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Sound

Sounds Good
The Work of the National's Sound Department
by Andy Lavender (August 1998)

Sound Studio
Sound Studio Illustration Jim Russell


Question: which branch of theatre has undergone the most radical change over the past decade, acquired entirely new tools for the job and altered the way that theatre can be made? Clue: it is easy to overlook that which you cannot see.

The answer, of course, is sound design for the theatre. 'Ten years ago the sound designer didn't exist as such,' says Rob Barnard, the National Theatre's Technical Manager for Sound. 'There was a technician who looked at the script and then provided a dog barking and a carriage departing on gravel. It is now acknowledged that sound is becoming as important a craft as lighting design, and the sound designers are now getting a similar kind of billing.'

There are two reasons for this elevated status. Firstly, digital technology now gives sound designers a huge range of possibilities in recording, manipulating and playing back their raw matter, bits of noise. The result is a speed and precision of execution that were previously inconceivable. Secondly, directors, especially younger ones, turn to sound designers to provide an added dimension to their shows. For sound can place a location with a single stroke, can alter the mood, can shape an emotional response. Spectators often don't realise, as they watch the stage, that they are auditors too and that their minds have been infiltrated by way of the ear.

The science of sound might be assisted by a range of new technologies, but it still depends upon that most elusive quantity, the relationship between creative artists. 'It's worth noting that no matter what a sound designeršs technical abilities are, 75 per cent of the job is communication and personality,' says Barnard. 'Being able to get on with the director, being able to communicate effectively. It's absolutely essential.'

Barnard has a team of between eight and fifteen, depending on the repertoire. Individuals are assigned as sound designers to projects, depending on their strengths. This sometimes involves an 'audition' with the show's director, but from then onwards the nature of the work varies depending on the individual styles of both director and sound designer.

Phyllida Lloyd, for example, gave Scott Myers an open brief for his sound design on her production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 'All she said was that the production would be more like the book than the movie,' Myers recounts. This led him to prepare a range of sound environments - school, museum and so on - in a more or less naturalistic manner. At which point a drastic rethink was necessary. 'I saw a run-through, and realised that what Phyllida had done, because of the cuts and pastes to the original script, wasn't anything like the book. So I got my notepad out and made quick sketches of what was happening. I realised that there was no way that naturalistic sound would work, and that everything I'd prepared was rubbish.'

Too modest! In fact Myers had the confidence - the verve - to say that sometimes less is more. 'I listened to Stephen Warbeck's music and realised that the transitions from place to place should be left to the music, not done by sound effects. So I cut a lot of what I'd prepared.' Not all of it, of course. At one point in the play Fiona Shaw, as the eponymous schoolteacher, recites Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott. Myers' approach to this scene illustrates his general principle.

'I try to take the sound studio into the theatre as much as I can,' he explains. 'I can play various kinds of wind on the keyboard, at high or low pitch. I played along with the scene in rehearsal. The keyboard is touch sensitive, so the harder I hit it, the louder the sound. I recorded what I played, and then created the effect we eventually used. There's wind, waves and seagulls - treated - on a backing track, as a bed of sound to add to the surrealism of the scene. But it's almost subliminal. Your attention has to be on Fiona, and you have to be able to concentrate on the text. The effect builds throughout the poem, and then it's all taken out when Fiona says, 'Jenny will be famous for [Myers pauses to indicate the sound being cut] - sex'. You can pull focus in that manner and use sound to dramatic effect.'

The joy of technology. There was a time when Myers would get a reverb-effect by placing a speaker and a microphone in the National's toilet. Nowadays the National's sound department uses digital samplers alongside MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) keyboards. The sound is loaded into the sampler, where it can be 'seen' on screen. It can then be stretched, altered in pitch, given added reverberation, combined with other effects and have its beginning and end tidied up.

Sometimes it's more useful to manufacture a sound through this kind of digital cooking than record it in the first place. Myers simulated the sound of mallet hitting croquet ball, for instance, for Richard Eyre's production of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, rather than risk the vagaries of the British outdoors, with its planes, weather and all manner of noise pollution. Every sound effect is then loaded onto a minidisc or assigned to a key on the keyboard, ready for instant playback.

'The sampler allows you to have a whole palette of sounds available instantaneously,' Barnard observes. 'Gone are the days when you had to wind a tape backwards and forwards to find your dog-bark. You can have a multitude of dog-barks available.' As you can imagine, this leads to unwonted new possibilities in rehearsal - where the sound designer can sketch along with the action or introduce aural elements as a colouring to the scene - and to the performance itself, where the actors are freed from following a sound tape and can instead be 'accompanied' by the sound operator. The latter figure can now be found at the National, working at a control desk inside the auditorium, hearing with the audience rather than stuck behind glass in some tiny bunker.

Barnard's staff also reconfigure the sound set-up - the array of speakers, microphone and so on - with each change of production in the repertoire. They maintain the National's paging, television and intercom systems and Barnard oversees the bid for monies to update and enhance the available resources. The work also entails the sheer business of audibility - reinforcing sounds that are already there, whether they are made by voices, musical instruments or perhaps other items on the stage. In the case of Oklahoma! there is a 24-piece orchestra and 30 actors, the latter amplified through individual radio microphones worn usually in their hair, to allow for freedom of movement, the avoidance of rustle and neat concealment. The production features a sound designer, sound operator, two sound assistants looking after technical needs and two new backstage specialists whose task is to deal with the radio mikes.

'People are not used to listening to voices which are 30 metres away, so you can use microphones and speakers to halve the distance,' says Paul Groothuis, the production's sound designer. 'But I'm not a fan of amplifying for the sake of it. I prefer to let an orchestra grow so that it becomes exciting rather than just loud. There is a very critical point where something becomes not just bigger but louder, and louder is not necessarily always theatrically justifiable.'

How is this 'bigness' achieved? 'It's largely on the distribution of the sound,' Groothuis explains. 'Hanging speakers, so that all members of the audience get a slightly larger than life sound. You also do it with dynamics, building the sound at the right time so that it is ever so slightly more exciting than it really is, because that's what theatre's all about.'

This sounds very subtle, in its 'big' way, but there's a disarming directness to other aspects of Groothuis's work. 'I've always tended to be very clear,' he explains. 'Nighttime is crickets. In the Olivier, the clearest indicator for 'morning' is a cockerel. I've developed a library of almost cartoonlike sounds. A farmyard has to have cows, geese, chicken, and anything else is too much. In musicals there's very little time, so you've got to make it very clear. When the music starts, you've got to take the sound effects out.'

Elsewhere the sound effects are being put in. Chris Shutt will have a sampler and a keyboard in rehearsals for Tim Supple and David Tushingham's adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. 'It's like having 88 tapes cued up, ready all the time,' he says. 'I might leave it there for the director to play with, actually. That's always good. They become less scared of the technology.'

Shutt is celebrated for his ability to work 'on the hoof', generating ideas and effects swiftly as the rehearsal process demands, and for 'painting with sound', touching in the effects as if he were standing at a canvas wearing a beret. He remains modest, nonetheless, about the limits of his craft. It doesn't have to do everything. 'You need something visual in the first place,' he says. 'You need an actor, or perhaps something else. On stage, the most successful sound effects have a strong visual hook.'

Spoken like a painter.

Andy Lavender is a Lecturer in Drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He writes regularly for the Arts desk at The Times and has directed a number of small-scale productions