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The Foundation of Sound Design

Just as a painter formulates a mental image when facing the canvas so, too, does a sound designer need to have an aural “vision.” If you can’t hear the sound in your head, you’ll have a hard time determining what to create and how to create it. Allowing yourself as an artist to aurally daydream will open your imagination. Imagining sounds in the context of a production is the first step in designing sound for the theatre. You must hear sound not as a single entity, but as an interaction of parts making up a whole. Many individual sounds may comprise one effect; many effects used together constitute a design. The sound designer is asked to produce a whole from the parts, so the separate sounds that make up the whole are the essence of your design.

When your mind wanders to a jungle and you feel the humidity rise, what do you hear? Insects? Birds? Rain? Monkeys? Leaves rustling? The word jungle connotes many different sound images to different people. In taking mental inventory, you’ll pull up dozens of elements that could be applied to a jungle. Whether your jungle experiences come from a safari you went on or from old Tarzan movies, you’ll draw upon your aural/sensory memory in choosing elements for your palette. Your artistic judgment and taste will help you decide what is superfluous and what is appropriate for illustrating jungle with sound.

Now imagine a soundscape that you’ve created as it travels through the air and into your ear. Hear the individual aural elements emanating from various locations around you. Imagine the sounds enveloping you, stimulating your senses. This is the act of auralizing—of imagining sound in space, over time. Your aural imagination is an essential part of designing sound. If you were to auralize the exiting spirit of an individual who has just passed on, you might imagine the sound emanating from a stage center position, then traveling directly upward into the fly gallery. If you can aurally imagine this gesture, then it becomes relatively easy to develop a delivery system that will realize the particular effect in the theatre.

Visual artists in theatre work within the parameters of color and texture. Lighting designers use warm or cool colors. Set designers use textures that are soft or harsh. Costume designers use fabric patterns that are busy or simple. Sound designers have the same options open to them—all of these visual descriptors can apply to sound.

Some sounds have human characteristics. Take the sounds of weather, for instance. Rain or snow can be calm, menacing, inviting, or foreboding. Just as a menacing person presents the threat of attack, an approaching rainstorm with distant thunder poses the threat of a more violent storm to come. And just as a person who is friendly and warm makes you feel relaxed, the tempo, rhythm, and muffled lull of a gentle rain can be soothing and comforting.

Once you determine the specific ambiance, effect, or aural statement you want to create and find its basic building blocks, you then have choices about how you achieve the end result. With just the basic ingredients listed above, a jungle can elicit many sorts of different emotions. By reading the script, meeting with the director, and tapping into your own past experiences, you can gather a list of sounds that make up a total design. But without very specific consideration about the dramatic and emotional impact you want your sound to make, the finished sound design will become chaotic.

THE FUNCTION AND INTENT OF SOUNDS

In dealing with a particular cue, even one as simple as a car horn, you must ascertain many facts about that sound. Ask yourself why the sound is there in the first place. Is it to announce an arrival? To show impatience? To suggest traffic? How specific or arbitrary is the relationship between the sound and the dialogue? Is the sound associated with a character, and if so, does it need to reflect an aspect of the character? You need to know the period of the automobile, the distance that it is coming from, the time of day, the weather conditions, and the locale. To build a sound cue that will be supportive and appropriate to the play, you must glean information from the director, the script, and the production itself.

Beyond mere function, there is a psychological intent behind the use of a particular sound device. This intent derives from the playwright or director and relates to the character affecting that device. An offstage car horn, blown by a character already introduced to the audience, may show that he is angry, impatient, or late for an appointment. If the horn is meant to summon someone, the result may be to annoy a particular character to the point of rage; in this case, the cue’s function is not to bring the character outside, but to trigger a reaction. The intent behind a cue, then, has bearing on how you choose to execute it.

There are times when your sound design must create an unseen character interacting with the characters onstage. In this case, you develop an offstage reality that is more completely realized than just the surface effect of a horn. This design choice not only supports but also interacts with the onstage action. With the horn that enrages an onstage character, for instance, you could add (offstage or prerecorded) the extra annoyance of someone in the car yelling for the character to come out.

SOUND DESIGN AND ONSTAGE ACTION

A sound design does not exist in a vacuum. It is dependent upon its relationship with the performers, director, stage manager, technicians, designers, and audience to make it meaningful. If an actor is portraying a king, he will never successfully be a king unless the other actors onstage acknowledge him as their ruler. In the same sense, some sound cues need to be acknowledged by the characters. A cue can be brilliantly developed and executed at the perfect time in a scene, but if the actors do not work with it, it will be meaningless and intrusive. Even if the characters do not acknowledge a particular cue, the actors should be aware of it.

When the director specifically requests certain music or a sound effect, it is possible—because of other elements of the show demanding attention—that the cue will not be understood or acknowledged by the performers. When it looks as if your intention for a cue is being ignored or misinterpreted, bring this to the attention of the director and the actors and, if necessary, remind the director of what was requested. If the director’s intention has changed, you may need to redo the cue. Do not consider your questioning or reminding an imposition; maybe the director forgot what was discussed with you in early meetings. The director has the entire production to consider, but you have to make sure that the dramatic potential of the sound is being fully realized.

