I recorded these mud pots on a lark. I was on a reporting trip near the Salton Sea, and saw a sign for mud pots, which are pools of wet mud that burp and bloop because of geothermal activity. I pulled over and found this craggy, dry field with dozens of small, bubbling cauldrons of mud. The recordings I made would later become the first podcast episode of The World According to Sound, the opening of our original in-person live show, and a part of most workshops, lectures, or demonstrations we do.
Chris and I love these sounds because they’re dynamic, varied, humorous, conjure up imagery, convey action, and elicit a range of reactions and associations in people. We’ve been told they sound like someone is blowing bubbles in water or plunging a toilet. One listener said he imagined anthropomorphic carrots and potatoes being boiled alive in a stew.
I was initially drawn to the sound because I found the bloops and gurgles amusing, but as I recorded more and more I started to appreciate how much the sound varied.
The overall texture was consistent, but the pitch, speed, volume, and attack (how quickly the volume increased) was very different. Each mud pot had its own sonic signature.
I think that this is a large part of what makes a mix of these recordings effective even with zero narration or context. You can tell that the sounds are all being made by the same kind of thing, but also that each source is different. How? Is it their size? Their shape? The viscosity of the mud? The amount of geothermal heat? Perhaps it’s just their particular personality?
There’s a lot of room for your mind to wander as it grapples with these questions. I started hearing the sounds as chatter, like the mud pots were characters, and I was standing in the middle of a big conversation, where they were all repeating their different phrases over and over again.
Over the years Chris and I have remixed these recordings over and over again, first for the podcast, then for the in-person live performance, and finally for our online streaming show. Through all those mixes you can trace the evolution of our project, which started pretty close in style to public radio, but has gotten farther and farther away from that. Now when I listen back to the original podcast, some of the decisions make me cringe, especially when it comes to the narration.
The original episode had a ton of talking. Instead of just juxtaposing the different mud pots and letting the listener have their own ideas and experience of the sound, we dictate. We actually said “each pot’s got its own particular personality,” with a little bit of public radio twinkle in my voice. Yikes.
When we first played the episode for a bunch of people we know in public radio, they all said we should have more narration. My old editor from Marketplace told me that the episode irritated him because we didn’t give him enough facts. He said after listening, he went and looked up mud pots and read a bunch about them.
That feedback threw Chris and me into a pit of doubt (where we find ourselves often). Should we say more? Should we try to explain the geological process more? Maybe say how big the mud pots are or name other spots in the US where you could find them? Etc.
Eventually we realized that a listener going and looking up a bunch of stuff was actually the point. There’s no way we could say everything about mud pots. And actually by putting in descriptions and facts what we were doing was blocking people from having their own associations with the sound and dampening the urge for them to go do their own research.
What the listener thinks of or researches might be more interesting or fruitful than anything we could put in. We would have never thought of anthropomorphic carrots and potatoes being boiled alive. And who knows if the listener would have either if we were busy chewing their ear off about how many mud pots there are in the world and how we think they all have their own particular personality.
In our live show, streaming show, and subsequent mixes, like the one we played for the listening club this week, we stripped out most of the narration and increased the amount of sound. What we want is just to create the space for listeners to have their own experience and thoughts, not to dictate and circumscribe them.
This became a founding principle of our project. Try to say less. But it’s not easy to do. We still find ourselves having to fight back the impulse to narrate, to give more direction, hold the hand tighter. That’s the standard approach in public radio and much of media. And it’s a hard habit to shake even in the presence of a really wonderful, inspiring, self-possessed bloop.
Excellent!! Chris has explained your reasons for less narration than folks are normally used to, but this in-depth Reasoning is an article I hope all audience members view. it will hopefully allow them to trust their imaginations more fully.