It’s August 2020 in Melbourne, Australia – roughly a month into what would become one of the world’s longest COVID-19 inspired lockdowns, at 111 days. I’m out for my daily run along the Merri Creek, a serpentine trail winding through the city’s north. Normally quiet at this time of the week, it’s bustling with people, with locals generously interpreting the government’s directive to only spend one hour outside the home each day. We’re here to breathe in the crisp winter air, but also for the proximal human contact, scrunching eyes as we pass each other in hope of forging a connection from behind our masks. My phone buzzes, signalling an incoming SMS. I don’t recognise the number.

I press my thumb down on the link, ‘Where are you today?’. It directs me to a website where I’m then prompted to switch on my phone’s location services.

‘You are 1375km away from Farhad Rahmati, who recorded this 14 hours ago’, it reads, followed by a ‘play’ icon. I press on the button, and the audio I’m listening to – a news podcast detailing the latest on the pandemic – fades down through my earbuds into the gentle sound of birdsong. It continues for 10 minutes – a crow chimes in intermittently, the steady buzz of crickets gradually increases in volume, and some other nondescript sounds can be heard far off in the distance. Possibly cars, or maybe a train. The line between the recording and my surroundings is hard to detect at times, as Merri Creek bird populations – crows and magpies – weave through my audio bubble. Finally, there are footsteps, seemingly drawing closer, then an abrupt silence.

This is one of thirty audio pieces recorded by men seeking asylum, detained indefinitely by Australia after attempting to arrive by boat sometime after 2013. The issue of refugees has played a key role in Australian political life over the past two decades, with both the ruling Liberal-National Coalition and Australian Labor Party advancing a punitive agenda.

Prior to 2001, asylum seekers who arrived by boat in Australia would be detained in facilities on the Australian mainland while their claims for refugee status were processed. If found to be a genuine refugee they would then be released into the community on a protection visa; if unsuccessful, they would be returned to their country of origin.

This all changed following a notorious standoff in August 2001 between the Australian government and Norwegian cargo ship the MV Tampa, which had come to the rescue of more than 400 asylum seekers stranded on a fishing vessel in waters between Indonesia and Australia. This saga led to the ‘Pacific Solution’, whereby the Australian government established offshore detention camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea and implemented a policy of boat turnbacks.

Coming just after the September 11 attacks in the US, the policy proved popular, with the Howard government achieving an unlikely win in the federal election later that year. The Labor government dismantled the Pacific Solution in 2008, however facing growing numbers of boat arrivals and an increasingly hostile political climate it reopened detention camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea in 2012, going even further than the previous policy in declaring that no asylum seeker arriving in Australia by boat would ever be settled in the country. The approach has continued under successive coalition governments, with former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull winning praise from US President Donald Trump for the cruelty inherent to Australia’s policy of deterrence.

I received a new recording from one of six asylum seekers each day throughout August last year. The SMS would come at random times, with a short description giving some insight into their surroundings. The project was devised by the Manus Recording Project Collective – a group made up of asylum seekers and Australian journalists and audio producers Michael Green, André Dao and John Tjhia. You could sign up by texting ‘Hello’ to a mobile number – originally supplied to me via email by my producer at the community radio station I’m affiliated with, Triple R – after which time the messages would begin.

‘Where are you today?’ follows a similar project of the Manus Recording Project Collective’s  from 2018. Titled ‘How are you today?’, it involved 84 recordings documenting the experiences of men imprisoned at the Manus Island detention facility in Papua New Guinea, which were then presented as part of an installation at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne.

One of those involved in that project, Behrouz Boochani, has since been widely celebrated for his writing and advocacy. His book No Friend But the Mountains, written via individual text messages sent from Manus Island to his translators and collaborators on the outside, won numerous high-profile awards and is being adapted for both film and stage. Another, Abdul Aziz Muhamat, was recognised with the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2019. This came following his central role in the multi-award-winning 2017 podcast The Messenger – a story documenting his time interred on Manus Island, pieced together by more than 3500 WhatsApp voice messages sent between Aziz and Michael Green. Both men are now free, having been granted asylum by New Zealand and Switzerland respectively.

Digital media and platforms like WhatsApp have proved an effective mechanism for piercing the secrecy surrounding the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers. Journalists have for the most part been barred from gaining access to detention facilities on Manus Island and Nauru, and the Australian government has resisted calls for more transparency over its military-led maritime immigration and surveillance program, Operation Sovereign Borders. The extraordinary stories smuggled out of Manus prison, likened to Gramsci’s prison notebooks, have given profound insights into the reality of life for those trapped in a system that is designed to be so unbearable as to make people choose abject persecution in their own country over the conditions of Australia’s immigration detention.

In recent times, audio has proved a particularly successful medium for spotlighting the human suffering caused by harsh immigration policies. This American Life’s Pullitzer Prize-winning episode ‘The Out Crowd’ uses sophisticated character-driven storytelling techniques, incorporating atmos, first-person narration and music to explore the emotional toll and trauma experienced by both asylum seekers and migration officers as a result of President Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy.

In Australia, recent examples such as the Guardian Australia-affiliated podcasts The Wait and Temporary have provided episodic narrative investigations of the ways in which the government’s policies are impacting those fleeing persecution both within the country and in neighbouring Indonesia. These highly personalised stories reflect the capacity for podcasting to inculcate ‘hyper-intimacy’ (Berry, 2016), where predominantly headphone-based listening practices, combined with an often confessional, self-reflexive storytelling style foster deeply embodied encounters with podcast storytellers (Dowling & Miller, 2019; Lindgren, 2016; MacDougall, 2011).

The specific experience of listening to The Messenger has been referred to as ‘earwitnessing’ (Rae, Russell & Nethery, 2019), with the affective power of voice inviting empathy for Aziz’s plight, and enabling a political engagement with the experience of detention. Much has been made of the role of voice in podcasting, where a personal, conversational style of speaking is thought to make for a more engaging listening experience. What, then, to make of audio recordings documenting imprisonment, such as Rahmati’s, where voice is entirely absent?

Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation (BITA) is situated precisely 1375 kilometres from my location in Preston, Melbourne. Rahmati’s short bio, written in small-print below the ‘play’ button on the ‘Where are you today?’ website, provides the crucial context needed to layer meaning onto his gentle recording made during a period of quiet contemplation in the exercise yard at BITA.

“When I record without talking…it talks louder, because I let the audience find themselves and feel themselves in this situation that I have been trapped in,” he said during a radio interview I conducted with he and Green on Triple R.

“And I think that’s very powerful message. To let people feel our frustration and our pain, which has been around us for seven years.”

The act of listening to a snapshot of Rahmati’s soundworld, recorded just a few hours prior, had the effect of eroding the vast gulf of distance and life experience that separated us. It also gave rise to a feeling of shared listening, made all the more resonant with the subtle feedback of birdsong on the Merri Creek.

Five days later, I received a recording that originated from much closer to home.

Yasin, a 24-year-old from Darfur, could be heard intermittently adjusting weights, then exhaling with exertion, as he went about his exercises, set to the backdrop of country music. Like Rahmati, he was brought to Australia under the government’s short-lived ‘Medevac’ legislation that gave medical professionals the ability to order the transferral of asylum seekers from offshore camps to the Australian mainland for medical treatment.

The Mantra Bell City Hotel is one of a number of Alternative Places of Detention (APOD) used to hold asylum seekers transferred under Medevac. It’s located just a few blocks from my house, on a busy road that cuts across Melbourne’s north, leading out to the airport. A growing collective of pro-refugee activists assembled there in the latter part of 2020 in protest against the 60 asylum seekers held inside, often risking fines for breaking laws restricting outdoor gatherings introduced to curb the spread of COVID-19. In December the detainees were moved to a CBD hotel, then a month later the government announced some would be released on bridging visas. Still though, the government’s no-resettlement policy on boat arrivals stands, so there’s little certainty as to where these men will end up.

In one sense, my closeness to the saga unfolding at the Mantra should have made me care more about the plight of those men. But why should this be so? Proximity, we’re told, is one of the primary news values, but audio has a way of removing the perception, and significance, of distance. Listening to Yasin and Rahmati’s audio recordings had the effect of placing me, momentarily at least, by their side – offering the opportunity to ‘find myself’ in their plight, as Rahmati put so well. And if we’re to truly empathise with those detained indefinitely and without charge in Australia’s name, then we need to overcome the idea that a mere physical closeness to something – or its visibility – is a marker of its importance.

Reflecting on the project, Michael Green points to the lingering effects of listening to these audio pieces.

“I think almost one of my favourite parts of the of the recording is the moment when it finishes, it just cuts out after 10 minutes,” he said

“But actually, it carries on in my mind. I continue to listen along or imagine what Farhad had continued to do in that space afterwards. I think that’s kind of a powerful part of it the way it takes you with them.”

For a time late last year, Rahmati’s whereabouts were unknown. Refugee advocacy groups held concerns for his welfare after it emerged he had been removed from BITA following an interview on Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC, where he spoke about the plight of refugees held in detention. This came after a similar turn of events months earlier, when he was moved from a hotel facility to BITA after talking to media. It turned out he’d been sent to the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney, without explanation. Then, on February 17 this year he announced on Twitter that he had been granted asylum in the US, as part of a refugee swap deal negotiated with the Obama Administration. After eight years imprisoned by Australia, he would be free.

