Sound Decisions: Creating Audio for the Stage

Podcast Transcript

When you attend a play, you hear the dialog from the actors. Music might play at the start of an act, and sound effects will set the scene and punctuate the action. 

Creating those sound effects is the job of the play's sound designer. 

On the latest Short Talks from the Hill podcast, Janine Chow, an assistant professor in the Department of Theater and an experienced sound designer, talks about the process and history of creating sounds for theatrical production. 

"Radio, film and television all taught audiences conventions of how to listen," Chow said. "We learn what a sound means based on continued association with a visual, and film and theater sound designers can use this now even if you do not have the visual." 

Chow explains why the sounds we hear on stage might not be the same as what we hear in real life. She tells the history of the way listening has changed over time. And she reveals what are the hardest sounds to recreate on stage. 

Podcast Transcript:

Todd Price: Welcome to Short Talks from The Hill, a research and economic impact podcast from the University of Arkansas.

My name is Todd Price.

When you attend a play, you hear the dialog from the actors. Music might play at the start of an act, and sound effects will set the scene and punctuate the action.

Creating those sound effects is the job of the play’s sound designer.

Today we’re talking to Janine Chow, an assistant professor in the Department of Theater. Chow is an experienced sound designer.

Today on Short Talks, Chow is here to talk about the process of creating sounds for theatrical production, why what we hear on stage might not be the same as what we hear in real life, and how the way people listen has changed over time.

Janine Chow, welcome to Short Talks.

Janine Chow: Hi Todd, thanks for having me.

TP: And I know you brought some sound clips, so we’ll be hearing those throughout the conversation. So that’s going to be fun.

JC: Great.

TP: Plays have so many elements. The words and the dialog, the movement of the actors, the visuals of sets and costumes and lighting. Sometimes we have music, or in the case of musical, singing. What does sound design add to a production that has so much going on already? 

JC: Yeah, well you’re right, sound is one of many, many designs. And part of its thing is it’s actually under sung element of design. The Tony Awards didn’t have a spot for sound design for many, many years until it was recently reinstituted after years of begging and advocated for it. Sound adds two things to the production.

One are sort of like discreet, packets of information, where you have the sound of a rooster crow, a bell, things that signal things and move us along through time and space, which helps set mood and also helps set a little action. The other is sort of tone, whether that’s conveyed through music or any sort of tonescapes or naturalscapes that set us up for certain emotions.

And it sets us up for certain places, like the forest at night or inside a factory and you hear the sort of industrial hum of things. It can be continuous or discrete, and it helps frame the world.

TP: We can read a script of a play, even of works from the ancient Greeks. We can visit amphitheaters or historic theaters to understand how plays were staged. Sometimes they’re drawings of stage designs and costumes. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that we could record sounds. And at first, it wasn’t very high fidelity at all. How much do we actually know about sound design before we could produce accurate recordings of what was being done?

JC: Like you said, what we have of theater history is based on so many ephemeral things. And a lot of what we have left over are objects. So the only thing we know from ancient history of sound design is based on things that have lasted a very long time.

And what we have of evidence later is just the sort of physical sound makers, big sort of sheets of metal that were exposed to thunder, that kind of thing. But you’re right, it wasn’t until the late 19th century with the advent of recording technology, that we began to understand a little bit more about even what the actors sounded like.

Because everything prior to that is based on just written description, which tells us very little. And then sound design, therefore, evolved with recording technology and the ability to reproduce sounds.

TP: Has the way we actually listen and hear the world changed over time?

JC: Yeah. This is a huge thing. The history of listening changed significantly with the Industrial Revolution. This is something that Murray Schafer talks about in his book The Soundscape, where in ancient history or pre-industrial history,we had soundscapes that basically had only discrete signals, where a sound had meaning and it had a source. You understood that.

After the Industrial Revolution and the advent of all sorts of technology, we became surrounded by noise, the sort of ambient hum of machinery. Even, you know, in a podcast studio, where we’re trying to dampen that, we can hear the lights and you hear the ambient hum of electronics. And therefore, discrete signals became lost in noise and we listened less carefully.

