Sound in theatre

The sound designer is in charge of anything that is heard during the production. This includes life or recorded music and sound effects as well as the vocal projection of the actors, both speaking and singing.

A bit History

Around 3000BC, China and India accompanied their theatrical productions with incorporated music and sound, and we know of examples of sound used throughout the history of theatre. In Greek tragedies and comedies the productions call for storms, earthquakes, and thunder when gods appear. There is an extensive history of the machinery that was used scenically; and even though there are only a few mentions of it, there were also uses of machinery in place for the few sound effects they needed. In the Roman theatre, Heron of Alexandria invented the thunder machine using brass balls that would drop onto dried hides arranged like a kettledrum, and the wind machine with fabric draped over the rotating wheel.

In 1913, Italian Futurist composer Luigi Russolo built a sound-making device called the intonarumori. This mechanical tool simulated both natural and man-made sound effects for Futurist theatrical and musical performances. He wrote a treatise titled The Art of Noises, which was written as a manifesto in which he attacks old presentations of classical instruments and advocates the tearing down of the classical structure and presentational methods of the music formats of his time. This could be intimated as the next stage of the use of unconventional instruments to simulate sound effects and classical instrumentation

The field begins to grow when Hollywood directors such as Garson Kanin and Arthur Penn, start directing Broadway productions in the 1950’s. Because they had transitioned from silent films to ‘talkies,’ they had become accustomed to a department of people in the position of authority regarding sound and music. Theatre had not yet developed this field; there were no designers of recorded sound. It would normally fall upon the stage manager to find the sound effects that the director wanted, and an electrician would play the recordings for performances. In time, because savvier audiences could distinguish between recorded and live sounds, creating live backstage effects remained common practice for decades.