Music and sound effects should not overpower or replace speech. They should support it.
The haunting strings of a horror tale and the crackling of gravel beneath boots in a mystery thriller are both classic examples of these things. Music and sound effects serve as sonic set designers, helping to dress the stage in the listener’s mind, in concert with speech.
Without a musical cue of the right key and instrument, the scene might not feel as tragic, or funny, or poignant. Sometimes dialogue needs a boost. Without the right sound effects, some radio plays might lack texture and color, and give the impression of characters standing about in a bare room. Music and sound effects can also both be used as themes and leitmotifs. Rudolf Arnheim suggests the tingling of coins to indicate a miser.
Music and sound effects are the subordinate elements in radio drama, and are used to emphasize emotion, embellish settings, and define characters.
The role of the sound engineer, who interprets the radio dramatist’s script just as the actors interpret the dialogue, is an interesting one.
The sound engineer can pluck stock sound effects from an archive, or get a little creative and make up his own, or use stock sound effects which are one thing when recorded but are presented as something else entirely when inserted into the radio play. This can include using the sound of an erupting volcano to indicate a roaring waterfall, or the sound of a car tire rolling over a large piece of fruit to indicate the peeling off of a mask.
The role of the radio composer is mysterious to me. In the age of AI music, where the power of a full orchestra, a men’s choir, and a competent rock band is yours to command with a handful of keystrokes and mouse clicks, the producer, composer, sound engineer, and writer (and, in my case, the casting director) are all combined into one person.
I do know that without the talents of John Campbell and Dave Arnold, who did the music and sound design for Focus on the Family Radio Theatre’s dramatizations of The Chronicles of Narnia, the whole production would be that much poorer for their absence. That said, working with live musicians and singers in radio drama is a difficult, expensive segment of the production of a radio play, as attested to as far back as 1949 by BBC producer Felix Felton.
Logistical and economic hurdles abound where music is concerned, whether the production is live or recorded. But synthetic AI music solves every problem which music presents to radio drama and creates innumerable new opportunities for it at the same time. The use of AI music to speed-up the routine production of incidental music (music used to signal scene transitions) alone is a godsend to the radio producer working on a limited budget.
The Sonic Set Designers
Louis MacNeice, the dramatist behind The Dark Tower (1946), knew perfectly well what the role of music and sound effects were in a radio play. In one scene, the play’s hero, Roland, is accosted by an inebriate known as “Soak” who tries to entice him from his quest to get drunk in a tavern. When Roland hesitates, Soak invokes “the masons of the muses,” and a musical score strikes up, followed by dialogue from Soak indicating that the two are now seated in a bar.
The addition of music and sound effects can imply, illustrate, and embellish invisible action and physical activity which is stated and supplied by speech (either overtly or subtly).
Most of the time, it is not enough for a grubby Chinaman to badger a tenant for money owed to him by the tenant, as in the opening of The Man with the Twisted Lip (1990). There must also be sinister music in the background, the faint noise of creaking floorboards, the jingling of coins into hands, and the right dialogue, to indicate that a man with a strangely genteel, upper-class English accent is standing in a dilapidated tenement desperately trying to appease his Chinaman landlord by forking over some money.
Good radio drama is all about a strategic mix of teasing and revelation, with appropriate use of music and sound effects in addition to speech being key to such efforts.
It can be a Sherlock Holmes mystery which dramatically opens with impressions of an argument, on a stormy night, between a drunk traveler and a landlady after he attempted to assault her daughter, as in Bert Coules’ 1989 BBC dramatization of A Study in Scarlet.
Or it can be an Adventures in Odyssey episode like “The Right Choice, Part 1” (1996). Written by Paul McCusker, this episode is a type of comedy-of-manners where the most intriguing and amusing scene in the story is easily when Eugene noisily types on the keyboard of his laptop as he hacks into the computer system of his girlfriend’s hotel so he can spy on her, talking to himself the whole time.
With the help of music and sound effects as sonic set designers, a radio play can be immersive, hilarious, or shocking. Indeed, radio plays can be all of these things much better than movies or TV. In radio drama, where the stage is subjectively imagined in the skull of the individual listener, thrills, gags, and whole worlds come to life more convincingly than in any work of cinema, and are more likely to be enjoyed even more when the story is played again.
The purpose of music in radio drama is to latch onto an existing emotion implied by a scene and to magnify or intensify it. Sometimes, such a scene can feel completely different with either no music at all or a different type of music altogether. Like sound effects, music is meant to serve in a supporting role.
Sometimes, it is used so minimally so as not to attract much attention at all. But when that happens, music in radio drama is usually doing its job best. Examples of individual radio dramas where the music itself served in such an exemplary supporting role include the 1973 dramatization of The Prisoner of Zenda, as well as the 1990 dramatization of The Island of Dr. Moreau, both from BBC Radio 4.
Other times, a theme or leitmotif can add a type of signature to the production which makes it stand out, and only gets better and better with repeated listenings.
One of the finest examples of music in a radio play that I know of is in the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre dramatization of The Horse and His Boy.
