(Good) Structure

When you are creating a soundwalk you are telling a story. It doesn’t matter whether this story is mostly narrative (“this happened, and then this and then this”) or quite abstract (“this section has a flowy feeling, then we go into a grounded part”). It doesn’t matter whether it is fiction or documentary. It doesn’t even matter if your story is the same as the one of the audience. In the end your soundwalk is experienced by those walking it, and as humans almost all of us have an innate desire to make sense of things. We want to distil a coherent experience from what is happening around us, however personal or specific this story might be. This is not good or bad, it’s an important thing to be aware of so you can use it to your advantage when creating your soundwalk.

In theatre the term “dramaturgy” is used when speaking about the way, the shape and the form in which a story is told. The literal meaning is “creation of a play” and a long time ago dramaturgs were actually the playwrights. In contemporary theatre dramaturgs are often the outside eyes and ears, critically looking at the relation between what the director or choreographer wants to tell and what is experienced by the audience. In a classical dramaturgical theory everything happening on stage is broken down into singular ‘signs’ and for each sign you can ask the question: what does this tell i.e. how does this contribute to the bigger story?

This might sound complicated and as an incentive to overanalyze just about everything. A common misconception is that you always need to have a clear, explainable reason for every element of your artwork. While the opposite might be closer to the truth: if every part of your sound work was perfectly explainable in words a novel might have been the better choice of medium. A jazz improviser might not think about their next note on a conscious level but purely on intuition. But still this next note is never completely random but is informed by what came before and where the musician wants to go at the moment.

Also it doesn’t mean everything always needs to tell the same story. If a love story for example has a romantic plot, sweet harmonious music, a beautiful red velvet scenography and flattering lighting it quickly gets to the point of being overly cheesy. Consider how a sweet love song as the soundtrack to a break up scene will make the break up much more painful than the melodrama that might ensue from a very sad song scoring that exact same scene.

Dramaturgy is not a tool to police you, it’s there to help you to analyse if the thing you are making is actually telling the story you want to tell with it. And if the structure and form of your piece are working.

Another main dramaturgical question when you start to work on a soundwalk is: why a soundwalk? Again this is not a trick question to make things harder than they should be. But a soundwalk is a specific medium, and when choosing it to tell your story you want to make use of the possibilities it offers. If for example your work consists of a series of poems read over a soundscape, ask yourself why you choose the soundwalk format instead of another audio format like an album, a podcast or a live performance? There might be many answers to this question: the poems might be inspired by the specific locations the soundwalk passes by, your work might be about walking and you might want to ensure your audience is actually doing just that while listening. If the answer however is that you have no idea obviously nothing will stop you, but you can ask yourself if the soundwalk is the right format for your sound piece- and even if it does not as yet can it still make use of the fact that it is? What does it add to the work to have the soundwalk as it’s medium of choice?

Usually once the big questions have been answered, it’s time to zoom in more and more until you get to the level of details (though that doesn’t necessarily always have to be the order of your process). A common occurrence when intensely working on one thing for a prolonged time is that you get too much into details and lose connection with the bigger picture. Even for very seasoned creators it’s very hard to simply summon the state of seeing or hearing the work for the first time. The essential step of taking a tiny break, zooming out and looking at the work as whole can also be considered a dramaturgical process. This also touches on the fact that in theatre there are directors and choreographers that are dramaturgically very strong and still don’t do the dramaturgy for their own pieces. One can understand why the observations and the feedback needed to get this part of the work right can much easier be given by an outsider than someone on the inside of a creation. Even if you are not working with a dramaturg as such it can be invaluable to test your creation on a test audience member that you trust that ideally doesn’t already know too much about what you are trying to achieve with your piece.