4

Research, Resources, and Selection

Your research for the sound and music of a new project can begin at the moment you’ve decided to do the show. One of the first steps is thoroughly reading and understanding the script. After initial concept meetings with the director and possibly with the other designers to determine the slant being taken on a particular production, you can start gathering your resources. If music is to be part of the show and you’re unfamiliar with the style or period of the script, collect and listen to as much music from that period as possible. Try to gather examples to offer in the first few design meetings. If the production requires an exotic setting, playing a recording at a meeting and presenting authentic music and sounds will be more effective than trying to explain how an instrument sounds.

Sometimes what you bring into early meetings can influence and inspire certain aspects of the production. The dramaturge might show articles and pictures to the cast and production crew to familiarize them with the atmosphere of the production. Your sound and music contributions can be equally useful. Hopefully, your colleagues will start incorporating your ideas into their work as they go along. For example, the style of music you decide to employ could tell the costume designer that the show will be more comical and lighter than he had originally thought, so he might modify some of his costumes and materials accordingly. Having even a sketch of the sound and music can assist the director during preliminary developmental rehearsals. Even if you haven’t determined what you are using, or if you yourself are composing or hiring a composer for an original score, try to impart the flavor of the music and sound early in the rehearsal process. If the director has not yet established exactly what she wants for the show in terms of music or sound, and you can present something early in the process, your input will probably have more influence. The earlier you offer your ideas for a sound design, the more likely it is that they will be adopted.

Once you’ve presented initial information to your director, you may be asked to dig further into a style of music. Your discoveries at every step will supply the director with a myriad of choices and help the cast members to educate themselves about what is appropriate for a particular historical era.

By researching sound and music for a production, you acquire a base of knowledge upon which you will draw throughout your career. The more times you delve into completely unfamiliar territory, the faster and more successfully you’ll develop your researching technique. You can become quite well versed in many genres, from Depression-era Southern folk blues to the spiritual music of the Aboriginals to eighteenth-century Spanish boleros to old-skoolhiphop by learning how to research thoroughly.

As you approach a production, consider the alternatives before settling on one specific sound or style of music. Does a certain piece of music have a strong ethnic background? What instruments will you use to represent different characters? Is the play a comedy or a tragedy? Is it period, contemporary, or abstract? Depending on what you and the director have discussed about the characters and the show, you can choose whether you want an ensemble orchestration, a solo instrument, or possibly a combination of two or three instruments employed at different places. You may want a solo instrument with a mournful wail to represent a character who is lonely and brooding. If the play is broad and farcical, a big, bright symphonic sound used as underscoring will not overwhelm the audience the way it might for a more delicate think piece. If you compose, you may find that you can emulate the style of the period and opt to write original music.

Obviously, if your production is a comedy, your sound design or composition will call for more up-tempo and/or quirkier sounds than would be the case with a traditional production of a history or tragedy. For a Shakespearean comedy set in the Elizabethan era, you might need court instrumentation and also a more rustic sound at different times throughout the play. For example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, incidental music can herald the changes in locale for the royalty, the lovers, the mechanicals, and the fairies. At times, interpretations of Shakespeare may be more experimental and more modern, and whenever the show is set more unconventionally—Macbeth in 1130 A.D., Hamlet in the Victorian era, a 1950s Twelfth Night—you should surround the production with the sound of the era that the director is attempting to capture (e.g., for The Merry Wives of Windsor set in 1880 New Orleans, try a live zydeco band; for Julius Caesar à la The Matrix, use modern synthesized, sampled, and processed sound and music).

When beginning a music search, first find which composers fit into the years surrounding the play. A useful tool for researching eras is a timeline. There are many websites and history books that include a timeline linking world events and prominent people within each era. Although there may be no information about music, such a timeline can at least give you a sense of the style of the time. Sometimes symphony orchestras or opera companies distribute a timeline detailing the music and composers represented in their seasons. Although it may be limited in scope, this type of graph can be quite comprehensive for the era that it covers, with a composer’s date of birth and death keyed to the artists, writers, and world events of the time. Other timelines categorize composers by periods of music and mention only key historical events corresponding to their works. Any of these versions of a timeline is useful in giving you an overview of a period unfamiliar to you.