The interaction between the sound cues and the actors should be encouraged as early as possible. If the actors can start working with rough cuts of cues during rehearsals, so much the better. If they’re hearing some of the cues for the first time in tech, you and the director might want to describe the subtleties of the music or the sound so that they can begin to “play” the cues and integrate aspects of a sound design into their performance. Cues can trigger certain transitions if they occur at appropriate moments. Actors often rely on these occurrences and use them as acting beats. In effect, the sound becomes another character sharing the stage with them. Often, the audience uses these cues as emotional triggers as well.

The context within which a sound effect is heard will help shape its purpose. It’s not enough to say that a fast, high-pitched bell is always going to be a happy sound. If the scene involves a wedding, and joyous bells are heard, they will undoubtedly support the moment. But if every time the audience hears this sound a maniacal farmhand appears onstage with a pitchfork in his hand, then bells ringing in the wedding scene might evoke terror and impending doom.

EMOTION AND CONTRAST

Once you can attribute human qualities to the sounds you are creating, you can achieve the texture you need for a particular scene. And once you determine the emotion that you want your effect to illustrate, you can vary the pitch, rhythm, volume, equalization, timing, and tempo of a cue to temper its basic feel—within limits. For instance, in a realistic setting, you cannot alter the pitch or the volume of a door buzzer without destroying the sense of reality. Yet by subtly altering the timing of the rhythm and the length when playing the cue, you can support the emotion of the character ringing the buzzer—anxiety, impatience, reluctance, happy anticipation, or foreboding.

Sound can, on occasion, go beyond the emotional to the physical. A low rumble played through a subwoofer can put a physical presence into a room.

Since the 1990s Russia has had a VLF (very low frequency) modulator under development, operating at frequencies below 20 Hz. At low power, this directable acoustic weapon could induce nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pains. At high power, it could cause a person’s bones to resonate, which is apparently quite painful and incapacitating. While this might be a bit of overkill for a theatrical event, it does underline the human body’s sensitivity to the visceral effects of sound.¹

Having sound or music that contrasts with the emotions of a scene can be a device just as powerful as having sound and music that supports them. The impact of the action can be made all the more potent by introducing an effect that works as an emotional counterpoint to an onstage situation. For example, suppose you’re designing sound for The Haunting of Hill House, a play somewhat in the tradition of a Gothic horror story. Instead of using music that is conventionally scary, you could juxtapose the obvious element of horror with a piece of music that connotes innocence, perhaps a music box playing a child’s nursery rhyme. Because the storyline includes the haunting of the house by a child, you could insert a random line of the nursery rhyme in a child’s singsong voice. This could prove frightening in relation to the grotesque sounds of actual hauntings that happen throughout the play (doors and walls being shaken from the foundation, the house seeming to suck the occupants up). The sweet music could be used to foreshadow something evil.

APPROPRIATENESS

With an awareness of the function of the cue, you must ask yourself, what are the era, time, and location for this particular sound cue? Is it noon in present-day Manhattan? Is it breakfast time in rural Georgia, circa 1920?

Suppose you’re on the second floor of a large midtown Manhattan office building. You observe a Checker cab stopped at a busy intersection. The driver impatiently leans on the horn while trying to edge out into the traffic. The sound you hear will include screeching tires as the cab nearly collides with another cab. Both cabs blast their horns, and you’re aware of the continuing whine of the second car as it recedes into the urban traffic and away from the first cab.

The horn you hear in rural Georgia would sound very different. It might echo throughout the sparsely populated valley. If it’s daybreak, you might hear a rooster crow and the distant approach of a Model T jouncing closer, announcing its approach with a distinctive “aooga.”

These examples are simplistic, but you can see how much thought needs to be given to the most basic cue. Whether the sound is live or prerecorded, it must be appropriate to the situation, geographically accurate, and not anachronistic. If you’re creating a design for a show that takes place in Papua, New Guinea, find out what musical instruments are actually played there and research the sounds indigenous to that area (see Chapter 4 for more on researching sound). You may opt not to include those particular instruments, but at least you’ll have a working knowledge of the sounds from that region.

In Macbeth, a loud banging on the castle door is called for in the Porter scene (Act II, Sc. 3). You need to consider the time period in which the play is set. If it is in the year 1250 A.D., realize that the door would be made of different materials than if the scene takes place at a rural villa in present-day South Africa.

THEATRICAL FORMS/STYLES OF SOUND DESIGN

When designing sound and music for a production, you must decide whether to lean toward a more realistic or more stylistic approach. Both of these theatrical forms have their extremes. For a realistic production, a sound design can be involved and cinematic, or it can be selective and representational. With stylization, the sound design can be either abstract, where the designer represents his or her thoughts through impressions of sounds, or absurd, where nonsense seems to prevail.

THE REALISTIC APPROACH

In a realistic approach, the sound effects and music should be true to life, with strong attention paid to factual detail. Music can emanate from practical sources or can be used, without the characters’ awareness, as bridges preceding or following the action and dialogue. Should the music or sound originate from a practical source, such as a radio, characters will obviously be aware of it. Incidental music (underscoring) used in this convention usually is nonmotivating to the characters, supporting the action but not influencing it. In other words, the music may manipulate the audience, but it doesn’t often outwardly affect the development of the characters.

