Bioshock > Miscellany > Audio
Rapture is as rich an aural experience as it is a visual one.
Each level has its own background musics and noises to set the mood of the story. The music, generally of the electronica or industrial genre, sets a somber, melancholic mood to the environment.
Rapture is so isolated that, even though the year is 1960, its citizens still listen to swing music, a sanitized form of jazz suitable for dancing. The music, by such artists as Django Reinhart, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Noël Coward, and the Ink Spots, is played over loudspeakers, from jukeboxes, and from phonographs. The latest tunes often had to be smuggled in.
How the citizens would have reacted to the disappearance of swing in the 1960's as rock and roll became popular is anyone's guess.
The loudspeakers also broadcast advertisements for plasmids and gene tonics; public service announcements (mostly of the watch out for parasites/Atlas
variety); and cute little propaganda playlets with Mary and Jim, reminiscent of the Harry and Louise
playlet of 1993. Finally, there is a rambling speech of Andrew Ryan himself, explaining why he decided to build Rapture.
Fontaine Futuristics sells the Accu-Vox tape recorder, on which people have gotten into the habit of recording their thoughts and opinions. These devices are scattered everywhere in the city, allowing you a glimpse into how Rapture was conceived and built; and the mindset of the men who funded, built, maintained, and ultimately destroyed the city. You also listen in to those who discovered and marketed Adam and its plasmids, created the Little Sisters and Big Daddies, and the madness that had claimed most of them as their Adam use progressed.
After your avatar picks up the short-wave radio from the bathysphere that took him to Rapture, you pick up messages broadcast specifically to you, mostly from Atlas, Frank Fontaine, Andrew Ryan, Brigette Tenenbaum, and Sander Cohen.
Finally there are the rants of the citizens, addled by Adam and armed to the teeth. The type of rant depends on which of the nine models you encounter, but all involve some loss of an aspect of their lives: status (Ladysmith), youth (Baby Jane, Toasty), faith (Waders), motherhood (Rosebud), wealth (Breadwinner), security (Ducky), and respect (Pigskin, Grossman). And that is before they meet you, whereupon they first scream, throw insults at you, and come out swinging.