Sound as World and Story: The Creative Functions of Music and Audio in Welcome to Night Vale

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2024-07-09

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en

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The paranormal horror podcast Welcome to Night Vale (2012-current) by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor follows the ominous and strange town of Night Vale. As a fiction podcast, Welcome to Night Vale intertwines the legacy of radio plays with the modern technology of podcasting. This thesis aims to answer the question: How is the musical weather segment in the Welcome to Night Vale (2012-current) podcast by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor utilized for the worldbuilding of the podcast’s secondary world? I argue that audio has untapped potential as a tool for storytelling and worldbuilding in the creation of fictional secondary worlds. An analysis of eleven podcast episodes based on Schafer’s concept of a soundscape and Wissmann and Zimmermann’s elements of audioplay worldbuilding is conducted in order to better understand the dimensions of sound in Welcome to Night Vale and how it opens up new and innovative perspectives for audio fiction.

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