The pandemic has prompted us to grapple with the significance of distance and human connection. Podcast listening increased as people looked for ways to connect with the outside, with numerous COVID-19 specific ventures providing important news and insights into the health crisis, and many others offering a valuable source of companionship.

My experience listening to ‘Where are you today?’ reveals how audio has a unique power to forge an imagined relationship with others, not only through emotional, personalised storytelling, as has become ubiquitous, but also through the simple act of sharing a segment of one’s soundworld, allowing you to temporarily co-habit with those whose lives have been thrown into turmoil through the imposition of border politics.

After months of relative normalcy, where Australia’s privilege of isolation and closed-border policy served to keep COVID-19 at bay, Melburnians are once again in lockdown. The virus initially entered via a hotel in Adelaide, used to quarantine those relatively few overseas arrivals. We spluttered along for a while with low case numbers, trying to keep up with changing restrictions, before an outbreak in Sydney eventually drew us into its web. We’re now up to two-hundred-and-something-days in lockdown, with a tentative exit date of October 26. Some days are quiet along Merri Creek, others more busy. People tend to come out with the sun, gathering in larger numbers than are strictly allowed in the hope, or assumption, they’re not being policed. Still, the birds sing, as they ever did.

References

Berry, R. (2016). Part of the establishment: Reflecting on 10 years of podcasting as an audio medium. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 22(6), 661-671. 

Dowling, D. O., & Miller, K. J. (2019). Immersive audio storytelling: Podcasting and serial documentary in the digital publishing industry. Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 26(1), 167-184. 

Lindgren, M. (2016). Personal narrative journalism and podcasting. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 14, 23-41. 

MacDougall, R. C. (2011). Podcasting and Political Life. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(6), 714-732. 

Rae, M., Russell, E. K., & Nethery, A. (2019). Earwitnessing detention: Carceral secrecy, affecting voices, and political listening in The Messenger podcast. International Journal of Communication 13, 1036–1055. 

Walking through a city without direction and following its sounds, may uncover unknown territories of urban experience. Without a concrete navigational strategy, the listening trail might be more productive than a planned urban journey from A to B, when it comes to reconnecting with the city more intimately, heightened in a migratory context. Such a psychogeographic approach may lead us to explore contemplative listening as a strategy for coping and surviving in contemporary urban environments.

These environments are experiencing a growing sense of post-apocalyptic angst due to climate catastrophe, global warming, mass migration, pandemics, racial differences and strained with networked surveillance and state policing. Given the question of endurance and survival in these times, the subjective position, wellbeing and autonomy of a city dweller matters. This existential perspective involves the practices of walking, listening, and chronicling (e.g. writing or field recording) as the ephemeral traces of an inter-subjective interaction with the city from an artist’s contemplative distance.

The situationists, whose ideas have attracted the deep interest of urban theorists and artists, employed the concept of “psychogeography” to describe a certain experimental practice of subjective and mindful exploration of (urban) place (Sadler 1999; Coverley 2010; Self 2007). Expanding their ideas into sound studies, we can examine how acoustic geography engages mental construction of space through hyper-listening (Chattopadhyay 2012, 2013, 2017, 2021) – a listening mode explored in my practice. 

A number of my sound-based media artworks emerge from these conceptual considerations. Their artistic processes shed light on the perception of a rapidly developing and expanding city by engaging with the multilayered sounds of a temporally coalescing past and present. Many of today’s cities carry remnants of a rural past in the contemporary hyper-modernity, for example, in the architectural relics, sounds, and voices from the bygone eras. This merging of time reflects the cumulative urban ambience, in which sounds from the historical times, such as the archival sounds, blend with sounds from current urbanisation and digital convergence. Through historically aware and spatiotemporally exploratory artistic practice, this essential and characteristic composite ambience of the city can be evoked.

Discussing the resulting artworks gives the opportunity to investigate and speculate on present urban conditions in Europe and America as well as in the Global South (e.g. South Asia, Middle East, and Africa) that are still recuperating from the colonial rubbles, whilst also experiencing rapid growth, a lack of urban design and state control through surveillance. Devising an unfolding situation of the vibrant but clamorous cities from the Global South in corresponding acts of psychogeographic drifting, deterritorialised listening and field recording, a number of my artworks examine the processes of sensing an apparently chaotic and disorganised city with its multi-sensory complexity to develop an intuitive and personalised urban sound design. In European cities, on the other hand, gentrification is a matter of concern – as the process of noise abatement wipes out diverse voices and sounds from the urban atmospheres. With a lack of multiplicity in their sonic environments, such settings may alienate active listeners, who look for plurivocal and vibrant ambiences. 

My artistic practice also responds to such experiences from a migratory listening position, one in which listeners are immigrant, nomadic, itinerant and social outsiders. This is the context of urban mobility, in which I devise the term “hyper-listening” – a coingage that underscores the necessity for an itinerant listener to embrace a contemplative listening method.  As philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara suggests (1990), a propensity to listen without making immediate judgments, may potentially lead to affective engagement with the urban sonic environments that are constantly in a flux for a nomadic ear. In this context, “hyper-listening” is a concept that operates as a set of exercises and collaborative experiments that encourage listening without making immediate judgments. The idea is to engage with the surrounding environment – and those who inhabit it – through the act of meditative listening.

Here, listening attentively is an act to compassionately engage with the surrounding environment, and the bodies that cohabit this environment. This perspective challenges the normative ideas of listening as immediate meaning-making to arrive at conclusions in order to navigate the city. Rather, I underscore in my practice how hyper-listening involves the mindful aspect of the listening act as framed in the term itself in order to expand the scope of the listening to nurture an unfolding process of self-attunement to the urban environment.

Departing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of listening (2007) and Michel Chion’s listening modes (1994), I suggest how the mindful, context-aware, and temporally nonlinear aspects of listening transcends the ontological and epistemological constraints of everyday sounds. Termed “hyper-listening,” such spatiotemporally expansive and inward facing listening approach enables registering the poetic-contemplative states of a listener.

Such listening state generates social connection and affective engagement with the urban environment by a production of historically inclusive sonic subjectivity. This sense of subjectivity draws on memory, desires and reflections that arise from situated listening in a city of many migratory others, connecting with the city by personal reveries and associations. 

It often happens that an active, sensate but itinerant listener attuned to the shifting urban environments becomes absentminded or falls into a reverie when listening to certain sounds. They can be just everyday sounds we live by in our immediate environments. We usually do not attend to them in our daily chores. Some examples of these sounds may include a distant car horn out the office window, a flush of the toilet or the early morning drones from the street cleaning car. These sonic phenomena are nothing special; they appear and evaporate in our immediate environment during a working day without leaving any trace.

However, some of these sounds induce us to elevate ourselves to some other perceptual planes perhaps not directly related to the source or place of occurrence of the sonic phenomena. This exercise tends to empower the listeners to broaden their sonic worlds expanding the immediate moment towards the context-aware subjective associations, reveries, desires and deeply embedded assumption and trauma: for example, emotionally moving memories of the passing of a loved one, or past experience of an abuse.

Thus the listener is able to relate better to his or her personal narrative, memory, wound, and longings through a therapeutic process of self-listening. This personal exposure allows them to relate better not only to themselves but also, as a consequence of this self-attunement and sonic sensitisation, to their surrounding and others as an inclusive community of fellow listeners.

Hyper-listening to the everyday urban sounds in this way opens doors into another world beyond their intended immediate meaning or object-hood. They manage to unsettle a sensitive listener in such a way that they experience an elevated state of contemplation and emancipation. It seems that these sounds are not the specific causes for becoming absentminded, enjoying a sense of poetic detachment from the immediate reality; rather, somehow, an evocative but uncertain auditory situation unfolds around a listener as the sounds are perceived. This subtle formation is the point of curiosity in my current artistic practice, particularly in my listening-driven exploratory writings. 

For example, The Nomadic Listener (Chattopadhyay 2020) is an augmented artist book based on the notion of hyper-listening, considered here as a case study for discussion.

The book is based on my artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience and sonic alienation. It is composed of a series of texts (60 in total) stemming from psychogeographic explorations (namely walking, listening, and site-specific writing) of a number of contemporary cities developed between 2012 and 2019, spanning three continents. Each of these 60 pieces of writings is an act of attentive listening, leading to the recording of the specific urban location in sound and poetic text, attempting to attune to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. Spread over the pages of the book, these pieces of writings conjure a collection of meditations on the minutiae of life emerging, contemplatively interwoven with my own memories, associations, desires and reflections being in the city.

Sensitive readers and listeners are brought inside a playful and malleable map of contemporary urban experiences and the autonomous assemblage of the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in the act of walking through a city without any fixed direction but following its sounds, like a sonic drifter by means of being an itinerant, migratory and sensitive listener.

