"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Articles 3 & 4

 

[Welcome to the second entry in my republication of American Theatre’s July/August 2019 series on sound design.  The two articles below will discuss the use of background music in “straight” theater the way moviemakers use it and the various ways a young sound designer can learn the practical lessons of the art.  

[The articles in this series aren’t linked contextually, but they all treat the same general subject.  Each article has advice, lore, and recommendations (including references and sources of information) that can be helpful or just edifying.  So I recommend going back to 25 March and picking up articles 1 and 2 in the series either before or after reading articles 3 and 4 posted below.

[The remaining four articles in this collection will be posted at three-day intervals through 9 April.  I hope you will read all of them.]

 

“HOW TO MAKE THEATRE SCORES MORE CINEMATIC”
by Caitlyn Halvorsen 

Composer Jeremy Douglass was inspired by video games to create underscoring that reacts in real time to the action onstage.

It’s a common experience at the movies: You’re sitting in your seat, tense with anticipation, and at a pivotal moment the camera closes in on the hero while the music swells in the background. In films, a musical score is as integral as camera angles and lighting. It emphasizes and undergirds the action, sets the tone for a scene, and even tells us how to feel in a particular moment. While it’s rarer in theatre, more and more non-musical plays are using composers for similar purposes: Imogen Heap’s score for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, for instance, has generated as much buzz as the magical effects. 

According to Florida-based composer Jeremy Douglass, when it comes to scoring straight plays: “You have to just stay out of the way.” Much like other design elements in a theatrical production, underscoring is most effective when it amplifies the action onstage without distracting from it. 

But while a film composer will score based on footage that’s already been filmed, in the theatre it’s usually the other way around. Most of the time the sound designer or composer is at work before the performers have even put the show on its feet. While a lighting shift can usually be triggered in real time by a specific line or action, a show’s score cannot operate in the same way. As unpredictability is a defining element of live performance, it is nearly impossible for a piece of recorded music to specifically reflect the shifts in mood or tone throughout a live scene, because, as Douglass says, “You’re just pressing play.” That means that composers for stage plays are often confined to creating scores that are static, cautious, even bland. “You have to distill a complicated scene down to its most basic element and hope that it works, hope that it informs the audience,” says Douglass. While there is always the option to have live musicians plays along with the action, a la the string quartet in the recent Broadway production [of King Lear, 4 April-9 June 2019 at the Cort Theatre], sitting onstage playing music by Philip Glass, that’s an expensive option with its own instrumental limitations.

Frustrated by these constraints, Douglass discovered a potential solution when he was asked to score Hedda, Lucy Kirkwood’s adaptation of Ibsen’s 19th-century drama, at Jobsite Theater in Tampa, Fla. Director Stuart Fail sent Douglass a copy of the script marked with moments to be accompanied by music. Douglass was concerned, as many of those moments occurred during scenes of tension between the characters. He remembered thinking: “How am I gonna write music for this scene with all these shifting emotions if we’re just gonna press play and not choreograph to the music?” 

Unsure how to approach the task, a source of inspiration came to Douglass from another medium entirely: video games. Specifically, the 2014 survival horror game Alien: Isolation. In the game, players must hide from the title creature, with the alien’s proximity to the player indicated by how many layers of music are playing. One layer may include screechy violins, another the rumble of brass instruments. Douglass describes the game’s underscoring as “orchestral tension music,” minus melodies or chord changes. Because it lacks traditional musical development, the layers of the score “can start and stop at any moment within their own loop and it doesn’t sound like it’s starting in the middle,” resulting in music that feels reactive to the player’s every move. Douglass says that this type of composition has been used in video games for a long time, but he was unsure if anyone had tried adapting the style for theatre. Regardless, it seemed like the perfect solution to his uncertainty about scoring Hedda.

So how does this method work? Compositionally it requires a particular style made up of multiple layers of music, with each layer containing “elliptical phrases, these loops that repeat over and over again,” says Douglass. “They don’t have a beginning, they don’t have an end. You can fade a loop up at any moment, and it sounds like the beginning, just because now is the first time you’ve heard it.” The loops must be composed so that they can be played in any combination at a time, whether it be a single loop, three loops, or every loop in the composition. The composer must also decide which combination of loops, or layers, should play during a specific moment. This layering is what creates the musical development of the underscore, replacing what is traditionally fulfilled by melodies and chord changes.

Douglass cites the music of composer Bernard Herrmann, a frequent Alfred Hitchcock collaborator and master of loop-like motifs to create tension, as a major inspiration for his music choices in Hedda. The loops heard in Douglass’s score feature the instruments of a small string orchestra, a purposefully traditional soundscape that befits the domestic drama happening onstage. “We’ve already given orchestra a space in cinematic underscore,” Douglass explains. “Everybody’s comfortable with it—it’s a character we all know.” 

