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Below are extracts from the presentation I gave entitled 'Surround sound and the Royal Exchange Theatre, on the OISTAT Scenofest Stage at the Prague Quadrennial on Saturday 14th June 2003.

All of these extracts are (c)Steven Brown/Listen Hear Sound Projects. all rights reserved. no part of this article may be reproduced, stored on a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of the author, Steven Brown.

Experiencing any piece of theatre-in-the-round is a unique event.

The members of the audience occupy exactly the same space as the actors. At the Royal Exchange, in fact, the audience enter the auditorium through the same doors that the actors will use when making their entrances and exits during the performance. I believe that this is important for a number of reasons; most significantly, it immediately breaks down the invisible barriers, which a proscenium arch constructs. It is truly a space that is equally shared between the observed and the observer. The actors and audience see, experience and hear exactly the same things; they totally share the same environment. It is this shared ownership of the space and the shared theatrical moments that are encountered that, I feel, makes theatre-in-the-round such a fulfilling experience. In a proscenium arch theatre (much like watching television or viewing a film in the cinema) you merely watch a performance, with theatre-in-the-round you can be fully focused and feel totally involved with all the occurrences and performances relating to the production you are watching, it is the ultimate theatrical experience. As far as surround sound is concerned some people worry and argue that equal audio coverage of the auditorium is necessary, this may be the case with music or miked voices, but this certainly shouldn't be the case with sound effects. The audience will see all the various visual components of a production from different points of view, depending on whereabouts within the auditorium they're sitting, so, it stands to reason that the sonic elements should also be heard from different perspectives. Indeed it is this localisation of the sound that in many cases explains and gives reason to certain aspects of a play. We should finally consider that from the time when Roman Gladiators fought tigers in specially constructed arenas through to the major sporting events of today such as the World Cup final or Super bowl audiences have felt more involved when surrounding the action. It is human nature to surround an event whether it is a man lying on the ground needing help or some street entertainment. A proscenium arch theatre merely displays whereas theatre-in-the round truly contains.

Today we will be discussing my thoughts, ideas and experiences of using surround sound, much of which I have gained whilst working at The Royal Exchange Theatre, we will also discuss other environments and types of theatre spaces that may help or hinder this method of producing sound for theatre.

The Royal Exchange Theatre

I also have a great deal of admiration for Anton Chekhov. Apart from his undoubted mastery as a playwright he also considered sound as an important part of his plays. He has proved to me that you don't always need vast and complex soundscapes to warrant using sound within a play but a few well considered effects often serve to enhance a production and the audience's understanding of the story being told. Like the composer Erik Satie, Chekhov has taught me that often, it's what you leave out that is important, these silences can be as important as the notes or effects that you hear. Stanislavsky noted that Chekhov often conferred with the sound effects man to make sure that the noises produced were of the exact accord to what he had in mind. 

Act three of Three Sisters starts with the sound of an alarm warning of a fire and according to Stanislavsky Chekhov went to a lot of trouble experimenting with various apparatus in the hope of reproducing the typical soul-searing sound of a church bell usually found in a provincial Russian town. It is not clear how the sound of a distant, dying and mournful breaking string originated. This effect is heard twice in The Cherry Orchard and Chekhov certainly regarded this sound effect as an important device for evoking the right sort of mood in his audience. Stanislavsky himself was more than eager to produce sound effects but in Chekhov's opinion he often overdid it. His fondness for choruses of chirping crickets was a standing joke and his introduction of birdsong and croaking frogs were often inappropriate for the season. 

Chekhov used sound effects with great skill and much thought, he used them as a method, not available to him in his short stories, of creating atmospheres. His reasoning on this has shaped and is crucial to my philosophy about sound for theatre. There is nothing finer than a good actor reciting thoughtful lines with great skill, but theatre has the power to truly rise above this and take this experience beyond what we can obtain from reading a book. I sometimes want to experience more than an actor reading to me, I want to understand more about the world he inhabits. The costumes they wear and the settings that they perform on may help to give me more information, but for me, that crucial thing, sound, is often missing. I think Chekhov understood this and aimed to give the audience, when he deemed it possible, more than purely a recitation of one of his books.