Now, as human beings, since the advent of technology…a great demonstration of this is that in ancient history a lot of the most powerful gods were gods of thunder, because thunder was such a striking and powerful interruption to a larger soundscape which has now been diluted by industry.

TP: And the other thing that I think about changing is movies got sound of the 1920s. By the middle of the 20th century, television becomes common, or more common. How did all of that affect the way theatrical sound designers approach their work?

JC: Radio, film and television all taught audiences conventions of how to listen, particularly some of the early cartoons which established these famous cartoony sounds that would mean one thing or another. So, a lot of the times, we learn what a sound means based on continued association with a visual and film and theater sound designers can use this now, even if you do not have the visual.

I think a great example is the red-tailed hawk, which makes a sort of a screech sound. And it is the iconic bird of prey sound that you hear associated with every bird of prey ever. The thing is, it’s very commonly used for the bald eagle who actually sounds like a seagull. So film establishes that, right?

That the majestic bald eagle is going to make the majestic screech, despite the fact that that’s not true to life. And now theater can capitalize on that because audiences are trained to associate that sound with that bird.

TP: What are some other examples of sounds that conventionally we’ve come to associate with certain objects or experiences that are nothing like they are in the real world, like the bald eagle.

JC: Oh my goodness. I don’t know, I have another example that off the top of my head. Another examples from animal life… Lions are associated throughout history with like largeness and majesty and power. They sound like tiny cats. So anytime that you hear them roaring, especially in the MGM logo, that’s a tiger.

TP: Oh, really?

JC: It’s loud, it’s powerful. And that’s what people have, sort of, imagined as the ideal of a lion.

TP: Well, one thing that we all have heard is wind, right? You know, it’s a storm. The wind comes in. We all know what that sounds like, right? And that’s probably something you have to do a lot in productions. How do you create wind on stage?

JC: Wind is my greatest enemy. If you go out into the world with your little field recorder and you try to record wind, what you’re going to get is static. To make wind legible to the ear is a real challenge. The real way to do it in the theater space is to actually move that static sound from speaker to speaker to speaker, so you get a sense of movement.

That is, however, extremely hard, especially if you are working in theaters where the speakers aren’t really set up to cue differently. So your alternative is to find a sound that begins to suggest wind, even if it isn’t the right one. After five years of searching, I finally found, I believe, the BBC’s Polar Wind, which is a sort of hollow, echoing, whistling thing.

It doesn’t sound like static. It has whistling, but because of the histories of the film and theater it sounds like something is blowing so that you can get that effect. Wind is extremely difficult to capture effectively, and I cannot tell you to this day what it might be like to capture a light wind.

TP: I know exactly what that Arctic wind sounds like. I can hear it when you describe. I can hear it. I can see the scene, the snow, the door slamming shut. I know what that sound is. Well, violence is more common in plays and in movies than in real life, thankfully. And sound is so integral to the depiction of fights and violence. But most of us probably don’t really know what a punch sounds like or what breaking bones sound like. What conventions have been developed to convey these things to audiences?

JC: Impacts are a huge part of this. Of course. The sound of something hitting something, but it’s typically not flesh on flesh. You’re typically dealing with a sack of flour, right? And again, because our ears are trained by film, we understand some of these conventions. But, my favorite violent sounds are those from vegetables.

Because this is a convention of Folly, the act of making sounds from objects. And you can see this in a lot of horror shows, which I used to attend in Chicago, where they would literally have this big array of celery, especially, and squash, anything that could be popped or anything that can be crunched, broken, mashed up.

That’s the sound of a bone breaking. The sound of a head caving in is a pumpkin, you know? And it’s fabulous because in these cases, you never really see the sound designer. But in these cases, you can see the actual act of violence. That is then being mapped onto human bodies.

TP: Well, you’re talking about, you know, real objects, celery sacks of flour. I wonder, though, today we have computers, digital samplers. Technology is really advanced. How much does that change theatrical sound design or how often are people still just relying on these basic techniques of snapping celery?

