Two Shakespeares for the Price of One

Now that “Psycho Beach Party” is done and I am over my hours, I am back to NVCC, where I will be sound designing two Shakespeare shows that are in rep over the course of a couple of weeks.  I’m excited to see some of my students starting to pick up Qlab over the course of these shows.

The two shows we will be presenting are “Much Ado About Nothing” (set as a Mad Men-era piece) and a more classical edition of “Romeo & Juliet,” which opens tonight.

I was surprised that R&J actually stole my interest in the process of sound design, and let me solve some common workflow issues in sound design and the limitations of our space and gear. There were a lot of little flourishes I was able to make to help reinforce the sense of place for each scene. I enjoy trying to make things as real as I can and have the opportunity to do so. Sometimes that is literal – like my use of bird and bug sounds that are indigenous to the Italian countryside (or figuring out how the heck a peat fire differed from a wooden log fire for “Dancing at Lughnasa” last year). Sometimes that means giving the audience expected cues with how they perceive a sound to be – the famous example being a gunshot in the movies or tv sounds nothing like one in real life.

For this show, the latter situation is in the grave at the end of the show. I wanted to give that feeling of being deep in the earth, trapped away from everything, locked in position as the world slowly spins on its axis. So I went with some sounds that are not unlike what you would hear on the Starship Enterprise – sort of an ominous engine hum. The trick is not to make it draw your attention, and most of the audience may not even notice it is there. Psycho acoustics are fun.

But the real fun belongs to my birds. I found some samples of parakeets that are native to the area of the play, both male and female. So during one of the scenes, there is a whole subplot involving a courting pair of parakeets that call to each other, move around the room, and then fly off to stage right.

My solutions: because these two shows are in our black box theatre, the sound system in there isn’t quite as good – we have zero outboard gear available. Luckily, since all of the sound is playback, I took this as an opportunity to learn about effects and audio processing in Qlab. That was how I tuned the room, something I saw Pilobulous do a couple of years ago when I did audio for their tour when it came to the Quick  Center. I also finally figured out how to do multiple sound outputs that could be controlled independently through the same hardware – one for, say, soundscapes and another for cues, which run at different volume ranges. I designed a production of “Merry Wives” over the summer and wished I had thought of that sooner in the design & tech process.

-brian