Consistency is important in this form, but does not always have to be strictly observed. There are times when, because of focus onstage, it is necessary to ignore a prior indication of a sound cue. Let’s say you have established that the sound of a toilet being flushed offstage should be heard onstage. Imagine the character that has used the bathroom walking onstage during a passionate love scene—to the sound of the toilet flushing. Unless a comic effect is intended, you may have to sacrifice the sound convention at that point. The sound cues need not be totally comprehensive of all elements that would occur in real life, but should include enough of them to clearly represent reality. When these rules are broken, you create abstraction, which we discuss in the following section, “Stylistic Approach.”

One variation on pure realism is a cinematic form—a design that incorporates a strong sense of ambiance, employing lush and detailed underscoring. Music follows the action more closely, as in film. (Consistency, in this case, is vital: once you’ve associated particular sounds or music to an action, it’s essential to carry through accordingly.) With cinematic form, the sound designer draws together many elements to present a complete wash (or backdrop) of an environment.

The representational form uses sounds as genuine as those found in cinematic realism, but the overall design is sparser. Music is less incidental and more specific in this form. The cues remain true to life, but occur only when necessary. The artistic challenge here is selecting sounds that will support the action without fleshing out every nuance. It may not be necessary to hear every aspect of a jungle, for example; the voice of a single bird may be sufficient to convey the mood. Working in a representational form, the sound designer tries to find bare elements that will express a broader environment.

You may come across a situation where other design elements are stylized, but the directorial decision is that the sound be realistic. Our Town, for example, has detailed, realistic sound without a realistic setting. In this case, the sound design must supply the audience with much of their factual perspective.

In The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, first produced on Broadway in 1986, Lily Tomlin portrayed characters fully equipped with costumes that were created only with sound. Otts Munderloh’s work was a groundbreaking feat in the field of sound design. Sound effects were implemented to underline a majority of Tomlin’s gestures. Her characters included a young punker who prepared to go out for the evening and donned a leather jumpsuit with zippers of all lengths and sizes and a bag lady who wore an umbrella hat and sneakers fastened with Velcro. These “costume changes” were created through judicious choices by the sound designer and performer, and were carried out by the performer and sound operator carefully synchronizing sound to action. In a heavy sound show like this, you would have a good deal of artistic freedom—as well as the responsibility not to confuse your audience or go overboard with unnecessary cues.

THE STYLISTIC APPROACH

The stylized theatrical form distorts reality with qualities such as exaggeration, distortion, or conceptualization. In a scene where a man is about to be executed, the sound designer might use the sound of breathing or a heartbeat to elevate the tension. This is a highly stylized effect and a powerful artistic decision.

Abstract form represents the artist’s interpretation of reality, and so is impressionistic or expressionistic. An abstraction of reality alters the basic sound, but doesn’t completely disguise it. If you’re building a battle in the year 1500, you know that one of the main weapons of that time was the sword. You could distort the sound of the blades cutting through the air by slowing them down and adding reverb to lengthen and highlight their importance in the battle. This method differs from the more stylized technique of miking the weaponry to pick up every clash of metal. The distorted sound may not even be immediately recognizable as blades cutting the air, but you have selected an element from a realistic source upon which to base your interpretation.

When you conceptualize, you find the idea of the sound that you want to represent and attempt to find another sound that has the same connotation. For the absurd form, you can consciously pick sounds that will be ridiculously incongruous and somewhat disorienting. In Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, there is a garden outside of Dr. Prentice’s office. Many entrances and exits are made through a door leading from the garden. One way of paralleling and reinforcing the departure from reality that builds throughout the play would be the use of animal sounds coming from the garden. Not only could you increase the amount of wildlife dramatically, you could also use species (such as wildebeest) completely inappropriate for modern-day suburban England. Absurd and surreal elements in the sound design are appropriate for Orton’s outrageous comedy.

CONVENTIONS OF MUSIC AND EFFECTS

Music and effects used in a production fall into four categories: framing cues (preshow, entr’acte, and curtain call), underscoring, transitional sounds/music, and specific cues. Framing cues act as the bookends of a production. They exist outside the actual action of a play. They can comment on what will be or has been seen, but work independently from the actor’s presentation of the play. In musical terminology, the preshow is a prelude, the entr’acte (at intermission) a bridge, and the curtain call a coda.

Underscoring accompanies the action of a scene and is not heard by the characters onstage. Its purpose is to underline the emotions of the moment. To maintain the focus of the scene, it may be helpful to place underscoring upstage of the actors. This forces the audience to listen “through” the actors, and keeps the sound literally in the background.

Transitional sounds or music represent a movement of the action through time or place. They exist outside the action and can link one scene to the next. Placing transitional sound or music cues in loudspeakers away from the stage helps support the idea that the cue exists outside the action of the play.

The characters in a play are, however, aware of specific cues. While not at all devoid of emotional appropriateness, specific cues are more informational in purpose than the other forms, and are aural events that form part of the theatrical environment. Location of these cues is dictated by the practical placement onstage of the sources from which they emanate.

