When designing sound in theatre, radio, film – atmos and ambience is the core part of the sonic world we create. Whether naturalistic (realistic) or stylised (abstract and heightened), the design choices that go into creating the atmos of a scene helps determine its mood and story.

In the example I put together which you can have a listen to above, I complimented the dialogue from Macbeth with the sound of wind (atmosphere), bells (stylistic), and music/drone textures (stylistic/ambience). It contributes to the feeling of the scene, but is less like a score and more like a sonic bed, or a room in which the text can happen. If I wanted it to be more naturalistic, I could include more naturalistic sound effects.

This is my style of sound design, which is somewhere between sound and music and is not naturalistic and is more abstract, helping to place us in the psychological world of the characters or feel what the pulse/heart of the story is. I like to find what the heart of the story is, and weave that through everything the audience hears.

Sarah Angliss talked in her CRiSAP Guest Lecture about how in a sound design that she did for ‘The Hairy Ape’ she took the sounds of gorillas, and turned them into the sounds of boat engines, to subconsciously add a layer of storytelling and a sense of foreboding. This was something I really resonated with. Sound can add so many subconscious and psychological layers of nuance and depth to a story, and Sarah’s example perfectly chimed with my own philosophies as a sound designer. She is not just communicating the space of the boat with naturalistic sound effects, but using a dramaturgical idea to drive this forward and tie it in with a design language.