The Tonys and Sound Design

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.