Explore the Roar

I got chance to visit Niagara earlier on in the week and so took some recordings. The first is of a quick auditory drift around an amusement arcade. The second is of the falls – I wrapped my recorder and microphone in cling film to waterproof them and took the Maid of the Mist boat with a hundred or so other tourists right up to the foot of the Horseshoe Falls.

Sound Diary #2

In Treatment Season one DVD box set - 01/06/2010 - 10/06/2010

The sounds heard are simply those made by the therapist and patient – mostly talking, and some ambient sound. For the voices the show uses the audio equivalent of a close-up shot, but when the camera pulls away to reveal the larger context of the therapist’s office, with its collection of model boats and shelves full of books, the microphone stays stolidly still. And so the dialogue is at a higher volume than the dialogue of other TV shows I’ve seen, or at least without music and significant background noise, it seems louder. You hear vocal nuance clearly – inhalations and exhalations of breath, heavy silences, breaking and broken voices, sighs and you often hear emotion affecting speech. The therapist is a professional listener and this show makes demands on the audience to attain a level of listening skill akin to his.

In this way sound contributes to one of the shows most important effects - the creation of a deep, humanist involvement on the part of the audience with therapist and patient. The ambient sound has it’s role to play here too. You hear the sound of an occasional car passing on the road outside or bird song in the nearby trees. These background sounds make the show perfect for home viewing as the ambient sounds of our own environment merge seamlessly with those from the TV set. Again, the sound functions to draw the ‘viewer’ into a very particular setting.

Music rarely accompanies the action, when patients speak about their emotions, relationships and memories there is no heavy handed music guiding our interpretation or marking moments of high drama and clinical breakthrough. There are a number of different tracks that feature as the closing credits roll, but the DVD package`s main piece is a gentle piano motif repeated slowly over the top of a warm, continuous, subtly modulating, synthesizer chord. It`s sparse, minimal and entirely appropriate for the mood of the show. Often I found myself just listening to this piece, re-living the episode`s key moments, or thinking about my own life and the parallels with the issues and emotions brought up in the session. Either way this music, empty and soothing, provides a welcome rest from the emotional intensity of the scenes.