Audio Ecosystems by Ben Wieland

In thinking about the idea of genres, genre sets, and genre ecosystems, I’d argue that the radio essay is perhaps more mysterious as a genre than some of the more typical, written-style genres out there. Take the doctor’s form used in Bickmore’s article – the fact that it usually asks uniform, consistent questions, and acts as a record for the patient as well as a legal document. Even essays have standardized headings, the typical five-sentence paragraphs, introductions, hooks, conclusions, etc…

When we can comment on the merits of these essays, we usually approve of specificity. This concrete example here, or a cited statistic there. Even journalistic genres have very specific rules – the who, what, when, where, and how, for instance.

Yet, with the radio essay, it always seemed quite a challenge to nail down the specifics of the genre system. You have the story, the “trouble”, perhaps some music cues, maybe some sound effects if you want. But it’s not required. Even when discussing the strategic placement of music cues in the genre, the most specific answer we could land on as a class was that music should probably sprout up at the act breaks. Beyond that, it always seemed to boil down to a “feeling” of where the music should go – not something necessarily based in logic, but on intuition.

The radio essay is one of the more effective “genre habitats”, I’d argue. Like the doctor’s office example, a radio essay provides a habitat for whatever content is being discussed. It is a unique habitat: one occupied by human voices, by tone, intonation, cadence, etc… more so than a standard, written essay. The habitat provides for emotion to take center stage.

As I’ve mentioned before, the biggest takeaway from this course is learning to divorce wordiness from emotional impact. While it may look nice on paper to be verbose, how will that affect the listener? Will they care (they won’t)? In this way, it has been a struggle to give my narrative essays the emotional gravity I’ve desired. The biggest help is listening to others’ work in the class, and how they approached their issues, which were often very compelling and likely difficult to approach head-on. Listening to others’ essays, the structures, the music cues, everything, was a tremendous help by virtue of the variety of material I was taking in. It’s like reading in excess – the only thing that will happen is a diversified reader, becoming knowledgeable of forms he or she was not aware of before.