform is ‘smaller’:
And finally let’s turn the whole waveform back up to the same audible level:
You can clearly see that the mouth click is now much louder than it was before, relative to the original recording. Not only have we raised up the noise floor with compression, we’ve made the mouth clicks louder too.
Rats!
Yep – that’s right.
So now you know that in advance, it makes sense to try and eradicate the problem at source. For every mouth click you accidentally perform, you will end up with a much louder and more audible mouth click on the finished recording.
“Yes, you can edit out mouth clicks after the event, but it’s a pain in the arse and time-consuming – so get it right at source!”
Ok, well that’s all well and good, but how do we get it right during the recording process??
Why? As I’ve mentioned before…
Lack of hydration = less water in the mouth = sticky saliva = mouth clicks.
The problem with hydration though, is that the body can only take in water at a certain rate. Downing two litres of water 10 minutes before a session is of no use whatsoever. Your body will not have enough time to distribute this evenly around the body and into the mouth consistently. The result of this is that you have too much water in your mouth as you’re always drinking to catch up. Alas, then, you are still dehydrated at the start of the session.
The secret is that you need to start hydrating at least two hours before your session starts. Take in enough water to make sure that you are properly hydrated.
I had a chap say to me in our Elite Voiceover Mentoring Program recently that he was confused, because he regularly drank two litres but was still dehydrated. It turns out he was drinking two litres of Coca-Cola. Which is a diuretic, so of course…he would stay dehydrated.
When we talk about hydration – we mean water – water is all you need.
Being properly hydrated not only means that you won’t have as clicky a delivery but it also means that you are protecting your vocal cords. Your vocal cords are two pieces of vibrating mucous membrane that vibrate and rub together at high-speed. If your mucous levels go down (due to dehydration) the cords cause more friction when they rub together and you end up with a sore throat. Your voice will get deeper and more gravelly.
Cue George Best on any given morning….
So avoid any diuretics – coffee, caffeine, Coke, dairy, tea, Red Bull and so on – and just drink water.
Incidentally, if you have an early morning session, it’s important to start your hydration the night before as we lose a lot of water when we are sleeping. Proof of this is the fact that we always need a wee in the morning. If you have an early morning session and are dehydrated, the chances are you won’t have enough time to hydrate fully before the session. On my long-form projects, we start at 9am and so hydration the previous night is drilled into my voice-artists!
Your distance to the microphone and how loud you project are key components in fighting the mouth-noise battle.
If you consider then the extreme example of me shouting at you from 30 feet away, the relative balance between the volume of my dialogue to my mouth noise is going to be huge. You will never hear my mouth clicks. Delivering dialogue louder does not increase mouth noise as well, as mouth noise is just the tongue, saliva and teeth working together.
Likewise, if I put my mouth next to your ear and whisper to you, you are much, much more likely to hear my mouth clicks.
No matter how loud you shout, or how soft you whisper, the mouth noise and clicks will remain the same volume…
This is replicated in the same way in front of a microphone. We have to control the input gain (input recording level) so that you are recording at a nice, appropriate level which isn’t too quiet/loud and isn’t clipping.
If you are close to the mic (say 3 inches) and whispering, you will need to turn up the input gain to record at a suitable level. Therefore, the dialogue is quiet, and the noise floor and your mouth noises are louder, comparatively.
If you are further away from the mic (say 7-8 inches, use a ruler, don’t ask your husband) and projecting slightly louder than normal speech, you will need to turn the input gain down. Therefore, the dialogue is nice and loud and the noise floor and your mouth clicks are quieter, comparatively.
So the headline here is – back off the mic, and project more = less mouth noise.
Incidentally, if you are wanting to do that close-up and personal style of bass-proximity effect commercial recording – you just have to deal with the fact that you will have more post-production editing to do to remove the mouth clicks – simple as that – you’ve just got a nice rich, bassy, commercial sound – you can’t have your cake and eat it!!
Is this Hugh banging on about hydration…again???
Yes, I’m afraid it is. You see, most voice artists forget that while you are speaking during a voiceover session, you are dehydrating. The more you talk the more you’re using your vocal cords, the more your saliva-mucus-balance is reducing, and the more clicky you will become.
“It’s perfectly normal for a voice artist to come into the booth, click-free only to sound like she’s eating space-dust 45 minutes later.”
if you remember, I said that the body can only take in water at a certain rate. You’ve done all the good work in hydrating yourself before the session and now you’re dehydrating. You need to keep up with the water drinking throughout.
This…is the mark of a pro. I’m always terribly pleased when I see a VO come to a session armed with a bottle of water. I’m also disappointed when they aren’t.
So, constant sipping of water is essential – I usually get my VO’s to sip a little every 10-15 lines or so. Yes, you will be on the toilet in every single break, but you will be re-hired because your voice sounds delicious.
If you don’t do this – especially in modern air-conditioned studios – clickyness will ensue! You have been warned!
Just remember though:
Ok, so look, everyone knows that if you eat half a green apple, your clicky-mouth will cease almost instantly. In fact, this works with anything that has that sharp, citric acid. This cleans through the mouth and eradicates the nasty, clicky, dehydrated saliva.
But…I am here to tell you that:
You want headlines? I got headlines – concentrate on steps 1-3 and you won’t need green apples.
I think I’ve been saying this for some years now, and most recently in the Bill Hollweg Retrospective but Dirk Maggs is to the audio drama medium as Steven Spielberg is to movies. Master of the Film Source of the modern audio drama movement, Mr. Maggs has been working tirelessly producing action adventure audio for many years now.
So naturally Audible Range asked the question Who is this Dirk Maggs and why does he rule so hard? Because one of the wonderful things about Audio Drama is it keeps getting rediscovered again and again!
Dirk speaks about his experiences with audio drama and his new X-Files release. Check out the interview, and if you want to hear the man himself as he abides, check out our interview Maggsnifiscent Audio.
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