Audio Vision
I’ve been reading a great book lately, which reminds me of a lot of the reasons why I got into audio in the first place. It’s called Audio Vision, and it was written by a French film critic, sound designer, and director named Michel Chion. Early on, just after high school, I wanted to get into film sound. I thought ‘wow, they have all these great 5.1 sound systems in the cinemas now, and they aren’t taking advantage of them!’ I was going to sweep the film industry with all sorts of flying around, swirling till you puke sound effects. Then I discovered that I could have whatever-point-whatever surround systems in the theatre, and started trying to make the blue-hairs in the theatre puke with swirling sound effects. Technology was king, and I had racks and racks of amps, samplers, SFX systems, and a thousand speakers all over the place. I kept doing this as the geek I was….am….was… until, that is, I actually watched a show I designed. Then I realized that it was usually totally unnecessary to the show. Michel Chion writes about how sound that comes from outside of the frame of the screen takes the audience away from the world inside that frame, and back into the dirty cinema they’re watching it in. I’m pretty sure that is the same realization I came to years ago. However, theatre is a very different world from film, and I think there are probably more uses for surround in theatre.
Tom Mardikes, theatre sound design prof. At UMKC, has come up with a great way to get some of the benefits of the ‘immersive’ effects of surround while keeping it fairly subtle. In short, he converts normal left right stereo signals into MS stereo, and builds a sound system in the theatre based on MS. I think it sounds effin’ great, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good production to try it out on. In the meantime, I’ve been playing with it in the studio.
I may have overstated myself earlier – I haven’t really used surrounds that much in theatre, but I did push for it an awful lot. One of the times I’ve used with great success was a show I did called The Hostage. It took place in a bar, and the audience was basically sitting in the street outside it. There’s a big raid scene towards the end, where the English army is shooting at the bar from across the street. There were all sorts of gunfire coming from behind the audience, and corresponding glass shatters, explosions, and various destructive sounds coming from small hidden speakers throughout the stage. In that instance, all the speakers helped quite a bit to give the audience the same ‘surrounded’ (ha!) feeling the IRA agents had in the bar, without making them notice that they were still in a safe theatre on a college campus. A show I’m working that’s opening in the next couple months will probably have some surround in it too – it’s got a ‘play inside a play’ thing goin on, so the audience will probably hear themselves clapping when their hands are sitting quite still. I hope so, anyway.
This all brings me to my current big problem. It’s not so much a problem as much as a big change in how I design shows. There’s a certain director who I’ve been working with quite a lot over the past year or two whose work has drastically changed how I approach a show. As a sound designer, and I think most lighting designers probably feel the same way, I am highly interested in transitions. Of course what comes before and after that transition is important, but it’s also kind of the actors’ world, and it’s the job of the design team, esp. sound and lights, to get us from one place to another. When working on these new shows, and they are original shows, I’m in the rehearsal hall with the actors from day 1 creating a soundscape for each scene, and basically nothing for most of the transitions, letting each piece stand on their own. It’s horribly disorienting, but I love it, and I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done in my life.
So, what does this have to do with surround? Well, now that what I’m doing is directly intertwined with what is happening onstage, what the actors and doing and saying, it makes sense that it sounds like it’s coming from the same place the actors are, eh? Yeah, well, the first time this happened was a complete fluke due to the constraints of the production space and schedule. But a total fluke that I did totally on purpose. Totally. Basically, instead of putting speakers in a ‘normal’ spot above the stage, they’re usually sitting on the stage just upstage of the actors for these shows. I know this probably doesn’t seem like a big deal to most people, but the aesthetics call for it, and as a designer, I’m supposed to be the one who is obsessing over these things so the director doesn’t have to, just as a set designer obsesses over the perfect molding, floor color, or table, and how that molding adds to the meaning or aesthetic of the production. I’ve been thinking that MS technique I talked about earlier could be a great solution for these shows too…
Hmmm... methinks I need to work on shortening my posts.
Tom Mardikes, theatre sound design prof. At UMKC, has come up with a great way to get some of the benefits of the ‘immersive’ effects of surround while keeping it fairly subtle. In short, he converts normal left right stereo signals into MS stereo, and builds a sound system in the theatre based on MS. I think it sounds effin’ great, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good production to try it out on. In the meantime, I’ve been playing with it in the studio.
I may have overstated myself earlier – I haven’t really used surrounds that much in theatre, but I did push for it an awful lot. One of the times I’ve used with great success was a show I did called The Hostage. It took place in a bar, and the audience was basically sitting in the street outside it. There’s a big raid scene towards the end, where the English army is shooting at the bar from across the street. There were all sorts of gunfire coming from behind the audience, and corresponding glass shatters, explosions, and various destructive sounds coming from small hidden speakers throughout the stage. In that instance, all the speakers helped quite a bit to give the audience the same ‘surrounded’ (ha!) feeling the IRA agents had in the bar, without making them notice that they were still in a safe theatre on a college campus. A show I’m working that’s opening in the next couple months will probably have some surround in it too – it’s got a ‘play inside a play’ thing goin on, so the audience will probably hear themselves clapping when their hands are sitting quite still. I hope so, anyway.
This all brings me to my current big problem. It’s not so much a problem as much as a big change in how I design shows. There’s a certain director who I’ve been working with quite a lot over the past year or two whose work has drastically changed how I approach a show. As a sound designer, and I think most lighting designers probably feel the same way, I am highly interested in transitions. Of course what comes before and after that transition is important, but it’s also kind of the actors’ world, and it’s the job of the design team, esp. sound and lights, to get us from one place to another. When working on these new shows, and they are original shows, I’m in the rehearsal hall with the actors from day 1 creating a soundscape for each scene, and basically nothing for most of the transitions, letting each piece stand on their own. It’s horribly disorienting, but I love it, and I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done in my life.
So, what does this have to do with surround? Well, now that what I’m doing is directly intertwined with what is happening onstage, what the actors and doing and saying, it makes sense that it sounds like it’s coming from the same place the actors are, eh? Yeah, well, the first time this happened was a complete fluke due to the constraints of the production space and schedule. But a total fluke that I did totally on purpose. Totally. Basically, instead of putting speakers in a ‘normal’ spot above the stage, they’re usually sitting on the stage just upstage of the actors for these shows. I know this probably doesn’t seem like a big deal to most people, but the aesthetics call for it, and as a designer, I’m supposed to be the one who is obsessing over these things so the director doesn’t have to, just as a set designer obsesses over the perfect molding, floor color, or table, and how that molding adds to the meaning or aesthetic of the production. I’ve been thinking that MS technique I talked about earlier could be a great solution for these shows too…
Hmmm... methinks I need to work on shortening my posts.
posted by Dave at
10:30 PM
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