Theory For Theatre Studies - Sound-Methuen Drama (2019)

Theory for
Theatre Studies:
Sound
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Theory for Theatre Studies meets the need for accessible, mid-
length volumes that unpack keywords that lie at the core of
the discipline. Aimed primarily at undergraduate students
and secondarily at postgraduates and researchers, volumes
feature both background material historicizing the term, and
original, forward-looking research into intersecting theoretical
trends in the field. Case studies ground volumes in praxis, and
additional resources online ensure readers are equipped with
the necessary skills and understanding as they move deeper
into the discipline.
Series editors
Susan Bennett, University of Calgary, Canada
Kim Solga, Western University, Canada
Published titles
Theory for Theatre Studies: Space
Kim Solga
Forthcoming titles
Theory for Theatre Studies: Movement Rachel Fensham
Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion Peta Tait
Theory for Theatre Studies: Economics Michael McKinnie
Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory Milija Gluhovic
Theory for
Theatre Studies:
Sound
Susan Bennett
Series editors:
Susan Bennett and Kim Solga
METHUEN DRAMA
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First published in Great Britain 2019
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For Barnaby,
maestro of sound
vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Series Preface x
Sound: An Introduction 1
SECTION ONE
Classical Sound 15
Theatres in ancient Greece and Aristotle’s Poetics 15
The vocal map of ancient Greek drama 18
Vitruvius on acoustics: De Architectura 24
Shakespeare’s Globe and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum 27
Acoustic world-making on the early modern stage 35
A sonic imagination of early modern London 48
SECTION TWO
Avant-Garde Sound 53
New technologies for sound performance 53

Hanging on the telephone: Sigmund Freud and Roland
Barthes 63
The sounds of silence: John Cage’s future of music 70
Acousmatics and radiophonics: Pierre Schaeffer and the
BBC 78
Aura and archive: Making sound memories 85
viii CONTENTS
SECTION THREE
Experiential Sound 97
Prosthetic performance and deterritorialized listening 97

Listening to women: Andrea Hornick and Luce Irigaray 107
Affective theatres of embodied sound 113
Coda: Sound across the world 128
References 132
Further Reading 142
Index 145
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I start with warmest thanks to Kim Solga, my co-editor

in putting together this series: she agreed with alacrity to
explore the possibility of these Theory volumes and since
then has proven time and again an energetic collaborator
and astute colleague as we have written our own two texts
and commissioned authors to write others. Her unfailing
enthusiasm for student learning and her relentless pursuit of
fair and equitable pedagogies make us all better not only in our
classroom practices but also in thinking more carefully about
those we write for and how.
Sincere thanks are due, too, to Mark Dudgeon and his
team at Bloomsbury. Mark has been a champion of this series
from its inception, and he continues to provide thoughtful and
generous support in its development. Lara Bateman has done
a terrific job in ensuring authors, including this one, stay on
track and are well informed about the Bloomsbury publication
process.
I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts at the University of
Calgary for a six-month Research & Scholarship Leave during
which time the first draft of this book was worked out. But,
even more importantly, Sound would not have found its
voice without the opportunity to teach a graduate seminar
on interdisciplinary sound studies and the wonderfully rich
discussions that the students in this class fostered each week.
The podcasts this group of students produced at the end of
the course were without exception dazzling in their intellectual
range, as well as rigorous, innovative and often moving. Their
work inspired this work. Much love, always, to my family – it
is a perennial joy to share their creative worlds.
SERIES PREFACE
Theory for Theatre Studies (TfTS) is a series of introductory

theoretical monographs intended for both undergraduate and
postgraduate students as well as researchers branching out
into fresh fields. It aims to introduce constellations of ideas,
methods, theories and rubrics central to the working concerns
of scholars in theatre and performance studies at the opening
of the twenty-first century. With a primary focus on twentieth-
century developments, TfTS volumes offer accessible and
provocative engagements with critical theory that inspire
new ways of thinking theory in important disciplinary and
interdisciplinary modes.
The series features full-length volumes explicitly aimed at
unpacking sets of ideas that have coalesced around carefully
chosen key terms in theatre and performance, such as space,
sound, bodies, memory, movement, economies and emotion.
TfTS volumes do not aggregate existing essays, but rather
provide a careful, fresh synthesis of what extensive reading
by our authors reveals to be key nodes of interconnection
between related theoretical models. The goal of these texts is to
introduce readers to a wide variety of critical approaches and
to unpack the complex theory useful for both performance
analysis and creation.
Each volume in the series focuses on one specific set of
theoretical concerns, constellated around a term that has
become central to understanding the social and political labour
of theatre and performance work at the turn of the millennium.
The organization of each book follows a common template:
Section One includes a historical overview of interconnected
theoretical models, Section Two features extended case studies
using twentieth- and twenty-first-century performances and
SERIES PREFACE xi
Section Three looks ahead, as our authors explore important

new developments in their constellation. Each volume is
broad enough in scope to look laterally across its topic for
compelling connections to related concerns, yet specific enough
to be comprehensive in its assessment of its particular term.
The ideas explored and explained through lively and detailed
case studies provide diverse critical approaches for reading all
kinds of plays and performances as well as starting points for
practical exploration.
Each book includes a further reading section, and features
a companion website with chapter summaries, questions for
discussion, and a host of video and other web links.
Susan Bennett (University of Calgary, Canada)

and Kim Solga (Western University, Canada)
xii
Sound: An Introduction
Sitting on the bus, walking across campus to class, travelling on

a plane, working out at the gym and so many more everyday
scenarios where thought, action and even perhaps sense of self
are now typically accompanied by a soundtrack. It has become
a commonplace to go through the day with headphones in
ears, listening to a curated playlist, favourite radio channel,
podcast, audio book or a randomized selection of music
housed on a personal Apple or other branded mobile device.
As fans of theatre, we may be subscribed to the ‘PlayMe’
podcast, ‘transforming drama for the digital age’ and allowing
us to listen to original ‘Canadian Indie Theatre on a national
and international scale’ (Expect Theatre). Often, of course,
we choose a soundtrack to serve a purpose – change or set a
mood, inspire an activity, provide us with street directions or
just to block out the more unsettling and unwelcome sounds
of daily life, especially those of a city such as traffic, machinery,
too many other people. We live in a sound world that regularly
serves as a barrier to noise pollution in the real world. Michael
Bull describes our immersion in sound as an ‘audiotopia’,
created by the ‘intense pleasure’ and ‘desire for continuous,
uninterrupted use’ of iPods (2011: 528). More materially,
Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld note that sound has been
rendered ‘“thing-like” – a commodity to be bought and sold on
iTunes, a thing to be worn, as with personal stereos’ (2012: 5).
Even without headphones deployed, our daily lives
are pervaded and distracted by music and other varieties
2 THEORY FOR THEATRE STUDIES: SOUND
of ambient sound, part of a contemporary experience of

elevators, stores, coffee shops and restaurants, gyms, hotel
lobbies, art installations and so on. We are subjects hailed by
these public space soundtracks, chosen not (or, at least, not
just) to entertain us but more explicitly to put us in a mood
conducive to shopping or eating or working out. Sometimes
a soundtrack – often made up of classical music or opera – is
designed and deployed to discourage us from lingering too long
at a particular site (many public transit authorities have used
this strategy). This plethora of everyday sound experiences
Anahid Kassabian has usefully captured for us as ‘ubiquitous
listening’ (2013: 40).
The number and variety of these commonplace sonic
engagements make up a narrative of ‘human-technology
coupling’, David Cecchetto would say (2013: 4), and it is hardly
surprising that so many theorists have started to examine ‘the
sonic turn’ of the twenty-first century. How do we understand
the ways sound shapes theatrical production and reception?
How have sonic practices informed the performances we
make or attend? This book aims to think through the many
elements of sound that inform theatre and performance and to
provide critical entry points for engaging the breadth of theory
across historical and disciplinary perspectives concerned with
the nature of sound. Scholarship in theatre and performance
studies for a very long time emphasized, sometimes almost
exclusively, matters of visuality and of embodiment, even as it
was recognized that sound in its various forms is an intrinsic
part of any performance experience. It has long been obvious,
after all, that audiences receive a great deal of information, not
to mention enjoyment, through what they hear from the stage
as much as from what they see. Gertrude Stein, way back in
1935, declared, ‘I say nothing is more interesting to know about
the theatre than the relation of sight and sound’ (1957: 113).
To this end, Sound will look at different theories and diverse
performances that have explored and articulated how various
sonic elements shape and inform theatrical production and
reception.
AN INTRODUCTION 3
While this book will explore critical discussions of the

role of sound in theatrical production, it will also look at
theoretical writing about sound more broadly and via cognate
disciplines so as to measure the usefulness of this work for
investigations of performance matters. With careful attention
to relevant period studies that have thought through sound
in specific historical contexts, as well as to key disciplinary
and interdisciplinary texts, Sound will engage a wide range
of theatre and performance examples as well as provide case
studies so as to model a sound focus and methodology. But
how, exactly, should we think of this topic of sound? As a
starting point, then, let’s take up Mark Grimshaw’s definition:
‘Sound is an emergent perception arising primarily in the
auditory system and that is formed through spatio-temporal
processes in an embodied environment’ (2017: 468, italicized
in original).
What Grimshaw emphasizes is the relational nature of
sound: we understand it through space, time and the body
(all areas that have been amply theorized within theatre and
performance studies). Also, we might note that he begins with
an emphasis on the ‘auditory system’ and, thus, pays attention
to the role of the listener. Grimshaw amplifies his gloss as
follows:
The definition also stresses the importance of perceptual

context and opens the door to an understanding of
the dynamic relationship between sound and memory,
experience, imagination, affect, and cross-modality. Thus,
sound really is all in the mind and its emergent perception
is formed from varying combinations of material, sensuous
stimuli (possibly, but not necessarily, sound waves) or
immaterial, non-sensuous phenomena (such as imagination
and memory). (2017: 469)
Theatre director Peter Sellars, like Grimshaw, ties sound to

memory: ‘That is to say, sound is where we locate ourselves,
not physically, but mentally and spiritually. Sound exists
inside our heads. It is our greatest experience of intimacy. It

transports us’ (1992). Hans-Thies Lehmann, in his oft-cited
account of ‘postdramatic theatre’, calls for an ‘independent
auditory semiotics’ (2006: 91, emphasis in original). And
Lynne Kendrick asks us to think through ‘theatre aurality’,
‘a mode of engagement that – because it cannot be captured
by the eye – can exceed the boundaries by which our visible
world is marked out for us … sound can redraw the spaces
and environments around us’ (2017: xxii). In this book, we
will explore a range of sound experiences and consider how
production elements impact and affect audiences.
Sound is, in the sonic sense, a sampling. The goal of the
book is to generate key questions and productive approaches
that will encourage students and researchers to conduct their
own investigations of sound in the theatres and performances
they value. To this end, what should we consider as sound
in a theatrical context? The term catches within it elements
such as voice, music and song, sound effects, soundtracks,
intended and unintended noises (what Mladen Ovadija calls
‘environmental onstage and offstage events’ [2016: 11]),
acoustics, resonance, noise and even silence – many of these
fully deserving of a theoretical study of their own and certainly
all in need of careful explication and historicization. We might
think, for example, that the category of sound effects is both
transparent and transhistorical – what is the storm at the
beginning of Shakespeare’s The Tempest but a remarkable
sound effect? But, in fact, this sonic term came into use only
in the twentieth century in the infancy of the Hollywood film
industry, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) providing the
word’s first citation from a 1909 advertisement in Moving
Picture World for the makers of ‘high grade sound effects.’
The OED does, however, include the theatre in its annotation
of common usage: ‘a sound typical of an event or evocative
of an atmosphere, produced artificially in a play, film, etc.’,
suggesting how this modern concept has been taken up multi-
modally and made retroactively applicable to discussions of
theatrical practice at any historical moment.
AN INTRODUCTION 5
Sound in the theatre also implies – indeed, requires –

listening. Audiences, by virtue of their presence, are contracted
to listen and, inevitably, become producers of sound themselves
(some intended: clapping, laughing and so on; others less
so: coughing, chatting and so on). Actors onstage and the
technical crew offstage are all equally contracted to acts of
listening – to each other and for feedback. Remember, too,
that the etymology of audience connects the term specifically
to hearing and that the OED defines an audience primarily as
a body of hearers (‘All the people within hearing of something;
(hence) the assembled listeners or spectators at a public
performance or event’). How audiences listen is one area of
the theatrical sound experience that has generated thorough
and lively scholarly attention. Ross Brown, for example, has
argued that listening at a performance is ‘focused hearing –
active auditory attention that attends to one thing at a time
or follows a particular, “monophonic” flow (which might be
an ensemble of sounds)’ (2010: 135–6). Yet, that ‘focused
hearing’ cannot ever be fully realized as Rey Chow and James
A. Steintrager point out: ‘even when we attend to a sound’s
source, we sense sound as an emanation and as filling the space
around us. Objects as sonic phenomena are points of diffusion
that in listening we attempt to gather’ (2011: 2). Sound’s
tendency is always towards the immersive.
With this in mind, George Home-Cook writes that
there is ‘a great deal more to listening than meets the ear’
and suggests even as ‘the listener resides in the medium of
sound, equally this medium must be attended, explored and
travelled through. In short: listening, as an intersensorial
act of stretching, involves paying attention to atmospheres’
(2015: 168–9). His work refines the idea of a focused listening
directed at sonic phenomena so as to produce what he calls
aural attention. He suggests that how we perceive by way of
listening in the theatre is, in fact, ‘an inter-subjective act of
embodied participation’ (2015: 168). Home-Cook’s approach
is principally phenomenological – a way of thinking that we
will look at again later in the section on ‘avant-garde’ sound
(through a discussion of French theorist Pierre Schaeffer’s

concept of acousmatics and Samuel Beckett’s radio play
All That Fall). That listening can demand active or passive
participation is also considered by critic and composer Michel
Chion. He likewise employs a phenomenological framework
in which to elucidate these modes of response. Where our eyes
can only focus on a single point, our ears, Chion contends,
hear everything: ‘There is always something about sound
that overwhelms and surprises us no matter what – especially
when we refuse to lend it our conscious attention; and thus
sound interferes with our perception’ (2012: 53). From the
first theatres of ancient Greece to the most recent genres of
performance, the production of sound and the ways we hear/
listen/attend aurally have formed a dynamic network that we
now strive to better describe.
Particularly challenging for theatre studies scholars is the
task of listening to performances from the past. J. L. Stoever
warns: ‘Sounds disconnected from their contexts of reception
rarely answer our questions about the past, but merely make
for new listening experiences in the present’ (2009). This
argument notwithstanding, Bruce Smith has proposed that
when we look to recover sound in performances from earlier
periods, we should become ‘acoustic archaeologists who “un-
air” sounds that have faded into the air’s atmosphere and
catalogue them’ (2004: 22). The first section of Sound starts
with such a project – how to listen to the theatres, and the
sound theorists, of ancient Greece and early modern England,
to consider how acoustics were practised and understood
in those times and to rehearse our archaeological skills. An
acoustic archaeologist might take as her task the construction
of a ‘soundscape’ – a term first coined in the 1970s to describe
all the sounds that make up a particular environment. To make
a soundscape that described a performance from the past, then,
we would want to consider not just those sounds created by
and in a particular production but also those that somehow
and necessarily contextualize it. As well, we would need to
recognize the assumptions we bring to bear on building that
AN INTRODUCTION 7
soundscape: in effect, we would need to comprehend and

elucidate our own sonic (listening) histories.
Theatrical sound has, of course, long been a subject of
considerable interest for technical study of the theatre, and
practices of sound production have been extensively and usefully
explored in the context of stage design. Ross Brown’s Sound:
A Reader in Theatre Practice provides a valuable introduction
to ‘designing sound in relation to dramaturgy’ (2010: xiii), and
this work includes a useful survey of textbooks in the field from
across the twentieth century. Deena Kaye and James Lebrecht’s
Sound and Music for the Theatre: The Art and Technique of
Design is one of the best-known and highly regarded manuals
for the would-be sound designer. The authors warn the reader
that ‘[a]s a sound designer, you may encounter the perplexed
looks of others as they wonder what exactly sound design
is. Tell them that sound design is the creative and technical
process resulting in the complete aural environment for live
theatre – just like the music and sound accompanying film’
(2013: 1). What follows in their volume is a detailed work-
through from concept to running the show. Notwithstanding
the emergence of sound design as a significant professional
field, theatre sound as a critical enquiry was long consigned to
a background role, rarely doing more than support the main
action of performance research. We might look here at Patrice
Pavis’s practical text Analyzing Performance (2003) where one
of his ten chapters is devoted to ‘Voice, Music, Rhythm’. For
the first of these three terms, Pavis suggests that ‘the voice is
also a projection of the body into the text, a means of making
the corporeal presence of the actor felt’ (2003: 140). Music
he limits to ‘how it serves the theatrical event’ and rhythm as
what ‘organizes speaking bodies moving in the time-space of a
stage’ (2003: 140, 145). In other words, he shifts the impacts
of voice, music and rhythm to serve those categories we have
historically privileged in our studies of theatre – time, space
and embodiment – at the same time as he omits or at least
ignores other common performance elements such as sound
effects, sound scores and other varieties of sonic intervention.
More recently, however, there has been much more interest

in elaborating the work of sound in theatrical performance.
Less than a decade after publication of Analyzing Performance
(in English), for example, the collection Theatre Noise: The
Sound of Performance (2011) set the stage for more complex
examinations conducted across a range of theatrical styles and
performance genres, where Pavis, here as author of the book’s
Foreword, moots ‘Is it sound’s turn?’ (x). The book’s editors
certainly thought it was, but elect to make a move from sound
to noise, explaining that their term ‘captures an agitatory
acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound
design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory
spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience,
the political in produced noises’ (2011: xv). In their definition
of theatre noise, the editors looked to suggest the textured
vocabulary that discussions of sound, in performance and in
the world, employ.
Burgeoning interest in the complex terrain of sound as a
primary meaning-making mode in theatre and performance –
how it works socially, politically, ethically and psychologically –
has been informed by and resonates with the rapid expansion
in the twenty-first century of the field of Sound Studies, an
area marked by the publication of two hefty anthologies
in 2012. In The Sound Studies Reader, Jonathan Sterne
introduces Sound Studies as ‘a name for the interdisciplinary
ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its
analytical point of departure or arrival’ (2012: 2) and further
explains that scholarship in the area looks ‘to think across
sounds, to consider sonic phenomena in relationship to one
another … whether they be music, voices, listening, media,
buildings, performances, or another other path into sonic
life’ (2012: 3). Even as ‘performance’ appears as a term within
Sterne’s list of sonic categories, we should recognize that all
the other elements in his string bear examination in thinking
about sound in theatre.
In the other field-defining collection, editors Trevor Pinch
and Karin Bijsterveld introduce The Oxford Handbook of
AN INTRODUCTION 9
Sound Studies with the observation that ‘sound is no longer

just sound; it has become technologically produced and
mediated sound’ (2012: 4). They call for new sonic skills with
which to listen (2012: 11). Both volumes mark the need to
counteract the hegemony of the visual (‘ocularcentrism’) and
seek to rebalance scholarly interests between what we see and
what we hear. Two years earlier Gustavus Stadler, introducing
a Sound Studies issue of the journal Social Text, argued that
the field’s interdisciplinary interests provide ways to ‘reassess
and replenish political critique. What matters here is learning
how to hear what power, history, culture and difference sound
like’ (2010a: 10–11). Sterne makes much the same case when
he insists that investigations of sound ‘attend to the (cultural,
political, environmental, aesthetic … ) stakes of that knowledge
production’ (2012: 3–4, ellipses in original). Sound will look to
keep these stakes in view across the historical and theoretical
scope of the book.
While much of Sound Studies scholarship is directed towards
the latest technological conditions of sound production and
potential acts of listening (‘new sonic skills’), Sterne’s work
looks back to the history of sound. His scholarship has echoes
of Smith’s acoustic archaeology, suggesting that sound is ‘at
different moments strangely silent, strangely gory, strangely
visual, and always contextual. This is because that elusive
inside world of sound – the sonorous, the auditory, the heard,
the very density of sonic experience – emerges and becomes
perceptible only through its exteriors’ (2003: 13). Thus we
cannot authentically recover ‘an auditory past’ but must instead
focus on ‘the social and cultural grounds of sonic experience’
(Sterne 2003: 13) or, as French social theorist Jacques Attali
puts it, ‘it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion
societies (2012: 31)’. Simply put, sound has always been (and
continues to be) crucial to the production and circulation of
power.
Roland Barthes concluded his treatise on listening (a work
that we will examine in more detail in the second section of
this book, ‘Avant-Garde Sound’) with a claim for its potential
to resist: ‘no law is in a position to constrain our listening:

freedom of listening is as necessary as freedom of speech’
(Barthes 1985: 260). He celebrated the ‘sonic imagination’
of the audience. But while listening may be liberatory, being
listened to conjures much darker possibilities. Attali ventures:
‘Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance
are weapons of power. The technology of listening in on,
ordering, transmitting, and recording noise is at the heart of
this apparatus’ (2012: 32). Twenty-first-century performances
have often examined exactly this relationship between sound
and surveillance; in Section Three, we will look at Rimini
Protokoll’s Situation Rooms, a performance that equips
audience-participants with headphones to act out precisely
these kinds of conditions.
Sound follows a three-part structure that moves

chronologically through history. This arrangement recognizes
that to think about sound – and certainly to think about sound
in theatre and performance – is to recognize an evolution
of knowledge about how sounds are made and heard. New
technologies of sound production and reception generate new
theories that systematize the new practices. At the same time,
new technologies inspire new subjects for and innovative
modes of delivery in performance. This book addresses the
span of sonic history in the theatre.
The first section of Sound will explore theories of sound as
part of a canonical Western tradition. We will look at what key
thinkers have had to say about sound in the theatre as well as
how we think this might have been experienced in performance.
Starting with the earliest drama of ancient Greece, we will
consider ideas about sound in the context of the period with
particular attention to places of production (such as the theatre
at Epidaurus and, later, at Shakespeare’s Globe) and to relevant
sonic practices (such as music, sound effects and textual cues).
This account of ‘classical sound’ is not a survey of dramatic
AN INTRODUCTION 11
theory or of sound design, but rather it looks at the theatres

of ancient Greece and of early modern England in order to
think about how theatres have employed sound at particular
historical moments and how theorists, both contemporary to
these periods and since, have understood the matter of their
sound production. Two case studies, of Aristophanes’ The
Frogs and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, will allow us to explore
how sound features work in their respective periods as well as
to take up how the plays’ soundscapes have been adapted for
later audiences.
The second section will turn to ‘avant-garde sound’ to
address a fascination with and dependence on emergent
technologies of sound production in the late nineteenth
century and through to the mid-twentieth century. It will look
first at the theatrical experiments of the Italian Futurists and
the fervour with which they met the modern city and all of
the sounds it generated. Because of their excitement in and
fascination for the new possibilities of making and hearing
sound, the Futurists often not only undertook the elucidation
of new theoretical perspectives but also revelled in the making
of sound-saturated performances.
‘Avant-garde sound’ is also concerned with the new
machineries of sound – developments in communications
engineering – and how these inventions changed both sound
production and what Grimshaw calls ‘the dynamic relationship
between sound and memory, experience, imagination, affect,
and cross-modality’ (2017: 469). We will look, too, at how these
inventions found their way into theories of performance as well
as emerged as contributors to stage practice. A case study of
Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s orchestra of intonamuri will
examine how noise and silence entered a sonic performance
vocabulary – a topic that will be further developed in a discussion
of John Cage’s imagination of the ‘future of music’. Two further
case studies, of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice and Samuel
Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, will allow us to consider the
impacts, on stage and in the audience, of specific technological
developments: the telephone and the tape recorder.
The final section will examine ‘experiential sound’, a