In this mode of sonic navigation, “hyper-listening” is a useful concept and methodological entry point to understand the ways in which a city dweller may experience emancipation and relief from a tense and oppressive sonic environment of contemporary cities through a poetic engagement with it, and opening the experience up for an evocative storytelling to share with other listeners. Let me discuss one excerpt from the book as an example of my artistic practice with hyper-listening, and work through my personal narrative: 

Water splashes on the jetty since the medieval times; the sound of this primordial contact between nature and culture cannot make me forget that some people didn’t keep their words to me. The unkempt city is slowly drowning – the water level is rising with each passing moment. The words that weren’t kept, the faces that turned away, the bird that never returned to the house garden – all these worldly imperfections are weighing heavily on the decks of the motorboats. The misgivings of the city-dwellers have piled up to make the dustbins at the street corners spilling over. Water is flowing through the darker corners of the city bringing up skeletons of failed marriages, unborn babies, love letters thrown away, unmade beds and pillows – all floating in the knee deep water, reborn for further speculation. People who didn’t keep their words to the city, now rushes to jump into motorboat to escape the city’s rebirth as a heartbroken wasteland. (Chattopadhyay 2020: 56) 

Written in Venice while listening to the overflowing lagoon from a jetty, this meditation imagines the future of this Italian city in the aftermath of the global warming and climate change. As widely speculated, Venice, like many other cities close to the water, will be submerged by rising sea levels within a few decades. For an attentive and sensitive listener, the listening act to such a troubled auditory situation generates evocative imaginings scribbled in a poetic form, where the real meets the surreal, and gives the stream of consciousness a narrative flow.

In a mode of audio storytelling, the field recording at the Venetian jetty traces the setting of the sensory interaction with the past, present and future of the city with many unfolding stories to be engulfed by the rising water level in darker times to come. The auditory situation of this moment unfolds through the context-aware hyper-listening that endows the listener envisaging the future of the city in a climate breakdown.  

My interest in the above-mentioned project lies in contextualising the stream of thoughts, or the personal contemplation that sounds trigger, particularly for a migratory listener. More often than not, these thoughts, when registered or written down as scribbles for retelling the experience to an empathetic listening community, appear as lyrical, touching upon certain reflective, abstract, and introspective states of the mind. My subjective-artistic position as a sensitive migratory entity, seeking urban safety, wellbeing and autonomy as well as connections, is informed and supported by this sonic intervention in a city through audio storytelling.

Such a psychogeographic approach may have led my artistic practice to self-attune my wandering ears for surviving in the contemporary European urban environments marred by systematic oppression, state surveillance and climate catastrophes. Retelling of these stories and sharing them with other city dwellers help nurture solidarity and empathy within a community of listeners as a mode of resistance and advocacy.  

References

Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2020). The Nomadic Listener. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press.

Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2021). The Auditory Setting: Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2013). “Auditory situations: Notes from nowhere”. Journal of Sonic Studies 4 (Special issue: Sonic Epistemologies). 

Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2017). “Hyper-listening: Praxis.” In: Mateus-Berr, R., and Reitstätter, L. (eds.), pp. 171-175. Art & Design Education in Times of Change. Conversations Across Cultures. Vienna: de Gruyter.

Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2012). “Soundhunting in a city: Chronicles of an urban field recording expedition”. Field Notes 3. Frankfurt am Main: Gruenrekorder.

Chion, Michel (1994). Audio-vision: Sound on screen. Gorbman, C. (ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Coverley, Merlin (2010). Psychogeography. Herts: Pocket Essentials.

Fiumara, Gemma Corradi (1990). The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London: Routledge.

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007). Listening. Translated by C. Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press.

Sadler, Simon (1999). The Situationist City. London: The MIT press.

Self, Will (2007). Psychogeography. London: Bloomsbury.

“Alexa, open The Messlins” says one of my kids out loud to the smart speaker setup in our living room. After eight months of research, design and production, I was about to witness my children interacting with my voice-enabled audio story for the very first time.

With a background in performance and media production, I have always been driven to find new ways to connect with an audience, whether taking the stage to do sketch comedy, giving live readings of my self-published children’s book, or producing audio-visual content for broadcast, film, and web. In 2019, I began to explore the ways in which storytelling can transform into storyliving; an undeniable shift that we have been seeing more of in the last decade. This exploration eventually led me to Ryerson University’s Media Production MA program. 

I completed my master’s degree in 2020 with a research and design focus on interactive audio narratives using a smart speaker. Interactive stories told through a smart speaker are a relatively new way to engage an audience. As part of my research, I developed a prototype for an interactive audio narrative for children titled “The Messlins,” using Amazon’s voice-enabled device, the Echo. The story used a branching narrative design. Branching narrative is a form of storytelling that allows audiences to decide the path and outcome of the story (gamasutra.com). A child can decide how the story unfolds by voicing their choice when prompted by the characters heard in the story. Later, I will describe further why the Amazon Echo was chosen as the device for the design and user-testing of the prototype.

As a parent, my world presently revolves around all things that educate and entertain my twin 6-year olds, so it made the most sense to write a story for an audience for that age group.  Through my research, I learned that children between the ages of 4 to 7 have developed the skills to use their imagination and play make-believe (Calvert and Wilson 291; Vygotsky 1967). Many of us can recall a time in our own childhoods when a parent reads a bedtime story. Even though my mother or father had the responsibility of reading the words on the page, I was always encouraged to ask questions, add sound effects or speak “directly” with the characters. The beautiful thing about an audio narrative is that it can open a world of possibility that allows the listener to paint their own imagery of the storyworld and characters in their minds. 

Since the prototype was designed to be an interactive experience, it was important to understand what motivates a young child to interact with the story. One consideration was a child’s ability to communicate verbally. Storytelling with elements of play can help a child with their communication skills (Phillips 4; Ryokai and Cassel 2). Throughout the story of “The Messlins”, children are meant to interact with the characters as well as move around their physical space as if they are in the story. The design of the characters was another important factor when considering a child’s motivation to interact with the story. The main characters are siblings who would be described as tweens, as it has been found that young children respond better to older characters that they can look up to (Miller 2014).  As a side note, the inspiration for the main characters with whom the user interacts came from the adventurous spirit of both my son and daughter, so I decided to create a young male and female character with equal status. I also wanted to pay a small tribute to my heritage as a Filipino-German-Canadian, so I created another main character with a German name while weaving in Filipino references throughout the script. 

My years of experience as a video producer taught me to always start with a script outline, a “blueprint” that ensures flow and connectivity between the beginning, middle and end. An interactive story with multiple plots and endings adds an extra layer of complexity. Before writing the audio script, I first mapped out the main plot points of the story which evolved into a branching map, which looks very much like a tree, hence the name. Unlike a linear plotline, stories that employ a branching narrative require a lot of work and pre-planning to ensure that every choice available makes sense for the story progression (Crawford 117). I personally like to get literally hands-on for a project like this, so to begin I created the branching map by hand with lots of different coloured markers and a large piece of paper; this is where being a parent with an abundance of craft material comes in handy! I then created a digital version of the branching map using a mapping software called Lucid Chart.

There is one differentiating factor that sets interactive content apart from a linear audio story; the ability to make choices. In a branching narrative, the listener can influence the direction of the story. A narrative designer must consider how a user will interact with the system and factor in as many outcomes as possible (Crawford 31). The element of play involved in an interactive experience also changes the role of the child. When a child simply listens to a linear story, this is considered a passive activity. However, in an interactive story a child is an active participant who can be viewed as either a player, user, learner, or a combination of the three (Markopoulos et al 28). Designing for an active participant requires empathising with them, in this case the child, and seeing the story through their eyes. In the case of my prototype, it would be hearing it through their ears. 

Once an idea is sparked, the hardest part of the creative design process for me is often simply starting. I was carrying out two roles in parallel; the writer of a fairytale story and the VUI designer of an interactive experience. The writer in me needed to think about how to tell an engaging story that hit all the major beats. If the experience wasn’t entertaining, I would lose the interest of the listener (Buurman 1). While my inner-VUI designer had to consider the conversation between the user and the device from beginning to end (Pearl 8).  For no particular reason, other than it being one of the most popular brands of smart speakers that I also happen to own, I chose the Amazon Echo, which uses the virtual assistant AI technology called Alexa. 

Voice-enabled apps that are built for the Echo are called “Skills.”  Early in the design process, I knew that I wanted a narrator to introduce the Skill before the story began. I also wanted it to be a voice that was different from the voice assistant (in this case, Alexa) so that the user would know that the experience had officially begun. This meant that the narration portion would have to be scripted and recorded. 

Once I had established how the Skill would launch, mapping out the branches was a relatively fluid process. I would complete one whole branch from start to finish before going onto another branch. Some branching narrative designers believe that it is best to follow through to the end with one branch otherwise one may run the risk of creating several half-complete branches (LudoNarraCon 2020). In addition, this approach insured that every path was given the same importance in the design process. To avoid the map from branching out exponentially, I used a technique referred to as foldback, which involves linking certain points of different branches together (Crawford 121). Once completed, the first version of the branching map resulted in a total of 31 scenes which included the opening narration and credits. 