Then, during the performances of Hedda, the loops were programmed into the scene using QLab, a program designed for running sound and light cues that is commonly used in theatres. Using QLab allowed Douglass and sound designer Matthew Ray to program in advance the rate at which different tracks fade in and out, whether it be an immediate change or one gradually happening over 30 seconds—so it could better match the pace of the live scene. Then during performances, an operator only needs to press a button.

Douglass notes that, while looping programs such as Ableton Live exist, using QLab for the underscoring tracks is a more efficient option, as the tracks can run alongside lights or sound effects also in the program. “No special skills are needed if the company already uses QLab,” Douglass wrote in an email. “A lighting tech can run it, because in the end it works just like lights.”

The biggest challenge Douglass and Ray encountered during the process involved volume levels. The levels, or sound intensities, of each track had to be adjusted so that when all of the tracks play together it didn’t overwhelm the dialogue. For Hedda, Douglass set these levels in Logic Pro, the program he used to compose the score. Once the files were transported to QLab, however, making the levels consistent between cues became tricky.

“Music Cue 1 maybe has 10 tracks, and all of the tracks have been exported at different volumes depending on how I want those tracks to be blended when you turn them up,” Douglass says. “So that makes it difficult to keep the levels for each music cue consistent. If Music Cue 2, when all tracks are playing, is still too quiet compared to Music Cue 1 when all tracks are playing, we have to go through and bring up the levels of each track in Music Cue 2 so they match Music Cue 1.” Douglass believes this complication can be avoided in the future by waiting to adjust the levels of the tracks until the files are in QLab.

The next production he hopes to use this approach on is Steve Martin’s Meteor Shower at Jobsite, which he plans to give a contemporary sound with more modern instruments. To help other composers and sound designers who are trying to figure out how to better underscore a play, Douglass plans to create a series of videos outlining his process, so that they feel, as he does, that “you now have infinite control over music developing into a scene.” Score! 

[Caitlyn Halvorsen is a dramaturg and writer based in the Hudson Valley. A former editorial intern for American Theatre, she is currently working as the education intern for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, New York. She is a recent graduate of SUNY New Paltz’s Theatre Design and Technology program.

[On 3 and 6 March 2014, I posted an article on The Shaliko Company’s Strangers, an avant-garde performance piece composed by Leonardo Shapiro, the troupe’s director, and his company.  Strangers had a live score composed by jazz percussionist Max Roach.  In performance, Roach’s composition, which was part of what Shapiro called the “instrumental track” of the production, was improvised by a musician seated within view of the spectators at the edge of the performance space.]

*  *  *  *
“AURAL LEARNING”
By Jerald Raymond Pierce

Whether you learn at school or on the job, success as a sound design doesn’t follow an easy track.

When you’re in high school, sound design can seem so simple. There’s nothing too complicated, after all, about plugging an iPod or computer into a mixing board and cranking up the volume; even if you’re using a program like QLab, it’s still mostly press and play. But that’s not really sound design, of course, any more than high school acting is really acting. The training involved to do it on a professional level involves learning about music, science, script analysis, and even social skills.

While educators at both undergraduate and graduate levels agree that going through an official sound design training program isn’t the only way to make it in the industry, training can definitely allow for a smoother entrance into an already difficult field. Those who hope to make a living as a sound designer may find themselves working on anywhere from 10 to 20 shows in a year, if they can get the gigs. Chicago-based sound designer Victoria Deiorio, who runs a sound design program she helped create at DePaul University in Chicago, offered a general disclaimer: Sound design is a tough career, and, like many creative jobs, should be something you really want to do if you’re going to pursue it. Deiorio added that the difference between going to school or learning on the job depends on where a young sound designer wants to put their “safety net.”

“In school,” said Deiorio, “you have the ability to make missteps and crumble, in a sense, without too much consequence on whether you’re going to get paid, whether [or] not you’re going to have a job, or whether or not you will have burned a bridge. It’s an environment where you can test things out without too much consequence if you fail.”

In school, the room to fail includes the chance to experiment with different levels of equipment—not always the state-of-the-art digital sound boards, necessarily, as that’s not the reality out in the world—and to branch out artistically. Since sound designers are responsible for taking audiences on an aural and emotional journey, Deiorio added that an interest in human nature is important when deciding to work in the theatre.

“You have to really understand history and anthropology and sociology and psychology and the physiology of how sound waves hit the body,” said Deiorio, who authored The Art of Theatrical Sound Design: A Practical Guide, a sound design training book. “If you like all of those things, then it’s definitely the career for you. If you like psycho-acoustics then it’s totally the career for you.”

Expecting to find young designers or students with a knowledge of all of those areas is a tall task. That’s why programs like the masters program David Budries runs at the Yale School of Drama set out to find students of varying backgrounds and interests to complement each other. With just three students chosen per class, Budries said he tries to get one student who is more oriented toward the technological and engineering side of sound design, one who leans more toward musical composition, and one who falls somewhere in between.