reflection on performance practices that envelop the spectator
in a curated and participatory soundscape made possible by
the development of mobile sound technologies. Looking at
two of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s audio/video projects
(‘Forest Walk’ and ‘The Telephone Call’), we will examine how
new portable devices – in the first example, the Sony Walkman
and in the second, a small digital camera – took sound
performance (and its audiences) out of the theatre building
into other performance spaces. ‘Experiential sound’ relies on
the availability of headphones, an apparatus that Michael
Bull describes as transforming ‘the users’ relationship to the
environment’ and creating ‘sonic privacy’ (2011: 529) – their
adoption proliferating to the extent we now recognize a genre
of ‘headphone theatre’. Case studies will look at how oral
histories, delivered through mobile technology, become sonic
experiences that aim to compel their listeners to empathize
with, and sometimes (re-)enact, those narratives. In this
section, we will examine Shannon Yee’s Reassembled, Slightly
Askew, a headphone drama about the author’s experience
of a devastating illness and recovery, and Rimini Protokoll’s
Situation Rooms, a peripatetic sonic adventure that asks its
audience-participants to encounter the extraordinarily diverse
conditions and impacts of the global arms trade. ‘Experiential
sound’ will address the common assertion that active listening
converts sound into memory.
A coda to this final section will ask questions about the
application of this book’s theoretical scope to those sonic
elements that do not originate in Western ways of thinking
about sound matters or in Western conventions of sound
design for performance.
Whether researching theatre as a critic or a practitioner,
a beginner or an expert, Sound alerts us to the possibilities
of knowing more about this vital element of performance. It
insists that we think further about how sound in theatre and
performance works in the social, cultural and political moments
in which it is produced and heard. The ideas and examples that
AN INTRODUCTION 13
follow are intended to help with what Gertrude Stein saw as

the axiomatic puzzle of her theatregoing experiences: ‘Does
the thing heard replace the thing seen. Does it help or does it
interfere with it’ (1957: 101).
14
SECTION ONE
Classical Sound
Theatres in ancient Greece

and Aristotle’s Poetics
The history of Western theatre starts in Greece and the history
of ‘Western theatrical theory essentially begins with Aristotle’
(Carlson 1993: 15). And both the ancient theatres and
Aristotle’s theory are important to this project about sound.
They remind us that the first theatres were predominantly
aural and that the first theory was attentive to the production
of sound theatrically as well as to the effects on the audience
it sought to create.
Perhaps the best-known example of the earliest theatre
buildings is the amphitheatre at Epidaurus, built in the fourth
century BCE and since 1988 a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Its excellent preservation has allowed us to learn – as well as
to speculate – about theatre practices in the classical period.
Epidaurus can accommodate as many as 14,000 spectators. Its
vast size means that spectators in the back row find themselves
more than 60 metres from the playing area, yet the theatre
is famous for its extraordinary acoustics. The actor’s voice,
even at a whisper, can be heard at any point on any row. A
landmark essay in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, published in 2007, revealed what its authors, Nico
F. Declercq and Cindy S. A. Dekeyser, call ‘the geometry of the
theater’ and how this might explain such an exemplary capacity

to carry sound (2007: 2012). Thus, these researchers had set
out to understand, by measuring across different frequencies,
how ‘sound behaves after interaction with the seats of the
theater’ (Declercq and Dekeyser 2007: 2012). They concluded
that ‘the seat rows act like a filter’ (2007: 2021), effectively
muzzling background noise at the same time as the limestone-
constructed rows boost the sounds emanating from the playing
area. Modern acoustical science, then, was able to disprove
a long-held myth that the clarity with which sound travelled
at Epidaurus might be explained by frequent local winds; in
fact, the scientists’ experiments found that, acoustically, those
winds often had a negative effect on the theatre’s immaculate
sound (Declercq and Dekeyser 2007: 2012).
If the seat rows at Epidaurus were a boon to a sound-based
theatre, the wearing of masks by the actors on the ancient
Greek stage was almost certainly an inhibition. Today’s
theatre spectators know how valuable variations in facial
expression can be as interpretive cues and how a mask denies
this familiar and productive interaction and, moreover, the use
of masks, whether in contemporary or ancient Greek theatres,
also constrains engagement between actors themselves since
mask design is necessarily forward facing. Studies of images
of masked actors on ceramics of the same period in ancient
Greece – there are no actual masks extant – suggest that their
sight holes were no larger than the human eye, requiring ‘the act
of akroasis, the act of conscious and active listening’ for actors
and audience alike (Kontomichos 2014: 1445). Furthermore,
distances between the actors and at least the spectators in the
upper levels of the sharply raked rows undoubtedly meant that
the performers would have appeared almost in miniature for
those farthest away.
With the substantial limitations imposed on what we now
think of as conventional theatrical relationships (between
actors and audience as well as between actor and actor) created
by the visual dimensions of acting, sound was everything. For
this reason, Edith Hall has described Greek tragedy as ‘a palette
CLASSICAL SOUND 17
of vocal techniques with which to paint … sound pictures’

(2002: 7); Graham Ley argues that the genre ‘relied heavily
on the voice’ (2006: 54) and required ‘three kinds of vocal
delivery’, speaking, chant and singing (2007: 83). Theatrical
performances traded on the knowledge and skill of audience
members at the City Dionysia, an annual festival of drama and
song, since many of the Athenian men and boys who came to
see the plays would also have been participants in the festival’s
choral competitions. The playwrights recognized their audience
as ‘experienced, even expert, in recognizing and assessing
various poetic and musical styles and skills, especially in regard
to the choral parts – rhythms and melodies; choreography;
clarity and tunefulness of singing’ (Griffith 2013: 115–16) and
were able, therefore, to craft their plays for these sophisticated
ears. As Mark Griffith summarizes, ‘Athenian culture in general
was highly musical, and the theatregoers were probably more
so than average’ (2013: 116).
In this context, it is interesting to see what Aristotle’s Poetics,
the genesis document for Western theatre theory, has to say
about sound. Although best known for its definition of the
dramatic genres, much of Aristotle’s attention in Poetics goes
specifically to tragedy, ‘an action of a superior kind’ (2013:
23), which he asserts has six elements, listed from the most
important to the least: ‘the story, the moral element, the style,
the ideas, the staging, and the music’ (2013: 24). His more
detailed description of the components of tragedy does not put
a great deal of stock in staging, saying it ‘can be emotionally
attractive, but is not a matter of art and is not integral to
poetry’ and music comes last in his taxonomy (2013: 25).
Yet, at the same time, Aristotle insists that ‘music is the most
important source of pleasure’ (2013: 25) and, later in the
Poetics, he returns to music in espousing an argument about
the inferiority of epic when it is compared with tragedy: ‘there
is nothing that epic has that tragedy does not also have – it can
even use the same metre – but tragedy has a substantial extra
element in the form of music, which is a source of intense
pleasure’ (2013: 55). Unfortunately, Aristotle does not give us
any further account of how exactly music might incite such

pleasure nor does he elaborate on the importance of pleasure
for the spectator of Greek tragedy. But it is useful to remember
this turn to the affective power of sound in this earliest
reference text for theorizing theatrical practices.
The Poetics also describes the structure of tragedy: ‘prologue,
episode, finale, and chorus parts (sung either on entry or while
stationary). These items are common to all plays; some have
in addition arias and dirges’ (2013: 31). Aristotle goes on to
explain this arrangement in terms that emphasize the crucial
organizing function of the chorus:
A prologue is everything in a tragedy that precedes the

opening chorus; an episode is whatever comes between
two complete choral songs; and the finale is everything
that comes after the final chorus. Of the choral part, the
opening chorus is the first complete utterance of the chorus;
while a stationary ode is a choral song without anapaests or
trochees. A dirge is a lament shared between the chorus and
the actors. (2013: 31)
Theory in the Poetics therefore suggests that the action of

Greek drama was produced by highly formal and elaborately
layered sonic elements. The actors provided oratory but the
chorus and musicians added the sounds (and movement)
that turned words into drama for an audience whose sonic
knowledge was already expert.
The vocal map of ancient

Greek drama
In his discussion of the theatricality of Greek theatre, Ley
proposes that the text of a Greek tragedy is better understood
as ‘a vocal rather than just a semantic script, a composition
directing a variety of implementations of the capacities of the
CLASSICAL SOUND 19
human voice’ (2007: 84). And it was through the vocal map of
a play that character differentiation was produced and action
created with the different Greek playwrights each deploying
sound to specific and particular purpose. In Aeschylus’s plays,
the chorus often drives the action of the play in both word
and song (for example, in their role of searching for Orestes
in the Eumenides) (Ley 2006: 69–71) and in Agamemnon,
Cassandra is described as singing like a nightingale. In
Sophocles’s plays, the central male character generally sings to
indicate an emotional apex (Hall 2002: 7). In Euripides’ plays,
the chorus is regularly employed in singing and chant, both
to orchestrate stage action and to provide the audience with
guiding commentary. As Simon Goldhill explains, ‘the chorus
mobilizes the voice of the community – with the full weight
of what community means in democracy and in the shared
cultural world of the ancient city’ (2007: 50); in other words,
the varieties of sound that a chorus employs work collectively
not simply to give representation to the citizens in the audience
but to participate in the production of democratic identity,
often doing so from a particularly marginalized position (for
example, a chorus of women). This sense of the chorus as
community holds both potential and appeal for contemporary
productions of Greek tragedy although how to translate its
repertoire of sound for the twenty-first century is, as Goldhill
says, ‘most vexing’ (2007: 45).
In 1965 Roland Barthes had made a similar point
about performances of Greek drama, deliberating on why
modern adaptations so often aim for authenticity when ‘we
frequently perform Shakespeare today without bothering
about the Elizabethan conventions’ (1985: 87). He asserts
that ‘reconstruction is impossible’, because of incomplete
knowledge, ‘notably with regard to the plastic function of the
chorus, which is the stumbling block of all modern productions’
(1985: 87). How to handle the music is, he suggests, equally
fraught: ‘Greek music was monadic, the Greeks knew no other
kind; but for us moderns, whose music is polyphonic, all
monody becomes exotic: hence a fatal signification, which the
ancient Greeks certainly did not want’ (1985: 88). As outlined

in the Introduction, theorization of sound concerned with
theatres of the past inevitably challenges us to elaborate its
qualities and contributions in the context of our own sonic
histories and experiences of listening. Thus we are obliged to
weigh what kinds of sonic adaptation are necessary, appropriate
and/or effective when reading or producing a play that is not
a contemporary one and whether knowledge of the original
conditions of sound realization is relevant, informative or a
barrier to the possibilities of a play’s new life.
That the chorus of Greek drama was accompanied by
music, usually auloi (a reeded double pipe) and sometimes
lyre (stringed instruments), adds to sense that performance
comprised more a musical score than a play text. Auloi were
‘particularly prominent in connection with choroi [the chorus]’
and the sound these flutes created was ‘for want of a better,
general term, piercing’ (Ley 2007: 133). Imagine, then, the
arrival of the chorus singing, dancing and accompanied by the
arresting screech of the auloi, a fully sonic transition between
prologue and the main action of the play. For Peter Wilson, ‘[b]y
far the most important and intimate relationship’ in Greek
tragedy was the one between musician and chorus (2002: 39).
But without sufficient evidence to reconstruct the vocal register
of the choruses or the melodies of the music that accompanied
them, it is obviously a challenge to know how to make either
work effectively in a contemporary staging of Greek tragedy
(whether attempting an original practices performance or
a modern adaptation). Wilson makes the important point
that a ‘tune on the most authentically reconstructed aulos
is, in isolation, almost as meaningless to the modern ear as
a recitation of a speech of Euripides to someone ignorant of
the structure of ancient Greek’ (2002: 41) – a problem for the
scholar of historical sound, to be sure, and an issue to which
this book will return on several occasions.
But Wilson does not see this as the only, or even the most
vexatious, difficulty; rather, he points out that Aristotle’s
dismissal of staging (‘not a matter of art’), along with the
CLASSICAL SOUND 21
ranking of music as the least important of his six elements

of tragedy, has created a bias that informs how scholars of
ancient Greek theatre attend to sonic contributions. Instead
of focusing almost singularly on extant text, we need as
much to remember how frequently playwrights and theorists
of the period privileged sound, song, music and melody in
their writing for and about theatre. As Barthes insisted, we
have a responsibility to rediscover ‘the rigorous distinction
of the spoken, the sung, and the declaimed, or the massive,
frontal plasticity of the chorus … its essentially lyric function’
(1985: 88). Notwithstanding the considerable challenges
attached to the revivification of sound from ancient plays as well
as Barthes’s combination of cautions and recommendations,
a much-admired production of Aeschylus’s The Suppliant
Women by The Actors Company (2016–17) resurrected the
use of auloi in a new score for the play composed by John
Browne – an element that marketed the ancient instruments
as ‘heard on stage for the first time in 2500 years’! The auloi-
infused soundtrack was employed to frame the involvement of
fifty local women (not actors) who served as a contemporary-
day chorus of refugees seeking asylum, a choice that reviewer
Allan Radcliffe described as producing a ‘truly hypnotic effect’
(2016).
Case study: Aristophanes’ The Frogs

Like the earlier tragedies, Aristophanes’ eleven plays (the
only extant evidence of ‘old’ Greek comedy) demonstrate
a sophisticated deployment of sound – vocal styles, music,
singing and so on. Of particular interest to this study is The
Frogs (written around 405 BCE) where, in one of the play’s
comic episodes, Aristophanes pits Aeschylus against Euripides
as to who wrote superior tragedies: an onstage ‘battle’ between
the actors in these roles that requires them to sing parodies
of each other’s work. In Aristophanes’ play, Dionysus – the
god whose festivals, the City Dionysia, were the inspiration for
the first Greek drama – finds himself unhappy at the state of

contemporary playwriting. He travels to Hades to find Euripides
(who had only recently died) and finds there the dramatist in
competition with Aeschylus as to who is the better playwright.
Upon his arrival, Dionysus is asked to judge. What follows is
an extended parody of both Aeschylus’s and Euripides’ styles,
intended to entertain the audience as brilliantly comic pastiche.
But their rendition of each other’s work also provides an
illuminating historical document for better understanding the
sonic techniques characteristic of the two earlier writers. After
Aeschylus and Euripides have each made a case for the qualities
of their prologues, Dionysus asks them to address lyrics – to
which Euripides quickly replies, ‘His lyrics are all the same’
(Aristophanes 1964: 201). Euripides’ ennui with Aeschylus’s
writing is then demonstrated by the former’s performance of
lyrics from eight of Aeschylus’s plays. As Mark Griffith has
pointed out, The Frogs reveals Aeschylus’s songs to ‘adhere
quite closely to a venerable Panhellenic performance tradition’
(2013: 133) and, since only one of the eight performance pieces
is taken from an extant play (Agamemnon), Aristophanes’ play
furnishes additional historical evidence for the rhythms and
structures of Aeschylus’s choral odes across his oeuvre (see
Griffith 2013: 133).
The Frogs is equally useful for its laying out of the very
different Euripidean soundscape. In response to the critique
of his own compositional style, Aeschylus produces a pre-
prepared parody of Euripides’ lyric that he performs to the
accompaniment of a dancing girl – an additional (visual)
gesture that succinctly indicates Aeschylus’s poor opinion
of his opponent. In this performance, Euripides’ lyrics veer
away from traditional patterns ‘in favour of “free,” non-
strophic stanzas of unpredictable metrical character’ (Griffith
2013: 137). As Griffith explains, this shows the ‘much more
vocal and instrumental bravura’ of Euripides’ works that
‘form part of a decisive shift in the structure and character
of Greek drama during the later fifth century’ (2013: 137).
The extended exchange is obviously designed to poke fun at
CLASSICAL SOUND 23
both the traditionally styled lyric compositions of Aeschylus,

described most frequently by the Chorus and Dionysus as
examples of ‘good’ writing, and the more modern and ‘free’
style of Euripides, chiefly admired for the ‘cleverness’ of his
work. That Aeschylus is finally declared the winner is not
point; rather, The Frogs demonstrates Aristophanes’ own
bravura in composition.
But The Frogs has also proven to be an important
resource for scholars concerned with a fuller historical
understanding of how the earliest Greek dramas sounded. The
Aeschylus–Euripides contest at the heart of the play has also,
provocatively perhaps, been identified as one of the earliest
examples of the stage musical. Given this critical assertion, it
is perhaps less surprising to discover that Stephen Sondheim
was commissioned to prepare a new version of The Frogs in
1974 ‘as an after season fund-raising lark, staged in the Yale
[University] swimming pool’ (Brustein 2004: 25). The Yale
Repertory Theatre production is legendary, chiefly for having
had both Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver in its cast. But,
in thinking about ‘classical sound’, the Sondheim version
is notable by way of its shift from discovery of Aeschylus
and Euripides sounding off in Hades to more recent (and
English-speaking) playwrights, William Shakespeare and
George Bernard Shaw, in competition. In Sondheim’s version,
Shakespeare rather than Aeschylus emerges triumphant
(fortune favours tradition, it seems) after ‘singing the first two
stanzas of “Fear no more” from Cymbeline (the only time in
Sondheim’s career that he has set someone else’s lyrics)’ (Gamel
2007: 218). This adaptation of The Frogs was revived in 2004
by Nathan Lane, in a New York City production (at the Vivian
Beaumont Theatre), directed by Susan Stroman and set in an
explicitly post-9/11 context.
If The Actors Company’s The Suppliant Woman made a
persuasive case for the effectiveness of auloi in a contemporary
interpretation, these two productions of The Frogs involving
Broadway luminaries such as Sondheim, Lane and Stroman
suggest that the integral place of sound in the earliest dramas
is not so much lost as ready to be reimagined in new ways for

the audiences of their times.
Vitruvius on acoustics: De Architectura

While Declercq and Dekeyser’s study of the theatre at
Epidaurus could not prove that it was designed and built
with a working knowledge of what shape, size and materials
would produce the near-perfect acoustics (it could have
simply been ‘a coincidence’ [2007: 2011]), the subject of
sound in the theatre had nevertheless become fully theorized
some two hundred years later. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio’s ten-
book treatise De Architectura (Of Architecture), written
in the first century BCE, gives considerable attention to the
principles of construction for public buildings in general and
theatres in particular. De Architectura is generally considered
to be Vitruvius’s compilation of ‘best practices’ rather than a
manifesto of his own invention, but it remains a significant
source since it is the only text we have that outlines the theory
behind classical architecture. The importance of a theatre
building to the public spaces of Roman culture is signalled
when Vitruvius puts it second only to the construction of the
forum (1999: 65). Chapter 3 in Book 5 of De Architectura is
devoted to this particular topic. After brief instructions about
site selection, Vitruvius spells out in detail the form required
for an amphitheatre:
It seems that the transverse aisles of theaters should

correspond in their dimensions to the total height of
theaters, and in no case should the heights of the backs
of the aisles exceed their breadth. If they are made higher,
they will repel the voice, casting it out of the upper part of
the theater; in the upper seats, those above the aisles, such
theaters will not allow the endings of words to reach the
ears of the listeners distinctly. In short, determine the height
CLASSICAL SOUND 25
like this: if a line is extended from the lowest step to the

highest, it should touch the edge of every step, that is, every
angle. In this way, the voice will not be obstructed. (1999:
65–6)
De Architectura describes the variations in construction

methods between Greek and Roman theatres and pays
attention to the distinctive acoustical properties of site
selection. ‘Dissonant’ sites are ‘those in which the voice first
rises high, then meets resistance from solid surfaces higher up,
and when it is deflected back it comes to rest low, preventing
the rise of any other sounds’ (1999: 70). ‘Dispersive’ sites
create a lack of clarity and ‘resonant’ sites produce echoes,
but ‘consonant’ sites are those where the voice ‘reaches the
ears with precise clarity’ (1999: 70). The superiority of the
consonant site for theatrical performance is elaborated at
some length:
The voice is a flowing breath of air, and perceptible to the

hearing by its touch. It moves by the endless formation of
circles, just as endlessly expanding circles of waves are made
in standing water if a stone is thrown into it. These travel
outward from the center as far as they can, until some local
constriction stands in the way, or some other obstacle that
prevents the waves from completing their patterns …. For
the voice, therefore, just as for the pattern of waves in water,
so long as no obstacle interferes with the first wave, it will
not upset the second wave or any of those that follow; all of
them will reach the ears of the spectators, without echoing,
those in the lower-most seats as well as those in the highest.
(1999: 66).
Here Vitruvius returns to ‘the architects of old’ (1999: 66) –

that is, the builders of the first Greek theatres – and suggests
that they used ‘the canonical theory of mathematicians and the
principles of music’ to calculate how to most effectively build
‘on harmonic principles to amplify the voice’ (1999: 66).
Chapter 4 offers a description of the principles of Greek

harmonics and, in Chapter 5, Vitruvius employs these principles
to advise on the use of the echea, bronze vessels dispersed between
the seats in a theatre employed to clarify and amplify the voices
on stage. He includes technical detail on the placement of echea,
suggesting, helpfully, that smaller theatres ‘in towns of no great
size’ (1999: 68) can produce similar effects but with a much
cheaper option, clay jars. Vitruvius also deals with the wooden,
rather than stone, theatres that were proliferating in Rome
at the time, explaining that the floors provide the necessary
resonance and no echea are required. In his explication of
theatre design, Vitruvius mentions the convention of ‘a clap of
thunder’ that accompanies ‘the epiphany of a god’ (1999: 69),
a brief reference to a sound effect that David Collison links to
earlier evidence that the Greek theatres may have had stage
machinery for this single purpose (2008: 7, 8).
By the first century BCE, then, theatre building had
become codified, organized to optimize sound. As part of this
practice, a preliminary acoustical science developed so as to
meet the defining condition for successful play performance:
accuracy in hearing for all spectators. With theatres
recognized as fundamental to the development of Greek and
then Roman towns and cities, a theory of sound to describe
effective delivery from stage to audience was inevitable. The
relationship between sound, architecture and audience thus
defined the first Western theatres and, in fact, every theatre
since that time. Moreover, Vitruvius’s De Architectura was an
immensely influential text in the Italian Renaissance and was
referenced by English architects in the mid-sixteenth century
(although it was not in fact translated into English until the
end of the seventeenth century). Acoustical theory, then, has a
long history that informed choices in design and construction
materials for theatre buildings, and experimentation in the
sound capabilities of performance spaces has long brought
about systematized practices in production and reception,
elaborating how distinctive sonic features contribute to the
theatrical experience.
CLASSICAL SOUND 27
Shakespeare’s Globe and Francis

Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum
As public and private theatres were developed and designed
in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England,
proximity between stage and audience might suggest that
sound need not predominate their construction principles in
the ways that it had for the ancient auditoria. But, whether
open air or indoors, the theatres of early modern London were
also acoustically sophisticated spaces that the early modern
playwrights and the newly formed theatre companies sought
to exploit. After all, descriptions of theatregoing in the period
describe audiences going to hear a play rather than see it
(Escolme 2016: 107).
‘Authentic’ reproduction projects such as Shakespeare’s
Globe (opened in 1997) and the indoor Sam Wanamaker
Theatre (opened in 2014) on the south bank of the River
Thames in London as well as the American Shakespeare
Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia (2001),
have allowed for academic research and performance
experimentation that attempts to theorize precisely how sound
might have worked in those buildings and what audiences
might have heard. Claire van Kampen, for example, has written
of the ‘aural texture’ of the replica Globe, recognizing how its
architecture put the theatre’s musicians on show – an emphasis
on their importance for and within the performance of a play:
The music gallery, or ‘room,’ being placed directly above

the stage, in the centre of the frons scenae, is at the most
powerful visual point in the stage picture. What is more,
in an ‘original practices’ production, musicians are dressed
in Elizabethan clothing, which is colourful, far from the
standard black uniform of the modern performer. … In the
present Globe reconstruction, the music gallery completes

the middle circle, which, unlike the upper and lower gallery,
runs all the way around the stage. For ‘original practices’
productions, audiences were therefore seated on either side
of the music gallery, in the lords’ rooms, thus being behind
the stage itself, on the line of the frons scenae. (Interestingly,
from this position, audibility of the text is increased, though
visibility of the action is reduced.) (2008: 81)
Interesting, indeed, that the most expensive seats in the

theatre – those in the lords’ room – were the best for attending
to sound. Bruce Smith observes, ‘In terms of both vision and
hearing, the Lords’ Room offered an optimal situation: one
could not only see and be seen but hear and be heard: the
canopy [over the stage] would have projected the lords’ voices
as well as the actors’ (1999: 214). (Rather than opposing van
Kampen’s assertion of less visibility from the Lords’ Room,
Smith’s observation about sight lines is directed, I think, more
towards looking at the audience than viewing the stage.)
Van Kampen also explains that the location of the musicians
telegraphed to early modern theatregoers the place of the
Muses, between heaven and earth, with the effect that music
at the Globe was ‘not only heard but seen as the expression
of the Muses as it transmits heavenly impulses to Man below
on the earthly stage’ (2008: 81). These examples illustrate the
coupling of sound and sight that fostered meaning not just for
the play in performance but also for the social relationships
within the audience.
Attempts to recapture the sonic experience of early modern
performance do not, however, originate with the building of
these replica theatres in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries. Arnold Dolmetsch, a French-born instrument
maker whose workshop was in Surrey (England), collaborated
with William Poel in the early twentieth century on all the
influential director’s productions of Shakespeare’s plays and
Dolmetsch is considered one of the most significant figures
in the revival of early music practices (see Lindley 2008: 91).
CLASSICAL SOUND 29
Internationally recognized, the Academy of Ancient Music

(AAM) has been singularly committed to the production of
‘original’ period sound since the ensemble’s founding in the
early 1970s. AAM set out to retrieve the ‘essence’ and ‘spirit’
of baroque music through a return to original production
methods: ‘strings made of animal gut, not steel. The trumpets
had no valves. The violins and violas didn’t have chin rests, and
the cellists gripped their instruments between their legs rather
than resting them on the floor’ (Academy, n.d.). In other words,
the principles of the AAM’s sound practice were based on
authentic period-specific instruments and original technologies
for playing them, a commitment to historical accuracy much
like auloi-playing incorporated in the 2016–17 production of
The Suppliant Women. These practices might seem to afford
musicians and audience alike a kind of time travel to the past
but such a possibility has always been contentious. Arguments
against attempts to reproduce ‘original’ conditions either in the
concert hall or on the stage insist that hearing in the twenty-
first century is inescapably filtered by the history, sonic and
otherwise, that exists between earlier periods and the present.
Contemporary audiences may simply not connect to, or even
understand, an ‘original’ production component because of its
difference from what is now conventional. As David Linley
rightly insists, we cannot ‘get unmediated acoustic access to
Shakespeare’s world, no matter how historically informed the
musical performance may be’ (2008: 97) – the ways we hear
stage music are shaped inevitably by our familiarity with much
more recent genres of music and, particularly perhaps, film and
television soundtracks.
In a related context, Paul Meier reminds us that if we could
find ourselves at the very first production of Hamlet, ‘we would
understand little of what the actors have to say’ because of
radical differences in how words were pronounced (2016: 179).
How early modern actors spoke Shakespeare’s words and how
audiences heard them is at the heart of experimentation with
Early Modern English (EME) pronunciation more commonly
referred to as original pronunciation (OP). To investigate
how EME/OP pronunciation would impact performance,

Shakespeare’s Globe invited David Crystal, a linguistics
professor specializing in this area, to collaborate on an EME/
OP production of Romeo and Juliet in 2004. Crystal’s book
Pronouncing Shakespeare is his story of that project. An
EME production of Troilus and Cressida followed in 2005.
Crystal writes that the consensus among the actors and
other theatre personnel was that the ‘audiences were totally
engaged’ (2005: 136) and he quotes Tom Cornford, then
an assistant director at Shakespeare’s Globe: ‘What OP has
revealed to me is the extent to which Shakespeare’s language
“bodies forth” his characters’ (2005: 144). Crystal’s son, Ben,
an actor, makes the same point in a YouTube demonstration
of EME pronunciation – that it requires a much more
physical performance and that it speeds up delivery of the
lines, suggesting why a play in Shakespeare’s time might have
been but ‘two hours traffic on the stage’ (as the Prologue to
Romeo and Juliet has it) rather than the considerably longer
running time typical of contemporary productions of his plays
(Open 2011). Deploying the sound of early modern English
also reveals ‘lost rhymes, puns and wordplay’ (Meier 2016:
180), opening up the text, paradoxically, to new meanings and
interpretation.
Experimentation with differently sounded English has
the effect, then, of drawing attention to conventions of
Shakespearean acting – what we hear, for example, when a
Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) actor delivers a speech
and how we might be reminded that this is not the ‘natural’
or ‘authentic’ sound of Shakespeare’s words but a way
of speaking learned by actors and expected by the RSC’s
audiences. Thus, EME productions of Shakespeare ask sonic
questions beyond the performances on the Globe’s stage to any
and all productions of historically remote drama: for example,
how have words, whether Shakespeare’s or another writer’s,
become speech in a particular historical moment and what were
the conventions of delivery at that time? Certainly, the work of
David and Ben Crystal has been instrumental in emphasizing
CLASSICAL SOUND 31
what had perhaps seemed an apparently irretrievable gap

between sounds that were made on an early modern London
stage and how they were heard in the audience. They ask us
to consider what ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ pronunciation (and,
for that matter, other ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ elements) might
open up for original practices productions and their audiences
today. Even if contemporary spectators necessarily hear
through their own sonic histories (see the Introduction to this
book), the commitment of institutions like Shakespeare’s Globe
and the AAM to attempt historically authentic sound tempers
the authority claimed by some original practices productions
where the concept is realized predominantly, if not exclusively,
by elements belonging to the visual register of performance.
However successful or not, however useful or not, a
return to past technologies of performance might be, it is
simply impossible for a contemporary audience to listen as
audiences several hundred years ago would have. For this
reason, among others, critics in both musicology and theatre
studies have challenged the term ‘original practices’: Lydia
Goehr, in a survey of the critical arguments about the early
music movement, outlines a move to ‘a multiplicity of ways
to be authentic’ (2007: 283) while Don Weingust has argued
for ‘historically informed performance’ as a much more
accurate term: ‘One might well ask whether any theatrical
or other artistic practice can be anything but a practice of its
present’ (2014: 410). These kinds of criticism are just as true
for reception, giving rise to the commonsensical point so often
made about the experience of original practices productions
at Shakespeare’s Globe where the very modern interruptions
of planes and helicopters flying over the theatre are inevitably
part of a spectator’s sonic experience. Such anomalies extend
to even more mundane interventions such as the chirps and
songs of birds that land on the playhouse roof or on the stage –
some of these birds are species that would not have been native
to London in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.
Yet, even if we cannot hear as an early modern spectator
would have done, we do know a great deal about how sound
was generated and understood in early modern England.

This is among the subjects addressed in Francis Bacon’s Sylva
Sylvarum: Or, A Natural History in Ten Centuries, a work
published posthumously in 1651 by his personal secretary
William Rawley. Although the text postdates Shakespeare’s
career as a dramatist, and indeed the playwright’s death,
Sylva Sylvarum is nonetheless useful for capturing the sense of
mystery that had surrounded the production and reception of
sound in early seventeenth-century England. Among many and
varied interests in this volume, Bacon examines how sound
operates and carefully charts distinctions between visual and
aural fields of representation.
Bacon’s project in Sylva Sylvarum is to account for all of
life on earth through an extensive range of experiments, the
premises and proofs for which he proposes in some detail. No
modern edition of Sylva Sylvarum exists, but facsimile texts
are easily found in print and online. In the quotations that
follow, I have generally modernized spelling and punctuation
for ease of reading. Note, also, that the book’s organization in
‘ten Centuries’ reflects a rare use of ‘Century’ that the OED
explains as a particular volume in a larger history, a definition
that is supported by various citations from sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century ecclesiastical histories.
At the outset of Century II, Bacon argues that in the case
of music, practice has been ably explained, ‘but in the theory,
and especially in the yielding of the causes of the practique,
very weakly, being reduced into certain mystical subtleties of
no use, and not much truth’ (1651: 29). So, in lieu of mystery,
he looks to develop a taxonomy of sound. Bacon examines
sounds in nature (rain, wind and so on); the voices of humans,
beasts and birds; and music. In each case, he proposes a series
of experiments to explain their causes and their effects. Many
of these experiments require specific properties (often domestic,
such as glass, wood and musical instruments) to illustrate a
technically detailed acoustics. For the human voice, Bacon
offers physiological explanations. But it is in the following
volume, Century III, that he elaborates the operations of sound
CLASSICAL SOUND 33
in terms that might well have been inspired by his experience

of early modern performance and even a knowledge of how
sound was understood in the construction of the period’s
theatres.
In the first sentence of Century III, Bacon asserts that
‘[a]ll sounds (whatsoever) move Round, that is to say on
all sides: upwards, downwards, forwards, and backwards.
This appears in all instances. Sounds do not require to be
conveyed to the sense, in a right line as visibles do, but may
be arched’ (1651: 49) – something that not only recalls the
acoustical theories behind the ancient Greek theatres but
also describes architectural principles that informed the
polygonal structure of the Globe theatres. Bacon offers a
description of how sounds travel, what they can penetrate
and what causes them to be muffled. To contrast visual and
aural effects, he points out that colours ‘when they represent
themselves to the eye, fade not, nor melt not by degrees,
but appear still in the same strength; but sounds melt, and
vanish, little by little’ (1651: 51). As sounds ‘melt’ and
‘vanish’, so does live performance and, remarkably, we find
that Shakespeare relied on the very same verbs to describe
the dissipation of the wedding masque in The Tempest: a
stage direction indicates that the singing masque performers
‘heavily vanish’ (4.1.138 SD) and Prospero tells its audience,
Ferdinand and Miranda, ‘Our revels now are ended. These
our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are
melted into air’ (4.1.149–50).
Further, Bacon extends his analysis to the condition of
listening to sound. Thus Century III also considers the cognitive
processes behind reliable hearing and again draws attention to
differences between how people understand what they see and
how they process what they hear:
There is an apparent diversity between the species, visible

and audible, in this: that the visible does not mingle in the
medium, but the audible does. For if we look abroad, we see
heaven, a number of stars, trees, hills, men, beasts, at once.
And the species of the one does not confound the other. But
if so many sounds come from several parts, one of them
would utterly confound the other. So we see that voices or
consorts of music do make a harmony by mixture, which
colours do not. … a great sound drowns a lesser. (1651: 53)
Human inability to separate a mixture of sounds into its

constituent parts while, at the same time, possessing the more
efficient capacity to process a number of different visual
signifiers requires explanation: ‘Sight works in right lines and
makes several cones and so there can be no coincidence in
the eye, or visual point. But sounds that move in oblique and
arcuate [OED, citing Sylva Sylvarum, “curved like a bow”]
lines must needs encounter and disturb the one the other’
(1651: 53). Experience of the many public performances of
early seventeenth-century culture (those in theatre, of course,
and also other kinds of contemporary practice such as royal
processions, public hangings and ballads sung on street corners)
would have informed Bacon’s theoretical principles for how
sound moves in space and how humans process it, particularly
in combination with visual images. In other words, his is a
performance-based comprehension.
In fact, when Bacon shifts to matters of the human voice
and its delivery, he offers two examples that draw directly on
theatrical practices. In one, he is concerned with a capacity
and intention to imitate another speaker: ‘we see that there are
certain “pantomimi” that will represent the voices of players
of interludes so to life, as if you see them not, you would think
they were those players themselves’ (1651: 56). He does not
elaborate on whether this kind of sound production creates
good entertainment or whether it simply produces anxiety in the
hearer in the possibility of being duped through vocal imitation,
but his description suggests there was a buoyant market for
impersonation of celebrity actors. Additionally, this illustration
recalls the particular concern of early seventeenth-century
Puritans – that impersonation was a dishonest medium, likely to
lead to fraudulent behaviour and the duping of innocent parties.
CLASSICAL SOUND 35
The suggestion of deceptive activity comes in another of

Bacon’s examples where he refers to skill in the manipulation
of voice and, in particular, the talent to project so that what is
said appears to come from elsewhere:
There have been some that could counterfeit the distance of

voices (which is a secondary object of hearing) in some sort,
as when they stand fast by you, you would think the speech
came from far off, in a fearful manner. How this is done
may be further enquired. But I see no great use of it, but
for imposture, in counterfeiting ghosts or spirits. (1651: 56)
While Bacon finds this ability perhaps too trivial to explore

in more depth, his notion of its very limited utility might well
derive from the popularity of ghosts and spirits on the early
modern stage (consider Andrea in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish
Tragedy, a popular sixteenth-century play revived regularly
into the early seventeenth, or the ghost of old King Hamlet in
Shakespeare’s tragedy).
Before moving for the balance of Century III to a new set of
experiments that might explain the duration of a human life,
Bacon summarizes his theorization of sound: ‘We have laboured
… in this inquisition of sounds, diligently, both because sound
is one of the most hidden portions of Nature (as we said in
the beginning) and because it is a virtue which may be called
incorporeal and immaterial, whereof there be in Nature but few’
(1651: 23). In other words, of all the experiments that Sylva
Sylvarum works through, Bacon found sound among the most
challenging, not the least because of its intrinsic ephemerality.
Acoustic world-making on the early

modern stage
The ephemerality, mystery even, of sound in a pre-sound-
recording world likely gave it an added appeal for early modern
playwrights in the creation of their onstage environments.

Wes Folkerth has argued, for instance, that ‘Shakespeare
created worlds with sound, worlds that in turn contain whole
soundscapes within them’ (2002: 7). Knowledge of sound in the
early modern period has been bolstered by considerable recent
scholarship, much of it inspired by Bruce Smith’s magisterial
The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Smith’s
painstaking research allowed him to construct soundscapes
across city, country and court of the time and to consider
how they were produced by a variety of performance media.
The chapter ‘Within the Wooden O’ specifically concerns the
theatre as aural space. Here Smith asserts that theatres
as instruments for the production and reception of sound

ask to be thought about in different ways than theatres as
frames for the mounting and viewing of spectacle. What
were the acoustic properties of the instruments themselves?
What were they made of? What kinds of sounds could they
produce? What constituted the repertory of sounds on
which playwrights and actors could draw? What qualities
of the human voice figured in this repertory? (1999: 207)
Important questions all and they remind us of many of the

propositions that Vitruvius tried to elucidate in his account of
the construction of Greek and Roman theatres. By way of a
detailed analysis of the wood, plaster and lath fabrication of the
Globe Theatre, Smith notes that all these materials ‘return to
the ambient air a high percentage of the sound waves that strike
them’ (1999: 209) – excellent conditions, in fact, for projection
of the male voice. He continues: ‘The standing waves that create
harmonically rich, in-filling sound are produced by reflections
off many surfaces. In general, the more surfaces there are, the
fuller the acoustic effect. As a twenty-side polygon, the Globe
provided plenty of reflective surfaces’ (1999: 211). An indoor
and rectangular theatre (such as the Blackfriars) produced,
Smith suggests, ‘a “round” sound [reverberating around the
theatre space] quite different from the “broad” sound of the
CLASSICAL SOUND 37
Globe – just the reverse of the effect suggested by the physical

shapes of the two structures’ (1999: 217).
Smith also conducted a comprehensive study of the ‘aural
contrast’ between boys’ and men’s voices, measuring pitch and
timbre to conclude: ‘speech sounds gendered as male would
pervade the wooden O, filling it from side to side; speech
sounds gendered as female would be heard as isolated effects
within this male matrix’ (1999: 229). Similarly, Gina Bloom
has explored what she calls ‘the material attributes of the voice’
(2007: 3), arguing that for ‘early modern men, controlling
voice – their own as well as those of subordinates (children,
servants, and women) – often functioned as a signifier of manly
identity’ (2007: 8–9). We might extend Bloom’s focus, then, to
think about other sounds employed in the theatre to assert
(or contradict) normative gender roles and, more generally,
to examine how theatre sounds interact with stage voices to
shape an audience’s understanding of a play.
What, then, were the conventional theatre sounds of the
period? Some evidence is available from the one extant picture
of an open-air public theatre in Shakespeare’s time, a sketch of
The Swan made by Arnoldus Buchelius following a drawing by
his friend Johannes De Witt who had visited London in 1596.
This image represents the experience of theatre through four
performance signifiers, two of them precisely sonic: the flag
atop the thatched roof, a trumpeter in a box just below, the
musicians in the gallery and actors on the stage. Theatres raised
their flags to indicate the day of a performance, encouraging
potential patrons to cross the river to Bankside, but a more
specific alert came from the in-house trumpeter. As Tiffany
Stern has noted, it is conventional in our contemporary theatres
for audiences to receive visual prompts that mark the start of
performance, ‘the lights in the auditorium will be lowered; the
lights on the stage will be raised; a stage curtain, if there is one,
will part’ (2015: 359). She continues:
In the early modern period, however, the signal that

told spectators to stop talking and look to the stage
was primarily aural. A trumpeter, or sometimes several

trumpeters, ‘heralded’ the start of a play with two or
three sharp blasts – or even, sometimes, an entire ‘flourish’
(fanfare) – on his, or their, instrument(s). (2015: 359)
As she further explains, the early modern theatregoer would

be accustomed to the sound of a trumpet as a signal ‘that
something momentous and authoritative was about to
happen’, given its use in a myriad of other occasions such as
proclamations, coronations and challenges (2015: 359).
The trumpet blast was often only the first of multiple sonic
cues designed to grab an audience’s attention. In this regard,
Smith points out that ‘all but a handful of Shakespeare’s scripts
display quite obvious devices for establishing the auditory
field of the play within the first few moments’ (1999: 276).
It seems likely, too, that the nature of the sonic intervention
might also signal to the audience the genre of the play so that
they might attune their expectations accordingly. The histories
and tragedies generally start with the sounds of authority:
trumpets and hautboys (oboes) for 2 Henry 6, drummers
leading a march of soldiers in 3 Henry 6, a drummer leading
‘colours’ for the entrance of Bassianus in Titus Andronicus,
two fanfares to herald the entrance of King Lear, a ‘flourish’
for the entrance of Anthony and Cleopatra. By contrast,
comedies rarely start with sound although an exception is
found in Orsino’s famous opening line to his musicians in
Twelfth Night, ‘If music be the food of love, play on’ (1.1.1).
Tragedies often deploy ominous or threatening sound in their
first moments: it is a sound that provokes Barnado to cry out
‘Who’s there?’ at the start of Hamlet, while Macbeth uses the
sound of thunder to accompany the appearance of the witches.
Midway through Othello’s opening scene, Iago and Roderigo
beat on Brabantio’s door and shout loudly and aggressively to
wake up Desdemona’s father to the news of her elopement with
the Moor. An audit of extant plays from Shakespeare’s time
produces a substantial collection of military fanfares, trumpet
blasts and drum marches yet, as David Linley stresses, these
CLASSICAL SOUND 39
sounds ‘cannot, for a modern audience, convey the precision

of meaning that might have been available to an audience
for whom the language of military drums and trumpets was
familiar’ (2008: 95). In other words, important information
about characters, events and fates would have been telegraphed
to the early modern audience through a familiar and shared
repertory of sound.
Performances were also regularly punctuated with other
kinds of sound effects, what Bruce Smith has called ‘sonic
scene-setting’ (2013: 184). Among these were a variety
of musical instruments and other apparatuses that would
orchestrate the play beyond the human voice. A bell ‘stood in
for two objects: the public bell that stated alarm or ceremony;
and the clock bell that stated time’ (Stern 2013: 29). Horns
were sounded to indicate a hunting party: for example, in
the stage direction ‘Wind horns. Enter a Lord from hunting,
with his train’ at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew
when Christopher Sly has fallen asleep only ten lines into the
performance. Storms are frequent in the plays of Shakespeare
and his contemporaries and while lightning is obviously visual
(created, rather dangerously, with fireworks), thunder must
be delivered aurally. This might have been realized through
intense drumming but more usually by rolling around a
cannonball in the tiring house (appropriately, then, the sound
emanating from the upper level of the theatre that functioned
symbolically as the heavens). Gwilym Jones has described
an even more sophisticated technology, the ‘thunder run’:
‘A wooden trough, either on a fulcrum or sloping along
the floor, contains a cannonball which, when see-sawed or
released, rolls. Different levels may be built into the trough,
to enable separate thunderclaps to be sounded when the ball
drops’ (2013: 36–7). As Jones notes, Julius Caesar is the first
of Shakespeare’s plays to exploit a storm scene – a fact that
coincides with the opening of the Globe (1599) and may well
have been intended to promote the superior and spectacular
technological capabilities of the new theatre. A 2016
archaeological excavation of the possible site of the Curtain
theatre in Shoreditch, one of London’s earliest public theatres