But I want to start by trying to prove the value of sound in a production. Let us consider what would be achieved if all the various design elements were to be used in complete isolation. By complete isolation I mean no actors and no text - I would argue that a set standing alone or a particular series of lighting states cannot tell a story as well as a few well thought through sound effects or a piece of music. Two examples that we can discuss, firstly, most people have a favourite piece of music which reminds them of a particular special moment in their lives. Wherever and whenever they hear that piece of music the memories and feelings of past experiences will be remembered. Unfortunately, and here’s my argument, particular qualities of light or pieces of furniture rarely have the same emotional effect. By saying this I am not suggesting by any means that all scenic design consists of choosing and placing items of furniture on a stage or all lighting states replicate particular times of day or environments, but merely trying to prove that sound (in this case music) plays a very important part in our sub conscious. This powerful way of affecting people has, much to the dismay of many of us who try to understand how to create it, so often been undervalued in theatrical situations. So, imagine an empty, dark, stage. You hear a subway train rattling past and a distant wailing police siren. With the aid of these simple sounds you've been transported to New York, a clock ticks and the refrigerator hums we have now established that we're inside. The clock chimes twelve, rain is falling, the wind howls, a slow heartbeat and the rattling of keys outside. The scene is set and I hope that I have started to prove the power of sound.

In our daily lives, we are surrounded by sound. We are constantly bombarded with sonic information, which can warn and inform us of many things. In the soundtrack that was playing earlier, we were transported through many different locations and different periods in time and these sonic pictures or soundscapes hopefully told us a story and supplied us (whether we were conscious of it or not) with an enormous amount of information. The sounds that underscore our lives combine complex rhythms and timbres and reach our ears from so many different directions that, in all honesty, it's no wonder that we often have trouble in appreciating it. We all understand the messages that we sonically receive, but we largely choose to ignore this noise and rarely give credit to its existence. A person who can acknowledge the role that sound plays in their lives arguably fully acknowledges life itself. It’s easy to appreciate popular music whatever its style, we easily learn to recognise simple rhythms provided by percussion instruments, we recognise the sounds that pianos, guitars, brass and woodwind instruments provide but rarely appreciate the vast array of other sounds that play an enormous part in our lives. In fact, we all to often refer to the noise that everyday life produces as unwanted noise. It’s easier, after all, to dismiss something than learn to appreciate or understand it. It really is often the case of shoot the pianist the accompaniment is awful.

We should also ensure that we are not scared of the consequences, failures, criticisms and doubts that we as practitioners are likely to experience as we address the future of sound design in theatre.

Finally, it is widely accepted that the real turning point in the history of cinema came when the use sound was developed and became widely used. The advent of sound changed, improved, benefited and revolutionised the movie industry. A cinema organist often underscored films, but when we learnt how to record dialogue and then importantly create atmosphere and emotional responses using sound FX, the film industry never looked back. This could possibly be seen, in some respects, as an important lesson that theatre still has to learn.

Maybe we should just consider the following for a moment. Popular music has just about burnt itself out and many audiences are being fed artistes who are often just winners of talent contests, singing songs that more often than not have been made popular by others, more talented, before them. Even established artists rely on sampling instruments and musical phrases that have been written, recorded and made popular by others previously. Prime time television now often relies on reality TV shows, soap operas and programmes that consist of video footage either shot by the public or CCTV, never has there been a better time in recent history for theatre to once again provide quality, well-informed entertainment now that it seems other popular mediums are ignoring their responsibility to do this. But if we are to face this challenge successfully then we need to be able to embrace modern ideas and technology, we need to readdress how we approach designing for, what is now, a very sophisticated and technically knowledgeable audience whose tastes and expectations are vastly different from theatre going audiences of the past. Of course, the most important thing is that theatre needs to continue to attract new writing talent with fresh ideas but also, we do need to readdress our approach to design, which should, without question, include the acceptance of the proper and creative use of sound. Although I freely admit that the real challenge many theatre companies and producers will face, if they choose to explore new ways of considering design, is that they will be doing so in houses that were built in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries purely as 'Palaces for entertainment'. These theatres, with no actor - audience intimacy are often problematic if you wish to offer the audience more than just a lavish set. We do need theatres which are suited to live performance in the 21^st century and thankfully, the Royal Exchange is one of these

