Sound design

Technological innovations of the 20th century

Prior to the 1930s, the manner in which sound in the theatre was produced had not changed for more than 2,000 years. Music was played by musicians present in the theatre. Sound effects were produced by people who mechanically created sounds during every performance of the show. In the 1930s, however, the recording industry expanded rapidly throughout the world. Along with recordings of classical and popular music, the first sound-effects libraries were developed. These recordings, made on low-fidelity 78-rpm (revolutions per minute) records, contained short tracks of many different sounds, from barking dogs to steam locomotives. First developed for the burgeoning radio market, sound libraries were soon adopted by theatre technicians. The use of recorded preshow and intermission music to help set the mood of the production became fairly commonplace. Although many sound effects were still produced live, some directors began in the 1930s to make use of prerecorded material. However, because the playing of such material depended on a person’s ability to place a phonograph needle onto a record at just the right time and in just the right place and to adjust the phonograph’s volume on cue, the quality of these effects was often uneven.

In the early 1950s there were several simultaneous developments in the audio industry that ushered in the modern era of sound in the theatre. Advances in electronic engineering greatly enhanced the fidelity of recording and playback equipment. The development of high-fidelity magnetic-tape recorders and long-play (45- and 331/3-rpm) records as well as of sophisticated amplifiers, loudspeakers, and speaker enclosures all contributed to a previously unobtainable level of realism in the reproduction of sound.

In addition to high-quality playback, magnetic recording tape offered two other advantages over records: it could begin playing all but instantaneously, and it could be spliced, which meant that it could be edited, with sounds arranged and rearranged to suit the needs of a particular production situation. Additionally, for the first time the effects and the music needed during a production could be played from a central location. The playback deck as well as the amplifiers and mixing and equalization equipment were typically housed in a booth at the back of the auditorium. Portable loudspeakers were placed wherever needed on the stage or in the auditorium. Through the use of a playback mixing console (also called a mixer or a mixing desk), the sound operator could direct the sound for a particular cue to its appropriate location at a specific loudness level. It therefore became possible for one operator to run all of the sound cues from the sound booth during a production. Finally, the introduction of tape reduced the number of effects specialists needed; prior to the use of recorded sound effects, it was not unusual for a production to require a crew of six or more to create the effects during a performance, but afterward only one or two nonspecialist crew members were needed, primarily to move speakers and other equipment.

The changes to sound in the theatre over the ensuing three decades were again technologically based. Experimentation with multitrack recording and playback occurred in a variety of venues, and with various degrees of success, in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. But the most significant change came in the area of vocal reinforcement. By the early 1960s, it was standard practice in productions of musicals to use microphones to help project singers’ voices over the orchestra. These microphones were typically spaced across the front of the stage for downstage pickup and hung in the fly loft for upstage pickup. But these systems were not ideal. In a typical installation, singers had to stand directly in front of one of the downstage microphones for best results. The cables connecting the microphones to the mixing console were also subject to radio-frequency interference caused by the stage lighting system.

The development of affordable miniaturized wireless microphones in the 1980s significantly improved vocal reinforcement. Wireless microphones send their signal to the mixing desk via a small low-power FM radio transmitter hidden somewhere on the actor. The microphone is often placed in the actor’s hair or mounted on a flesh-coloured headset mouthpiece. The accuracy of sound reproduction (sometimes referred to as “presence”) that is obtained by placing the microphone in close proximity to an actor’s mouth is extremely high.

The improvement in the quality of vocal pickup spawned other changes during the 1980s and 1990s. The mixing desk was moved from the isolated sound booth into the auditorium so the operator could hear what the audience was hearing and vary the sound mix accordingly. Where a musical’s budget was large enough, it became standard practice to place microphones among the orchestra as well as on the lead singers so the sound operator could balance the levels of each for the best result.

The use of wireless microphones soon expanded beyond musical theatre to every type of theatrical presentation. The advantages of audiences’ being able to clearly hear actors were obvious. Also, the ability to modulate the loudness of an actor’s voice allowed directors and sound designers to begin experimenting with the use of background music and effects throughout entire scenes in much the same way that movies and television used sound.

The other significant technological development to affect the sound industry in the 1980s was digitization. Digital sound equipment—preamplifiers, amplifiers, mixing consoles, and so forth—began appearing early in the decade, although only in the late 1980s did such equipment become sufficiently affordable that it was adopted widely. While there is no question that a digital signal most accurately replicates an original sound, there was at the turn of the 21st century considerable debate among sound designers as to the quality of sound produced by analog and digital equipment. The debate centred on the aesthetic issue of whether digitally reproduced sound demonstrated the same “tonal warmth” as sound recorded using an analog signal.