Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2010 - 72

SOund deSign

By Dave Tosti-Lane

scanning the wonderful bellman archives of TD&T, looking for the first article about sound, i was
pleased to discover "Professional sound facilities in the theatre" in the second issue, october
1965. i was even more delighted to find author gary W. gaiser, the director of stage lighting and
sound at indiana university, using the term "sound designer" in almost the same way we do today
long before the earliest official designation we know of on a professional show in the u.s.
"the present availability of flexible electronic control of sound for
theatre production allows the director to specify not only the necessary
high fidelity sound effects the play demands but also a sound environment
consistent with any style of directing. the resources of such on audio envelope permit the sound designer to interrelate prelude, entre-act, and
postlude music with explicit and implicit sound effects specified by the
playscript and the style of the production."
it is significant that gaiser did not say "system designer," he said
sound designer, and if there was room to misinterpret what he meant, one
needed only read a little further:
"as part of the theatre's ensemble of tools, [sound] should join
other production arts in a compatible and aesthetically satisfying revelation, definition, and orientation of the environment and action. once this
composition is achieved, the entire design should be focused to reinforce
the dramatic atmosphere of the production and yet not be obtrusive as an
independent agent or force. finally, the time-art demands of the theatre
must be recognized..."

My excitement was tempered as i continued to work through the archive
and the collection of Sightlines issues made available to me for research. certainly, people were talking about sound but there was no push at the time to
create a sound commission. to be fair, there really wasn't yet a solid commission structure in any area, the institute was still going about discovering what it
wanted to be (an endeavor that arguably never really ends).
between this first sound article in 1965 and lee Watson's announcement of the formation of the lighting & sound commission in 1981, i found
no fewer than twenty-three articles in TD&T about sound. so our perception
today that sound has only recently been "discovered" as one of the arts of
theater is perhaps a bit suspect. Most of these early articles were focused on
the technology of sound, but that was about to change dramatically.
the fall 1979 issue of TD&T, the first "big sound issue" (with the first
appearance of the human ear as cover model-in fact twenty-five of them
in multi-color glory) included articles prepared by the audio and acoustics
sub-commission of the usitt engineering commission, up to now the organizational unit of usitt involved with sound. Mostly focused on acoustics

2009

49th Annual
USITT Conference
& Stage Expo,
Cincinnati, OH.

2009

Tharon Musser
(1925-2009), lighting
designer of over 150
Broadway shows and
winner of three
Tony Awards.

2009

New USITT logo published in Sightlines.
Logo was unveiled for the first time in March
during the conference in Cincinnati.

2009

50th
Annual USITT
Conference &
Stage Expo,
Kansas City, MO.

"ANSI E1.31 - 2009 Entertainment Technology - Lightweight streaming
protocol for transport of DMX512 using ACN" is approved by ANSI.

2009

2008

Publication
of The Designs
of Jules Fisher by
Delbert Uhruh.

2010

theatre

design

teChnology

Golden Pen
Award goes to
Dressed: A Century of
Hollywood Costume
Design by Deborah
Nadoolman Landis.

W I N T E R

2010

2010-2012

Joe Aldredge
USITT President

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2010