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Sound Design
By Bryan Reesman
Volley
Paul Charlier
Up
Paul Charlier serves up
his sound artistry in
the Broadway drama
Deuce.
Veteran sound designer Paul Charlier is nothing
if not devoted. When he speaks to Stage
Directions, it is 1 a.m. where he is in Australia,
and he has just finished a crazed day at work. But
he is more than willing to discuss his work on the
Tony-nominated Broadway drama Deuce, which stars
Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes as retired women’s tennis
pros who made a stellar doubles team back in the day, and who
are now guests of honor at a modern match between two new
stars. But as their verbal interplay proves, the game has become
much more about achieving stardom and nabbing endorsements
than the love of the sport. The 90-minute drama grips
audiences because of its luminous leading ladies, engrossing
story and Paul Charlier’s dynamic sound design, which creates
the illusion that a live tennis match is going on just in front of
the cast. It is complemented by Sven Ortel’s clever video design,
which includes large projections of digitized audience members
that help create the illusion of a live stadium audience.
Charlier is a veteran of film, television, radio, dance and
theatre whose credits include Democracy, Copenhagen and
the Heath Ledger/Geoffrey Rush film Candy — not to mention
being involved in the early 1980s with pioneering Aussie
industrial group SPK (which also featured Hollywood composer
Graeme Revell). He knows his stuff, and he loves chatting about
the artistry of sound. In this case, Deuce provided Charlier with
an exciting opportunity to truly create a world with which we
are somewhat familiar — that of a live tennis match — by using
his sound techniques to their full potential.
Stage Directions: How many years have you worked in
sound design?
Paul Charlier: About 25. A long time ago, I used to joke that
it was a little bit like seasonal fruit picking, because I had to go
where the harvest was. I worked as a radio producer at ABC
Radio for a while, making programs there and doing installations
elsewhere. I’m more interested in crossing over between
and bringing techniques from one to another. Doing music
and sound design are part of that anyway because I don’t usually
distinguish between the music and the sound design that
much. With a show like Deuce, I think of the effects in the same
way as I think of music cues anyway.
The volleys back-and-forth definitely have a certain rhythm.
That was one of the good things about working with the
actors in rehearsal. I worked a lot of it in rehearsal because the
sound is like a character. There are also musical things that happen.
For example, the tempos of the games vary throughout
the show in the same way that music does. Then there are some
other music production techniques because trying to get the
Paul Charlier at work
sound of the tennis hits turned out to be quite a huge task. It was
a little bit like trying to perfect a snare drum sound. It’s a sound
that lasts for a fraction of a second and has a certain impact, and
it has different expectations for people. It was actually a little bit
harder with this one than, say, doing a film because you don’t
have any visual reference to help the audience hear what you’re
doing. Everything has to be in the sound.
You help to create the illusion. Obviously the video projections
of audience members behind the two leads help that,
but you do need sound. It’s very cinematic, and I assume
your experience with film probably helped with that.
The odd thing for me, which is different from a cinematic
experience, is that you don’t have that visual connection. Walter
Murch said that 90 percent of sound is what people hear in their
head, and often in film that’s triggered by what they’re seeing.
When you don’t have that actual physicality of seeing the
effort that the tennis player puts into hitting the ball and what
that generates in you, you have to imbue this very short sound
with all that energy that you can’t see. Obviously, having the
spectator reactions is part of doing that, but also manipulating
the timing. There was a lot of detail work in trying to build up
the tension with bouncing the ball before the serve, the delay
before the serve, and then getting the shock from the hit.
How did you create those sound effects? Did you tape
people playing?
I do a lot of field recordings myself. My initial assumption
was that I would get someone and record the hits. Then the
Australian Open was on while I was doing prep in Australia, and
it suddenly occurred to me that there are only a 100 people in
the world that can actually hit the ball like that; I wasn’t going
to get any access to them because they’re all professional tennis
players. There wasn’t any point in getting a good player
out somewhere because there’s the racket, the ball, the tennis
surface, the acoustics of the stadium and just that energy that it
takes to hit a ball over 100 kilometers per hour.
So I took the path that was closer to recording drum sounds. I
recorded a lot of the Australian Open, and I was listening back to
the sound, which isn’t a strong indication of what it sounds like
in the stadium, but it is the sound that people identify as it. Most
of those recordings were off-miked because it’s all shotguns on
the edge of the court. So I actually turned the sound off and
20 September 2007 • www.stage-directions.com