Sound Effect

Sound Effect tells the story of the effect of theatrical aurality on modern culture. Beginning with the emergence of the modern scenic sound effect in the late 18th century, and ending with headphone theatre which brings theatre's auditorium into an intimate relationship with the audience's internal sonic space, the book relates contemporary questions of theatre sound design to a 250-year Western cultural history of hearing.

In this study author Ross Brown proposes that the way the world sounds depends on the way it is heard, and 18th-century theatre began to hear the world in relation to a pictorially composed stage. By configuring its sonic components - live and mechanically reproduced sound effects, music, speech, noise and occasional silence - into a composed picturesque, theatre played a role in the configuration of a new auditory aesthetic that influenced the representation of sound in popular cultural products ranging from tourism and travelogues to written fiction and exhibitions of novelty.

This modern way of pictorial hearing would in time come to characterise not only the 19th-century theatre mise en scene, but also the film soundtrack, radio production and the use of sonic effect in music production. It was a markedly different take on the acoustic world from the early-modern aurality reflected in Shakespearian theatre and one that was to become the traditional orthodoxy of 20th-century sound design. In tracing this relationship the study considers Gainsborough's love of fake thunder, Sarah Siddons' voice, Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula, a drunken 1888 recording session, Varese and Bartok, Jekyll and Hyde, Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, Charles Ives and Charles Mingus, the Goons, Frank Zappa, The Beatles, The Who and Kendrick Lamar.