Consciousness,
Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume
1 Number 2, July 2000
_______________________________________________________________
Cognitive
Mapping and Radio Drama
by
Alan
Beck
KEYWORDS:
cognitive mapping, invariants, 'mise en scène', referentiality, 'Umwelt'
(environment)
Abstract:
Listening-in
to radio drama demands a competence in navigating or orienteering through the
fictional 'scenery' which this article investigates via the paradigm of
cognitive mapping or mental way-finding. Links are also made to the psychology
of perception, particularly in fixed-point perspective, virtual environments and
listener positioning. The article suggests that radio drama scenery and
movements offer a sort of abstract geometry of outlines and a flattening of
perspective, and that time-space-motion is compressed. Reception theory is
approached through referentiality, phenomenology and ecological anthropology,
with some final doubts about theoretical way-finding for the Humanities
academic.
Introduction
This
article looks at how the radio play listener images, in the mind, fictional
scenery from the usually sketchy information given in broadcast, in the 'blind'
medium. Processing such data for radio demands actively completing and
filling-in, drawing on the diversity of perceptual knowledge we ordinarily
assume about our Lifeworld. I particularly focus here on cognitive mapping - the
way-finding decisions and spatial constructions we make in our minds - and I
place this within a reception theory of radio drama. Our spatial awareness as
listeners is of radio scenes and locations (the aural 'mise en scène'), and of
radio characters' movements and aural physicalisation ('embodying').
As
with all fiction works, we do this task to a large extent intuitively and it is
somehow involved with our processing of incoming data from the Lifeworld, the
world-taken-for-granted we experience, and the space-time points we inhabit. The
key term for this connection between the fiction work, and aspects of the
Lifeworld to which it makes reference, is referentiality. So I will be examining
some of this referentiality - the ways the fiction work points outside of itself
- below. I am also concerned with the body's interactivity with the Lifeworld,
so I will also draw on phenomenology.
Cognitive
mapping, or mental way-finding, also forms part of our reception of the
scenographies of all performative fictions, both mediated (film, TV, radio,
etc.) and unmediated (the stage). I have not found references to cognitive
mapping in the rapidly developing studies of scenography and digital/virtual
scenography, and I hope that my application of this to reception theory will be
useful to others.
It
may seem somewhat strange to focus on locations, positioning and movement of
characters, and the 'sets' in radio drama, as radio plays are 'blind' (or
'invisible' as Bernard Shaw called them), and dominated by the verbal. But radio
characters inhabit spaces and they move around. And as I argue below, we are now
in the digital age which has revolutionised sound. I particularly welcome more
adventurous radio drama productions which assimilate techniques from the film
sound-track, and which offer more 'scenery'. I have already used the term 'mise
en scène'. This literally means 'putting into the scene' and derives originally
from the theatre where it refers to the arrangement of actors, props, and action
on a set. It has a broader application in film theory, involving overall style.
This and some other terms can be found in the Glossary below.
Way-finding through this article
My
way through this article is as follows. I will first describe cognitive mapping
and then I will link this, through phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty, with the
internalist model of the human sensorium. This latter model allows me to
acknowledge that hearing is penetrated in some way by the other four senses.
Many, in listening-in to radio, report 'seeing', 'touching', etc.
I
also emphasise the psychology of perception within reception theory, along with
rapid changes for us in this digital age. So this orienteering through radio
drama is discussed through both the psychological processes of reception and the
conditions of reception. I will draw analogies between cognitive mapping of
radio plays and visual perspective. I will include the concept of the 'Umwelt',
or environment, from ecological psychology, and apply this to the 'listening
niche' of the radio play audience and the positioning of the listener.
I
consider also how the radio play director can assure the listener of the
'reality' of 'mise en scène' and narrative, for in the blind medium, there is
not the camera to connect 'I' and 'eye'. The film apparatus is so often used in
classical Hollywood cinema to equate vision with truth. I then give an analysis
of three short scenes from a 1929 radio play, 'Ingredient X', putting the
cognitive mapping paradigm into operation. The result is, for me as a listener
at any rate, an impression of radio drama 'mise en scène' (outlines, edges and
surfaces) as being more abstract geometry, rather than textured volumes and
colours, and with a flattening of perspective. Finally, I give a personal
warning about how to research the psychology of sound from a Humanities base.
Overall,
I hope that this discussion of listener navigation offers a fresh approach to
radio drama reception theory, partly from phenomenology, and enlivened by recent
work connecting film and cognitive theory (Branigan 1992,
1997, Martin, 1990, Sweeney, 1998). It is the first attempt, to my
knowledge, that includes cognitive mapping in media reception theory.
It is also to be hoped that the topic of cognitive mapping could, in the
future, be applied to stage scenography, and to the puzzle, for example, of how
theatre audiences interpret 'on' and the mysterious 'off' in the 'mise en scène'.
Previous
discussions
These
aspects of reception theory - audience, fictional plot and perceiver's
competence - are currently much discussed. In film studies especially, there
have been approaches through narratology (Bamberg, 1987,
Branigan, 1992, xi) and through the 'interdisciplinary field known as
"cognitive science"' (Branigan, 1992, xii,
Carroll in Bordwell, 1996 48).
Branigan's study of audience schemata and levels of narration is perhaps the
best known (Allen and Smith, 1997, 3, 40). I find
Forrester's new work on 'sound as event' and sound as auditory geographies
particularly convincing and summative (Forrester, 2000).
