Hi folks,
I’m taking another look this week at the advice offered by Erik Barnouw in his Handbook of Radio Writing (1947). This time the attention is focused on “shifting the scene” of a radio drama using a technique known as the “musical transition”. These techniques are common sense but nonetheless easy to overlook.
Scene Shifting (part 4)
Musical Transitions
This is probably the most common form of transition used in audio drama. It is probably the clearest form of auditory “curtain” used between scenes
Advantages
A musical transition is easily recognised as a curtain by the listener.
The musical transition can be varied to commuinicate a particular mood (anger, joy, triumph, despair, etc.) as well as signal the end of a scene.
Bridging musical transitions can move the audience from the feeling of one scene into the mood of the next (assisting in the narration).
A musical transition can be used without requiring the old scene to be faded out.
Dialog in the new scene does not need to be faded in.
Music can transition into the sound of the next scene where the sound effect carries a similar rythm.Disadvantages
The main disadvantage of the musical transition is the cost of commissioning the music itself. However, there are large libraries of free and public domain music that can be approached for pre-recorded music.
The musical transition is the most commonly used in our scripts.
If you’d like to see some examples of how scene setting is handled in the scripts we publish be sure to visit http://weirdworldstudios.com/product-category/our-products/. We have lots of free samples you can download.
See you next time.
– Philip Craig Robotham