JC: Oh, yeah. Snapping celery is really rare, especially on Broadway. I think the only example I can think of in the last ten years is the Sponge Bob musical, which of course is deriving from cartoons. You know, Foley was important. Digital sound has hugely changed the experience, both for cueing, which makes it incredibly easy to set up the fades and the sequences that you need for sound, and makes shows reproducible internationally.

TP: Well, you’ve worked on a lot of productions of the sound designer when you were a graduate student and a student. What is your process? How do you arrive at sounds that are legible for an audience? How do you approach that?

JC: Yeah, the process typically starts with, as all design, reading the script, close reading it for two things. One, you go through and you find where you really need something that is necessary to tell the story, whether that is the sound of wind or the rooster crowing, which is going to interrupt hamlet when he’s Midway through talking to his dad, right. And then you also read for mood and tone to figure out where you might insert something or insert something underlying the scene so that you have a sense of brightness or a sense of darkness, or a sense of happiness or a sense of like loss or absence. And a lot of that, too, is part of a collaboration process.

You must be talking to your director, and your director often has an idea of what they want. Sometimes it’s as abstract as please give me T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in sound. Oh, that was a doozy. And sometimes it’s, “I want this set of ten songs cut here, here and here. Play it here, here and here, throughout the piece, throughout the show.”

But the process is some combination of that. And then as a sound designer, I try to self-advocate for more creative or interesting things. One of my favorite designs I’ve ever done, and actually my first design, was a production of Richard III, which was very sort of heavy metal and involved curses and magic heavily.

So for that, I brought in the closest thing I could to infrasound, which is sound below the threshold of human hearing and is therefore visceral and felt. I just took white noise and took down its frequencies. And that rumble became an expression of magic throughout the show. And the expression of violence. So it wasn’t something that the audience really cued onto and heard, but it’s something they felt every time.

TP: Well, you talked about how you start with the script, but then you go to the director —and everything in a play is a conversation and dialog with the director. But I think about, we have very specific language to talk about visuals. We can describe shapes and colors and light. It feels like we don’t have the same vocabulary to talk about sound. So how do you have these conversations with directors when you’re trying to understand what they want and trying to convey what the possibilities are?

JC: Talking about sound is so difficult unless your director is a talented voice actor. You’re not going to get it right the first time. What I can do sometimes is I ask questions, in order to try to understand what the director is giving me. When they say this sound is too bright, I’m like, okay, does that mean it is too high? Or does that mean it’s too regular or melodic. And then they can sort of tell me, oh, yeah, no, it’s too high. And then I take it down some frequency? And it works for them much of the time.

Sound is a matter of guessing, because they might have an idea of how a door closes. And it might slam in a particular way, and I bring them a door closing and it doesn’t work. So they say, oh, no, I want it to be more of a thunk. You’re like, oh, right, based on that I bring them back sounds, then it doesn’t work. So then I have to bring ten of them, right. In order to sort of get an idea of what they actually mean.

It’s no one’s fault. It’s just that sound is difficult to communicate. It’s also difficult in this way to find when you’re using sound libraries, you have to learn the ins and out of onomatopoeia and generally just listen for a long time.

A great example of this is, I was working on a show where we had a salon bell in the show for when people are entering or exiting the space, and we had this lovely little dinner bell that was meant to be a sort of a live sound. And the director hated it. What she told me was, “This is too much of a tinkle, tinkle and not enough of a tinkle, tinkle.”

TP: Oh.

JC: So I took that bell. I took it home. I recorded it, layered it on top on top of itself, and brought it back to her. And she said, “Oh, this is perfect.” Which is actually a great example, too, of how people listen differently if they don’t have the visual cue. But yeah, discussing and talking about sound is a major challenge and often just comes down to trial and error.

TP: Excellent. Well thank you. This has been such a great conversation. I’ve learned a lot. It’s been really fun.

JC: Thank you for having me. Todd. This is great to talk about.

TP: Short Talks from the Hill is now available wherever you get your podcast. For more information and additional podcasts, visit ArkansasResearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas. Music for Short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris.

Short Talks from the Hill  highlights research, scholarly work and economic impact news at the University of Arkansas.