(1577), uncovered a fragment of a ceramic bird whistle – a
find that prompted the claim that it might well have been used
in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a play almost certainly
staged at the Curtain and replete with numerous references to
bird song (MOLA 2016).
Most commonly deployed in the early modern theatre’s
repertoire of sound effects was, of course, music. This is hardly
surprising given the penetration of music into so many aspects
of early modern life. David Linley describes music in the parish
churches as well as in ‘communal celebration, at weddings,
feasts, or church ales’ where minstrels would almost always be
present (2016: 135). And, as Linley puts it, the ‘largest and most
prestigious musical establishment was that of the royal court’
(2016: 136). Actors were often also trained musicians and
different theatres, to meet the size of the house, indoors or out,
had different sound capabilities and different play repertoires.
Some plays relied on mood music at key dramatic moments:
in The Merchant of Venice, each of Portia’s suitors enters and
exits to a ‘flourish of cornets’ with the key stage direction ‘Here
music. A song the whilst BASSANIO comments on the caskets
to himself ’ (3.2.62). The song ‘Tell me where is fancy bred’ is
led by ‘one from Portia’s train’ with a refrain from ‘All’ that
likely drew the audience into singing as well. When Richard
III marshals his troops to counteract Richmond’s insurgency
(4.4) – ‘Enter KING RICHARD and his train marching with
drummers and trumpeters’ – the sound is surely intended to
be intense, to summon fear and foreboding as war becomes
imminent. The intimate conversation between Hamlet and
Horatio ahead of the performance of ‘The Murder of Gonzago’
is interrupted by the entrance of the royal party indicated first
as ‘Enter trumpets and kettle drums. Sound a flourish’ (3.2.82)
and, two lines later, ‘Danish march. Enter King, Queen,
Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and other lords
attendant, with guard carrying torches’ (3.2.84). Here the
sounds of power underscore Hamlet’s distance, physically and
politically, from the royal party.
CLASSICAL SOUND 41
Shakespeare often relies on sound to create environment as

well as mood, with As You Like It one of his most sonically rich
dramas. If the first scenes of that play conjure the violent world
of the court (for example, the noisy wrestling match between
Orlando and Charles), Act 2 relies on music to transport
characters and audience alike to the Forest of Arden. In 2.5,
Amiens and Jacques sing ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, its
words about harsh weather (a thematic repeated in Amiens’s
next song [2.7] ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’) undermining
the idea of lyric pastoral that would conventionally attach to
a rural setting. And, in As You Like It’s final act, songs prepare
the stage for the marriages expected in the resolution of comic
dramas. In 5.3, Pages sing ‘It was lover and his lass’, a popular
song that survives today through its setting for voice with lute
accompaniment published in Thomas Morley’s First Book
of Airs (1600); in the following scene (5.4), preparation for
Rosalind and Celia’s return to their appropriate gender and class
roles comes in the form of a stage masque, introduced by ‘Still
music’ (line 96) and the song ‘Wedding is great Juno’s crown’.
Commissions of new settings or arrangements for the play’s
songs in more recent productions underscore how important
sound remains to interpretation and contextualization: in 2011,
the Barenaked Ladies were asked by the Stratford Festival
(Ontario) to arrange the songs for that season’s As You Like
It (the band also released the songs as an album); in 2013, the
RSC commissioned singer-songwriter Laura Marling to give
their production’s music a contemporary feel; and in 2016, the
National Theatre in London worked with Orlando Gough, an
associate artist at the Royal Opera House, for their production’s
unique musical arrangement.
Case study: Shakespeare’s The Tempest

I will look here at how the playwright conjures up his stage
world, the magical island setting, through an imagination of
sound, as well as examines how conventions of sound typical
to early modern theatrical production were deployed in the

creation of the eponymous storm. We know that The Tempest
was presented on 1 November 1611, Hallowmas Night, at
Whitehall, a performance at court as part of the celebrations
for Princess Elizabeth’s betrothal to the Elector Palatine, and
it is generally agreed that the play must have been performed
earlier at one of the King’s Men’s venues, likely the indoor
Blackfriars Theatre. As Arden editors Alden T. Vaughan and
Virginia Mason Vaughan observe, the setting for the play is
constant – ‘one fictional island’ – but the use of various sound
effects is extensive and varied in the course of the action:
‘thunder, confused noises, soft music, solemn music, a noise of
hunters, dogs barking’ (2011: 9).
The play starts with a memorable soundscape indicated in
the opening stage direction – ‘A tempestuous noise of thunder
and lightning heard’ – sure to grab the attention of any theatre
audience, then or now. Editors Vaughan and Vaughan furnish
a footnote to suggest that in Shakespeare’s theatre such a
direction would prompt the use of a ‘sea machine (pebbles in
a drum)’ to create the sounds of crashing waves and ‘a wind
machine (a loose length of canvas turned on a wheel)’ for gusts
of wind, drums for thunder and fireworks ‘hung from a rope
across the rear of the stage’ for lightning (2011: 165). Not
all critics agree since if The Tempest was, in fact, an indoor
theatre play (at Blackfriars and, of course, at Whitehall), then
the production was unlikely to risk fireworks, ‘leaving the
storm to be represented through sound alone’ (Jones 2013:
39–40). Such an argument is surely supported by word choices
in the relevant stage direction, ‘noise’ and ‘heard’.
Gwilym Jones makes the important point that storms in
Shakespeare’s plays are never ‘simply’ storms: ‘rather, the
scenes are always concerned with human apprehension’
(2013: 45). His observation reminds us that sound in theatre
performance can cue a variety of responses beyond its primary
representational field (here, weather). To expand Jones’s
comment, the sounds of the storm also set a psychological
map for the play’s characters: everyone will experience a
CLASSICAL SOUND 43
personal ‘tempest’ in the course of the action. Moreover,

throughout the play, sound orchestrates action and often
underpins relationships between characters. Jones concludes:
‘Even with the basic effects of a noise of thunder, Shakespeare
can achieve a bewildering array of variations in what they
signify’ (2013: 50).
If those effects, in Scene 1, create for actors and audience
alike a sense of the chaotic world on board the ship and
predict a tumultuous series of events, sound (actual and cited)
elsewhere in the play is fundamental to both crafting the island
environment and elucidating the characters’ relationship to it
and to each other. Most often, Ariel is the vehicle for the play’s
sound. When the spirit gives Prospero an account of the action
we have already witnessed in the play’s opening moments, it
is replete with descriptions of the sound effects that we heard:
‘dreadful thunderclaps’ (1.2.202) and ‘the fire and cracks /
Of sulphurous roaring’ (1.2.203–4). Later, Ariel will become
‘invisible, playing and singing’ (1.2.376) in the task to lure
Ferdinand towards a meeting with Miranda. ‘Come unto
these yellow sands,’ the first of Ariel’s four songs in the play,
anticipates both a lull in the storm and a couple’s dance (a
rehearsal, perhaps, of the choreography of Ferdinand and
Miranda’s courtship). A stage direction follows the main verse,
‘burden dispersedly’, which suggests that Ariel is accompanied
by other spirits who provide the song’s chorus ‘sung from
various positions around the stage, or perhaps from beneath,
but not in unison’ (1.2.382 footnote). The words in the
chorus, ‘Hark, hark! Bow-wow, / The watch dogs bark, bow-
wow refrain’ (1.2.383–4), has led some editors and modern
productions to imagine actual dogs barking – a sound effect,
whether sung or not, that adds to and reveals Ferdinand’s
fragile and confused state. Ariel’s second song, ‘Full fathom
five thy father lies’, prompts Ferdinand to think it must be
about his ‘drowned father; / This is no mortal business nor no
sound / That the earth owes’ (1.2.406–8).
Ariel returns at key points in the action with sound, music
and song labouring on behalf of Prospero’s plan and no sonic
intervention is more important than the third song ‘While you

here do snoring lie’, delivered ‘in Gonzalo’s ear’ (2.1.300).
It wakes him and then Alonso, forestalling, at the very last
minute, Antonio and Sebastian’s plot to kill the sleeping King
of Naples. This scene is directly followed by Caliban’s entrance
on stage ‘with a burden of wood; a noise of thunder heard’
(2.2). The sound of thunder is repeated time and again to
coincide with Caliban’s movements, suggesting he, like the sea
in the opening scene, is part of an untamed nature that needs
be regulated. In this particular scene, he meets Stephano and
Trinculo whose drunkenness is indicated through discordant
singing; indeed, their sonic performance serves as a stark
contrast to the exquisite musical and vocal skills of Ariel that
have so recently been on display. In 3.2, Ariel successfully
imitates Trinculo’s voice, like one of Bacon’s pantomimi,
effectively sewing dissent among the members of the newly
aligned triumvirate – Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban. When
Stephano tries to arrest the conflict by suggesting they sing
‘Flout ’em and scout ’em, / Thought is free’ (3.2.121–3), Ariel
provides a musical accompaniment on tabor (drum) and pipe,
unseen – terrifying the shipwrecked duo, undermining their
bravado and prompting Caliban’s famous (and beautiful)
speech:
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; (3.2.135–40)
In both of these examples, the ear plays an important part:

Ariel sings to the sleeping Gonzalo in order to save Alonso
from murder, Caliban has learned to listen the island’s strange
soundscape for its ‘delight’ (what, perhaps, makes it feel like
home to him). As well, Prospero initiates his revelation of the
familial backstory with an imperative to Miranda to listen, ‘The
CLASSICAL SOUND 45
very minute bids thee ope thine ear’ (1.2.37). In this context,
Gina Bloom offers an illustration from Giogrio Barberio
Corsetti’s production La Tempesta (staged at Teatro Argentina,
2000) in which ‘Miranda listens to Prospero’s lecture from one
of the seats in the theater auditorium. Miranda’s ears become
the ears of the audience, and Prospero’s repeated anxieties
about being heard by his daughter are linked to the actor’s
(and perhaps the playwright’s) concerns about the wandering
interests of playgoers’ (2007: 155).
Miranda, of course, offers her own lecture to Caliban where
the crux of her argument turns on his entry into (English)
language:
I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known. (1.2.352–8)
The ‘natural’ Caliban is not accorded language by

his Milanese masters but instead described as capable
only of ‘gabble’ – one of the play’s starkest moments of
dehumanization and an explicit illustration of how colonial
regimes imposed the English language as one particularly
effective mode of discipline. Without her language lessons,
Caliban, she imagines, could not understand himself or his
world. Thus she shares with European colonizers ‘the belief
that the Indians [of the New World] had no language at all’, a
supposition that Stephen Greenblatt describes as ‘[a]rrogant,
blindly obstinate, and destructive’ (1990: 26). Caliban’s retort
is, of course, much quoted: ‘You taught me language, and my
profit on’t / Is I know how to curse’ (1.2.364–5). At the same
time, Prospero’s punishments – levied at Caliban’s tardiness in
bringing them fuel – aim to reduce the unwilling servant once
again to nothing more than sound, to a state of pain beyond
language:
If though neglect’st, or dost unwillingly

What I command, I’ll rack thee with hold cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar,
That beasts shall tremble at thy din. (1.2.369–72)
Later in the play, Prospero activates a similar strategy of

torture to quell the hapless insurrection of Stephano and
Trinculo: ‘A noise of hunters heard. Enter diverse Spirits in
shape of dogs and hounds, hunting them [Stephano, Trinculo,
Caliban] about. Prospero and Ariel setting them on’ (4.1.254),
inviting the dogs to ‘grind their joints / With dry convulsions,
shorten up their sinews / With aged cramps’ (4.1.258–9), a
reprise of the kinds of torture that earlier (1.2) threatened to
render Caliban outside language.
In the second half of The Tempest, sound is more often
produced in service of resolution and concord, preparations
for the parties to return to Naples and their proper roles.
Prospero lays the groundwork for his reveal to Alonso and
his party first by conjuring ‘Solemn and strange music’ and a
lavish banquet to astonish his guests (3.3). Notably, Alonso
and Gonzalo react in sonic terms:
alonso
What harmony is this? My good friends, hark!
gonzalo
Marvellous sweet music! (3.3.18–19)
This shift in tone is, however, modified when Ariel appears

to deliver a lesson to the ‘three men of sin’ (3.3.53) and is
accompanied by thunder and lightning, recalling both the play’s
opening sequence and the unruliness of Caliban elsewhere in the
play. The thirty-line speech demanding Alonso and his group
repent concludes again with sonic cues: ‘He [Ariel] vanishes in
thunder. Then, to soft music, enter the shapes again and dance
with mocks and mows, and carry out the table’ (3.3.82). This
acoustic shift from harsh sounds (thunder, barking, hunters’
horns) typical in the first parts of the play to ‘soft music’ here
CLASSICAL SOUND 47
marks a pivotal turn in the action. Orchestrated by Prospero,

events will now unfold towards harmonious settlement, at
least for everyone but Caliban. The masque in 4.1 repeats
the underscore of ‘soft music’ (stage direction at line 58) and
continues with the songs and dances of the nuptial-inflected
masque that Prospero has evoked. The classical sophistication
and concert of the masque performance is, however, brought
to an abrupt end when Prospero hears ‘a strange hollow and
confused noise’ (4.1.138 SD) that reminds the magus of ‘the
beast Caliban and his confederates’ and the planned revolt.
Eventually the insurgent group is despatched by a reprise of a
‘noise of hunters’ and the Spirits ‘in shape of dogs and hounds’
(4.1.255).
By contrast, the play’s final act is almost without sound
effects – only Ariel’s song ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck
I’ interrupts a focused process of resolution. This is a song
that not only celebrates Ariel’s approaching freedom but also
accompanies Prospero’s conversion visually through costume,
from magician to Duke of Milan. With harmony restored
between the characters, sound – and especially music – seems
to have served its purpose in the play.
What this case study illustrates, then, is the interpretive
framework that sound provides for the play. Whether as
critical reader or performance director, audience member or
stage actor, how The Tempest works and what it means relies
on a comprehension and interpretation of its sonic register.
Even in more radical adaptations – for example, Julie Taymor’s
film version with Helen Mirren in the role of Prospera – music
remains at the heart of the play’s performance. Taymor, after
all, commissioned frequent collaborator Elliot Goldenthal
to prepare an original soundtrack and Goldenthal not only
reworked the songs of Shakespeare’s text but also added
others (‘Alchemical Lightshow’, ‘Brave New World’ and
‘Lava Dogs’, among them). Goldenthal’s twelve songs for
Taymor’s film were also released as an album. A. O. Scott,
reviewing the film for the New York Times, described
Taymor’s interpretation ‘a visual stew’ accompanied by a
‘musical sauce, full of lumps and clashing flavors’ (2010) – a

caution, perhaps, to the consequences of a poorly integrated
sonic environment.
The Tempest was, moreover, one of the most performed
plays of the Restoration period. The John Dryden–William
Davenant adaptation, which premiered in 1667, ‘constituted
a tenth of all live performances on both stages in its first
season’ (Shanahan 2013: 91) and was praised by Samuel
Pepys, among others, for its ‘echo’ music. In 1673–4, Thomas
Shadwell adapted the Dryden–Davenant version as an opera,
using music by five different composers and, as Julie Muller
notes, most of the characters are sung for in this reworking of
the play (1994: 192). The opening stage direction indicates a
‘Band of 24 Violins, with the Harpsicals and Theorbo’s [large
bass lute]’ to accompany the sounds of thunder and lightning
conventional to the production of the storm (Vaughan and
Vaughan 2011: 79). While this version was by far the most
popular of the eighteenth century, David Garrick produced
his own opera Tempest in 1756 where ‘[t]he text was cut
to make room for thirty-two songs’ (Vaughan and Vaughan
2011: 83). Charles Kean’s 1857 version – some five hours
long, even as the text was drastically cut – opened with ‘an
immensely realistic shipwreck scene … in which the dialogue
was inaudible’ (Booth 1981: 49). Indeed, for almost two
hundred years, The Tempest was primarily a spectacular
musical rather than Shakespeare’s play – an extended sonic
interlude, then, in the drama’s extensive history of production
and adaptation.
A sonic imagination of early

modern London
Notwithstanding my earlier scepticism about claims for
original practices, authentic performance methodologies
CLASSICAL SOUND 49
suggest another route through which we might approach the

sounds of historically remote drama. Jonathan Sterne argues
that studying the past requires ‘sonic imaginations’ that are
‘plural, recursive, reflexive, driven to represent, refigure and
redescribe’ (2012: 5). For Sterne, these ‘imaginations’ are built
on relationships between different sonic phenomena ‘whether
they be music, voices, listening, media, buildings, performances
or another other path into sonic life’ (2012: 3). Similarly, Bruce
Smith asks: ‘What kinds of sounds did Shakespeare and his
contemporaries hear? What kinds of sounds occurred in the
world around them? What kinds of sounds did they make
themselves?’ (2004: 22)
To apply these ideas to the theatres of ancient Greece or
Shakespeare’s London requires movement beyond the isolation
of particular elements (voice, music, sound effects) and, more
generally, the theatre setting towards a more thorough mapping
of what Sterne so usefully calls an event’s ‘sonic life’. How can
we approach the sound archive of a more extended geography
in which a performance once took place? This suggests that
we need to consider, like Vitruvius, the properties of the sites
where theatre was staged.
A productive model can be found in Maarten Walraven’s
‘History and Its Acoustic Context: Silence, Resonance, Echo
and Where to Find Them in the Archive’, an essay that
asks the listening historian to work beyond and outside the
‘earwitnesses of aural culture’ to understand sound both as
an object of study and as the acoustic context of an event.
His approach suggests that we investigate not just the impact
of the physical properties of the playing space but also locate
them – and the ways those places were heard – in the sound
culture of the period. Walraven asserts that the study of sound
must encompass qualities like noise and silence alongside music
and voice; indeed, he suggests that the acoustic environment of
a neighbourhood will produce and determine the experience of
a particular sound in a particular place. To grasp the power and
meaning of such a sound in such a place, Walraven proposes
that researchers extend discussion of aural architecture to

include the neighbourhood contextual to a sound’s production.
This might include, for the performance of a Shakespeare play,
the other buildings immediately contiguous and in the streets
around the theatre, the surfaces that performers and audiences
travel to reach that theatre (the street, the river) and the sounds
of human bodies themselves as components in the formation of
a specific environment as well as in its passers-by. Historically
informed performance, then, would try to capture a Globe
Theatre sound event in the full scope of its technical conditions
within the playing space and beyond, as part of a map that
composed a sound profile of the Southwark area and the River
Thames. Productions at today’s Shakespeare’s Globe, a replica
theatre on more or less the same site as its predecessors, can
signal this kind of aural archaeology so that it might inform
our ‘sonic imaginations’. For instance, David Crystal refers to
a twenty-first-century production of The Tempest at the Globe
and describes a moment when Caliban delivered his ‘This isle
is full of noises’ speech (3.2) ‘and to everyone’s delight, a pair
of river-boats hooted’ (2005: 7). This is not just a sound-based
‘bonus’ to the pleasure of the text realized serendipitously for
a modern audience but an active sonic trace of the history of a
river that was the primary travel corridor and economic engine
of early modern London.
A sonic methodology, Walraven suggests, must seek ‘to
re-compose the interplay of humans and their environment
through sound’ and, in this way, ‘historians must pay attention
to the resonances, both psychical and physical, within that
environment. In doing so, historians can understand how
people used the resonances in their environments, urban or
rural, home or public, to create communities’ (2013). To re-
compose the soundscape of the Globe of Shakespeare’s time, a
historian might turn, among other things, to period documents
(maps, laws, images, playtexts) about neighbourhoods and
thoroughfares in early modern London so as to discover traces
of sound. For example, we might examine complaints about
an excess of urban noise or records of exceptional events of
CLASSICAL SOUND 51
celebration or disturbance. Smith, in his discussion of the

‘acoustic archaeologist’, notes of London that ‘church bells
still hang in some of the same belfries and can still be rung.
Some of the same interior spaces still exist, and their acoustic
properties can still be experienced’ (2004: 22). Such sources
might add to our knowledge of the normative interpretive
frameworks that players and audiences might apply to the
sounds produced and heard in the theatre. At stake, Walraven
argues, is ‘the audibility of history’ (2013).
Any reading or production of a play from ancient Greece

or England’s early modern period can only benefit from a
more comprehensive knowledge of what I’ve called here
‘classical sound’. A sonic approach makes available new
strategies of comprehension and/or of direction and design
as the incorporation of the aulos into The Actors Theatre
Company production of The Suppliant Women so powerfully
demonstrated: a very contemporary adaptation (to address
the perils experienced by migrant populations in the twenty-
first century) utilized the ancient soundtrack to access for its
audiences a millennia-long history of the dangers faced by
refugees. As well, to focus on sound is to open up new research
topics on the theatres of these historical pasts even if, as Barthes
wrote of Greek theatre, ‘our archaeology affords us incomplete
information’ (1985: 87).
The nineteenth century is, of course, much more commonly
described as having ushered in a ‘pictoral culture, and the
theatre was also pictoral’ (Booth 1991: 95). As Michael Booth
described it: ‘Looking at the world through the medium of
pictures … became a habit in the first half of the nineteenth
century, and as the pictorial means of information grew more
sophisticated and better adapted to mass public consumption,
the bombardment of visual and specifically pictorial stimuli
became inescapable’ (1981: 8). The stage, framed now by the
proscenium arch, borrowed from the visual displays in shop
windows and the scenes portrayed in dioramas. The theatre

created its most spectacular effects from new advances in
lighting technology with sound and music relegated to little
more than a backdrop to a visually compelling scene. In
Booth’s words: ‘To look at the stage as if it were a picture
was by 1859 an automatic response in audiences, and to
make performance resemble painting was a habit of managers
and technical staff’ (1981: 10). Such a focus on the stage as
a visually realized art ‘rendered sound a secondary epistemic
object’ (Dyson 2013: 419). Indeed, the drawing-room dramas
that predominated mainstream stages from the advent of
realism until at least the mid-twentieth century were much
more prosaic in their use of even the most modest sound
effects: for example, the door bell that would herald the arrival
of new characters into the fourth-wall-removed setting.
David Collison describes the theatres of Victorian melodrama
as marking the ‘final days of effects machines’ (2008: 38).
But, at the same time, it was also a period coincident with
the rapid development of technologies for sound recording
and amplification. Indeed, the first use of recorded sound in a
theatrical production took place in 1890, in a performance at
Terry’s Theatre in London of The Judge (a three-act farce by
Arthur Law) when audiences heard ‘an offstage phonographic
playing of a baby’s cry’ (Booth 1991: 93). From this very simple
beginning, sound recording and related technologies would
soon become commonplace elements of theatrical production
and, indeed, constitutive elements of twentieth-century avant-
garde performance.
SECTION TWO
Avant-Garde Sound
New technologies for sound

performance
If mainstream theatres of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries were determinedly pictorial – for example,
the ‘act-ending tableaux’ that presented ‘a combination of
scenery, furniture, properties and actors frozen in action
just as on a canvas’ (Booth 1991: 95) – emergent avant-
garde art forms revelled in new and innovative possibilities
for sound, particularly inspired and made available by the
rapid proliferation of machine-based technologies. Rather
than prolong the ‘ocularcentrism’ that was for so long the
focus of criticism about art forms from the late nineteenth
century and into the twentieth century, Adrian Curtin, in his
ground-breaking book Avant-Garde Theatre Sound, insists
that ‘modernity was crucially informed by sonic phenomena’
(2014: 8).
Curtin explains that a burgeoning aesthetic interest in
sound during this period was produced by way of a whole
host of environmental changes, as well as in recognition of
the potentials offered in the appropriation of those newly
invented machines for artistic production. Among the most
significant influences, he includes ‘increased noise levels and
dense sonic environments of modern metropolises’, ‘being
able to preserve the sound of one’s own voice and the voices
of others using sound-recording technology’ and ‘conceiving
of sound as a “thing”-like entity that can be purchased and
owned (e.g. a gramophone recording)’ (2014: 9–10). In other
words, and not surprisingly, experimental theatre makers
were not only thoroughly engaged with how technological
inventiveness might expand the possibilities of sound for
their own performances of modernity but how they might
harvest the sounds of everyday urban life as art. That sound
is such a key feature of the Modern period is, too, evidenced
by the first appearance of the word ‘sonic’ in the Oxford
English Dictionary. The dictionary cites the May 1923 issue
of Scientific American for its example of the word’s inaugural
use: ‘Sonic sounding is rendered possible by the fact that
sound vibrations, passing through water and striking a solid
surface, are returned as an echo to the source from which
they originated.’ But, by 1923, explorations of the sonic had
already become vital to both theories and practices of avant-
garde performance.
On 20 February 1909, ‘The Founding and Manifesto
of Futurism’ by Filippo Tomaso Marinetti appeared as an
advertisement on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le
Figaro. In its one-and-a-half columns, Marinetti’s document
declared the advent of the Futurist movement ‘because
we want to free this land [Italy] from its smelly gangrene
of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni [tour guides], and
antiquarians’ (1972: 42) and set out eleven principles as a
manifesto. The last of these principles reads:
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure,

and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic
tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of
the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing
with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that
devour smoke – plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds
by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the
rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter
AVANT-GARDE SOUND 55
of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-

chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the
hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the
sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind
like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
(1972: 42)
Marinetti captured, for the Futurists and their potential

audiences, what he felt was the stultifying presence of history
and the exhilarating possibilities of the new: transportation
and industry, the sounds and sights and smells of the urban
environment which promised ‘the habit of energy and
fearlessness’ in the world to come (1972: 41).
Some six years later, Marinetti, with Emilio Settimelli
and Bruno Corr, elaborated on the 1909 salvo with their co-
authored publication of ‘The Futurist Synthetic Theatre’ (18
February 1915). This was a declaration that sought action
to replace the structures of traditional theatre since it was
‘too prolix, analytic, pedantically psychological, explanatory,
diluted, finicking, static, as full of prohibitions as a police
station, as cut up into cells as a monastery, as moss-grown as an
old abandoned house’ (1972: 123–4). Synthetic theatre would
instead be only brief in its duration and ‘destroy the technique
… from the Greeks until now’ (1972: 125). Among the
many plays of Italian Futurism, Francesco Cangiulio’s drama
‘Detonazione’ (Detonation) provides an exemplary illustration
of both the sparseness of the performance and the starkness of
a sonic response to experiences of war. Both the manifesto and
the play itself were written in 1915, the second year of the First
World War. Cangiulio’s play, in its entirety, reads:
SYNTHESIS OF ALL MODERN THEATRE

