Audio tutorial ▫︎ sonic storytelling

Laura: Here is a secret every great storyteller knows: no conflict, no story. You’ve heard us say that often in these modules. But there’s another secret that gets less play: conflict doesn’t just apply to words, but to sound.

As a lifelong fiction writer and musician, I took it for granted that both stories and songs evoke emotions. Only when I began producing Shelter in Place did I begin to understand that perhaps the best and most intriguing offspring of words and music is conflict.

Conflict is the problem to solve, the reason the story exists, the thing that keeps us watching or reading or listening. The rules of conflict shapeshift with the medium. When we pick up a book or magazine or sit down in front of a movie, we assume a certain patience that isn’t typically found with podcasting. We’re probably not trying to walk our dog or do the dishes or drive at the same time. Maybe it’s even cost us something—money, time, our Friday night—to wait for the story to get good.

With podcasting, the assumption is that listeners are distracted before they’ve begun, that they need to be convinced to stick around. We might have minutes—or even seconds—to capture their attention. In this sense, podcasting is a lot like music. Melodies, like conflict, have resolutions. Beats and chords and catchy guitar licks invite us to ride along the story and see what happens next. Those first few seconds will determine whether listeners will keep listening. If they do, they might return to that artist again and again. This is true with podcasts too. If our listeners know they can expect a certain reliable sound experience, that will become part of the reason they keep coming back.

In this module, which we’re calling Sonic Storytelling, we’re going to look at how to choose music and sound effects that will make our stories sing. As usual, we’ll look at the big picture to understand some basic principles of sound design, and then we’ll zoom in close to specific ways that we can play with sound to enhance our stories.

Nate: One of the best things I learned in advertising portfolio school, that I’ve used over and over again in my work with print and web designers and have even taught in college classes, are the three principles of visual design: hierarchy, contrast, and repetition.

But the epiphany I had when Laura and I began working on episodes together was that all of these principles apply not just to visual design, but to sound design as well.

Let’s go through those one by one and we’ll show you what we mean.

Hierarchy means that there’s a clear ranking for the listener of what is primary, what is secondary, and what is tertiary.

Laura: Think about this in terms of volume levels. Sure, you could level everything exactly the same, and some people do, but especially if your music has a lot of instrumentation, you can quickly run the risk of creating a whole lot of noise.

At Shelter in Place, we made an early decision about hierarchy that was in response to feedback we were getting from listeners. We took a listener survey to ask people if they liked or disliked the music, and what they thought about the volume levels. We also had conversations with people in our life who we know listened to the show. What we learned surprised us: while most of our listeners didn’t have strong opinions about the music or generally liked it, there were two listeners who were so bothered by the music that they sometimes had to stop listening. My dad and one of my best friends both wear hearing aids, and they told me that if the music was too loud, they couldn’t hear anything else. We made a conscious choice from that point forward to make sure that our music volume levels were low enough that the speaking voices in our voice over and interview tape could always be heard clearly.

A key part of that final listen-through is tweaking levels so music doesn’t compete, and paying special attention to places where things like horns, violins, or snare drums might start to ramp up the noise level a little too much and need to be adjusted.

We err on the side of the music being too soft, and we know that the tradeoff for that is that if you listen to our episodes while you’re driving on the highway, you’ll probably miss some of that great music—but that tradeoff was worth it to us so we could make our episodes listenable to more populations with different needs—including those two people who are very important to me.

You may make different decisions about hierarchy, and that’s okay. If you are intentionally trying to create a cacophonous soundscape, dramatize mental illness or emotional distress or a chaotic crowd, then having many competing voices or sounds would be appropriate. Here’s a clip from our season 2 episode “The Noise Inside,” which is a dramatized short story that takes you inside the experience of a woman who is experiencing a stroke and struggling to communicate.

Nate: the second principle of visual design is contrast. Differences between loud and soft, between tones of voice, between fast and slow music, energetic versus contemplative — all these create interest for the listener. Clear contrast also shows intention, and communicates the care you have put in as a creator, which is another way of telling your listener you respect them and value their attention.

We’ve probably all fallen asleep in classes where the teacher’s delivery was monotonous. Of course, if you’re doing a sleep aid podcast, then in that steady tone might be a good thing! But for those of us who don’t want to put our listeners to sleep, something as simple as varying the cadence and pitch of your voice to match the tone of the subject matter in the story can provide contrast.

To make a visual comparison, we have probably all seen page layouts done by design novices, where there are a bunch of different fonts that all sort of look the same. Was it intentional? Was it on purpose? It’s confusing to the reader — and in the same way, a lack of clear contrast for a listener is also confusing, and confusion is bad, because confusion makes people more likely to not pay attention.

So another way to create that clear contrast is going back and forth between your voiceover and interview clips. (This is an especially helpful tool if your guest’s voice is not very expressive). Boring voices, bad audio quality, distracting sounds—most listeners won’t mind putting up with a certain amount of those things as long as they get some relief in between.

