Edusio
Audio is not a lesser version of a page or a screen. It is a different instrument, with a narrow range it plays beautifully and a wide range it cannot play at all.
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Audio is not a lesser version of a page or a screen. It is a different instrument, with a narrow range it plays beautifully and a wide range it cannot play at all.
Every medium has a shape, and the shape of audio is a line. It moves forward at a pace the listener does not set, it disappears the instant it has been heard, and it enters through a sense that has no equivalent of the sideways glance. A reader can look at a paragraph, look away, look back, and take the sentences in a different order than they were written. A listener cannot. That single constraint explains almost everything audio does well and almost everything it does badly, and it is worth holding onto before any other claim is made about the medium.
What the line gives you is sequence. Sound is superb at the kinds of understanding that are built one step at a time: a story that gathers meaning as it goes, an argument that stacks a claim on a claim, a change of mind that has to be walked through rather than displayed. Written text can do this too, but text always offers an escape, and readers take it. In audio there is no skipping to the conclusion without losing the road that led there. The medium enforces the very patience that certain ideas require in order to land at all.
Sequence is the one structure that survives being heard rather than seen.
Audio is consumed while something else is happening, and that changes everything about how it should be built.
Proximity does something to comprehension that no amount of clarity in text can replace.