Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Stage Sounds
Props: "Suppose some reader of The Strand were to ask, “What is a wind-machine?” how many persons in an intelligent audience would be able correctly to answer the conundrum? Yet how often have they, in some thrilling drama at Drury Lane or one of the great London theatres, listened with sympathetic anguish to the heroine’s tearful ejaculation, “Oh, what a night! Hark to the fearful wind as it beats on yon desolate moor!” And what if, after all our straining of ears to hear the wind beating on the desolate moor (the scene, by-the-bye, of the heroine’s desertion by the villain of the play), there were nothing more realistic to reward us than the scene-painter’s gorse and heather and the proscenium lights turned low?"
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2 comments:
When I'm watching a show at a theater, I rarely think of if the sounds are physically being made behind stage or made with prerecorded sounds because I guess I always assume they're prerecorded in the design process. One time I worked on a show this last summer at a small theater where they had multiple mini-doors behind the stage so that the actors could slam them, and I think there's a great appeal to replicating sounds behind the stage because of its authenticity. However, it presents a problem because its impossible to achieve a variety of noises as this article mentions.
I loved reading this article. Sometimes I think it's unfortunate that we don't employ this same sort of creativity and commitment to such problems anymore. Although there are certainly many practical advantages to digitally reproduced sound, including cost and reliability, there is something to be said for a tactile, physical source. Small adjustments can be made to such machines, and they can be used anywhere - not requiring electricity, licensing expensive sounds, or complicated computer systems to edit them. Overall, it seems like there was an 'craftsman' attitude in this time where homebuilding something was considered far superior to buying or assembling a black-box solution. In many aspects of what we do, I don't think that's such a bad idea, and wouldn't mind giving it a try.
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