The aim of this artefact was to gauge how the attention of the audience can be maintained and directed strictly through the use of audio means. A sketch especially conceived for this purpose was recorded and played to two focus groups that had no previous knowledge of the subject or characters of the sketch.
There were difficulties in deciphering the content of the sketch as well as identifying the characters. A number of cues and supplementary questions were asked in order to aid the audiences understanding. Asked to picture the characters, they could identify the broad picture, but didn`t make connections between the verbal and the paraverbal initially. Asked to describe the plot, the first group was much more effective, while the second group complained about the poor acoustics of the room and needed two re-runs of the material to get even a basic understanding of the subject. They also mentioned receiving the content in a fragmented manner (“I would hear the odd joke”).
The focus of the participants’ attention seemed to lay on getting an overall picture of the plot and characters from listening to the dialogue, which they would later (presumably) flesh out with the aid of visuals. Given the lack of visual aids, the only source of supplementary information would have been paraverbal cues. As one respondent noted, our current reliance on mainly visual information has made audiences relatively desensitised with regards registering the subtle signs provided through paraverbal language. The next artefact will look at a specific situation in which audiences might voluntarily rely on paraverbal language to distinguish between a genuine or a false message.
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