Theatre Sound – Echoes from a CAS Research Group

In January 2024, about five months after the CAS Research Group “The Sound of Theatre” has finished with a three-day conference¹ , I wrote to the fellows asking for some remarks in hindsight. Hindsight? Already, I stumble over the last word: why are so many words that we connect to knowledge or experience visual metaphors? Hindsight? New perspectives? Viewpoints? Seeing something clearly as it becomes transparent?

So let’s rephrase: I asked my fellows for some echoes and resonances from their experience of the project. I suggested the following questions as stimuli:

1. What dominant thought, insight (!), or impression do you take away from the project?
2. What have you learned that surprised you?
3. Is there a particular sound that you connect with the project?

 
From the responses I received, I will weave the following short text. The project itself can be traced here.
 

Thoughts

Even a year-long project with many exchanges – in person, on Zoom and by email – is often remembered by individual instances or aspects.

For Anna Burzyńska, it is about going back to first things: “How to define music and musicality, especially in theatre, but not only.” A project that sits between art forms, disciplines and traditions of thought unsettles some of the terms and notions we take for granted. Anna asked, whether in this instance “the sender (or source) of the sound and its intention were crucial? The sound/melody/rhythm as such? Or the recipient of the sound and how they process what they have heard?”

Millie Taylor had corresponding ideas acknowledging “the diversity of sound experiences in performance contexts and the enormous range of approaches to studying them.” She continues: “One of the dominant impressions I have of the conference is the way it focused my mind and my awareness on sound in everyday life and the impact it has on emotions and wellbeing.” She also references the discrepancy – that was highlighted by Becky Applin in her talk at our conference – between the importance of sound and music for many theatrical productions and the precarious nature of trying to earn a living as a composer or sound designer for the theatre.

Picking up on the work that visiting performance company ZU-UK presented, Lynne Kendrick mentions the “complex interplay between sonicity and visuality” that their work with Virtual Reality involves as a “surprising take-away” – another instance that exemplified the recurring theme of the project, that sound in theatre is always contextual and its experience moulded by our other senses. Lynne also mentions sound artist Melanie Wilson’s audio paper, which was a particularly impressive example for the “space that attention to sound work makes for reparative practice”: sound as a form of engagement with strong psychological and political impact.

Julia H. Schröder emphasises the unusually collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the project, experimenting with different forms of exchange: “regular online and hybrid discussion groups, working on a book project, informal exchange during the residencies, a series of podcast recordings as well as jointly preparing a conference.” In the humanities, where close collaboration is still the exception and not the norm (like in the natural sciences), this was a welcome change for most of us.

And Pieter Verstraete remembers fondly, how the project was able to spill over to his teaching, when his students from Groningen were able to remotely attend the conference as part of their MA course: “It was a great experience for the students and I am happy that such cross-institutional synergies between our universities are possible.”

Things Learned, Surprises Experienced

A project should always generate new knowledge and perhaps even hold a few surprises for those involved. Lynne mentions that she “gleaned more about the impact of sound – in all its manifestations – on making processes. From Anna’s excellent curation of [Tadeusz] Kantor’s practice to the visiting designers podcast testimonies.² I gained more insight into the fundamental challenges and changes that attention to sound in any format brings to theatre practice.”

Others express being surprised regarding the topics’ status (or lack thereof) in the academy: How come, says Millie, “that there are very few people studying sound in popular theatre forms and musical theatre sound”? She adds: “Given musical theatre’s ubiquity across Europe and most of the developed world it seems odd that the primary focus of sound studies remains on experimental performances. It was good that this project explicitly included commercial and mainstream theatre forms, but speaking to the other researchers, the rarity of any awareness of sound in that field (given its economic and technical impact on other fields) is still surprising.” It seems our field is not entirely free from some remaining snobbishness. Adrian Curtin extends this thought with regard to the geopolitics of research: “I appreciated how the conference provided a ‘big tent’ for a broad range of practices to be co-examined. I still wonder whether the tent in question could be even bigger, or have a more culturally diverse membership. Working on the project has made me realise how Eurocentric theatre sound studies has traditionally been. This field of study could probably benefit from a decolonising initiative.”

