Listening to the first episode of Homecoming wasn’t my first experience with podcasts. In the past, I have listened to a bunch of podcasts related to tech-related topics on Spotify, and it was simply something I used to do as way of passing time while working out, etc. I never thought of podcasts to be particularly immersive, but this ~30 clip was quite captivating in many senses. First of all, the background. I think most of the immersion can be credited to the smart use of background sounds. For example, the sound of sirens, the opening and closing of doors and the setting of a microphone, and so on, helped conjure a mental picture of what the setting looked like. One particular interesting “auditory” scene was when Heidi was talking to the officer outside of her workplace and her boss opened the backdoor to tell Heidi that her break time’s up. The sound effects accompanying that moment really conveyed what the scene must have looked like. Additionally, the background sounds helped set the mood of the different scenes, along with the different vocal expressions that each of the character said.
However, one thing that I had trouble with keeping up was the chronological flow of time in the story. Although I did get it at the end, I was confused during the course of the audio and would stop and ponder at exactly what part of the timeline I was listening to.
My final comment on the audio is a more general statement on the use of audio as a medium of story-telling. We often interpret audio stories by trying to pictorially visualize what is being told, but what does it mean to vizualize the audio itself? Would that even be possible? Even though audio is a strong medium for the deliver of a story, it could be very well substituted for a video with subtitles, so that raises the question as to which forms of stories are best able to capitalize on the medium itself.