Online references, such as Wikipedia, have their information organized in numerous ways. Searching for “Popular Music in 1900” should bring up a fairly organized list of subjects to read.

For shows set in much earlier historical periods, you might also consider composers preceding the era by as much as 50 to 100 years. Writing styles and instrumentation were constantly changing, and in bypassing an earlier era, you might be sacrificing many possibilities. In doing preliminary research for this kind of show, you’ll also find mention of which instruments were in use and what developments and trends were taking place in music—for example, the sonata form, counterpoint, or instruments accompanying singers.

For shows set within the last 100 years, you will need to be much more accurate with musical selections meant to represent a specific year. You can be certain that there will be a music historian in the house, a ragtime buff, or a jazz aficionado who’ll be irritated once he hears a certain piece of music that he knows hadn’t yet been written at the time set for the play. As long as there is someone alive to remember that Colonel Bogie’s March was written and used during World War II, it’s not a good idea to use it for transition music in Ah, Wilderness!, which takes place on July 4, 1906. Whether you’re researching ancient or modern music, your work must be thorough if you’re to avoid anachronisms.

There are many places to locate music and sound effects, but the Internet provides easy access to various music and sound effects libraries. There are numerous websites that allow you to audition, purchase, and download music and sound effects, as you need them.

MUSIC RESOURCES

Throughout your sound search, rely on your artistic imagination to circumvent any limits on resources—there are always options. Music can be either composed or pulled from other sources. You can select music from your own collection of recordings, the collections of friends or colleagues, Internet resources such as iTunes, postproduction houses, or the public library.

Once you’ve decided to use a certain group of instruments from an established era or a specific locale, your library is a great place to start your search for the right music. See what is available under a particular composer’s name, a country, or a title of a certain composition. You can often find everything you need on a subject by looking up music under either country of origin or date. For instance, entries listed under “Music-Italy-Sixteenth Century” will include all instrumentation and artists of the era and will have references to both music and literature on the subject. Look under the instrument, the artist, or the name of a composition. Be inventive. Many libraries have music divisions with librarians who can tell you who wrote music during Moliere’s or Ibsen’s time—or even who wrote musical settings for their plays. Some of the better-known labels that specialize in period music are Musical Heritage Society (MHS), Deutsche Grammophon, Harmonia Mundi, Allegro, Qualiton, and Nonesuch. Smithsonian Folkways, Putumayo, Arhoolie, and Elipses Art all have comprehensive series of authentic sound recordings that deal with the music indigenous to different cultures and countries.

Reference books are also good starting points. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, The New Oxford Companion of Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, The New Oxford History of Music, The Harvard Dictionary of Music, The Music Article Guide, The Music Index (guide to periodicals), and The Rilm: Abstracts of Music Literature (a cumulative index) are all publications that can help you delve into different subjects and styles of music.

If your public library has recordings that can be checked out, you can “audition” music at home. If the library has listening facilities, you can narrow down your choices before lugging any materials home since you may be limited to the amount of material you are permitted to borrow at any one time. Something with a title that sounds perfect for your needs might turn out to be light-years from the kind of sound you had in mind. Always gather more than you think you might use. This initial screening will go rather quickly. You can probably tell by listening to the first few seconds of each cut if the music has vocals, if it has the type of instrumentation you’re looking for, or even if the tempos will work for you. The more you listen, the more your ideas will solidify.

Of course, there are lots of places on the Internet to audition music. Apple’s iTunes store gives you a thirty-second excerpt of any song they carry to listen to. However, you can’t choose which thirty seconds to listen to, so it’s a bit of a crapshoot when researching long classical music pieces because you might not hear a portion that’s relative to your needs. Researching music utilizing everything from search engines to the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) is merely a jumping-off point in your quest for knowledge. The library that is the Internet is open 24/7 and has resources from all over the world.

