Video transcript
Drama Company 2023 - The Wasps - 04. Sound design

[intro music]

KINGSLEY REEVE: Hello, my name is Kingsley Reeve. I am designing the sound for this production of 'The Wasps', and I came onto this project not directly.

I was originally going to mentor a student here who was going to do the sound design. And she took a job. And as luck would have it, then I was asked to come in and work with the team on developing the sound for this production. And consequently, that's how I came to meet Gen and the team and put together the sound for the final execution of the piece.

I always have to ask on any engagement I have with sound is, 'What's its function? What is the function of this sound?' Because we come from a really long line of human evolution that has used sound from our earliest days, knocking bones and sticks and rocks together to make communication between our species, all the way up to the present day, using modern tools, et cetera.

But it's still about the message, and it's still about, 'What are we trying to communicate?' And so for me as a sound designer, it always comes back to, 'What is that communication, what's the message, and what are the means of conveying that message?'

'The Wasps' needed to-- there was a couple of constraints in place, which I really enjoy working with constraint. I really find I'm kind of at my best when my back's at the wall in terms of the tools and the palette that I can work with because it forces a creative outcome that I might not otherwise get to. And what that constraint was in this sense was that we needed to work with material that wasn't beholding to someone else's intellectual property.

That was very important that we didn't just necessarily bring in extant music that, of course, has its own story, or extant sound recordings or field recordings or sound effects that have its own kind of history. We didn't want to start there. So because we couldn't do that, it made me think, Well, what can we do for this story and with this cast? And how will sound actually function?

And the solution we came to was that because of the theme and because of the story, what it was asking us, it allowed us to, or it certainly allowed me to think, What could the cast themselves generate? And what could I use from those-- that material to actually create texture, to create a rhythm, to create sound effects even? And I thought, there's a great constraint there. And I'm always constantly surprised by, in this day and age, the simplest of means, like a microphone and a simple recorder and an imagination can absolutely get you really, really far in terms of the material you can create.

I was also given another technical design provocation to think about, and that was using this cheeky little device here, which is called a launchpad, effectively. And as you can see, it's an 8-by-8 grid of buttons, pads, all tactile. And so the function of this became about, well, we would like something rhythmical, something that the performers can actually play. So it's actually an integrative piece of technology, rather than it be just a device that is attached to a sound system that nobody sees. It just sits outside the frame.

Well, we wanted this to very much be focal. So it became a focal point, literally sitting on the stage. It also became a performative tool. And why it became a performative tool was because in some abstract way, this became a symbol of the internet.

And why it became a symbol of the internet was that the theme, largely, about this work is that we're hearing comments constantly and people writing things, which ultimately is their voice. They're writing out their voice, even if it's a silent voice on the screen. But in our heads, when we read it back, we do hear a voice, even if it's our own.

And so what I wanted to capture from the cast were lines and mutterings and resonant ideas from the cast to do with their characters they were playing, and grab all those as, really, base material and then create from them a rhythmic sort of structure, be it a word, be it a-- some sort of vowel that was elongated. There might have been something that I actually found a rhythmic structure when I looped it. And I actually found that it had quite a music of its own.

And then I would map them to keys and then create a bass beat from someone making a [tsst] like a hi-hat sound or a [gulps] with their throat. And so we would come up with this beat, and then upon which they could hit these keys in time. And that would fire off these comments.

And these comments would then become almost like their comment on what they see and hear in the real world. And so the more they hit, the more comments. And so that echo goes through the whole story, is about how at a moment's notice we can comment, possibly without even thinking about it. But then when we need to hear it back again, upon reflection, we might not like what we actually heard. And we might be quite surprised about how we have acted because all these other comments were also in the ether as well.

So it was really quite simple, actually. I took a little handheld recorder, the most basic you can find, a little what they call Zoom recorders, a little mono Zoom recorder. I took a standard dynamic microphone and a mic cable on a stand. And I said to the cast-- I just wrote down on paper a few provocations of what I might want to ask-- get them to perform for me.

And so they came up one at a time literally in rehearsals. And I said, 2 or 3 lines. And I hit Record, and I just grabbed all those. And at the end of the day, I had quite a cache of these lines and these recordings.

And so I took those away, and then I put it into a piece of software. You can use any software you like. I just happened to use one that is quite great at helping find rhythmic structure. But truly, you can do it with anything with an imagination.

And then I would find these little short snippets. Some of them were 4 seconds long. Some of them equated to more like 12 seconds. But I was-- the most important thing was that they had a rhythmic structure.

And then I would take them and put them onto a computer, which could then play them back and interact with this because it's tethered by USB. And so then I would literally take a little sound clip that I've got. It might be person one.

