Author: jpl

I’ve been asked for my class notes for my SETC Workshops.  The SETC Wireless workshop was in 2014, Wireless Dressing is 2016.  These were both intended to be discussion starters, and the Wireless Dressing workshop in particular relies on props and some hands-on time.  But these might be of value to someone, so here they are.

There are a few dated details in the SETC Wireless slide deck.  The 600MHz auction is now summer 2016.  The Shure ULX-D product can pack… 43?  45?  47? wirelesses in a single 6MHz TV channel if you put it in high density mode, which was enabled after my presentation.  The Shure QLX-D products can hit the 14 channel number I’d quoted back then.  I’m still not aware of any other vendor’s products that can hit that mark, particularly the >40 channel number.

SETC Wireless

SETC Wireless Dressing

One last hanging chad from my three part Acoustics set is the concept of the sound being the same in every seat.  This is only partially an acoustical issue, so it gets its own post.

I hope it’s obvious why this is a goal of sound in theater.  While I understand that there will always be some seats that are better than others, what we do not want is for some seats to be noticeably worse in ways that the audience member does not really understand.  If they’re in the back and can’t see very well, they will understand that they had a lousy seat.  If they’re in the middle somewhere and can’t understand the words, the show’s sound was bad (in their mind).  If someone gripes to a friend that they had a lousy seat, that is very different than griping that the sound was bad.  One turns into an expression of sympathy, the other turns into bad press.

All of the components of acoustics discussed so far decidedly contribute to this goal.  Reverberant fields by nature leave hot spots and dead spots scattered around the room.  In an extreme case, a resonance can leave individual seats completely unable to hear a single note that one seat in any direction would find uncomfortably loud.

But here is where we add in the sound system.  The system can’t fix problems with the acoustics, but it can certainly be good or bad on its own.

A properly designed sound system for theater will produce the same sound in every seat and will produce the same volume at every frequency… to within a small tolerance.  It is common to see a sound system specification that says: “The system shall reproduce from 50Hz-18KHz +- 3dB in every seat in the room.”  The numbers may change a bit from system to system, but that’s the gist of it.  A normal electric bass guitar goes down to 42Hz, bass drums might be a little lower than that, and the human voice (bass, obviously) commonly gets down to around 65Hz, so we need to cover more or less down to those options.  Going up, the range in the mid-teen KHz is important for hi-hat, triangle, and for intelligibility of speech.  Nominally we can hear from 20-20KHz, but as a general rule the real extremes aren’t as useful.  The “+- 3dB” part indicates that the volume will not differ terribly much from one location to another.

The more stringent the specification is, the more difficult it will be to create a system that can meet it.  Even the example I use above would require computer modeling of the room and the sound system using tools such as EASE that can account for the acoustics as well as the speakers being installed and their installation locations.

Clearly, if you’re trying to do this correctly, simply knowing something about sound isn’t nearly enough.

So we’ve established our target: shortish decay time (~0.75 seconds) that is flat across all frequencies, and that is the same no matter where in the room an audience member is.  As few resonant frequencies as possible, and those resonances should be “weak”.

Weak?  Huh?  The short explanation of that: a simple resonance is one where the sound bounces back and forth between two walls that are exactly as far apart as the sound wave is long.  Since sound moves at 340m/s, a 5m long room would resonate at 68Hz, which is approximately C#2.  (It would also resonate at multiples of that, but we’re going to stick with the simplest option here.)  Now if the room is also 5m WIDE, we have a second 68Hz resonance on top of the first, making it stronger.  If the room is 5m TALL, we get a third.  In the other direction, if we were to add material to the walls to damp the reflections, it would be weaker.  Yes, this is oversimplified, but you get the point.

We’ve all been in theaters that are more or less shaped like a scallop shell.  Angled sides, curved rear wall?  Those angled sides don’t reflect sound at each other, so no resonances can form between them.  If that back wall is constructed correctly, sounds go there to die – no reflecting back into the room.  It’s easier to build one very absorptive wall than 4.  I’ll bet the floor and ceiling aren’t parallel, either.  Sound will still bounce around a bit, but we want a little so that’s OK.  Yes, there are very good shape options other than this one, but it’s the one I understand best.  The Troy Savings Bank Music Hall has parallel walls, and I have no idea how that works.

