Loading...Good day. Let us today examine the hat of the Sound Designer. Usually, a wizard’s cap covering a bald head or a ridiculous hairstyle more at home in a Lord of the Rings movie than walking amongst people. Come to think of it, I rarely see sound designers walking amongst people. I think they have all mastered the ability of social invisibility, which may be a requirement. They may, in fact, be ninjas but this is pure conjecture.
The sound designer’s chief concern is the eldritch, mystic art of audio reinforcement. Their work concerns the rich panoply of technologies ranging from playback devices, retrofuturistic sonic transducers and, occasionally, enrolling an intern to beat two irregular bits of wood together rather loudly in the back of a barn.
As a result of the incredible depth of knowledge and attention to detail required for the position, it is a frequently agreed-upon understanding that the sound team will also be responsible for solving everyone else’s problems. This usually manifests itself in the immediate and universal requirement to hear any conceivable thing going on within or outside of the theatre at a moment’s notice, as well as possibly see it too, and also all of the internet right now. It is at these moments of imminent necessity that invisibility is a sound designer’s greatest asset.
Few other professions so totally engage the full array of talents demanded of the sound department despite financial compensation, except for every production intern everywhere in the history of ever. It’s a bit like being the only grandkid at the Thanksgiving dinner with a degree in computers and being then expected to function as the extended family’s IT department. It’s also a bit like being a mailman, if you were also asked to handle delivery of water to firefighters, critically injured patients to hospitals and indiscriminate public brutality to the LAPD. I’ve forgotten precisely which theatre department each of those metaphors correspond to, being that we all have a passing familiarity with extinguishing fires and extending percussive force to obstreperous equipment.
Never content to sit in one seat for a particular length of time, the sound designer is always in motion, slipping effortlessly through the shadows and baleful cries of “my headset isn’t working!” to detect any remotely audible embuggerance that can utterly destroy their work, such as noisy air conditioning, a particularly self-evident beer fridge or a spotlight operator who won’t turn off their “Harlem Shake” ringtone during showtime, despite all appeals to their basic human decency.
The enemy, in this case, is the wide spectrum of audible frequencies which were invented in the early thirties by german scientists for the precise purpose of bumming everyone out. Often fragile and spectacularly out of control, the archwizards in the sound community have discovered extensive methods for the control and even propagation of these frequencies, usually whispered at low volume to the small imps that live and work within pro audio gear. Their allotted work time, paradoxically referred to as “quiet time,” consists of near-constant blasting of what they call “pink noise” to mask these incantations, regarded as closely-held professional secrets.
Typical show procedure involves waiting patiently through almost interminable production meetings while other, more legitimate designers from different departments argue about the emotional connotation of a specific shade of blue (often coming to bitter blows). After months of enduring such discussions, the designer can then look forward to the immensely satisfying creative endeavor of deciding which is the best bit of the somewhat overplayed popular MP3 music the director downloaded off of LimeWire or YouTube in a fit of drunken solipsistic rage the night before.
The Mighty SM 58, strongest of all known Microphones, wielded by the god Thor. I think he worked for Metallica.
A sound designer’s toolkit (or “grimoire”) is deep, due to a lifetime of pursuing out-of-the-box solutions for notoriously underfunded budgets. To accurately portray the peculiarly specific quality of, for example, a Maine Coon Cat being thrown backwards in time through a liquid vortex and emerging intact atop a 1976 Dodge Charger driven by John Wayne, a designer may rely on many tools. Specialized computer software, for instance, which streamlines the protracted process of calling a circle atop a pentacle and communing with the Dark Lord for aid. Known only as “ProTools,” this software requires specialized hardware that runs off the blood of innocents, which counts for the curiously high turnover rate in sound internship programs (with spontaneous, complete madness rounding out the remainder).
Once all of the scraps of show program are arranged in order of sephirotic prominence as laid out by Achmed the Mad in “Yamaha Sound Systems: A Primer,” the process of tech can then begin, at which point the designer spends fifteen minutes routing the audio to dozens more speakers than are strictly necessary. After the lighting designer finishes their cigarette, having arrived thirty minutes late, the sound designer’s chief mission becomes attending to the video and audio monitoring by every person of every other person in the theatre at all times, punctuated by brief interludes of severe intoxication.
Once the lengthy process of tech is complete, the delicate gossamer web of crafted sound is ready to be completely destroyed by a swarming mob of patrons who have somehow mastered operating an automobile yet cannot be bothered to silence their “Fur Elise” and stock iPhone Marimba cell phone ringtones. If a sound designer manages to survive the lengthy process of public torture lovingly referred to as “previews” without bludgeoning themselves to death with their totem, the surprisingly sturdy Shure SM 58, they can look forward to the opening night party. Looking only out of the corner of your eye, you may just see them, barely visible in the corner adjacent to the snack table, weeping softly to themselves about the horrible prices their soul will pay in the hereafter.
