Conclusion

The claims of the book are set out against the background of the relationship between art and philosophy. This background encourages an openness to the idea that things are never as they appear, the recognition that existence is not stable and enduring but a process that changes over time, and an appreciation of the strangeness of sound. Audio drama's suitability for exhibiting openness, process and strangeness has a foundation within phenomenology. This centres discussion around two topics: (1) the aesthetic dimension of causality; and (2) the difference that phenomenology can bring to an appreciation of audio drama. Conclusions arising from these debates are: (1) audio drama is not just drama through the medium of sound, but drama that is perfectly equipped to achieve the causal concentration that is mimesis ; and (2) the showing achieved by audio drama is consistent with our status as noisy grapplers, the condition that is posited by Heidegger's phenomenology as the fundamental nature of human being-in-the-world. In turn, this nature is expressed by the audio dramatic voice as an eruptive becoming that acts and is acted upon within an audio mise en scène . Three further lines of enquiry are suggested: (i) the possibility that the mimetic ecology of voice and audio mise en scène has something to offer the tension between human freedom and causal necessity within Aristotle's concept of drama; (ii) continued exploration of the relation between sound art and narrative, in which the embodied perspectives of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are compared with Ricoeur's emplotment; and (iii) the enjoyment of listening to audio drama while doing something else is indicative of an aesthetics of accompaniment which can be articulated in terms of Heidegger's concepts of technology and being-with ( Mitsein ).