SONIC SCENE DESIGN

The purpose of The Audio Penguin blog is to discuss the use of sound creatively in virtually any setting other than just listening to traditional pop or classical music.  (There are many websites for that.)

One of my greatest interests is in the use of sound composition intended for theatre and dance performances, and I would like to elaborate upon this form of sound art in this post.  Though I have set the article in terms of theatre and dance, everything I present would also apply to sound design for audio theatre, advertising, film and TV, etc.

A major portion of my graduate study was in the field of theatrical scene design. Though I now no longer design sets, I have turned to a form of scenic design that is often underutilized or utilized very crudely in theatre: design of the sonic environment.

In her book, Architecture and Design 1970-1990, the interior designer Beverly Russell (editor of Interiors magazine) identifies four “mainstreams” of design to which she gives names which refer to music. She notes “It is not by accident that I decided to organize these four groups around musical references. Sonic rhythms are an original, basic human communication system, which, when harmonically coded, become music. Aural art forms, therefore–music and poetry–reach into people’s consciousness much faster than any of the visual media, such as art and architecture.” I couldn’t agree more.

Since in the theatre, and many other media, one has a relatively small time frame to work on the emotions of the audience, it would seem to follow that dance and theatre would make best use of the sound medium to create the kind of atmosphere desired by the choreographer or director.

Unfortunately this is often not the case. Dance would seem to come the closest since music is used for the dance. But so often in dance companies music not produced by a live orchestra is reproduced very poorly. Tinny sound systems seem to be the norm for all but the most prestigious companies. And much of the music is simply pop music (though sometimes classical or jazz) purchased at a record store. High budget dance companies do have scores or electronic music composed. Low budget companies usually say they can’t afford it though there are many composers, especially electro-acoustic composers, who could — and would — turn out original music at quite low cost. It is too bad that more choreographers don’t form long term relationships with a sound composer early on as Merce Cunningham did with John Cage. That way the sonic environment would be designed specifically for the performance, not just purchased at a record store or on iTunes.

The situation tends to be worse in theatre, especially low budget community and experimental theatre. Except for speech, and sometimes singing, produced by the actors, sound in many theatrical productions tends to be limited to “sound effects.”

Though spot sound effects are an important part of overall sound design, often you can spot the sound effects before they come. About fifteen seconds before the effect you hear sixty cycle hum as the sound engineer fades up the poorly grounded player. Then you get a brief sound effect through tinny speakers.

But even if the sound reproduction quality is good, sound effects tend simply to be literal references required in a scene (a police siren, say, to indicate the police are coming) or cliches (crickets to indicate a summer night). But they can be so much more. The stage director Robert Wilson has always created performances in which light, sound and movement were on equal terms with the script. He sees theatre as a multi-media totality, not just as actors speaking a text. Early on he collaborated with the sound designer Hans Peter Kuhn, a German designer known for his subtle multi-channel sound environments of appropriate, though often not literal, noises. In a Wilson production the visual set may be limited to the stage, but the sound makes it feel to the audience as if the set extends all around. Even the speech of the actors, picked up by body mics, is sometimes processed and reproduced in locations different from where the actors visually appear.

Much of my own theatre sound work has been done for another Wilson: Ann Wilson, no relation to Robert Wilson though she worked for him for ten years. Even though I have not had the budgets to support eight channel sound systems, I have found that high quality stereo sound can be very effective if used with imagination. Since Ann Wilson productions often make considerable use of dance, some of my pieces are designed for dancers and are quite metric to allow the dancers to time movements to the sound. Other sounds simply provide environments during or before a production to create atmosphere. One set of pieces was even created to provide environment for an art installation by Ms. Wilson and made use of the artist’s own voice in multi-track collage before each musical segment.

Much of my own theatre sound work has been done for another Wilson: Ann Wilson, no relation to Robert Wilson though she worked for him for ten years. Even though I have not had the budgets to support eight channel sound systems, I have found that high quality stereo sound can be very effective if used with imagination. Since Ann Wilson productions often make considerable use of dance, some of my pieces are designed for dancers and are quite metric to allow the dancers to time movements to the sound. Other sounds simply provide environments during or before a production to create atmosphere. One set of pieces was even created to provide environment for an art installation by Ms. Wilson and made use of the artist’s own voice in multi-track collage before each musical segment.

Toward the end of the post I will put up some samples of my own sound design for the play, “If All Danes Were Jews” written by the noted Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevushenko. These sound were created rather than being “performed” or recorded with a microphone.  In the near future I will put up a post on this process, but in this post I want to focus more on the aesthetics rather than the production techniques.

Toward the end of the post I will put up some samples of my own sound design for the play, “If All Danes Were Jews” written by the noted Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevushenko. These sound were created algorithmically rather than being “performed” or recorded with a microphone.  In the near future I will put up a post on this process, but in this post I want to focus more on the aesthetics rather than the production techniques.

Three principles seem to me to be most useful in thinking about theatre sound design:

1. Nothing is silent. 

 If one sits quietly in a room and does not speak, one tends to think that the room is silent. But it is not. There is always sound from something: a motor, street noise, heating and AC noise, etc. Each room has an ambience. Film sound recordists are aware of this and usually, when filming a scene on location, the director asks everyone to be silent for five or ten minutes so that “the sound of the room” can be recorded. That sound — or one appropriately similar — is used as a foundation sound for the entire scene which takes place in the room. If one literally uses silence for so-called “silent” scenes (in which there is no movement or speech), the unnaturalness of the sudden silence jumps out. One sees this occasionally in beginning student videos where the student mistakenly thinks that sound need not be reproduced in scenes where there is no dialogue.

