The Phenomenology of Audio Drama

Audio drama is overlooked by philosophy even though it raises many philosophical questions. It seems to be a contradiction: drama is a form of showing yet the exemplary form of showing a world—visual representation—is absent from it. What kinds of world do we find if we concentrate on what is revealed through sound and the voice? According to fans of the medium, ‘the best pictures are in the head’ but might its potency be more fully realized if we consider that the best pictures are in the body?

This book shows how phenomenology addresses these questions and provides new ways of theorizing audio drama. It transpires that the phenomenologist and the audio dramatist share the same predicament: how is a world going to make itself apparent to us or to our audience when our materials—sound and the voice—are only available when we are active and noisy in our environment? The book gives a clear account of phenomenology’s rethinking of embodiment, technology and causality, and how it enables the drawing of relations between audio drama, sound art and audio fiction. Instead of contradiction, sound and the voice emerge as principal expressions of dramatic structure and human being-in-the-world, and audio drama is shown to be an art form that manifests the power of causality to enrich aesthetic sensibility.

The Phenomenology of Audio Drama will appeal to philosophers working in aesthetics and modern European philosophy, and to theorists and practitioners within the fields of audio drama, sound art and performance.