A Priori Acoustics (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Noise)

I can't deny that I've spent a gorgeous afternoon in my room with the curtains drawn, listening to dead men through a dead medium. That's how I like to spend my time. Different strokes, right? I find that when I create a wall between me and reality, I can see reality better. Separation allows for objectivity, or maybe it's like Douglas Adams' Somebody Else's Problem Field - to wit, something that your brain filters out because it isn't your problem, and you only can catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of your eye.

Every sense is important, but some are undervalued. Theater is like sex, though - every sense must be utilized in order for the participants to find release. Mind you, I'd start wondering what I was doing as a sound designer if my work gave audience members orgasms (and I'd have a hell of a time explaining things to the cleaning staff), but I know there's a similar thing that sound can evoke without all that unnecessary stickiness.

Right now my ears are ringing with Lou Reed's ambivalence and feedback. Nobody else is home, so the turntable is cranked to a metaphorical 11 (except that the dial has no numbers at all, so I have to assign volume levels arbitrarily - "soft," "ow," "rock out," "42," "11," and "noise ordinance violation," in that order). It helps with inducing states of synesthesia. At my best, I can physically feel the sound, feel the shriek of the violin or the silk of Nico's voice, or see the spirals of color inherent to this nominally black angel. That, or I'm just having caffeine withdrawal.

Maybe I'm biased from working in radio, a purely aural medium, but sound doesn't get enough credit or attention in theater. The envelope there needs to be pushed, or ripped open, or run through a shredder and set on fire. It's not just music - although music is a crucial way in which people can experience aural transcendence - but the way that things in their entirety are heard and realized. Words are sound. Read this out loud, find the colors and the vibrancy in it that just don't exist as they sit static on your computer screen. Sounds are signs and symbols. Hell, thanks to sound designers from the 30s and 40s, everyone thinks that hoofbeets sound like two coconuts being banged together. This is of course a side effect from Foley sound design - a form of creating sound effects that usually has nothing whatsoever to do with what something sounds like and everything to do with what people think it sounds like; the sound of broken bones is made by snapping sticks of celery, and the aforementioned Monty Python bit, which made for a trope that was delightfully subverted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Sets tell an audience's eyes where they are, but sound tells it to the blind man, or the girl who forgot her glasses (or stubbornly didn't wear them because she thinks they make her look like a librarian), or to everyone during a blackout. Sound evokes primal reactions more than any other sense - that's why horror movies without the sound are just funny, or action movies dull, or why there's an entire business field centered around writing music for pornos. It is our duty in theater to both entertain and enlighten, and sound on its very own can achieve both of those, whether manifested as an LP or a Zen sutra.

I've opened my curtains now that the record is over. Now is the time to embrace the comparative silence - the other side of the aural coin. Yet even in the silence I hear windchimes, five kinds of birds, children, traffic, the wind and rain, my faucet dripping, the clicking of my keyboard and, underneath it all, my own heart beating. Eyes closed, I know exactly where I am and what my world is composed of.

And now I flip the record and coin and start it all over again.

(Next up: Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" and why pop music makes for great theater)