If you’re searching for something that your library doesn’t carry, you can also use music stores as research venues. Some stores have salespeople who specialize in particular areas of music. You may find stores devoted exclusively to classical, ethnic, or folk music. Look for a music retailer that has listening stations, what was once a commonplace service in the middle of the last century. A small number of stores will allow you to listen to any recording they have in the store on headphones.

If it seems that the type of music you’re looking for is so obscure that you can’t locate any preexisting recordings, try to find a similar sound. For instance, let’s say that you’re looking for an instrumental representation of a rustic French bistro. You’ve read descriptions in books of what might be appropriate. You’ve even watched (and listened to) some movies that re-create the place and period of your production, but you can’t find any recordings that are exactly what you’re looking for. You might try the traditional music of either Canada or Louisiana because of their links to French heritage for recordings that suggest the appropriate instrumentation and atmosphere

When choosing the medium of your recording, you have two options to consider: physical media such as DVDs or compact discs or downloaded, compressed digital audio files such as MP3s or AACs. Compared to most downloaded digital audio files, compact discs and DVDs are the best option for higher quality source material because they use uncompressed audio files and are produced at a higher sampling frequency. Compressed audio files can be up to one-tenth the size of their uncompressed equivalents (and therefore quicker to transfer over the Internet). They obtain this smaller size by losing information that the compression software deems unnecessary. An exception to this rule can be found in audio files that use lossless compression. Files that have been compressed using FLAC or ALAC, for example, may be half the size of an uncompressed AIFF or WAV file, but retain all of the information to reproduce the audio just as well as the uncompressed file. Be sure to look in the Glossary for more information about these file formats. Be aware that the lower sample rates and compression of downloaded music mean that they will not sound as good as CDs or DVDs. You should let your ears be the judge as to whether the sound quality of an MP3 or other downloaded file is good enough for your needs. Try to avoid mixing MP3 and CD audio within the same production, as the difference in quality between the two could be obvious and, therefore, a bit distracting. Digital music downloads do have their advantages, however. You often have the choice of downloading just the selection(s) you want as opposed to buying the whole album. These music files are also ready to obtain at any hour and are easy to transport on a hard drive or small jump drive.

Don’t underestimate the value of LPs and 78s in providing an option for source material. A scratchy record might be the perfect source given the proper circumstances.

SOUND EFFECTS RESOURCES

Sound effects can be culled from field recordings, from studio recordings, from your own sound collection or that of your theatre, or from purchased or private sound effects libraries. The Internet also offers many opportunities to download sounds for a fee or for free. Two good sources for downloading sound effects are Sounddogs.com and the iTunes store.

Sound effects can be created, but sometimes substituting the sound of a boiling kettle for a steam train simply doesn’t cut it. There are occasions when nothing is as viable as an authentic recording.

There are many recordings of the sounds of steam trains, large industrial equipment, junkyards, farms, oceans, railroads, disasters, and other atmospheric settings. Complete sound effects libraries are available from such labels as Sound Ideas, Network, Valentino, Hollywood Edge, Digi-Effects, and BBC; all of them provide an index listing the effects and their lengths. Sound Ideas provides a stand-alone database application that allows you to search their entire catalog for a sound. The database is modifiable so that you can add your own library of sounds to it and limit the catalog search to just the Sound Ideas libraries you own. The entries for each sound are detailed, so you’re not searching just on a file name, but on the description of the sound.

It’s good practice to archive your materials when you complete a show. If you have twenty-five minutes of evening ambiance (crickets), fifteen minutes of ocean, or exceptionally fine barking dogs, rest assured that you’ll need them in future productions. These sounds are important assets in your own library. There is bound to be a perfect thunderclap you’ve created that you’ll never be able to duplicate. You can always embellish it, double it, or build on it for other productions.

Many designers store their sound effects libraries on a hard drive. As your library grows, it will be impossible to remember every sound you have or where it’s stored. Naming and organizing your library carefully will allow you quick access to your sounds.