At
the least, this article aims to rezone the ongoing debate on listener reception
of radio. There have already been valuable and insightful discussions of radio
as blind or invisible (an acutely and inventively expressed Shingler
in Shingler and Wieringa, 1998, 74 contra the monumental work of
Crisell, 1994, and Crook, 1999, 53-61, who
offers a refreshing range of new approaches). I have contributed too on this
debate (Beck, 1999b). Other relevant points are:
listeners as playing a movie within their minds (Ferrington
1993, in the section ‘Theater of the mind’), radio drama as the 'visual
track' (Felton in Langham, Felton, MacNeice and
Baker-Smith, 1949, 7) and 'the darkness of the listener's skull' (Gray
in Lewis 1981, 49). I will refer below to my approach to radio drama as
affording an 'aural paradise' (Beck, 1997b). But
there should be concern over the reliance on some few traditional metaphors in
radio reception theory and by a narrowing in debate.
Technical
terms
Already
some technical terms have been used and nuanced by me in particular ways. A
Glossary is supplied below and more can be found in Beck, 1999a. In any
discussion of radio theory and indeed, of sound, a warning has to be given that
our working vocabulary is not
sufficiently precise and varied. Lewis and Booth, 1989, xiii comment, 'radio
practice and policy lack a language for critical reflection and analysis', and
Altman calls for a 'retooling process' to deal with the film soundtrack and
sound generally (Altman, 1992, 15). Forrester
comments on the lack of conceptually rich theories in psychology here (Forrester,
2000, 4.1).
Cognitive
mapping
Cognitive
mapping is a way-finding, survival skill that enables us to deal with our worlds
spatially, and to memorise, to fantasise and to communicate about these worlds (Ungar,
1998). Downs and Stea, 1973, 18 give their definition:
...
[it is] a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which
an individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls and decodes information about the
relative locations and attributes of phenomena in his everyday spatial
environment.
Spatial
cognition is of interest to the following subject areas, among others: computer
graphics, virtual reality and virtual environments, and also geography and
architecture. They all deal in various ways with real, Euclidean space
(occupying spaces with X,Y,Z dimensions). It is how we familiarize ourselves
with and navigate spaces. Cognitive mapping is also used loosely for various
mental models in information solving, including management decision-making, but
the reference here is to mental geography only.
It
is the sort of mental activity that one uses in travelling to a friend's house,
having an internal picture of the route. A central debate is how to categorize
cognitive mapping. Is it more abstract patterns and not a formal,
representational picture (conceptual hypothesis)? There will be an argument
below in favour of the radio play listener possibly experiencing shapes, volumes
and edges more as abstract geometry. Or is it both verbal and visual-imaginal
(dual coding)? Or does one convert visual information into the verbal? This is
certainly crucial in radio drama, where so much of the 'visual' has to be
described (Crisell, 1994, 146, Beck, 1997, 84-6). Or
is one able to rotate one's mental map in 3D and flip it over to make more sense
(visual with mental rotation)? Of course, in real-life interaction, the full
sensorium is in use and included also may be emotional connotations which
provide cues along the route. Downs and Stea point out that cognitive maps are
functionally equivalent to a cartographic map, as opposed to being
homomorphically equivalent. Note
1
The
skills of moving around our environment and our adeptness with our senses seem
to come naturally to us, but of course, such knowledge does not. Nearly the only
time we notice the existence of these skills is when they do not work and in the
case of processing radio data, when we are lost in a radio play scene, puzzled,
and cease to be entertained and informed.
Radio
audiences
Radio
listeners are not a generality, of course, and we lack applied research, as also
of their different competencies, acquisitions and cognitive organising of radio
data. (See Forrester 2000 on sound, Branigan
on cognitive schemata as applied to film (Branigan, 1992,
13-14), and Morley, 1986, 239 on the differences that each reader of a media
text brings to bear.) Most listeners' judgements will never be directly
accessible. Substantial reception studies involving sound are often not of radio
but concern audience take-up, in TV commercials of the soundtrack in relation to
the visual track (see Forrester, 2000, 2.6). So to
summarise on this: we can identify some of the categories or schemata that
listeners employ in their traffic with radio plays, and cognitive mapping is one
way in. Here, very little hangs on whether radio is blind or a movie-theater or
a seat in the stalls for one, but on the listener's cognitive availability for
the 'naming of parts', for providing shape and meaning to radio dialogue's
ongoingness, as scene follows scene, and as 'mise en scène' cuts to, or fades
into, the succeeding 'mise en scène'.
Another
factor in this discussion is that radio offers only a limited repertoire in its
'mise en scène'. This may be a controversial point to make. I have to explain
here that my overall approach to radio theory is to emphasize radio's
degradation of data, by comparison with the plenitude offered by the sight/sound
media. Or, to put this more briefly, I do not readily think that 'you get the
best pictures on radio'. This is in contrast to the 'apologia' or defence of
radio offered vigorously and cogently by Shingler and
Wieringa, 1998. I go so far as to argue in my work (in progress) that, in
some important instances, radio's range of 'mise en scène' is so limited,
disjointed and compressed, that this spectrum of representation might be
considered only a metaphorical transference. (See Beck,
1999b, 1.4b.)
'Mise
en scène'
'Mise
en scène' now needs some more introduction. The definition given in the
Glossary below, itself from my Radio Theory site, is this:
Locations,
spaces and perspectives for all genres of radio, but also including style and
mode (as realism, non-realism, etc.). For radio drama, this involves
representation of the play scene, its composition, ‘set dressing’ and
perspective, and the characters’ behaviour in that environment and style.
(Beck,
1999a)
The
term has a wider application in film, for example, being linked to style and to
'auteur' theory (Martin,
1990).
In
the detailed analysis of an early radio play excerpt below, the focus is on how
listeners interpret radio space in the aural compression of space-time-motion.
It is a defining aspect of sound that it exists in space (Ferrington,
1994, 'Aural Information'). It is characterised by the space it occupies,
its resonance and acoustic, and by the
surfaces off of which it reflects and into which it is partially absorbed.
Dialogue itself gives constant depth cues.
