Blog 5

Listening to these audio-based stories, one of the elements that stuck out to me the most was how the speaker’s tone of voice was used to control the tone of the story. Especially in the case of the Moth piece “Real Men Don’t Rob Banks”, Liel Leibovitz tells a story which contains elements that could treated very seriously, including the pressures of gender performance and having a parent go to jail when he was a child, and makes it funny by using his tone of voice to mark it as comedy. He uses comedic timing and a laughing tone to demonstrably tell it in a comedic way, thereby giving the audience permission to find it funny and laugh along, and by doing so to invest themselves in the story. It’s a technique that isn’t really available in written storytelling; someone writing a book can use punctuation and word choice to approximate a comedic tone, but they can’t actually use their own voice to do so. Another technique that I noticed that set the voice-based storytelling apart was how the speakers could use tone of voice to distinguish and contrast different characters within the story. A character who is supposed to be shy can have this trait emphasized by the speaker moving to an exaggeratedly quiet tone, or one who is supposed to be more masculine than the speaker, such as Leibovitz’s father, can be given a voice deeper than the speaker’s. In written dialogue, most of what one can do is add tone tags or a phonetically transcribed accent, whereas the storytellers in audio mediums can use a wider range of tools to make characters stand apart from each other or from the teller.