Laura: You can also provide contrast through your music choices. Obviously you can choose different types of music within the same episode to create contrast, but you can also create contrast between the music and the subject matter or the story itself.

If you’re working on a very sad story, your gut instinct may be to pair it with sad music—and that is certainly one direction you could take it. But what happens when you go a different direction? What if instead of sad piano, you choose blues guitar? Or a paired down piece that sounds suspenseful? Or something that has a beat and gives you a sense of momentum?

One of the exercises you’ll do this week is to create three different versions of your episode trailer by pairing the same audio with three very different music choices. If you created the trailers assigned during the past few weeks, you’re welcome to use one of those. If you’d rather start fresh, that’s fine too. Either way, try to select an audio clip from your episode that is less than a minute long (ideally one that tells a good story and already has conflict baked in). This could include voice over or interview tape or both. Then head to a royalty-free music site like Storyblocks, Blue Dot Sessions, or Epidemic Sound. If you don’t have access to those, we’ve provided some music from our own library that you’re welcome to use. Set a timer for fifteen minutes, and find as many songs as you can for each of the following categories: 1) Music you’re immediately drawn to—the first thing that occurs to you. 2) Music that feels like a bit of a stretch, but pushes you slightly outside your comfort zone. 3) Music that is borderline ridiculous and probably won’t work, but that for some reason you like.

Now take your audio clip from your episode and make three versions of it, one from each of those folders. We encourage you to let yourself get a little silly with this exercise. Try things that you normally wouldn’t. See this as another creative experiment. It doesn’t have to work the first time.

Our brains want to go to what’s familiar and comfortable. It’s why clichés exist. But when we’re forced to work fast—when we don’t have time to overthink our decisions—we find ourselves in more interesting territory.

We’ve done this exercise dozens of times with our trainees, and it’s one of our favorites. Almost always, people are surprised by how much they can accomplish in such a short amount of time. Often the folder that yields the most interesting results isn’t their gut instinct, but is the third folder where they were letting their imagination run wild.

Before we move on to the next principle, let’s take a moment to talk about one of your most powerful methods of employing contrast as a podcaster: silence. In a noisy world, silence is the ultimate contrast. Whatever is said right after the music stops is going to sound important to your listeners—even if it isn’t! This is true to a lesser extent to the point where the music begins. These moments of contrast make your listeners’ ears perk up, so use that to your advantage. Our season 3 trailer has a rather dramatic example of this, where we used silence to jolt our listeners awake on purpose:

Silence can also be used to emphasize a moment when you really want your listener to focus on something powerful that’s being said. Sometimes interview tape or Voiceover is working so well on its own that you don’t actually need music in that moment. Making decisions about where not to add music is just as important as decisions about where to add it. Those decisions—as well as decisions about whether or not your contrast will be dramatic or incredibly subtle—will vary by person and podcast. A lot of them come down to your own artistic opinions. But if you start paying attention to those decisions, you can start using them as tools in your creative toolbox, things you can pick up easily when you need them.

Nate: A third principle of visual design is repetition.

Human beings are always searching for patterns in life, clues about the world that will help us pull meaning from the chaos and disorder. Again, to compare to the visual world, repetition shows intention — that something is there on purpose — which we find pleasing. Repeated flagstones on a path, repeated fonts on a page, repeated songs in a podcast: all of these make us feel good because we can tell that the environment has been shaped with care.

Repetition is a way of creating a pattern, and we can use that pattern to soothe or calm, to trigger a memory, or even to foreshadow some conflict that’s coming. If you’ve ever seen the original Star Wars trilogy, then you’ve already experienced this through music. When you hear Princess Lea’s theme song, your heart swells. When the Imperial March comes on, you know something bad is about to happen.

If you’re not a Star Wars fan, you can check out this week’s inspiration, where David Bowie narrates Peter and the Wolf and each animal has a different instrument assigned to it. You can also start listening for these principles of repetition in music choices in pretty much any movie or TV show.

In our Shelter in Place episodes, we’ll often choose a small handful of pieces of music that will be included in an episode, but there will be one or two of them that come back again to signal something to the listener. In Everyday Magic, an episode we’ve listed in our further reflections section, there’s a piece of music you’ll hear whenever Cathy is in Paris or referring back in some way to that time in her life.

Laura: One of the tools we’ve included in this week’s module is my personal step-by-step guide to audio editing and sound design, the order that I do specific tasks in every episode. It’s a list that I’ve done it so many times that I know the steps by heart and they’re intuitive. But it’s also a list that I’ve given myself permission to play around with and change a lot over time.

When I first began doing sound design, I worried that I didn’t know enough to do it right. But then I started having so much fun with it that I forgot my imposter syndrome.

I encourage you to think of sound design as something that you’re playing with, that you will always be learning how to do differently, and the learning is part of the fun of it. Challenge yourself to go beyond your gut instinct. Let yourself be silly. Let it surprise and delight you. Let it make your stories sing.