Sound Effect

The Theatre We Hear

Ross Brown, Scott Palmer, Joslin McKinney, Stephen A. Di Benedetto

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350045910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023 Sound Effect tells the story of the effect of theatrical aurality on modern culture. Beginning with the emergence of the modern scenic sound effect in the late 18th century, and ending with headphone theatre which brings theatre's auditorium into an intimate relationship with the audience's internal sonic space, the book relates contemporary questions of theatre sound design to a 250-year Western cultural history of hearing. It argues that while theatron was an instrument for seeing and theorizing, first a collective hearing, or audience is convened. Theatre begins with people entering an acoustemological apparatus that produces a way of hearing and of knowing. Once, this was a giant marble ear on a hillside, turned up to a cosmos whose inaudible music accounted for all. In modern times, theatre's auditorium, or instrument for hearing, has turned inwards on the people and their collective conversance in the sonic memes, tropes, clichés and picturesques that constitute a popular, fictional ontology. This is a study about drama, entertainment, modernity and the theatre of audibility. It addresses the cultural frames of resonance that inform our understanding of SOUND as the rubric of the world we experience through our ears. Ross Brown reveals how mythologies, pop-culture, art, commerce and audio, have shaped the audible world as a form of theatre. Garrick, De Loutherbourg, Brecht, Dracula, Jekyll, Hyde, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, James Bond, Scooby-Do and Edison make cameo appearances as Brown weaves together a history of modern hearing, with an argument that sound is a story, audibility has a dramaturgy, hearing is scenographic, and the auditoria of drama serve modern life as the organon, or definitive frame of reference, on the sonic world.

PART ONE

Theatrical hearing

1

It’s obviously an effect
(An introduction)

Splat

Now hear this. The crowd settles down as the lights dim. There is a beat of silence, and then…

A hazy childhood memory from the late 1960s, England. Maybe John Noakes – one of the hosts of the long-running BBC children’s TV magazine programme Blue Peter. It is vague. It may have been another programme and another presenter, but for the sake of argument, it was Noakes. He is presenting an item on the secrets of sound effects. He is showing how to make the sounds of people being punched, by hitting a cabbage with a rolling pin. At the end of the demonstration, a watermelon is dropped for a really juicy, head-splitting splat.

These were very familiar sounds – not the sounds of cabbages and watermelons, but representations of punching. The aurality of screen violence was more known to children than those fruit and veg. Baby-boomer children heard a lot of cartoon violence in the 1960s. They mainly heard it on TV but more viscerally at ‘Saturday Morning Pictures’ – the variety bill of children’s drama serials, cartoons and advertisements, screened weekly at the local cinema. In such auditoriums, many impressionable ears first encountered the theatrics of sound – their effect and ontology; their artifice and rhetorics. The rhetoric of commencement, for example, which has the extraordinary power to silence a crowd of excited children with the dimming of the houselights and the opening of a curtain. This is what overture means – the opening not only of a visible space, but of a hearing space beyond the here and now; beyond the ordinary. It is a rhetorical flourish that begins things. Now see this. Now hear this.

In the cinema, the curtains slowly parted to reveal the screen in the most exquisite, anticipatory silence. Soon, all the watching children knew, would come a piece of music called Asteroid, which began with an orchestral POW! followed by conga roll and tremolo woodwind that sucked in the silent anticipation from the auditorium, transformed it, held it for a while, built it to a crescendo, and then released it into the signature music of the cinema advertising company, Pearl and Dean (even children’s theatres gather under the rubrics of commerce). Layers of framing followed. The hissing of a cartoon snake warned us that thieves might steal bags from under our feet. Advertisements for sugary fruit drinks and peanuts with cartoon jungle imagery and sounds, and local Indian restaurants with sitar music, clumsily edited together so as to cause loud pops from the narrow soundtrack of the worn 35mm film. A we formed, and felt present in a theatre, even as these frames drew us into the space beyond the curtain.

