Recently, I had the pleasure of “sitting down” with sound designer Ken Goodwin. Ken Goodwin is a theatrical sound designer who has worked for various prestigious production companies including Visceral Entertainment, The Public Theater, The New Group, and Broadway in New York City. His work includes various shows such as Rocktopia, The Parisian Woman, Groundhog Day, and On The Town.
For this post, I picked out some of the questions and topics which I thought were most interesting and probably most useful to people reading about this topic. If you want to see the full interview, be sure to check out the video. I hope you enjoy this interview!
David: Once hired to do sound design on a theatrical production, what is your process like to come up with sounds for the show?
Ken:
Usually it just goes into: “hi, I’m a director, I’m looking for a sound designer. These are the dates. Are you available and interested? And this is kind of what the play is about.” And I’ll usually say, yeah, and they send me a script and I’ll read the script once or twice and then I call them up or we go out for coffee and we get to have a really great conversation about just the world of the play or the musical that we’re doing and just really talk about the characters and developing, you know, the background and their environment in which they live. So that’s how it starts. And then once you know, the director says, yes, you’re a great match for me and for my team of people that I’m trying to build.
Then we go into the nitty gritty details of contract negotiations and going to the venue, and we’ll do a site survey of the venue and everything from can we turn off that air conditioning? It’s really noisy to “oh, I have to add 80 speakers to this venue because you don’t have any installed”, which is a fairly typical New York thing because most of our venues are empty or just for wall rentals here. And then through the next couple of weeks, it could be 12 weeks long, we’ll be developing sound effects and going to rehearsal and working with rental shops and building up paperwork, upon paperwork, upon paperwork and drafting.
And then we go into the theater and load in the sound system and tune the sound system. And we get to have a good time actually putting the show together on stage with all of the technical elements.
David: How do you figure out what sounds you’ll need for the play?
Ken:
I mean, I think sometimes the most obvious sounds that are in the play are just written directly in the script. Right. If the playwright deems that they need a car pulling up to foreshadow an important character and, you know, entering the world on stage, you know, they’ll write “sound of a car up off stage and a door slam” or something, but that oftentimes the sounds that I’m the most interested in are the ones that are not explicitly written in the script.
And those are the ones that we develop along with the director. And a lot of the time, I’m inspired by the set design, the costume design of the characters. Right. And I have to then create a world of a play outside of the theater, bring it into the theater, and then also make sure that it fits within the story that they’re telling on stage.
David: What considerations do you need to take when creating sound for theaters?
Ken:
I guess my philosophy is that I have to make sure that there’s this constant, invisible thread between the audience and the actors on stage. Right. And if that thread snaps because it gets too tight and then they lose focus of what’s happening with the characters on stage, or if it becomes too loose and they get bored and they start looking around the audience, then I’m not doing my job either.
So, you know, when it comes to creating a soundscape which besides the spot sound effects that are in those scripts that say, you know, car door slam, you know, rain, rain outside the actual more cinematic mood driving sound effects of the, you know, the ambiance. That’s the stuff that you really have to kind of play super subtle. And when I say a super subtle you know, when we think of the dynamics in a movie, you know, we think, you know, movies are fairly compressed, you know, but you know, when we think of creating the mood on stage, it has to be something that comes from the stage but doesn’t distract the actors. So it has to be fairly quiet, but also has to be heard by perhaps three thousand different people. And in the actual audience of the house.
Yeah, and we might just try a little one DB shift or a two DB shift or we might put it, you know, coming from a single tiny speaker on stage.
But then we’ll try to delay it into the main speakers in the House so that people know where it’s coming from, but it’s supported more out where they are and less on stage. So we create this kind of soundscape to suck the audience in. But if we can’t suck them in too hard into the sounds, because then we’re distracting from the actual storytelling on the stage.
So, you know, the dialogue and the vocals are always, you know, the number one thing that we have to worry about, because if that story isn’t told, then we’re not doing our job. But sometimes the sound design becomes its own character. And we’ll kind of leap out upon the page there. And that’s when it gets kind of fun.
