A long long time ago, in this galaxy, movies were born. It is unknown what is officially the “first ever film”, but we know it was released in the late 19th century and they were nothing more than a series of still images linked together with frighteningly no sound. This iteration of the art form would include intertitles, put simply; these were frames of film with text on them, usually used in place of dialogue or sound effects so that the audience could fill in the gaps. This was good but there was still something missing. Music would then be played live in auditoriums were movies were being shown, which was the first use of sound in cinema. Entire orchestras would be set up in the pit below the screen to play along with the movies, meaning every time the movie played, the experience would be minutely different. And for a while this was enough for people, music synchronised to a moving image. What happened next would blow the brains of the people of the roaring 20s.

Al Jolson was a titanically famous singer and comedian who made cinematic history on October 6th 1927, as the first person to speak on screen, in movies or television, for his role in Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927). Discounting this movies enormous historical significance it was also a commercial home run, grossing around $2.6 million, which may not sound like much by today’s standards, but adjusted for inflation that money is worth $39.5 million today. And from that point on that is how movies were made, microphones on set to record the actors which encouraged the emergence of the traditional Hollywood studio soundstage; because the microphones were so temperamental and extremely sensitive, soundstages needed to be built in order to record clean enough audio.

Although leaps and bounds were being made in the music industry with artists like The Beatles and their producer George Martin making use of stereo recording, no such progression was being applied to film. That is until 1976, when Barbara Streisand insisted on implementing Stereo sound to A Star is Born. A feat that cost her $1 million of her own money. But this decision along with the rapid developments being made by Dolby Digital at the time, signified a turning point in cinematic sound which was about to be blown out of the water by the godfather of sound design, Walter Murch.

Speaking of The Godfather (1972), this was a watershed moment for Francis Ford Coppola and his contemporaries as they would go on to dominate the next 25 years of cinema. Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, all friends, are widely considered some of the best and most influential filmmakers of all time. However, simultaneously we were experiencing a renaissance in sound design. George Lucas first met Walter Murch at USC in 1965, and Lucas went on to introduce Murch to Francis Ford Coppola in 1969, a relationship which would go on to span many decades and produce countless critical acclaim.

In the same way these four directors would help each other over the years, the same thing was happening in the sound department. When Walter Murch wasn’t available to work on Star Wars (1977) with George Lucas, he recommended Ben Burtt, who went on to win an academy award for the film. Similarly, Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, originally wanted Ben Burtt to do sound design for their first short film Luxo Jr. (1986), but Burtt wasn’t available, so along came Gary Rydstrom, who has since won a staggering seven academy awards.

Let’s rewind a little bit back to 1979 when Francis Ford Coppola embarked on what would become notoriously known as the most difficult film production of all time. I am of course referring to Apocalypse Now (1979). Francis Ford Coppola literally and figuratively went through a war to get this movie made and he wasn’t interested in cutting any corners, this is includes the sound design. He got the man he trusted the most, Walter Murch, to champion the sound design but not to sell himself short Francis Ford Coppola asked Walter Murch to design the sound not in mono, not in stereo, but in full 360º. Up until this point Murch had only worked in mono. But he and his team made up of Richard Beggs, Mark Berger and Randy Thom got to work and 18 months of sound editing and 9 months of sound mixing later, the film was done. The rest is history.

This six-track full 360º audio is more or less the sound we still use today, albeit at a higher quality with Dolby Atmos. However, there is still a little bit more innovation to be squeezed out of the history of sound design. As I mentioned briefly earlier, Luxo Jr. was the first of Pixar’s now illustrious filmography and Gary Rydstrom pioneered something we take for granted nowadays. Up until Rydstrom started work on Luxo Jr. sound was still being edited and mixed in analog. Rydstrom was the first person to design sound on a digital device, which is something we all have access to nowadays with programmes such as Audacity and Audition.

And this is whereabouts the innovation ends; sound is now being captured, edited and mixed digitally. Cinemas have now embraced the 360º sound which was pioneered by Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch.

Despite how cutting edge locative audio apps are, there have a variety of studies in human response to sound and music in particular. Three professors from the University of Nottingham conducted a study into musically guided walking experiences. They start by noting the day to day influences that music can have on us. They highlight that ‘People now routinely select music to accompany physical activities, curating their own mobile soundtracks.’ (2014) these mobile soundtracks can be in the form of Spotify or Apple Music playlists or just sporadic music that people choose to play when doing particular activities. They also explain that humans subliminally ‘mirror physical actions to match the tempo of the music’. I can say from personal experience that this is very true. If I am going to be typing something that is quite long I will listen to piano music, usually without lyrics so it almost feels like I am playing the piano when I am typing. Personally, I get distracted by anything that has lyrics or is too electronic when I am trying to work, so I purposely listen to classical music. They go on to explain how music driving spatial attachment at various levels. The way I interpret this is that music can bring back memories and remind you of a certain time or place. An alternative viewpoint is that tone of music can influence how you feel or can influence how you physically move. This moves us onto how they attempt to prove this hypothesis.

The study was relatively simple, they would place participants in the centre of a field and play them all the same piece of music, from there the participants would move where the music takes them. As they move to different areas, different pieces of music would play causing different reactions and further emotionally charged movements. When they experiment finishes they would analyse how different music influence participants. What they found was that tone was very important in influencing direction, for example C2 (a piece of music that was played) was scary and encouraged people to move on from that area. Also interestingly, participants were influenced by the lack of music and they found that ‘silence can be used to indicate an end or ultimate arrival or to disengage’ (Hazzard).

In conclusion, as to how this influenced my project in particular I think although we didn’t use music throughout the app, we tried to use elements of the sound mix to influence the how the user would move for example as you approach the church, you would subtly hear church bells which would ultimately urge you towards that area.