Then the programme began: heroes and villains pretending to punch each other to the sound of what those of us in the know knew were probably cabbages or watermelons. But if punches were cabbages, then what else lay behind the splats, plops, boings, thumps, bangs and crashes that accompanied the exploding bombs, ricocheting bullets and dropped anvils? What common or garden objects lay behind the haunted houses, the African jungles, and the rattlesnakes, coyotes and stampeding cattle of Wyoming or Texas? While pondering this, we were also shown the technicolour modernity of Gotham City, where big-band orchestral stabs and pop-art cartoon captions, not vegetables, stood in for punches and kicks; shown too, the black-and-white modernity of Laurel and Hardy, whose automobile sounds and police sirens we accepted as an alternative to those we heard in our streets. Silent shorts inducted us into the musical orchestration of their old-fashioned modernity: percussion and siren or swanee whistles (slapstick), woodwind and horns (sirens and the city) and strings (romance). Also on the bill were badly overdubbed melodramatic serials from abroad – Robinson Crusoe, White Horses or Belle and Sebastien – where the spoken voices did not match the moving faces or the acoustic of the scenic sound effects, and whose disposition of sonic oddness and melancholic music made us feel strange. Then there were the cartoons, where sound effects and musical instruments vied with one another in a harum-scarum chase, and we learned precisely what a falling anvil sounded like. It was onomatopoeic and phonically alliterative; and it had a reality of which the obvious fakeness of it all was a part.

Away from the cinema, other theatres configured a me rather than a we: listening disobediently to Pirate pop radio under the bedsheets; Ed Stewart’s Junior Choice, with its swinging, sound-effect-rich novelty records. Then there were theatres of childhood ennui – where clocks ticked ever louder and slower as the sound of the school bell or longed-for doorbell never came. It was within the rhythms of these scenes and a framework of cabbages, swanee whistles, anvils, Stan Freberg’s ‘Banana Boat Song (Day O)’ (1957), and the silent longueurs of anticipation, that children of this late baby-boomer generation learned to hear. It was also where we learned to sound. When we play-fought, some would mimic punching sound effects and gunfire, and others would mimic dialogue or sing theme music while they enacted domestic or romantic scenes with dolls and toys. Some put on voices or made sounds with their bodies that made others laugh; others learned to clap, sing, skip and dance in formation. This was how we, who were not yet sure how much we had in common, tested and agreed our aural knowing and established who we were.

There is nothing special about that late baby-boomer generation. Each generation learns to hear according to its own cultural circumstances. The expressive sounds and noises members of that generation then grow up to make later in life, reiterate, adapt and develop that seminal way of hearing. Its soundings reaffirm its we and its noise-making jams the ‘unequivocal’ soundings of outsiders (Lingis, 1994: 104). This becomes the way of hearing the next generation learns from, and so the audibility of the world resonates, iteratively forwards, through history, mutating slowly like an auditory genome. Children now inhabit a world of TV, films, computer games and downloadable audio products made by grown-up baby-boomers, or their grown-up Generation X offspring, and so it will go on. Do children still hear a world divided into similar scenes? The longueurs of waiting as the ticking of the clock slows down? The domestic ennui of windscreen wipers, boiling kettles, pinging microwaves and baby siblings crying? The solitude of lying awake at night to the creaking of the house, insulated from the weather outside within their own breathing, swallowing, sniffing bodies; sometimes scared of sounds they might have imagined? Is this kind of scenic partitioning of auditory experience innate or learned and historical?

Audio memes

The auditory genome is disseminated by performance. It is rehearsed in the playground and other theatres. It is part of an audimus, a we hear that treats sound effects from popular culture as repositories of aural knowledge. An example of this is the way in which, for successive generations, not only thunder, but other moments of dramatic realization, have been audible in terms of the ‘Castle Thunder’ effect of Frankenstein (1931). By the 1960s, this had become the definitive stock library effect by which subsequent popular TV and film quickly referenced the gothic and the index of delight, thrill and empowerment that recognition of a gothic effect instantly provides (which shall be discussed later). If you have not seen James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, one of the earliest, genre-defining horror talkies, then you will have heard the DeLorean, or the Clock Tower, being struck by lightning in the Back to the Future trilogy, or the lightning and thunder in Bambi, or Citizen Kane. All three are the same recording: the Castle Thunder. If not these, then Ghostbusters, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, The Land Before Time, Airplane!, The Jungle Book, The Muppet Movie, and Young Frankenstein all use the same 1931 Frankenstein thunder clip. If you have seen none of these, and there are many others I could list, you will surely have seen episodes of Scooby Doo or other Hanna-Barbera cartoons. If you are a millennial, you may know it from Spongebob Squarepants or the Powerpuff Girls; from computer games such as Oregon Trail II and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron; or The Haunted Mansion attraction in Disney theme parks. It forms part of the sound collage in the raid of the Death Star in Star Wars IV, A New Hope (1977), one of the aurally defining films of Generation X. If you still cannot recall it, search online for a movie clip or gif of the Castle Thunder Sound Effect. If you grew up within the range of this kind of pop culture, you will know it.

