Sound Effect

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023Sound Effect tells the story of the effect of theatrical aurality on modern culture. Beginning with the emergence of the modern scenic sound effect in the late 18th century, and ending with headphone theatre which brings theatre's auditorium into an intimate relationship with the audience's internal sonic space, the book relates contemporary questions of theatre sound design to a 250-year Western cultural history of hearing. It argues that while theatron was an instrument for seeing and theorizing, first a collective hearing, or audience is convened. Theatre begins with people entering an acoustemological apparatus that produces a way of hearing and of knowing. Once, this was a giant marble ear on a hillside, turned up to a cosmos whose inaudible music accounted for all. In modern times, theatre's auditorium, or instrument for hearing, has turned inwards on the people and their collective conversance in the sonic memes, tropes, clichés and picturesques that constitute a popular, fictional ontology.This is a study about drama, entertainment, modernity and the theatre of audibility. It addresses the cultural frames of resonance that inform our understanding of SOUND as the rubric of the world we experience through our ears. Ross Brown reveals how mythologies, pop-culture, art, commerce and audio, have shaped the audible world as a form of theatre. Garrick, De Loutherbourg, Brecht, Dracula, Jekyll, Hyde, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, James Bond, Scooby-Do and Edison make cameo appearances as Brown weaves together a history of modern hearing, with an argument that sound is a story, audibility has a dramaturgy, hearing is scenographic, and the auditoria of drama serve modern life as the organon, or definitive frame of reference, on the sonic world.

Acknowledgements Now hear this (a preface) PART ONE Theatrical hearing1 It's obviously an effect (An introduction) Splat By design 2 Dispositions The god soundAuditory space and its dramaturgy The scenography of sound 3 Auditorium A space in process A fictional ontology PART TWO Reconfigurations4 Present (A theatre about our person) Inscape Personal audio / immersive theatre The hi-ficell 5 A sound from the suburbs (The curious storyof Colonel Gouraud) An electric house A baby cries Anathema maranatha! 6 Picturing the scene The scenic reconfiguration The picturesque of sound The Eidophusikon PART THREE 'Our thunder is the best' (Living in the audio world)7 Arty, exotic and gothic Pop, art and the theatre of hearing The theatre we daydream Thunder on the ear 8 Inside out (Symbolism, cinema and The Bells) The soundtrack, its prehistory and audiovisual morphology My God, it's coming out of your ears! The free ear 9 Audio drama The sound effect in its widest sense (the stuff of radio) The theatre Corwin heard Common sound The Anatomy of Sound, by Norman Corwin 10 Conclusion Audimus: the theatre we hear References Index