Referentiality
My
discussion is also crucially about the final stage of a text's reception, in the
mind of the reader. So I am concerned here with the fictions of radio drama and
the connections these make with the listener's own real-life interaction, the
Lifeworld - the listener's own existential situation; and also how radio
represents the Lifeworld or what I term the 'extra-radio world'. This article
looks at how the listener actively completes the fictional scenery from the
necessarily sketchy information given in broadcast, in the 'blind' medium.
The
term for this making of connections by the reader is referentiality, as I
introduced above. It is the act of making reference, in a work of fiction, to
the extraneous world outside, and to various objects or referents, believed to
exist independently, outside the realm of the fiction. It is how the fiction
work points outside of itself. I take the common-sense attitude that real
objects exist independently of their being observed (metaphysical realism) and
that, unless problematized by an author such as Samuel Beckett, referentiality
is possible.
Referentiality
is also used in linguistics to mean the relationship between words and the
objects that the words represent. As a term, it is more familiar in study of the
novel, and it is not established in theatre studies, and it has come to the fore
recently in countering structuralist and poststructuralist views of the text as
a closed, self-contained system (the prison-house of language). It is now
possible to argue that literature is not closed off from the world outside of
it, and so to take a stance against radically nominalist assumptions found in
post‑Saussurean critics. But in this postmodern 'moment', we are meant to
be free of such master-narrative dogmatics.
So
this article is but one aspect of the overall referential dimension of the radio
play, and indeed, of literature. How does radio drama evoke coherent,
recognisable worlds for the listener? What is the relationship between radio
fictions and reality, and on right through to the listener, to how the fictional
world becomes 'concretized' (Roman Ingarden's term,
Ingarden 1973) in the imagination and becomes applied to the listener's own
existential situation. In particular, I will be examining how the radio 'mise en
scène' takes its part in generating the fictional world. I will not, however,
be considering how referentiality has been problematized by certain radio
dramatists (Tyrone Guthrie, Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, Barry Bermange, and
Lucy Gough, for example).
Phenomenology
My
other broad frame of reference within reception theory is to phenomenology. For
the radio listener, perception is interpenetrated with action, and indeed,
perception and action have very similar characteristics. This is the principle
of embodiment, our somatic interactivity with the world, from the
phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962, Langer, 1989),
so influential recently in film theory (Sobchack, 1992,
Sweeney, 1994). To repeat: we
draw on our own body's interactivity with the world. An aspect of that
interactivity is our way-finding cognitive mapping. Here is Sommerhoff on
embodiment as a brain connection:
Since
the body functions as an important frame of reference in the perception of
spatial relations, the brain's internal representations of the external world
can be complete only to the extent to which they are integrated with the
internal representation of body posture and movement.
(Sommerhoff,
1974, 234) Note
2
Reception
theory in the digital age
Discussion
of reception theory, such an energetic debating area in film and performance,
must also involve aspects of virtual
reality (VR) or computer-generated worlds. The digital age has shifted the human
sensorium and its workings (Ryan, 1999) - the principle that Marshall McLuhan
called the 'massaging of the ratio of the senses' (McLuhan,
1967, 68). VR and virtual environments (VEs) include the text-based
Multi-User-Dungeons or MUDs, also known as Multi-User-Dimensions. Here are some
of the interesting issues: the sense of presence
of a person in a VE, the degree of feelings and imaging estimated for the other
(unknown, remote) person in IRC chat, and medical simulation in training doctors
and computer-aided design.
Most
importantly, and this encourages the inclusion of VEs in any and all reception
theorizing within the digital age, there is the experience of being immersive,
'appearing' interactively onscreen as what is termed an avatar in VE games or
training. The avatar is the me-there-moving-in-the-virtual-environment, linked
to the me-here-in-the-Lifeworld operating the mouse and other controls.
Phenomenology had already introduced us to the concept of an object as an
extension of the body - a prosthesis. Examples are a walking stick and a hat.
Our connection with the on-screen avatar is even more so. In the case of the
prosthesis and the avatar, we 'incorporate them into the bulk of the body
itself' (Langer, 1989, 47). (See also Forrester,
2000, 2.7 on the 'outside' and the 'inside' of listening to music with
headphones.)
Such
new virtual paradigms help us investigate listening-in and way-finding, and also
to ponder the sense of presence of radio's performers for us. In some radio
plays, stereo technique may provide a sense for the listener of being in the
midst of the fictional events and characters, sometimes even swirling around the
listener, or rapidly projecting the listener and his or her sound centre into
the events (the moving sound centre). In fact, this was part of B.B.C.
experimental formalism in the early 1970s, when stereo was introduced. This
article can only suggest the possible inclusion of the VE avatar in radio
reception theory, not least because the listener could also be an Internet
surfer whose 'sense ratio' has been 'massaged' by such experiences (McLuhan).
Perspective
So I have set out some of the
theoretical issues in this cognitive mapping approach to radio drama: reception
theory and referentiality, phenomenology and virtual environments. And I have
mentioned my overall 'degradation' approach to core radio theory - how radio
compresses time-space-motion. My next step in this article is to give the
relevant basics of perspective and to go on to link these with aural
way-finding.
In real-life interaction, we see from a
current vantage point (egocentric or ego-centered perspective), and we reckon
position via salient landmarks,
especially that which is foregrounded and in movement - shapes and colours (hue,
saturation, and brightness) in our mental visual images (focus, brightness,
depth of field):
[W]hat
is foregrounded is always more salient than the background, since we are
evolutionarily wired to react to an attacking enemy than to the far away hills.
(Tarnay,
1997)
In
eye-scanning, we are pre-cognitively attracted to whatever is found interesting
- eye-catchers - at a given moment. It is useful to make a comparison with the
study of perspective in Renaissance
paintings and its figure-and-ground
construction here, as it gives some insight into rationales of our patterning
and of our visual memories. There is not, however, an easy equivalence with
artifacts and with how our perceptual apparatus works under normal conditions
(Tarnay, 1997) - one of the problems of referentiality. As artworks, paintings
offer satisfaction for the optimum
viewing position in their linear perspectives, allowing the image to appear in
correct proportion. Similarly, the radio listening zone is in the listener's
'consummatory field'. This latter term is taken from Belton, 1999, on the visual
arts and negotiating one's way around the art gallery.