And I would map it to this key here. And in the software, it would say, right, every time they hit that, it's going to fire that particular comment. And every time they hit it again, it will stop playing that comment. So when they interacted with it, it would always retain a musical attribute.

And so effectively, then I would put that through the mixing desk into the sound system, and away we went. So it became a rehearsal tool as much as a performative tool as well.

Well, I was thinking, What is that swipe sound? Because it's functionally a silent sound when you actually do it. So I had Max, one of our cast members who's playing Tomoti. And I thought, Well, what sound would you make?

What does that-- [whoosh] what does that sound like? Is that a swoosh? We've got a very cinematic idea of what a whoosh sounds like. Just open up and see what you get.

And so we came up with a sound not dissimilar to that. It was like a [fwit]. So I went, great, and got a few of those. And then I chopped those up and, sure enough, layered a few together. And we got this [fwit], this sort of sound that he actually physically gestures and generates.

And so we got that. And there was also-- we needed something every time one of these 'went off' as a notification. We wanted a sound.

Of course, we're so used to that. Every time we get a [whistles high low] or whatever sound it is, we kind of do that. We wanted a symbolically rich sound that also had that Pavlovian sort of idea.

So I thought, well, we can't use the [whistles high low], for whatever reason that we can't. So what if we reverse that and go [whistles low high], which is a normal dog-like Pavlovian conditioning to go [whistles low high] and something comes to you. So I got one of the cast members to go [whistles low high], and that became our notification sound.

So every time in the show they hear that [whistles low high], that's a notification ping that's like a Pavlovian conditioning--

GENEVIEVE DE SOUZA: Cool.

KINGSLEY REEVE: --to react. I would say, the very first thing, if you were trying to regenerate this from a sound point of view, is a microphone if it's then going to be a played-back thing, something to record it on, and then grabbing those recordings and just listening to them for interesting musicality, if you were going to have something rhythmical in it. If you weren't going to have something rhythmical in it, you're still listening to them as little concrete comments, almost like if you were to cut it up in analogue days, that would be little pieces of tape.

And each one of those pieces of tape is something then that if you were to do this in poor theatre, you might just have a machine or a CD deck or a cassette. But each one of those becomes a functional comment because the function of that sound is to remind us that there are these voices out in the ether. Even with a really modest free piece of software in this day and age, you can actually layer up multiple streams of these comments and actually create quite an interesting composition using very, very limited means.

So it's by no means-- what you arrive at isn't defined at all by having a launchpad or anything even to fire them back because you can, of course, have-- you could even stack them up really old-school style with stuff you can find from cash converters, all these CD decks or, you know, whatever technology you might want. But each one of them might have those pieces of metaphorical tape that has a comment, and being able to trigger those as ideas. The most important thing is that we connect what we hear with the comment idea. So I would suggest start low budget and work up. And cut away anything you don't need.

One thing I always try to do with any sound I work with in a theatrical space is How do you keep it as live as it can be? Because that's what we do in theatre. We keep it live, hence why we're in it.

And so when you have playback material, it's being done in another place and another time. And so it's like we're reanimating this dead matter that we just put back off a computer or whatever. And it just comes back through speakers, and we-- it can be that thing that you don't know where it's coming from.

And that's all fine. But my-- what I really try to do, always, is to make sure anything that is made has a strong connection to what's happening on stage, that the characters can hear it. If possible, the characters can acknowledge it in some way.

And if it's going to be rhythmical, that the characters can actually feel that and use it because it needs to be as functional as it is-- I mean, it can be as aesthetically pretty as it wants to be. But if there's no tie-in for what's happening on stage, and it's just something that no one acknowledges, it's the elephant in the room, as far as I'm concerned. So when-- in our cast, when we had them stamping along to the beat, that made good sense for me because they acknowledged the presence of the pre-recorded material, rather than it being just an overlay of a track that some sound designers made and pushed into the performance for their own benefit.

Deep listening is something I can't encourage any human being enough. And what does that mean? Deep listening actually means attending to things long enough that you actually start to notice change, and you can notice layers because once, for me, you can start hearing layers, I think, effectively, then you can start to unpack what it is to design sound.

You need to deconstruct something so you can work out what's going on so that you can then reconstruct it in an artistic way, because I only know what I know, how to do what I do because I've spent a lot of time reverse-engineering how a sound gets put together. So then when I actually-- someone says, I would really like this thing to do this thing in that action, I've got to go, How would I do that? Because I've got to think through, OK, that's what we want. How do I reverse-engineer that to get the base elements, so I can build it back up again to then hit go and it feel like it's all meant to be?

So anyone who's really deeply considering it, I would start to think, first you've got to give yourselves a good ear cleansing and start to hear the world in a much more nuanced and detailed level. And anybody can do it. It's just the attention you give the world through your ears and your head and your heart and your brain, yeah.