Behind the Scenes with Sarah Boothroyd and Inge Hoonte, contributors to the fourth Deep Wireless Radio Art Compilation


Sarah Boothroyd's work is frequently heard on CBC Radio, and has been presented at the International Features Conference and on BBC Radio 4. She spent two years as the A&E Coordinator at CJSF Radio in Burnaby, a year as the Arts Calendar Editor at CKCU Radio in Ottawa, and was conference coordinator for the 2006 National Campus and Community Radio Conference. Sarah is an artist in residence for 2007 at New Adventures In Sound Art. Her work is featured on Deep Wireless 3 and Deep Wireless 4, two CD compilations of radio art by sound artists from around the world.

[Boothroyd produced Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain.]

Dutch multi-disciplinary artist Inge Hoonte received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been presented internationally in Finland, The Netherlands, Canada and multiple cities in the USA, including Cleveland, Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

[Hoonte produced Mr. Right. ]

> How does your piece interact with the "Trans-X"  theme that runs through the compilation?

SB: “Transmission, transfer, pass on, translate, analyze, transcribe….” This piece opens with a vocal narrative listing off words that describe journalism.  This sets the stage for the rest of the piece, which is an exploration of the idea that journalism is a transmission of thought – a transfer of information from source to reporter to audience. 

Besides the narrative voice, there are several other voices that turn up in the piece.  These are the voices of interviewees, recorded in the field and on the phone.  These clips are audio leftovers from interviews that I’ve conducted over the years – they are the scraps of unusable tape left on the cutting room floor.  Creating this piece was an exercise in ‘reverse editing’: I edited in everything that would usually be edited out of a journalistic segment.  These interview clips illustrate the transmissions or interactions that take place between reporters and interviewees – from the reporter checking the audio levels before an interview starts to a source refusing to answer a question during an interview.

Finally, the narrative voice not only hints at ‘the what’ of journalism, but also ‘the how.’  As the narrative iterates “climax, reveal, hero, villain, goal, obstacle” and so on, the piece touches on how information is translated through journalistic methods – how it is shaped and structured for consumption.

IH: Trans stands for all that establishes connection. It is the physical, imagined and energized space in between objects and people. It is preferably ambiguous or has a double meaning, and is built as a cross-over, mix or
collage, whether consciously chosen or unintended.

As a lot of my other work, Mr. Right is very much about seeking connection with an automatically implied missed connection - the play of reaching out and holding back when interacting with others.

When placing a personal ad, your profile ends up in a special “person looking for person” section, next to rows and rows of other “person looking for person” sections. All of them are written from a desire to find someone,
be with someone, share time with someone, to various degrees. On endless pages of newspapers, magazines and internet sites desires scream off the page, straight forward, aiming to reach the right person. It strikes me that technically one could draw lines between individual ads or cut them out to form them into pairs (or threesomes for that matter), to enable connections. It seems easy enough on paper, but reality needs more than a paragraph of words to connect you to someone. It needs the "trans," this indescribable powerful energy in the distance between people.

> In this case, your work is both narrative and conceptual. What are the main challenges of making conceptual audio work?  Are you afraid listeners won't "get" it?

SB: There is a broad spectrum between absolute transparency and complete opacity – between announcing the meaning of a work on a huge banner in the sky and hiding that meaning in a locked chest at the bottom of the deepest sea.  In this piece, the narrative voice attempts to strike a balance between these two extremes.  The words are an effort to make the piece accessible, to point the listener toward contemplating the work’s theme – which is journalism, its methods, products, agents and audience.

While the narrative elements in the piece do point directly to this theme, the words are arranged in a list format without any connective tissue between them: it’s up to the listener to eke out the relationship between the words and thereby create the overall meaning themselves.  This is generally my strategy for resolving the narrative versus conceptual debate: I try to leave enough room for the listener to participate in the interpretation and construction of meaning, but I try not to leave so much room that the listener is frustrated and lost amid a sea of indecipherable symbols.

Also, although I do want people to ‘get it,’ I don’t think that there is necessarily only one ‘it’ for them to ‘get.’  I suppose what I really want is for them to ‘get something.’  I hope listeners who are interested in digging into the thematic content of the piece find the material thought-provoking, but I also hope that the listener who just doesn’t ‘get’ the journalistic theme finds the rhythmic musicality, variety of scenes and other sound design elements intriguing and engaging.

IH: It is my experience that people like to be challenged by a conceptual piece, it’s refreshing to be activated and engaged in that manner. As much as it takes two hard working parties to build a solid relationship, a powerful
experience can only be build up if reader, listener, viewer, participant and creator are engaged enough to do so.

The biggest challenge is to captivate an audience. With live (improvisational) performance you can feel the audience and attune accordingly, whereas with recorded material for broadcast or publication these adjustments are edited and fixed beforehand.

Through a process of layering, skipping certain information and enhancing the amount of detail in other areas, I aim to create work that engages on many levels, while leaving enough space in between these layers for the
audience to complete the piece. Sometimes I embed subtle information that only a handful of people “get”. By triggering different emotions in people a piece can provide more than a single experience, causing the piece to exist and be elongated in a broader range.


> How do certain production techniques in your piece deliver information, as well as sound design?

SB: The vocal narrative delivers information – each word is a clue as to what the piece is about.  But the narrative voice is more than a carrier of information – by doubling it and altering it with various other effects, I’ve morphed the voice into a sound design element.  The narration can be experienced on two levels – at the level of content (what is being said) and at the level of aesthetics (how the words sound). 

I’ve altered the narrative voice to give it an ethereal or omniscient quality and also to separate it from the rest of the soundscape – to situate it above or in front of the interview clips and the rhythmic printing press loops.  By contrast, the interview clips featuring the reporter and her sources are not manipulated at all, and in this way they retain their ‘real world’ tone and texture.  The only manipulations applied to these interview field recordings are pans, which help delineate between the different scenes by changing the aural location of them.  The pans also create a sense of dynamism and movement within the scenes, keeping the piece lively and moving at a quick pace.

I created rhythmic loops out of printing press sounds and layered them under the vocal narrative and interview clips in order to give the piece some structure, to create scenes, to mark transitions, and also to add some musicality, ambience and texture to the piece.  There are three major loops that occur throughout so the work has a triptych structure – a format that is quite classical and accessible to many listeners.

The piece ends with a bridge that consists of several highly manipulated and spacious sound elements followed by a denouement in which the interview clips seem to indicate that the piece is coming to a close.  For example one interviewee says “Hopefully I’ve answered some of your questions clearly enough” and another says “That’s pretty much it for me.”  In this way, the piece ends on a self-referential note: as Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain is drawing to a close, so are the field recording interviews that are interspersed throughout the work.

There is also a broader self-referential aspect to this work as well: while this piece is about the transmission of ideas, the work itself is also one such transmission – one that is edited, arranged and presented with a particular purpose in mind.

IH: Mr. Right was recorded with a stereo mic and DAT recorder, walking up 18 flights of stairs with a stack of selected Chicago Reader personal ads. I wanted very much to create an atmosphere of exhaustion with a high level of intimacy to emulate the sometimes exhaustive search for a partner, thus holding the microphone close to catch the full scope of my breathing. I walked the stairs a couple of times in a row so I would have a wider range
of material to edit. My experience was that the material got more interesting after the 10th floor, and more intimate towards the top floor as the physical environment itself grew more intimate as I reached the roof.