Breaking the Flow

Normally, flow is a good thing. A lot of my time as an editor is spent trying to make ideas and words connect smoothly to tell a story. But while editing a recent podcast, I had an important realization: Sometimes breaking the flow of one element increases the flow of the whole.

To hear a good example of this, listen to the Echoes podcasts. An interviewee will be talking, you'll hear his music bubbling along underneath, and then, just as the narrative hits the important idea, the music will burst forth to emphasize it and pump up the emotion even more.

For my article "The Art of Podcasting," I asked Echoes engineer Jeff Towne to explain the concept.

"It's not like, 'Oh, the voice stopped, so I'll turn up the music,'" he replied. "I always get a little frustrated when I hear that on other radio shows, when there's an opportunity to say something with the music underneath the narration and then make a dramatic statement once the music's in the clear. It actually takes a little time and energy to arrange that. It's not quite as simple as, 'We'll start the track and move it around till it comes up right.' There's often a lot of pushin' and shovin' and clippin' and twistin' and trimmin'. But that's what you should do. At least, that's what we want to do."

That hit home when I compared the two podcast interviews I did with Francis Preve recently. In the first, I started the musical examples at what seemed like the right point, but then immediately faded them out again so they wouldn't fight with Preve's voice. In the second, I simply split the voice file after the important word and slid the remainder off to the right on the timeline, moving it later in time. Then, when the musical statement finished, I brought in the voice again.

It seems obvious in retrospect, but somehow I had to give myself permission to break the flow of the voice so I could bring in the music. When I listen to the final production, it sounds like we simply stopped talking to listen, which was exactly the flow I wanted.