There’s more to it than just shape, though.  This is also where my expertise gets very thin, so here we start to gloss a bit.

What if the walls resonate?  Or the floor?  Or a space on the other side of the wall?  That can pass energy back across the wall the same as it got there in the first place.  There’s a great story about the acoustics at Carnegie Hall in New York where a renovation in 1986 was said to have “diminished the famed acoustics”.  Turned out that there was a slab of concrete poured in under the stage causing the problem, and when it was removed in 1995 things were much better. (See: this New York Times article from 1995) So it’s possible that such resonances are bad, but equally possible that they are good or even necessary.

Then we can get in to the use of resonators to tune the room.  The Troy Savings Bank Music Hall has small cavities built in to the ceiling for exactly this purpose.  In modern design, this sort of thing is generally used as “bass traps”, to damp down low frequency resonance, but I have no doubt there are other uses.

All of this, from the shape of the room to the wall materials to building in resonant cavities must be planned before construction starts.  It can be retrofitted later, but it’s cheaper to do it right the first time from the beginning.  The lesson to be had here is: When you start a construction project on a theater, whether you are building new or repurposing something existing, bring in your architect and an acoustics expert at the beginning, and design it right.  Then build to that.  You’ll be glad you did.

It’s easy to think that if too much reverberant echo is bad for theater, then less would be better and none would be best.  Well, none would be awful, actually.  Our brains aren’t designed to work in an environment with no reverb.  The closest that exists in nature is the outdoors, but even there sound does bounce off of everything it encounters and we do use those bounces as part of our understanding of our environment.  An actual absence of reverb is quite unsettling, and spending too much time in an anechoic chamber will quickly lead to hearing the blood flow inside your own ears.

So what does make for good acoustics for theater?

Clearly, we need reverb that doesn’t last too long, but also isn’t too short or nonexistent.  The usual numbers I’ve seen quoted are on the order of 0.75 seconds RT60.

RT60, you ask?  So last post I mentioned decay time and said we’d get back to it.  Then is no longer soon, it is now.  RT60 is the time required for a sound to decay by 60dB.  Originally this was measured using a stopwatch and Wallace Clement Sabine’s ears, and it is roughly the amount of decay required for a sound to become inaudible.

But, of course, there’s more to it than that.  Go back to the big stone church again and think about what you hear as a sound decays.  It doesn’t just sound like the original noise is stretched out as it slowly fades away.  No, it tends to be the low notes that last the longest and the higher notes tend to fade away faster.  Or in a smaller room with hard parallel walls, the higher notes may last longer than the low ones, and may even sound oddly fluttery (a “flutter echo”).  Worse yet, you could have a single note that jumps out from all the rest – that one will reverberate much longer than others around it, and will be louder to begin with.  That’s a resonance, where the room itself is helping the note along.  All of these things are bad.

So for theatrical use, we want a room with as few resonances as possible, and any that are there are as small as possible.  We also want a room that decays as the same rate no matter what frequency (pitch) a sound is at.

Lastly, we want a room where the sound is the same, no matter which seat you are sitting in.  As it turns out, while those other things are hard to do, this is the hardest of all.

Possibly the one specialty field that is less understood than Sound Design in theater is Acoustics.  I know of no other aspect of the world around us for which nearly everything that lay people say is wrong.  Usually people have at least some small grasp on reality, but you can’t see or touch acoustics, and when you hear them it’s almost more what you don’t hear than what you do. Or maybe it’s what you can’t hear well.  Or possibly what you… hmmm.

So let’s start with the concept of good vs. bad acoustics.  Two problems with this seemingly basic concept: it’s subjective, and it depends on what the space is going to be used for.  Think for a moment about a large stone cathedral.  One where you can hear your own voice for several seconds as it bounces around.  These sorts of spaces led to the creation of musical styles such as Gregorian Chant, as the long, slow tones combined with the long, slow decay time (we’ll talk about decay time later) make for an amazingly powerful instrument that can lend a physically moving component to what is supposed to be a spiritually moving circumstance.  Now try to imagine singing Gilbert & Sullivan in that same space, preferably one of their patter songs.  After the first line the entire room is filled with audio mud and the cast can’t hear themselves well enough to keep singing.

