ABSTRACT
Introduction: Traveling Backward in Time
This is the longest chapter in the book, and with good reason: it is the culminating chapter that attempts to bring together all of the main ideas introduced throughout the book. I open the chapter telling the story of teaching my first class in sound, and encountering Alex North’s haunting score for Death of a Salesman to use as an example of thematic sound, and how that would influence my own sound scores. This leads to an introduction of the main material in the chapter, the subjective experience of the play as perceived through memory, our amazing ability to perceive time in large chunks. I outline the course of the chapter.
The New Stone Age
We pick up our story about 10,000 years ago during the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian one. We consider the evidence that it was the construction of permanent temples—“theatres” in which ritual and music played a prominent role—that precipitated the change. We introduce the emergence of the “oral tradition” for passing down the stories of a culture from generation to generation, and the sophistication required of the anatomically modern Homo sapiens brain required to accomplish this.
Memory
Introduction
We contrast the close relationship between the role of memory in dreams and the role of memory in shamanic ritual and storytelling, and the great power such an ability to manipulate human memory must have conferred on the shaman in an increasingly large social setting. We consider Nairne’s three requirements for increased memory to be considered an evolutionary adaptation. Also, important to note is that almost the entire brain is involved in processing memories, so we no can longer simply focus on the specific functions of individual areas of the brain as much as we focus on the systems employed by the brain to process memories. We suggest that we, as sound designers and composers, must consider three aspects of memory in our work: creating the memory, storing the memory and retrieving the memory. Finally, we introduce the Atkinson/Shiffrin model for three types of memory that must be stored and retrieved: sensory, working and long-term. These three will serve as subsections in this chapter.
Sensory Memory
We remind the audience that we introduced the auditory form of sensory memory, echoic memory, in the last chapter, and further elaborate on its relationship to sound design and music composition for theatre.
Long Auditory Store/Short Term Memory/Working Memory
We introduce the “consciousness” part of memory, the current focus of our brain at any given time and its relationship to other forms of memory, including the phonological loop. We introduce a couple of prominent theories about working memory and discuss the implications and opportunities of the phonological loop and their associated earworms for sound designers and composers. We introduce Levitin’s conception of “style” as simply a form of repetition. Style is particularly useful in memory through a process called “chunking,” which Levitin describes as the “process of tying together units of information into groups, (that allow us to) remember the group as a whole rather than the individual pieces.” Chunking allows us to hold more items in our phonological loop, that is, attend to more complicated subjects simultaneously. I provide a number of examples from my own work to demonstrate these concepts in practice.
Long-Term Memory
Long-term memory is the type of memory most people think of when they think of memory, and we spend the most amount of time in this chapter discussing its relationship to theatre. We first consider how long-term memories are created, primarily by inciting strong emotions that tend to more indelibly embed memories. This naturally leads to a discussion of how we use music’s strong suit—its ability to incite emotions—to embed memories. I again provide examples from my work. Storing long-term memories is only the first part of our job as sound designers and composers; we must learn how to strategically retrieve them in service to the storytelling needs of the play. We discuss four different types of long-term memory in some depth, and provide examples of how we use each to tell the story: implicit, explicit episodic, involuntary explicit episodic and autobiographical.
The Origins of Theatre and the Problems of the Oral Tradition
We return in the conclusion to one of the opening discussions in the introduction of the book, which suggests that how we define a word has a lot to do with the arguments we will make to subsequently defend our approach to our subject. Definitions, we argue, are ways we “categorize” knowledge, and categories are an important process of human memory. We discuss how the brain categorizes knowledge, and apply that to how we have categorized the fundamental thesis of the book, that theatre has roots in music, emphasizing that it is how we defined music and theatre that lead us inextricably to this conclusion. We point out that because of the way that the brain categorizes knowledge, that this is not the only way to think about theatre, and that many theories about the origins of theatre can exist side by side without conflicting with each other, depending on how you define and categorize it. We’ve chosen these definitions and categories because they are the most useful in helping sound designers and composers understand how their work fundamentally shapes and empowers theatre.