I would certainly underline this idea and am also aware of the difficulties of such an initiative. Anna exemplifies this when she points to the terminological frictions even within a European tradition of scholarship: “Because we were working in an international team, differences in native languages often translated into differences in perception of phenomena. For example, in Polish we don’t have a word that would allow us to convey the meaning of the term ‘noise’ (in the sense, for example, of Douglas Kahn). We have the word ‘hałas’, but it only implies something thunderous, aggressive, and unpleasant. And we have the word ‘szmer’, which implies a soft, murmuring sound, of rather natural origin. Neither of these terms encompasses the phenomenon of noise in all its complexity and captures its aesthetically or emotionally neutral character.”

I think collectively we learned, as Adrian puts it, “how vibrant theatre sound studies still is.” His worry, if “perhaps, it had peaked as a scholarly endeavour”, could be dispelled – be it by intersectional voice studies³ that Konstantinos Thomaidis introduced us to, rich praxeological research as Duška Radosavjlević presents it in her book and website concerned with Aural/oral dramaturgies, Ross Brown’s seminal study on the “theatre of audibility” to name but a few. “Theatre sound studies”, Adrian concludes, “now seems less niche and more entangled with other intellectual concerns than it was before”.

As a footnote, I personally challenged myself with a techno-practical task: trying to learn, how to produce, record, edit, and publish a podcast, which seemed a particularly appropriate medium to accompany our project. 24 episodes of Staging Sound: Reflecting Theatre Music and Sound Design have been published to date and span a wide range of topics and formats, that pay witness to that vibrancy of our field.

Reverbarations

Harking back, our fellows mention a few characteristic sounds that have stayed with them. Both Millie and Lynne mention the “sound of Munich trams”, with Lynne regretting that her recording of their sound got lost: a reminder of the fleeting nature of sound indeed!

Anna also mentions the sonic genius loci with reference to our swanky office spaces in Friedrichstraße: “silence, the sounds of air-conditioning and electrical appliances and the sounds of the street heard from the office. At weekends I was usually the only person working there. At my home university, I share very noisy workspaces with a lot of people, so this was a unique acoustic experience for me.”

Adrian mentions a specific techno-sensorial experience: “the sound of audio spill from headphones, and its opposite – environmental sound heard through headphones – both of which I experienced several times at the conference. There’s something about being sonically ‘enclosed’ yet also trying to be aware of what is happening outside of one’s own frame of reference and embodied experience that resonates with my lingering contemplation about theatre sound studies as a field – what it contains, whom it includes, what it is (unknowingly) excluding, and what it has yet to ‘hear’.”

For me, it was a sound we could and could not hear: When speaker Salomé Voegelin played a particular piece of avantgarde music during her talk, Zoom’s algorithms – which seek to enhance the sound of a meeting – decided that this track was “noise” and eliminated it completely for the remote listeners, who watched us in the room listening intently, baffled by the apparent silence. Also, I strongly recall the soft sound of Dan Scott’s voice during his presentation of binaural headphone sound, as we all sat enveloped with a pair of illuminated “silent disco” headphones over our ears in the CAS conference room: it felt like a momentous interaction and quite unique.

The opportunities provided by the Center for Advanced Studies felt very generous and invaluable at the time – listening back to our recordings, reading the chapters written during this time and sensing the ripples that emanate from this year feel more lasting and continuous than we could have hoped for.

Much thanks to
Dr Anna R. Burzyńska, Krakow
Prof Dr Ross Brown, London
Dr Adrian Curtin, Exeter
Dr Lynne Kendrick, London
Prof Dr Ursula Kramer, Mainz
Dr Duška Radosavjlević, London
Prof Dr David Roesner, München
Dr Julia H. Schröder, Berlin
Prof Dr Millie Taylor, Amsterdam
Dr Konstatinos Thomaidis, Exeter
Dr Pieter Verstraete, Groningen