Another detail that is often missed is that there is a sweet spot designed in to good churches such that someone standing at the altar can be clearly heard in every seat.  I know that modern technology can be used to make the preacher loud enough to be heard everywhere, but in the 14th Century that simply wasn’t an option.  It’s really quite amazing walking around nearly that sweet spot talking and hearing how the whole room changes when you step on it.

So does that cathedral have bad acoustics? No. It has precisely the acoustics it needs for what it is meant for. It wasn’t meant for Operetta, so if you try and repurpose the space for your new G&S Company, you are going to be very sad with the result unless you put a lot of effort and money into changing it. I’ll guarantee that keeping the look will be nearly impossible if you fix the sound, too.

Over the last 5 years a company I work with on a moderately regular basis purchased a “new” building, in the form of an 1850s timber framed church. People involved with the purchase touted the “wonderful” acoustics and told me I’d love working in the new space. Since moving in there have been nothing but complaints about how bad the sound is.  Guess how much time and money went in to changing the acoustics from the old purpose to the new?

… or “How Hollywood Has Changed Theater”

OK, I have absolutely no proof that it has anything to do with Hollywood, but that’s where I see the trends as coming from.  Not that this is a bad thing, it’s just a thing.

We’re all familiar with underscoring from any movie made in the last 40 or 50 years.  That music underneath a scene that helps build tension when the good guys are going into a risky situation, or feelings of victory as they’re winning (whatever that means), or helps make everyone teary in that touching moment.  Note that I do not mean a character’s theme, generally, I mean music that exists to elicit an emotional response.

Using Star Wars as an illustration, the Imperial March of Vader’s Theme are used to introduce the character and then to underscore his appearances.  They may help set a mood, but they’re more closely tied to the character than the mood.  Obi-wan’s theme, on the other hand, after his death, quickly becomes an underscore meant to induce feelings of loss, loneliness, and maybe a bit of “dammit, we’re going to win for him.”  But really, the music in Star Wars is far more sound track and far less underscoring – while it may inspire emotional response, that isn’t really what it’s good at.

To pick on another movie I’ve seen recently, in Pacific Rim the vast majority of the music really is underscoring.  Yes, the various bits of theme are associated with various characters, but not strictly so.  When kaiju appear there’s scary music, when the jaegers are heading out there’s triumphant music, when the jeagers are getting their butts kicked there’s scary music again, then the jaegers are kicking butt there’s triumphant music.  The movie gets a real visceral response, even out of scenes that are otherwise pretty normal for a modern SF/action flick.  This is part of why it got pretty poorly reviewed, and yet has a pretty serious cult following.

So how does this all apply to theater?  Doing precisely the same thing theatrically as they’ve been doing in Hollywood for decades is really coming in to its own, and really gives the opportunity to add a whole new dimension to our shows.

It’s also where my own skills and experiences are thinnest, so I can speak more conceptually here than anything.

My first experience with the concept was doing a production of The Diary of Anne Frank where the Director had a really solid feel for what he wanted and could really communicate it with me.  He wanted to underscore the readings from her diary, staged as her in a spotlight and everyone else frozen in the dark, with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.  I spent some time looking for other options, but that’s what we went with, and my biggest lesson was that I didn’t know nearly enough about classical music, and my second lesson was that I didn’t understand his vision until after I saw it done.  He wanted the juxtaposition of the terrified words of Frank, the horrors that the Germans had committed, with the hauntingly beautiful music… that the Germans had created.  It stabbed right through you.

I managed to use the concept years later when I underscored the murders in Jekyll & Hyde with a boys’ choir version of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.  Unusual that I managed to do this in a musical, this is mostly used as a straight play concept.

This has lead to an entire new focus for the field of Sound Design.  College Sound Design programs are turning up with a focus on composing your own scores, precisely for this purpose.  Seems to be that composition programs have existed forever, but composition purely for the underscoring effects is new.  It is becoming expected that resident sound designers at major regional companies will be able to write music, as well as be able to wrangle massive sound boards and fleets of wireless mics.