CHARACTER
A BULLET
Road at night, cold, deserted.
A minute of silence. – A gunshot.
CURTAIN (1970: 131)
Marinetti himself wrote in a variety of genres but garnered

most attention for his sound poems or words-in-freedom,
as he described them in the ‘Destruction of Syntax – Radio
Imagination – Words-in-Freedom’ (11 May 1913); the sound-
poet, Marinetti wrote, ‘will begin by brutally destroying the
syntax of his speech. He will not waste time in constructing
periodic sentences. He could care less about punctuation or
finding the right adjective’ (Rainey 2009: 149). In the place
of traditional poetics, he proposed that the sound-poet ‘will
assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations,
just as their insistent pressure in him demands. The rush of
steam-emotion will burst the steampipe of the sentence, the
valves of punctuation, and the regular clamp of the adjective.
Fistfuls of basic words without any conventional order’ (Rainey
2009: 149). To achieve these goals, Marinetti described a
typographical revolution that would be required by the sound-
poem, but, as Curtin reminds us, Marinetti was not only looking
to realize his sound-poems in a radically new print layout. He
also performed this material. In April 1919, Marinetti staged
Zong Toomb Toomb in London, a work inspired by his time
as a war reporter at the 1912–13 Battle of Adrianople and
described by Claire Warden as a sound-poem that ‘morphs
into a war report’ through its performance (2015: 123). The
live-action version of Zong Toomb Toomb was, to be sure,
replete with sound: Marinetti’s work required the ‘use of a
telephone, some boards, and “the right sort of hammers” to
act out the orders of the Turkish general and simulate artillery
fire; off-stage drums (played on cue in another room)’ (Curtin
2014: 168). Wyndham Lewis, in the London audience, claimed
that ‘even at the front, when bullets whistled around him, he
had never encountered such a terrifying volume of noise as
Marinetti produced’ (Thompson 2002: 143).
‘The Futurist Synthetic Theatre’ was undoubtedly the
most influential of the many manifestos, ‘programmatic for
the acoustic turn in the arts and theatre of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries’ (Ovadija 2016: 27). Indeed,
the Italian Futurists insisted that the realities of a Modern
soundscape – and particularly as it had been shaped and

experienced in the context of the First World War – required
‘a poetics open to the forces exerted by the new technologies
of transportation, communication and information’
(Kahn 2013: 95). This poetics demanded, as Curtin illustrates, a
refusal of the passive and silent behaviour of audience members
in traditional theatres: the Futurists, he notes, ‘established noise
as a principal component of the serate, theatrical evenings …
riling spectators into actively participating in the performance
by disrupting it in some fashion’ (2014: 154). What Futurist
performance encouraged was, in effect, an experiential and
interactive theatre, a genre that has again become popular
and pervasive in early twenty-first-century forms, although
descriptions of audience participation in the serate make the
carefully controlled environments of productions such as
Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More seem rather tame and pedestrian:
Typically, audiences [at a serata] did not just holler, boo,

laugh, and whistle at Marineti and his fellow futurists,
but threw vegetables and other missiles at them (bought
especially for the occasion), set off firecrackers, honked
horns, blew on whistles and pipes, struck cow-bells, and got
into fights with the performers and with each other, giving
rise to a violent, carnivalesque affair. (Curtin 2014: 154)
Case study: Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori

and ‘The Art of Noise’
Given the raucous soundscapes of the serate, both onstage
and offstage, it is no surprise that among the many Futurist
publications one was dedicated to a theorization of ‘The Art
of Noise’ (Luigi Russolo’s manifesto of 1913). Its author was
chiefly a painter and a composer, but this work is important to
theatre sound both for Russolo’s elaboration of the aesthetic
properties of noise and for his invention of a range of twenty-
seven noise machines called intonarumori (which he assembled
as an ‘orchestra’). These intonarumori were designed specifically

to put Russolo’s own theories into practice. Simply described,
the instruments were sound boxes with a large speaker
mounted on the front side and operated by the musician via a
hand crank:
The cranked wheel would rub a string attached to a single

diaphragm, stretched on a cylindrical resonator sending
sound out through the funnel [speaker]. This created a wide
array of sounds, which could be tuned and rhythmically
regulated by means of mechanical manipulation. The pitch
was regulated by a lever on top of the box that continually
increased or reduced the tension and length of a vibrating
string, allowing for an infinite number of musical intervals
divided into semitones, quartertones, and smaller fractions
of the eharmonic scale. Different rhythms and timbres were
obtained by the physical or chemical preparation of parts of
the instrument. (Ovadija 2016: 124–5)
Russolo’s manifesto, written in the form of a letter to

Balilla Pratella (who had himself written manifestos on
Futurist music), starts in the same vein as Marinetti’s 1909
document – an attack on the classical: ‘The Greeks … have
limited the domain of music until now and made almost
impossible the harmony they were unaware of’ (Russolo
2013: 75). And, as in Marinetti’s work, it is modern life
that has prompted a ‘revolution’ away from ‘musical art’ to
‘noise-sound’: ‘In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as
well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create
today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound,
with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any
emotion’ (2013: 76, bolding in original). Russolo argues that
the noise-sound of transportation and massed crowds in a city
produce more pleasure than listening to a symphony – to be
specific, Russolo pejoratively calls it ‘listening once more’ to
the exhaustingly familiar sounds of symphonic compositions
(2013: 76, bolding in original).
What Russolo saw as radical was the opportunity both

for hearing sounds that had not been heard in the world
before and for demonstrating how these newly experienced
realities were fundamentally affective. The impact of the
sonic environment on the theories expounded by the Futurists
cannot be underestimated and, indeed, their work may well
represent the pivot between classical sound production in the
theatre and the multiplicity of sound economies in theatres
and other performance spaces that have developed in the
Modern period and since. Bruce Smith, whose work on the
soundscapes of Shakespeare’s theatre was discussed in Section
One, acknowledges the decisiveness of this paradigm shift:
‘Two inventions – electricity and the internal combustion
engine – make it difficult for us even to imagine what life in
early modern England would have sounded like’ (1999: 39). In
other words, technological developments in the Modern age
have inevitably constricted research about sound in historical
periods before then. The post-nineteenth-century human ear
can never actually experience what it was to hear before
industrialization.
Russolo’s manifesto, however, was focused on the creativity,
inspiration and excitement that a new world of sound might
offer to artists early in the twentieth century. He urges an
acoustic consciousness to meet the demands of urban life:
Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the

ear more attentive than the eye, and we will vary the pleasures
of our sensibilities by distinguishing among the gurglings of
water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumbling and
rattling of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits,
the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical
saws, the loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the snapping
of whips, the whipping of flags. We will have fun imagining
our orchestration of department stores’ sliding doors,
the hubbub of the crowds, the different roars of railroad
stations, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power
plants and subways. (2013: 77)
Strikingly, his imperative for a city encountered and

comprehended by a sonic flâneur anticipates Walter
Benjamin’s more visual-spatial urban walker in the arcades
of Paris by almost two decades. In fact, Benjamin, far from
embracing the thrills Russolo found in a deluge of urban
sound, wrote grumpily of its constraints on typical human
interaction: ‘With the steady increase in traffic on the streets,
it was only the macademization [ashphalt laid over the
cobblestones] of the roadways that made it possible in the
end to have a conversation on the terrace of a café without
shouting in the other person’s ear’ (1999: 420, M2,5 in
‘Convolutes’).
If Benjamin wanted to retain the quieter pleasures of
bourgeois café culture, Russolo, by contrast, was a champion
of human shouting. Indeed, it was a component of one of the
six ‘categories’ of noise that he suggested Futurism should
generate through new technologies of performance. He did
not assign these six categories identifying titles but simply
presented cluster groups of noises without any particular
rationale for the arrangement:
1 2
roars whistles
claps snores
noises of falling water snorts
driving noises
bellows
3 4
whispers shrill sounds
mutterings cracks
rustlings buzzings
grumbles jingles
grunts shuffles
gurgles
5 6
percussive noises using animal and human voices:
metal, wood, skin, shouts, moans, screams,
stone, baked earth, etc. laughter, rattlings, sobs
(2013: 79)
Since neither words nor traditional musical instruments were

up to the task of capturing the noise-sound complexities of the
Modern condition, Russolo looked to new instrumentation
that might do so. It makes sense, in the context of the Futurists’
dizzying appreciation of the sounds of machines, that Russolo
would construct his own to manufacture a repertoire of noises
that could deliver the ‘special acoustic pleasure’ of his art (2013:
79): these were the intonarumori. The first performance of noise-
sound, enacted by the first of his intonarumori, the scoppiatore
(which apparently emitted the sound of a spark-ignition engine
across two octaves), was at a serata hosted by Marinetti in Milan
in August 1913. Marinetti promised that the performance would
give the audience ‘pleasant feelings’ (Maina 2011) but Russolo’s
scoppiatore were drowned out by the even noisier audience, by
now accustomed to full-on vocal participation in Futurist events.
A second performance in Milan the following year produced
considerably more drama as Marinetti himself described:
While the angry but imperturbable Luigi Russolo is directing

precise and painstaking I go down through a side door [at
the Teatro Dal Verme] and hurl myself against the first row
We slap them around cramming our fists down their
jeering throats and left and right Futurists and carabineers
[armed soldiers] fists flying body against body egged on by
Lydia [sic] Borelli’s white clapping hands in her private box
until the mad crush sends us hurtling through a trapdoor on
stage down to the lowest cellar and the newspaper Il Secolo
noted that although the Futurists were booed they didn’t
get the worst of the fracas since the eleven people who were
injured and brought to the hospital were all passéists. (Flint

1971: 285, missing punctuation in the original)
If the clapping of actress Borelli provided Marinetti with

the rhythmic soundtrack to what seems, for him, to have
been the most invigorating part of the performance – violent
interactions with spectators – Russolo was unimpressed with
the boisterous audience members and the carabineers who
intervened: he pursued a lawsuit after the event.
Notwithstanding negative responses and violent assaults,
Russolo nonetheless persevered with his intonarumori
performances, staged in major European cities such as
London (1914) and Paris (1921). Curtin astutely points out
that, ironically, ‘Russolo’s preferred mode of response for
his noise music … was in the tradition of musical idealism,
focused listening. This is further evident from the fact that
Russolo adopted the organizational structure of symphonic
music’ (Curtin 2014: 160–1). At best, Russolo’s noise-sound
performances were artistic curiosities and his machine-
instruments useful additions to the repertoire of other
Futurists performers. For example, Marinetti incorporated
an intonarumori orchestra into his play Il Tamburo di Fuoco
(The Fire Drum) (1922), but ‘the instruments were reduced
to playing “background music” and providing sound effects’
(Kirby and Kirby 1986: 38).
What to make of these extraordinary performances?
They are not just examples of avant-garde eccentricities
whose regular theatrical revival seems unlikely, even as an
academic experiment, but they also mark an important turn
towards sound innovation, a moment where a rejection of
conventional theatre sound collided with an embrace of extra-
theatrical noises. Furthermore, the theory and practices of
the Italian Futurists (and of other allied artistic movements
like Dada, Bruitism and Expressionism) underpin and inform
later avant-garde theatrical developments such as the work of
John Cage which this section will also explore. These Futurist
performances are, too, the sonic ground zero for the experiential
theatres of this book’s third section, a connective tissue

between modernity and a twenty-first-century predilection
for genres such as audio walks, ‘headphone’ theatre and other
sound-dense performance installations. They presage, too, the
contemporary turn towards a more participatory theatre.
Hanging on the telephone:

Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes
The experimental performances of Marinetti and Russolo in
the first decades of the twentieth century looked to create sonic
worlds that would refuse traditional theatrical conventions for
sound production and reception and, in their place, capture
the polyphony of modern life as the matter of performance. By
the 1930s, however, the first technologies of sound recording
and reproduction had moved into the mainstream of society
and, thus, into artistic production. The telephone and the
phonograph – signature inventions of an acoustical era – would
be joined by other important sound developments: the first
‘talking’ film (The Jazz Singer, 1927), the first electronically
amplified record players (1926) and the first tape recorders
(such as the Blattnerphone that was first used by the BBC
in 1932). And these new technologies promised a wealth
of performance advantages, not the least of which was as
a cost-saving measure. David Collison cites ‘one of the first
documented examples of records used in the theatre’ from an
article in a 1932 volume of Scientific American (volume 146,
January–June): it contained a report about a production of
Hamlet in New York where ‘the prelude, overture, and entire
musical accompaniment to the show were reproduced over
the system – there being no orchestras or other conventional
music used in connection with the play’ (2008: 110). This
early twentieth-century example reminds us, moreover, of the
ubiquity of recorded music and sound in contemporary theatre
and performance. This fact alone suggests that performance
analyses need to furnish more explicit recognition of the place

of recorded music and sound and its relevance to the seemingly
perennial interrogation of what, exactly, constitutes liveness.
But to return our focus to the contributions of new
technologies to theatre and performance practice in the first half
of the twentieth century, we can see that these new machines
did more than put some theatre orchestras out of work: they
also prompted new streams of revenue generation and, at the
same time, extended the parameters of the theatrical event.
The théâtrephone (invented by Clément Ader and given its first
public demonstration in 1881) had allowed users to connect
by telephone to ‘the Opéra, the Opéra Comique, the Comédie-
Française and the Concerts Colonne’ for a few minutes at a time
(Curtin 2014: 88). Launched in the 1890s, the théâtrephone,
‘an expensive “theater chez soi” home subscription service’,
provided unlimited access to performances and gave subscribers
the option to purchase additional sets of earphones so that
group listening would be possible (Van Drie 2015: 76, 80).
London had a similar service from 1895, providing live relays
from theatres, churches and the Royal Opera House (Crook
1999: 17). In 1907, Lee de Forest (often described as the ‘father’
of American radio) proclaimed: ‘It will soon be possible to
distribute grand opera music from transmitters placed on the
stage of the Metropolitan Opera House by a radio telephone
station on the roof to almost any dwelling in Greater New
York and vicinity … The same applies to large cities. Church
music, lectures, etc., can be spread abroad by the Radio
Telephone’ (cited in Reidy et al. 2016: 18). And, of course, the
immensely popular twenty-first-century performance-to-screen
transmissions (best known through the extensive worldwide
availability of National Theatre’s NT Live programming)
had their genesis in these sound-only distributions to remote
venues.
The Paris théâtrephone and its imitators in London,
New York and elsewhere were not just curiosities, however.
Rather they marked a new intermediality possible for theatre
production: as Melissa Van Drie notes, ‘the performance was
transformed into sound and imagined in the spectator’s mind.

Audition is granted a creative role’ (2015: 81). Put another
way, sound is experienced internally by the listener who, thus,
realizes the performance. The innovations in sound relay made
possible by telephone technology did not only offer up new
ways to reach theatre audiences but also generated new material
for onstage exploration. The following case study looks at
how expansion of the sound-listening dynamic exploited what
Jonathan Sterne has called the ‘sonic imagination’.
Case study: Jean Cocteau’s

The Human Voice
As Sterne has explained, the introduction of commercially
available technologies for the distribution of sound meant
that ‘[p]eople had to learn how to understand the relations
between sounds made by people and sounds made by
machines’ (2003: 216). The arrival of the telephone into
individual households thus provoked extended examination of
the instrument’s social and psychological impacts on human
relationships – Sigmund Freud, for example, argued that the
telephone allowed the subject to ‘hear at distances which would
be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale’ (1930: 4408).
And it was a pervasive fascination with the telephone that lent
the technological raison d’être for Jean Cocteau’s monodrama
The Human Voice (La Voix Humaine). The play was first
performed at the Comédie-Française on 17 February 1930
with Berthe Bovy in the play’s single role. In his ‘Author’s
Preface’ to the print edition, Cocteau describes The Human
Voice ‘as a pretext for an actress’ (1951: 8) and notes, too, that
he ‘gave this act to the Comédie-Française in order to break
with the worst prejudice: that of the young theatre groups
versus the state theatres’ (1951: 9). The Human Voice was
written for an audience of traditional theatre that Cocteau
thought had unfortunately remained ‘a public hungry for
sentiment’ (1951: 9) and in the knowledge that younger, more
fashionable spectators had left for ‘the cinema and the so-called
“avant-garde”stages’ (1951: 9). Yet his play, although set in
the conventional room of the fourth-wall-removed theatre,
is as fascinated with the affective impacts of sound as any
Futurist performance. Cocteau’s text exploits what Ella Finer
has described as telephonic technology’s ability to ‘play tricks
with the distance between speaker and listener by scaling down
by a false immediacy, as the electric wires mediate the distance
instead of breath and air’ (2017: 16).
The Human Voice opens with a dramatization of this new
co-dependency between people and their sound machines:
the unnamed female character is attempting to make a phone
call but struggling with the complexities of shared service.
Commonplace in the early days of domestic telephone use,
she is using a ‘party line’ – a local telephone circuit that was
shared by more than one user; if someone was talking on the
line and another party to that line picked up, they could hear the
conversation of that first user. Appropriate ‘party line’ etiquette
(particularly, equitable sharing of line time) was not always
easily resolved and the correct routing of a new call was far from
guaranteed so that a successful phone connection often required
the involvement of an operator at the local telephone exchange.
‘Someone’s calling me and I can’t answer’, Cocteau’s character
tells the operator, ‘There are people on the line. Tell that woman
to ring off’ (1951: 21). At this point, the speaker hangs up on the
call she was trying to make, only for her phone to ring at once:
Hello, is that you, dear? … … is it you? … … Yes …. it’s

very difficult to hear …. you sound ever such a long way
off … … Hello! … … Oh! it’s awful … … there are several
people on the line … … Ask them to put you through again
… … Hello! Ask them to put you through again … … … …
… … … … … …. I said: ask them to put you through to me
again. (1951: 21–2)
Like Marinetti’s words-in-freedom, the text for The Human

Voice deploys typographical innovation to capture the sonic
pace of a telephone conversation, using spaced ellipses to

indicate silences of varied lengths: Cocteau’s ellipsis use runs
from the conventionally accepted three to indicate omission in
a standard English sentence to as many as ninety-six! Indeed,
his short play is choreographed by sound and sometimes by
the lack of it, and the audience is asked to listen in (a real-
life replication of the experience of using a party telephone
line). The task of the woman’s performance is to listen to what
spectators cannot: the other end of the conversation.
The telephone enacts as ‘injunction to listen’ and, as Roland
Barthes would later argue, it demands ‘the total interpellation
of one subject by another: it places above everything else
the quasi-physical contact of the subjects (by voice and ear)’
(1976, in Barthes 1985: 251). In The Human Voice, then, the
audience hears one half of a conversation, that of the woman,
talking with a man who has, until very recently, been her lover.
As the man expects the woman to listen, so Cocteau requires
the audience to listen to her, a sounding out of Barthes’s act of
total interpellation. In the play, it becomes clear that this is the
phone call that will mark the end of the couple’s relationship
and it is disclosed eventually that the man is about to married
to someone else. By turns, the woman is suicidal, hopeful,
grateful, distraught, desperate and loving; the man (at least
insofar as her responses to him are reliable witnesses of his
words – and they may not be) expresses guilt and worry about
her present emotional state and future life. Curtin describes
Cocteau’s play as staging ‘the crossover between telephony and
human desire. It showcases the dark side of the telephone’s
ability to provide – or prohibit – pleasure’ (2014: 94).
The audience for The Human Voice has no sonic evidence,
of course, that the speaker does in fact have an interlocutor
at the end of her phone line or, at least, not necessarily the
one an audience might imagine for her through the words she
speaks in apparent reply. The Human Voice also flirts with
the revelation of the woman’s unconscious mind, desires and
drives that emerge in the one-sided stream-of-consciousness
monologue that she performs – what Cocteau calls, in his
preface to the text, ‘all the strange, deep tones which the
voice assumes in that instrument’ (1951: 7). It is useful, then,
to remember that Freud had, as early as 1912, taken up the
metaphor of telephone conversation to explain unconscious
communication as well as to describe a method for the
(listening) analyst:
To put it in a formula: he [the analyst] must turn his

own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the
transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust
himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted
to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver
converts back into sound waves the electric oscillations in
the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so
the doctor’s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the
unconscious which are transmitted to him, to reconstruct
that unconscious, which has determined the patient’s
free-associations. (1912: 2470)
As the receiver (the telephone, the audience) is the analyst

of the woman’s crisis so the play’s ending literally drops the
connection. The woman has been lying on the bed, hugging the
receiver close to her body and inciting the end-to-come:
I’m brave. Be quick. Break off. Quick. Break. I love you, I

love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. … … … … …
With that string of ellipses, all that remains are Cocteau’s

stage directions: the telephone receiver falls to the floor
(in fact, the play’s last sound) followed by the instruction
‘Curtain’ (1951: 48).
Roland Barthes described the telephone as ‘the archetypal
instrument of modern listening’, suggesting it
collects the two partners into an ideal (and, under certain

circumstances, an intolerable) inter-subjectivity, because this
instrument has abolished all senses except that of hearing:
the order of listening which any telephonic communication

inaugurates invites the Other to collect his [sic] whole body
in his voice and announces that I am collecting all of myself
in my ear. (1977, in Barthes 1985: 252)
Cocteau’s dramatic meditation on ‘the order of listening’

has proven popular in theatre repertoire, even as telephone
apparatuses and networks have become ever more
sophisticated and other archetypal instruments in our listening
economies have come into quotidian use. For example, the
Toneelgroep Amsterdam production of The Human Voice
(2008), directed by Ivo van Hove, adopted the cordless phone
so that actor Halina Reijn could pace back and forth in her
tiny apartment while talking. As well, in this version, one of
Cocteau’s carefully crafted and ellipses-scored silences was
replaced by a burst of music from the woman’s MP3 player.
Yet, surprisingly perhaps, van Hove’s more contemporary
interpretation chose to privilege space as much as, if not more
than, the play’s soundscape. The synopsis on the Toneelgroep
Amsterdam website reads: ‘It feels as if she is imprisoned in
her own apartment, and at times she roams her limited space
like a caged animal’ – a concept realized by Jan Versweyveld’s
claustrophobic set design.
Versweyveld trapped Reijn’s character in a minimalist glass
box with a sliding glass door, suggesting a balcony high above
street level and serving as the only visible exit from the oppressive
situation; in other words, her constraints were spatial, casting
the audience as voyeurs at least as much as eavesdroppers. Is
it inevitable that twenty-first-century interpretations default to
a visual economy? Or does this kind of revival of a Modernist
aesthetic, through its use of sound, instead challenge the
sway of an ocular-centric theatre? I think that van Hove’s
adaptation of The Human Voice for contemporary audiences
was not only concerned with a kind of visual incarceration but
also purposively sonic in its incorporation of ‘jarring sound
effects and a doom-laden musical score’ (Morrow 2011). Like
the minimalist environments of the Italian Futurists a century
earlier, Versweyveld’s design embraced the sounds and noise

of an urban landscape: the actor was required at one point
to slide open the door (which she could not move through –
there was no stage space beyond it) and hear the energy of a
world from which she is estranged and in which, it is implied,
her about-to-be-former lover is at liberty. While both Freud
and Barthes saw the telephone as a metaphor for unspoken
human desire, where ‘the listener’s silence will be as active as
the locutor’s speech’ (1977, in Barthes 1985: 252), van Hove
and Versweyveld’s collaboration leveraged updated sound
technology and the ubiquity of its use in the everyday to make
the same point: ‘While waiting for her ex to call back, she
listens on her iPod – not without poignancy – to Beyoncé’s
Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)’ (Morrow 2011).
For Barthes, ‘there is no human voice which is not an object
of desire – or of repulsion …. Every relation to a voice is
necessarily erotic’ (1985: 280) and in Cocteau’s The Human
Voice, acts of speaking and listening (and eavesdropping)
cohere as a shared fantasy, an erotic performance mediated
for all parties by the sonic capacity of the telephone. We will
return to the sensory stimulation of this particular technology
in Section Three by examining Janet Cardiff’s audio-video
walk ‘The Telephone Call’ (2001).
The sounds of silence:

John Cage’s future of music
While avant-garde performances in the first half of the
twentieth century had been driven by a celebratory embrace
of both new technologies and the cacophony of sounds that
dominated modern city living, by the 1950s this enthusiasm
had been exhausted and even overturned. This was not the
result of the degradations in day-to-day living that urban
congestion produced nor even a burgeoning sense of the
sonic and other contamination that industrialization and
concomitant mechanization had caused to the environment.

