The Decameron

The voice. It’s the thing you’re subconsciously using in your head while reading this. It is a most peculiar thing(?) and the power it holds cannot be measured. I mean, when actors started talking in films it basically changed everything for cinema, from public perception to it being widely accepted as an art form. The voice has been used in art to tell stories for thousands of years, from ancient theater to music, and now most recently in cinema. Outside of art, public speaking has been a valuable skill since the creation of human civilization, with orators like Cicero and his speeches being able to help shape public opinion in political matters. This isn’t very different from today, with all politicians having to persuade the public with their voice in order to gain their approval. This shows the power of the voice, and I place emphasis on it for this reflection because this week at AYA I learned about podcasts.

I never really considered the impact that podcasts have on politics, so when one of the readings this week talked about how the Joe Rogan podcast may have been the deciding factor of Trump being elected as president, I couldn’t believe it. Podcasts hadn’t interested me because I didn’t find any value in people just telling stories about the world, but this reading made me realize that these stories actually impact my community and that popular media is worth keeping up with. I’ve also found out that good podcasts are not just people going back and forth on a subject, but that there are several things used in order to help tell the story. There was an emphasis on sound design in the lectures, and this intrigued me because I’ve worked on sound for plays at my school. One of the readings was an episode of Radiolab titled “The Political Thicket.” This episode demonstrated for me the power of sound design in helping to tell a story, because the overlaying of both voice and sound bites which complement each other gave clarity to what was being said. Another topic of sound design that caught my attention was Montage theory. This was originally a theory created by Soviet filmmakers during the silent era of cinema, and the idea was that the use of editing to juxtapose different shots would create meaning. I hadn’t thought of applying this to sound, however, and when I was shown the same clip of Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (a film I particularly admire) three times each with different music, it illustrated clearly how impactful sound can be for any form of storytelling.

I titled this reflection “The Decameron” because Boccaccio’s book has a premise that I think could be compared to the use of Podcasts. The book takes place in Italy in a time when the Black Death was spreading around Europe, and women and men secluded from society in a shelter begin to tell each other stories. I believe this is similar to podcasts, where people who are isolated from society can tap in and listen to a story, whether fictional or nonfictional, and the intimacy of the podcast created by the nature of the medium makes the listener feel like they are being told the story by somebody personally. The intimacy of podcasts, like the voyeurism of cinema, is a topic that fascinates me greatly, and podcasts are a medium I’d like to experiment with in the future. It’s something I think I can use just to express myself about anything I’d like, and that’s what attracts me to them, along with the creative factors that can be used to help tell stories, like sound design which I mentioned earlier.