With the map created, I was then able to write the script, a process which was once again twofold; the beginning and end of each scene were driven by principles of VUI design while the middle section was all about the narrative. The front and backend of each scene were treated as conversational markers (Pearl 40). This means that a scene opens with positive feedback to the user indicating that the choice they had made in the previous scene was heard and accepted. It also means that the same scene would eventually end with one of the characters prompting the user to make a choice for the next scene. I opted for the characters to suggest how to respond as it has been found that providing examples is a better user experience (Pearl 21). 

The original branching map included two distinct choices for the user at every major plot point. My original thought was that it was best to keep the answer short and simple as to make it easier for the child to repeat. I later discovered that short commands like “Study” can be problematic for a voice-driven application and it is easier for the system to recognise phrases such as “Go to the Study” (Pearl 131). Of course, we can’t forget about the middle section of each scene; this was my moment to shine as a storyteller and comedian. I was making a prototype for kids after all and humour can make an experience more enjoyable (Hall and Maeda 95) but it is important to note that it is different from adult humour (Miller 2014). Fortunately, I have a strong background in sketch comedy which makes me keenly aware of comedic timing and the art of being silly. I added little moments in the script that would hopefully elicit a giggle from the listener, whether it was for the child or their parent. 

When the university closed its doors due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I had to be proactive to ensure that the production process would continue as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately, the social distancing rule that was put in place in mid-March 2020 made in-person recording sessions impossible and I had to pivot my approach. I planned a virtual sound production that required building a temporary sound booth in my basement, delivering equipment to the homes of my voice talent, directing them over a video conference call, and uploading the audio files onto a shared drive which my sound engineer could access.

While I was able to find alternate methods to keep production going, it did not come without its challenges and setbacks. The sound booth that I was able to build at home was the perfect size but I was unable to cover it with blankets from top to bottom, which would have been ideal in order to cut out any external sounds. This meant that there were moments when noise in the home like the furnace going on, would get picked up by the microphone. Directing the voice talent remotely was also challenging. I had to listen to my voice actors through my computer speakers. There was no way of really knowing how the recordings sounded until I received the files. Fortunately, my voice actors also live together which made it easier to match their ambient sound. The recordings that my husband and I did at home also matched. Adjusting the reverb and adding ambient sounds created the illusion that the characters were in the same space. This is where having a sound engineer who can make this happen is incredibly important.

The audio clips were made up of various sound elements which included voice recordings, original and stock music, and sound effects. The voice recordings were provided by myself, my husband, and two friends. Since this was an interactive audio story for children, I wanted all the characters including the mischievous creatures, to be lively and likeable. The high energy delivery of the character voices was intended to keep a young listener engaged. As sound can affect us psychologically and emotionally (Treasure 2020), I also wanted to avoid any of the characters from sounding too menacing or scary for a child. I had a similar objective for the music selection. All the stock music in the prototype are instrumental pieces that were part of a family-friendly music library. The main theme song of the story includes original lyrics that I wrote with three characteristics in mind; simple, fun, and catchy. 

The sound effects evolved throughout production. I had originally planned for sound effects that would help support each scene such as ambient sounds of a room (eg. the sound of feet walking down a long hallway) and the characters’ movements and interactions with objects (eg. a character pulls a cork out of a bottle). Further research on VUI design prompted me to consider how sound effects could be used to provide the user a context on how to interact with the story (Pearl 62). For instance, a twinkling sound effect was later added to cue the user whenever it was time to make a choice in the branching narrative. This type of sound effect is considered an earcon because it is a piece of information that lets the user know that they are expected to respond to the system (material.io 2020). Another addition into the audio mix were various hero sounds, which indicated whenever the user had selected a choice that would advance the narrative closer to success. This could also be considered a form of feedback, which has been found to be effective in a VUI designed for children (Cieślak 2020).

Despite all the unexpected ways in which I had to shift production, overall I was pleased with the end result.  Once the produced audio clips were ready, I incorporated them into the conversational map that I created with Voiceflow. I was then able to test out the prototype with my children using our home smart speaker and observe how they interacted with the story. To witness their intuitive responses to the characters and get up to take part in some of the activities brought a huge smile to my face. As a creator, there is no better feeling than to see the content elicit a reaction from the audience, and on a new level, interact with the content. Observing my children playing with the interactive audio narrative allowed me to confirm what worked and didn’t work. The children’s interactions and reactions to the story confirmed that receiving feedback from the characters affirmed their role as the choice-makers. Music played its most important role as a cue for commands. The children knew that they could respond once the music had ended. Their attentiveness throughout the story was due in large part to their required involvement to determine the story progression (Miller 2014; Sperring and Strandvall 233).

The prototype test also revealed what needed to be improved. Using vocal commands to communicate with a smart speaker is intuitive but the moment the voice assistant cannot pick up a command, which happens more often with children, is when it becomes frustrating for a user. I also found it interesting that my children were more invested in chasing after the Messlins than to do the side activities. For them, that was the main objective of the game, and anything beyond that was an obstacle. In terms of the character design, I spent considerably more time on the development of the prince and princess characters because I had assumed a child would feel more connected to them because of their age and shared goal of finding the Messlins. So, it came as a surprise that my children were more engaged whenever a Messlin was in the scene. Although the Messlins had considerably fewer lines compared to the other characters, they were the most memorable characters because they were, as one of my kids described them, “silly and funny.”It is an exciting time for voice technology, and with huge brands like Disney and Hasbro starting to develop their own content for voice-enable devices it’s evident that we are just witnessing the beginning of a new way to connect with audiences. It is especially important these days, with everyone at home and relying more on screen time. Providing children with a new way to interact with content while also encouraging them to imagine the scene in their own minds is fulfilling to me as both a creator and a parent. In the coming months, I look forward to testing out the prototype with other users through the Ryerson University Transmedia Zone Incubator program of which I am currently a member. Further testing is an integral part of the process and I hope to gain valuable new insight on the user-experience.  Much like a branching narrative, where this creative process leads me to next is still unknown, but I’m looking forward to the adventure nonetheless. 

References

Buurman, H. A. Virtual Storytelling: Emotions for the narrator. MS thesis. University of Twente, 2007.

Calvert, Sandra L., and Barbara J. Wilson. The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development. Wiley-Blackwell, GB, 2008.

Cieślak, Katarzyna. “How to design a Voice-First game for kids? – Voice Tech Global Medium.” Medium, 24 Jan. 2020, medium.com/voice-tech-global/how-to-design-a-voice first-game-for-kids-79ec345d0c35.

Crawford, Chris. Chris Crawford on interactive storytelling. New Riders, 2012.

Hall, Erika, and John Maeda. “Conversational design.” (2018).

LudoNarraCon. “Developing Branching Narratives.” YouTube, uploaded by Fellow Traveller, 5 May 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgD81pQlu1o.

Material.io. “Applying sound to UI.” 20 March 2020, https://material.io/design/sound/applying-sound-to-ui.html 

Markopoulos, Panos, et al. Evaluating children’s interactive products: principles and practices for interaction designers. Elsevier, 2008.

Miller, Carolyn H. Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment. Focal Press/Elsevier, US. 2008; 2014;.

Pearl, Cathy. Designing voice user interfaces: principles of conversational experiences. ” O’Reilly Media, Inc.”, 2016.

Phillips, Louise. “Storytelling: The seeds of children’s creativity.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 25.3 (2000): 1-5.

Ryokai, Kimiko, and Justine Cassell. “Computer support for children’s collaborative fantasy play and storytelling.” CSCL. 1999.

Sperring, Susanne, and Tommy Strandvall. “Viewers’ Experiences of a TV Quiz show with Integrated Interactivity.” International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction: Social Interactive Television, vol. 24, no. 2, 2008, pp. 214-235.

“The evolution of video games as a storytelling medium, and the role of narrative in modern games.” 6 Apr. 2020, www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ChrisStone/20190107/333798/The_evolution_of_video_games_as_a_storytelling_medium_and_the_role_of_narrative_in_modern_games.php.

Treasure, Julian. “The 4 ways sound affects us.” 13 Mar. 2020,  www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us?language=en

Vygotsky, Lev S. “Play and its role in the mental development of the child.” Soviet psychology 5.3 (1967): 6-18.

From our launch in 2013, The Writing Platform has published hundreds of articles on digital innovation in storytelling from around the world. We have featured articles on everything from augmented reality storybooks for children to immersive theatre and from re-imagined books to experiments with virtual reality and binaural audio. We have published interviews with leading thinkers and writers in the field and shared snippets of digital storytelling projects through our Screenshots series. 

Since we started, everything has changed. There have been new technologies, innovations, platforms and new ways of telling stories. For many of us, most aspects of our lives are now online.

For 2021, we want to take a deeper look at digital storytelling and focus on a different theme every few months. We are excited about the rapid pace of innovation and want to take you with us as we dive into ways of telling stories to look at our rapidly changing digital world. 

Through open submissions, we have been looking for artists, writers, researchers, technologists and creators who want to share their stories, projects, new ways of thinking, research and ideas. Our editors have been guided by an interest in experimentation, personalisation and playfulness and we are excited by what we have found. 

