Loafers of the Kandinsky Sound Museum

(part of a soundplay based on a chapter from the novel)

The Secret of the Cicadas Song * by Michael Lyons

1. EXTERIOR -big open field. Walker is walking around on his land.

 SOUND 87k)OF FEET WALKING THROUGH DRIED GRASS CRACKLING, WIND moving across an
open space, the wind or this sound has to define the place. there needs to
be a kind of reflectance of the wind sound as something going around and
giving a sense of landscape.

                    I took the opportunity while at the farm 
                    to become a loafer. I don't mean the kind of 
                    loafer you see hanging out in the middle of 
                    the day, although I have done my share of 
                    that too, but the kind of loafer they mean 
                    when they refer to people who listen in to 
                    the VLF band (Very Low Frequency) --on your
                    radio dial.

 SOUND 138k OF RADIO CHANNELS BEING CHANGED Drifting through static and cross
talk in between stations fading in an out off the edge of audibility

 SOUND BEAM 300k In the fields, to ameliorate and blend with the sounds of
cicadas, wind, crickets and crackling grass, there is an all encompassing
SOUND BEAM. This is a pleasant filtered white noise (brown noise)
presented with a 40 msec delay between left ear and right ear so that
it appears to be localized in the head. It is an aural illusion that
appears as a beam of sound passing through the brain.

                    Loafers is also what they call these long, 
                    low-frequency radio waves. These waves 
                    fall in the audio range and go below the edge
                    of human hearing. Some people say they go 
                    down into the realm of brain waves, into 
                    the unconscious.

SOUND: LOW RADIO DESCENDING THE SCALE INTO SUB AUDIBILITY, a deep base presence

NOTE: This being a demo of playscript with sound files on the web we jump down to a human voice. You can browse the whole text of this chapter by clicking Loafers.

                  It is a very delicate operation to tune the 
                   superheterodyning system in these old World War 
                   II radios.

                 He gave me a mischievous grin.

                 "It's like performing brain surgery,"

PAUSE.

                "You have to tune the line of transformer 
                stages in amongst the tubes and high-precision 
                 military components with a plastic 
                 screwdriver in order not to contribute to 
                 the ferocapacitance and mess up the signal."
                                                                   FADE TO:

 3. INTERIOR OF CLASSROOM

SOUND: SHUFFLING OF FEET, SCRAPING OF CHAIRS AND GENERAL CLASSROOM NOISE, PEOPLE MILLING AROUND, RISE AND FALL OF THEIR CHATTER AND COUGHING in the background during the following monolog

                   He was a teacher from the old school. 
                   He felt hurt and took it personally when any of 
                   his students didn't learn.
                   But what was worse was how shocked and 
                   disappointed he became when it came out,
                   with irrefutable evidence, that there was 
                   wide spread cheating going on in his classroom.
         
                   They cheated all the time because he was 
                   always so distracted he didn't notice. 
         
                   I was afraid he might go into cardiac arrest. 
                   He was such a sensitive do--gooder that it 
                   made you want to protect one such as he who was
                   just totally without a bit of street sense. 
                   They all made fun of him behind his back. 
                   Many of the students were the privileged sons 
                   and daughters of rich Arabian oilionairs. They 
                   might spend more on a night on a town than 
                   I made in a month.

(To be continued. A tape is in production and you can order it soon)

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