HAZZARD, A., S. BENFORD and G. BURNETT, 2014. Walk this Way: Musically Guided Walking Experiences.

Geo-locative apps are by the far the most cutting edge technology I have tackled thus far in my degree. Despite their simplicity and the similarity they bare to tech used in places like museums and guided tours, it has now fallen into the hands of fictional storytellers. In a journal by German cartographers Indans, Hauthal and Burghardt, these cutting edge applications are broken down and I am going to attempt to make sense of it myself. They start by comparing this technology to the visual AR (augmented reality). They recognise the shortcomings that audio can have in comparison in that ‘audio information cannot augment reality to the same extent however with subtle changes can create a seamless experience’ (2019). So where visual AR attempts to transport you to another world, audio attempts to add light and shade to try and enhance the real world. However, audio can be just as immersive, they explain it as ‘an acoustic envelope’, so although visual AR can take you to another place altogether, the audio creates a smoother transition into that world. Although visual AR is the one that has become more mainstream I would argue that the audio is actually more important. I think that visual AR would not survive without audio but audio AR can survive without visuals.

The cartographers go on to provide examples of applications that have succeeded in creating immersive audio experiences for their users. For example, ‘Zombies, run!’ is a jogging app that encourages users to run faster to evade zombies that are chasing them down. It also challenges users to improvise running routes in order to avoid zombies. The app provides a map however the main element is the zombie sounds that are triggered when you encounter a zombie or are being chased by one. Reading this reminded me of another game that required users to get out and about in order play, ‘Pokémon Go’ which was a massive phenomenon when it was released by Niantic in July of 2016. Although this app leaned more into the visual AR than the audio it’s geo-locative gamification is something that was highlighted in the journal. Gamification is something I really wanted to lean into when creating our app as well. I think our story being a murder mystery would really benefit from gamification elements to help drive the story forward.

The final element touched upon by the cartographers was the idea of personalised experience. This is the idea that users can pick their own time and place in order to create their own experience of the audio track. This could be done with audio books or maybe a particular favourite soundtrack. Of course with our app, users have to be in a certain place to enjoy the experience however they are still able to customise the time they go to the place. The experience may be calmer in the morning or more scary at night. It all depends on what you want to get out of the experience. But again this all links back to the immersiveness of locative audio. You create your own experience with the audio provided and I think locative audio has a very bright future because of it.

INDANS, R., E. HAUTHAL and D. BURGHARDT, 2019. Towards an Audio-Locative Mobile Application for Immersive Storytelling .

As we move closer to our deadline of our geo-locative audio app it’s time to put some thought into our critical reflection. Now our brief states that ‘critical reflections require you to evidence a critical and creative enquiry into narrative fiction as it relates to your specialist individual production project’. But what is ‘narrative fiction’? So I’m here to tell  you.

In the book written by Marie-Laure Ryan entitled ‘Towards a definition of narrative’ Ryan says that ‘Narrative is about problem solving, conflict, interpersonal relations, human experience and the temporality of existence’ (2007). So let’s break that all down. Firstly, problem solving, without a problem to solve the story doesn’t move, we are stuck in a endlessly easy cycle of life, nothing to overcome. There needs to be mission to complete, a task to conquer a villain to defeat, otherwise the narrative is pretty bland. Secondly, conflict, every narrative has to have some friction or tension in order to built up some suspense or keep the audience engaged. Next, interpersonal relationships, human to human contact, the audience need to feel something: something to hate, something to love, something to cry at. Next, human experience, this is all about growth, that’s why character arcs are important however they need to grounded for the audience to understand them and relate to them personally. Finally temporality of existence, this is about time and more importantly about lack there of it. Death essentially. We need to know that the characters in the story are at risk. That’s why I’ve never liked Superman, he’s pretty much invincible, an alien, who looks like a human who can’t die, what’s interesting about that? All narratives have to come to an end, that’s what temporality of existence means.

Ryan also breaks down narrative into 4 dimensions, of which she believes all narratives must have: Spatial dimension, temporal dimension, mental dimension and formal and pragmatic dimension. Spatial dimensions refers to the idea that ‘the world must be populated with individuated existents‘ (pg.29a) which I interpret like a video game. A crowd of people in a video game usually don’t have intelligence, they are just told by the programmer to walk and maybe talk, but no backstory or complexity.  So, for a story world to feel real and lived in these characters must have backstories and complexes. The temporal dimension refers to the idea that ‘the world must be situated in a certain time and that limitation of time can be used to create tension’ (pg.29b) for example Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) works solely due to the fact that they must submit their assignment by the end of the day. Thirdly, the mental dimension, ‘some participants in the event must be intelligent agents’ (pg.29c) this means that characters must have thoughts and feelings to challenge and react to the events of the story world. Finally, formal and pragmatic dimension, which is the one I disagree with the most, as it states that ‘the sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure’ (pg.29d) which I don’t think is necessarily true, closure isn’t always needed, it can be disappointing for audiences but if it is grounded in truth then closure can be ignored.

Now, as to how this relates to my particular project. My story is called ‘The Story of Will Trodd’ and is a murder mystery adventure set in the late 1950s. So in terms of the first 5 aspects of narrative I spoke about my story has problem solving as it is a murder mystery. It has conflict as you encounter the characters alongside the main character. There is small interpersonal relationships between characters like the sailors. The main characters is forced to undergo change and learn new things as you travel through the story world. And ultimately the temporality of existence is front as centre because someone dies. As we are limited to the 6-8 minute run time it is difficult to cram in all the complexity that Ryan speaks about and its difficult for me as first time fiction writer but I’ve tried to draw inspiration from movies and Tv shows I have watched and hopefully the end result is as good as I think its going to be.

RYAN, M., 2007. Toward a definition of narrative .