Introduction

Two themes run throughout the book: (1) acknowledgement of the aesthetic dimension of causality and, in particular, its creation of a bond between ‘audio’ and ‘drama’; and (2) recognition of the difference that phenomenology can bring to an appreciation of audio drama. (1) To claim that causality has an aesthetic dimension is to assert that an effect (from a cause) is an occasion when something is made manifest, something is brought into appearance or audition. The claim arises from two encounters with Aristotle: a close reading of the Poetics ( chapter 1 ) and the retrieval of a concept of causality by Martin Heidegger that has been obscured by Latin Scholastic interpretation of Aristotle ( chapter 5 ). (2) Phenomenology makes a difference to the appreciation of audio drama by changing our understanding of human being in the world. As a result, we become alive to those aspects of our selves that make us realize just how much audio drama speaks to our situation. These changes include: the conceptualization of living beings as creatures that are set within their environment, where emphasis on being-in-the-world elevates the significance of audibility ( chapter 2 ); the body becoming an ontological framework that accounts for experience in terms of its embeddedness within the world, with consequences for the experience of listening to audio drama ( chapters 3 and 4 ); the introduction of a concept of technology that distances itself from instrumentalist, means–end thinking and instead treats causality as a creative, ecological relationship with nature ( chapter 5 – 7 ); and the assertion that human being, through their voice, is first and foremost a being-with-others, a Mitsein , a state of being-in-the-world that is only possible because it includes being with others ( chapter 8 ).