Do not feel married to the notion that only music can be used for preshow, entr’acte, and curtain call. Familiar sounds can also serve as lead-ins or bridges. A clip from a television show that is recognizable to the audience, for example, can work as well as music to establish the mood of a production. Hearing Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton along with the laughtrack from The Honeymooners will place you in the 1950s as easily as would hearing Fats Domino singing Blueberry Hill (assuming that these aural events are part of your prior experience).

Once you set a convention as to how the music is used, be consistent. This is not to say that there won’t be situations where you want to break convention for the sake of effect. But in cases where you’ll precede the first act with a preshow, bridge scenes with pieces of transition music, and cap the ends of acts with music, stay aware of symmetry. Also, carry through with sound what the director is doing dramatically. If each scene ends with tentativeness and a feeling of anticipation, look for that same quality in the music you select. If it seems that the director is giving finality to a particular scene, let your music or sound have that same sense of completion.

If music is supposed to serve as an outside comment that the characters are not supposed to be aware of, treat it that way throughout. In the same sense, if the music and sound are connected to a character, don’t confuse your audience by throwing in commentary sound out of nowhere. Commentary sounds are often-clich é d themes and signature music, such as using The William Tell Overture (a.k.a. The Lone Ranger Theme) for a chase scene. They are best used in broad comedy, melodrama, and stylized productions. On the other hand, don’t make your musical puns so obscure that the audience doesn’t get the joke.

For simplicity’s sake, it’s best to keep music within a certain range of instrumentation and styles. But even if the style is intentionally a hodgepodge of different kinds of music, you can still establish that as a convention, so that the audience will not be confused. They will easily accept the variety of the pieces if you are using them as comments or jokes.

FRAMING CUES (PRESHOW, ENTR’ACTE, CURTAIN CALL)

Preshow and entr’acte sound can consist of music, voiceovers, a montage of sounds, or a blend of all of these. Many directors use preshow music to establish a period, location, or mood. Preshow music also helps familiarize the audience with the style of music to be used in the production. You may choose not to use music as a framing cue when the production is a presentation of a total concept, like the broadcast of a radio program or a beauty pageant. Both of these premises might include an abundance of internal music, so preceding the production with music that sets the style is unnecessary. Instead, you could help establish the reality with appropriate announcements or the venue’s natural ambiance.

The length of a preshow is an artistic choice. One option could be to have the preshow start at house opening, bringing the audience into the aural environment. You may want to prepare the audience for the show once they have been seated for a certain amount of time. When you have a specific piece of music leading into the opening of the show, you should make this a separate cue, rather than tagging it onto the preshow, to facilitate the cueing. You may opt to go with a short preshow, perhaps because you want to use thematic music to lead directly into the action instead. Rather than using washes of sound to set the mood, you may introduce a more specific theme just before house lights go to half. In these cases, the music acts more like a transitional cue. Sometimes you may decide to have silence before curtain, but then you must also determine how much of a silence you want and what will be the last sound heard before that silence.

The entr’acte may be shorter than the preshow. If there is a tenor fifteen-minute intermission and you are using music to end the act, you may not want to begin the entr’acte until three minutes or so before the next act is to begin. Should you want to go with a longer entr’acte, some productions call for breathing time after the last cue of the preceding act before beginning the entr’acte music. This allows the members of the audience to absorb what they have just experienced before going on to something else that demands their focus.

Preshow and entr’acte can make a strong impact when crossfaded into the action at the top of the act. Perhaps you’re establishing a 1960s ambiance inside a diner. You may wish to have period cuts playing in the house as a preshow and, as the light preset is coming down and into black, crossfade to the stage. When the lights for the scene establish, you can continue the sound from an onstage jukebox. At this point, the preshow music becomes underscoring.

At some theatres, it has become commonplace to hear an announcement just prior to top of the show. Announcements range from asking theatregoers to turn off their cell phones or reminding the audience that photos and recording are prohibited. If you have to include such an announcement in your preshow, try to persuade the producer not to play it immediately before the top of show sequence. After all, your preshow is there to set the appropriate mood for the show and chances are that an announcement will break the mood. If you use a sequence of music for your preshow, try to build it so that one piece ends, the announcement comes on, and then another piece of music begins. Simply fading out your music for the announcement and fading it back in will seem sloppy and will make the announcement even more of an intrusion than it already is.

UNDERSCORING

Underscoring is often referred to as incidental music—with the misleading connotation that such music is superfluous and not well planned. No element of your sound design should ever contain elements that have not been thought out. Because underscoring is not heard by the characters, you have more variety within the design. You are not constrained by the conventions of the play either in style of music or instrumentation. You don’t have to mirror the music that has been used as part of the action of the play.

To clarify, you might have decided that all internal cues in a production will be ragtime music, coming from a phonograph or an offstage piano. That is the convention within the play. In using underscoring, though, you may employ a completely different style of music, which may or may not include elements of ragtime. The underscoring can serve as a character theme that the audience hears and that the actor can work with, but of which the character is not aware. With underscoring, you’re creating an entirely different dimension through which you can elicit a certain response from the audience.