Rather it was an inevitable outcome of the experiences of two
world wars. Yet the appalling losses of human life that new
technologies of war had caused – and the traumatic stress of
wartime living (often felt at its most terrifying via sound: the
air-raid siren, the strange buzzing noise of the V1 ‘doodlebug’
bombs that showered London in 1944) – hardly slowed the
exploration, and theorization, of sonic performances. It was
just that everyone had become a lot less enthusiastic about
noise. This section takes as its primary example one of the
best-known works of this post-war period, John Cage’s ‘4ꞌ33″’,
a composition that is often referred to (wrongly) as silent. In
both his theoretical writings and performance compositions,
Cage shifted the acoustical context for sound production, to
take account of new environments in which he wanted sound
to be heard and understood.
The first recital of ‘4ꞌ33″’ took place on 29 August 1952
when pianist David Tudor came on stage inside the tiny
Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, to play
two works by Cage. The first of these, a composition that
had previously debuted in New York City, was called ‘Water
Music’ (the title of an ironic replication, no doubt, of the
much-beloved baroque classic composed by George Frideric
Handel). Often considered to be Cage’s first performance
piece, the six-minute ‘Water Music’ is replete with a variety
of sounds including some generated by the use of a radio,
several different bird-whistles, a deck of cards and containers
of water. The score indicates that the pianist will realize forty-
one different sound events and provides exact timings for each
of them. Thus the composition mixed a traditional musical
instrument for solo recital, the piano, with more practical
‘machines’ for sound (re)production: some imitative of nature
(birdsong, water) and others more domestic (scanning stations
on the radio as well as shuffling playing cards above the piano
strings). While ‘Water Music’ might be described as a more
restrained version of a Futurist sound-noise performance, it
was the second piece on that evening in 1952 which would
become the artist’s signature composition: ‘4ʹ33″’. (On this

first night it was called ‘Four Pieces’ and only later assigned
the now more familiar title.)
‘4ʹ33″’ required Tudor to sit at the piano and open the musical
score, then raise the lid to the keyboard, start a stopwatch and
shut the lid; after 30 seconds, he reset the stopwatch – an action
that was repeated again after another 2 minutes and 23 seconds,
and once more after a further 1 minute and 40 seconds. The
pianist described the piece as ‘one of the most intense listening
experiences you can have’ (Hermes 2000). Every bit as radical
as Marinetti’s serate in Milan – and generating as much
audience disapproval (although no violence) in its inaugural
rendition – Cage’s composition was received ‘as a joke or some
kind of avant-garde nose-thumbing’ (Hermes 2000). Audience
and critics alike demanded to know what was the intention
behind Cage’s silent piano.
Of course, while there was no audible rendition of music
from Tudor on stage, the performance in its fullest sense
was not silent. Sounds from the pianist’s and the audience’s
movements and expression, as well as those from the
contextual environment, filled the sonic gaps ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ appeared
to create in the auditorium. In the absence of the music
expected, given the presence of piano and pianist, the slightest
scrape of a chair, cough by an audience member, creak from a
door or even wind in the trees outside the Maverick Concert
Hall registered in the listener’s consciousness. This was Cage’s
point. His composition was designed to retrieve the usually
inaudible as both the subject and object of the audience’s
experience. On the one hand, this performance acknowledged
that the noisy city (that had so excited Marinetti and the
Futurists) had more or less erased the many subtle and
muted sounds of life’s more natural elements. On the other,
it also revealed, and revised, the sonic component of what
had become the conventional production-reception contract
in the performance of classical music (and, indeed, theatre):
the performer licensed to make sound and the audience
disciplined to be silent.
The genesis of ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ had come from a visit by Cage to an

‘anechoic chamber’ (literally: a room without echoes) at Harvard
University. The chamber had been built for engineering tests
and was designed to provide maximum isolation from outside
noise or vibration. But, instead of the complete silence Cage
had anticipated in his immersion in the chamber, he reported
to the Harvard engineers that he had heard two sounds, one
high and one low, while he was in the room: ‘When I described
them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one
was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in
circulation. Until I die there will be sounds’ (Cage 1961: 8). And
it was those sounds of the living body, not an all-encompassing
condition of silence, that Cage wanted to capture in ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ for
his audiences. (In another kind of exploration of the living body,
Shannon Yee’s immersive audio performance, Reassembled,
Slightly Askew (2015), puts audience members ‘inside’ the brain
injury she suffered. This work will be discussed in Section Three.)
Eschewing the commonplace description of ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ as silent
performance, Ross Brown more accurately describes it as
‘framed noise’ (2010: 46). This is a helpful description since the
composition requires of its audiences ‘to let themselves go with
the unintended and previously unattended sounds of silence
to be found in their environment’ (Ovadija 2016: 142). As a
performance installation, ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ prompts audiences to attend
to whatever varieties of sound fill the void left by the noiseless
piano and, more crucially, to think about how they hear them.
Cage’s composition is, in effect, another meditation on listening.
It is timely, then, to return to Barthes’s examination of the topic:
he insisted that ‘listening is active, it assumes the responsibility
of taking its place in the interplay of desire, of which all language
is the theater: we must repeat, listening speaks’ (1977, Barthes
1985: 259). Experimental performance, Barthes argued, relied
on signifying rather than signification (active meaning-making,
not coded message). To elaborate this theory, he turned to Cage’s
work and described the specific experience of listening that this
kind of composition demands: ‘[I]t is each sound one after the
next that I listen to, not in its syntagmatic extension, but in its
raw and as though vertical signifying: by deconstructing itself,

listening is externalized, it compels the subject to renounce his
“inwardness”’ (1977, Barthes 1985: 259). As an exercise in
listening, ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ puts the relationship between sound-silence
and the ear at the forefront of reception.
Cage’s composition also acted, in its published form, as a
challenge to the conventional method of writing for future
sound (re)production. Typically a musical score deploys
standard notation: language and symbols that not only
furnish the content of the work but also serve as a guide to
its realization in performance. But Cage’s score deliberately
parodied traditional practice and dismantled its authority.
For the score of ‘4ʹ33ʺ’, each of the three sections bears the
instruction ‘TACET’ and notes the assigned duration so as to
comprise the four minutes and 33 seconds of ‘playing’ time.
‘Tacet’ (Latin: literally ‘it is silent’) conventionally ‘informs a
player that he [sic] should play nothing during a movement’
(Nyman 2008: 210); thus Cage’s score repeats a conventional
notation precisely to refuse the conventional realization of
that notation (production of sound). Moreover, in the ‘4ʹ33ʺ’
score, a ‘secondary part of the notation tells the performer
that the piece may be done on any instrument, for any length
of time’ (Nyman 2008: 210), destabilizing the authority of
the original performance (and its printed remnant) and, at
the same time, liberating future productions from apparent
obligation to fidelity. Salomé Vogelin suggests that Cage here
dematerialized ‘the object of composition, emptying the score
of its musical sounds’ but, at the same time, trapping the new
sounds perceived ‘in the tight space of musical conventions
and expectations’ (2010: 81) – a problem, inevitably, for much
avant-garde performance that was realized in concert halls,
theatres and other culturally over-coded spaces.
Cage had signalled his interest in theorizing the sonic
environment as early as 1937 in a short manifesto presented to
the Seattle arts society. His subject was ‘The Future of Music:
Credo’. The talk was later published in the programme for a
twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective of the artist’s work
in New York (1958) and is the first item in Cage’s collected

writings, a volume the author wryly called Silence. ‘The Future
of Music’ begins: ‘Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly
noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we
find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour.
Static between the stations. Rain’ (1961: 3). The ‘fascinating’
soundscape that he hears is different from, more diverse than, the
urban noises that excited the Futurists. Like them, he drew on
the sounds of transportation (a truck) and of new technologies
(the radio), but, unlike them, he included the natural world
(rain), suggesting a more holistic view of contemporary sonic
possibilities. Furthermore, Cage continued to theorize the
possibilities of sound production and wrote in 1957: ‘Where do
we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more than music
resembles nature’ (1961: 12).
The theatre Cage imagined, however, was not performing
a repertoire of the classics of the Western dramatic canon. In
fact, he expressed dismay at the plays of Shakespeare, Ibsen,
Tennessee Williams he had seen, claiming in this context that
‘the theater was a great disappointment to anybody interested
in the arts’ (Kostelanetz 1991: 24). Rather, he looked to the
experimental performance scene of 1950s New York – for
example, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and The
Living Theater. To accompany the latter’s 1951–52 season
at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, Judith
Malina and Julian Beck, the company’s founders, asked
Cage to write a manifesto. His very short document, with
the single word headers ‘instantaneous’ and ‘unpredictable’,
comprised:
nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music ) our ears are

)
“ “ “ “ hearing “ “ “ “ ) now
)
“ “ “ “ playing “ “ “ “ )in excellent
condition.
(Cage 1961: xii)
These must have been inspiring precepts for the theatre

that would introduce European playwrights such as Cocteau
to New York audiences as well as stage the plays of American
Modernists such as Gertrude Stein. Thus, Cage’s ideas about
sound, noise and silence emerged through his knowledge of,
and often collaborations with, other artists living and working
in New York at the same time – Merce Cunningham, Robert
Rauschenberg, Beck and Malina, among them. In their different
artistic disciplines (Cunningham in dance, Rauschenberg in the
visual arts, Beck and Malina in theatre, Cage in music) each
looked to create and practice anti-hierarchical and anarchical
forms of artistic production and reception.
In 2008, visual artist Tacita Dean and Merce Cunningham
collaborated on ‘Stillness’, a performance choreographed to
Cage’s ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ where Cunningham held a pose, ‘shifting positions
for each of the three movements in Cage’s composition’ (Dean
2010). Cunningham, by then almost ninety years old, had been
Cage’s partner and frequent collaborator and ‘Stillness’ proved
an elegant companion piece to a work still resonant after more
than fifty years. ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ nonetheless remains haunted by its
designation as a silent work, a fact that underscores the awkward
social space that soundlessness occupies. R. Murray Schafer
(whose theories of environmental sound open Section Three)
points out that ‘the ultimate silence is death’ and, in Western
society, ‘silence is negative, an embarrassment, a vacuum. Silence
for Western man [sic] equals communication hang-up. If one
does not speak, the other will speak’ (2008: 37) – a theoretical
position that the absent presence of the woman’s telephonic
interlocutor acted out in The Human Voice. Conventional rules
of theatregoing prescribe silent behaviour for the audience –
captured even before the performance proper begins in the
injunction to turn off our mobile phones. These rules ensure the
audience’s attentiveness to sound emanating from the stage so
much so that silence on stage often produces anxiety on the part
of those who watch and listen. When no sound emanates from
the performance proper, as in the case of Cage’s ‘4ʹ33ʺ’, non-
intentional environmental noises inevitably fill the auditorium
but this kind of enacted ‘silence’ has the capacity to create

an unwilling self-consciousness in the audience member qua
audience member, both individually and collectively. (A similar
experience can come from an unexpected pause when an actor
has forgotten lines.) Imposed ‘silence’, like the experience of the
anechoic chamber that Cage visited, reveals the presence and
existence of bodies. In its simplest form, that wordless sound
of life is breath.
Samuel Beckett’s brief play ‘Breath’ (written in 1969), like
Cage’s earlier experiment with ‘4ʹ33ʺ’, strips performance of
its most conventional elements – bodies and words. Instead
Beckett’s thirty-second piece uses only recorded sound and,
resembling the structure of the Cage composition, presents
that sound in strictly time-choreographed, distinct sequences.
‘Breath’ has three ‘acts’: the first describes the stage, faintly lit
and ‘littered with miscellaneous rubbish’ with an instruction
to hold the tableau for five seconds (1971: 9). The second
reads: ‘Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow
increase of light together reaching maximum together in about
ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds’ (1971: 9).
The final segment indicates ‘Expiration and slow decrease of
light together reaching minimum together’ over a ten-second
period until the light level matches that at the start of the
play (1971: 9). ‘Breath’ ends with five seconds of silence. The
additional instructions that the script provides are equally
minimalist and quite precise on the subject sound: the two
cries must be identical, the sound of ‘vagitus’ (OED: ‘A cry
or wail; spec. that of a new-born child’). Further, Beckett
prescribes that the cries and breathing should be derived
from recorded sound and not performed live. With garbage
lying all around the playing space, the audience is literally
looking at rubbish – nothing of value – but impelled to listen
to something of remarkable value, the breath that sustains all
human life punctuated by those first sounds that indicate every
individual’s viable entry into the world.
‘Breath’ was originally written for inclusion in Kenneth
Tynan’s erotic revue O! Calcutta! in New York, on the
understanding that the pieces commissioned would be

performed anonymously. Other luminaries such as John Lennon
and Sam Shepard also contributed. Beckett’s short script (he
sent it to Tynan on the back of a postcard) was presented on the
opening night of the revue with naked bodies writhing in the
garbage-strewn setting and with Beckett’s authorship attached.
Because of these two departures from the agreement with
Tynan, Beckett angrily withdrew ‘Breath’ from the production.
Later in the same year, ‘Breath’ received a theatrical premiere
in Glasgow. As part of a project to record all of Beckett’s stage
plays, a film version of ‘Breath’ was made in 2001, directed by
Damien Hirst.
Acousmatics and radiophonics:

Pierre Schaeffer and the BBC
Performance of the absent body was, by 1969, already
well practiced in Beckett’s oeuvre through the sequence of
dramas he wrote for BBC radio in the late 1950s and in his
well-known stage play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), a dialogue
between the onstage actor and tape-recorded diary entries.
If the gramophone and telephone had become familiar
performance technologies in the first decades of the twentieth
century, by the 1950s interest had moved on to new forms
of sound recording that Beckett, among others, was keen to
explore. And an ascendant performance platform was, at this
time, the radio. As Tim Crook notes in his study of the genre,
radio drama ‘had a short period when it floated in the luxury
of radio as an electronic medium that was dominant for about
thirty years’ (1922–52) (1999: 49).
Beckett, living in Paris, was almost certainly aware
of the work of radio engineer and sound theorist Pierre
Schaeffer; moreover, the radio drama team at the BBC who
commissioned Beckett’s radio plays had been to the French
capital to visit Schaeffer’s sound studio and were keen to test
out his theories through their productions of Beckett’s work.

Schaeffer’s theory of acousmatics, fifteen years in the making
and eventually to appear in published form in 1966 as Traité
des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects), addressed
the reception of sound when its source could not been seen –
as in the case of radio transmission. The OED provides two
definitions of ‘acousmatics’, collectively an illustration of both
the history behind Schaeffer’s selection of the term and the
more recent meaning that his own theory had introduced.
In the historical sense, ‘acousmatics’ was the term given to
the students of ancient Greek philosopher-mathematician
Pythagoras; from Schaefferian theory, the word became ‘of,
designating, or characterized by sound produced without a
visible source, a visual component or association; audible but
unseen’.
So why did Schaeffer turn to Pythagoras for his
terminology? As the OED explains, this was ‘owing to the
belief that the acousmatic followers of Pythagoras were so
called because they were not permitted to see Pythagoras
when they listened to his lectures’. As a disembodied source
of sound – Pythagoras stood behind a curtain and demanded
his students remained on the other side in total and respectful
silence – the ancient Greek philosopher-mathematician
was a useful figure for Schaeffer’s theoretical imperative:
to describe what was ‘audible but unseen’ but also to
understand how audiences listen in such circumstances.
Schaeffer writes:
This is why we can, without anachronism, return to an ancient

tradition which, no less nor otherwise than contemporary
radio and recordings, gives back to the ear alone the entire
responsibility of a perception that ordinarily rests on other
sensible witnesses. In ancient times, the apparatus was a
curtain; today, it is the radio and the methods of reproduction,
along with the whole set of electro-acoustic transformations,
that place, us, modern listeners to an invisible voice, under
similar conditions. (2008: 77)
As this extract illustrates, Schaeffer’s interest in the reception

of sound followed a phenomenological approach, drawing
specifically on the work of German philosopher Edmund
Husserl. Indeed, to establish the phenomenological basis for
his own theory, Schaeffer quoted at length from Husserl’s
Ideas:
Let us start with an example. Constantly seeing this table

and meanwhile walking around it, changing my position in
space in whatever way, I have continually the consciousness
of this one identical table as factually existing ‘in person’ and
remaining quite unchanged. The table-perception, however,
is a continually changing one; it is a continuity of changing
perceptions. I close my eyes. My other senses have no relation
to the table. Now I have no perception of it. I open my eyes;
and I have the perception again. The perception? Let us be
more precise. Returning, it is not, under any circumstances,
individually the same. Only the table is the same, intended to
as the same in the synthetical consciousness which connects
the new perception with the memory …. The perception
itself, however, is what it is in the continuous flux of
consciousness and is itself a continuous flux: continually the
perceptual Now changes into the enduring consciousness of
the Just-Past and simultaneously a new Now lights up, etc.
The perceived thing in general, and all its parts, aspects, and
phases … are necessarily transcendent to the perception.
(cited in Schaeffer 2017: 207)
In other words, perception is not what the thing is or means

but rests in the experience of the thing and in the content/
meaning produced by that experience of the thing. If
Husserl’s elaboration was singularly visual, how, Schaeffer
wondered, could this be articulated in the context of sound
production?
The answer was to be found in his description of a ‘sonorous
object’ that must first be defined by what it is not. It is not
the instrument that was actually played (the source of the
sound) nor was it the gramophone record or tape (the acoustic

signal); rather, the sonorous object was ‘contained entirely in
our perceptive consciousness’ (2008: 79, emphasis in original).
For this reason, a sonorous object is only revealed in the
acousmatic experience. As Brian Kane explains, ‘Schaeffer
understands the Pythagorean veil (and its perpetuation in the
form of modern audio technology) as a tool for bracketing the
spatiotemporal factuality of the sonic source. This encourages
two fundamental changes: first, the objectivity of sound is
grasped as a phenomenon, and second, attention is redirected
to the particular essential characteristics of a given sound’
(2014: 25). Schaeffer termed this experience acousmatic or
‘reduced’ listening, the perception of sound apart from its
source. In other words, his theory was a perfect match to
the practice of listening invoked by the increasingly popular
medium of radio.
As Schaeffer explained it, in the practice of reduced
listening, ‘sound no longer appears as a medium or placeholder
for “some other thing”’ (Kane 2014: 29), excluding – in the
same ways that Husserl had described for his object table –
‘other sensory means of assessing sound’ (Kane 2014: 37).
‘Such is the suggestion of acoustmatics’, Schaeffer wrote, ‘to
deny the instrument and cultural conditioning, to put in front
of us the sonorous and its musical “possibility”’ (2008: 81,
emphasis in original). Schaeffer was himself a sound composer,
of what he called musique concrète (concrete music), a fertile
ground for testing his theories of sonorous objects and reduced
listening. In 1948, he had produced a ‘concert of noises’ for
broadcast on French radio, ‘a set of pieces composed entirely
from recordings of train whistles, spinning tops, pots and
pans, canal boats, percussion instruments, and the occasional
piano’ (Cox and Warner 2008: 5). His composition had been
later released on gramophone records – a set of which the
BBC radio team brought back to London after their visit to
Schaeffer’s Paris studio.
It is not surprising, then, to find in the first of Beckett’s radio
plays, All That Fall (first presented on BBC’s Third Programme
on 13 January 1957), sonically dense stage directions that

actualize Schaeffer’s conception of the sonorous object. The
script of All That Fall opens:
Rural sounds. Sheep, bird, cow, cock,

severally then together.
Silence.
Mrs. Rooney advances along country road
towards railway-station. Sound of her
dragging feet.
Music faint from house by way. ‘Death and
the Maiden.’ The steps slow own, stop.
MRS. ROONEY
Poor woman. All alone in that ruinous old
house.
Music louder. Silence but for music playing.
The steps resume. Music dies. Mrs. Rooney
murmurs melody. Her murmur dies.
Sound of approaching cartwheels. The
cart stops The steps slow down, stop. (Beckett 1981: 33)
What Beckett provided for radio performance were not

directions for a naturalistic scene, a slice of rural Irish life;
rather, he described the soundscape produced by, and existing
in, the consciousness of Mrs. Rooney on her walk to the
railway station. Donald McWhinnie, at the time Assistant
Head of Drama at the BBC’s Third Programme and one of the
group who had visited Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française’s
sound laboratory where Schaeffer held a senior position, met
with Beckett to discuss ‘the acoustic design of the play, and
both agreed that the sound should be treated surrealistically in
order to evoke the inner life of Maddy Rooney’ (Porter 2010:
440). To this end, rather than deploy actual sounds from their
effects library (for example, the sheep, bird, cow and cock
with which the play starts), the director asked the actors to
voice them – a decision with which Beckett expressed some
dissatisfaction (Morin 2014: 9).
Elsewhere in the design for All That Fall, the production

team at the BBC did elect to use sounds from their extensive
sound library but brought the sought-after ‘surreal’ quality
to their delivery by means of electronic manipulation. Some
pre-recorded sounds were slowed down or speeded up.
Other sounds were re-recorded on tape, allowing them to be
spliced into segments and reassembled in a different order.
These innovations in sound production designed specifically
for All That Fall proved to be a crucial step towards the
BBC’s creation, a year later, of the Radiophonic Workshop
(where, among other things, the theme for Doctor Who was
first created). But, as Everett Frost points out, techniques
of sound manipulation that were groundbreaking in radio
dramas of the 1950s have since ‘become the clichés of
the popular music recording industry and commercial
advertising’ (1991: 370).
In the BBC production, to emphasize that events in All
That Fall were to be heard as the process of Mrs. Rooney’s
perception, the actor (Mary O’Farrell) was placed in close
proximity to the recording microphone while the other
speakers were kept further away. ‘Across the airwaves’,
as Jeff Porter suggests, ‘Maddy [Rooney] looms large. In
contrast with the other, more muted characters, she is
heard as an expressive subject who fills up the air space.
Not surprisingly, it was much easier for Beckett to erase
the boundary between subject and object on the radio than
on the stage’ (2010: 442). In effect, the play created for its
listeners, pace Schaeffer, Maddy Rooney’s sonorous body.
After the play’s enthusiastic reception by critics and listeners
alike, there was considerable interest in putting it on stage –
an idea that Beckett abhorred:
All That Fall is specifically a radio play, or rather radio

text, for voices, not bodies. I have already refused to have
it ‘staged’ and I cannot think of it in such terms …. I am
absolutely opposed to any form of adaptation with a view
to its conversion into ‘theatre’. It is no more theatre than
End-Game is radio and to ‘act’ it is to kill it. (quoted in

