When you attend a play, you hear the dialogue from the actors. Music might play at the start of an act, and sound effects will set the scene and punctuate the action. Creating those sound effects is the job of the play’s sound designer.
In the latest Short Talks from The Hill podcast, Janine Chow, an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and an experienced sound designer, speaks with host Todd Price about the process and history of creating sounds for theatrical production. Just a heads up, some of these sounds are featured in this excerpt.
Todd Price: Plays have so many elements — the words in the dialogue, the movement of the actors, the visuals of sets and costumes and lighting. Sometimes we have music, or in the case of musicals, singing. What does sound design add to a production that has so much going on already?Janine Chow: Well you’re right. Sound is one of many, many designs, and part of its thing is it’s actually an undersung element of design. The Tony Awards didn’t have a spot for sound design for many, many years until it was recently reinstituted after years of sort of being begged and advocated for. Sound adds two things to the production. One is sort of like discrete packets of information where you have the sound of a rooster crow, a bell, things that signal things and move us along through time and space, which helps set mood and also helps set like literal action.
The other is sort of tone, whether that’s conveyed through music or the sort of tone scapes or natural scapes. They set us up for certain emotions, and it sets us up for certain places, like the forest at night or inside a factory, and you hear a sort of industrial hum of things. It can be continuous or discrete, and it helps frame the world.
Price: We can read a script of a play, even of works from the ancient Greeks. We can visit amphitheaters, historic theaters to understand how plays were staged. Sometimes there are drawings of stage designs and costumes, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that we could record sounds, and at first it wasn’t very high fidelity at all. How much do we actually know about sound design before we could produce accurate recordings?
Chow: What we have of theater history is based on so many ephemeral things, and a lot of what we have left over is objects. So the only thing we know from ancient history of sound design is based on things that have lasted a very long time, and what we have of evidence later is really just the sort of physical sound makers, big sort of sheets of metal that were supposed to make thunder. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, with the advent of recording technology, that we began to understand a little bit more about even what the actors sounded like, because everything prior to that is based on just written description, which tells us very little.
Price: Has the way that we actually listen and hear the world changed over time?
Chow: This is a huge thing. The history of listening changed significantly with the Industrial Revolution. This is something that F. Murray Schafer talks about in his book “The Soundscape”. Where in ancient history or pre-industrial history, we had soundscapes that basically had only discrete signals where a sound had meaning and it had like a source. You understood that. After the Industrial Revolution and the advent of all sorts of technology, we became surrounded by noise, the sort of ambient hum of machinery.
In a podcast studio we’re trying to dampen it. We can hear the lights, we can hear the ambient hum of electronics. Discrete signals became lost in the noise, and we listened less carefully as human beings since the advent of technology. And a great demonstration of this is that in ancient history, a lot of the most powerful gods were the gods of thunder, because thunder was such a striking and powerful interruption to a larger soundscape which has now been diluted by industry.
Price: Well, and the other thing that I think about changing is, movies got sound in the 1920s. By the middle of the twentieth century, television becomes common. How did all of that affect the way theatrical sound designers approach their work?
Chow: Well, radio, film and television all taught audiences conventions of how to listen, particularly some of the early cartoons which established these sort of like famous sort of cartoony sounds that would mean one thing or another. A lot of the times, we learn what a sound means based on continued association of a visual in film. Sound designers can use this now, even if you do not have the visual. I think a great example is the red-tailed hawk, which makes this sort of screech sound, and it is the iconic bird of prey sound that you hear associated with every bird of prey ever. It’s very commonly used for the bald eagle, who actually sounds like a seagull. Film established that, now theater can capitalize on that because audiences are trained to associate that sound with that bird.
Price: What are some other examples, then, of sounds that conventionally we’ve come to associate with certain objects or experiences that are nothing like they are in the real world, like the bald eagle?
Chow: Another example is from animal life. Lions are associated throughout history with like largeness and majesty and power. They sound like tiny cats. So anytime that you hear them roaring, especially in the MGM logo, that’s a tiger.
Price: Oh, really?
Chow: Because it’s loud, it’s powerful, and that’s what people have, this sort of imagined idea of a lion.
Price: Well, one thing that we all have heard is wind, right? It’s a storm, the wind comes in. We all know what that sounds like. And that’s probably something you have to do a lot in productions. How do you create wind on stage?
Chow: Wind is my greatest enemy. If you go out into the world with your little field recorder and you try to record wind, what you’re going to get is static. So to make wind legible to the ear is a real challenge. The real way to do it in the theater space is to actually move that static sound from speaker to speaker to speaker, so you get a sense of movement that is, however, extremely hard, especially if you are working in theaters where the speakers aren’t really set up to cue differently. So your alternative is to find a sort of sound that begins to suggest wind, even if it isn’t the right one. After five years of searching, I finally found, I believe, the BBC’s polar wind, which is a sort of hollow, echoing, whistling thing.
