CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Some Things I’ve Noticed About Working With Sound…

Pro Sound Web: As with politics, it can be very difficult to be rational when we think, discuss and make decisions about sound. Of course, much about sound is subjective, even if there are quantifiable aspects to what we do.

No matter how it looks on Smaart, the end result has to be something that satisfies the audience, or at least satisfies us – and we should (hopefully) be the toughest customer of our own product.

1 comment:

Mike Vultaggio said...

This article gives a good insight into some basic aspects of being the "sound guy" that most people may not realize. The part of this article that most stands out to me is the part on the second page labeled "Everyone Notices". This part of the article specifically resonates with me because it is something that I have experienced so much first hand when I was first getting involved in sound. In my high school the sound department never had any budgeted time or money to take care of things, they were just expected to be done. This occurred until I became the head of the sound department at the end of my Freshman year. The first show that I mixed was Anything Goes and let me tell you, it didn't sound very good, well to my standards, to everyone back then they had come to expect bad audio to just be something that they experienced when they saw a high school show. That following summer I worked at a local theater as an A2 and came back to school with many new ideas to make our shows sound better. By the spring Musical that year (Beauty and the Beast) I was intelligently coordinating wireless frequencies on the Shure Wireless Workbench program and had a good enough relationship with the sound department that I had worked for that summer that I was able to borrow some of their wireless system that was much better than the one that my high school owned. Even with the sound running smoothly I noticed that there was little to no praise for the work I was doing. The point I am trying to make is that in the sound world more than any other you find yourself only being noticed when something goes wrong rather when things are running smoothly. For me, this is what makes sound special, the way that a well designed system or composition will go unnoticed makes me feel like I'm doing something right. For me, sound should not take the show, merely compliment it.