Castle Thunder has become what I term an audio meme, a meme being a ‘cultural element whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (especially imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2017). It provides an instant index of genre-based theatricality. It is a way of knowing thunder drawn not from direct sensory experience, or even from indirect representation, but from what we might term a memic index of reference sounds, whose original conditions and context might be long forgotten and are in any case irrelevant. They ‘work’ as alert tones on phones, apps, games and toys precisely because of this irrelevance. One can set a crash of thunder to sound when a message arrives, or a dog bark as a timer alert without confusing anyone who might overhear it. The seeming randomness acts as a kind of shibboleth or tribal password. It sends a meta-notification: I am from this play-space; I am part of that ‘we’ who met in one of those auditoriums and bonded through our consequent play-life. In the chapter on ‘Game Audio: Virtual Reality Fundamentals’ in his book Designing Sound, Andy Farnell writes that ‘because games are written within an object framework, it is fair to say that everything in a game is an object’ (2010: 316). Perhaps in life and theatre too – me, us and our aural subjectivity included.

Why do sound effects and music sound good together?

Almost from birth, children learn to hear within the artificial object framework of the sound effects repository, or memic index. Parents have probably always sung to their babies and made animal noises to teach them what animals are. The musical box is not new, nor are sound effects devices that moo or bah or make other sounds to induct children into the epistemology of sound. In the last few decades, there have been interactive talking books or sound effect button boards that present taxonomies of common animals or machines using sampling technology. There are play phones or video game controllers with buttons built in that make sound effects. Such learning aids help children to learn language, but the play also develops an aesthetic, a sense of what they like to hear, and of the fun of making sound effects.

A point is reached when the sound effect of a cow no longer instructs the hearer in the linguistic concept of a cow but is available for scenographic functions – to suggest to the child that cows are the vicinity of the story, that the moo moo here and the moo moo there places it in a space of cows. This diegetically instructive principle becomes more complex as time progresses. The aesthetic disposition toward the sound effect perhaps does not. Children graduate to real video games and phones, and different kinds of musical box. Everyone reading this book has grown up in the audio age, wherein their relationship to music and sound effects matured in front of a loudspeaker of one kind or another (in radios, TVs, laptops or on shelves, floors or in headphones).

Let us consider music, and how it fits into the developing world of sound from a child’s perspective. It begins with nursery rhymes, but as they become more aurally aware, children’s understanding that music is of a different order to cows and the object framework of sounds that constitutes their everyday reality will be learned principally through these loudspeakers – the radio, if their parents have one on in the house or car, or from the soundtracks or theme tunes of TV shows or video games. Audio is not only the medium of music in these examples. It also places music, this different order of sounds, within the audio domain, and thus in the audio object framework, which provides coordinates to a play-space reality. It also introduces to the aural aesthetics of sound, a dispositional relationship between music and other audio objects. An aesthetic is established between music and sounds or audio effects. If music is the principal programme (on a record or download, for example), qualitative audio effects frame and narrate a relationship to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Now hear this (A preface)
• PART ONE Theatrical hearing
• 1 It’s obviously an effect (An introduction)
• 2 Dispositions
• 3 Auditorium
• PART TWO Reconfigurations
• 4 Present (A theatre about our person)
• 5 A sound from the suburbs (The curious story of Colonel Gouraud)
• 6 Picturing the scene
• PART THREE ‘Our thunder is the best’ (Living in the audio world)
• 7 Arty, exotic and gothic
• 8 Inside out (Symbolism, cinema and The Bells)
• 9 Audio drama
• 10 Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Copyright