Our first theme will be audio storytelling and articles over the next few months will include locative storytelling from Poland, how immersive audio experiences can help people with Parkinson’s disease, how voice technology can be used to tell stories for children, a look at adaptive podcasts and experiences of sonic alienation. 

Our next theme will be activism and social change through storytelling so get in touch if you’d like to contribute. 

– The Writing Platform editors 

The creation, presentation and publication of new creative work has been a core element of undergraduate teaching programs at Queensland University of Technology for over four decades now. What started as the writing and performance of works for the stage by drama and dance students, has been transformed via a tsunami of consumer-led technologies and pedagogical incarnations to embrace work designed for stage, screen, new media, animation and numerous digital delivery platforms. And in recent years the practice of creative writing (in all its forms) has evolved from a traditionally individual process to that of a vibrant team-based practice with writers working in vertically integrated, interdisciplinary production enterprises. 

The School of Creative Practice in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT is comprised of six discipline areas; Music, Dance, Drama, Creative Writing, Visual Art and Film/Screen & Media. The Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees that span these six programs incorporate discipline specific practice units, shared academic and critical studies units and in the final year, a suite of interdisciplinary creative practice units. These capstone interdisciplinary practice units were conceived in response to industry consultation, and the reflective and lived experience of creative practitioners in the teaching faculty, as critical to preparing emerging creative artists for the team-based creative environments they would engage with.

On July 2, 2020 Queensland University of Technology Art Museum launched an exhibition of William Robinson’s artworks titled By the Book at the William Robinson Gallery in Old Government House. The exhibition was partnered with the publication of a non-fiction novella of the life and works of William Robinson by award-winning Australian writer, Nick Earls. The exhibition curator proposed a format where an audiobook read by the author would guide visitors through artworks, photographs and artefacts referred to in the text.

Nick Earls reading during a recording session (Photo: Michael Whelan)

As a music academic at QUT, my role in the exhibition was to produce the recording of the author reading the book and to coordinate the subsequent editing and assembly of the sixty individual audio cues that accompany the in-person and virtual tour of the sixty works on display in the exhibition. During the editing and post-production process of the voice recordings, and in conversation with the curator and the author, the brief began to expand to include additional audio resources to enrich the audience experience in the gallery and online. A sound artist named Lawrence English had captured and made available nature soundscape recordings from selected field locations that featured in many of Robinson’s landscapes. William Robinson is also an accomplished pianist and a recording of Bill playing Brahms Intermezzo in A Major was offered to accompany the field sound recordings as additional media and context to complement the reading.

Nick Earls reading during a recording session (Photo: Michael Whelan)

With the production brief now expanded to include location sound and occasional musical cues, I proposed the inclusion of small musical motifs to conclude each cue to signal the end of the cue for listeners (You know it’s time to turn the page when Tinkerbell rings her little bell). Using Bill’s recorded performance of Brahms Intermezzo in A Major as a point of departure, I recorded a series of fifteen separate five-second improvised variations on the main theme to place randomly at the end of each cue as our Tinkerbell signal to virtual and in-person viewers that the audio for that particular piece had concluded. The final format for the audiobook descriptions was finalised and the sixty cues were completed with author voice recording, location sound, background music and cue-end markers.

Final year Creative Writing students in the School of Creative Practice participate in a range of these interdisciplinary creative projects; some connecting with various aspects of the publishing industry (zine, blog and online formats etc..), some leading community writing initiatives and some collaborating with visual artists on illustrated poetry and prose publications.

The By the Book project with its combination of written text, recorded spoken word, sound design, music creation, neutral and character performance, audio recording combined with the design, production and publication of streamed programs and podcasts provide an exciting format for creative writers to participate in a wide range of team-based interdisciplinary practices. Within this model, writers are the creative and conceptual nucleus of projects that may include acting students, for whom training and experience in recorded voice-over and character performance will be extremely valuable. Audio and technical production students have the potential to collaborate, design and produce audio environments that capture core themes, locations and psychological landscapes. Music producers and composers interested in music and sound for film, television, multimedia and games can find a variety of challenges supporting and foregrounding key themes in the text through leitmotif and underscore. And Film, Screen and Media students may collaborate with the QUT student record label, Vermillion Records to realise these audio programs for distribution online.

The rise of the enhanced audio podcast has been hyperbolic in recent years on the back of genres such as audio books, serialised true crime, news and current affairs commentary, short stories, comedy, in-conversation and, wellness and mindfulness programs. According to US marketing firm Brandtastic, podcast listeners consume an average of seven different shows per week and podcast review sites speculate that there are currently between than 700,000 and 1,000,000 active podcast programs available for download. Apple podcasts alone feature more than 500,000 programs in over 100 languages. With blockchain tracking so simple with this digital delivery format, there are abundant analytics outlining the production growth and market penetration of podcasts as the entertainment format with at-home and in-transit the most popular.

 Content has always been king, and undergraduate creative practice at QUT will increasingly embrace creative writers as core contributors, project leaders and collaborative artists in a diverse range of interdisciplinary production projects. Enhanced audio podcasting with its booming market consumption and dynamic combination of media, creative stakeholders and production practices seems certain to generate a curriculum and project-based learning wave to surf into this fertile future of storytelling. The By the Book project at QUT has provided an exciting stimulus for academics and students in creative practice disciplines to reimagine writers and writing. 

I set out to make ‘A dictionary of the revolution’ in 2013. I planned to record conversations with different people, asking them to define words I heard people using to talk about politics in Egypt. Then I’d use transcriptions of their speech to create entries in a subversive ‘dictionary’ that tries to represent language as a material, capricious and changeable. At the start, I proposed it as a printed book project. 

It’s not that I had never worked with text outside of a book before. More than a decade earlier, I’d ventured away from left-aligned stanzas into making visual and concrete poetry, maps and drawings made of text, and poetry games. I adored artist books, especially those that play with structure to conjure new ways of reading. Cards come up repeatedly in my practice. Cards are unbound pages that allow for fragmented and fluid narratives. They can be laid out on a surface, shuffled, and recombined. 

The dictionary project started with a set of cards. In 2014, I gathered a list of 160 words that I heard come up frequently in conversations about politics in Egypt. I printed 250 sets of vocabulary cards, each housed in a palm-sized box. Conceived as a research tool, the box also works as a game or conversation starter. 

Vocabulary cards for a dictionary of the revolution (2014), photo by Amanda KM

Six months later, I started listening to recordings of nearly two hundred people interacting with the vocabulary box. First I edited an audio archive, then worked with transcriptions of the archive to assemble the text. The process was years-long, obsessive and laborious. I took the long route. Rather than work with each recording individually, I listened to recordings by term. This meant that I was constantly rotating between recordings of different individuals. I wanted to reach a plural understanding of each term, with many individuals near to each other giving unique definitions. My circuitous route through hundreds of hours of recordings demanded a publication twisted out of the linearity of the bound book. 

Working log for the project, image courtesy of the artist

To be honest, other pressures pushed me away from print. I wanted to launch the publication to an Egyptian audience first, and if I tried to publish a book in Egypt, the text would have passed through the hands of censors. I was not at all confident that it would return intact, or that I would be willing to make changes. Moreover, I didn’t want the attention such a process might bring to me or the project.

Earlier, I met a young publisher in Cairo who was interested in putting it into print. I brought up my concerns to him, which he addressed this way: One, he planned to write a foreword to the text which would directly declare that I was a foreign researcher, a US citizen, or something along those lines. Two, the book would not be placed in bookshops, but would only be available by mail order.

The question of access was the decisive factor in publishing digitally. By 2017, the public atmosphere had changed dramatically in Egypt. The loud and unrelenting conversations that had inspired the project, expressing ideologies previously relegated to very private spaces, had disappeared under great weights of intimidation, harassment, prison, and other methods of repression. I was uncertain how to distribute a printed object about a subject most people had gone silent about. It seemed intuitive to turn to digital space, where a large audience could access the text at any time. 

Next came the question of how to organize a text originally intended for the page in digital space. I thought back to something Ahmed Refaat, the lead researcher, brought up during the research. He wanted to ask participants to group cards into families of related words. I thought it might distract from the intimate flow of conversation I wanted to record. But now, with texts woven from everyone’s speech, it was possible to assemble those families. By searching for a term in the complete text of the dictionary, I could locate the entries in which it appeared most frequently. I could answer the question, “What other terms do people talk about when they talk about a given term?” I did this myself for a few words, but needed a machine to do a complete and accurate analysis.

I was getting close. I looked for a programmer. After a few failed attempts, a friend introduced me to Youssef Faltas, who immediately understood what I was looking for. With his background in physics and art, he was the perfect person to work with to find the form to best suit the publication. We settled on a chord diagram, a data visualization that represents connections between nodes in a circular layout. Faltas programmed the machine reading of the text, animated the diagrams, and insisted on a one-page design. We used line weight to indicate the closeness of the relationships between words. Together, we overcame some challenges, including coming up with a vocabulary to talk to each other about what we were doing. (It wasn’t until after I completed the project that I learned about corpus linguistics, making me feel foolish as many of the problems I encountered along the way had already been tackled in the field.)