As we approach our discussion about surround sound let us briefly go back in time. Sound was thought about and used long before the invention of the marvelous samplers and computers that are now available and long before the advent of magnetic audiotape, forget wax cylinders even, let us go right back…..

Let us look back at some history of sound in the theatre. Let’s visit the theatres in London around the late15^thand early 16^th centuries and discover that understanding the importance of sound isn’t the recent theatrical or cinematic concept that we all perhaps imagine it to be. The theatres around this time such as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Fortune had thrust stages surrounded by galleries. No member of the audience was further than 15.25 metres (at the Royal Exchange this is 9 metres) from an actor standing downstage at the focal centre of the stage. Because of the design of these theatres the actor was not just standing in the centre of the visual space he was importantly standing in the centre of the aural space. It was said at the time, by the poet Sir Thomas Overbury, “sit in a full theatre and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears whilst the actor is the centre”. These south bank theatres were in fact designed as instruments to produce, shape and propagate sound and it could be argued that the architects and builders involved in the construction of these spaces were, in fact, early sound designers and engineers! I have always believed that you will only be able to achieve true surround sound in a spherical shaped environment, a theatre reflects the world we live in and sounds surround this world, maybe this is also why Shakespeare appropriately named his theatre the Globe! In fact I have recently discovered that even as far back as the 1^st century BC, Vitruvius, a Roman theatre architect and scenogropher, stated that the shape of a theatre should be the shape of sound itself, a sphere.  

Sound was a priority for many centuries and remained so until the advent of electricity. But it is the art of sound what we’re here to discuss. How were sound effects created?

Sound has always been an issue. Ben Johnson's character Morose complained that he didn't want to hear "fights at sea, drum, trumpet and target". When James Burbage started building his theatre in Blackfriars neighbours petitioned and complained that the playhouse was so near the church that the noise of drums and trumpets will greatly hinder both ministers and parishioners. (This all seems vaguely familiar!). Drums and trumpets were used to an enormous extent. Plays would start with three loud trumpet blasts, various stringed and brass instruments would be used to accompany the actors, bells, drums and cymbals for effects, sound props such as swords, shields, foyles would be used to enhance battles along with fireworks and explosives. Thunder, which was used usually as a sign of supernatural happenings and created, as we all know, often by rolling cannonballs along specially constructed wooden shutes. The theatres of Shakespeare’s time were full of sounds besides those made by the human voice. A play entitled Loves Pilgrimage by Francis Beaumont has the stage directions for both a cannon and a pistol to be shot off. As the playhouses moved from being in the open to having roofs the use of many of these effects, for obvious reasons, were scaled down, and music began to play an even more important role.

These methods of creating sound remained pretty much the same until the early twentieth century. Although sound props such as thunder shutes, rumble carts, bird call whistles etc. were still heavily used well into the 1940's. This is demonstrated brilliantly in Act 2 of Ronald Harewoods "The Dresser" where he describes the making of the Storm in King Lear using instruments, props and stagehands.

The important thing for any designer, in any discipline, is to be creative. What makes a person creative? Does a creative person need to be a good technician? Well, creativity is a difficult thing to quantify but it is something that we all need to address and importantly something to be encouraged and nurtured.

