Took the time yesterday to completely listen to the interview with Jennifer Ralston again.  I wanted to focus closely on all the details of the interview.  I was amazed over the details given to the audio recordings.  Some of the concepts that were covered in the interview were completely contrast to what I would have thought would be important.  An example of this contrast would be how to cover the audio in a scene if the scene is too loud.  I would have thought that you would reduce the sounds but in fact, you add sound.  If a scene is too loud, add the sound that you are trying to portray in the scene.  This seemed completely backwards to me.

Another detail that seemed so strange to me is how to portray silence.  It was so amazing that the way to portray silence was not to have the background sounds go quiet but to emphasize sounds that normally could never be heard.  I thought about this for a while.  We live in a world that is never silent.  When you think of the silence of outside late at night, you hear soft crickets or frogs, or an occasional dog bark.  If there was complete silence, the sound would not be natural.  Prior to this interview, I would have never thought about this.

I found in the interview when we listened to the scene of Kima being shot, I was immediately taken back in emotion to the episode.  I didn’t even think about the audio when I watched the episode originally.  The loudness of the music placing you in the car with Kima, listening thru the wire takes you to Daniels and McNulty out of the car from Kima.  It was so interesting to me that just by using sound you carry the view from person to person by simply focusing on what they hear.

The last part that I was greatly amused by was the use of the dog and baby.  The dog usage was just hilarious.  I never had put two and two together that they were portraying McNulty as the “dog” he is.  I found that so funny.  After Jen, said that, I immediately thought back to all of the scenes in which Dogs are barking with McNulty around.  The use of the baby sound was emotional.  The invasion of innocence was a term that Jen used.  The baby representing Wallace and Greggs.  The two innocents that were left out to dry by each of their sides.

This was definitely an incredible interview that I learned so much about the use of audio.  This was very useful especially with our focus being audio this week.  Thank you Jennifer Ralston.