Doesn’t sound like static. It has whistling, but it tells you, because of, again, the histories of film and theatre, that it is wind because it sounds cold and it sounds like something is blowing, so then you can get that effect. Wind is extremely difficult to capture effectively, and I cannot tell you to this day what it might be like to capture a light wind. Zephyrs. Forget about it.
Price: I know exactly what that wind sounds like. I can hear it when you describe it. I can hear it. I can see the scene, the snow, the door slamming shut. I know what that sound is. Well, violence is more common in plays, in movies than in real life, thankfully, and sound is so integral to the depiction of fights and violence. But most of us probably don’t really know what a punch sounds like, or what breaking bones sound like. What conventions have been developed to convey these things to audiences?
Chow: Impacts are a huge part of this. Of course, just the sound of something hitting something, but that’s typically not flesh on flesh. You’re typically dealing with a sack of flour. And again, because our ears are trained by film, we understand some of these conventions. But my favorite violent sounds are those from vegetables, because this is a convention of fully the act of sort of making sounds from objects.
Price: Well, you’re talking about real objects, celery sacks of flour. I wonder, though, I mean, today we have computers, digital samplers. Technology is really advanced. How much has that changed theatrical sound design? Or how often are people still just relying on these basic techniques of snapping celery?
Chow: Snapping celery is really rare, especially on Broadway. I think the only example I can think of in the last ten years is the SpongeBob musical, which of course is derived from cartoons. So, Foley was important. Digital sound has hugely changed the experience, both for cueing, which makes it incredibly easy to set up the fades and the sequences that you need for sound, and makes shows reproducible internationally.
Price: You’ve worked on a lot of productions as a sound designer when you were a graduate student and a student, and what is your process? How do you arrive at sounds that are legible for an audience? How do you approach that?Chow: The process typically starts with, as all design, reading the script, close reading it for two things: One, you go through and you find where you really need something that is necessary to tell the story, whether that is the sound of wind or the rooster crowing, which is going to interrupt “Hamlet” when he’s midway through talking to his dad. And then you also read for mood and tone to figure out where you might insert something or insert something underlying the scene so that you have a sense of brightness, or a sense of darkness, or a sense of happiness, or a sense of loss or absence. And a lot of that, too, is part of the collaboration process.
You must be talking to your director, and your director often has an idea of what they want. Sometimes it’s as abstract as “please give me the wasteland, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ in sound.” Oh, that was a doozy. And sometimes I want this set of ten songs cut here, here and here, play it here, here and here throughout the show. But the process is some combination of that, and then as a sound designer I try to self-advocate for more creative or interesting things.
Price: Well, you talked about how you start with the script, but then you go to the director and everything in a play is conversation and dialogue with the director. But I think about, we have very specific language to talk about visuals. We can describe shapes and colors and light. It feels like we don’t have the same vocabulary to talk about sound. How do you have these conversations with directors when you’re trying to understand what they want and trying to convey what the possibilities are?
Chow: Talking about sound is so difficult. Unless your director is a talented voice actor, you’re not going to get it right the first time. What I can do sometimes, I ask questions in order to try to understand what the director is giving me. When they say this sound is too bright, I’m like, okay, does that mean it is too high? Does that mean that it’s too regular or melodic? And then they can sort of tell me, oh yeah, no, it’s too high. And then I take it down some frequencies and it works for them. Much of the time, sound is a matter of guess and check, because they might have an idea of how a door closes and it might slam in a particular way. I bring them a door closing and it doesn’t work. So they say, oh no, I want it to be more of a ka thunk, and you’re like alright, based on that. And I bring them back another thunk. It doesn’t work. So then I have to bring ten of them. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just, the sound is difficult to communicate. It’s also difficult in this way to find when you’re using sound libraries, you have to learn the ins and outs of onomatopoeia and generally just listen for a long time.
A great example of this is, I was working on a show where we had a salon bell in “The Misanthrope” for when people are entering or exiting the space, and we had this lovely little dinner bell that was meant to be a sort of a live sound, and the director hated it. What she told me was, “this is too much of a tinkle tinkle and not enough of a tinkle tinkle.” I took that bell. I took it home. I recorded it, layered it on top of itself and brought it back to her. And she said, “oh, this is perfect,” which is actually a great example of how people listen differently if they don’t have the visual cue. And talking about sound is a major challenge and often just comes down to guess and check.
Janine Chow is an assistant professor in the Department of Theater at the University of Arkansas and an experienced sound designer. She spoke with host Todd Price about the process and history of creating sounds for theatrical production.
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