Perspective
and the vertical
For
the viewer/listener or the viewer, orientation
in the consummatory field depends on the vertical.
Paintings are hung on the vertical axis, vision is oriented from the standing
(art gallery) or sitting position (cinema, TV and computer). The listening
modality, however, is free from the vertical, or it need not be vertical. It
could possibly liberate itself from relations with the vertical gaze, with its
connotations of power and domination. That brings in other issues of 'talking
heads' in radio dialogue and realism in the 'mise en scène'. But it is
significant that broadcast radio drama makes so few attempts to break free of
the vertical, partly because of all art forms, radio has little or no broadcast
avant-garde (though Derek Jarman's audio piece, 'Blue' (1993), is an obvious
exception), and there is little connection made between sound installation works
and broadcast.
Renaissance
perspective and invariance
There
is considerable discussion in artwriting (David Carrier's term) on perspective
in paintings, and especially Renaissance
projection-point perspective methods, and their relation to perceptual aspects
of depth and space. Projective perspective rationalised the presentation of
space in the compelling illusions created in Renaissance paintings. Theorists,
then and up to now, have debated empirical claims that linear,
or central perspective was a scientific
translation or replication of the mechanisms of human visual processing. Are
there perceptual invariants - elements
perceptually invariant even under transformation - in what was founded in
Renaissance perspective? (Useful authorities are Kubovy,
1986 and Deregowski, 1980.)
Invariance
under transformation is well known from the psychology of perception, e.g., size
and color constancy, invariance of melody under change of pitch. Some invariants
are 'wired' into the nervous system, others - including many involved in
conceptual tracking - are learned (MacLennan, 1998). (See
Millikan, 1996 for a philosophical defence of Gibson's affordances (Gibson,
1979)). Again, another direction, for which there is not space in this
article, is to investigate possible invariants in radio listening-in.
Viewing
a painting depends on a single-point perspective or, more complicatedly, two or
more vanishing points. (This refers to Euclidean
space - occupying spaces with X,Y,Z dimensions.) Changes in tone and colour
value are observable in objects receding from the viewer. Monocular vision is
inherent to perspective setting and it is the argument of this article that the
radio listener is positioned, indeed 'raised', to a 'point' or
point-of-listening (Beck, 1998) directly opposite the
vanishing point.
We
also scan visual images via foveation and saccades,
which are our rapid, successive and overlapping glances, building up to
recognition. The process is experienced as simultaneous rather than sequential,
along the perpendicular axis rather than the horizontal - 'relatively
simultaneous perception' (Ungar, 1998, 'The Past:
Getting the Question Right'). This works by simplifying the information. Human
vision research shows that, by these rapid, repeated saccades
(glances), we extract information from the visual scene rather than building an
intricate three-dimensional model. Part
of this mental work is central to cognitive mapping - orienteering and
path-finding. Saccades (rapid glances of the eyes) are a bottom-up process (Branigan,
1992, 37-8), a pre-cultural aspect of visual perception. Cognitive mapping
is one of the ways we actively categorize and integrate incoming information.
Way-finding
in radio drama: aural paradise and 'Umwelt' (environment)
In
the radio drama 'mise en scène',
the navigation or orienteering is firstly done for the listener by the director,
in an aural paradise, as I have termed it (Beck,
1997b), amid highly specific and pleasurable conditions. In my opinion, this
aural paradise is a first principle in analysing the listening-in. And secondly,
the competent and engaged listener is in an ideal radio 'Umwelt'
(environment), to borrow a key concept from ecological psychology. This 'Umwelt'
is the subjective phenomenal world as an animal or human itself sees it, in
contrast to the actual environment. The 'Umwelt' is the sentient being's niche.
This concept recognises the intimate connection between the special environment
that human beings inhabit and the fundamental - and distinguishing - qualities
of human psychological processes. Note
3
The
human 'Umwelt' is the interweaving of the biological development of the human
body and the appropriation of the cultural/ideal/material heritage which exists,
especially in artifacts, and in this discussion, in radio. This 'Umwelt'
coordinates people with each other and the physical world
In the radio-mediated 'Umwelt' (environment and here listening niche), all is
totally the subjective world of the single modality of listening, which overlays
and matches point-for-point - and this is the pleasure of radio drama
fictionalising - the 'actual' environment. The listener has a radio subjective
cocoon, and the capacity to interpret each and every stimulus broadcast, for the
reason that - and here is the point - radio 'Umwelt' (cocoon) is
'Welt' (Lifeworld) for the fictional while. That is, while listening-in, the
subjective individual's environment (the lived 'Umwelt') equals to, or is
coextensive with, the 'out there', the
'Welt' (world), the external reality independent of an individual observer.
This is one of the crucial ways in which radio differs from the sight/sound
media, especially one of the ways it differs from the plenitude of the visual
track. This is where radio referentiality is categorically different. Of course,
there is frequently interference or 'bleed-through' from secondary activities of
the listener. These activities - ironing, driving the car, washing-up, etc. -
are often mentioned in discussions of radio reception and attentiveness, as for
example Crisell, 1994, 137 and Beck, 1998, 5.
There
is no peripheral 'vision' for the radio
listener but complete aural 'focus'. All aural stimuli, of referents distant or
close, could be classified as 'proximal stimuli' (from perceptual psychology)
because they are 'in front of' the ears. There are little or no 'distal stimuli'
(from Gestalt psychology), which in real-life
interaction are in the environment. Note 4
Invariants
Crucial
to these environments are invariants (Gibson, 1950 on
perception of 2-D paintings and precursor of his affordances, and already
mentioned above) - organizing landmarks and configurations which remain stable
(invariant), here, as the listener processes the data concerning radio play
characters moving through the 3-D 'mise en scène'. (That is, '3-D' within
radio's compression of time-space-motion.)
