In the Land of the Blind...
By Nathan P. Butler

Y'know, things have changed immensely in my little chunk of the past quarter century.

When I was born, I seem to recall an archaic set of bricks in my grandparent’s home. I think they called them “8-tracks.” They were accompanied by a more laudable medium, upon which I still own some of the greatest Bill Cosby comedy of all time, something called the “LP.” Vinyl. No, my child, these were not things of myth.

Now, of course, our musical culture is dominated by the omnipresent CD, the burgeoning DVD-A, and the music industry’s worst nightmare, the dreaded MP3.

As music media moved forward, our requirements of an acceptable format grew more stringent. “Mono” is now dreaded in discussions on both health and music. Stereo rules the day, with AC3 and Dolby Digital 5.1 making simple 2-channel stereo look like a stone hammer in the power tool department of Home Depot.

Maybe you'll never leap into the realm of 5.1 and prefer to stick to simple earphones, but we are a two-eared species, and we want sound from left, right, and the space in between . . . and fan audio dramas need to reflect this.

Visualization is the gift of the writer’s mind, or so I’ve been told. As we grow as writers and creators, we stop “writing” and start, as J. Michael Straczynski once put it, “listening” to our characters. We know our creations so well that we can almost set them loose in a scenario and have the scene write itself. That visualization talent is an excellent tool for writing, but it also plays an important role in the creation of a stereo presentation.

Okay, so you may never listen to your project beyond the paltry little speakers that came with your Sam’s Club PC or the little baby speakers built into your notebook, but someone, somewhere will most likely be listening to your project one day with headphones, so an ear toward the creation of a stereo presentation, with both left and right components, is certainly in order.

The advice for today: visualize; visualize; and then visualize some more. Storyboard if you have to. The key to creating a stereo presentation is keeping tabs on where all of your players and all of the other noise-making objects in their area are located, relative to one another, at any given time, and, yes, where they are relative to your camera, despite the lack of video in a fan audio drama.

Your characters are together in a room? Anyone can simply not balance for stereo and say, “Uhm, they were all standing really close together.” That’s not a reason; that’s an excuse. Basic editors can easily separate out characters into different “left/right” locations. Have four people? Why not have one on the far right, one on the far left, one mid-right, and one mid-left. Now they’re not all speaking from the same location.

But is there a logic to how they are standing? Is there a bigger purpose to the setup? For instance, if your characters are in an office, are they all standing in a circle speaking? Is one by the door and another by a desk? Is one perhaps walking toward a desk as he speaks?

As a writer, you instinctively know the answers to these questions, but your audience may not. It is your job in mixing to make those actions a part of the overall flow of the piece. For instance, if a character is entering an office, and walking toward a desk on the opposite side of the room to offer a report to a superior, you should make the audio balance reflect this. If your “mind’s eye” sees your scene with a desk on the far right side of the room and the door on the far left, then any door-related sounds must be balanced on the left, and anyone entering must begin his speaking or footsteps at that same location, and that balance must shift from left to middle to right as he proceeds toward the desk, at some pace that makes sense for the size of your room.

Is it a subtle thing? Yes. However, it is part of a broader point. Imagine a space battle where all sounds seem to come from one location, or a podrace where engines seem to remain stationary. Much of the magic is lost.

So, keep balance in mind. It is not your job to place your listener in front of the action, nor behind it, nor above or below, but into the drama of your production, and being amid the action means adventure and atmosphere to all sides.