Briefly, the theatre industry places a huge value on technical competence, everyone is expected to be able to use the tools of their trade and be able to perform a cue under pressure. But one of the great problems of paying so much attention to technical competence is that the frame of mind in which interesting things germinate is often desperate and confused rather than organised and confident. I believe that being creative is having the ability to balance and shift between these extremes. I always believe that if you are confident and believe that you know exactly what to do when you start a project then this is the surest way to guarantee that nothing interesting will happen. If you approach a project in that way I believe the best that you’ll come up with is a duplicate of something that you or someone else has already done before. I would argue that it’s always best to start a project with few assumptions on how to proceed. I start all of my designs with very few preconceived ideas, I try to obtain as much information and in the initial stages, be led the director and set design.

I strongly believe that the assumption by many that creating sound for stage productions is merely a technical activity is dangerous for the continuing growth of the profession. A lot of what sound designers now do, and desire to do, draws a greater parallel to musical composition than technical exploration.

A good play will always start with a good script, the production will develop as the creative team takes this blueprint and adds depth to the story. In an ideal world all the collaborators should be open to explore the text and each others ideas. The best and most creative ideas will always come from doing the work itself, they will rarely form in our minds or by staring at a blank piece of paper. The difficult but crucial rule is never to be frightened of making mistakes, as nothing paralyses an artist more than this fear.

So finally! My approach to designing sound for Theatre in the Round,

When I read a script I, obviously, primarily try to understand the story that the playwright is telling, I note the explicit sound effects that are described, I also note the environments and note any keywords that may describe the environment, emotion, mood, reaction or suggest a sound. I also note any spatialisation or imaging ideas that I might have.

I often imagine sounds such as cicadas, clock ticks and birdsong in a musical context, other sounds such as wind, rain and crowd noises I try to imagine as randomly created noises. I then decide what needs to be ambient and what needs to be concrete. A mixture of randomness and rhythm often works well when creating ambience and atmospheres. I dissect every sound into its component parts as this is crucial when ensuring the correct spatialisation and imaging. All sounds have the capability to evoke an emotional response, for instance, subtle changes in the rhythm and tone of the sound created by a cricket or clock tick for instance can help create or build tension, as can changes in frequency of, say, a whistling wind. These sounds can do so much more than purely inform the audience member of the weather or location! When thinking about sound, especially ambiences, I try to use my mind like a prism. A prism, as you all know, splits a beam of white light into it’s component parts, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. If, for instance I’m trying to create a street atmosphere I will consider all the sonic elements that might create this soundscape. For instance, whilst standing on the corner of a street you may hear the sounds of a train rattling over head, footsteps, emergency vehicle sirens, cars, street vendors, talking and shouting, road works. I’ll then decide what sounds are necessary to help the production, and then how this sound is placed within the audio image. I also need to consider whether the sound is stationary or moves. It is most often the case that you’ll not need all the sound elements that are part of a real sonic landscape to, theatrically, portray this environment. The decision about which sounds are fundamental and which are unnecessary is crucial. For instance, a single police siren and the sound of a train rattling overhead may be more than enough to set the scene, the other sounds may prove to clutter and confuse the moment. Or, perhaps the scene could start with all the various elements then each could subtly and individually fade out. The decision made is entirely dependent on the needs of the production. It is important to think carefully about how to create an atmosphere and what sonic elements are essential to tell the story.  

Being imaginative with emotive sound is often the most creative and satisfying part of our art. Conceiving moods and atmospheres with (or with what people may consider as) often abstract sounds is immensely satisfying and although we all use similar techniques to those a composer would use when creating a piece of music, we attempt to achieve similar results but by using less conventional sounds. These soundscapes can absolutely influence the mood of any piece in the same way that conventional music can. Whereas composers of music will be influenced, like us, by the world around them, they will often be restricted by the limitations of the musical instruments they use, I believe that we don’t have these limitations and that the whole sonic world is our orchestra. I think it is false to assume that an audience necessarily requires strict song like structures to enable them to appreciate sound and understand sonic emotions.