Michael Armstrong

I am a media researcher with an engineering background working at the interface between people, stories, media and technology. My work spans issues from access services, speech audibility, video quality to human perception and most recently the structure of media content and its relationship with the audience. My most recent work has been examining the role of the audience in media and the issue of media personalisation, both of which turned out to be poorly documented.

 

I took voluntary redundancy in March 2024 and am now developing a subtitle quality project with the University of Dundee.

Object-Based Media

 

Object-Based Media is a concept developed from live radio broadcasting and computer playout systems. In contrast with the standard approach to audio and video where a final version is rendered as a single file, Object-Based Media is based on the idea of a playlist where each item is available separately, so the objects used, their order of presentation and even the audio mix can be changed in response to the user and their environment.

 

What is a story if it isn’t represented by a fixed artefact like a book, a radio play or a film? The 20th century has been dominated by the artefact, the fixed story which conforms to a limited number of templates, or so the industry would have us believe. Even the video games industry, the most interactive of media, is dominated by the hero’s quest story structure.

 

Yet there are many other story forms to be found all around us that do not conform to the Aristotelean form of beginning, middle and end. Standard news story writing has an entirely different structure known as the inverted pyramid where the story is told over and over again in increasing levels of detail. TV soaps are ongoing structures where many interrelated stories play out between characters with no beginning or end in sight and my favourite radio drama, Under Milk Wood, has no plot structure whatsoever, yet is one of the greatest radio plays ever made.

 

However, all these are fixed forms of media, where do we look to find truly interactive storytelling which responds to the audience, forms that can make best use of Object-Based Media? The answers are many and varied and the evidence is all around us, from everyday conversations to oral storytelling and the firehose of stories conveyed by social media.

 

The striking similarity between the structures of computer programming and narratology lead me to conclude that responsive storytelling is, first and foremost, an algorithm with sets of rules and templates which drive the interaction between the characters and the world they inhabit. I am aiming to find ways in which we can encapsulate stories as algorithms in a way that brings the qualities of oral storytelling to our media experiences.