Screenshot from http://qamosalthawra.com

The website allows a non-linear reading through a web of connected concepts, events, objects, and characters. Definitively, it organizes the way people read the text. According to analytics, people spend only brief amounts of time on the site. I suspect that most play with the chord diagrams more than anything else, resulting in the curiosity of the text’s effective disappearance. If I’m correct, they’re playing with a surface, navigating through a text they don’t read. The project is translated into its visualization — or, as Faltas says, is gamified —and reading becomes clicking on words and navigating their relationships.

Screenshot from http://qamosalthawra.com

I included a downloadable pdf for each entry on the Arabic version of the website. I think, more than anything, that was because of residual ambivalence about moving completely away from print. I hope that people might collect the texts and save them locally. But publishing digitally also meant that I could share an archive containing some of the material used to make the project, like the library of audio clips. I still think of the project as a book, perhaps because I recall its five hundred page heft as I was editing the first draft. Now it’s a kind of book on the internet.

In the run up to the launch of RadioBook Rwanda in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, the three young creatives behind the international publishing project reflect on the digital journey of their new imprint.

Louise Umutoni (Huza Press)

Lily Green (No Bindings)

Otieno Owino (Kwani Trust)

RadioBook Rwanda is a multimedia literary imprint showcasing creative voices from Rwanda and East Africa. It’s first output is a triptych of bilingual pocketbooks with complementary podcasts and audiobooks. The imprint is the brainchild of three independent international publishers: Huza Press (Kigali, RW), Kwani Trust (Nairobi, KE) and No Bindings (Bristol, UK). It was supported by the British Council East Africa Arts Programme. 

Photo by Jo Hounsome

Proposal Stage

What intrigued you to create a multimedia imprint to showcase Rwandan writing?

Louise Umutoni: In Rwanda, radio has has always been really far reaching with many Rwandans tuning in to listen to different radio shows. It has not been the same with reading. The reading culture is still relatively poor. So, we thought, ‘how do we reach people with these texts?’, and turning them into audiobooks seemed like an obvious solution at the time. Just having the material as audio content, online, we anticipated greater reach without having to worry about the hassle of getting the printed texts across borders and oceans and so there were practical reasons too. We also wanted to experiment with this new content and ask, ‘can we go beyond the book, can we have a much wider effect?’.

Otieno Owino: The reasoning for us wanting to create a multimedia imprint came out of us wanting to extend the possibilities of what a book is and how people consume stories. It was also a genuine interest in meeting our audiences in ways that are ‘cool’, essentially because the target audience was younger people (18-35). To speak of Nairobi, there had already been a rising popularity of podcasts as a medium of storytelling and a lot of young people were turning to audiobooks as a means of experiencing stories. This new imprint was to contribute to an already growing fan base of audiobook enthusiasts but offering fresh new writing by Rwandan writers not already well known in Kenya.

Lily Green: With No Bindings, I specialise in combining audio, community and print. Oral storytelling, whether it be ancient epics, or contemporary spoken word, allowed and allows for a different kind of access to literature. Back in 2016, when I started No Bindings, I very much saw podcasts, and to a certain extent, radio as the digitised version of that oral tradition.

The popularity of radio in the East Africa region, the growing demand for podcasts in Kenya, and the publishing community that Huza Press has been building, meant that working with No Bindings was a good fit.

The intrigue for me was learning from the other two publishers and working internationally. Within the collaboration, we all had something to offer: my approach to form, Louise’s ongoing work building up a literary and publishing infrastructure in Rwanda, and Kwani’s long-standing work publishing new literary talent from the continent. The ‘new Art new Audiences’ afforded us the chance to take the risk to create something novel and ambitious.

Knowledge Exchange and Research Trip to Kigali, Rwanda

What did we learn about digital consumption in the UK/Rwanda/Kenya and what were we inspired by?

Louise: For us at Huza, we already knew that Rwandans consume a lot more audio content than they do print. However, I think what was interesting was actually producing the audio content. There were quite a few challenges getting our heads around how to produce an audiobook and getting people who understood what it entailed to work on the product. However, we were really impressed with how quickly people caught on and were willing to experiment and learn. The result was some really fantastic content. There was a lot of learning for us but that’s expected when you are doing something that has not previously been done.  People aren’t accustomed to experiencing books through the radio, so it will be really exciting to see the response when they are broadcast here in Rwanda.

Lily: What didn’t we learn! In March 2019, myself and Eloise Stevens, the audio producer, visited Kigali for for three weeks to learn about what our target audience, 18-35 year olds in Kigali, wanted from books and audio. Louise and Huza’s literary producer, Lucky Grace Isingizwe, already had a lot of understanding around consumption of audio, so we grilled them over many teas and coffees. They also connected us to other digital innovators in the city.

Jado Castor at Radio TV 10 was able to give us insight into what languages to use. Kinyarwanda is spoken by all, but there is a growing demand for English language content among the younger generation

The Girl Effect run Ni Nyaminga, a quarterly magazine and weekly radio show for young girls. It is insanely popular and they have an interactive element through a mobile messaging service.

It became clearer and clearer just how much mobiles and smartphones were the go-to for personal and professional communication. For example, Moto drivers use the uber-like app, SafeMoto. All our meetings were set up via WhatsApp and it felt so intimate to be contacting the leading creatives in the city in that way.

This usage of digital technology got me interested in other ways that we might distribute the audio content besides radio and podcast platforms and I pitched the idea to Louise and Lucky Grace, how would people respond to receiving the audio content through WhatsApp? They were both excited by that idea and Louise put me in touch with her sister, Clarisse Iribagiza, the CEO of tech company, HeHe Limited. The issue we discussed was data. Would there be capacity for 20 – 25 minute audio to be sent from phone to phone? Clarisse introduced me to, ARED, a social enterprise where vendors, the majority women, are given training to maintain solar powered charging kiosks in the city, and make a living off selling charging time. The kiosks also have a WiFi radius of 10m or so, where users interface with a free webpage, with advertisements, before accessing other apps and websites etc. It seemed to me that ‘digital’ in Rwanda was all about the mobile and the smartphone. And, although we found a similar network for fixed internet shops, that also help with government paperwork, this also taught us that digital content was being accessed in places that encourage people to gather in real spaces. Much like an audience gathers around a storyteller, people huddled around WiFi hotspots.

Photo by Jo Hounsome

Publication Stage

Where and how have people experienced the audio so far?

Oti: There was a very positive but mixed reception to the audio elements of the radiobooks in Nairobi. While the dramatized stories brought the print work to a new life and was really well received, it is the conversation podcasts that have been most well talked about by people who’ve listened to the work. People I have spoken to laud the new dynamic brought on by the conversations with the artists and writers involved in the creation of the work and those whose voices depict similar experiences to those in the stories. These readers/listeners say the mix adds to the mood, and gives a glimpse of the collaborative relationships taken in the creation of the stories. The universe of the stories widen, so to speak, and many people were very excited about this. To them, it is as if the very act of the conversations invite the readers into the creation process.

Lily: At the UK launch of RadioBook Rwanda in Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio, the digital content was presented in both an installation and an impromptu cinema like setting.

To realise the former, I teamed up with my fellow Pervasive Media Studio residents Liam Taylor-West and Emma Hughes from Roomsize. Using the platform, Open Space, VR technology allows for the geolocation of sounds around a physical space. A phone in the pocket, headphones and a tracker, means participants can walk around in a space, handsfree, to discover different sounds. I’d experienced this with their Digital Catapult funded prototype, which used music and wondered how this could transfer over to story.

I proposed setting up the room with three focal points, one for each pocketbook. As the user approached the pocketbook, they begin to hear the dramatised narrations. They could choose to stay and listen or move through the other stories. With some cleverly positioned lighting and a view over the harbour lights, guests explained that they left the experience really moved. Much like the the solar kiosks in Rwanda, they had gathered together around digital focal points.

Photo by Mikael Techane.

The Future

What can we do next with RadioBook Rwanda audio?

Louise: We’ve partnered with Ubumuntu Arts Festival and we’re trying to use the audio content during the festival to allow people to engage with the literature. Ubumuntu haven’t had a literary element before and they have asked us to create some literary events and content. This is going to be quite interesting because when people think we’re going to be introducing the literary part of the festival they’ll think books but actually we’ll also be using the audio content and the podcasts.

We are also working on engaging with literary podcasts across the continent and trying to see how they can incorporate the content. What’s really good about this content is that it sets the stage for conversations on themes addressed in the books. We’ll also continue to push the audio content on radio.

Oti: From the outset, we’d thought it would be possible to get the audio featured in local radio stations. That has not been possible in Nairobi, but is something we can still pursue. I do think we can also approach established podcasts in our regions, those that have some following to talk about, as well as play the audio content to their dedicated audiences. I think anything going forward has to be to ensure as many people as possible get to listen to this beautifully produced work.