All questions and problems of knowledge
are posed and answered within the aural world which has to be a knowable place.
(A confused listener is a lost listener.) The director and the radio apparatus
'hear' and 'see' what the human ear cannot in the Lifeworld.
Problems
with radio reception theory
The
next part of the article is concerned with applying cognitive mapping to radio
drama directly and using an excerpt from the 1929 radio drama, 'Ingredient X'.
As has already been pointed out, a lack of range in reception studies and the
nature of the dispersed radio audience mean that most listeners' judgements will
never be directly accessible. This methodological problem seems to afflict radio
much more than in film or TV studies, even if little commented on. There have
been severe criticisms recently of such a reductionist approach to audience
studies, as here, in the case of film, summarised by Collins,
1993, 2:
...
empirical research concerning an audience's reactions and viewing patterns...
[is] an ethnographic imperialism which rejects interpretation of anything except
audiences, and simply abandons any notion of critique ...
Regarding
the sociological model of reception studies, there has been one sensible
suggestion for a working method, among others, which I recommend here. As the
researcher cannot in a single study grasp the full dynamics and complexity
implied by the notion of reception, it is better to select a perspective and
consistently stick to the premises implied by this choice (Birgitta
Höijer in discussion). (See also Gripsrud, 1995 and I come back to this at
the end of the article.)
With
the misgivings of the last paragraph, the premise in this article is that I, the
analyst, stand in as the (supposedly) representative listener, 'journeying'
through the play. This typical radio play - and 'Ingredient X' of 1929 stands as
the fount and origin of all, in my opinion - is of the type of production I term
standard (Beck, 1997, 128-9) where there are fixed
conventions of spatiality, on the model of Renaissance perspective. This
standard production is in the realist mode and so conforms (in its own way) to
the laws of motion in Euclidean space. We could also refer to Cartesian
coordinate geometry, the predominant method of representing three-dimensional
space. I take it that the radio fictional characters move in their represented
fictional 'mise en scène', which possesses cubic volume.
This
is not the occasion to query realism in radio. But realism is not the mode - and
especially in view of my emphasis on the 'degradation' aspect of radio - that
raises questions in the listener's mind about the actual and potential illusions
of aurality (or the 'listening-in' in itself), nor does it problematize
referentiality, in the main.
Listener
positioning
So
on to my way-finding through some play scenes. My listener
positioning is at the best vantage point, the ego-centered,
and this is nearly always a fixed sound
centre. (See Forrester, 2000, 3.5
on 'being at the centre of the auditory experience' in the Lifeworld.)
The sound mixing and balancing have already been done for me through the
mediation of radio, and I am at the optimum listening position in my
consummatory field. The fixed sound centre, nearly always the norm in standard
production, allows only a limited representation of those 3-D dynamic forms such
as we experience in the real world
And
so I constantly maintain orientation
- this is key to how I unambiguously process what I hear. It is how I understand
the increasing and lessening in volume of the various sound events, especially
the dialogue, as being near or far, as characters approaching the centre of the
sound picture. A comparison could be made with film, as radio drama directors
frequently do in production. Relative positions are mainly, as in film, CU or
'close shot', medium close up shot or MCU, and medium shot or MS, to the
'knees'. (These are microphone positions 2 and 3 - Beck,
1997a, 48-56.) There is also further off (LS 'long shot' - microphone
positions 4 and 5). Being compulsorily attuned to the sound centre, I am offered
a single-point perspective, certainly in standard production. Nearness and
farness are equivalent to painting's changes in tone and colour values in the
representation of objects which recede from the viewer.
'Ingredient
X'
So
here now are some short scenes from 'Ingredient X', a 1929 radio play by
L(awrence) du Garde Peach. This was the first convincingly radiogenic piece, in
my opinion. That is, it is the first to make the 'optimum aesthetic use of sound
in radio transmission' (using Tim Crook's neat definition), and the first in
which some main techniques of radio drama were brought into play together. It
was originally a live broadcast, as recording technology did not then exist in
the B.B.C. at Savoy Hill, and so the production is lost to us. But even in
reading this excerpt, one gets a sense of how the listeners of 1929 were rapidly
transported from location to location (storm at sea, African jungle, London
board room). The plot concerned capitalist greed and colonialism, as the
mysterious 'ingredient x' is exported from Africa via ship for the London rubber
market. Storm and revolt bring about disaster, and as we take up the play, the
tragedy speeds to its climax (however partially this was achieved in the
technology of the time). After this excerpt, there are only five further scenes
to the play's end. (The original script is in the B.B.C. Written Archives,
Caversham.)
Scene
35
Scene:
The Sea
447
FX: (THE
STORM SOUNDS ARE NOW VERY LOUD. ALL
DIALOGUE MUST BE SHOUTED.)
448
CAPTAIN: Clear up the port boats!
449
DEAN: Number
One's stove in, sir.
450
CAPTAIN: Stand by two and three.
451
FARRER: Starboard boats all jammed by the
list, sir.
452
CAPTAIN: Very good, Mr. Farrer. All hands to the port
side. Are
your men up on deck, Chief?
453
CHIEF: The second's
blowing off steam now.
454
CAPTAIN:
Get all hands up at once. See everything clear forrard, Mr.
Farrer, and -
(FADE)
I
visualise the scene on the ship's bridge in LS or long shot, and the principal
character, the Captain, is probably, in production, more foregrounded. The atmos
of the storm is 'off', or in the outer frame (as defined in Beck,
1998). If it were not for other
factors, my 'viewing' of radio would be that of a fixed
stare. The serial ongoingness of talk radio, for
example, suggests that turn-taking in dialogue is akin, somewhat, but only
somewhat, to the shot-reverse-shot of film
dialogue.
