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Sound is a reliable thing. The sounds of songs we use to recover from break ups or sing at traditional events, and the sound of our baby breathing, our dog barking, our fingers scuffing the pages of a book we are reading, all have a feeling we recognise and trust. So what are audiences meant to think when a soundscape is telling them to fear someone despite being told there is a strong possibility they are harmless?
In 2012, Jon Ronson's Ted Talk titled 'Strange Answers to the Psychopath Test' discussed his research into the grey areas of the psychopath checklists and examinations. Accompanying this talk was live-mixing projected imagery, along with illustrative sounds and music. This impact is often subtle and hidden beneath Ronson's explanations, however it illustrates that inability to trust the information given; music and sound sets a mood that we as an audience are taught to trust. The entire experience plays with our ability to look beyond wanting to label another human being psychopathic, and the illustration of shackles, echoing voices, and singing birds, gives us a contrasting image to Ronson's words that the audience has to choose whether to trust.
I think our trust in sound is important, because it is an area of vulnerability for an audience where a collaborator can take their expectations and use them to surprise them or induce a response. This vulnerability is also a strength for the audience, as it allows that connectivity and communication that is important in portraying an experience. It does not have to be sound. What happens when we make an audience unable to trust something as familiar and connecting as a sensory experience? 'Walk' was based in Trent Tunnel in University of Nottingham. The interesting aspect was not just the acoustics, but its reverberation of footfall, which the artists, Paul Bavister, Jason Flanagan, and Ian Knowles, projected a "base sine wave of 70 hertz along with the combination of other pure tones based on a Japanese scale". The affect was that audiences had an ambience to enjoy, combined with the reverberated footsteps following them along the corridor. The ghostly element of the footsteps only added to the experience, where what could be trusted was being tested. After all, the same audio could be played in a living room space and sound incredibly different. The space the noise is held in impacts the characters and sound it has; and this is an example of how to create a presence or character through this use of sound in space. In the We The Curious exhibition, the children's activity that probably interested me the most was the interactive wall sound and visual wall. The wall was decorated with little characters and objects, some embedded with secret copper lining which reacted to a person's touch, triggering sound and animations projected in light onto the wall. This created an interactive storytelling experience for children to experience multiple perspectives of Bristol's past and developments. I loved how something so simple could tell so many stories, and how the relationship between lighting and sound could bring this set (wall) to life. I'm very interested in bring sound into the physical experience, as well as the visual. Lighting and sound are interesting partners that are often put together and for a good reasons, but there are other sensory elements to an experience that can be used to create something interesting. That said, there must be a reason we associate them together, and there are a lot of interesting experiments to be had with the two mediums. How do we allow our sets to respond to audience members? Or how does that response turn a set into a character or a collection of characters themselves? 'Arrival,' directed by Denis Villeneuve, tackled the concept of communication through a science fiction plot line, where translation between humans and aliens is explored through a new form of visual and audible language. An example of the sounds used can be found in the First Encounter sound piece, where the alien habitat and language can be heard. It's difficult not to get me excited about a sound team's methods of recreating sound, let alone their attempts to create an original language for an alien species unfamiliar with earth. Sound editor for the production, Sylvain Bellemare, said that they opted for organic sounds so the piece would sound more "like a natural mountain moving, instead of a very sci-fi, electronic sound." This involved creating composition and sound effects through various organic sounds, including rock sound effects and animal sounds. Examples of nature meeting man-made seem to continuously come up in researching. 'Arrival' Ink Ring Translations The entire aesthetic of the film seemed to have an curved feel. The aliens communicated through varied ink splattered rings. The ship they arrived in was a giant curved sheet. And that is no different for the sound, which seemed to revolve and pan with increasing and decreasing intensity, repeating many of the same sounds over and over again. In connecting the other elements of a production to the sound, opening ourselves up to the shapes and colours that our sound creates can not only create a cohesive piece, but bring to mind ideas we would never have considered.
