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Sound Design
continued from page 21
game the same as your perspective to the
voices of the actors on stage.
The hardest thing about it was actually
getting the 40,000-spectator sound when
you can’t actually put a huge P.A. behind
the audience. Getting the sound of 40,000
spectators is huge as it is, especially in tennis,
because tennis crowds are unlike any
other sporting crowd as they’re traditionally
quite polite; they don’t tend to react the way
baseball or soccer crowds do. Unlike soccer
or football, they’re not cheering constantly
through it — they’re very quiet in between
points. Probably the hardest thing was pulling
together enough crowd sounds. I joked
with Michael that the acting range of the
crowd was the biggest problem I had with
the sound design, just being able to get
enough of various reactions — those “oohs”
and “aahs” when a ball’s almost hit or when
someone does something good in the middle
of a rally, and then trying to create the
sense that there is actually that many people
in the stadium. We didn’t try to go with making
it sound like there are 40,000 people with
you in the theatre because it just didn’t make
acoustic sense, and because there is also this
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State University of New York,
Fredonia
false perspective that you’re hearing these
two people talking on the other side of the
court at the same volume as you’re watching
the game, so there are a lot of liberties that
you’re taking with the realism.
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What kind of console were you using?
We had a Yamaha DM2000 as the desk. As
far as the sound design goes, I end up using
the mixer as an extensive matrix because all
of the localizing is done in Cricket. It comes
out of the computer and is routed directly
one-to-one through the inputs/outputs of the
mixer, and I think we had 10 outputs coming
out of the MOTU into the mixer. I could start
programming Cricket in the rehearsal, then
just take that into the theatre and open up the
outputs and just keep working on it, so I didn’t
have to start all over again. By the last week
of rehearsal, they had 90 percent of the show
with the playback as it would be in the theatre.
It’s fantastic for being able to break everything
into small elements and roll them over.
Then Jake Rodriguez, who wrote Cricket
and some modules specifically for the show,
put a MIDI show control module in it because
sound triggered half the video, which is running
off the Hippo system. In order to keep
their heads in sync with the game, Cricket
triggered the video when it needed to be in
sync with the sound. Cricket also triggered
cue lights to help the actors know where
they had to look, because often from their
point-of-view, it was not easy to tell which
way they were supposed to be looking. We
had two lights at the back of the theatre that
Cricket also triggered. Cricket became like
a pacemaker that was running the show.
It’s probably the biggest show I’ve done
on Cricket because there were about 2,000
modules in the sound design, and we got
up to about 400 cues at one point. I think
that came down to about 320 by the time it
opened, and they were linked within 80 cold
cues. It’s possibly much more complicated
than it sounds, but it’s a tribute to the system
in a way. There are a lot of fail-safes built
in to make sure those games run in open
time.
Bryan Reesman is the N.Y. Bureau Chief for
Stage Directions. His work has been published
in the New York Times, Playboy,
Billboard and MovieMaker.
42 September 2007 • www.stage-directions.com