When you store your sounds on a hard drive as sound files, you can maintain your library as a collection of folders organized by category. For instance, you can include a folder full of animal sounds. Within that folder, files can be organized within subfolders by mammal, reptile, or amphibian, and so on. Then you can organize those files in subfolders by species.

A hard drive of sounds might be organized using the following subjects:

As your library grows, you might want to reorganize it. You might have had just a few bird sounds initially, so if you’ve added a number of specific bird calls, you might want to organize them into folders organized by the specific parts of the world where the birds are found.

Since all computer operating systems and most digital audio workstations have search functions, naming your files comprehensively is important. Develop a naming convention and try to stick to it. For example, a simple naming convention might be a description and source. An ambulance siren that you recorded for a production of Julius Caesar might be named “Ambulance Siren 1.JC.” A dog bark found on Sound Ideas disk 6001, track 34 might be named “Large dog bark SI6001.34.” You could take your naming convention further by ordering the descriptive words by major category and then subcategory, so that the large dog bark might be called “Dog, large, bark SI6001.34.”

Organizing and maintaining your library can take a good deal of thought and time. There is no perfect cataloging scheme. Get ten sound designers into a room and ask them how to categorize a library and you’ll get at least eleven answers. Where would you file a glass crash? Under glass? Crashes? Fight sounds? Household sounds?

Don’t forget that it’s good practice to have a backup copy of your library stored in a safe place. If your working copy is damaged or lost, you can easily make another copy of the backup.

OUTSIDE CONTACTS

Maintain a black book, a Rolodex, or a PDA to keep track of the businesses and people whose services you employ. People whom you meet professionally can be an invaluable help. Keep track of resources in many areas including music experts and repair shops. When you’re expected to know how to do everything from building cues to maintaining the equipment, it’s comforting to know someone who might be able to help. Many people even peripherally connected to the business are great fans of the theatre. Become familiar with your local stereo shops, music stores, and electronic equipment centers. You might find someone there who loves the theatre and would be happy to assist you.

THE LEGALITY OF PULLED MUSIC AND EFFECTS

Your producer should obtain rights clearances on any music or effects that are used, regardless of the level of the production for which you are designing sound. All libraries have a copy of 17USC, the United States copyright laws. Refer to them for the exemptions.

When using a recording of music that is not in the public domain, an attempt should be made to reach the artist directly. Even if the artist approves the use of his material, though, he does not always hold the rights to his own music. Permission to use his material may have to be cleared through his manager, producer, or publishing company—parties that may not be as generous with the material as the artist (they may ask for a royalty or a hefty licensing fee). If you can’t get through to the artist, contact performing rights organizations such as ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated), or a clearinghouse (a company set up to clear musical rights and schedule royalty payments). Composers register their music and receive royalties through these organizations. Stringent laws apply to the use of music through ASCAP and BMI, but such laws are intended more for arenas, exercise studios, nightclubs, stores, and other businesses that use music for background ambiance than they are for theatrical use. Your budget, the size of the theatre, the number of performances, the way the music is used, and many other considerations will determine the fee that you would pay through ASCAP or BMI.

Clearing the use of music may involve a certain amount of red tape. You should not have to obtain permissions yourself, but give all the details to the production office so that they can secure clearances for you. Theoretically, all the producer needs to do is contact the artist (or her estate) directly with information about the production and what material is being used. What an artist will demand for permission to use her composition can vary widely. Sometimes she’II allow a piece to be used gratis, with only a mention in the program; sometimes she’II ask for a royalty, especially when the piece is used for dance. It depends on your production and on the artist.

Licensing of prerecorded sound effects varies from source to source. Some sound collections—such as Sound Ideas, which is a complete library of sound effects—take the purchase price as a buyout. You may use them freely as long as you don’t try to sell the effects as your own. However, most of the sound effects recordings purchased at commercial retailers forbid the reproduction of their effects without written permission.

