Entry One: Sound Design

Sound Design in a Nutshell

This entry is a re-post! It was an accompanying piece to the Second Wind’s Video Blog entry of December 24th, 2009, for The Woman in Black.

I've been designing sound for the theatre for well over 20 years, working with companies both large and small, including TheatreWorks, Second Wind Productions, Golden Thread, JB Enterprises, Center Rep, SF Playhouse, and many others. I didn't start out with a desire to be a designer-- producing my first, very modest show with Chinook Theatre in Boulder, Colorado, I realized I needed particular sounds, found them, and inserted them into the show. Back then we used cassettes. I never thought of myself as a "sound designer" until an opportunity opened up to design a production for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. So I donned the monicker and threw my resume into the ring. I didn't mention that I had never spliced tape before (reel to reels were the preferred method at the time). After they offered me the job I asked if I could sit in on the tech rehearsals for the show before mine. I watched the designer at work, and never had to confess. Over the years, I learned by watching others and experimenting. There are few good tutorials on the subject. So as a professional sound designer I wanted to provide a more complete guide on designing sound for the theatre. This is by no means a full course—merely a nutshell approach, and a few tools for getting the job done.

Finding Tone

Saying that creating a design starts with the script is no earth-shaking revelation. The more important question is what to look for when reading a play. My first read as a sound designer is the same as every theatre artist: I’m simply trying to experience the play without filters. On the subsequent read I begin to take notations. The simplest of them is where sound occurs: scene shifts, internal object cues like doorbells and telephones, and places where underscoring (music that runs under dialogue) may be of interest. I’ll also note the period/time frame of the play, and the cultural setting. The cultural setting is usually multi-faceted. What is the ethnicity of the characters? From what country? What is their social standing? Tone is more than pitch, and it's more than tamber; it's the emotional quality of sound and it can convey an almost complete sense-memory experience.

My next set of notations is a little more intuitive. I attempt to characterize the tone of the play, and if appropriate the tone of the individual characters. Are they blunt or refined? Harsh or lyrical? Is their world hard-edged? Happy-go-lucky? Comical? Fierce? Sly? Elaborate? Delicate? All of these tonalities can be mirrored in the sound. By this point, I’ve typically begun to hear music in my head—though sometimes it is only a feeling of a type of music I’ve never actually heard. Sometimes artists have already sprung to mind.

At this stage I’m equipped to hold a conversation with the director. Frankly, most directors are not good at articulating their “vision” of sound; most, also, think they are. For this reason, I sometimes bring samples of music with me to my first meeting (which is hopefully a one-on-one get together). The main purpose of this meeting is get on the same page with the director. Occassionally, I find I need to substantially refine my sound ideas, but more often the director is simply glad to have someone who has put more thought into the design than they have. The worst outcome is generally when the director has one piece of music they’d like to have in the design; I’ve wrecked more than one design trying to shape a full design around a director’s single contribution.

The next bit of information I seek is from the set and costume designers. Their designs are typically more helpful than the director’s thoughts. Generally, they’ve been working on the project for several weeks before the sound designer; they’ve also had numerous meetings with the director. In looking at a set design I pay attention to the colors and shapes: are the colors warm or cold? Is the set aged or new? Cozy or alienating? Are the shapes made of lines or arcs? I ask similar questions of the costume design: are the colors warm? Do they blend in with the set colors, or stand in contrast? Are they bright (comical)? Somber? Formal? Casual? Shiny or textured? When the set, costume, and sound design work together, we create a world.

At this point I generally look forward to the first read-thru. While a costume designer takes in the actor, the sound designer absorbs the sound of their voices. Do they support the concept you’ve developed so far? Do they speak with accents, tonalities characteristic of their ethnicities/the world of the play?

The Sound Itself

Step Two (yes, all of the above is one step for me) is creating a sound palate. Using the framework I’ve developed from answering the above questions, I start to find music that may be useful. I attempt to find as many “shades” and emotionalities within this framework. I take notes that describe each piece. They typically read: Musician’s Name, CD, Track, and then a description such as “dark, driving, anxious, changes at :20). To save time, I typically only listen to the first 45 seconds of a track when hunting though music I’m not familiar with. The larger the number of possibilities you find—and the greater the emotional range—the better.

Libraries are a great resource for exploring music. I also subscribe to a music service where I can search and listen to music for a monthly fee. These services often show related artists, which helps the process. For sound effects, my favorite site is www.sounddogs.com. They have a huge selection of searchable sounds.

Matching the Cues

The next step is to identify the emotional tonality of the cue points in the script. By this point, I can usually match the sounds in my palate to many of the cues I’ve marked in the script. (Sound cues, incidentally, are “numbered” by letter—the first cue is “A”, the second “B”. This distinguishes it from light cues, which usual real numbers. Cue “Q” is skipped, so there is no confusion when the SM calls the cue live.)

Other times, however, I don’t feel I have an appropriate sound cue for a moment in the script. Then I’ll describe the moment in the play the same way I’ve described my sound cues: “jaunty, happy, motivated, driving.” That helps me know what I need to find.