But
take the next tense scene, where the traders Bruce and Anderson, have paused in
their jungle escape, and whisper to each other:
Scene
36
Scene:
The Forrest
455
FX:
(THE TOM-TOMS ARE FAINTER)
456
BRUCE: What’s
that?
457
ANDERSON: Nothing.
458
BRUCE: I
thought I heard something in the bush.
459
DOCTOR: So did I.
460
BRUCE: Imagination.
Push on. You all right, Doc?
461
DOCTOR: I can manage.
(FADE)
Scene
37
Scene:
The Board Room
462
CHAIRMAN:
- and now gentlemen, with regard to the proposed issue of fresh
debentures. I think we may safely advise the General Meeting to -
(FADE)
I
feel myself at a mid-point between the two-hander realist dialogue in Scene 36,
if in standard production they are both at microphone position 2, 'close shot',
and their dialogue turns are quite short and regularly paced. Both Bruce and
Anderson remain in this 'two-shot' for the short scene. I am not 'turning my
head' as in watching a tennis match. I just
have a pretty regular two-shot sound picture, maybe fading in and out a little -
both characters 'seen' in 'head and shoulders', or 'head', frontally on to me in
a triangular configuration. (The film spectator is 'controlled and confined by
framing and camera movements to what should be visually *salient* to him' - Tarnay,
1997.) In terms of paraproxemics (apparent interpersonal distance between
radio's performers and myself), that is how close I am to these characters,
certainly in relation to the depth cues of dialogue. They are not shouting as in
the previous scene. L. du Garde Peach, already in 1929, and so soon after the
first UK experiment in 1922, had the skill to contrast listener's positioning
here, rapidly from scene to scene.
Another
question is raised for the moment. Does my ego-centred position equal that of
the disembodied camera 'eye' / 'I'? (For some
later examples from Hitchcock, see William Rothman's book, The "I" of the Camera - Rothman,
1988.) Certainly Tarnay's 'controlling camera' analogy should not be pushed
too far for radio drama. But there is not the space to follow through here this
tantalising issue about apparatus theory. (Forrester,
2000, section 5, takes up my points about the listener's sound centre in
radio drama.)
I
maintain my sense of direction because the play's information system severely
limits me to a few salient landmarks (STORM
SOUNDS and TOM-TOMS).
They have clarity of display. Because of
radio's economy and structuring
hierarchy of sounds, I can extract these landmarks with maximum ease and most
efficient attention.
Objects
in outline Gestalts
But
what do I 'see' here? Shapes, outlines or objects in all their detailed
'presence'? Let me analyse more generally at this point. Radio drama's filtering
out means that the objects represented in so many plays - doors opening and
closing, steps, the acoustic allowing me to hear voices within the dimensions of
a domestic room, a cave or a cathedral, Spot effects of cups and glasses, FXs of
car doors and engines - are to be grasped in their relatively simple,
emblematic, perhaps at times almost abstract
properties or outline Gestalts. Gestalt is defined
here as a psychic whole formed by the structuring of the perceptual field, and
especially so in the limited perceptual field of radio. In my
cognitive-perceptual tracking, I 'see' outlines: a three-dimensionality of edges
and lines, patches of 'colour', tones, the volumes resulting from sound events
in space, etc. At their most basic, and stripped of their narrative context,
these are relatively simple stimuli. Of
course, and this is back to referentiality in radio, other listeners may
'concretize' the fictional events more fully and colourfully than I have.
However,
there are links across my whole perceptual array (sight, smell, touch, hearing,
taste). On what is termed the internalist model of the human sensorium - and so
back to phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty - aural perception is in some way
penetrated by the other modes. The listener 'sees', 'tastes', 'smells', etc., or
at least many anecdotally so report, as I said above. The various modalities are
always present or potentially so. In
real-life interaction for example, even tactility, the physical sensation of
touch, is linked to mental information of the texture
of spaces, and complex socio-cultural references (personal and universal,
intimate and distant, literal and figurative). So 'tangible' / 'intangible,'
'material' / 'immaterial,' 'visible' /
'invisible' exist in parallel to each other. I could sum up this
phenomenological approach by saying that radio both is, and is not, 'invisible'.
I
recognise the radio equivalent of invariants -
elements perceptually invariant even under transformation. These crucially
affect radio drama's limited vocabulary in the non-verbal domains and they are
the means for generating expectations and my filling-in of missing information.
Of course, when used creatively, invariants (in the play excerpt, the STORM
SOUNDS and TOM-TOMS)
offer the radio director many opportunities. This is just one particular
approach to the relatively limited stock of radio drama's FXs (sound effects). Filling-in
is the compensation that the listener makes for what radio has filtered out in
its representation of the extra-radio world.
So
as I orienteer through the play, I transfer over, in my meaning-making, some
attributes of my own Lifespace: shape, size, relative distance and directions.
This is the validating process or concretizing I mentioned above (Ingarden
1973), when I introduced the topic of referentiality - the listener's task
of conjuring up in the mind and imagination. I have to rely on my own memory
storage and personal experiences (Branigan's schemata and
Forrester, 2000, 1.4 on our 'cultural repertoire'), for as the philosopher
Nelson Goodman says, worlds are always made from other pre-existing worlds (Goodman,
1978, 48).
Radio
of course, filters out and excludes incoming 'information' from the extra-radio
world, like a character's facial appearance, colours and smell. (See also Crisell,
1994, 10). But I can recognise
all of the cues en route. They are most often dialogue in the foreground
balanced against an atmos background (often traffic
or rain and in 'Ingredient X', the STORM SOUNDS and TOM-TOMS), or some FX sound effects (boiling the kettle,
opening the door, footsteps going 'off' up the stairs), or dialogue in a neutral
acoustic.
