For this project, I composed an original audio drama, Night Visions, performed by me and

actor Paul Melendy. Night Visions is a mashup of several dramatic genres. The audio drama, now
often delivered by podcast, is a later iteration of the radio play. However, radio plays are
typically performed (and broadcast) live, with all of the performers present; this is perhaps less
true of the modern, digital audio drama. Additionally, audio dramas are often shorter than fulllength staged plays, but mine is shorter still, with just two compact scenes, in order to meet the
requirements of the course rubric; it likely has more in common structurally with a 10-minute
play.
It might also be classed as a dream play in that the protagonist, Mans, dreams constitute
an important part of the action of the play. I certainly was hearkening back to earlier dramatic
works that feature dreams in various ways, most especially Agnes de Milles well-known dream
ballet from Oklahoma! However, the affordances of the audio mode allowed me to uniquely
experiment in this well-established stage genre that is more commonly evoked through visuals
such as choreography, lighting, or set pieces by considering how it could be effectively
represented exclusively through sound. Moreover, I believe that composing sonically is what
endowed me with such freedom to experiment with genre; the conventions of the audio drama
are much more nebulous and encompassing than those of stage dramas, perhaps because it has a
shorter history and is therefore less overwrought with generic expectations.
Night Visions was inspired by the cover of Lady Stearn Robinson and Tom Corbetts The
Dreamers Dictionary. The book is precisely what it sounds like, a dream dictionary with
thousands of alphabetical listings that one can reference to interpret their dreams. Ive had it
since I was a teenager; it has been my almost constant companion throughout my life and now
occupies a permanent place on my bedside table, right on top of my dream journal. Going into

this project, I knew I wanted to write an audio drama but I wasnt sure of the subject matter. One
morning I woke up after experiencing two particularly vivid dreams the night before. I pulled out
my dream journal and The Dreamers Dictionary, and suddenly it struck me that that the subject
of my drama could mirror my experiencedreaming, waking, referencing, and analyzing.
In fact, the visual that inspired this drama is threefold my dream dictionary, my dream
journal, and my dreams themselves. The Dreamers Dictionary serves as the thematic inspiration
for my drama and is also featured in it as Mans own dream reference guide. Additionally, the
actual content of my dreams infuses the piece; all the dreams that Woman reads from Mans
journal are excerpts from my own dream journal. So although I was unable to physically capture
the visuals of those dreams in the same way as the book cover, I still wanted them to be aurally
present in the play. Simultaneously, my intention was to construct the dream sequence in a way
that conjures strong mental images in the audience, despite its delivery in the aural mode.
Using these images to inform my ideas, I crafted this audio drama in several steps,
beginning with writing the script. When I started writing, I knew the play was about an artist who
was obsessed with understanding his dreams. However, I wasnt sure of the reason for his
obsession. Halfway through writing it, I discovered his secret motivation, which is that
heartbreakingly, he has been diagnosed with macular degeneration, and eventually his dreams
will be his only way of experiencing the visual world. The theme of blindness has appropriately
had a long history in the genre of the audio drama, from Samuel Becketts All That Fall to, more
recently, Erin Andersons experimental Our Time Is Up. I see Mans story as adding to that
particular genre tradition, although it is also somewhat based on the true experience of a family
friend. Finally, I carefully curated the content of Mans dreams from my dream journal, all of
which were genuinely written in that confused, half-awake state that is otherwise hard to capture.

Once the script was written, I began the process of assembling the audio assets, starting
with the dialogue. After consulting with my fellow performer Paul, we decided to record our
lines separately, in an effort to alleviate any pressure to achieve a perfect take. I then selected
the best take for each line and spliced it all together, a phase in which I experienced significant
technical difficulties while becoming familiar with Audacity. Finally, I collected the remaining
assets, including sound effects and music, all of which were located online. With the exception of
Edith Piafs Non, je ne regrette rien, all materials used are licensed under Creative Commons.
Each of these sounds was layered on top of the existing foundation of the dialogue.
The two most significant rhetorical decisions I made in this piece were to make the
setting sound as natural as possible, while also trying to depict the dreams in a haunting and
evocative way. These goals may seem contradictory, yet I think they are indeed complementary. I
deployed several strategies to achieve naturalism, regardless of the fact that the dialogue was
recorded by the performers at different times. Many of the sound effects were used to create the
impression that the audience is in the same room with Man and Woman. For instance, at the
beginning of the second scene, just after the alarm clock goes off, I inserted a clip of a quilt
rustling; this effect simulates the sound of the couple waking up and turning over in bed. During
the editing stage, I chose to include the actors breathing, and I made other subtle choices like
adjusting the volume of Womans footsteps depending upon whether she was approaching or
moving farther away from Man, from whose auditory perspective the narrative is told.
Simultaneously, I needed to convey Mans dreams in a distinctly non-naturalistic way;
they had to sound different enough from the rest of the dialogue that the audience would be able
to recognize them as something other. While I wanted the dreams to sound suggestive and
separate, I was wary of them coming across as facile, a simplistic audio rendering of the dreams.

In point of fact, my purpose was to position the dreams as what Theo van Leeuwen (1999) called
sound acts (p. 97). The dreams are not simply representations or expressions of a dream; they
act in the play. The dreams-as-action build throughout the drama, culminating when Woman
reads the pregnancy dream aloud. As she reads, her voice fades into the background, becoming a
subordinated auditory texture, while the dream sounds increase in volume to demand that the
audience hear them as the dominant sound gesture (p. 112).
I also thoughtfully considered the role of silence in my audio drama. As Heidi McKee
(2006) has said, citing the work of Franois Jost, silence is not simply an absence of sound, but
rather an absent presence that traces noise (p. 351). The silences not only enhance the
naturalism of the play, such as the natural breaks in the flow of the couples conversation, but
also emphasize moments when language fails, such as when Woman discovers why Man feels
disconnected from his art and is preoccupied with his dreams. Silence is very much a presence in
that moment, tracing the things that cannot be said.
Moreover, Night Visions deployment of voice and vocality is very much aligned with the
paradoxes described by Erin Anderson (2014) in Toward a Resonant Material Vocality for
Digital Composition. That is, voice is often used in the service of spoken language in this
drama, as it is with almost any audio drama. The characters voices are the audiences primary
way of experiencing them as individuals, whose bodies are invoked by their speech, yet still
deferred (in much the same way that McKee thinks about silence). However, I deliberately
allowed for non-linguistic vocality, particularly in Womans crying at the end of the first scene,
which works to further the realism of the characters emotional responses.
I made many other rhetorical choices when composing Night Visions, yet I hope the most
poignant is the use of tension in what appears to be opposites, both thematically and aurally:

knowing and not knowing, vision and blindness, despair and hope, voice-as-speech and voice-assound, sound and silence, real life and dream life. Ultimately these binaries are not necessarily
reconciled, but remain present in the drama as a both-and, giving Night Visions its complex,
bittersweet, tone.