In scene transitions, I typically try to match the mood of the scene that’s ending; not the one beginning. Trying to match both often produces a schizophrenic, crowded sound. My philosophy is that you are helping to sustain the mood while the scene shifts happens, so that the audience doesn’t lose the feeling. When I go into tech, I also try to have alternates on hand, in case I or the director dislikes the first choice.

The Technology

Burning CDs is the most common technology used by small and mid-sized companies. It works well. Big companies (and technologically advanced ones like Second Wind) use computer software that allows the designer to set precise sound levels, fade times, overlaps, etc. They allow the designer to create more complex, and delicate, designs. Second Wind uses SCS 9. I won’t get into it here, but know how sound boards, amplifiers, speakers, and wiring work. Then make sure you never require your sound operator to know how they work. Running sound for a show is actually a nerve-wracking experience. The simpler you keep things, the better.

Do’s and Don’ts

There are only a couple of “Don’ts” in my book, and even those are more like guides than rules. Avoid music with lyrics. Plays are made up of thousands of words. They don’t need any more. Lyrics often distill complex subjects into pithy sentiment, and the playwright is generally trying to convey the complexity. Furthermore, they take the audience out of the world of the play and into the world in which they know the song. For that same reason, avoid popular music for things a little less recognizable. Even if the intent is to evoke something specific to the piece of music, people generally remember when they heard the song—who was around them, the setting and emotions. That famous song from Woodstock is more likely to evoke someone’s basement than the festival.

Do make songs your own. Add sounds to them. Layer. For one production, I added percussion to several pieces of music; the percussion consisted of outdoor sounds— trash cans, horns, cat yelps, etc—for a comic effect that also underscored the main character’s personality: he was agoraphobic. If you can write your own music that’s great, but remember that both the quality of composition and the recording quality will be compared to the best there is. Crackle and hiss in a recording is quite distracting nowadays.

Who’s the Boss

So you’re in tech, the director hates the sound cue you’ve chosen and you hate the one the director would like to use—what do you do? Negotiating is the best choice. Throw out both choices and start from scratch. Don’t feel compelled to accept the director’s choice. The bottom line is that the director is not the boss when it comes to the design. Sound designs are actually copywrited to the designer; neither the director nor the theatre company can alter or re-use them. Furthermore, when the review comes out, no one is going to blame the director for a bad design. If you cannot resolve the dispute, you should turn to the Managing Director (or Artistic Director); they are the ones who hired you, and are therefore the closest thing you have to a boss. That said, you really don’t want to put either of them in that position unless you’re ready to murder someone, because they’ll be reluctant to hire you again. If they don’t back you up, then you shouldn’t want to be hired by them again.

Final Thoughts

The most important tool a designer has is his or her ears. To say, “LISTEN”, sounds ridiculous, but it’s truly the most important thing you can do during tech. I have glasses, and though I don’t wear them often, I put them on to listen in the theatre. Seeing helps me hear better for some reason. I ask myself, “does it support the emotion of the play? Does it lead it (a bad quality), or underplay it (another bad quality)?” If the operator didn’t run the cue properly during Cue-to-Cue, stop and have them run it again. Listen with your whole body.

For more insight into sound design, you can check out my entry in Second Wind’s video blog at: http://secondwindtheatre.blogspot.com.

Ian Walker

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Entry Two: Postcard Development

Today's behind the scenes entry is of the development of the postcard for Ashes to Ashes. Because our rehearsal process was shorter, we didn't meet with the actors until rather late in terms of the postcard deadline. To hurry things along I sat down with Rob Siemens for a marathon session for the card development. I had taken a number of shots of the actors for the card, but to be honest, my head was in the "show photo" mode, rather than "poster-shot mode." The difference, I discovered after the fact, is that you really want to get in close for a show pic-- chopping off the top of someone's head can make the image more dynamic; in creating the postcard, however, it presented a problem.

This was a starting image. It had the combination of intimacy and menace, yearning and violence, that is an important element of the piece.

In life the actors were quite close together; in "photo-life" they appeared quite far apart. The chopped head poised a challenge as well. We talked about the fragmented reality of the play, and Rob came up with the idea to experiment with dividing the image into asymmetrical squares, and then enlarge certain features:

The result was much more dynamic. It amplified not just the menace, but the sensuality. It did, however, underscore our next challenge, which was to replace the background (something we had intended from the start). The bits of chair, curtain, poster, and carpet had to go. In replacing the background, we started down the wrong path. The image became crowded and disjointed. We had to grap the top of his head from a different photo, and try to get it to match. Before this was complete, we realized there were too many problems.

After a couple hours of work we had to reverse our steps. It was clear we were working ourselves into a corner in terms of the text, and the visual wasn't coming together. Worse, it felt like we had lost the dynamism of the original experiment. So we went back to the original image in asymmetrical squares, substituted the glitzy apartment image behind just the squares, and placed it against a black backdrop. This felt closer.

Closer, but not quite on the money. The image felt jarring. We talked about how the play is, in many respects a puzzle, and Rob began to separate the squares. Still missing something. We added a city skyline (I had re-set the play in New York).

Here's the final version of the postcard:

In the end, I think it captures many aspects of the play-- it's a fragmented reality; it's a puzzle; the line between sexual tension and violence is central; these are people who are wealthy and removed, yet cannot escape a communal grief over events of the past.