David: Deconstructing the sound of the virus in the musical Emojiland
Ken:
Um, well, before the shutdown, the last big show I did was a musical called Emoji Land, which is not the not the movie, but was a show where all the characters were emojis and they lived within a phone and the phone gets an update, so a whole bunch of new emojis come along and sort of a popularity contest. But one of the emojis is called Nerd Face and he meets the older emoji called a Skull Face and Skull Face is a little depressing, a little bit evil. And Skull says, look, man, I’m a skull, but for some reason I can’t die. Right. So could you help me out and make me a virus? Right. And so Nerd Face trying to be a best friend to his new friend the skull face makes a virus. And Skull takes the virus and smashes it on the ground. And the virus spreads throughout Emojiland, corrupting all of the, you know, all the bits and bytes and has to basically corrode this world and potentially risk, you know, killing everybody in the Emojiland.
So right at the end, Act one skull smashes this test tube of this virus. And I have to create that smash sound and this swirling sound of the virus spreading and all of the things dying and crashing around it.
And then all through Act 2, it’s all about how do we find the antidote to the virus.
David: The most important skill to learn as a sound designer?
Ken:
How oh, man, and so I. I think listening is so important because as a listener, you are no longer trying to there’s always a perspective of listening, right. And that perspective is either. Are you listening as the sound designer? Are you listening as the director who might be listening to your sound effect for the first time, or are you listening as an audience member or are you listening as an audience member who may have, you know, been forced to come to this show by, you know, their kids who really wanted to see this show.
Or are you coming in as an audience member? Who is super engaged with the show and is listening to everything, right? And I also have to. To listen, as somebody who hasn’t heard the show at all, right, and so every single time we do this performance, I have to try to reset my my internal listening, you know, memory clock and say, OK, I need to come at this with, you know, tabula rasa, a fresh mind.
I need to listen to the show like it’s the first time I’m ever seeing this show. We’ve been doing this show for six weeks straight. I can’t… you know, and it’s really hard. Right. But every single time. But you do things like, OK, I’m going to sit in a different seat today or I’m going to sit in. The seat that the critic is going to sit in or I’m going to go sit in the back where the cheap seats are, right.
And, you know, my job is to try to make all these places sound the same, but I have to make all these experiences unique and personal to the person sitting in the seat next to them.
And you’re basically putting yourself in the shoes of somebody else and trying to hear from their perspective. So it’s kind of like you’re changing your mindset basically of how you’re going to listen to a sound.
Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, but that’s just one type of listening, you know, listening from a new perspective of, you know, this the fresh air idea how to come into a, you know, an area with a sort of fresh ideas.
But when it comes to also being an active listener, you have to be an active listener in a room full of collaborators. You have to know what they’re bringing to the table as well. And then you have to listen to them, because if you as a sound designer, don’t merge your sound design with all the other design disciplines and all the other crafts on stage and different acting techniques all these different actors will bring, then you just stick out like a sore thumb and you need to also listen to your collaborators and know how are you going to kind of create this, like harmony between all the different elements are being put into this pot, right?
David: What skills would you say sound designers should develop?
Ken:
I mean, there’s technical skills or technical skills, the fun thing about being a sound designer is that you never stop learning new technology. You know, I mean, people can say that pro tools is the standard, or Oh, but there’s logic and there’s Ableton and there’s Reaper and, you know, but like, you need to know how to edit sounds. Right. Maybe don’t learn how to, you know, cut and splice reel to reel tape these days, but, you know, learn how to get yourself and Ed know how to do a fade in and a fade out.
Know how to layer a couple sound effects together. Know how to put in a compressor or a limiter and reaver plugins. Those are the technical things, right? It’s something that can be used whether you work on movies or game design or Theater design or rock and roll and. Uh. But when it comes to actually developing skills, the best skills you’re going to learn to develop are the ones that you use with the people that you work with.
Right. And because I don’t get hired, because I’m a good sound designer, at first I get hired because people want to work with me. And so the more people who want to work with you, the more likely that then those skills that you need to learn are going to be put to the test.
Act one skull smashes this test tube of this virus. And I have to create that smash sound and this swirling sound of the virus spreading and all of the things dying and crashing around it.
And then all through Act 2, it’s all about how do we find the antidote to the virus.
That’s it for this written interview. Make sure to watch the VIDEO to get a lot more details and information.
Check out Ken and his work here
If there is somebody else you would like me to interview or have on to discuss sound design, do let me know in the comments below.
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