Defining “Experimental”: A Gallery of Meditations on Genre
What does it mean for a podcast to be beyond “fiction” and “nonfiction”?
What does it mean for artwork to be experimental?
It is hard to define the concept in an artistic context without describing what it is not. By definition, it requires some sort of deviation from the status quo, an other-ing that somehow makes itself known to its audience. A hint of newness that pokes through the material, whether that “new” is borrowed or built. But how do we define “newness” or “originality” when everything is derivative of everything is derivative of everything?
(“Derivative” isn’t a bad word, either. While the idea has definitely been used to keep out the traditionally underrepresented or marginalized in media by positioning certain markets or trends as “already saturated” (looking at you, traditional book publishing), there is nothing inherently wrong with being inspired — even reading over that, it sounds silly!)
What derivation does mean is that the process of attempting to define “experimental,” and, beyond it, experimental sound, becomes something of an experiment in itself. At what point does a lushly sound designed miniseries stop being distinct from a musical concept album? When fact crosses into fiction where does one start and the other end? What do we use to define that boundary? Is it blurred genre lines? Is it auditory chaos? Is it intention? What happens when a creator dies and loses the chance to document their intent? Or if they never want to document it in the first place? Or if their intent is ignored by a majority who wants to see something other than what they’re given? Or if their intent is overshadowed by the marketing department of the large media company they sign with a season or two in?
And then, the inevitable follow-up question: Who gets to set the metric on what counts as “experimental”? Critics? Which ones? The artist(s) themselves? The general concept of The Audience?
It might help to imagine the concept of “experimental” as an art gallery with rotating exhibitions. Within this gallery, there is a diverse array of works. The gallery’s curator has identified some common throughline among the works, but that throughline may not be obvious or even visible to the casual passerby. If a new curator is given free rein over the gallery, then some pieces may be removed, new ones added, the works rearranged and given new roles within the museum. Any work could, in theory, find its way into this “experimental” gallery; in this way, all audio art has the capacity to be considered experimental, especially in a medium that is relatively under-considered. Of course, there are certain works that will fall in every curator’s rotation, while others may be featured by only the smallest few. Regardless of the works inside, however, the gallery will always stand.
Here, I have tried to curate my own “exhibition” of thoughts surrounding experimental audio. I’m not here to argue the “experimental” qualifications of every referenced piece; instead I want to paint some potential pictures of what “experimental audio” can and does look like. Inside my “gallery,” I’ve included several questions for you, the reader, as well as a few exercises to interact with and think through. You do not have to read through each section in order, though they are numbered to provide you with a suggested reading experience, much as an art gallery might give a suggested path through the works on display.
1. Believing?
Film sound, stripped of its visuals, feels over-the-top. After talking to a handful of composers, it turns out that it has to be: When your audience’s primary point of focus is a complex visual, sound serves as an accessory to making things obvious. Emotional sledgehammer-level obvious. This doesn’t work quite as well when working in audio alone; music that’s too loud or thick or canned takes up valuable space, overpowers the feel of the rest of the track. So why do so many podcasters still want to aim for that “Hollywood sound”?
If you’re not sure what I mean by that phrase, think of the bigger-budget audio fiction that’s been put out over the years, like Gimlet’s Sandra and Homecoming or QCODE’s The Left-Right Game. There are smaller productions, too, that aspire to that flashy movie feel — but these are a small sample of the names that come to mind when thinking of “Hollywood sound.”
To be clear, it’s not solely about audio quality, but about authenticity. The job of the sound designer and/or foley artist is more complex than trying to exactly replicate the sounds of real life; it’s why we get effects like slashing watermelons for stabbing scenes, or the coconut effect, born out of a tight budget, and now universally synonymous in latent memory with horse hooves. Perceived and nostalgic reality is more important in the audio space than accuracy.
It then makes sense that found footage is such a popular framing in audio fiction; crunchy, distorted audio seems natural when it’s supposedly on a cassette tape, and the corresponding retro vibe of older recording formats hits that nostalgia button in all the right ways. It also follows that some high-end productions fall into the trap of favoring high-fidelity above all else — which leads to their painstakingly built worlds sounding flat and artificial.
But what happens when the end goal of a work is completely divorced from the idea of realism at all? If “immersing” is separated from “convincing” or “transporting”? When there’s no need to stay rooted in the Known, what directions become available? How does it change how we think about sound and character, storytelling and communication?
