©JM Helps for SAE Education Ltd.
I recently attended a public lecture, here in Oxford, at the SAE Headquarters. The guy they had in was an Australian called Robin McCarthy – who has a lot of experience working with sound for theatres. He started off his career in smaller theatres and had quickly moved up to work in some rather large and successful places. His skills being stretched and going off in other directions to make sure the job could be done.
What was interesting to me was Robin explaining that the theatre, as an environment, is a great place for sound design and exploration – and this was something I hadn’t really thought about before. Music production and sound design for multimedia was all I had been thinking about since being interested in all this – but theatre? No, not really. Over Robin’s career, he had the pleasure of setting up sound systems, in theatres, from the ground up and he took it upon himself to do a masters in acoustics. Acoustics for sound is obviously a huge part of any sound work… For recording, for mixing and playback… and in theatres, it’s even more so. He explained how the ’sound stage’, created with the correct speaker placement, could be used to create realistic aural environments that enhanced the action on stage. Also, how he used particular sounds and parts of the sound spectrum (like low rumbling frequencies) to create mood and atmosphere. One example he gave was of a scene of two lesbians in love, both heroin addicts, where the love for each other was suffocating them. He pushed this feeling forward by recording dark atmosphere that sounded like it was in a fish bowl… The idea that there was no where to go. I could see how this would work, especially being in the audience watching the scene unfold.
In theatre, it’s all about queuing sounds to be in sync with the action on stage, and Robin introduced a few pieces of software that is regularly used in this line of work. One notable piece is a program called QLab by Figure 53 for the Mac. There is a free version for you to try and also paid licenses (that have more features) – always a good software business model if you ask me. He went on to explain how he admired Amon Tobin (an artist I very much love too) because he too uses layer upon layer of sound beds to create a final piece – just like what you do for theatre sound design.
It got me thinking that sound design for theatre is much more than just creating sound effects or Foley for a script – it’s more about being interactive and dynamic with what you have and ‘performing’ this on the fly. It seems like a nice mix of being a live engineer and a conventional sound designer wrapped up in one. An interesting side of sound work that I personally hadn’t thought about before.
For more information on SAE public lecturers, keep an eye on their website.
