Episode Six - Directionality with Sound - November 6th, 2023

The sixth episode of The Impossible is Only the Untried: a Prologue Podcast with Mandy E. MacLean.

In this episode, Mandy shares a recap of the group's exploration of creating directionality with sound - including playing with concrete sounds with Designer Richard Feren.
 
W. Ross Macdonald X Prologue Performing Arts Collaboration is supported by The Canada Council for the Arts and the Arthur and Audrey Cutten Foundation.

Learn more about the W. Ross MacDonald X Prologue Performing Arts collaboration at @prologuearts and www.prologue.org

Transcript

Episode Six - Directionality with Sound- November 6th, 2023 

(student voices) WRMS. W. Ross Macdonald. W. Ross Macdonald School. WRMS. W. Ross Macdonald School. W Ross. 

The Impossible. The Impossible. 

The Impossible is Only the Untried. 

(Mandy) Welcome to Episode Six of The Impossible is Only the Untried - a Prologue Performing Arts podcast. My name is Mandy E. MacLean, and I am the Project Coordinator for the collaboration between Prologue Performing Arts and the W. Ross Macdonald School for the Blind.

In this podcast, we are sharing findings that are being discovered and questions that are being asked when we think about how to make performing arts more accessible to youth from the Low Vision and Blind community. A team of professional theater artists - and the fabulous students of the W. Ross MacDonald are helping us discover techniques and strategies through our exploration - and even fabulous questions! 

In this episode, I’m going to share with you some exciting discoveries we’ve been making with the class through our exploration of sound with Dora Award Winning Sound Designer Richard Feren. 

Over the last two weeks, we have been experimenting with sound directionality. Two important areas we explored are (1) moving sound to establish space and the movement of characters and objects in that space - and  (2) elevating the concrete sounds of movement in that space 

For each of these explorations, we used the school’s auditorium, which includes an elevated proscenium stage and two front-of-house speakers that send sound toward the audience. 

So let’s get into it.

For our first exploration, we focused on moving sound. For this exploration, we added an additional four speakers and a subwoofer to the system. In theatre, the term pre-recorded sound or sound cues when played through a system of speakers is called a “playback sound” or a “playback cue”. We programmed the system to be able to run from front to back of the house and from left to right. Therefore, we created a boundary of sound for the performers and audience to exist within. For example - we tested this with the class using the sound of a race car travelling throughout the space. 

(the sound of a car zooming past)

Richard played the queue, and moved it around the theatre - and when sitting in the audience, all the students were able to follow the sound around the space - cool right? And we did this with only 6 speakers and a subwoofer - so imagine how effective and specific this directionality could be with a setup of 20 speakers or more! One student even said it felt like the car was coming toward them! The subwoofer played an important part in this - as it gave depth to the sound and dimension and created an immersive experience - it made the seats vibrate whenever there was a lower sound that occurred! 

Landon and Alesia (who you met in the last episode) were really both game to play! I asked them to jump up on stage with me, and with Richard at the board, they were both able to fully orient based on the movement of sound between the Front of the House and onstage speakers. This allowed them to find directionally towards the audience, and also towards each other as scene partners. This is also amazing because when you consider this from the audience’s perspective, it can help strategically place focus in a way that visual queues would for a sighted audience member. It helps carve up the space, and therefore helps tell the story!   

In the following class, we looked at how concrete sounds can be elevated - and how floor condenser mics can support this. We were curious since sound is so helpful when orienting and identifying - maybe each character needs a sound to help suggest when they move. Cool right? 

Normally in theatre, we try and make things like shoes quiet, so they don’t detract from other stage elements sonically. But in this case, they helped the students understand directionally where characters were in space and their quality of movement - and since our play takes place in winter - it makes sense that a character would wear clunky, noisy winter boots!

We asked each student to experiment with a different type of footwear - and since we have a wheelchair user in our class, we played with attaching things to the chair, and getting her to wear different gloves, and different types of jackets - so brushing her sleeves would create sound! For the cane users, we tried different cane tips, and we even did silly things like putting dog toys, you met my puppy Mulder in a previous episode, into Alesia’s shoes, which we thought was just going to be funny but it turned out to be one of the best sounds we tested because it bumped up what sounded like just a regular squeaky sneaker on a gym floor. 

(audio of Alesia walking) 

Alesia: For someone who can’t see, they can tell the different characters by their shoes, they might not know their name, but it tells them this is a different character then, I don't know, five seconds ago, by what they have in their shoes, how they are walking...

Next, we added condenser mics, lined across the edge of the stage.. . Since we’re working on a proscenium stage, this bumped up the travelling of characters from stage Left to Stage Right through the front-of-house speakers. This allowed the audience to orient the action on the stage, and focus their attention to where a character was travelling.

We also tried different surfaces in alignment with the condenser mic - and we even tried bubble wrap! Which made us wonder… should designers start thinking about how their sets behave sonically? Instead of “making things quiet so they won’t detract from the storytelling” maybe we can begin to think about how a play set in a kitchen sounds like a kitchen as the characters move around, instead of only looking like one!

Sound is an amazing piece of storytelling. And as we’ve learned, that the more strategic sounds you can incorporate around from the initial concept into your storytelling - and the more you can use techniques and strategies to create directionality, the less you have to use audio description for storytelling as sounds will take the place of visual cues for people from the Low Vision & Blind community - because, after all, some of these students use sound as cues in their environment on a daily basis just as those of us who use visual cues. 

Richard: The thought process I'm having for this is, how do we convey that same information that we take for granted as sighted audience members, to be able to be conveyed purely through sound? So, that's what led me to think about, oh, can we distinguish the characters simply by how their footsteps sound, or if they have something on them, or is it the sound of their wheelchair? Or their cane? Or they've got a keychain? Or something.. so that without needing to see anything, we know who is entering, we know who they are...

Mandy: Thanks Richard! 

Next week, Richard will be exploring transformational sound - and I can’t wait to hear what happens!

I encourage all of you to come up with questions, and if you are interested in exploring more, please reach out to Prologue to continue this conversation. Visit www.prologue.org or find us on social media at @prologuearts!

And here are those amazing students to send us off - 

(student voices) The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible is Only the Untried.