This radio play, produced in 2000 and adapted by Paul McCusker, with John Campbell and Dave Arnold responsible for the music and sound design, contains a memorable theme of strumming, nostalgic guitar music, a neat Western compliment to the story’s setting in a fantasy world akin to The Arabian Nights. It is also a powerful sonic signal of the story’s overall theme as an allegory of a Christian wandering through a hostile world and trying to finally get to a place where he feels at home.
Among radio plays where the music is quite memorable in and of itself include the 2009 dramatization of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, with its piercing, zither-esque opening, as well as the excellent 2017 dramatization of Kidnapped, which featured authentic Scottish folk music. These both came from the excellent BBC Radio 4.
Sound effects dress the scene in the listener’s mind, just as music dresses a scene’s emotions.
The sound of a door opening and closing, followed by dialogue, indicates that the speaker is either alone and talking to himself or having a private conversation with somebody else. If this is not the case, then this sequence would be preceded by the sound of a group of people talking amongst themselves to indicate the opposite situation.
Sound effects should be used sparingly and tellingly, and should always be used to support and bolster speech. Some sound effects are easy to identify, such as foghorns, church bells, and train whistles, but others need a bit of speech to support the image which they communicate, such as rain storms, factory machinery, and fireplaces.
One mistake is to use too many sound effects at once or to use the wrong sound effects in the wrong place. In my own work on Son of Yi, Son of Pangu, I ran into several instances where what the sound effects were meant to represent were unclear to my listeners, because there was no appropriate speech soon enough to clarify the scene. In other places, the sound effects were used too heavily to the point where they drowned out the speech and caused distraction rather than immersion.
A big lesson from Pangu was that speech (economical speech!) is primary, with sound effects as a bolstering force. It is common to open a radio drama with a striking sound effect or musical cue to set the mood, followed by an arresting line of dialogue.
The classic example of a good opening in radio drama is the opening crawl of The Shadow, with its uncanny tune, the titular character’s blood-curling cackle, and then the famous words: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”
The general rule-of-thumb for openings is to keep them simple, short, and to engineer them to spark immediate interest and curiosity in a fickle listener with a finite attention span and a quick thumb on the radio dial. The right mix of music, sound effects, and speech is key.
My knowledge of music theory is limited, but I do know that leitmotifs (a musical cue associated with a character, place, situation, action, idea, or theme) are a crucial subject when discussing music in radio drama.
Leitmotifs are usually played when a specific character is the focal point of a scene, or sometimes when an absent character is being discussed by other characters.
The Focus on the Family Radio Theatre dramatization of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1998) is a case study in how to correctly do leitmotifs. With music and sound design by John Campbell and Mark Drury, it successfully conveys the emotional character of Lucy, Mr. Tumnus, and the White Witch through the use of carefully designed leitmotifs.
In addition, the use of sound effects as leitmotifs in that production is notable. The roar of the lion Aslan (voiced by David Suchet) was carefully engineered from the sounds of lions, polar bears, and other animals to produce a unique sonic theme representing the power and ferocity of this iconic character.
I imagine that what makes for a good leitmotif is something which is more the concern of the radio composer or sound designer than the radio dramatist himself. In the process of producing a script, a producer or director might collaborate with the sound designer to come up with one without getting such an idea from the actual instructions in the script. In my own case, where I produced the whole of Son of Yi, Son of Pangu myself, including the musical scoring, I inserted a leitmotif for Gong, the principal villain (synthwave in F-minor), and used the sound effect of a hissing snake for Nugua, a benign goddess.
My whole process was very ad hoc and full of improvisation and guesswork. I used a blog post on music theory as a cheat sheet for figuring out which musical chords would be best suited to particular scenes, and did further internet research to figure out what musical instruments would work best where. It was an enjoyable exercise, but far from expert in its execution. My best advice to the reader, however they use their music, is to make sure that its use does not distract from the radio play’s speech.
In sum, music, sound effects, and the people responsible for them in radio drama are inestimably valuable, but thanks to AI music and other tools, their roles (and those of others) may be usurped by a single producer. What I do know for sure is that sound effects and music play an important embellishing role in radio drama, but must remain secondary to speech.
Music in a radio play is not as important as music in a film, but if executed well can make a significant, appropriate contribution to a radio play’s memorability.
Sound effects, the cinematography of the mind, are, I am told, often used excessively by amateur, novice producers. The more sound effects which are piled on, the harder it will be to discern the radio play’s speech. I am not exempt from this foible.
The invaluable technique of the theme or leitmotif cannot be stressed enough. Yes, use it sparingly, but use it well. It might be just the thing to complete the magic trance which is your radio play.
I cannot make this clear enough: Music and sound effects are meant to serve in supporting roles in a radio play. They should not be so heavily used as to obscure the spoken word. I will say, however, that my own grand experiments with a lengthy run-time have allowed for equally grand experiments in the role of music in a radio play. Son of Yi, Son of Pangu includes a Greek chorus, multiple songs from the heroine, Lo, and a full-scale rock opera finale in the final act. This is all possible thanks to the democratizing power of AI.
Levi Sweeney is an indie radio producer from Seattle, WA. Listen to his new radio play Son of Yi, Son of Pangu, now available on Spotify.
Leave a comment sharing your thoughts. If you have any questions or comments you'd like to send Levi directly, reach out to him by email at info@bolostudios.io