Blue – Derek Jarman
This film can be seen as a proto audio essay, as it uses mainly audio (against an unchanging blue screen) to communicate a personal story/autoethnography through philosophical and poetic enquiry in a nonlinear structure. Although it was made before the advent of the audio essay we can see how film and other forms of art and media have shaped what we have now come to know as the audio essay.
The audio essay and audio paper are nebulous and largely undefined forms – although both are largely recognised as being constituted by the presence of a recorded voice combined with other audio elements to communicate an idea through the auditory medium.
The audio paper, while sharing common elements with the audio essay such as use of the voice, typically consists of rigid “academic research and arguments (shared) in an audio format. It integrates academic discourse with sonic elements like music, sound effects, and vocal performance to create a rich, multisensory experience.” [Definitions and summaries from Seismograf Journal]
This academic rigour is what defines it slightly apart from the audio essay which may be more poetic, fragmented, philosophical and abstract than the academic (audio) paper.
The audio essay and audio paper allow us to situate and spatialise knowledge outside of the written text. They produce “affects and sensations” (Groth & Samson, 2019) which situate us within certain contexts of knowledge and allow new ways into thinking through them.
“the soundscape of the audio paper is a re-emergence of sites and places in an embodied language that takes into consideration the specific knowledge situation of the body in space, and how it the landscape and coordinates are embodied in the situation. Or, to quote the manifesto, “The aesthetic, material aspects of the audio paper produce affects and sensations. What is felt could be the body of the site and place, the soundscape of the place” (Groth/Samson 2016).“
Groth & Samson (2019) The audio paper: from situated practices to affective sound encounters
As Donna Harraway writes, all knowledge is situated. The audio paper and audio essay allow us to situate knowledge through certain affects and sensory experiences that exist outside of traditional academic text.
References:
Groth & Samson (2019) The audio paper: from situated practices to affective sound encounters. Paragrana, 28(1), P188-196