Untrained Vision

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.