Some possibilities, all drawn from real shows:
- Narrators who have no qualms breaking the fourth wall
- Narrators who spoil their own show
- Slip-stream memory delivered in poetry
- A living archive (of the dead)
- A living archive (of the living)
- An exercise left to the reader
- Sound itself as a character
Every creative decision will eventually show up in your work’s atmosphere, like ripples in a pond. The farther you drift from established convention and towards the abstract, the larger and further-traveled the ripples, the more they overlap, the more the reflection of the pond’s surroundings distorts into something entirely unexpected.
2. Interpret / Imagine
Have your screen reader read the following instructions aloud to you and follow along.
Breathing Exercise #11:
Close your eyes. Think of a cloud. Do not imagine it, just think of it. How is it doing? How is it feeling? This is not about the size of the cloud, or the colour of its lining, or its position in the sky. These are the details that we might normally ask ourselves to consider. Not today. We don’t care how big or small the cloud is, or whether it is shaped like an elephant or a baby. What we would like to know is: Has the cloud eaten today? Does its soul feel heavy? Is it ready to burst? If the rain falls and the cloud dissipates, who gets wet on the ground? Is it the cloud’s fault?
Open your eyes when you are ready.
2.5 Fiction As Nonfiction As a Lens
(This section contains discussion and details of anti-Asian violence/hate crimes, specifically with reference to Vincent Chin, as well as discussion of the Grenfell Tower Fire.)
Dramatization of real-life events is a relatively common practice among storytelling and/or narrative nonfiction podcasts, so it might not seem like an experimental tactic at first glance. The bones are still there, though — and a major issue is consideration of the ethics involved.
It requires an immense amount of care to ethically dramatize life events — especially those involving characterizations of real people in even a partial-documentary or docudrama context. There’s a lot that can be — and has been — said about the power dynamic between filmmaker (or, in our case, podcast creator) and documentary subject, and it boils down to the level of control the subject has over the finished product. The International Documentary Association frames it in the following questions: Do subjects have the means to represent themselves? Do they have alternative access to the media apart from that provided by a given filmmaker? If they don’t, the IDA says, then the documentarian’s burden to ethically represent their subject proportionally increases.
This is a topic long debated in narrative podcast contexts, particularly in the genre of true crime. Just saying the name Serial is enough to bring to mind the vast and varied criticism surrounding the series’ representation of Hae Min Lee, of the centering of Sarah Keonig as a sort of protagonist, of the lack of consideration or acknowledgement of the racial and ethnic factors at play.
As recently as this month, a podcast was called out for not attempting to contact the family of their subject at any time before the show’s release. The podcast in question, inconsiderately titled Hold Still, Vincent (Vincent Chin was held down while beaten to death) was a six-part series dramatizing the events leading up to Chin’s murder and the landmark court cases that followed. In her criticism of the show, Annie Tan (writer and activist, as well as cousin of Vincent Chin) points out that the respectful thing to do would have been to at least attempt to reach out to the family. She details the impact listening to the show had on her and other family members, describing in particular the scene with Chin’s murder, where drumbeats from a fictional dance scene punctuate the blows of the baseball bat that killed him. Tan finished by saying: “…if we’re to tell the stories that matter with integrity, we have to do the work, and that means reaching out to those most impacted.”(Hold Still, Vincent was subsequently pulled from all platforms.)
True crime, docudrama, documentary — they’re all conceived with specific narrative framings in mind. They’re telling a story; their story. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it can cause problems. When creators try to carve out “interesting” or “impactful” bits to shape a compelling story, the narrative can become distorted — and consequently, harmful. It begs the question: Is there a way to tell enticing stories rooted in reality with empathy? Can we uncouple the idea of “engaging” from “dramatic”? What is it that we tell ourselves audiences don’t want to hear or find too confusing, and why have we drawn those conclusions?
I’m not interested here in going into what any of the above mentioned shows could have done better, but instead am intrigued by alternative stories that experiment with fiction to elicit the same intended intrigue and invite further thinking from their audiences, all while lowering or completely eliminating the potential to re-traumatize anyone in the process:
The award-winning Have You Heard George’s Podcast?’s two-part dramatization of the 2017 Grenfell Tower Block Fire is, in two words, absolutely heartrending. Yet the majority of the piece doesn’t take place during or mention the actual fire at all. Instead, “A Grenfell Story” follows a fictional teacher called Bea, who lives in the titular apartment block. We go with her to school, where she does her best to engage one of her students in a discussion about probability and the money laundering fifteen-year-old Savannah is so determined will be part of her future (for which Bea is later chastised by an administrator as wasting time, a nod to “one-size-fits-all” school systems that’s unpacked further in Part II.) We look in on a date with the man she’s seeing, a fictional version of creator George the Poet, and learn about her daughter and her daily worries as a single mother. We listen in on her phone calls, hang out with George backstage at his readings, hear from their friends, all in Have You Heard George’s Podcast?’s trademark poetry.
