There was a thought I couldn’t quite figure out for a while: in radio art, what exactly is sound?

At first, I thought sound was just a carrier of information. Dialogue delivers the plot, sound effects create the space, music heightens the emotion—all tools serving the story. But through the research process and the hands-on experience that followed, I gradually began to feel that this understanding was too shallow.

When I listened to Whitehead’s On the Shore Dimly Seen, what moved me most wasn’t any specific line of dialogue. It was the process of the Morse code gradually blurring beneath the ocean waves, eventually being swallowed whole. It didn’t just tell a story about lost connection—it made you experience lost connection directly. Those few seconds of the signal fading told you what it means to lose contact more immediately than any explanation ever could.

Later I realised that this is the most fundamental difference between radio art and other narrative forms. In film and television, time is an accessory to the image. Editing can jump back and forth. But in radio art, time is the sound itself. The rises and falls, the loud and soft, the fast and slow, the pauses—they all trace a continuous, flowing line of time. The listener is held on that line. You can’t pause it, you can’t skip it. You just have to follow the sound, second by second, forward. That feeling of being carried along by time—no other medium can give you that.

This had a big impact on how I wrote the script for Best Partners. I started consciously thinking about how time was distributed. When should the dialogue rhythm speed up—like that section where Xiao Liang and Ken talk over each other, the tension of words chasing words coming not from the content but from the rhythm itself? And when should everything slow down, or even stop altogether—like those two seconds of silence, not there because the blank space looks nice, but because at that point, both time and emotion needed to take a breath.

I also started to respect the independent value of sound materials. The sound of Da Lin flipping through folders—it doesn’t just tell you he’s looking at something. The very texture and rhythm of that sound conveys a sense of order and control. Xiao Liang’s backpack sounds chaotic, ungoverned—those noises are an emotion in themselves. I began learning to use sound itself to shape the emotional arc within time.

If my earlier understanding of radio art was “telling stories with sound,” now I’d rather say it’s using sound to carve out a stretch of time. Whether you carve well or not isn’t measured by how much information each sound explains. It’s about whether, within that stretch of sonic time, the listener was truly drawn in. Whether there was a moment when time itself seemed to stretch a little longer, or contract a little shorter. That’s the magic of sound and time, and it’s what I most want to keep exploring.