SEGMENTABLE MUSIC

Many compositions are set up thematically with sections (phrases) that you can refer to as A, B, C, D, and so on. A phrase is the smallest complete unit of musical thought, and it can be either created as an indivisible whole or structured by combining two or more smaller segments. Often, two parts of a musical phrase can sound almost identical, with the first part having a different resolution that doesn’t sound as final as the ending of the second phrase. If two phrases together take twenty seconds and only ten seconds are needed for the cue, using the second phrase alone gives you the same musical statement in a shorter version. In Figure 4.1 one does not need to read music to see the patterns in the formation of the notes. The eight-measure phrases, A and B, can be evenly split in two.

FIGURE 4.1 Variation V from Mozart’s Piano Sonata in D Major (K. 284) excerpt.

If you were to use A and B thematically, you could segment this composition in many ways for different timings and effects. You could:

There are as many permutations of the composition as your needs for different timings. When you’ve introduced a theme and need to punctuate briefly between scenes, especially for Shakespeare, where the acts are often broken up into many scenes, the abbreviated forms of these themes are very convenient. You can use the entire piece or just the beginning of the two-part phrase at the top of a short scene and use the second phrase to end it. The audience will remember the musical statement, and the scene will be “framed” nicely.

When the director wants themes for certain characters, select instruments and musical strains that are easily extracted from a larger piece of work. Sometimes these themes will run as short as eight or ten seconds. With a piece of music that is sixteen, twenty-four, or thirty-two measures, you can usually find a shorter musical segment that sounds complete. You don’t have to be able to read music or have the score in front of you to be able to discover such a segment.

As you listen to a segment, try isolating it from the rest of the piece to see if it can work alone, as a freestanding musical statement. Might it connote a particular feeling appropriate for your production? When listening to a piece of music with the idea of removing a small section—for example, a certain passage of a Brahms intermezzo or a certain lyric of a ballad by Jewel—plan how to extract a passage cleanly from the rest of the composition. Listen for “breaths” in the music that allow a clean edit or for small pauses that don’t bleed into the next phrase. If none of these exist, your alternative is to do clean fades in and out.

If you have a basic background in music or you’re working with a composer or music director who can assist you in determining the key of the music you are using, there are ways to blend the respective pitches of recorded and live music. For example, if you have prerecorded music for either a preshow or an entr’acte leading into live singing (either a cappella or accompanied), you can change the key of the entire composition by adjusting its pitch so that the last note of the prerecorded music will be the same pitch used as a cue for the singers onstage. This technique gives a feeling of continuity to what happens before the action onstage, and works especially well when the prerecorded music is instrumental. Virtually all digital audio workstation software can perform a pitch change without changing the speed of the recording. But beware that there are limits to how much you can alter a recording before it sounds unrealistic.

To adjust a musical piece so that it better fits the situation, or for reasons of length, you may sometimes have to tack on different endings or beginnings from other sources. Certain production techniques allow you to take chords or notes directly from the piece itself and lengthen them—isolating the note or chord, looping this small segment, and adding it on to the existing tape. Suppose you have found the perfect piece for a theme, and all that’s missing is a fanfare to introduce it. If the only suitable fanfare you can find is neither in the same key nor in a complementary one, you can change its pitch to make it fit the original. If you need to cut a piece short at a breath in the music, try adding some reverb to the end so that there is the appearance of a natural ending, not an abrupt silence.

PRESENTING YOUR CHOICES

If a character would best be represented by a certain selection of instruments and a style of music, try to find three choices for each theme to present to the director—remember not to offer dozens of alternatives (see Chapter 3). If a director is not musically articulate, she may have difficulty expressing what does or does not work for her. If the choices you offer have variety and fit within a certain character perception, the reaction from a director will give you more insight into her ideas so you can better supply what she wants.

When working on a show, you cultivate the germ of an idea. However, researching sound and music for a production may lead to materials and resources that modify the initial idea and guide you into new directions of development. Allow for this fluctuation in the process, and trust your artistic judgment as your rudder. As you narrow down the choices, a concise design composition evolves—only its execution remains.