And then, there is the fire.
The final scene of part 1 of “A Grenfell Story” does not mention the fire directly. Instead, we hear a monologue from Savannah to Bea that circles back to the probability question from the start of the episode. Savannah lays out her newfound understanding, not only of the math involved, but the real lesson her teacher was trying to give her— and the pain of a realization that comes too late. It’s an incredibly moving scene, one that always leaves me crying, and it’s a perfect example of what “A Grenfell Story” does brilliantly: conveying the impact of the fire not only on the victims who tragically lost their lives or on their families, but also on the people at the middle and edges of their lives, in a way no interview could hope to capture. There’s a constant reiteration of realizations that come too late — Savannah’s probability, the repeated references to George consistently not remembering Bea’s apartment complex’s name, Bea’s worry that she might someday leave her daughter alone with just her father to raise her.
There’s a moment at the end of Part 1, after Savannah’s monologue has been allowed to echo, where George the Poet (not George the character) comes back to take over as narrator. He starts by asking the audience to imagine the end of a movie, the words “Based on a true story” on the screen. But then, after going through the credits, he says, “This piece was written in honor of the Grenfell Tower residents and the surrounding community.”
Note that phrase, “in honor of.” By asking its audience to follow its small cast of characters instead of attempting to capture the magnitude of the fire’s collective impact, “A Grenfell Story” ends up making a larger point. This is not a traditional narrative with a “hero” who pushes through adversity and saves the day. To frame it so would be disrespectful, in the same way as a dramatization attempting to capitalize off of real people or recreate the experience of being in the fire for listeners. The fire is dramatized in “A Grenfell Story,” yes — but only briefly, only so much as it needs to be for the sequence of events to become clear. The fact that everyone speaks in poetry, too, removes a layer of “realism” from the piece — not in impact, but in visceral atmosphere and feeling. The entire piece is a masterclass in using fiction to bring an experience not personally lived to life while taking into consideration the trauma it left behind, of bringing attention to a tragedy without placing a spotlight on anyone who had to live through it.
The poetic horror podcast Folxlore, on the other hand, looks inward for its narratives. The show is certifiably fiction in that each of the episodes is a horror story in the traditional sense. At the same time, it’s a work explicitly about queerness, more specifically Scottish queerness, and the writers have not been shy about the fact that the stories are based in their lived experiences. The rhythm of the episodes’ lilting poetry helps blurs the lines further, then — it begs the question: is Folxlore just queer horror, as in fiction? Or is the show also memoir via metaphor, transformative creative nonfiction lifted off of the page?
And then there’s the shows that look to potential reality for their source material. Take the immersive fiction nonfiction podcast Qualia, where the entire point is to make you feel. Each episode leads you through a series of thought exercises revolving around a specific decision-making factor, like “Risk” or “Reason.”
Here’s a rundown of the second exercise from the episode “Empathy,” which turns the issue of homelessness into casual dinner conversation between a series of carefully-crafted characters — and you.
Qualia sets the table — in this case, quite literally: You’re at a dinner party. It’s fancy. Or at least it sounds fancy. Maybe it’s the way the silverware clinks. Certainly nobody here is houseless.
But that’s what the conversation is about: houseless people, and “what to do” when someone asks you for money. Some of the guests are condescending or deflective, championing a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” way of thinking. Their actors exaggerate the condescension in their tones, to the extent that you can almost picture the characters lazily sprawled across their seats. Other attendees are more sympathetic, offering initial defenses but never really pushing the opposing opinion. One or two guests, perhaps, hold their own — but they’re drowned out by the incoming volleys of counter-arguments and examples. This entire time, you listen, unable to voice your opinion, unable to disagree or react in any way. The point reiterates: You’re at a dinner party. It’s fancy. Maybe it’s the way the silverware clinks. Or the way this conversation about the lives of real people almost feels like a contest seeking a winner. Certainly nobody here is houseless.
It’s not a subtle interaction, but it is a powerful one. The fly-on-the-wall setup makes you uncomfortable; it’s meant to make you react, as the show explains in the episode description for “Empathy”:
“SCENE: The guests’ opinions of the homeless during a dinner party.
