Sound design is the art and practice of creating auditory elements of media. It involves specifying, acquiring and creating audio using production techniques and equipment or software. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including filmmaking, television production, video game development, theatre, sound recording and reproduction, live performance, sound art, post-production, radio, new media and musical instrument development. Sound design commonly involves performing (see e.g. Foley) and editing of previously composed or recorded audio, such as sound effects and dialogue for the purposes of the medium, but it can also involve creating sounds from scratch through synthesizers. A sound designer is someone who practices sound design.
History
The use of sound to evoke emotion, reflect mood and underscore actions in plays and dances began in prehistoric times when it was used in religious practices for healing or recreation. In ancient Japan, theatrical events called kagura were performed in Shinto shrines with music and dance.
Plays were performed in medieval times in a form of theatre called Commedia dell'arte, which used music and sound effects to enhance performances. The use of music and sound in the Elizabethan Theatre followed, in which music and sound effects were produced off-stage using devices such as bells, whistles, and horns. Cues would be written in the script for music and sound effects to be played at the appropriate time. Italian composer Luigi Russolo built mechanical sound-making devices, called "intonarumori," for futurist theatrical and music performances starting around 1913. These devices were meant to simulate natural and man-made sounds, such as trains or bombs. Russolo's treatise, The Art of Noises, is one of the earliest written documents on the use of abstract noise in the theatre. After his death, his intonarumori' were used in more conventional theatre performances to create realistic sound effects.
Recorded sound Possibly the first use of recorded sound in the theatre was a phonograph playing a baby's cry in a London theatre in 1890. Sixteen years later, Herbert Beerbohm Tree used recordings in his London production of Stephen Phillips’ tragedy NERO. The event is marked in the Theatre Magazine (1906) with two photographs; one showing a musician blowing a bugle into a large horn attached to a disc recorder, the other with an actor recording the agonizing shrieks and groans of the tortured martyrs. The article states: “these sounds are all realistically reproduced by the gramophone”. As cited by Bertolt Brecht, there was a play about Rasputin written in (1927) by Alexej Tolstoi and directed by Erwin Piscator that included a recording of Lenin's voice. Whilst the term "sound designer" was not yet in use, some stage managers specialised as "effects men", creating and performing offstage sound effects using a mix of vocal mimicry, mechanical and electrical contraptions and gramophone records. A great deal of care and attention was paid to the construction and performance of these effects, both naturalistic and abstract. Over the twentieth century recorded sound effects began to replace live sound effects, though often it was the stage manager's duty to find the sound effects, and an electrician played the recordings during performances. Between 1980 and 1988, Charlie Richmond, USITT's first Sound Design Commissioner, oversaw efforts of their Sound Design Commission to define the duties, responsibilities, standards and procedures expected of a theatre sound designer in North America. He summarized his conclusions in a document which, although somewhat dated, provides a succinct record of what was then expected. It was subsequently provided to the ADC and David Goodman at the Florida USA local when they both planned to represent sound designers in the 1990s.
Digital technology
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