Sound Effect: The Theatre We Hear - Paperback

by Ross Brown (Author), Joslin McKinney (Editor), Scott Palmer (Editor)

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. It argues that while theatron was an instrument for seeing and theorizing, first a collective hearing, or audience is convened. Theatre begins with people entering an acoustemological apparatus that produces a way of hearing and of knowing. Once, this was a giant marble ear on a hillside, turned up to a cosmos whose inaudible music accounted for all. In modern times, theatre's auditorium, or instrument for hearing, has turned inwards on the people and their collective conversance in the sonic memes, tropes, clichés and picturesques that constitute a popular, fictional ontology.

Author Biography

Ross Brown is Dean of School and Professor of Sound at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK, where, in 1994, he started and led the UK's first degree courses in Theatre Sound Design. He made work in the late 1980s and early 90s that is now seen as representing a 'sonic turn' in UK theatre practice. In 2009 he published Sound.