From Princeton to Prison – Audio Storytelling Reflection
Listening to Mahmoud Reza Banki’s story on The Moth, I felt some sort of heaviness settle in me. From Princeton to Prison was about how his life flipped upside down after being wrongfully arrested for receiving his mother’s divorce settlement money from Iran. What stood out immediately was how he started sharing with us his childhood in Iran. He said, “Looking back now, the red alert sirens in the middle of the night, Iraqi missiles and fighter jet assaults, getting into bunkers as a child, all seemed routine and normal.” Hearing him say that so calmly made me pause, and stating that it was seemingly “routine and normal”… I thought about how experiences shape people so differently.
The way he told his story didn’t rely on sound effects or music, but his voice alone carried it and the humming of the recorder. His pacing was steady. He took appropriate pauses to gather his thoughts, making it seem like he’s not reciting a story–he’s telling a story. You could hear when his voice wavered or paused, especially when he described being dragged out of his apartment at dawn by SWAT officers. When he said, “They slam me against the wall and handcuff me,” it felt conflicting, because his voice was soft but the words themselves hit hard. There wasn’t any dramatic music to push you into feeling this pressure and urgency. Instead, his soft voice left in it–the room for the listener to feel it themselves. I noticed the lack of background music in The Moth’s production style actually made the story more powerful. It’s another one of those audio techniques, that sometimes intentionally leaving out certain sounds can be just as effective as layering it in. Of course, the silence between his sentences added weight. When he described his first days in prison, he said, “I laid down on my metal bunk and quietly, I cried. Not because I was scared, cold, or hungry. I cried because I could not be heard.” Hearing that in silence just made it feel even more real. His words came out slower. His words came out weaker.
Banki ended his story by explaining that even after getting out of prison, the punishment never stopped. “I am not equal. Prison, at some point, ends. The punishment never does.” I sat there for a while after it ended. It reminded me how important the choice of narration style is in audio storytelling. In this episode, The Moth producers didn’t add music or layered effects or anything. Instead, they let Mahmoud’s voice carry everything. The voice that couldn’t be heard during that tough time was given a chance to be heard, with no distractions. His pauses, his slightly shaky breathing. Those were enough to build the atmosphere. I think this style works for stories like his. When a story is already filled with injustice and heartbreak, adding dramatic music or heavy effects would almost take away from it. This episode showed me that audio doesn’t always need to create an atmosphere. Sometimes, it needs to just give space for the speaker’s reality to ‘breathe’ and come to life. That’s what I want to remember in my future audio projects.
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