The War of the Worlds Broadcast was a really weird one. At least, I thought it was. When I first heard it, the first I thought about was why would any one want to play such a cruel joke on the public? Mass media outlets aren't for playing around; they are for bringing news and non-frightening entertainment to the masses (I suppose some people like to be frightened though). As I listened to it, I couldn't help trying to put myself in the place and that time to see if I would have believed such a thing if I was just an ordinary citizen driving in my car to some destination I would have called home. The answer that I come up with every time is a big fat no. I suppose that could be simply because I prior to listening to it, I knew that it was fake and I knew that some people believed it when it was first broadcast. This knowledge kind of ruined the thing for me because I was no longer able to separate the broadcast itself from my historical knowledge of it.
However, that lack of separation coupled with the things that I have learned in this class also worked to my advantage because it caused me to listen to the broadcast with my ears completely open. What I mean by that is I was able to focus on the elemental aspects of it as I paid close attention to detail. Like my band discussed in class on Wednesday and as Chase said in his blog, what I found most interesting was the how Welles' voice was such a good example of the grain of voice. For all I know, Welles could have deliberately made his voice sound that way for the sake of good and believable broadcast, but I feel as if they used anyone, the results would not have been the same. There was just something about his voice that pierced me in a way that I cannot explain and will not even try to. After all, that is the essence of the grain of voice and the third meaning, that it is lost once you attempt to explain is inexplicability.
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