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Thursday, March 20, 2025
Meyer Sound Helps Sound Designer Jonathan Deans Achieve Sonic Vision For Broadway’s "Redwood"
ProSoundWeb: “Redwood,” a new Broadway musical starring Tony Award winner Idina Menzel, has a narrative brought to life through projected visuals and an immersive soundscape created by sound designer Jonathan Deans, who’s leveraging Meyer Sound to help transforms the theater environment into breathing forest.
This as a concept is so cool and I really wonder how it actually played out in real life. I feel like this would be really hard to achieve seamlessly as a scenic designer and that you would have to be really really good at system design and just really in tune with what you want as a designer. I feel like my design style would really follow this not that I have really ever explored it but it just seems like such a cool concept to explore. I noticed this gradual radiation of sound when I was watching John Proctor and that was kind of the first time that I really thought about sound as something that could blanket the audience instead of just sound effects and something that was just set on stage. I feel like with sound design, oftentimes people think of it as something that is very limited and something that you can’t do much with but when you really think about it, sound design really has no limits and it is really up to the creativity of the designer.
I love to see people push the boundaries of what can be done with theatre and when people really communicate with one another. Sound can be such a creative and beautiful experience when you really put the time and effort into it. It’s super awesome to read about an experience where sound was so strongly emphasized and created so that audience was truly immersed into the soundscape. What’s more, I am learning more names and tech that exist in the sound world. I would love to a be part of a process similar to this and really explore how we can shape a space using sound as a cornerstone to the experience. I think sound can create an emotional space and have such a strong impace on the experience of the audience. Overall, I would love to see this production and talk to the sound designer and engineers about ther process of designing and making the system.
This is super cool. I love the idea of being immersed in the sound in a sense that's like 360 around you, like spatial audio. When I was younger, I used to listen to spatial audio on YouTube in my headphones to get that effect of 360 sound around you, so I think having this sound designer incorporate spatial audio into a Broadway show is kind of brilliant. It also kind of plays on the idea that I guess the student designer did, like the stage is sort of round, and though you're not sitting in the round, it kind of looks like an arena set-up, and looking at the photos kind of feels like and in the round experience even though it's a proscenium stage. I just think this is super cool. It's a very new idea with sound design or new to me, and it seems like it would be an incredible experience, almost like riding a theme park that has like 360 audio. I'm very intrigued by this, and I would really like to experience this live.
Wow, this sounds cool! I love the idea of immersive and surround type soundscapes and how they can be used in viewing media (particularly in live media like theatre, as it is already pretty utilized in film and movie theaters). If there was any production to try this out for, this would be the right one. Nature on its own has so many sounds that are coming at you from 1 million different directions, and every step you take the sound shifts. I would really love to see this production because of the story, but now I want to see it even more because of this sound design! all the technology they are using sounds really cool, and I loved reading about how the set and sound designers had to work together and compromise between speakers and LED walls. As everything gets more technically advanced, I noticed more and more “stuff”. Every new Broadway show I see, I notice the theatre packed with even more speakers and even more densely packed lighting rigs. While this can create an awesome show, Broadway theaters are typically small and the departments are already fighting for real estate as it is. It sounds like they made it work for this production, but I do wonder in the future, how each production will deal with each aspect of design and how much space in a theatre each department will get.
I love shows like this with minimal set but complex lighting, sound, and media. I think being a musician really comes in handy when doing sound design. You know the way people respond to music, and you know how to pull it off when composing a score. I did the sound design for my high school’s production of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Using my skills as a musician, I wrote music for each of the transitions and underscores. It was the most music heavy design I’d ever done, but I had a lot of fun with it. I set up some speakers at the sides of the house, and sent slightly different tracks to each one to simulate the experience of an anxiety attack and overstimulation. I took advantage of my knowledge of tempo and pitch to make some of the scores sound off in certain ways. Sound designing as a musician can get very ambitious but when done well, it creates an entirely new environment.
5 comments:
This as a concept is so cool and I really wonder how it actually played out in real life. I feel like this would be really hard to achieve seamlessly as a scenic designer and that you would have to be really really good at system design and just really in tune with what you want as a designer. I feel like my design style would really follow this not that I have really ever explored it but it just seems like such a cool concept to explore. I noticed this gradual radiation of sound when I was watching John Proctor and that was kind of the first time that I really thought about sound as something that could blanket the audience instead of just sound effects and something that was just set on stage. I feel like with sound design, oftentimes people think of it as something that is very limited and something that you can’t do much with but when you really think about it, sound design really has no limits and it is really up to the creativity of the designer.
I love to see people push the boundaries of what can be done with theatre and when people really communicate with one another. Sound can be such a creative and beautiful experience when you really put the time and effort into it. It’s super awesome to read about an experience where sound was so strongly emphasized and created so that audience was truly immersed into the soundscape. What’s more, I am learning more names and tech that exist in the sound world. I would love to a be part of a process similar to this and really explore how we can shape a space using sound as a cornerstone to the experience. I think sound can create an emotional space and have such a strong impace on the experience of the audience. Overall, I would love to see this production and talk to the sound designer and engineers about ther process of designing and making the system.
This is super cool. I love the idea of being immersed in the sound in a sense that's like 360 around you, like spatial audio. When I was younger, I used to listen to spatial audio on YouTube in my headphones to get that effect of 360 sound around you, so I think having this sound designer incorporate spatial audio into a Broadway show is kind of brilliant. It also kind of plays on the idea that I guess the student designer did, like the stage is sort of round, and though you're not sitting in the round, it kind of looks like an arena set-up, and looking at the photos kind of feels like and in the round experience even though it's a proscenium stage. I just think this is super cool. It's a very new idea with sound design or new to me, and it seems like it would be an incredible experience, almost like riding a theme park that has like 360 audio. I'm very intrigued by this, and I would really like to experience this live.
Wow, this sounds cool! I love the idea of immersive and surround type soundscapes and how they can be used in viewing media (particularly in live media like theatre, as it is already pretty utilized in film and movie theaters). If there was any production to try this out for, this would be the right one. Nature on its own has so many sounds that are coming at you from 1 million different directions, and every step you take the sound shifts. I would really love to see this production because of the story, but now I want to see it even more because of this sound design! all the technology they are using sounds really cool, and I loved reading about how the set and sound designers had to work together and compromise between speakers and LED walls. As everything gets more technically advanced, I noticed more and more “stuff”. Every new Broadway show I see, I notice the theatre packed with even more speakers and even more densely packed lighting rigs. While this can create an awesome show, Broadway theaters are typically small and the departments are already fighting for real estate as it is. It sounds like they made it work for this production, but I do wonder in the future, how each production will deal with each aspect of design and how much space in a theatre each department will get.
I love shows like this with minimal set but complex lighting, sound, and media. I think being a musician really comes in handy when doing sound design. You know the way people respond to music, and you know how to pull it off when composing a score. I did the sound design for my high school’s production of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Using my skills as a musician, I wrote music for each of the transitions and underscores. It was the most music heavy design I’d ever done, but I had a lot of fun with it. I set up some speakers at the sides of the house, and sent slightly different tracks to each one to simulate the experience of an anxiety attack and overstimulation. I took advantage of my knowledge of tempo and pitch to make some of the scores sound off in certain ways. Sound designing as a musician can get very ambitious but when done well, it creates an entirely new environment.
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