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 June 15, 2005 Sound Effects in a Former Rifle Range A recent issue of my alma mater’s alumni magazine contained a story in which a number of journalists reminisced about their days working on the university newspaper. It seemed that most of them had spent far more time and energy on the paper than on their studies, but that in the end it had all been worthwhile.This struck a chord with me, partly because it recalled my father’s stories of his days on the paper, and partly because I’d observed the process close up, watching my sister’s career there, including her appointment as its first female sports editor. I wrote for the paper too, though only briefly. I found my means of avoiding studying elsewhere. What kept me away from the books most effectively was my involvement with the student theater, the center of the university’s dramatic life. Before arriving at university I’d been an enthusiastic participant in my high school’s active theater program, and I was able to continue that interest in college. Over the years I appeared in a number of plays, though never in a major role. If I made a significant contribution, it was to the productions’ sound effects and incidental music. The theater itself was a gem, buried beneath the quadrangle of one of the school’s crypto-Oxonian buildings. Its acoustics were extraordinarily good, which was remarkable considering it had originally been built as a rifle range, and became a theater only when the family who’d donated the building decided that the students would be better off seeing plays than blasting away at targets. In my day -- the mid-1960s -- students did all the acting and much of the backstage work, but the stage management and lighting direction were handled by full-time staff members, who brought much professionalism to the productions. Except when it came to sound, which no one seemed to know or care very much about. For one thing, the equipment was all wrong, consisting largely of two heavy-duty turntables that allowed you to neither preview a sound nor accurately cue it. As a result, the audience was usually treated to a long pause before a sound effect began, or an effect that started in the middle. The first play I appeared in had a small number of sound and music cues, and as none of them occurred when my character was onstage, I volunteered to look after them. First, however, I talked them into buying a tape recorder with a Pause control that could be operated silently backstage (most recorders back then were pretty clunky), and that could start the tape virtually instantly. That acquired, I used my own collection of music and effects to build a single tape containing all of the play’s sound and music cues, separated by lengths of white leader. This made it easy to line up each separate recording, even in the often-dim backstage light. Handling this was no big stretch for me, but people -- especially other cast members -- were impressed that sounds came in at the right time for a change. One thing that helped was that I’d built up a fairly respectable library of sound effects. Recordings of things other than music were important in early audio, train sounds being especially popular. The very first stereo LP was of trains, and the company that released it, Audio Fidelity Inc., followed it up with a series of sound-effects records covering everything from doorbells to bombs. Elektra had a good three-disc set as well, and I bought one disc from Major Records, which specialized in sound effects. I was familiar with Major because some of my earliest sound purchases were of Major 78s, the only true vinyl 78s I ever owned (the rest were mostly brittle lacquer). The Major LP was one of the brightest records I’d ever heard, but turning down the treble, as you had to do to make it listenable, also got rid of a lot of surface noise. I also used some recordings I’d made myself. For one play, the theater’s director asked me to come up with a recording of pounding surf that would play throughout an entire act. I had what I thought was the right sort of thing, but before I could play it, the director said that the sound he had in mind was like the distinctive sound of the waves moving the pebbles on the beach in Nice, France. When I played the recording, he said it was perfect, and asked what it was. "The waves moving the pebbles on the beach in Nice," I said. By chance, I had recorded it a few summers before on a trip to Europe. The most complex track I ever created was for an Australian play, Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, which contained a scene where cast members upstage watched a television set facing away from the audience and commented on a parade that was supposed to be appearing on it. Practically any sound could have come out of the set, as the volume was to be low enough that the audience would hear only a murmur. I opted for realism, however. I layered in tracks of marching bands, hysterically cheering crowds, horses’ hooves, marching feet (courtesy a wooden box full of dried peas, shaken rhythmically), and my own extempore commentary on the passing scene, delivered in a bogus Aussie accent. A few cast members who actually listened to the nonsense I was spouting broke up (in rehearsal, fortunately); others thought I had got my hands on a recording of the real thing, which I took as a compliment. One of my most realistic effects was recorded in an old-fashioned, unrenovated bathroom in my parents’ basement. Alas, although I did sound for all that theater’s plays for almost four years, I never found a use for that marvelous flush! Putting a spin on it Back in my sound-effects days, the source material was mostly LPs. In his 1997 volume The Book of Numbers, British author William Hartston talks about those discs in terms of their rotation speeds. He doesn’t always get things right, but he does include an amusing bit of trivia: "Anyone born in ’33, it should be noted, will have been 45 in ’78." ...Ian G. Masters
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