Frost 1991: 366)
Knowledge of Beckett’s outrage about collapsing the

distinctions between the reception of radio drama and
stage plays – as well as knowledge of Schaeffer’s theory of
reduced listening – might animate new questions for more
contemporary performance including the PlayMe podcast and
many examples of headphone theatre.
‘All That Fall provided both a context and an outlet for
the BBC’s exploration of the new territories opened up by
the magnetic tape’ (2014: 2) and the ‘acoustic sophistication
of Beckett’s script’, Emilie Morin suggests, ‘marked a
decisive turning point for the BBC’s work on radiophonic
sound’ (2014: 2). While this is undoubtedly true, writing
for the sound-only medium of radio drama appears to have
been an experience that prompted Beckett to think more
about the dramatic potentials of new technologies of sound
and, specifically, about the usability of magnetic tape. The
result was the play that received its first production, directed
by Donald McWhinnie, at London’s Royal Court Theatre in
October 1958: Krapp’s Last Tape.
One of Beckett’s most regularly produced dramas, Krapp’s
Last Tape is, like Cocteau’s The Human Voice, a dialogue with
the unseen other. In the play, an old man (it appears to be his sixty-
ninth birthday) listens to, and interacts with, a tape-recorded
diary entry he had made on his thirty-ninth birthday (where he
talks about previous recordings made ‘ten or twelve years ago’
[1981: 16]); he then attempts, quite unsuccessfully, to record a
new entry to capture the present occasion. Krapp’s Last Tape
takes up two theoretical problems that had circulated around the
increasing importance that technologies of sound recording and
reproduction assumed in social, political and cultural contexts:
what, in these circumstances, was ‘original’ sound and how
should we understand the impact of sound’s addition to the
archive?
Aura and archive:

Making sound memories
To prepare for Beckett’s theatrical unpicking of these
two theoretical concerns, this section rewinds first to
demonstrations of the telephone and phonograph in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then to the
promise of the sound archive that new recording technologies
had created.
From the outset, the telephone and the phonograph were
deployed in performance and, as Jonathan Sterne describes,
Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson travelled
around the United States to exhibit their invention ‘with Bell
demonstrating the virtues of the phone and Watson performing
(and managing other performers) on the other end of the line’
(2003: 250). The théâtrephone, discussed earlier in this section,
had its first demonstrations at the 1881 World Exposition in
Paris where visitors lined up to hear snippets of a performance
from the Comédie-Française. In the next decades, phonograph
parlours sprung up across the United States where customers
took up a ‘hearing tube’ from a coin-operated machine to
‘listen to a short tune or sketch’ (Sterne 2003: 162). Other
phonographic entertainments were more temporary – for
example, a street corner where photographs and a hearing-
tube-equipped phonograph might be set up for a small group
of people to view and then listen. Gustavus Stadler recounts
a horrifying example of one such entertainment as it was
described by a ‘prominent African American entrepreneur,
veterinarian, civic leader, Civil War veteran, and anti-lynching
activist Samuel Burdett’ who was visiting the city of Seattle in
1893 (2010b: 88).
Burdett had unwittingly come across the street-corner
installation of a photograph and wax-cylinder phonographic
‘entertainment’ that purported to record a lynching in Paris,
Texas, of one Henry Smith:
The helpless victim almost went mad at the very thought of

being tortured as he saw he was going to be. He hollered out
in an agonizing, heart-rending manner, ‘Oh, Lord, Mr. –,for
God’s sake don’t burn me; Don’t burn me – Oh, oh, kill me,
kill me! Shoot me, shoot me!’ His crying and entreaties fell
on deaf ears. Hot irons were brought out, and then his eyes
were burned out. The moans and screams which he uttered
cannot be described, and perhaps it is as well that they
cannot. It were better that it all might be forgotten, and that
nothing of the same character should ever transpire again.
The things seen and heard there have haunted the writer
from that day to this. (2010b: 89)
The traveller’s vivid description of his listening experience

suggests the affective power of recorded sound performance;
after all, he dwells on the sounds of Smith, not the images of
the torture on display. But, as Stadler goes on to explain, the
likelihood that Burdett was listening to an authentic recording
of the actual event was slim to none. At this time, recording
technology was generally confined to the studio and even if
the lynching of Smith had been thoroughly premeditated,
‘it would have been essentially impossible to encapsulate
on a phonographic cylinder in any manner approaching the
completeness and “fidelity”’ that Barrett’s account describes
(Stadler 2010b: 92). What is much more likely, then, is that this
was a recreated performance of the lynching event, undertaken
in studio for the purpose of its future commercial circulation.
In this context, Stadler describes the catalogue of The Talking
Machine Company of Chicago: among its many offerings was
the ‘Burning of Smith at Paris, Texas’, listed as the creation of
one of the company’s most popular artists, Silas Leachman.
Other catalogue items ranged from spectacular events (such
as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the departure of
a Hamburg–America ocean liner) to mashups of scenes from
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin complete with
minstrel songs. These sound recordings, then, were intended
to work as street performances that ‘advertised to listeners the
affective and aesthetic potential of the medium’ and promised

‘listeners kinds of experiences not previously available to
them’ (Sterne 2003: 242). Very few wax cylinders exist today
and only very few of those few that do are readily playable,
but Stadler is surely correct in his conclusion that the street-
corner performance that Burdett stumbled over was ‘part of a
growing culture industry in sound recordings’ that captured all
kinds of events ‘in a highly theatricalized form’ (2010b: 95).
This slice of sonic history is relevant, too, for its anticipation
of ‘headphone theatre’ – a popular performance genre more
than a hundred years later and a topic for the final section of
this book.
Examples of how new sound technologies found a market
both through and as performance connect to the concerns
of Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, ‘The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). He writes:
‘Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard
that … permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art
and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact
upon the public’ (2008: 36). The advent of new technologies,
importantly for Benjamin, rewrote the relationship between
original and copy. As he notes, manual reproduction of
an original was generally designated less than – indeed, ‘a
forgery’ – and this belief allowed the original to maintain its
authority: ‘not so vis à vis technical reproduction’ which ‘can
put the copy of the original into situations which would be
out of reach for the original itself’ (2008: 36). To illustrate,
Benjamin suggested that the phonograph record could deliver
an original performance into a home’s drawing room.
Thus, the power of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin
argued, lay in its ability to change ‘the reaction of the masses
toward art’ (2008: 45). The distribution of technically accurate
copies caused the ‘aura’ of the original to wither and a possibility
of politics to take up the vacated space. Notwithstanding what
Benjamin sees here as the more accessible ‘copy’, Jonathan
Sterne has argued for a much more careful theorization of the
specific conditions underlying sound reproduction: ‘Without
the technology of reproduction, the copies do not exist, but,

then, neither would the originals. A philosophy of mediation
ontologizes sound reproduction too quickly’ (2003: 219).
Sterne’s contention is that, in the field of sound, distinctions
between original and copy ‘operate as placeholders for
concerns about the social process of sound reproduction itself’
(2003: 221). In the original–copy dynamic inherent to sound
recording, this has almost always been described as the quest
for perfect fidelity.
Although, as Sterne notes, ‘every age’ of sound recording
has had its own standard of ‘perfect fidelity’ (2003: 222),
the most familiar image likely remains the one of Nipper
the dog, leaning in to the horn of a phonograph at the
sound of His Master’s Voice. Implied in the advertisement
(trademarked in 1900 and used for decades by the Victor and
HMV companies) is, of course, the dog’s inability to tell the
difference between original and copy; for the master, however,
it threatened the possibility of erasure. Understanding the
dynamic of this sound-ear equation, Sterne suggests that
the fantasy of perfect fidelity demands ‘a loss of being, the
disappearance of aura’ (2003: 285). Sound recording portends
a precarious subjectivity, then – a condition that Krapp’s Last
Tape examines in the stage presentation of a protagonist who
appears in both live and recorded form.
The second prompt necessary to prepare, theoretically
speaking, for Beckett’s tape recorder play comes from the entry
of sound into archival collections. The advent of new recording
technologies late in the nineteenth century offered the possibility
of extending archival evidence beyond artefact and text. For the
first time, it would be possible to preserve, and later hear, events
from the past and, more significantly, voices beyond the grave.
As Sterne notes, ‘The chance to hear “the voices of the dead”
as a figure of the possibilities of sound recording appears with
morbid regularity in technical descriptions, advertisements,
announcements, circulars, philosophical speculations, and
practical descriptions’ (2003: 289). While much of this
discourse was devised in order to market the new sound
recording machines commercially, the appeal of this ‘resonant

tomb’ was vast (Sterne 2003: 287). Future generations, whether
in a domestic setting or a national archive, could theoretically
have access to actual sonic evidence – another aspirational
performance of fidelity.
But, in reality, sound preservation has proven difficult
and unreliable: most of the earliest sound recordings held in
archives cannot be played either because they are too fragile
or because we no longer have access to the specific player
for which they were designed. For example, the National
Museum of American History (part of the Smithsonian) has
in its collection about 400 of the earliest audio recordings
made by Volta Laboratories, an enterprise run by Alexander
Graham Bell and his partners. But, until a new technology
was developed, no one at the museum had ever heard them.
It had been deemed impossible without fatally damaging the
historical artefacts. Only the development of a non-invasive
optical process that created a high-resolution digital scan
allowed, in 2011, for the ‘sonification’ of six of the discs in their
collection (‘Playback’). When these discs from the 1880s were
eventually heard, it was likely for the first time in more than a
century. One – of a man reciting the ‘To be or not to be’ speech
from Hamlet – is almost certainly the earliest recording of a
Shakespeare ‘performance’. More and more theatre companies
now archive their performances via video recording and the
fate of the earliest sound recordings reminds us that modes of
technology inevitably come with eventual obsolescence. Even
as ‘recently’ as the late twentieth century, theatrical productions
recorded on videotape have become, in some circumstances,
unplayable and, even when the relevant machines are available
for playback, recordings are often substantially degraded by
both age and wear. Despite an exponentially growing digital
archive replete with HD recordings of performances, we need
to be cautious, surely, of what future acoustic archaeologists
might be able to hear.
As phonograph records grew in popularity and
affordability, many ‘great’ late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century actors recorded speeches from the plays

that made them stage celebrities. These were intended for
commercial sale, but they also changed the scope of, and
expectation for, the archive informing theatre history. Some
of the cylinders from the late 1890s have survived and
offer recordings of Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Edwin
Booth and Herbert Beerbohm Tree performing speeches
from the Shakespeare plays in which they had famously
appeared. What can we learn about the conventions of
nineteenth-century performance from listening to these
voices? What can we learn about the history of Shakespearean
performance in that time that might open new questions for
performances before and since? Is the style of delivery for
these well-known speeches representative or exceptional
for late nineteenth-century performance? We might remind
ourselves of Maarten Walraven’s exploration of the
‘audibility’ of history; as he put it, ‘How does the historian
turn into a listening historian?’ (2013). And, even as these
early examples of actors speaking Shakespeare miraculously
exist, how many other late-nineteenth-century performances
of the same Shakespearean roles have been lost? What
archival silences remain? For example, the first broadcast of a
Shakespeare play on BBC Radio, a 110-minute performance
of Twelfth Night on the evening of 28 May 1923, has no
known recording in existence (McMurty 2016).
Case study: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last

Tape
In Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett explores the fidelity of the
sonic archive as well as the actions of a listening historian.
The protagonist (Krapp) has had the habit of tape recording a
diary entry each year on the occasion of his birthday and, as
archivist of his own life, listing each spool of tape and a brief
summary of its contents in a ledger. In the course of the play,
he seeks out a particular spool, one he recorded on his thirty-
ninth birthday – apparently thirty years earlier, suggesting that

‘today’ is his sixty-ninth birthday – and attempts to record an
entry for the immediately past year. The performance starts
with an extended mime sequence, largely involving the eating
of bananas and consumption of alcohol, before Krapp, ‘a
wearish old man’, finally speaks:
KRAPP (briskly). Ah! (He bends over ledger, turns the pages,
finds the entry he wants, reads.) Box … thrree … spool …
five. (He raises his head and stares front. With relish.) Spool!
(Pause.) Spooool! (Happy smile. Pause. He bends over table,
starts peering and poking at the boxes.) Box … thrree …
thrree … four … two … (with surprise) nine! Good God! …
seven … ah! The little rascal! (1981: 12)
The combination of Beckett’s phonetic instructions to the

actor (such as the extended ‘o’ sound of ‘Spooool’) and his
stage directions that signal specific affective responses imply
the pleasure Krapp expects to find in his archival project.
Krapp’s sounds form a contrast to his decrepit physical
condition that, as Jane Blocker suggests, ‘lends urgency to
the task of conserving the historical record’ (2015: 41). Yet
this man, whose birthday celebrations are both solitary and
modest, seems to anthropomorphize his taped recollections
as favourite companions as much as traces of his own past.
If number seven is a ‘little rascal’, then spool five – the one
he’s been looking for – is a ‘little scoundrel!’ (1981: 12). The
ledger’s summary of spool five concludes ‘Farewell to love’
(1981: 13) and, at that point, Krapp ‘raises his head, broods,
bends over machine, switches on and assumes listening
posture, i.e. leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping
ear towards machine, face front’ (1981: 13). He is prepared to
hear the acousmatic voice, speaking to him from the remote
past. As Schaeffer’s theory proposed, ‘The tape recorder has
the virtue of Pythagoras’ curtain: if it creates new phenomena
to observe, it creates above all new conditions of observation’
(2008: 81).
The second character in Krapp’s Last Tape is, then, Tape,

whose words predominate in the thirty-minute drama. Like
the telephonic almost-ex-lover of Cocteau’s play, the taped
39-year-old Krapp proves a confident interlocutor. Stage
directions indicate a ‘strong voice, rather pompous’ (1981: 14)
as his narrative reaches back into tales of his twenties – ‘Hard
to believe I was ever that young whelp! The voice! Jesus! And
the aspirations! (Brief laugh in which Krapp joins.)’ (1981: 16).
He turns next to the deaths of his parents and, of his mother,
where he comments ‘there is of course the house on the canal
where mother lay a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long
viduity, and the – ’ (1981: 18). At this point Krapp jumps up and
then stops the tape. He rewinds, leans in to the tape recorder
and replays that last phrase. The word ‘viduity’ puzzles him
and he leaves the stage, to return almost immediately with ‘an
enormous dictionary’ (1981: 18) that provides him with the
word’s meaning, knowledge that has evidently dissipated with
the passing years. A single word from the sound archive has the
capacity to undo Krapp’s sense of self. A little later, Krapp starts
the present year’s recording with a reflection on his spool five
self: ‘Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for
thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank
God that’s all done with anyway’ (1981: 24). Here Beckett surely
asserts a necessary scepticism in claims for the fidelity of sound
recording (‘hard to believe’) and the promise of the archive.
Moreover, Krapp’s attempt to record a new entry is largely
unsuccessful: ‘Nothing to say, not a squeak. What’s a year now?
The sour cud and the iron stool. (Pause.) Revelled in the word
spool. (With relish.) Spooool! Happiest moment of the past
half million’ (1981: 25). From this flash of sonic pleasure, he
moves to a summary of his ‘success’ as an author: ‘Seventeen
copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating
libraries beyond the seas. Getting known’ (1981: 25). Rather
than the somewhat hopeful ‘Getting known’, however, Krapp’s
print output might more accurately gesture towards Jacques
Derrida’s suggestion that the development of ‘phonography
and of all the means of conserving the spoken language,
of making it function without the presence of the speaking

subject’ might portend the end of the book (1976: 10).
Krapp’s attempt to make a new recording continues with
fragmentary thoughts that drift from one topic to the next,
from the present reality to his childhood, from lovers desired
to lovers lost, before he abruptly switches off the recorder. He
removes the tape and replaces it with spool five, again, and hits
fast forward to reach its conclusion:
Here I end this reel. Box – (pause) – three, spool – (pause) –

five. (Pause.) Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was
a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not
with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.
Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in
silence.
CURTAIN
(1981: 28)
The character’s listening posture, along with his failed attempt

to capture his ‘now’, suggests that these recordings form an
endless, and eventually soundless, chronicle of his life. Krapp
bemoans the passing of his ‘best years’, even as the tapes
preserve them in sonic form. Neither the 39-year-old nor
the 69-year-old Krapp wants those years back but neither is
comfortable with his present moment. Derval Turbidy posits
the archive of tape recordings as ‘a technological revetment
against the erosion of memory by time’ (2007: 5). But, as
Krapp’s wrestling with the word ‘viduity’ demonstrates, sound
traces of his younger years have not effectively maintained and
protected his memory. Perhaps Sterne’s expression is closer
to the truth: that is, Krapp’s tapes are a ‘resonant tomb’. But,
perhaps not, since the very first stage direction in Krapp’s Last
Tape indicates ‘A late evening in the future’ (1981: 9). With
such an ambiguous sense of the play’s time, Krapp’s history is
unclear and his sonic archive’s provenance uncertain. If this is
indeed Krapp’s last tape, what remains?
The theories and practices of sound that characterized avant-

garde performance across the first half of the twentieth century
illustrate both the rapid development of new technologies and
the incorporation of their diffuse potentials into theatrical
practices. What had started out as experimental, opening up
live performance to an array of new possibilities for sound
production became, in the century’s second half, a standard
part of theatrical practice. Assumptions about the dramatic
potentials of sound, noise, silence and different manners of
listening finally migrated from avant-garde performance to
the theatrical mainstream. As director Peter Sellars put it,
‘Very late in our day, the technology has become available to
allow sound to begin to occupy the place in theatre arts that it
occupies in our lives’ (2013).
By the 1970s, as Christopher Baugh further explains,
sound designers were charged with ‘the creation and constant
modulation of the entire auditory experience of a performance’
(2013: 208) – elements that became ever more sophisticated
and even easier to manage and manipulate with computer-based
technology. In this context, Lynne Kendrick observes that ‘the
designer is no longer necessarily confined to a specific space, to
certain times in the production process, or indeed to a received
idea of what the sound designer role should be’ (2017: xix).
And, to quote Sellars again,
We are beyond the era of sound ‘effects’. Sound is no longer

an effect, an extra, a garni supplied from time to time to
mask a scene change or ease a transition. We are beyond
the era of door buzzers and thunderclaps. Or rather, door
buzzers and thunderclaps are no longer isolated effects, but
part of a total program of sound that speaks to theatre as
ontology. Sound is the holistic process and program that
binds our multifarious experience of the world. Sound
is our own inner continuity track. It is also our primary

outward gesture to the world, our first and best chance
to communicate with others, to become part of a larger
rhythm. (2013)
The final section of this book continues to recognize and

evaluate the impact of new technologies on sound performance.
The advent of increasingly mobile technologies has not only
produced what Michael Bull calls ‘iPod culture’ (2013a: 526)
but also richly enabled experiential performance, a practice
that hails the audience as co-creator of this participatory form.
The relative affordability of these new technologies (at least
in the context of the developed world) has, as we shall see,
enabled more inclusive sound economies and new acoustic
world-makings to emerge.
96
SECTION THREE
Experiential Sound
Prosthetic performance and

deterritorialized listening
The final section of Sound addresses sonic practices enabled
by the late twentieth-century development of new mobile
technologies – innovations that both open up new sonic
possibilities in the theatre and accelerated the movement of
performance out of conventional theatre buildings into found
spaces, both indoors and outside. Particularly, sound is the core
medium for what we have come to call ‘headphone theatre’,
a form Rosemary Klich defines as ‘a sub-genre of the wider
sphere of “immersive” theatre’ and ‘rooted within a digital
performance paradigm that uses locative, wearable, audio,
and mobile devices to facilitate immersive and intersensorial
audience experiences’ (2017: 366). In other words, headphone
theatre relies on creating (and involving its audiences in)
immersive performance soundscapes.
But before examining case study examples of these
experiential sound theatres of the late twentieth- and early
twenty-first centuries, we need to account for the advent of
this concept of the soundscape. The term, used to capture all
the elements of an acoustic environment, had its origins, in the
late 1960s, in the research of a group led by R. Murray Schafer
at Simon Fraser University in Canada. The group’s work had,
initially at least, been motivated to counteract burgeoning

noise pollution in urban environments. In his well-known and
influential pamphlet The Music of the Environment (1973),
Schafer wrote: ‘The soundscape of the world is changing.
Modern man [sic] is beginning to inhabit a world with an
acoustical environment radically different from any he has
hitherto known’ (2008: 29).
To explicate this notion of radical difference, Schafer’s
theory traces concepts of high- and low-fidelity (hi-fi/lo-fi)
where a ‘hi-fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds
can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level’
and a lo-fi soundscape is one in which ‘individual acoustic
signals are obscured in an overdense population of sounds’
(2008: 32). The soundscapes of cities, he suggested, were lo-
fi, an inevitable by-product of industrialization and the same
conditions, of course, that had earlier in the twentieth century
inspired Russolo’s noise orchestra and Schaeffer’s musique
concrète. Merging music with the auditory environment,
the avant-garde practitioners had celebrated ‘overdense’ lo-
fi sound. In contrast to his Modernist predecessors, however,
Schafer privileged the hi-fi countryside and imagined an
acoustic design that would ‘let nature sing for itself’ (2008:
36). The ever-increasing noise of modern life risked inhibiting –
even silencing – natural sound and, thus, our humanity.
This position Schafer explicitly linked to John Cage’s
theories of sound, and his own ideas were reminiscent of the
environmental awareness that works like ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ were intended
to promote. By the mid-1970s, Schafer’s research group had
established the World Soundscape Project (WSP), conducting
thick-description collection and analysis of relationships
between people and their acoustic environments. To this end,
they worked on the soundscapes of five villages – one each in
Sweden, Germany, France, Italy and Scotland. An archive of
acoustic world-making, the WSP sought to address a lacuna
in conventional field anthropology (where sound recording is
conventionally considered a methodology and not content) so
as to think about sound as ‘a publicly circulating entity that is
EXPERIENTIAL SOUND 99
a produced effect of social practices, politics, and ideologies

while also being implicated in the shaping of those practices,
politics and ideologies’ (Samuels et al. 2010: 330).
More generally in his work, Schafer advocated for the
promotion and preservation of a hi-fi acoustic world – nostalgia,
surely, for pre-industrial societies and a simpler appreciation of
their human-scaled soundscapes. In fact, Schafer’s language,
in 1973, was not so very different from Bacon’s in Sylva
Sylvarum where that seventeenth-century study of sound
paid attention to the ‘hidden portions of Nature’ (Bacon
1626: 23). Nonetheless, Schafer’s idea of a soundscape has been
profoundly influential across disciplinary and interdisciplinary
thinking about all kinds of sonic practices (it is a key term in
Sound Studies scholarship) and as an inspiration and guide for
the development of sound art.
Where Schafer’s theory of an acoustic ecology better
prepares us for thinking through contemporary practices
of experiential performance is, specifically, in his dissection
of listening spaces. In an explication of sound reception,
Schafer articulated a spectrum of conditions that ran from
the ‘concentrated listening’ encouraged by a dedicated theatre
or concert space via the ‘peripheral hearing’ possible at an
outdoor performance (think here of the ‘broad’ sound that
Bruce Smith described for Shakespeare’s Globe) to headphone
listening which isolates ‘the listener in a private acoustic
space’ (2008: 35). For Schafer, headphone listening initiated
a dynamically new and individualized experience within its
contextual sonic environment:
[W]hen sound is conducted directly through the skull of the

headphone listener, he [sic] is no longer regarding events on
the acoustic horizon; no longer is he surrounded by a sphere
of moving elements. He is the sphere. He is universe. While
most twentieth-century developments in sound production
tend to fragment the listening experience and break up
concentration, headphone listening directs the listener
towards a new integrity with himself. (2008: 35–6)
In other words, headphone sound orchestrated the listener at

the centre of the world in which the acoustic experience took
place, creating for ‘him’ a narcissistic performance of the self.
Headphone technology, Schafer argued, made the listening
experience complete and singular as it affirmed the listening
subject.
On 1 July 1979, the Japanese electronics company Sony
introduced the first portable magnetic tape cassette player,
battery-powered and equipped with a headphone jack but
no external speaker. Its first American name was the ‘Sound-
About’ but the device soon became known globally as the
‘Walkman’. Sony had optimistically projected sales of 5,000
units a month, but remarkably more than 50,000 were sold
in the first two months (Haire 2009). The freedom that the
Walkman allowed, not surprisingly, soon piqued the interest
of both performance artists and sound theorists. Shuhei
Hosokawa’s 1984 landmark essay ‘The Walkman Effect’ gives
some sense of what this technology made available, for the first
time, to users.
Hosokawa took up what he saw as the limits of
Schafer’s theory of headphone listening as an isolated
space, applying Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion
of ‘territorialization’ to suggest the conservatism implicit in
Schafer’s thinking. By contrast, for Hosokawa, ‘walkman
listening on the street appears as “deterritorialised listening”’
(1984: 175). In other words, while Schafer’s concept of
headphone listening was, for Hosokawa, no more than the
latest iteration of a traditionally conceived and constricted
practice, the Walkman, he argued, deterritorialized that
process. Hosokawa understood the potential of the
Walkman to dismantle architectures of control as well as to
disarticulate codes of sonic reception: ‘You may ask yourself
how the Walkman, while making no substantial contribution
to the public soundscape, can intervene in the urban tone,
how it can interfere with the urban acoustic without having
a material effect. The answer is: through the walk act’ (1984:
175, emphasis in original).
The pleasure and the promise of the Walkman came, as

