Monday, April 22, 2019
4 Ways to Use Silence to Enhance Your Productions
Pro Audio Files: When we think about creating music we tend to think about the sounds we want to add. Silence is not something that usually comes to mind. Silence, of course, is what’s left where we don’t add any sounds, but thinking about silence as its own entity gives you the power to use it creatively in your work.
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I find it quite interesting just how difficult silence is to achieve in a theater. So many factors can impact the silence and whether it is truly silence, like audience members, moving lights, and just motors that are used to keep things running. I've noticed that we spend so much time trying to figure out how to make the noise happen, that often times maintaining a clean silence falls by the wayside. I remember during Dark Play the sound designer saying that they wanted the most impactful portions of the show to be about the absence of sound. This was a great concept, and the subwoofer that was created really had the impact it was intended to, but the silence fell a little flat, because there was media and lighting in the same space. So many factors add noise pollution, and rather than silence the experience starts to almost highlight the noises we aren't supposed to be hearing. I wonder what could happen if the companies manufacturing these instruments started to focus more on making things silent.
I love silence. Joe Pino had a really passionate opinion about how to create “silence” within a theatrical moment in a play/musical. It’s such a fascinating concept because in actuality, we’re always hearing noise. Almost always we will experience a minimum of 40 decibels at a time. This article presents some interesting points. One of the main concepts within this article is that, when in doubt, just cut. Like most people are not so observant that they hear particular things that only a sound designer would know to listen for. People often either do not care, or they are not trained in the art of listening. This article provides some really good advice for ways in which people can decide how and when to make cuts to certain music related moments. I was looking to see if the article would suggest putting an underlying form of white or pink noise through speakers consistently and then remove that noise so to be able to make the audience actually feel silence.
In Production Audio, not long ago, Joe was talking about the challenges that a sound designer has in a production and one of them is silence. Silence seems like something that would be easy. Alas, to create true silence, you must fight noisy audience members, squeaky chairs, HVAC systems, color scrollers, moving lights, projectors, etc. It is a really challenging thing to achieve. This article teaches a lot about how to pursue silence in an attempt to help sound designers figure out what is important and necessary in their productions. Being able to figure out what is really impactful in a piece is a true challenge, and this article brings up some interesting points about how to find it yourself, but, in doing so, getting the effect of silence that you are pursuing is really difficult. It is interesting how a lot of designers will, at some point in their process, reach a point where they begin to pare down to the essentials, and this article could be useful in doing so.
This article had a trick I did not know before, to help with decreasing a recorded instruments noise bleed from its surroundings. It says to invert the phase, play both together and then bring in the noise through an EQ. This article also mentioned something which any good sound person should always be aware of, which is using silence. I am currently in the middle of a sound design piece, in which I have realized that I have not utilized enough silence. The piece is so fast, that finding places for it to breathe without taking away some important plot details is hard. I will try some tricks discussed in this article. Part of why I love sound, is because to use it well, is a mix of left brain right brain. There’s an artistry in true listening, and manifesting what we want to hear from what the microphone hears. The tip to decrease instead of increase when there is a lot going on, also feels applicable to life.
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