TRANSITIONAL SOUNDS OR MUSIC

There are no rules or formulas for how to incorporate transitional music into the production. Many designers and composers use music that is thematic to particular characters—that is, played as signatures for the audience whenever these characters appear onstage. After deciding what the instrumentation and sound will be, you need to address the context in which the music will be heard. You and the director should decide whether the music will cap off a scene or precede the next one, or whether combining two different themes can serve both purposes. By using themes that are easily recognized, you can aid your audience and advance the flow of the show by helping to chronicle the progression of action. Note that you can do the same thing using ambiance or sound effects.

At the ends of scenes or acts, you may want to begin the music under dialogue and let it continue to usher out the ending of the scene. There may be times when you allow transition music to continue into the action (after beginning prescene or preshow) and find a place that it can effectively end within the scene. Underscoring in this way can have a very dramatic effect, but find subtle places to begin and end, or it will sound too melodramatic. However, if you’re going for melodrama, the more blatant the placement of a cue, the better it may work.

In The Merchant of Venice, the setting alternates between Venice and Belmont. One way to delineate these switches could be composing or compiling separate themes for Portia, Antonio, Shylock, and possibly for Launcelot and Jessica. This would indicate, by character association, where the next scene would be: Portia dwells primarily in Belmont, Shylock in Venice. By identifying the location with music, the audience has an early clue as to locale and to which subplot will be taking place. To make each scene complete, since so much Shakespeare is in French-scene format (whereby scene divisions are marked by character entrances and exits), a theme of one character can be used to begin the scene, and a theme of another can be used to end it, signaling what will follow. Additionally, there are several places in Merchant where music is indicated in the script. These cues, where musicians are called to play as part of the action onstage or offstage, are required music (see the next section).

A segue is a device that takes you from one place in a scene to another. This movement can be a trip through time or a change of location. Transitional sounds or music link one scene with another scene, while the segue leads from one point within a scene to a different point in that same scene.

SPECIFIC CUES

Specific cues fall into five areas: required music, spot effects, ambiance, progression of effects, and voiceovers. All sound cues need to be emotionally correct, but specific cues are primarily informational in nature, supplying of-the-moment data and supporting play development. Omitting these cues would be conspicuous. When characters let the audience know that they hear a marching band, a barking dog, a car horn, or a ringing phone, those cues had better be there. When a specific cue that falls within the realistic realm breaks the convention of that reality, it makes that cue abstract.

Required music is a particular piece of music that is indicated at a certain moment in the script. Sometimes the director has blocked a certain action to support it. In The Private Ear, there is a seduction scene that is literally choreographed to the builds in an aria from Madame Butterfly. With some required cues, you could substitute one aria for another. But in the case of The Private Ear, the timings and actions were worked out by the playwright to this specific composition.

Spot effects are specific sounds such as thunderclaps, dog barks, and explosions. In a loosely adapted production of the melodrama The Tavern, the director and sound designer set up a convention that every time someone came in the front door, a crack of thunder sounded and a wind-and-rain track bumped on. When the door closed, the wind and rain stopped and what was left of the thunder rapidly faded. All of these effects were individually cued, and their placement was specific. This obvious technique was not distracting, and even became an in-joke with the audience. Included in this category are source-specific sounds, like a television or telephone.

An ambiance can be perceived as a foreground, middleground, or background element, its primary purpose being to provide an atmosphere or a setting, rather than to highlight a specific short duration event as the spot effect does. For this reason it is most often observed as a background element, even if it begins as a foreground event. When spot effects are used in a series and are not individually cued, they take on the properties of an ambiance. Ambiance should become a backdrop in front of which other sounds or the action of the scene may play. Traditional backgrounds are crickets or ocean waves—sounds that can be established and then play without drawing much attention to themselves—but ambient sound can be more complex than this. Ambient sound is longer in length than most cues, but needn’t play for an entire scene. The main difference between a spot effect and ambiance is that ambiance blends into the background, whereas a spot effect takes focus. Spot effects are often added to an existing ambient track. For example, what if you wanted to illustrate the sound of a person rowing a boat on a lake on a stage without any real water? You could trigger the sound of an oar hitting the water, being pulled back, exiting the water and re-entering on the next stroke in synch with the actions of the actor. This might sound a bit odd as an isolated sequence, but if you add the background ambiance of gently flowing water and some light forest sounds, those layers will act as a kind of glue, allowing the oar to have spot effects to blend more realistically into the scene.

Spot effects and ambiance can be combined creatively. In essence, ambiance shouldn’t have any landmarks in it (loud, attention-getting sounds), because you can’t determine where in the action they’ll occur. Using a summer-night-in-the-country ambiance as an example, you would use many sounds that could be heard in such a setting: crickets, dog barks, frogs, train whistles, owls, trucks on the highway. Some of these sounds can become obtrusive, and placing them in an ambient sound field could be inappropriate. This doesn’t mean that these effects can’t be used in a scene—it just means that they have to occur at the proper moments. If inserted wisely, specific cues in an ambiance, such as a dog barking, can play as seamlessly as the ongoing track of crickets and form part of the background. By including these dog barks, you can reinforce the mood that you wanted to achieve with the ambiance, and create something more textured than just a monotonous drone of crickets.

