What to make of this week’s
decision to drop the Tony Awards for Sound Design? Outside of the Broadway and
West End bubble, after all, sound is really quite the thing. To drop awards for
Sound Design seems a little, er …odd.
There is much current popular interest in auditory culture and sound as a plastic medium. Consider the BBC’s recent Noise:
A Human History or Apple’s current Your Verse promotion and a plethora of new phone
apps for DIY editing, designing, composing, manipulating and sharing sound. Now
think of the inescapable fetishization of high-definition sonic immersion, from
high-end Dolby Atmos to the far-fetched claims for virtual surround sound
emblazoned on the boxes of bargain supermarket flatscreeen TVs. No one can have
failed to have noticed how interested people are in sound at the moment.
We know what sound design is
because as modern sonic subjects we design our aural lives. We have the technology
and aural technique to make aesthetically bespoke daily journeys. From our personalised
wake-up alarm-tones to our choice of bedtime podcast, we weave in and out of headphone space, through intermedial
public places, acoustically sculpted built environments, exhilarating noise-spots
and planned oases of idealised peace and quiet. We make playlists to match or
orchestrate our moods. Our houses are wired and wi-fied for sound. We wear ringtones like jewellery. We wear
earplugs to sleep.
In universities around the
world, students of anthropology, history, geography, sociology, psychology,
media studies, cultural studies and other disciplines now take courses in Sound
Studies as part of what Jonathan Sterne calls an ‘interdisciplinary ferment in
the human sciences that takes sound as its point of arrival and departure’. Among the Profs, a new idiom of analysis comes
littered with acoustic metaphors. PhD candidates investigate the alleged ‘ocularcentricity’
of modernity—a supposed visual bias in modern figures of speech that represents
or produces a characteristically modern visual modality of though. To counter this appears the sudden, prolific
adoption of the term aurality— the field of interaction between the acoustic
world, its inhabitants and their cultural activities.
Theatre would seem well-placed
among these to think through all of this. After all, your ticket doesn’t only
buy you a play, some acting and a queue for a warm bottle of Becks at halftime,
it buys you an expertly-crafted, intermedially-material experience. However, where
the discourses of theatre have typically equated the material with the visible and
sound with the technical, the concept of theatre aurality challenges them to conceptualise
the phenomenology of immersion and resonance, the meaning of atmosphere and
noise, the significance of the energised materiality between theatre’s objects
and so on.
Theatre doesn’t use these terms
itself of course; this is the language of academic drama or performance,
which increasingly wants ‘industry’ practitioners to come along to its conferences, employ it's graduates and tell it about the impact of its research. I would argue that the development of the academic interest in the epistemology of sound goes hand-in-hand with the rise of sound in culture generally.
I’m an academic. But twenty years ago I composed scores for plays and even back then theatre was
thinking about these things through practice. Sonic experiment even then,
occupied an increasingly prominent place within the collaborative rehearsal
process. It was this that led to the rise of the sound designer. There is
rarely a play produced in London without one credited these days. If, as has
been suggested, the Tony committee doesn’t understand the term, the one wonders
how much time its members have spent around the creative processes of theatre
in the past couple of decades.
Their decision makes the commercial
end of theatre seem foolish and inward-looking just at a time when there is a
growing interest in theatricality. Others are realising even if the theatre establishment does not, that sound is central to the sense of theatre. A new book by Mladen
Ovadija, Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre, wants
to move the history of avant-garde art into theatre history. It argues that Futurism,
Dada and Expressionism began ‘a continuous tradition’ of aural materialism now evidenced
in contemporary theatre’s ‘return’ to ‘pre-verbal and corporeal impulses’ and music-like
staging methods. The book also notes a trend towards the aural and physical
values of choric performance; an emphasis on aurality, the use of the
sonic-sphere as kinetic sculptural space; and intermediality. Sound design has
been instrumental in this trend.
I doubt the Tony panel considers that the performative generation of material meaning
through sound is too crucial to contemporary dramaturgy to be trivialised by awards for ‘Best Sound Design’. Is it the petulance of a threatened establishment which
believes in an ocularcentric hierarchy of theatre production which begins with
reading and ends with watching? Maybe. Why is this important? For sound designers it
is not only about parity with other creative workers in terms of status and
glamour; it is about parity in terms of pay. Directors want sound designers in
the room with them; so do lighting and set designers. But as long as institutions
of the establishment such as the Tonys keep the discipline invisible, producers
will feel they do not have to pay proper rates or conceded proper royalty
pointages. In the end, theatre’s relevance will suffer.
People are keenly
interested in the acoustic world they live in and their own heightened and
complicated aurality. Only by valuing its
sound designers can theatre, as a live arena where intermedial experience is crafted
and examined, be a defining artform of the age of aurality.
