My favorite audio clip is a story about a young 21-year-old man named John Mills who is serving prison time for robbery. Mills was given a tape recorder in order to record his life as a prison inmate. I was drawn to the piece because I figured that it would have really cool natural sound, and it did. It reinforced the fact that natural sounds should not be arbitrarily used, but should instead be used to advance the story along and provide a sense of setting.
I particularly liked the fact that we were constantly reminded of the lack of control that prisoners have over their own lines. Each time the story transitions to another physical location or point in time, it is the voice of the officers inside the facility that dictate the location and time that the story transitions to. Every time Mills experiences a moment of normalcy and outside reality, it is eventually taken away by the voice of some prison official or loudspeaker message. This is exemplified in the scenes where his mother is visiting him and where he’s zoning out to his music at the end of the story. We are reminded by the voices of prison officials, from over the loudspeaker, that he is still a prisoner.
http://www.albany.edu/talkinghistory/radiodiaries/rd-pd-john.mp3
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