Telephone A

[Opening theme music plays]

ALEXANDER DANNER

You are listening to Exercises in Sound, an exploration of narrative sound design. 

[Theme music fades]

[TV continues in background.]

[Character A wakes up.]

CHARACTER A - JORDAN HIGGS

Oh, what? I guess I fell asleep. Hey, you let me fall asleep!

[No response. Character A shifts in his armchair. He turns off the television and puts the remote back down on a coffee table.]

Hello?! Where’d you go?

[Character A gets up and crosses the room. He picks up a telephone handset. We hear the scrape of a coiled phone cord against the edge of its base. He dials a number on a rotary phone. It rings. It connects.]

CHARACTER B - JORDAN STILLMAN

[Phone distortion]

Hey, you’re up.

CHARACTER A

There you are.

CHARACTER B

Have a good nap?

[Occasional sound of phone cord as A paces.]

CHARACTER A

You were here when I fell asleep, but then I woke up and couldn’t find you. You left me all alone.

CHARACTER B

[Phone distortion]

I just ran to the store. I haven’t been gone long.

CHARACTER A

I wish you’d left a note.

CHARACTER B

I got you some ice cream.

CHARACTER A

What kind?

CHARACTER B

[Phone distortion]

There was some kind of wild rush for ice cream before I got there. You wouldn’t even believe how emptied out they were.

CHARACTER A

So…?

CHARACTER B

[Phone distortion]

Rum raisin. It’s all they had.

[We hear the chord scrape as Character A crosses back to the receiver. Character A hangs up on Character B, returns to the armchair, and resumes watching television.]

[Closing theme music]

CREDITS

ALEXANDER DANNER

Exercises in Sound is created, written, and sound designed by Alexander Danner and directed by James Oliva, featuring performances by Jordan Higgs and Jordan Stillman. 

Theme music by Catherine Seaton, tile art by Sam Twardy. 

Exercises in Sound is inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style and Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story, which conducted similar experiments in the forms of prose fiction and comics respectively.

Funded in part by grants from HeartLife NFP and Emerson College. 

Find episode transcripts online at exercisessinsound.com. 

For access to an ad-free feed for exercises in sound, you can support the show at thirdSight.memberful.com. 

For news and updates, sign up for the Third Sight Media newsletter, link in the show notes. 

Exercises and Sound is a ThirdSight media production.