ABSTRACT
Don’t underestimate the valuable contribution that sound can make to your programs. In a good production, sound is never a casual afterthought but an essential part of its appeal. People often think of television as ‘pictures accompanied by sound’. Yet when you analyze most worthwhile television and film productions, you will find that for quite a lot of the time, it is the sound that is conveying the information and stimulating the audience’s imagination, while the picture itself is really a visual accompaniment! In a radio broadcast, we conjure up mental images of time, place and people, from just a few audio clues without any picture at all. Sounds are very evocative. Supposing, for example, you show a picture of a couple of people leaning against a wall, with the open sky as a background. If you accompany that picture with noises of waves breaking and the shrill cry of seabirds, we quickly assume that they are near the seashore. Add the sound of children at play, and now we are sure that there is a pleasure beach nearby. Replace all those sounds with the noise of battle, explosions, passing tanks, and they are immediately transported to a war situation! They might even appear particularly brave and unflappable, as they remain so calm in this tumult! In fact, all we really have here is a shot of two people leaning on a wall. The wall itself might have been anywhere – up a mountain, in a desert, or a replica in a studio. The location and the mood of the occasion have been conjured up by the sound and our imagination. As we shall see, successful audio is a blend of two things:
Appropriate techniques – the ways you use your equipment, Appropriate artistic choices – how you select and blend sounds.