Lily: For me, I’d certainly like to do more live installations with Roomsize, as well as audio cinemas. The other major line of inquiry I’m pursuing is looking into how pre-existing everyday applications like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger might serve as a means to access the audio content. Through a Network for Creative Enterprise bursary I’ve been able to contract creative technologist Tim Kindberg to investigate how image recognition might mean people can simply take a snap of their book, send it to “RadioBook Rwanda” and receive the audio content in return, thus creating a little library of literary content through interactive conversation. Or, I might look at creating a oral literature on demand telephone line for those who aren’t so digitally literate.

Reflection

What’s been the most interesting or surprising result of creating aural content  in conjunction with publishing a book, especially a book that has hand crafted roots and individually sewn binding?

Louise: Through the production of the audio content there was a coming together of so many people from different creative sectors; the artists and writers, the people involved in the production of audio content, actresses, poets and the translators and editors. It was almost as through a community came and as such there’s been a kind of collective ownership of it. In more traditional publishing a lot of what happens is that internally writers work with editors, whereas with these books it’s been quite outward facing. People, especially those in the Rwandan arts scene, know about RadioBook Rwanda because there’s so many touch points with professionals from a wide range of creative disciplines. I would like to do this kind of collaborative work in the future because we’re bringing something quite Rwandan to the rest of the world.

I would also like future publications to incorporate stories from the region and from the UK. Something more collaborative, maybe RadioBook Kenya, RadioBook UK. The question is, how do we push this platform that we have created a little further to ensure wider collaboration. To use it as a meeting point for our stories and experiences.

Oti: Speaking for Nairobi, I think a lot of people were much more excited about the aural content than with the print book. That was surprising because at Kwani we are well-known for our print work and also because the books were so beautifully done, as most of the participants who bought the books at the launch were quick to say.

Lily: It was the Huza team who really pushed for audiobooks to be made. Previously I’d stuck to creating audio that linked to printed texts more thematically. The use of voice actors was a revelation and breathed life into the audio content in a way I had not been expecting. And the dramatised narrations became the staple resource for the installation and the audio cinema.

I’d say the other interesting aspect was seeing how digital, both as an experience and a practical necessity can gather people in the physical realm, much like a performance. This gives me much encouragement when thinking about developing more digital oral literature.

Access the audio universe of RadioBook Rwanda

Online at radiobookrwanda.com

On Spotify

On Apple Podcasts

On SoundCloud

Buy the printed pocketbooks

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We ran a workshop called The Object of the Story for the Making Day at Mix 2013, introducing our work and exploring how digital technology is offering new platforms for telling stories. Objects often spark stories or memories, from the jewellery we wear to the ornaments in our homes. Using RFID technology  (found in libraries and Oyster cards), we taught the group how to attach audio stories to objects. In just one hour, they worked in pairs to write and record stories connected to a selection of objects that we brought along. Tags attached to the physical objects trigger the stories, which you can listen to below. The photo below shows the group with their objects.

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When The Writing Platform asked me to discuss how working collaboratively – as I do from time to time – might have influenced my writing process, I wasn’t immediately sure. To give some examples of the kind of projects in question, last year Dicky Star and the Garden Rule, my novella reflecting upon the 25^th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, was published alongside a series of works by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson, and I wrote a script for their film The Toxic Camera. I created a GPS-triggered work of fiction called Missorts that was commissioned as a public sound work for the city of Bristol and launched at the end of the year, while in April 2013 the Science Museum publish my new novel Shackleton’s Man Goes South. An apparent flurry of activity, although of course all of these projects have been developed over periods of up to several years, and involved differing degrees and types of collaboration, but they were often written to slightly crazy deadlines and – last year at least – published with little space or time for reflection, so the question was a welcome one.

Working collaboratively? Of course much of being a writer and of the publishing process is collaborative even if it is not usually called that. Research and work done with other writers or with agents, commissioning editors, copy-editors, typesetters, proof-readers, designers, photographers, all the way down the line to readers; all of these can perhaps be thought of as collaborations of one sort or another. If you are starting out as a writer and think that you don’t like collaborating with other people, then you probably need to have a rethink and get to like it, as it is a fact of life even in what – to borrow a term from particle physics – might be called ‘standard model’ trade publishing. But in publishing as in physics the standard model is no longer the whole story. The book trade is changing fast, as are the ways that people read and engage with writing, and the book trade is not the only place where such changes – economic as much as technological – are being felt.

Reaching readers interests me, and going where readers are, and that may be partly why I also find it very useful to collaborate outside of the trade, to work with artists, composers and musicians, technologists and others, but this may not simply be a strategic response to a changing world. Thinking about it now, I have been working this way for much longer than I have been a published author. Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that I went to art school, catching the tail-end both of a post-punk DIY scene, and of a kind of multimedia ‘arts lab’ ethos in art schools that saw artists working with emerging technologies like sound and moving image, or with their own live presence. For a few years in the early 1990s I commissioned live works, screenings and readings at a gallery called The Showroom in London, working with visual artists and writers including Caroline Bergvall, Tim Etchells, Aaron Williamson and a Swallowing Geography-period Deborah Levy (‘Swallow this!’ she wrote on the title page of my copy after the gig). In 1994 I founded Piece of Paper Press, a samizdat imprint used to publish limited edition, 16-page, A7 books by artists and writers. I’m just about to publish the twenty-seventh title in the series: an exclusive new Jerry Cornelius story by the great Michael Moorcock, who has been a supporter of the press for a few years now. Between 1999 and 2007 I also worked for Arts Council England’s then Interdisciplinary Arts Department, supporting emerging practice in art and science collaborations, sound art and new forms of distribution across the arts. These days I pretty much write fiction for a living, but perhaps it is not surprising if I have brought some of those ways of working into what I do as a writer.

Sometimes collaboration is about needing to ask for help; wanting to do something different or needing to bring other kinds of knowledge, expertise or processes into a piece of writing. In my own work this might include a musician composing an accompaniment to one of my short stories for a particular gig. Other times, someone might know or be a fan of one of my novels and, because of that, approach me with the idea of developing something new together. That is how more than a decade ago I ended up on a remote Scottish island with art and science duo London Fieldworks, composer Kaffe Matthews and a world champion stunt kite team amongst others, contributing to an interdisciplinary project called Syzygy. Come to think of it, that did demonstrably shift my writing process: I haven’t written a review, per se, of a visual arts project or exhibition since then, instead choosing to use fiction as a way of writing about art, but in the spaces that are normally given to reviews or catalogue essays.

More recently I was commissioned to work with the brilliant Blast Theory on an interactive drama for mobile phones, commissioned by Channel 4 and broadcast in October 2010. Ivy4evr, as it became known, was a very complex writing project, but before any real writing began we had to do audience research. The brief had been to produce a drama for young people that would be delivered on mobiles, but rather than simply jump into the app market, or assume that this would be delivered by video onto iPhones, we needed to know what kind of technology our target audience had access to, and how they behaved with it. Perhaps surprisingly we found that among the sample groups we worked with there was almost zero use of so-called ‘text-speak’, so we gladly threw that cliché out straight away. A more important discovery was that only a tiny percentage had smartphones. Most young people at that time had old or hand-me-down Nokia hand-sets, usually with big bundles of free text messages on their contracts. We also found that being in a lesson at school or college was no barrier to our potential audience reading or replying to a text message. Ivy4evr would have to be delivered by SMS: a one-to-one, text messaging conversation taking place in real time and at any time of day. The mobile developers who joined the team were used to coding SMS engines with a large enough capacity to run real-time, interactive quizzes for prime-time TV audiences; technology that we stretched and pushed as far as it would go.

In addition to the story itself, and the considerable ethical and legal implications of facilitating intimate conversations with a fictional character, there were many interesting and challenging things about writing Ivy4evr. For all the apparent simplicity of the 160-character text message format on a basic mobile phone screen, the drama itself would be completely automated, and ‘the script’ was in fact a huge series of spreadsheets where each apparently discrete message from ‘Ivy’ to the reader/player brought with it a host of coding preconditions (what the reader might need to have done to be receiving this message now, rather than any of a myriad other), and needed to incorporate fields into which user profile data could be fed back, things that ‘Ivy’ remembered about you or wanted to tell you, or that related to how you had responded to a particular question, maybe days ago. Thus a single message might need to be instantly compiled from numerous sources on the project’s highly secure database without compromising either privacy laws and Ofcom regulations, or the ‘natural’ feel of a 160-character message.

Through early work with small groups, to paper tests, and on to a final, week-long, real-time systems test prior to the actual broadcast, we quickly found out what worked and what didn’t, and also that our initial ‘guesstimates’ about response times – how quickly users might reply to Ivy and how quickly she should reply back – were wrong. During the tests, texts were flying back and forth in a matter of seconds, taking minutes to burn through whole story-lines that we had initially thought might last hours or days.

During the complex rewrites that resulted from each test, and the long days in the Blast Theory studio, I was reminded of the old Burroughsian saw about collaboration: ‘The third mind is there when two minds collaborate.’[1] In the book The Third Mind, Gerard-Georges Lemaire elaborates: this ‘is not … a literary collaboration but rather the complete fusion in a praxis of two subjectivities […] that metamorphose into a third; it is from this collusion that a new author emerges, an absent third person, invisible and beyond grasp, decoding the silence […] the negation of the frontier that separates fiction from its theory. It is, finally, the negation of the book as such – or at least the representation of that negation.’[2]

‘Complete fusion’? Well, maybe not, and we weren’t negating the book but proposing – in effect – a new kind of book, but I was only half-joking when I said once or twice to Matt, Ju and Nick during our collaboration that I felt more intelligent when we were all in the same room.

