Great Northern downloads
from all over the Internet

You can get individual stories at Audible.com, or at SpokenNetwork.com (U.K.). You can download the great and silly alike from the new Echo Fiction website. They've got eleven of our works all bundled up in the "Great Northern Live" Digital Box Set.

And this from the ZBS Summer Fantasies catalog: The Pretty Much Complete Stearns & Price productions are now downloadable. These two brilliant guys, also known as, "The Great Northern Audio Theatre," have a finely tuned sense of humor. Some of their titles are: "Dialogue with Martian Trombone," featuring David Ossman of Firesign Theatre, "Tumbleweed Roundup," "Peter Galaxy," "Drummer´s Dome," "Permafrost," "Super Pal," and more. It´s under HUMOR at: www.zbs.org.

Audio Reviews from Great Northern

Brian Price has been reviewing audio theater and audiobooks for Audiofile magazine for some time. Lately he's gotten a new gig on the AudiobookDJ.com website, too. Take a look there for his recent essays, The Echo of One Hand Clapping, notes on audio publishing and production.

Mark Time Awards Announced

The Mark Time Awards for Best Science Fiction Audio Production, and Ogle Awards for Best Fantasy/Horror Production for the production year of 2008 were just announced. They will be presented at Convergence 2009 on July 2, in Bloomington, MN. Look for us to be there doing the annual Mark Time Radio Show, too.

• MARK TIME AWARDS - Science Fiction Audio
  
  
• GOLD Award - The Outpost
  Written & Produced by Julie Hoverson
  19 Nocturne Boulevard
  www.19nocturneboulevard.net


• SILVER Award - The Return of the Bogman Mummy
  Written by Roger Gregg
  Produced by Roger Gregg and
  The Gaiety School of Acting, Dublin, Ireland
  www.gaietyschool.com


• OGLE AWARDS - Fantasy/Horror Audio


• GOLD Award - Waiting For A Window
  Written and Produced by Fred Greenhalgh
  Final Rune Productions
  www.finalrune.com


• SILVER Award - Something Wicked This Way Comes
  Produced by Chris Snyder, Mark Vanderberg, Jerry Robbins
  Written by Ray Bradbury
  Colonial Radio Theatre
  www.colonialradio.com

Bent Echoes 

Production Notes and Opinions on Audio Theater
By Brian Price

Noise In Space

I like outer space. Some of my best friends live there. It’s a great template. It’s a great place to set up a plot, create characters and try out ideas. But like any genre outer space has certain rules, limits and pitfalls.

For science fiction, especially space fiction, there’s one problem inherent to audio, film and television sound design that drives me nuts. It makes Lucas, Roddenberry, and Straczynski all sound the same sometimes, way too much the same. I’m just going to say it. Space is boring. It sounds boring. The usual ambience on a space ship sounds like crap. There’s nothing going on.

Why is being in a space ship sound so boring? One reason might be because it’s a workplace. By definition workplaces are boring. Maybe they’re supposed to be that way. Who knows? But workplace ambiences can be deadly on sound design.

Sure, there are some very recognizable workplace ambiences: Police stations, newsrooms (although I don’t think anybody owns a typewriter anymore), carnivals, hospitals (with all those heart monitor pings). By hearing just a few sounds the listener’s imagination is immediately carried to a specific place and idea.

Not so with the background sounds of a space ship. Hummms don’t usually bring anything to the listener’s mind except hmmm; although to give the early Star Treks credit—in and among the gentle buzz were a few cool nineteen sixties style USS Enterprise technical pings and whirs going off.

Of course, when action is going to take place on a space ship (or any ship or submarine for that matter) an alarm goes off. To me alarms are like buzzers and sirens in real life—you don’t mind them for about five seconds. They kind of get your blood rushing, but then you desperately want somebody on the space ship to turn the annoying sound off. All I’m saying is that, for better or for worse, the dull hmmm and the action-packed buzz buzz buzzes are the main stays of most space science fiction sound design. Technically one of the main reasons space can sound so boring is because space doesn’t sound like anything at all. Sound waves don’t’ travel in space, it’s a vacuum, so all those big blasts and explosions you hear on TV would actually sound like pssst or Kaboom. In his Firefly series, Joss Whedon, used bright silent explosions to show a ship blowing up. Really cool, visually effective and unfortunately, not the answer to our space ship audio design problems.

One of the best ways to deal with space ship sounds is not to use background ambiences at all, but to use music. Probably the most famous example of this approach is 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Stanley Kubrick used a recognizable classical score to illustrate his universe. Tom Lopez often develops pace and mood by using jazz instrumentations to interact with the characters in his long-running Ruby series. And, of course, many producers lean towards synthesizer sounds figuring that space must sound a lot more electronic than organic, although The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy notoriously used a banjo in its theme music and there can’t be anything more organic than a banjo except for maybe a mandolin.

Another good way to deal with being on a static sounding space ship is to get off the ship. Go to a planet. Go back in time. Go into the minds of the characters. Just don’t go to the character’s office. If you’re doing audio drama go to someplace that sounds interesting. Change pace and scene to keep the sound varied and compelling.

Sometimes ships are ships. One time, to create the sound of two space ships scraping by each other, we used sfx sounds of wooden ship creaking mixed with metal railroad cars crunching —definitely got the listener’s ear believing there’d be an accident. That’s the beauty of audio—the sounds you use don’t have to be the sounds they are.

What a space fiction audio drama sound designer must be constantly trying to do is balance what is emotionally recognizable or emblematic with sounds that are creative and emotional different. The first sounds give your listener something familiar to hang on to. The next sounds create your vision for the story and your universe.

There are just so many (sometimes just a handful) sounds that create immediate recognition of setting in the listener’s mind: Crickets evoke a summer evening, sea gulls evoke a beach, and hmmm sort of, kind of, maybe makes one think of a space ship.

So say you decide to break with the tried, true and traditional Star show buzz? What if you come up with an alternate ambient background noise? That’s fine, but you’re probably going to have to explain yourself and your setting to the audience. For instance, Silent Running starring Bruce Dern, one of my all time favorite 1970s science fiction movies, had giant forest pods traveling through space--the last forests from a wrecked and defoliated Earth. For audio the sound was great, because you had birds and frogs and babbling brooks in the background. However, if that film were straight audio, somewhere along the line you’d probably have to say, “Hey look, we’ve got a forest here in space. Those darn parrots sure make a lot of noise.”

Science fiction writers and producers use Space (with a big S), because is such a great story-telling tool, but sometimes for the audio producer it’s too easy to fall back on the old buzzy tricks. It’s hard to do. It’s a tall order, but the challenge remains to design sound for an audio drama production that is varied, compelling, unobtrusive and makes sense to the story you’re going to need something more inside your head than hmmmm.

Good luck.