Posted by: Carlos Maeda on October 22, 2005 07:18 PM | Comments (0)

Jad Abumrad's session -- he's the producer and host of Radio Lab -- was more than I hoped for. "Music is segmenting [your words] into bite-size chunks," he said, "if your piece were text, music would be the highlight marker."

As an audience, Jad explained, we pay more attention to audio after a fade-out of music. It's like putting a big exclamation point at the end. Also, for five minutes, Jad talked about using six seconds of music between narrations and interviews. For some unexplainable reason, according to Jad, six seconds is an important number.

And, forever embedded in my mind is how to and how not to use mainstream music. As Jad put it, "It's like the K-Mart models. They're beautiful, but you don't recognize them." As a producer myself, I've learned through painstaking trial and error that using a popular piece of music will almost always take the audience away from your story. As the listener, we'll start to get off subject and concentrate on the music. "Oh, they played that tune at my prom." Or, "I heard that on the subway." Or my favorite, "I witnessed my parents making out to that."

Of course, Jad suggested exceptions to this and explained how it could add color and texture to a piece. Just be aware, he said, of the possibility of drawing your audience from the story that you worked so hard on. This session was, to me, one of the most helpful and most inspiring.

More from Third Coast Festival 2005 :
« What they do in Australia | Alan is enthusiastic about the enthusiasm »