It was brain-fryingly complex stuff at times, but Blast Theory’s experience of creating interactive and augmented- or mixed-reality dramatic experiences – through their own long-term collaborations since the mid-late 1990s with computer scientists on seminal, large-scale works like Desert Rain, Can You See Me Now and Uncle Roy All Around You – meant that they had ways of analysing and understanding what we were doing. They quickly found new ways to describe the kinds of story structures that we were creating – we talked of ‘stubs’ and ‘story ladders’, of ‘calls to action’, ‘triggers’, ‘pre-requisites’ and ‘response settings’ – and looked for ways to reinforce the reading experience not just through an unprecedented degree of personalisation but also by being explicit about when Ivy needed something, when she was asking a question that needed a reply: ‘Q.,’ she might say at such times. ‘Am I right to worry?’

Importantly, readers’ replies to such questions weren’t falling into a vacuum. The drama was not running on tracks like some old ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ book. The story unfolded much more organically than that. But neither were their messages to ‘Ivy’ being read and responded to by us (nor by a warehouse full of ‘work-experience students’ as one critic suggested!), it really was completely automated, with readers’ respective experiences of the drama being both dependent upon and defined by the fact that they were each having a unique and two-way conversation. So the final collaboration here was with the reader, who was supplying as much as half the text of their own private version of Ivy4evr. For a writer of stories this was and is fascinating. As ‘Ivy’ might say: Q. Where is the actual story located in a piece of writing that is being produced in such a way?

The experience of collaborating with Blast Theory on Ivy4evr throughout 2010 immediately informed development at the beginning of 2012 of what became Missorts, my public artwork for Bristol. The brief was open and the commission, from Situations and Bristol City Council, was for a site that I know well: a square mile immediately to the west of Bristol Temple Meads station that follows the line of the city’s mediaeval Port Wall, bounded to the east by a massive, derelict, former Royal Mail sorting office, and to the west by Phoenix Wharf and Redcliffe Bridge: an anonymous-seeming corridor of dual carriageways and roundabouts. Flanked as it is by the amazing Gothic architecture of St Mary Redcliffe and the house where poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was born, this part of Bristol is also associated with radical literary practices. Not only with the Gothic revival via Thomas Chatterton’s amazing and metafictional ‘Rowley poems’, and his legacy among the Romantics and with William Blake, but also with the earlier mediaeval heresy of Lollardy, and associated texts such as the alliterative, satirical and revolutionary Middle English poem The Visions of Piers Plowman.

Rather than simply plonking some new cultural artefact directly into this part of Bristol, I wanted to learn from the kinds of cultural behaviours that already existed in the area (just as with Ivy4evr we had taken time at the outset to find out what kinds of technology our target audience used). With the help of a group of Fine Art students from UWE we surveyed culture/media use in various parts of the site and at different times of the day. As with Ivy4evr, the results were surprisingly ‘trailing edge’: people weren’t playing with iPads or Kindles, tapping smartphone screens or even reading the Metro, they were – most of them – listening to music or other content (audiobooks? radio?) on headphones. Also, once a week, a surprising number and range of people attended a Thursday lunchtime organ concert at St Mary Redcliffe.

It was only after collating this research that the idea for a geo-located and fictional audio work that could draw upon the area’s radical heritage but be set within an experience of walking and listening to music was born. That was when Situations and I approached Clare Reddington of Bristol’s groundbreaking Pervasive Media Studio to begin the process of identifying a developer to collaborate with (i.e. to ‘ask for help’, as above).

I knew the area well because I had already done a lot of research towards – and had written an early draft of – a much more ‘linear’ work of fiction that orbited the derelict sorting office, a novella entitled Missorts Volume II (which has now been published by Situations in Kindle and EPUB editions alongside the finished sound work). Rather than adapt that novella, once finished, for distributed audio, I felt strongly that it should remain ‘a book’, but that the new work might create opportunities for new writers and new writing. I also wanted to bring St Mary Redcliffe’s organ music out into the street, if I could find a composer who could do justice to their celebrated, one-hundred-year-old Harrison and Harrison pipe organ. From a private shortlist of two or three, I brought in Jamie Telford, a composer with whom I had collaborated once before; in the late 1990s he regularly played a live, improvised accompaniment to some of my readings. Jamie has a pop background and is a classically trained composer, but most important in this context was the fact that he had played church organ as a child – his father had built a replica pipe organ for the church in his hometown.

With commissioners Situations bringing a huge amount of expertise and experience to the project, and offering a perceptive and hands-on production team, and with hosting and other support from Bristol Record Office (including invaluable work from their archivists Julian Warren and Alison Brown on the transcription of a letter from William Blake, which forms a central theme in the novella), I devised and ran a series of short story workshops that attracted writers from around the country. We used William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s ‘cut-up technique’ to create completely new stories from Piers Plowman and other texts. As the workshops progressed, the writers started to gravitate towards potential locations on site, with each writer also quickly asserting their own voice and practice in the stories being written. These were rich and diverse works of fiction but they began to interact across the site in unpredictable ways – architectural and other motifs recurring in an unusual combination of Gothic, psychedelic and quotidian topographies. Because all of the stories drew from similar, limited sources, markers like characters’ names began to echo and recur across all ten of the pieces chosen for development into the final work. Editing and abridgement brought these connections – in stories by Sara Bowler, Holly Corfield-Carr, Thomas Darby, Jack Ewing, Katrina Plumb, Jess Rotas, Hannah Still, Helen Thornhill, Isabel de Vasconcellos and Sacha Waldron – into a sharper focus.

As with Ivy4evr, iterative testing from as early a stage as possible was also urged by Calvium, the app developer, who have a very robust GPS-based audio app-building template that has been road-tested on some quite high-profile factual and local history projects, including the Guardian newspaper’s King’s Cross Street Stories. Missorts is a work of fiction, but the coding and locative principles were the same. However robust the engine though, it was only through dozens of iterations, countless person-hours spent by the team tramping around the site, doubling back, testing and re-testing boundaries, knowing every inch of it, that final edits and mapping of the work’s constituent parts could be reached. Interaction design – if I’m using the term correctly – was important here, too. For example, challenges emerged around the duration of the stories, where 400-500 words turned out to be about the maximum workable length in a noisy street environment. Then there was the question of how Jamie Telford’s music might give way so that a story could begin. Would it fade out? What would be helpful to the listener learning how to use the work? Should we include a tell-tale intake of breath in the split second before each story started, or a particular short musical phrase? Who would do the readings? Would everything loop? How would you listen again or access information? What would the map need to look like? How about the icons on the map? All such questions could only be resolved by a period of intense collaboration, of testing the work, re-testing it and then re-testing again.

Quite what impact these large-scale collaborative projects will have on my future writing I am not yet sure. My latest novel, Shackleton’s Man Goes South, is published in April. Some of the work that has gone into the novel was begun while I was writer in residence at the Museum in 2008, with further early research and writing undertaken through a wider series of conversations and collaborations. Now I am again collaborating with the Museum – an entity of about the size and population of a small town – on a publication of the novel as their Atmosphere Gallery commission for 2013. I was just about to say that with Shackleton’s Man Goes South being a more or less traditional literary novel there wasn’t really space for anything like user testing. Except that actually in this case there was. What now appears in slightly different form as the opening chapter – ‘Albertopolis Disparu’ – was first published as a chapbook for free giveaway in the Museum in 2009. I was reliably informed at the time that our chapbook had passed the Museum’s informal but stringent ‘litter test’: none of the 5,000 copies given away during that week or so were found dumped in stairwells, on windowsills, under benches or in litter bins around the Museum! It was also tested in live readings, while further feedback came from reviews on 3am and Londonist. Following that early ‘rapid prototype’ publication of ‘Albertopolis Disparu’, as the novel started to take shape I tested the basic structure and early drafts in the form of a lecture with readings at the Free University of Glastonbury, then later on presented other elements of the near-final draft as part of the Biotik programme at the Eden Project.

Now we are planning for a publication where alongside the print edition, ebook formats of the novel will be available exclusively (and later, as part of the same fixed-term license, non-exclusively) free and DRM-free on the Museum website, and for visitors to email themselves from a touch-screen within a dedicated display that will be up for a year. The Science Museum’s own detailed user-based evaluation has been more than just an interesting backdrop: audience breakdowns, dwell-time and visitor statistics around movement and interaction within the galleries have directly informed how the novel is being published, even if these were unknown quantities when it was being written.

From being unsure what impact working collaboratively might have had on my writing, it is clear that it has contributed enormously, and that lessons-learned and ways of working developed in projects like Ivy4evr or Missorts are transferable to more traditional literary forms. Perhaps this is also a useful reminder that the production of narrative is not always so seamless or unitary as the reading of it might suggest.