The sounds of a busy setting like a construction site are noisy and complex, but, within a scene, they can provide an atmosphere that recedes into the background—as long as no single sound is over-whelming. In Act II of A Touch of the Poet, the offstage bar is full of rowdy drunks. There are many references to the “boys in the back room,” so not to hear them would seem odd. While an Irish bar ambiance is not as benign as a field of crickets, it is possible to establish this track without stealing focus.

Some ambient sound fields may be difficult to recognize immediately. Adding in other, more recognizable sounds when the ambiance first establishes can remedy this problem. A soft, lazy summer wind might sound like white noise to some people, but adding in a bit of leaf rustle or a branch creak might just be the extra “spice” needed to say “wind” to the audience. These added elements are sometimes called identifiers or sweeteners.

Occasionally, the script demands spot effects that seem to come out of nowhere. If you find mention of just one thunderclap in a script, it may be appropriate to set up distant rumbles ahead of it, to suggest a realistic progression of effects. The same holds true with the time after an effect—you may want to have a storm dissipate slowly.

In the script for Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana, the playwright indicates only a few specific thunderclaps during the storm at the end of Act I. It might seem appropriate to add rumbles prior to the first cue mentioned, to form a realistic build. Additionally, you could choose to tie in the storm that ends Act I with the top of Act II, bringing in a simple, distant thunder rumble as an aftermath of the storm.

If your intention is to create a realistic storm, gauging the length of a progression of effects like a thunderstorm is essential. If the scene that holds the storm runs fourteen minutes, you should determine exactly where in the script you first start a distant rumble and how quickly it grows to its peak. You can create a realistic build, whether or not it is an authentic timeframe for a storm. After all, the timeframe is dictated by the theatrical clock of the scene, not real time. As with any sound design, there are no rules to this. Sometimes you want to create a progression, and sometimes having the thunder as a surprise is appropriate.

Voiceovers appear within the action of the play, but are not perceived by the characters. In a voiceover, the audience hears disembodied speech—sometimes embellished with effects—presenting information or thoughts. To heighten the effect of a voiceover, you can play it through loudspeakers not used for realistic effects. Artificial reverberation can be added to voiceovers as an additional means of expressing the stylization. Conversely, presenting a voiceover in a realistic manner can ground the effect of the voice, enhancing realism. In the proper context, this might seem very real, or possibly frightening, especially if there is not a person present making the sound.

CREATING FOCUS WITH CUEING

When you think of the word focus, you normally think of a camera. When the lenses inside of that camera are in their proper relationship, the image is in perfect focus: everything you see through the viewfinder is seen clearly. Similarly, careful setting of all the controls you have over a sound will achieve correct focus for your sound design.

A sound cue is any introduction of an aural element into a production. Cueing refers to the manipulation of that element. That manipulation could be in the timing of its entrance, volume change, addition of signal processing, segue, transition, or exit of that element. The subtleties that you incorporate into your cueing control the focus of that cue.

Some cueing choices may seem obvious. A phone should start ringing before a character says, “I hear the phone.” But how far in advance of the line should the ringing start? If there is a chaotic moment onstage, the phone could start to ring in the middle of that moment. Although the audience is immediately aware of its presence, it may take a while before the characters onstage acknowledge it.

This can add to the chaos. On the other hand, if there is a tense confrontation where there is no dialogue, the ring of a telephone may be a jarring interruption to both the audience and the characters onstage. In this case, leaving a space before the ring may help build the tension. There is as much dramatic impact in hesitating with the execution of a sound cue as there is in the pauses an actor takes. If you consider emotional pacing when cueing, the overall sound design starts to develop a character of its own.

THE VOLUME OF A CUE

An established ambiance doesn’t have to stay at the same volume for its duration. When the volume is higher, the effect becomes more scenic. When the volume is lowered, the actors’ voices become more predominant. The placement of that fade is an artistic choice about where that focus is necessary. One can usually sense—by reading the script, watching rehearsals, or talking to the director—where changes in the scene occur. Lighting cues often happen at these transitions; a good place to adjust the volume of a sound cue is at such a shift of focus. If you sense that the action of the play is switching focus to the environment that surrounds it, then a boost in the volume of the ambiance will help the audience to experience the place along with the characters. Where to start this modification, along with the rate of change and execution of the fade, can make the transition either obvious or imperceptible.

In terms of considering volume as it applies to music, remember that the addition or deletion of volume affects the musical intensity. Of course, layered in these choices are rate, rhythm, tempo, location, and movement of the music. Sound and music can be thought of vertically, with the highs signifying a lightness and the lows demonstrating weight.

It’s too simplistic to say that establishing focus is as easy as raising the volume. Levels that are inappropriately high become annoying; sounds played so softly that the audience cannot recognize them become distracting. If the audience has to expend a lot of energy trying to figure out what (the hell!?) they’re hearing, then their focus on the show is lost. If you feel that the cues must be played so softly that they are inaudible, then they probably have no place in the design.

RATE OF EXECUTING THE CUES

While placement of a cue is crucial to giving the cue its proper focus, equally important is the rate at which the cue is executed. One of the conventional techniques used with ambiance is called establish and fade. It isn’t always necessary to have a soundtrack running throughout a scene. A constant rain track in the background may become more of a distraction than a support after a while. If the characters are making constant references to the rain and it isn’t heard, it will seem odd. But if you are simply establishing a mood and place, you can let the background fade out. The audience will eventually accept sounds that are fairly simple and unobtrusive, since a constant wash of background sound fulfills its purpose within a short period of time. The audience wants to focus on things that are changing and giving them new information. They know there are birds singing in the garden—they don’t need the continuous sound of the birds once that has been established.

