Reflections of a Sound
Effects Producer

by Tad Curry

Three years ago I worked as a sound engineer at a summer theater in rural Pennsylvania. One play called for thunder, lightning, and rain. The sound designer and I put together a sample tape for the director, of crashes, peals, and rolls of thunder, culled from a dozen prerecorded sound effects discs. The director, passionate about this story, was dissatisfied. He wanted three degrees of thunder: a distant rumbling, a more threatening roll, and a final triumphant crash that would bring down the rain, the curtain, and the house. It was that final crash that was missing.

We had neither the time nor the equipment to chase down a storm and record real thunder. We sat in the theater, racking our brains to figure something out, when a set-builder on stage dropped a long length of two-by-four wood onto a pile of other boards. He dropped it at just such an angle that the resulting sharp crack of a noise jolted our ears and our brains. We snuck off with a couple lengths of that wood and went to work. I won't bore you with the details, but in the end we had produced for the director a crack of thunder he had only ever heard in his dreams, and we did it with two-by-four boards, a pile of metal-and-wood folding chairs, and a rough brick floor.

Sound effects, in a play on stage with an audience, are, well, sound effects. They can be an important contribution to the mood and setting and plot of a play, but they work in combination with the physical set, props, costumes, lighting, and actors' movements--all visual elements (I think our thunder worked so well because it was joined by visual effects of lightning and rain, and by the actors' reactions). But sound effects in a radio play must be all of these at once. They are the listener's only clues to the setting of a play, and they work in combination solely with the actors' voices. The burden for accuracy is greater in a radio play than a staged one, because if the audio effects are not believable, the listener cannot build the setting and mood in his or her mind, and the story will never come alive.

I am new to the art of the audio play. I work in news radio, where the sound I work with is the sound the reporters bring to me, elements for their stories. It's my job to make their audio sound as good as possible. So I was nervous about being asked to produce the audio effects, from ground zero, for a radio drama. It meant I had to be the reporter, to go out and find the sounds. Or make them. Or find pieces of sounds and put them together to make a different sound. I had to play the part of properties manager, to ensure that the props the actors used became, in the listener's ear, the objects the characters held, or dropped, or opened, or snapped. And I had to build the set and design lighting, all through audio. "Morning" looks obviously different than "Night", but how do they differ in sound? How close is that bird? How heavy the door, and does it latch shut or simply hang free?

Considering this was my first experience working on an audio play, I think I held my own. I did have to redo some elements on the spot but they worked well (thank goodness for directors and executive producers, who don't miss a thing!). Regardless of my satisfaction, or lack thereof, I have come away with a new understanding of how sounds affect the telling of a story. I learned some new audio tricks, too. Most significantly, I understand this with greater clarity: Sounds, when detached from their visual counterparts, are no longer slaves to our eyes. With the proper shaping and molding, they can become, in our minds, objects quite different than our eyes would have us believe. Does it matter what thunder looks like, as long as it sounds like thunder?

Tad Curry is a broadcast recording technician at WBUR-FM in Boston and a graduate student in playwriting and audio production at Emerson College, Boston.

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