Forest 404 follows Pan, played by Pearl Mackie, as she tries to understand a recording of a rainforest in a time when nature no longer exists. The podcast has an incredibly relaxing feel underneath the disturbing mystery and the relationship between Pan and her boss. Episodes are followed by expert opinions on subject matter from within the drama and a sound excerpt for audiences to enjoy. Forest 404 attempts to help us explore our relationship to nature in a world where speed and data are highly valued. Bird sound and synthesisers seem to creep throughout the scene underneath the speech of these characters, creating both a sense of ease and one of fear. In an expert discussion on Forest 404 was titled 'How is the sound of the world changing?' Two excerpts by Bernie Krause were played, both were of Lincoln Meadow, California's Sierra Nevadas, were played, the first recording from 1988 and the other from 1989. Spectrogram of the Original Recording
Since the first recording, selective logging had begun in the area, and whilst the visual landscape appears the same, the audible one has changed. The creatures no longer overlapped each other; they seemed to allow each other space to be heard. He has returned to the sight numerous times over the last few decades and his research has shown no improvement in the environment after the logging. In fact the programme goes on to explain how the communication of dolphins and other mammals is being disrupted by human pollution. Are we silencing nature? Our relationship to the environment is complex. Many fish use sound as a way to navigate safe places to live, so a healthy coral reef is often described as sounding like popcorn popping, due to all the courtship and warding that goes on in these collected environments. Allegedly, the sound of the ocean can "even disrupt the sonic transmissions of submarines" due to the amount of din that exists there. In conjunction, the damage that we have had on underwater environments is so great that, some scientists are monitoring the sounds that fish respond to in order to attract them back to coral reefs that were abandoned after human interference. Sound can be used to monitor the impact humans have on nature, and vice versa, but also work to undo some of the damage that nature has sustained. Which is why it is such an important part of our relationship to nature that we need to consider when making theatre. Silence is a powerful device in story making, because when select correctly it can create an uncomfortable exposure for the audience. Especially in performances like 'La Maladie De La Mort' where sound exists beneath the performance an is not noticeable until it is gone. Silence creates an anticipation, waiting for the next noise. We have seen how films like 'The Silence' and 'A Quiet Place' have created worlds where sound is a danger to human survival.
The focus was not on the silence. It was on the rare moments where sound occurred and how loud and impactful that quiet noise felt, despite the fact that the wait before the noise was even more terrifying. In a fast paced world, slowing down to enjoy quiet has become a vulnerability that exposes us to our thoughts and concerns. However it has also existed as a form of therapy and a way to stir ideas from within. Maybe our reckoning is the loss of sound or maybe it is the moment sound takes away our ability to slow down? It's also important to consider how we bring sound into the visual. VR music videos have brought a more immersive medium to experiencing music. Applying colour and imagery to music is a common trial that artists go through, and it has allowed them to explore plot lines within the music, portray the experience from the perspective of Chromesthesia, or even place themselves within the main narrative of the music. Whatever reason, the approach we take to bring the audible into the visual is very delicate; are we dressing up the sound, or supporting it, or is it supporting the visual? The purpose of the sound in the entire piece, because after all it is not the only aspect of a piece, is a great way to find out how to present it. Consider DJs, and how they can arrange their audience around a mixing desk, supported by lighting and speakers. We might not be intending to place sound at the centre of the piece, but consider its relationship to light and how the audience are utilising the space it exists in. Think about how, in everyday life, announcements are communicated through speakers and tannoys; the divide or hierarchy that creates between the person speaking and those listening. Look to the intimacy and secrecy of communicating through a pair of headphones. The way lights can glow gently in time to music... The relationship between nature and man-made sounds interests me because it highlights a battle to overcome one another in which both simply exist together. The SFX that we hear are rarely as they seem, which is why frying bacon is used to create rain showers, and that opens up an entire world of potential. The use of nature in an immersive soundscape about reckonings allows us to take the expected and recognisable, and manipulate it in order to draw reactions out of audiences. Nature is not the only path this can go down, because we have trust in so many aspects of our lives and sound has many relationships to us, including that of our emotional memory.
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