Depending on the type of ambiance being used, you can either fade out the sound gradually or take it out quickly. Gradually fading out a sound will be less obtrusive than popping it out. The previous example of the rain is a case where it’s better to fade the sound gradually. Since the rain is a rather dense background, if it went out quickly the sudden lack of ambiance would be noticeable. However, a sparse track such as a single singing bird is easier to lose rapidly. Since birds naturally pause between calls, an abrupt ending to the soundtrack can seem authentic.

Suppose you have established a jungle ambiance and the lead actress is about to deliver a pivotal speech. If you start to soften the background just prior to that speech, the actress will appear to jump out from the background with much more presence. A lighter ambiance, such as distant ocean waves, must be faded out completely to affect this kind of focusing. Removing it isn’t jarring, though, because the cue was already subtle.

Another way to soften an ambiance is to lower the volume or fade out busier elements. Although you might hear a city ambiance playing out of just one pair of loudspeakers, it could comprise many tracks. If the city background is being delivered on a multitrack playback device and you’ve split the ambiance into three stereo tracks composed of horns, traffic, and urban roar (the hum of the city), you could soften the ambiance by first fading out the horns and then lowering the volume of the traffic. By doing this, you’ve lowered the overall volume of the cue and made the most distracting sounds less noticeable.

If you’ve been running a rather obvious background ambiance and you remove it completely, you may draw attention to it. Sometimes that’s acceptable—you want the abruptness of a sound going out to make an impact. But if you need to sneak out a sound, do so when there’s a distraction, such as talking, laughter, or an entrance.

If you’re at the end of the play and all the lights are fading down to a pin spot on a character, you may choose to break the realistic convention along with the lighting designer. You have a choice of fading your sound down to complement the lighting or fading the ambiance up to embellish the final tableau. The ending of a cue can also be motivated by a specific action onstage.

The effective use of silence in your soundtrack can also improve focus onstage, especially in key moments.

THE LOCATION AND MOVEMENT OF SOUNDS

The location and movement of a sound are as vital as all your other considerations. In a realistic design, a sound should come from its implied location. Onstage telephones should ring at the source. An outside environment heard from the setting of an interior should be placed so that it seems to emanate from open windows or doors.

Movement is often used to provide greater realism and is often necessary to make an effect seem complete. An airplane that is supposed to fly overhead should have movement. To create such movement, consider the rate of execution in an expanded sense. Its distance, type, and purpose of flight will dictate the speed at which the plane establishes and fades. Faraway planes take a long time to build, close planes zip by, an old single-engine plane doesn’t move as fast as a jet, and a plane on a joyride may travel more slowly than a plane carrying a donor heart to the hospital. The rate of the actual movement of the plane from one area of the theatre to another will depend on how close the plane is supposed to be—the closer the plane, the faster the movement.

Movement can also help establish location. If you want to reinforce that a scene takes place outdoors in a valley surrounded by mountains, providing echo to a loud effect such as a shout can work quite well. In The Night of the Iguana, Tennessee Williams calls for Maxine to yell “Fred!” and for us to hear her shout echo off the nearby mountains. If the series of fading “Freds” were to move around the theatre, the expanse of the unseen mountains would come alive.

Also consider the freedom of being able to think not just linearly with the placement and movement of sounds, but creating aural illusions and phantom images that can be placed in any location in the theatre. Just as an exact location within the theatre is used for realism, playing your sound out of many speakers at the same time will make its location unspecific. Ghosts and phantom sounds floating and moving unpredictably in the theatre can be quite powerful.

What supports this abstraction is the lack of positional specificity. Sounds do not need to be limited to simply left and right. There are so many more possibilities when you consider adding depth and motion to the cues.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOUND CUE

Not all of the sound or music that you are asked to provide will be prerecorded. Sometimes it’s necessary to use live effects (a crash box), musical instruments, or practicals (working effects like an onstage doorbell). The immediacy and literal hands-on element of a live, nonrecorded sound adds another level of life to the design. Some cues will be a combination of live and prerecorded sounds.

Volume, quality of tone, and balance are important acoustical characteristics of both live and prerecorded cues. The difference between live and prerecorded sound is the method of adjusting these traits—instead of making adjustments at your mixer, you have to shade live sound acoustically. Some live sounds that you will have to consider are the performers’ voices. Simulating the environment from which the voices emanate is something that you can control by the same principles involved in controlling the properties of musical instruments.

Should a crowd scene need to sound larger than it appears, you may wish to supplement the live crowd noises with a recording. Your prerecorded cue should match what has already been established onstage. Consider age range, sex, and general tone of the crowd (happy, angry, accented, foreign language). If there is relocation or dispersal of the crowd, decide if you want to include that detail on tape or have it happen live. Fine-tuning when mixing actors with recordings can be achieved only by rehearsals.

