Fifteen minutes from the BBC Archive that every sound designer should have in their bookmarks: in 1955, for his television series Orson Welles' Sketch Book, Welles looked back at his 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
Most of the retellings focus on the "mass panic", a story that historians still debate. What interests me here is something else: a first-hand account of how a radio drama was engineered to behave like reality, and why that is, at its core, a sound design problem.
The sci-fi problem
According to Welles, the production had a particular motivation. His sound effects people had been critical of the team for dabbling in science fiction, so the company made a special effort to make the show as realistic as possible. And "realistic" did not just mean convincing effects. The goal was to reproduce all the radio effects, not only the sound effects: to do on air exactly what a real broadcast would have done had the world really been invaded.
The format as sound design
That decision changes where the sound design lives. The programme is built as ordinary evening radio, with dance music from a hotel ballroom, repeatedly cut into by news bulletins that grow more urgent. Remote pickups, interruptions, reporters losing the signal, a studio announcer trying to keep control of the situation: the grammar of the medium itself becomes the main material. The listener is not asked to believe in Martians; they are asked to recognise a familiar structure and trust it.
The crew
The credits are worth knowing. Music was by Bernard Herrmann, sound effects by Ora Nichols, Ray Kremer and Jim Rogan, with John Dietz as sound engineer. In rehearsal, special attention went to the crowd scenes, the echo of cannon fire and the boat horns in New York Harbor. Notice what these have in common: they are about space and distance, not spectacle. A foghorn far away tells you more about a city in crisis than any explosion would.
An idea with a BBC precedent
The approach was not entirely new. In 1926 the BBC had broadcast Ronald Knox's Broadcasting the Barricades, a fake report of a riot in London, which Welles later said gave him the idea for his own broadcast. It is a nice loop that this reflection on the programme was itself commissioned by the BBC.
What I take away
Perceived realism comes from context, structure and perspective, not from the fidelity of single sounds. You can have flawless effects and still break the illusion if the format around them feels wrong; you can have modest means and make it work if the listener's expectations are respected and then, carefully, betrayed. It is a lesson that applies as much to game audio and immersive installations today as it did to a CBS studio in 1938.
Video: BBC Archive, "1955: Orson Welles on The War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast". Credits and background drawn from published sources on the 1938 broadcast.
Matteo Milani