In the theatre, there is a natural ambience from the audience, the heating and AC systems, etc. But that is not necessarily the ambience that creates the emotional effect the director is looking for. Subtle atmospheric sounds, just slightly above the loudness level of the theatre’s own natural ambience, create a new ambience that can have a big impact on the audience. That is why sound in the theatre should not just be limited to “effects” necessary to make a literal reference or the songs required in a musical.

2. Abstract references are stronger than literal ones.

 The stage is an arena of simulacra, of theatrical referents to real world experience and emotion. When we cry because a character in a play dies we do not believe the actual actor has died. Indeed he or she will be revived in time for the curtain call. Rather, we see a theatrical referent to the real loss of a person. It is what has been called “aesthetic distance” that allows us to feel the sad emotion of the loss of someone who never really existed, without feeling the true horror that is felt when an actor actually collapses and dies on stage.

When something is greatly distanced from the reality to which it refers we are far more willing to allow a broad range of expression and variation. Thus when a cartoon character falls off a tall building we do not necessarily think of him as dead and find no surprise in seeing him dust himself off a few seconds later. The range of expression open to an abstracted, or greatly distanced, character is thus greater than that of a less abstracted one.

It is also true that the closer something gets to reality, the more we judge it against reality. Thus when a hihgly stylized or abstracted human figure is drawn in a work of visual art, we accept the stylization without saying “that is not what a person looks like.” However, when the drawing is so close to reality that it is near-photographic in realism then we are critical of even the slightest departure from realism. We say, “look at those awkward hands; that artist can’t draw.” Thus abstractions from reality can be more imaginative and expressive.

In designing sound compositions for theatre and dance, I try to keep all references to the “real world” very distant. When I was asked by the Sefa Jorques Dance Company to design music that sounded like “birds, bugs and reptiles,” for example, I used no actual sounds of any of those creatures. Rather I worked with synthesized sound objects that sonically simulated, in an abstract way, the sounds and behaviors of those living creatures. This allowed the audience to feel a kind of presence of those beings without wondering whether snakes were crawling around under their seats. People who hear my work may notice that the aural representations of birds in the Sefa Jorques piece are somewhat similar to my representations of fish in “Fish Dance” created for Ann Wilson’s performance piece, Mattise: A Performance Collage for Theatre. But of course. Fish and birds both travel through fluids (water and air).

I have three times been at organ recitals in churches where a bat or bird got loose and flew out into the audience. I can assure you that nobody heard much of what the organist was playing. Their attention jumped immediately to the creature. If I had used real bird sounds in Matisse many audience members would have immediately started to look around to make sure a bird had not flown into the theatre. Their attention to the play would not be enhanced but actually distracted. Similarly, real sounding bird sounds would have caused others to start comparing the sounds with real bird noises and noticing any errors. Again a distraction. By using musical sounds with a swooping bird-like motion, I conveyed a bird feeling while keeping enough aesthetic distance that the feeling came through untarnished by the patina of reality.

3. Sound texture works better than tradional music.

Since a sound environment is in some way a simulacrum of ambient sounds in the real world, it is often useful if it mimics the acoustic structure (even if not the content) of the environment it simulates. In verious workshops I have given I have talked about “Designed Randomness” as a basis for creating sonic compositions resembling music but having certain non-architectonic structural characteristics of sounds being produced in nature.

When one builds a stage set to look the a prison, we are not concerned that it might not look all that much like a prison. It might be very evident, for example, that the stones are mere paint on canvas flats or even abstract structures that give the “feeling” of a prison without actually looking like one. What has been captured is the overall visual texture of a prison. Similarly, if I create a sound composition to represent a prison tower in a castle, as I did for a production of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s play, If All Danes Were Jews, I strive only for prison-like sound textures. I synthesized some sounds which vaguely resembled water dripping while adding soft string-like chord clusters designed not to refer to anything found in a real prison, but rather to reflect the sad aimless boredom of imprisonment. It is these textures, reproduced softly (almost at the edge of perception) so that lines could easily be heard, which were able to “reach into people’s consciousness much faster than any of the visual media” (to borrow Beverly Russell’s words).

Here is a short clip of the sonic design for the prison scene in “If All Danes Were Jews.”

Another scene from that play takes place in the dark of night in a cemetery.  One can imaging all kinds of spirits and spooks and I tried to capture that in this sound design.

Finally, on a less grim note, there is a scene in the play where two characters play chess with oversize (3’ or so) chess pieces on a floor painted to look like a chess board.  Chess is a game where someone makes a move, there is quiet while the other player thinks, then that player makes and action – back and forth it goes.  This excerpt shows the sound design for that scene.

Original ambient sound is still a very underutilized resource in most theatrical productions. Before the advent of high quality digital recording and reproduction, and of synthesizers capable of creating complex organic sounding textures, it was expensive and difficult to make use of sound as a theatrical environment. One had either to compose and write out complex scores for high priced musicians, or painstakingly work with magnetic tape, cutting, splicing, overdubbing, etc. But now one can produce high quality digital sound files more easily.

One can even produce fully interactive realtime sound generating/processing systems for the theatre using equipment that barely costs more than a couple of professional open reel tape recorders did three decades ago. And with algorithmic generative music systems and sound collage processes it is easy for dance companies to have original music created specifically for their needs, rather than having to rely on commercial recordings.

No stage director would ever say “Lets leave the lights set as they were for the last play and adjust our blocking to that.” It is taken as a given that a set design and lighting design will be custom designed for each production. Yet up to now that same director might have either ignored sound entirely except for the most obvious “sound effects” (doorbells, telephones, and such) or, if producing dance, might have said “Lets go to the record store and look for some music” — music created for another purpose by an artist unknown to the director. But the director of the future — as the Wilson-Kuhn collaborations have demonstrated — will recognize that textural sound is as important a part of the set and the flats and lights.