Cognitive
mapping in the radio studio
Cognitive
mapping, as a paradigm, is another way, through reception theory, to consider
aspects of radio's dynamism and the economy rule. This latter is how radio
filters out or excludes many sound events by comparison with real-life
interaction. In the process of radio drama production, cognitive mapping is also
a useful, practical paradigm for sorting out the logic
of sound events, their balancing and ordering. This sorting is done all the
time, speedily and intuitively. It may appear
trite to point out, but the fact is that some of the knottier, time-consuming
problems in radio drama production are to do with the logic and ordering of
sound events. At what point do you fade down the background atmos (rain) when
the house door is closed? Character X moves off to the livingroom door. Where is
it in the stereo picture, left or right? Above all and a constant refrain:
'Where are we in the sound picture?'. The director, Studio Manager and
technicians are constantly employed in cognitive mapping. One of their many
skills is this ability to orienteer through the play script.
Linear
I
am problem-solving as I navigate the play's narrative, and I am also constantly
reinforced by the linear manner of broadcast, along the horizontal
axis. It continuously builds up my recognition and continuously repeats
information about the salient landmarks. But beyond the figure-and-ground
structure of dialogue against atmos (storm, jungle, traffic, crowd, factory
machinery, etc.), and because of the salience of dialogue, I still, for the most
part, experience the radio representata in a linear
manner, one thing after another, one thing hidden behind another, leading to
this or that closure. The dialogue
'landmarks' the characters at the centre of the sound picture, in close-up or
further off, and orients me at my ego-centre position.
So,
providing I am averagely competent, I should not have memory problems or be
disoriented with these signals and cues. This, in a sense, is the aural
equivalent of the visual saccades (glances) or successive reinforcement of the
landmarks: the characters are 'there' in the sound picture (microphone positions
2 or 3 for conversation, head or head-and-shoulders 'shots'), the storm at sea
just outside the ship's bridge, the background TOM-TOMS (outer frame,
acousmatic sound). This is strictly foreground-background,
and is like the drawing room model Altman
analyses for some film scenes, with 'primary attention devoted not to space but
to speech' (1991, 63). Of course there are other styles of radio drama
production, but this standard production is dominant.
Although
the input is totally aural, my spatial cognition system, functioning well as I
enjoy the play, enables me also to perceive the sound picture in all my sensory
modes. So I can place the characters in their space and I can 'see' and 'smell'
the sea storm, 'feel' the jungle heat and 'be in' the London Board Room.
On the internalist model, which has
already been referred to, aural perception is penetrated in some way by the
other four modes. I switch signals: auditory to visual to olfactory etc.
Abstract
geometry
In
summary of this scene analysis, and making use of Gibson,
the ecological psychologist (Gibson, 1950, 1979), we
could describe the aural 'mise en scène'
and its array of invariants as experienced only in outline. It is a territory of
abstract geometry (planes and lines -
outlines only) rather than of ecological
geometry (surfaces and edges, substantial and textured - to be seen). I am aware
that this is my opinion only and does not have backing in reception studies. Of
course, the film spectator navigates the visual track via the camera and the
director's editing. Rothman comments: 'The camera also represents the viewer.
Does it, then, always serve two masters?' (Rothman, 1988, ix). But camera or
microphone - both restrict the epistemic situation of the viewer/listener.
The
radio frame
The
radio 'mise en scène' does afford clear and continuously reaffirmed information
about location in the sound picture or field. It has a clearly defined boundary,
and it is argued elsewhere (Beck, 1998, 6) that the
sound medium is able to impose this more definitely than film and TV, within a
main frame and an outer frame. It communicates that there is no other way to
'view' the situation. All is gathered within the frame, whether it is double, as
inner and outer, or a single frame - all other 'viewing' positions and
possibilities are somehow obliterated. We
are not invited outside the main or the outer frame, as we are frequently in the
cinema, to direct attention to what is movement off-screen.
Information-gathering and communication (Tarnay, 1997)
for the listener are one.
When
I reach the end of a scene and the beginning of another, a scene
boundary, I am guided along the horizontal axis by the serial nature of
broadcast (forward-only). In mapping, this could be described as a path
intersection. Some radio play scenes offer more and richer depth cues, and more
layered spacialisation. Standard production is more homogenised.
Flattening
of perspective
By
contrast, does the reading of the B.B.C. news, with the presenter at microphone
position 3 or 2, and in a neutral acoustic, suggest a plane,
that is a 2D, rather than a 3D environment? To each listener is granted his or
her own interpretation: the active audience thesis (Watson
and Hill, 1997, 2). There are other additional factors here in reception,
not the least of which is media intertextuality, the cross-over with TV
newsreading. Radio 'presence', considered above under paraproxemics, is itself
the creation of an apparent interpersonal distance between the listener and the
radio performer. The listeners may relate to the two-dimensional picture and do
not miss the explanation of the third dimension.
In
all of radio's 'mise en scènes',
flattening of perspective is to be noted. This is a loss of space-in-depth,
partly because of the compression of time-space-movement, but also because radio
reduces the spaces between speakers or speaking characters. These spaces, to
take an analogy from nineteenth-century naturalist painting, are areas of transition
or areas of 'passage', linking foreground
objects (for radio most often its speakers or performers) and background.
Radio makes these 'passage' areas
vague or distorts them; and it masks spatial relationships and seeks to mask
spatial discrepancies. In the case of the too-wearisome 'talking-heads' radio
drama scene, distortion or flattening
of 'passage' areas becomes intrusive to the listener, along with the seeming
immobility of the characters and the dialogue. The radio sound picture
disintegrates, where the extreme close-up (ECU) on talking heads is prolonged
and is emphasised at the expense of the potential of the whole. The characters
and the action in the scene's sound picture are no longer 'visible' as
constituent elements within a Gestalt, but they
fragment. Unlike photography, radio is not isomorphic in its representation.
