1984 Sound Memory

My Freshmen year I was at UTSA in the CAP program in order to transfer to UT. My strategy was to make no friends in San Antonio. That way I wouldn't be attached to that school in any way once I left. So I mainly spent all my time with my roommates or alone. And while I was alone I started listening to audio books because at the time I was incapable of reading anything longer than a few paragraphs on the internet.

That year I learned the reason why all kids want their parents to do the voices of all the characters in the stories they read. The first book I listened to was George Orwell's 1984. The man who narrated the book was great. He had a low voice and brought so much excitement to every word. And he did the voices.

I have no doubt that if I had actually read 1984 I would have easily been lost in Orwell's story. I would have created a very detailed version of the characters and the world. I would imagine all the actions like a movie happening before my eyes. This sort of imagination is lost when one sees a movie. Because the characters have faces and the world is a film set and not very much is visually left up for the viewer's own interpretation.

But the experience of personally forming a mental representation of the world an author presents is not exclusive to actually reading the book. What I experienced that year was possibly the same thing I would have experienced if I had read the book. The only thing that is lost is the listeners version of what each character's voice sounds like. But the reader of 1984 did a good job at conveying personality differences in character's inflections which was just enough to really put me in the story. He captured the appropriate tone for different moments in the story and he enunciated the descriptions giving time for my imagination to paint the details he was describing. And just as Orwell intended when writing, my mind would fill in the blanks for what he did not describe in detail. This is the power of literary text that allows a reader to bring their own experiences and interpretations to the story.

I still listen to audiobooks three years later and I still think they are a powerful way to enter the stories that authors create for us. I can close my eyes and just let the text flow over me while I create the world of the story behind my eyelids. It's arguable that there are actually less distractions in experiencing a book this way than reading.

The story of 1984 had a big impact on me at that time in my life [teenage angst politics, similar to films like V for Vendetta]. My first year at UT I took a digital media class and for the audio assignment I made an audio piece using excerpts from the BBC film version of 1984, philip glass music, and a cover of Daniel Johnston's True Love will Find You in the End. That was my first audio assignment in a production course here at UT. I am excited for the opportunity to create more stand alone audio pieces in this class.