Month: June 2014

… there may be a whole bunch of these…

So my first philosophical point was that the ideal to strive for is invisibility, that perfection is when no one realizes we’re doing anything.

My second point is that, particularly in the community theater world I live in, we should be doing a lot.

I live in a world of untrained voices, untrained artistic visions, and untrained technicians.  One view might be that this is what community theater is and our audiences know what they are getting in to.  Of course, there is a lot of the world that views community theater with contempt precisely because of the lack of skill that “untrained” implies.

My view is that anything I can fix, I should fix.  Why should I leave something be that is within my power to correct, simply to pass along that flaw to the audience?  In the name of… what?  Telling the audience the truth?  No, fix it any time you can.

Untrained or only somewhat trained voices tend to have 3 major categories of problems – pitch control, breath support, and dynamics.  I can’t fix pitch without resorting to AutoTune (evil!) so that’s out of my hands.  Breath support I’ve been known to have a chat with the Music Director when I realize that’s someone’s issue, so I’ll take an indirect interest in fixing that but the direct action is above my pay grade.

Dynamics, on the other hand, is why God put all those faders on the sound board.

I’ve been asked how much of the dynamics “we” should remove from a performance, since that’s changing the performance as the actor is giving.  I answered incorrectly at the time, and this very question is why this blog actually exists.  The answer is: “Remove every last dB of dynamics that detract from the show.”  Line-by-line mixing exists as a concept for a reason, because even the best and most trained actors and singers are not constant from night to night, scene to scene, line to line, and even syllable to syllable in their volume.  If your choices are single syllables that will blow out the audiences’ ears, single syllables that aren’t audible, or adjusting moment by moment to make it work… make it work.

Untrained vision… that’s a topic for next time.

So it is my intent that this blog be about primarily live sound, and specifically theatrical sound.  Some things may be applicable elsewhere, but that isn’t the point.  Also, I primarily participate in at the community theater tier, which means that most of the people I’m working with are untrained and are doing this entirely out of love of the craft.

In light of the recent decision by the Tony Awards Committee to discontinue the Best Sound Design categories, only instituted back in 2008 after many years of lobbying, the core philosophy of many sound designers comes out into the light: We are at our best when the audience can’t tell we’re there.  Unfortunately, much like Stage Management (for which there also is not a Tony), this leads to the misconception that this is merely a technical endeavor, and not an art.

Sound Design as an art exists to support the show, just as Lighting Design, Set Design, etc.  Universally, the show is for the audience who has paid to partake of the experience.  Audience members willfully suspend their disbelief when they walk in the door – they WANT the show to work, or they wouldn’t have parted with their money for the ticket.  Problem is, there are things we can do that break audience members out of that suspension of disbelief, and while the first time in was free, subsequent instances of dragging audience members back “in to the show” are more and more difficult.

Due to the nature of sound and how humans perceive it, “subtle” only begins to describe what must be done to craft sound and not stand out as artificial or wrong.  Natural sounds progress along a path, an arc of existence, but artificial ones don’t have to.  Certain rules apply to how sound physically propagates around a room when someone speaks, and we can artificially violate those rules.  But when we don’t follow the rules, everyone in the audience will know something is wrong, even if they can’t put their finger on what that might be.

For example, sound reverberates.  A church bell, a door bell, a gunshot, a thunderclap, … I could go on… these sounds all start big and then decay over time.  Having them cut off suddenly is comparable to dropping a rock in a pool and expecting to have a way to suddenly stop the ripples.  Would this break suspension of disbelief?  Probably not, particularly since modern doorbells all do this all the time, but it’s unnatural enough that it will subtly detract.  When it’s done right, the audience doesn’t even think about it – yes, that really is a church bell down the street.

Similarly, there are several characteristics of how sound moves and how we perceive it that are commonly on the chopping block through the use of wireless microphones.  A sound coming from multiple places, within a short spread of time, will appear to come from wherever it arrived from first.  It will also appear to come from wherever it arrives from loudest.  The concept being that, in nature, the original sound will arrive at your ear first and loudest, as any reflections will have to travel further and will lose magnitude (volume) along the longer path.  When those two conflict (first from the stage, loudest from a speaker hanging over the stage, for example) the sound will be perceived to come from a location somewhere in between.  How often have we been to shows where the spoken lines sounded perfectly normal, but the songs suddenly were coming from the speaker up at the proscenium?  Distracting, isn’t it?

So subtlety really does rule in this line of work.  Too bad those who are knowledgeable and are supposed to know better aren’t, don’t, and run the Tonys.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/470/217/554/reinstate-the-tony-award-categories-for-sound-design-now/

So over the years I’ve been told, repeatedly, that I need to write up all the stuff I know about sound.  It seems… presumptuous of me to put this stuff out where people can see it.  People who know more than I do, people who have training, people who have actual professional experience, …, but I suppose they aren’t who I’m aiming at.

No, this is for the people who live in a visual world, rather than the auditory world I experience.  While that might make it sound as though I’m visually impaired, this has more to do with how I experience the world than anything physical… although I expect I have more in common with how the blind might listen to the world than most do.

This is also for those who are looking for some understanding of what I hear, and for those who might be trying to recreate it.

We shall see what comes of it.