However, as has been repeated in this article, the competent radio listener is
an active listener. The logic of a radio text for each listener is to do with
his or her own functional, cognitive map, providing - and here is the competence
element - this map 'sounds' and 'reflects' time-space-movement appropriately.
Final
remarks
I
have treated the - for some - daily enjoyment of listening to a radio play as a
geography exercise in the imagination, but I hope that I have come at the
perennial problems of reception theory for radio from new directions. I have
linked cognitive mapping to some challenging developments, especially in film
studies and in the digital. But this in turn, like the domino-effect, knocks at
other, wider theoretical conundrums. We now draw a borderline between the
aesthetics of reception and the psychology of perception. And how to deal with
the psychology? I find Forrester's new work in the psychology of sound
particularly impelling (Forrester 2000), which has
prompted these last thoughts.
As
mentioned at the top of this article, film studies has embraced the
'interdisciplinary field known as "cognitive science"' (Branigan,
1992, xii), though a warningly rigorous approach to meta-theory is demanded
in the recent collection of essays, Film
Theory and Philosophy (Allen and Smith, 1997).
Coming from a base in the Humanities as I do, evaluation of cognitive science
and cognitive studies presents special difficulties. New and radical theories
emerge, as for example, LaBerge's (1997) theory of
attention and awareness. (LaBerge suggests a highly compartmentalized brain in
which discrete areas perform distinct mental functions.)
How,
and this is an obvious plaint, is the lone Humanities academic to assess the
match of a cognitive theory with empirical evidence and to cope with the
research spread of theories of mental function? At least it is to hoped that
this article's limited exploration of cognitive mapping in radio drama allows me
some personally-limited and personally-declared exploration of empirical
evidence, in the new mood of Post-Theory (Bordwell and
Carroll, 1996). Or at least that I have tackled and decomposed the larger
complexities of listening-in to radio into some more manageable questions.
Glossary
Aurality (radio):
(author’s
term) Part of core theory for radio. 'Aurality', matches film's 'specularity'.
It has three aspects: the
'listening-to-ness' of radio reception, the 'heard-of-ness' of the broadcast
speaker and other sound events on radio, and listening in itself.
Domain
(radio):
(author’s
term) Term for each of the different categories of sound on radio which are key
organisers of both form and content: the vocal, sound effects, atmoses or
different conditions of ambience, music, noises from nonsentient objects,
silences.
Extra-radio
world:
(author’s
term) The world to which listeners have access through production and broadcast.
This is the equivalent of film's 'pro-filmic event' and the 'extra-cinematic
world'. See referentiality.
'Mise
en scène' (adapted from film and stage scenography):
Locations,
spaces and perspectives for all genres of radio, but also including style and
mode (as realism, non-realism, etc.). For radio drama, this involves
representation of the play scene, its composition, ‘set dressing’ and
perspective, and the characters’ behaviour in that environment and style.
Referentiality:
(Fiction)
The act of making reference to an extraneous world believed to exist
independently outside the realm of the fiction. The reader 'concretizes' the
text in his or her mind and this is the final stage of the text's reception.
(Language)
The relationship between language and what it designates - non-linguistic
reality (objects, events, actions, qualities).
Standard
production:
(author’s
term) Convention-bound radio drama directing style with limited use of radio's
features. It successfully enables budget-controlled studio production: linear
continuity of plot, dialogue- and protagonist-dominated, dialogue mostly in
positions two and three, and strictly foregrounded above SFXs. Overall, a much
plainer style - neutral acoustic or near-neutral (living-room) is common.
Notes
Note
1
Perspectival
painting on the stage backcloth, and film also, represent homomorphically, that
is spatial properties represent spatial properties of the things represented
relatively. See Altman, 1992, 46 ff on the relationship between image scale and
sound scale.
Also:
These
transformations [processing incoming data] may be viewed as utilising sensory
input to modify ongoing internal functional states. These internal functional
states are then homomorphic with external reality. The sensory input feeds and
modulates an internal state of intrinsic origin.
(MacKay,
1987, 93)
Note
2
Here
is the description by Llinas, the neurologist, on the processing a subject goes
through in perceiving objects, and it includes what Merleau-Ponty calls
embodiment:
In
order to see one requires first to have moved within the world and to have
established, via the use of natural coordinates, the properties of objects with
respect to our own physical attributes (the weight of each object, its size with
respect to that of our body, etc.). It would be clear then that it is only
through the ability that our brain has to transform measurements in one set of
coordinates (the visual system) into comparable sets of measurements
(visually-guided motor execution) provided by other sensory inputs (for example,
touch from fingertips) that one can truly develop the necessary semantics to be
able to understand what one sees. The point is that understanding the functional
connectivity of the visual system is not sufficient to understand vision.
Rather, putting vision into the context of coordinates that are intrinsic to the
body is the essential step needed to 'make sense' of the visual information.
(Llinas,
1987, 352)
Note
3
The
source of the 'Umwelt' concept is
von Uexkull, predecessor of J.J. Gibson (Uexkull, 1982 and Ingold, 1988, 13). Giddens,
1991, 244, following Goffman, 1979, adopts the term 'Umwelt' to refer to:
…[a] phenomenal world with which the individual is routinely
"in touch" in respect of potential dangers and alarms ... a core of
(accomplished) normalcy with which individuals and groups surround themselves.
To
which one could add that this is the subject 'cocoon' or 'Umwelt' to which the
individual responds through tactile cells on the skin and/or perceptive cells in
the eye retinas.
Note
4
In
the cinema, the Cinerama format encompassed the audience's peripheral vision
because of the screen - 75 feet long, 26 wide and an arc of 146 feet.
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