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.

How can sound be used to not just support story, but to tell story itself? I think sound and music can be a powerful form of storytelling.

Foley is the creation of new sound effects which do not exist yet in a sample or sound effects library.

We created our foley sound effects through recording ourselves with a range of microphones, including a Shure SM58 and two Neumann KM184 stereo-paired microphones. These are both cardioid microphones, which are well-suited to foley as they create a focused area of recording to help isolate the sounds we’re trying to record. The way we created the sound effects was by using objects in the Foley Studio as well as our voices/bodies to create sounds of screams, of fire, and of a watermelon being destroyed and then eaten.

There are also many example of live foley, wherein “The Foley Artist has to be highly responsive to the performance being foleyed, and is often interesting to watch in itself, as the sound being created is often at odds to what is being used to create it. This was one of its qualities that we wanted to explore in front of the audience.” (Gareth Fry). A recent example of a live foley artist has been Ruth Sullivan (a prominent Foley artist) who recently performed live foley in Melanie Wilson’s sound-lead performance piece ‘Cow | Deer’ which uses only live Foley and field recordings to evoke the lives of two animals: the cow and the deer. This is an example of foley as a unique art form in its own right, which is something that will hopefully be given more attention and resource within sound arts in coming years.

Radio offers a temporal and ephemeral medium with which to create audio works. When I visited Graeme Miller’s LINKED, a sound walk using radio, I was taken by the unique ability of the radio to create place sound objects within a hidden layer pulsing underneath the city. With sound objects placed in different radio footprints, the radios created fragments of signal and interference noises that you were able to sort of compose yourself based on your location.

Editing radio audio allows a lot of room for detail. Here is a rough first sound edit for a short snippet of dramatised audio which I designed in class:

Radio is a powerful medium for communicating information which one may not be actively looking for; but as one dials through frequency channels they might hear a flicker of new information or a sound which piques their interest.

Radio in recent years has offered a lot of room for experimentation with binaurality. Many radio producers have been interested in using audio in immersive and experimental ways. This perhaps comes from the apparent limitations of the acousmatic, which in recent years has been extended and challenged with radio and sound artists offering new ways of listening. Complicite’s ‘The Dark is Rising’, for example, was a major cornerstone of binaural radio stretching the capacity of the medium of radio.