Practicals are used onstage as they would be used in real life. If the sound cue is to be from a radio or television, give qualities to the recording that will maintain the sense of the medium. A speaker in the playing area of the radio or television will help, but also be aware of how much making the sound thin or tinny will add to the realism. Consider the period of the appliance: an old Victrola will sound very different than a state-of-the-art stereo system.

EQUALIZATION AND TIMBRE

Equalization (EQ), a term applied to prerecorded or miked sounds, refers to changing the tone or timbre of a sound, usually to compensate for deficiencies in its reproduction. Adjusting the treble, midrange, or bass frequencies can enhance the sound—making it truer to life. Exaggerated boosting of the low end in a thunderclap will make it more foreboding; boosting the higher frequencies on car horns can make them much more irritating.

Timbre refers to the tonal color of a sound. When trying to adjust volume or timbre, it may be difficult to change these qualities independently. A technique used to lower the volume of an effect will also change its timbre.

VOLUME AND THE MIX

One of the easiest controls over a cue is volume, but determining the proper playback volume of a cue is not simple. As mentioned earlier, a cue needs to be established at a level that is in keeping with the amount of focus it requires. A thunderclap that is supposed to scare the daylights out of the characters should have the same effect on the audience. Music that underscores a tender love scene must not overwhelm the moment.

An increase in volume may assist a comic moment by exaggeration. If, in a broad comedy, there is a scene where wasps invade a picnic and the comic action depends on the characters being threatened, then the wasps need to be played larger than life. In a thriller, the wasps may pose a serious threat, and the buzzing might also be played at an unrealistically loud volume.

By burying specific emotional triggers in the mix (like crying, laughing, or screaming), you can insinuate more of an impact into the “face value” of a cue. A buried sound is not perceived as that specific sound, but becomes part of an overall mix. If the emotion-prompting sound were to be recognized, it might be too heavy-handed, but by hiding it in the mix, you can subliminally suggest emotion.

The volume of live effects or music can be controlled through the physical placement of the effect or technique of actuating the live effect in performance. In the same way that the strength with which an instrument is played affects its volume, how you “play” a crash box determines how loud it will sound. The force with which you throw an item to be crashed is one volume adjustment. Unless the box is packed so tightly that nothing can move, you can also play with the number of items inside the box to increase or decrease the volume. The inside surface can be made to more efficiently absorb or reflect the sound; the size of the box’s opening can be adjusted as well.

Obviously, how far from the audience the sound is executed determines volume, and if placement cannot be changed, then you can mute or reinforce the effect or instrument. How loudly practicals like doorbells or offstage phone-ringers ring depends on how securely they are attached to the set. The set acts like a sounding board, so a loosely attached mechanism will have a softer volume and tinnier quality. Solid wood surfaces such as hard flats or the stage floor reflect sound, as do structures designed specifically for that purpose (bandshells, for instance).

Working with the set designer to accommodate the acoustical needs of your show is an ideal situation. Discussing placement of live musicians—in an arrangement that will be visually pleasing as well as offer the proper acoustics—can save you a great deal of grief once you hit the set.

The proper mix of an effect takes all of its elements and places them in perspective. If a script calls for the sound of an elephant falling out of a tree, you can’t go to a sound effect CD and just pull it—you’ll have to mix together various sounds that represent that crash. For this mixed cue to work, it’s essential to know several things. What components are being used? What is the foremost ingredient in this cue? What is the relationship between the sounds? You make the decision that what will be heard is, in this order: the branch (that was holding the elephant) cracking, the elephant trumpeting as it descends, the branches that break as the elephant passes, and the elephant’s reverberating impact with the ground. All of the components are essential, but the most important thing that we should know is that an elephant has fallen. The sound of the tree’s destruction is secondary to the elephant’s fall.

Once you’ve decided the order of events and when each one will start and stop, you must figure out the volumes of all the effects within the cue. Having established the elephant as the most important element of the cue, you should make sure that it’s mixed prominently. This is not to say that the breaking branches aren’t important, but that all sounds associated with the elephant must stand out. Secondary to the elephant’s trumpeting is the sound of the crash, since it tells the audience that the elephant has fallen. The crash must also be prominent, because it relays the information of the fall and because in real life, a falling elephant would make a loud noise.

Controlling the volume of the sound effect or music is the way to regulate its relative balance in the mix of all the other sounds onstage. Instead of balancing the components of your prerecorded music or effect to themselves, you have to balance to the onstage action.

The final step in mixing is making sure that the overall volume of the sound effect or music works with the full range of sounds onstage. Once you’ve balanced the components of your prerecorded music or effect within its own mix, your sound design—with a blend of creative expression and technical precision—must balance music and effects to the action onstage.

A piece of music inherently contains all of the variables we’ve discussed in regards to sound effects. But the qualities of rhythm and tempo are usually thought of as just for music. The high-pitched versus the low-pitched instruments are another quality to consider. However, when you start thinking about sounds and ambiance in musical terms—the low brass of the classic foghorn or the fast tempo of a jackhammer—then your sound palette and aural imagination can have greater possibilities.

REFERENCES

J. Wiley, E. Larsen, and R. M. Aarts (2002) Reproducing low-pitched signals through small loudspeakers. J. Audio Eng. Soc., 50(3), 147–164.