McKee Response

Paraphrase of McKee‘s argument:

Sound in multimedia compositions include: vocal delivery, music, special effects, and near-silence.  You can look at each individually or also in relation to visual and interactive modes as well.  Thus, I will first address the often tricky relationship of part-to-whole and whole-to-part

You need to take every element together in order to get the full effect.  What would a band be without its lead guitar?  It’s not enough to analyze one scene as an all-encompassing explanation of a movie, either.  That scene is important in relation to all the other scenes in telling a story.

I listened to the episode ‘Sinatra‘ from This American Life.  I loved the episode for its in-depth look at a legend we’re not all familiar with.  Ira Glass and other narrators don’t hold back in their analyses of The Chairman of the Board, who was incredibly multi-faceted and mysterious.  There are facts, opinions, sound clips, and background music that allude to Sinatra’s eccentricities.  The storytelling done by these narrators is gold; how they paint such us such a vivid picture with only our sense of sound is beyond me.  The stories are so filled with passion that I feel so much closer to Sinatra by the end of the program.

At different points in the episode, narrators depict Sinatra’s personality with pieces of stories they’d previously written.  The most solemn parts had no background music.  Each pause in the narrator’s speech left me hanging on the edge of a cliff.  Music would have distracted me; the silence said enough.  However, the mood was made lighter when a voiceless tune accented the story.  It was also utilized in transitioning from one idea to another, such as in going to a break.

The special effect clips were testaments to how powerful Sinatra’s personality was.  By broadcasting old audio footage of Sinatra, we get to see a number of aspects of his stage life, whether strong or pathetic.  The story would not have been nearly as effective without them.