Where does this leave us?  I’m not really sure.  I don’t expect this will become de rigueur in the world in which I play – community theater.  It’s really quite beyond most sound designers, and those who can write their own are going places.  Using other people’s music is problematic, since getting the rights to incorporate their work into your own (“Grand Rights”) is difficult to impossible.  I expect we will see a rise in the illegal use of others’ music under the guise of “fair use” (wrong!) or the ever popular but fictional “if you only use x seconds of it, that’s allowed, right?” (No, it isn’t) as Directors run into the concept and want to do it themselves.

First, a definition:

A soundscape is a sound or combination of sounds that forms or arises from an immersive environment.

OK, I admit that’s from wikipedia, but it’s not a bad starting point.  There was a bit of a nod to the concept of a soundscape in my last post when I referred to using wind and flapping sails to establish a sailing ship, in that case making up for a crummy knocked-together set piece and making it clear what we were actually looking at.  (It was actually pretty amazing what could get built in only a couple hours the day before tech when the Director added the new set piece at the last possible second, but it never looked like more than something built the day before tech.)

But this is so much more.

Keeping with the same image, a full-on soundscape would involve speakers in multiple positions around the audience, and appropriate sounds coming in from all directions.  Immersive, remember?  In the setting I’m referring to, the audience was looking at the front of the ship as though it was about to sail straight up the center aisle.  So we’re magically floating 10-80′ in front of a ship crossing the English Channel, looking back at the ship.  What do we hear?

Wind, all around us.  The sails are above and in front of us, likely starting 10′ or so above the deck.  (This would have been a multi-masted schooner… notice how these details keep coming?)  We should hear waves against the prow of the boat as it cuts through the water.  Creaking of the wooden ship.  We could place birds pretty much anywhere around the audience.

In the end, the audience should feel like they’re truly in the environment, even without any set at all.  Rain forest?  Lots of animals, dripping, rustling leaves.  Angry mob?  Angry walla coming from all directions… but not coherently, because one yelling voice doesn’t come from all around you, it comes from over there on the left, and a mob is a collection of individuals.  Restaurant?  Unless your table is against the wall, clinking glasses, silverware on plates, and (again) walla coming from all around.  Who needs sets?

… we’ll get to underscoring at some point, I promise.

Right out of the gate, this is a bit misleading.  Sound Design gets such short shrift in general that many college theatre programs don’t cover the possibilities nearly enough.  So even trained Directors may be functionally untrained for my purposes.

I’ve been known to say that of anyone in the theater, I have the most power.  An actor has their tools: their voice, their body.  A set designer has wood, paint, etc.  Lighting has color, brightness, and angle.  Costumes has fabric and accessories.  And so on.  All of these have real, physical limits imposed by their very nature.

I have your imagination.  Limits?  I don’t need no steenkin’ limits.

Sound can set a scene anywhere.  Sound can make anything happen.  Turn out the lights and I can drop you into a crowded street, a restaurant, a ship at sea, a spaceship… anything I can imagine I can pass along to you.  A crummy plywood attempt at a ship’s bow suddenly makes sense when you hear the wind and flapping of the sails.  I don’t know how many people I’ve “killed” over the years, mostly by gunshot, but my favorites were broken necks.  If you do it right, at the end of Diary of Anne Frank, the audience is just as terrified of the SS breaking in to take them away as the characters up on stage.

How does this tie into untrained vision?  Easy.  Most Directors have no idea what you can do with sound so it has no real place in their theatrical vision for the show.  I’ve had Directors tell me: “I trust you, just do it” without so much as a time period to aim for.

In every case, creating a sound design involves starting by interpreting the script with a ear toward what it should sound like.  This involves coming up with your own “vision” for the show, and going back later and working out with the Director where the two visions don’t line up.  Without a Director’s vision, instead this means understanding where the choices are in the design that effect how it will integrate with the rest of the show and prying choices out of the Director, possibly with pliers.  The easy example is a doorbell: What’s the era?, How recently was the house built?, Are the owners wealthy?, Are they hip and modern?… there are hundreds of different doorbell sounds out there, ranging from a bell rung with a string to a bell on the door rung by a mechanical twist to the classic “bing, bong” chimes to a modern electronic fake of that classic chime.  If you don’t tell me when and where and who these people are, I’ll be sure to pick something you will not like just to force you to answer me.

This is before we even consider the concept of underscoring and sound scapes.  That’s a topic for another post.

… 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/