ABSTRACT
What is involved in designing sound for a Shakespeare production? Is there such a thing as ‘Shakespearean’ sound design – design that accords with aspects of Shakespeare’s theatre? One might think designing sound for Shakespeare simply involves supplying the relevant sounds referenced in the plays, or else some mood music to set the scene or lend an atmosphere. This is not so. The growing importance of theatre sound design over the last 30 years has meant that designers typically create distinctive, multi-layered compositional scores, often in collaboration with other members of the design team, including the director, and sometimes the performers too. Sound design for Shakespeare has become increasingly ambitious, adding to the already complex acoustic environment of a Shakespeare play in performance. This acoustic enrichment is informed by cinema, television and radio, concert performance, video games, and the ‘sonification’ of everyday life via gadgetry, advertising, and soundscaping (the acoustic design of an environment), all of which has led theatre audiences to expect that productions – even productions of centuries-old plays – should be sonically enhanced. Audiences expect not only to be able to hear actors with the same clarity and loudness as speech heard in other media (an unreasonable expectation with regard to loudness, unless stage actors use microphones) but also to have a soundtrack to live performance that accords with contemporary listening habits. Why should theatre be less sonically sophisticated than other forms of entertainment? Hence the rise of the theatre sound designer, who has fashioned brave new (audio) worlds for Shakespeare’s plays.