WHAT THIS DOES: Gives you rationalizations that will help you block empathy. It also argues against rationalizations (but not intensely).”
Those rationalizations — the overpowering voices of those guests who believe houseless people just aren’t trying hard enough, need to “do better,” are given a direct channel to inside your head — all that’s left is for you to react. And Qualia emphasizes that there’s no “right” way to react, either, removing feelings of guilt, denial, or defensiveness that might otherwise crop up in such a situation. It’s crafted to make clear that it’s just you and the thought experiment present, no judgement invited — and then uses that framing to encourage you to rethink how you approach empathy and reaching out to others.
Another podcast that asks its audience to partake in a thought experiment or two: the futurism podcast Flash Forward. Both it and its sister show Advice For and From the Future have a simple premise: Pose a question about a potential future. Then respond with what that future might look like, both in conversation with subject-matter experts (scientists, historians, activists, writers, members of the affected communities) and via a short piece of fiction that gives you a glimpse of what living that future would feel like. It’s a small twist on traditional narrative nonfiction, and it makes a tremendous difference to the feel of the shows. By providing a small window into an imaginary lived experience, host and creator Rose Eveleth grounds these futures by contextualizing them in the known, something especially difficult to do when dealing with abstract possibilities. Eveleth gives her audience someone to root for; it contextualizes the entire rest of the episodes’ discussion and brings it all back down to Earth.
Both Advice For and From the Future and Flash Forward are also specifically designed with journalistic responsibility in mind. Eveleth, in her interview with Elena Fernández Collins, points out that, “If you can just invent a character that’s a stand in for a person…you don’t have to grapple with the realities of those people: how complicated they are, how they might not actually have the opinions you think they have…Sometimes, I feel that the people who are blending fiction and journalism [are doing it] because they couldn’t find the story they wanted to find, so they just made one up.”
Eveleth’s shows are consequently pointed in their premise: Commit to the bit! they seem to say. Have a specific story you want to tell but can’t find? That’s what fiction’s for!
Those shows that do lean into the idea do it well, and with intention. Both Qualia and Flash Forward invite their audiences to step into another world for a brief moment, to play the part of spy for enough time to connect to the situation and the characters. The supposed intimacy of audio is deliberately counteracted by the forced distance of being a passive observer; the audience’s inability to do anything about the conditions they’re being shown is used to spark the relevant emotion. The move serves different purposes for each show; in Qualia, the impetus is for the listener to reflect on and reconfigure their view of the world; for Flash Forward, the idea is to invest the listener in the pros/cons of that week’s hypothetical advancement as a demonstration of why they ought to care about the consequences outlined in the rest of the episode. In each case, the dramatization keeps its intended emotional draw without encountering the ethical issues that come with recounting existing events and people.
This isn’t to say that dramatizing fictional narratives isn’t hard, or that there are no ethical considerations involved with making this type of work — only that it offers an avenue to new and exciting types of stories, ones that might be able to shed light on the human experience without disrespecting the very experience that gives it its name. “I look at art like a torch,” George the Poet said in an interview for the New York Times. “It shines a light on things. We have an opportunity in the arts community to impact and make people care, to do something and go beyond.”
There’s a line at the top of Part II of “A Grenfell Story” that echoes a similar, but somewhat shifted sentiment: “If we forget how outcast the voice of an outcast is / they’ll never be heard; / every word is noiseless without answers; / see, there are no choices without chances.” When it comes to documentary and documentary-adjacent work, are we thinking about whose story is being told? Who is doing the telling? What of their story is being left out, and why? What’s being added in? Do subjects have the means to represent themselves?
Where is fact, where is fiction, and what does it mean to be both?
3. A Conversation Between the Audience and the Art
[The following section is based on an installation by sound artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork titled “the input of this machine is the power an output contains.” You can visit it at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.]
There is a museum, somewhere. You can choose the place. It’s a contemporary art museum, one whose current exhibition showcases a variety of works left up to your taste and discretion. There’s one piece that particularly catches your eye as you walk the halls — an audio installation set in a glass-walled terrace off of the main galleries.
The installation has two “rooms” set up within the terrace. As the museum-goer, you start by picking a room. You walk into it. On the inside, you discover a particular combination of speakers and soundproofing. While you’re examining the fabrics and feathery tiles, an actor outside both of the rooms continuously reads through portions of script — script that an AI generated from various historical speeches. His voice is piped through the speaker in your room; it echoes off the plastic walls and is absorbed into the soundproofing the way Kiyomi intended it to. Unless you’re particularly fascinated with soundproofing, there’s not much to look at inside the room, so you might even close your eyes.