“I have discovered over the years that the integration of different ideas, different dramaturgical approaches, just different mindsets is hugely important to the diversity of the individual classes,” Budries said.

In the classroom, those differing voices are able to bounce ideas off each other and grow based on the strengths of their fellow students. Deiorio, who had conversations with Budries, among others, as she crafted DePaul’s undergraduate sound design curriculum, also employs this strategy, noting that varied voices are crucial as the sound design field moves toward diversifying its workforce. Porsche McGovern’s HowlRound study of design positions in League of Resident Theatre (LORT) theatres between 2012 and 2017 found that 86.4 percent of sound designers were men, and that those men took up 89 percent of all sound design jobs. (The number jumps to 96 percent if you look at Broadway employment during the 2017-18 season, according to data collected by ProductionPro.)

More variety in the background and interests of sound design students means that the training programs are able to provide a necessarily comprehensive training in all things “sound design and engineering” while also allowing students the flexibility to explore their specialties and affinities. According to sound designer Sun Hee (Sunny) Kil, assistant professor at SUNY New Paltz, computer software like Logic Pro and Garage Band makes it easier for students to craft music and soundscapes. While it’s not essential that all students come out as expert composers, it’s important that they have the tools to realize their ideas.

“Students need to get trained to express the emotions or drama in each scene,” Kil explained. “Only sound can make the emotions. We are the psychologists, we are the manipulators—we are the people who can tell the story and really tie it to the audience.”

To that end Kil has her students study music, theatre, and piano, all to help learn the connection between the aural world and human emotion. Students also have to take engineering and physics classes too to better understand the science of sound. As Kil pointed out, “There are many sound engineers who have no sound education out there; they start learning from the shop or touring companies.” Kil said those engineers are missing out on important foundational knowledge.

That’s not to say that bypassing traditional schooling, or joining the sound design game late, can’t work out in the end. Deiorio herself was a ballet dancer who pursued musical theatre as an undergraduate. She had moved to Chicago thinking she’d be an actor and director (she still occasionally does both), but the sound design world, she says, “chose her.” She considers her first three years working in the field to have been her training. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, then, that Deiorio, in both her book and her program, emphasizes teaching young sound designers how to collaborate and express themselves.

“I remember there were times that I did things or said things that were my young, rash mind—what I thought was the right thing at the time,” Deiorio confessed. “You burn bridges. I didn’t want that to happen for the sound designers who were starting out.” She hopes to give her students the ability to clearly and diplomatically “speak to why you want something in a show or why something may not be the best fit for the delivery of that emotion to an audience.”

Effective communication of ideas becomes even more important when considering how difficult it can be for young sound designers to prove their worth to new companies. Sound engineering and soundscapes are so intrinsically tied to their productions that simply playing a director or producer a sound can’t possibly carry the same weight as that sound did in the context of a play.

Kil, who served as the associate sound designer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, recommends that young designers put together a website and portfolio of photos and documentation from previous productions. She advises students, if they didn’t compose the music, to take pictures and include diagrams so people can see the size of the production and the setup. Then, as sound designer Jeremy Lee says, comes talking about that work.

“As a sound designer,” said Lee, former head of the sound design program at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, “you have to get really good at communicating your ideas clearly. The people who are going to be hiring you as a designer are directors and producers, so they want to know what your process is.” 

Lee notes that summer stock theatres and internships that rely on student talent pools are great opportunities to build relationships with more experienced sound designers. (Kil equates this to the restaurant industry—it’s smart to work in a restaurant and see how it’s run before trying to own your own place.) Those connections, in a world as small as the theatre world, may be conversation starters in interviews down the line. Once out of school and working in the industry, Lee explained, it’s all about who you’ve known and worked with and the relationships that have been built.

Once relationships are established, the skills learned as a sound designer can translate to jobs in many entertainment industries, not just legit theatre. Deiorio said she’s had students go on to work on cruise ships, with Cirque du Soleil, and even intern at Kirkegaard Associates, an acoustics and a/v consulting firm. Television, film, gaming, and animation are all open to theatrical sound design students because, as Deiorio noted, the students already know how to tell a story and find that story’s emotional value.

To get there, though? It comes down to meeting people and putting in the work. Deiorio said she encourages her students “to be lifelong learners. You can learn from every single person you work with.” If you’re willing to listen, of course.

[Jerald Raymond Pierce is the associate editor of American Theatre. He studied acting at Ohio University and received his M.A. in arts journalism from Syracuse University. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association, he is also a freelance reviewer for the Chicago Tribune. 

[Article 5 in this sound design series will be posted on Wednesday, 31 March.  It discusses the measures theaters can use to counter potential interference with wireless microphones on their stages. I hope ROTters will come back to read this examination.]