A person made this

By looking into alternative listening practices within the context of Modern Scripted Audio Drama, both as a medium as well as a contemporary sonic culture, this Audio paper will attempt to analyse the material qualities of Audio Drama and theorise ways that these practises may be applied. As well as give insight into how the culture of Audio Drama can be steered in a more open, accessible, experimental and radical direction.

Much of the research was done through analysis of relevant sources and interviews with several figures who work within Audio Drama who each provide a different perspective on the medium. The ultimate conclusion is an encouragement to the Audio Drama community, both listeners and producers, to learn to love and intentionally use “bad” audio and to seek out productions made by newer creators. The hope being that more marginalised voices will use audio drama to create politically radical productions and audio drama as a whole will begin to be made in more experimental ways.

Bio

Born and raised in South London, Cai Gwilym Pritchard always approaches their artistic practice with an intense love of creation, something which can be found in both their noise music as Dinas as well as on their Audio Drama, Chain of Being. They are drawn to feedback and Noise as their main sonic aesthetics due to their ability to embody and represent their queerness in a personal but also deeply political sense. Presently they are attempting to marry Audio Drama and Sound Art with both academic and practical approaches.

Bibiliography

Zeynep Bulut, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Ole Frahm, Anja Kanngieser, Brandon LaBelle, Anna Raimondo, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Åsa Stjerna, Dirty Ear Report #1, Errant Bodies: Glasgow, 2016

Andrew Brooks, ‘Glitch/Failure: Constructing a Queer Politics of Listening’, Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 25,  (2015): 37–40

Michel Chion, trans. Claudia Grobman, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press: 2019)

Geoffrey Heptonstall, ‘NEW DIRECTIONS FOR RADIO DRAMA’. RSA Journal, vol. 136, no. 5380 (March 1988): 273–275

D Jackson, ‘Earwitnessing the Queer Acoustics of Public Space: Law, Sex and Nature in Ultra-red’s Second Nature‘. Law Text Culture,vol. 24, (2020): 328–363

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1406&context=ltc.

Ultra-Red, Five Protocols for Organised Listening (2011)

Ultra-Red, Mission Statement (2000)

Ella Watts,. Drama Podcasts An overview of the US and UK drama podcast market, (London: BBC 2016)

Watts, Audio Drama and the Art of the Invisible Wall (2020)

Watts, The Gays Destroy Capitalism in Space: the Radical Imagination of Audio Fiction (2023)