When you feel it is time to move on, you exit the room. You enter the other one, if you’re excited by, or dissatisfied with, or left with a certain sense of sonder from the first. This room is exactly the same size as the other, but is… fuller, somehow. The sounds echo more, here. Time passes; the sounds layer and build over each other, turning the disjointed words into a presence. You know, objectively, that the room was small when you entered, but standing now at the center of it, echoes of this passionately-delivered speech whirling around you, it feels immeasurably large. It keeps building, and this fiery flurry of noise, this jingoistic hurricane of pride and determined perseverance, feels entirely centered on you.
And then, suddenly — it all disappears.
The actor has stopped talking. There is no voice to echo. And still, there is a sound: The silence rings.
4. Soundscapes
There is an entire genre of experimental audio that boils down to a very simple concept: Field recordings of ordinary spaces. You see this in Field Recordings, in certain episodes of random tape, in the streaming project REVEIL, in Janet Jackson’s The Tube.
In terms of storytelling, these pieces have a minimal amount of narrative shaping. Not every piece is completely hands-free — The Tube is specifically designed to emphasize certain sounds over others at varying times; random tape often provides running commentary; REVEIL is designed to portray the 24 hours of a day via overlapping audio streams, and has streams sorted by geographic coordinates as well as by hour. But there’s a certain peaceful familiarity to them all, grounded in their capture of hyperspecific pieces of spacetime.
So what about a theoretical opposite, where everything is engineered, meticulously designed? What if the soundscape is no longer a real-time capture of a place that exists but a fictional representation of something that only previously existed inside its creator’s mind? Something that would veer closer to the territory of ambiances and ASMR, that’s notable for its artificialness rather than its replication of the real? Is this kind of work more or less experimental? It’s rooted in the same principles that guide scene-setting sound design, sure — but in our theoretical, this work doesn’t exist to play support to a primary narrative. Does it only count as experimental when divorced from a larger context? Would its experimental-ness then come from the blank canvas it would provide for its audience to build a world onto?
4.75 A Space Station Beeps
A space station beeps.
Its engines hum, low and thrumming in the background.
The air filter hisses, circulating fresh oxygen throughout its rooms and halls.
Every so often, the hydraulics sigh.
Space is silent, you know, but there’s a tangible, near-melodic presence to it.
The stars seem to shimmer, audibly.
Someone is typing at a console behind thick closed doors.
Your footsteps echo off of the metal floor.
Where are you going?
5. And You!
This piece is a collaborative process. If you weren’t here reading it, it would mean nothing. It’s the age-old concept of a tree falling alone in a forest — except the question isn’t so much whether it makes a sound as much as it is whether it still impacts the ground, whether that matters if no other creature is present to take something from the experience.
Attempting to explain the power of experimental audio fiction-nonfiction on a macro level is a pointless task purely because that power comes from the way its audience interacts with it. This is true of all art, to some extent, but it’s more pointed in those pieces that stand out as different, especially in a medium characterized by its ability to facilitate an “intimate,” direct line to its consumers. Both “nonfiction podcast” and “fiction podcast” are phrases loaded with inherent assumptions as to their content; the former conjures up images of a host or three feeding information — whether direct reporting or conversation style — into one’s ears; the latter perception tends to default to either lo-fi one-person-and-a-mic or studio-polished “movies for your ears.”
Both descriptions can be stifling. There’s room for imagination in anything, if you try hard enough, but the majority of podcast content is designed to be a one-way interaction: A story is told, some breaking news reported, an interview conducted and then sent out in a nice, shiny package. In this way, it’s all the same, regardless of genre, topic, or host. In a medium specifically called out for its supposed intimacy, the majority approach is to whisper into someone’s ear, not to facilitate a conversation.
It’s from this notion that I draw my personal definition of “experimental”: If an experimental work is one that discernibly steps outside the lines of convention, if an experimental work is one that manages to affect a certain form of qualia, then it must be a work where you are invited to contribute in some way.
The application of these terms will vary from person to person. What you consider to be an experimental work will almost certainly differ from what I do, and that’s part of the beauty of the label; it defies self-identification or boxing by definition. This is okay. I am not arguing that a piece needs to directly ask its audience to provide a response for it to be experimental; this would automatically qualify every podcast with a call-to-action in the credits. (Although who knows, maybe they all are!) Instead, the piece should feel enriched for you having engaged with it. It should offer you its hand and ask for you to take it — and, with your reciprocal touch, transform.
The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.