Hosokawa saw it, precisely in the mashup performance of
listening and moving. Audiences in theatres and concert
halls might be expected to practice what Schafer had called
‘concentrated listening’ (Hosokawa calls it subtractional
listening – where the audience typically commits to participate
in the active elimination of all sounds except those of the focus
performance), but the Walkman allowed for ‘an additional
listening act’ (1984: 176, emphasis in original) for which
the sound-generating instrument performed as prosthetic.
Hosokawa’s description of the bodily sensations that additional
listening produced carries, rather ironically, an echo of Cage’s
immersive experience in Harvard’s anechoic chamber:
When we listen to the ‘beat’ of our body, when the walkman

intrudes inside the skin, the order of our body is inverted,
that is, the surface tension of the skin loses its balancing
function through which it activates the interpenetration of
Self and world: a mise en oeuvre in the body, through the
body, of the body …. Through the walkman, the body is
opened; it is put into the process of the aestheticisation, the
theatricalisation of the urban – but in secret. (1984: 177,
emphasis in original)
Thus Hosokawa celebrated the Walkman as a ‘secret theatre’

(1984: 177), intrinsically open, mobile and embodied. He
argued that passers-by recognize the performance of the actor
(the holder of the performance-instrument) but cannot know
its content.
Similarly, Iain Chambers described the Walkman as ‘a
privileged object of contemporary nomadism’, encouraging
in its users a Benjaminian flânerie inflected with emotional
energy and musical beat (1984: 99). Succinctly, and following
Hosokawa’s dramatic metaphors, Chambers argued that ‘the
Walkman is both a mask and a masque: a quiet putting into
act of localised theatrics’ (1984: 99). As a sound technology
consistently defined by a theatrical vocabulary, it is hardly
surprising that the Walkman became, more literally, an

occasion for performance creation that put the bodies of the
audience to work. ‘Experiential sound’ will explore three
case studies – Janet Cardiff’s sound walks (the first of which
was created for Walkman performance) and two headphone
theatre projects. Each of these examples addresses a question
that Karen Collins has articulated in her examination of the
video-game player – that is, ‘How is interacting with sound
different from listening to sound?’ (2013: 23).
Case study: Janet Cardiff’s sound walks

The first of Cardiff’s audio projects, ‘Forest Walk’, was
devised in 1991 while the artist was in residency at the
Banff Centre in Canada – a spectacularly scenic location at
high altitude in the Rocky Mountains. The twelve-minute
performance invited the Walkman-wearing audience member
to switch on the player while standing by the garbage can
outside the Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery and then
to head out on a trail, identifiable by ‘an eaten-out dead tree.
Looks like ants’ (Cardiff Miller – all quotations from the walks
and from the artist come from this website). After delivering
the walk’s initial instructions, the voice (‘Janet’) periodically
stops talking to be replaced by the sounds of footsteps, of a
hand brushing tree bark, of crows cawing and of a train’s horn
in the distance. The effect of her sound score is to prompt the
audience-participant to walk in step with both the speaker and
what Schafer would call the hi-fi soundscape of a rural setting.
Every now and then, ‘Janet’ shares her observations with us
in a flat, somewhat affectless voice so that she veers between
companion and guide: ‘Walk up the path. I haven’t been in
this forest for a long time … it’s good to get away from the
Centre, from building noises, to idyllic nature. Ok, there’s a
fork in the path, take the trail to the right.’ It is almost as if the
original audience for Cage’s ‘4ʹ33ʺ’ had been wrested from the
concert hall into the soundscape of ‘Forest Walk’ to practice
contextual listening in motion. Fundamental to Cardiff’s audio

performance is the participant’s collaborative process with the
artist, literally following in her footsteps, tuning the ear to the
sounds Cardiff heard in the work’s creation and collaborating
in an act of acoustic world-making.
But, as the listener discovers, ‘Forest Walk’ is no rural idyll;
no sooner is the ambulatory audience member immersed in
the ‘secret theatre’ of Cardiff’s Walkman environment than
different voices interrupt the newly intimate connection with
‘Janet’. Her friendly words are displaced by those of ‘Jvox’ and
‘Man’s Voice’, rendered in an altogether different timbre:
Jvox I just want to be with you.

Man’s Voice It’s so beautiful in the forest at night …. It’s
kind of spooky though.
Jvox We’ve had wonderful times.
Man’s Voice It’s my fucked personality, blame it on me.
The lone audio-walker, by now some way into a forest of

very large spruce and pine trees, suddenly finds herself in the
role of unexpected and unsuspecting eavesdropper, obliged
to listen in on another relationship between two people
whose biographies are unknown. The couple’s exchanges are
part erotic, part angry, part terrified. The listener cannot help
but look around: are these people here? Are they following
me? Should I be scared? ‘Forest Walk’ intercuts the cliché
of the bucolic mountain hike with nightmarish interior
sequences that have no obvious place in the immediate sonic
experience of the setting. The Walkman prosthetic provides
no comfort or reassurance, just the imperative march of
recorded footsteps and occasional instructions to continue
the endeavour alongside ‘Janet’. As Cardiff has explained, the
‘virtual recorded soundscape has to mimic the real physical
one in order to create a new world as a seamless combination
of the two. My voice gives directions but also relates
thoughts and narrative elements, which instils in the listener
a desire to continue and finish the walk’. More accurately,

this desire is fuelled by both pleasure (for the walk itself) and
anxiety (prompted by the odd and disruptive interpolations
of Jvox and Man). The impetus ‘to finish the walk’ suggests
the terms of the contract between the sound recording and
the participant. Without the listener, the performance does
not happen; in other words, the listener’s role is what sound
artist Norie Neumark has described as ‘co-compositional’
(2017: 32).
The Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre reprised
‘Forest Walk’ in 2011, twenty years after its first creation, and
it was more than a little revealing to find I had so forgotten ‘the
Walkman years’ that I needed instructions on how to operate
the device and, of course, the forest had grown and changed
in the intervening decades, making getting lost an inevitability,
however rigorously instructions were obeyed. The soundscape
became, in its retrospective framing, more of an experience of
the forest’s ghosts – a distant but present sound archive. ‘Forest
Walk’ in 2011 was, too, a record of the area’s environmental
shifts and changes, not the least of which was the exponential
growth of tourism witnessed by the persistent interruption of
tourists’ voices drifting upward from a viewpoint not too far
away. To encounter ‘Forest Walk’ belatedly invited a process of
making and remaking the soundscape of the Walkman’s ‘secret
theatre’, exercised through the dispersed time frame of then
and now. Of this first audio walk, Cardiff has since written:
It didn’t have very good instructions and the quality of my

mixing was terrible since it was mixed on a 4-track cassette
deck, but the work really inspired me and changed my
thinking about art. Probably only 10 people heard it at the
time, but it was the prototype for all the walks that followed.
When I listen to it now, I can appreciate the freshness and
looseness, even with all of the bad editing.
As Cardiff suggests, the ‘Forest Walk’ experiment established

a performance practice that the artist has now developed in
more than twenty other ‘walks’ for sites and events across the
world. For these projects Cardiff now uses the technology of
binaural recording which ‘reproduces sound the way it is heard
by human ears, as opposed to stereo recording, which does
not take into account the distance between the ears and the
“headspace” in the middle. Sounds are clearly located in a quasi-
physical space, producing the seemingly naturalistic production
of sound as experienced in the real world’ (Klich 2017: 370). The
advantage of binaural sound played back through headphones
is, then, that the sound seems to come from the surrounding
environment and not from the instrument itself.
Most of Cardiff’s walks since the first in Banff have been
commissioned by and designed for museums or galleries in
urban settings. Some of them involve walks on city streets such
as ‘The Missing Voice: Case Study B’ (1999), a performance
that leads the participant from the Whitechapel Library to
Liverpool Street Station in London; others explore interior
spaces, such as ‘The Telephone Call’ (2001), the second of
Cardiff’s video walks. ‘The Telephone Call’ was staged at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) for the
‘010101, Art in Technological Times’ exhibition. This video
walk asked the audience-participant to follow pre-recorded
film on a small digital camera that was also equipped with
headphones. The user saw a film of the museum space that
they were in at that moment, ‘live’, and thus the performance
had the participant move through identical actual and filmed
environments and, as with the audio-only walks, follow sonic
instructions. Cardiff notes: ‘The architecture in the video
stays the same as the physical world, but the people and their
actions change, so there is a strange disjunction for the viewer
about what is real.’ The premise for ‘The Telephone Call’ came
from the idea that visitors to museums and art galleries often
construct biographies for and stories about the other people
they see there and, sometimes, develop fantasies of chance
meetings with these strangers.
Unlike the one-sided telephone ‘conversation’ in Cocteau’s
The Human Voice, Cardiff’s piece allows participants to
eavesdrop on both parties to the titular call. We hear a phone

ringing and the sound of someone beside us taking their phone
out of their bag:
Janet Hello,
Bernard What are you thinking about?
Janet Who is this?
Bernard What do you mean? I’m sitting right beside you.
Janet We have to go now. Point the camera where I’m
pointing it. Synchronize your movements with mine. Stand
up. Walk to the right. Follow this woman. Go behind the
stairs. Now walk past her.
Like the earlier ‘Forest Walk’, ‘The Telephone Call’ trades on

the uncanny, deploying voice and sound effects to produce and
pump up anxiety in the body of the listener. The audience-
participant is hailed as Janet’s collaborator (‘Synchronize your
movements with mine’) but never has quite enough information
from her to know exactly how they should participate in her
scene and to what purpose(s).
Without any predictable sense of what comes next,
participants in ‘The Telephone Call’ found themselves more
and more conscious of their own affective responses to the
increasingly confusing performance script. John S. Weber,
the show’s curator at SFMoMA, suggested that ‘listening
to Cardiff’s voice, people are suspended between Janet’s
invented world and the real world’ (Cardiff Miller). The walk
ends with Janet curtly saying ‘Goodbye’, that conventional
farewell of an everyday phone call, yet participants were
often uncertain, Weber noted, ‘as to whether the piece was
in fact really over when the video stopped. They described
thinking and hoping that everyone around them – who had,
of course, just been absorbed into Cardiff’s theater – might
still have lines to speak and roles to play’ (Cardiff Miller). The
curator also observed that audience-participants consistently
described their experience of ‘The Telephone Call’ ‘in
virtually sexual terms: the mingling of bodies, the feeling

of being “in” someone and having someone inside them; a
sense of unusually close physical communion with another
person. A number of visitors observed that they needed to
cry in the elevator after finishing the piece’ (Cardiff Miller).
This anecdote marks a fundamental difference between
reception of The Human Voice in a conventional theatre
setting, where the audience is obviously outside the acoustic
world of the stage, and Cardiff’s audio/video installations,
where the audience is required to inhabit and move through
the soundscape as much an actor in the work as Cardiff’s
fictional speakers.
Writing about his experience of participating in ‘The
Telephone Call’, Peter Salvatore Petralia described the anxiety
as ‘tangible’, but he also suggested that the most powerful
part for him was ‘the fascinating layering of real and recorded
time that the headphone format created’ (2014: 96). His
reaction reminds us, then, that while headphone theatre puts
a premium on sound (in both its production and reception
elements), the genre can also be an effective dramaturgical tool
for explorations of and challenges to theatrical time and space.
Listening to women:
Andrea Hornick and Luce Irigaray
It is little wonder that Cardiff’s audio- and video walks have
been commonly staged in museum settings since these cultural
institutions had been particularly quick to adopt the new mobile
audio technology that the Walkman and its competitor devices
offered. Since the 1980s, audio guides have become omnipresent
in museum and gallery settings and are designed to offer their
users, typically at extra cost, an informed viewing of the materials
on display. The British Museum, for example, advertises its guide
as providing ‘260 expert commentaries on highlight objects’ as
well as offering the chance to create ‘a digital souvenir you can
send to yourself with a list of what you visited’ (British Museum).

In other words, the contract between the sound performance and
the listener is one that accepts the museum’s construction of what
is important (‘highlight objects’), what a visitor should want to
know to enhance their understanding (‘expert commentaries’)
and what that visitor could retain or archive (‘a digital
souvenir’ – a value-added benefit that enacts, to evoke Jonathan
Sterne’s concept, a ‘resonant tomb’ of touristic experience). The
composition and distribution of these audio guides exemplify
the soft power of museums, stratified and organized by way
of a Deleuzean territorialization of its collection- and visitor-
subjects. Like any authoritative practice, however, the audio
guide is ripe for appropriation and remediation, subsequent acts
of deterritorialization that might strive to undo the structured
pathways of museum organization and to liberate the visitor to
receive – and produce – contradictory narratives and competing
fields of knowledge.
Revisionist audio guide ably describes Andrea Hornick’s
Unbounded Histories (2017), commissioned by the Barnes
Foundation in Philadelphia. This museum is best known
for its extensive holdings of French impressionist and post-
impressionist paintings (including almost 200 Renoirs – more
than any other collection in the world), but its founder Albert
C. Barnes (1872–1951) collected widely and far beyond his
French favourites. Indeed, the collection houses 2,500 items
that encompass visual art, artefacts and furniture from all
periods and cultures – a remarkable and unique diversity that
Barnes himself painstakingly organized in a series of small
rooms. Almost every available inch of wall space in each
and every room is packed with art and objects, arranged to
deliberately mix periods, styles and countries of origin. Barnes’s
meticulous curatorial practice also insisted on withholding the
usual descriptive information labels posted by each work of
art; instead there are pictorial guide sheets available in each
room for those visitors who are determined to know the
provenance of an item. Moreover, his bequest insisted on the
maintenance in perpetuity of the rooms and their contents as
he had arranged them. By conventional standards of museum

management, then, the Barnes Foundation is wildly different
yet extraordinarily rigid. Unbounded Histories, as its title
signals, looked to pry loose the visitor’s experience of the
collection through Hornick’s sound play on and critique of
the genre of the audio guide. Her soundtrack was available
for streaming, without cost, to any visitor with a web-enabled
phone. If needed, headphones could be borrowed from the
Barnes Foundation.
Hornick’s process for the creation of Unbounded Histories
started with sound experimentation. Over a period of
weeks, she visited the collection after hours, sometimes with
invited guests, and created thirty ‘drum journeys’ – shamanic
drumming rituals where she asked her spirit animal to show
her how the objects in a room were connected and how
they might be transformed: ‘I asked how this information
was relevant to myself and anyone who would listen to the
narratives generated from shamanic vision that were conflated
with the accepted art histories in the resulting epic poem
sound work, Unbounded Histories’ (Hornick). The result was
an emphatically feminist re-imagination of the collection that
offered its listening audience an alternative route, literally and
metaphorically, through the many rooms that Albert Barnes
organized and oversaw.
Like Cardiff’s, Hornick’s voice is deliberately affectless
(curator Martha Lucy described it as ‘robotic’). Distinctively,
the artist deployed a kind of staccato delivery – a stark
contrast to the confident authority that typifies modes of
speaking in a more usual museum audio guide. Navigating
what is unquestionably a perverse history of the collection – it
lived up to its titular adjective ‘unbounded’ – the audience-
participant was frequently incorporated into Hornick’s
creative act: for example, in Room 2, the listener was told
to pay attention to a vase of flowers in one of the paintings
and that this bouquet would be your contribution to a dinner;
later, in Room 13, the listener was invited to the dinner
pictured in another artwork where Hornick indicated we will
be served a bouillabaisse that has taken three days to prepare.

The listener was reminded then, too, to bring something for
the table (presumably the flowers?). Elsewhere, our guide’s
reading of Renoir’s famous ‘Bois de la Chaise (Noirmoutier)’
(1892) commented not on the conventional aspects of art
criticism that a conventional audio guide would celebrate
(colour palette, brush stroke, depth of image, historical
precedents, provenance and acquisition history) but instead
merely pointed out the appearance of the two women pictured
in the landscape, ‘Attire: seaside casual for a late spring early
evening gathering’. Other interpolations in Hornick’s guide
suggested illicit sexual relationships between subjects who
not only occupied different paintings but were also found
in different rooms – a fantasy of after-hours shenanigans in
the museum collection that tapped into familiarity with the
popular Night at the Museum film trilogy.
Throughout the ‘tour’, Hornick’s conversation with the
audience-participant was replete with both intimate and
everyday details. Her objective was to invoke listeners to hear –
and thus see – extraordinarily famous artworks anew: she dwelt
on the minutiae of domestic life and the texture of interpersonal
relationships within a single work or between several of them.
The speaker was determined to thwart any expectation that the
guide would deliver expert opinion on the exceptional talent
of the artists and instead challenged her audience to be active
participants in making art history rather than performing as
its passive receiver. The audio walk started on the gallery’s
mezzanine level where the audience-participant was instructed
to kneel in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary ‘who is looking
benevolently down toward you to reassure’ (in other words,
the audio walk recognized at its inception the audience’s
inherent performance anxiety). The narrator-guide pointed
out the encounter in this space takes place between women
from three different ‘belief systems’ – Mary holding Christ, a
ninth-century French fertility bust and a Spiderwoman-motif
blanket woven by Navajo ‘women sitting on Mother Earth’
(Barnes). Thus Unbounded Histories implicated the listener in

a performance that refused the authority of the audio guide,
creating an exemplary act of Deleuzean deterritorialization
in its rejection of the lines of flight of ‘expert’ interpretation.
Hornick’s work at the Barnes made a sonic contribution to the
very many historiographical projects of recovery and revision
for all genres of women’s cultural production that feminist
scholars have undertaken since the 1960s.
Attentive readers of Sound will have noticed that
the first examples of ‘experiential sound’ are also the
first appearances of women in this book. Their projects
draw attention to the fact that Sections One and Two
featured only men thinking about and making sound, a
fact underscored by my intermittent additions of ‘[sic]’
to annotate use of the ‘universal’ he in so many of the
quotations from classical and avant-garde sound theorists.
As well, theories of listening complied with the same
universal assumption – that the listener was a man. That
the work of women in the sonic domain emerges only late
in the twentieth century speaks volumes as to the gendered
performance of and scholarly interest in sound. ‘Thinking
historically about gendered soundscapes’, Christine Ehrick
writes, ‘can help us conceptualize sound as a space where
categories of “male” and “female” are constituted’ (Ehrick
2015). She rightly argues that we urgently tune in to sound
as a signifier of power. In this context of theory for theatre
studies, it is worth remembering, too, that a study of the top
10 subsidized theatres in the UK (conducted by Elizabeth
Freestone of Pentabus Theatre in conjunction with the
Guardian newspaper) found, in 2011–12, only 6.6 per cent
of all sound designers employed were women and that six
of those ten theatres had ‘no female sound designers at all
employed as part of their creative teams’ (Cabanas 2013).
Notwithstanding the long gendered history of sound,
it is evident that an immediate consequence of new sound
technologies that were relatively inexpensive, accessible
and thoroughly mobile was to open up the field of sound

production to women artists. Even if many theorists have
continued to assume a ‘universal’ – which is to say, man’s –
perspective (the narcissistic mastery of Schafer’s headphone
listening, for example), many experiential sound projects
press us to consider matters of difference and obligations of
ethical practice as fundamental to making and understanding
acoustic environments. This task could not be better captured
than in the opening sentence of French feminist theorist Luce
Irigaray’s proposal for ethical listening: ‘Let us begin with:
how am I to listen to you?’ (1996: 115).
Irigaray’s meditation on listening offers that ‘I am
listening to you as someone and something I do not know
yet, on the basis of a freedom and an openness put aside for
this moment. I am listening to you: I encourage something
unexpected to emerge, some becoming’ (1996: 116–17).
As the antithesis of an always already territorialized act of
listening, ethical auditory practice attends above all to the
position of the other: ‘Listening to you requires that I make
myself available, that I be once more and always capable
of silence’ (Irigaray 1996: 118). In the promise to ‘make
myself available’, I hear an openness beyond the specific of
the ear – rather, that the undertaking she imagines is fully
embodied. This is an idea that resonates with Gillian Siddall
and Ellen Waterman’s proposition of ‘sounding the body’.
They insist, rightly, that sound is a physical phenomenon:
‘Sound is active: it travels, insinuates, reverberates, repeats,
and fades away. Sound is sensual: it whispers and shouts,
tickles your ear, and thumps in your chest. We embody, and
are embodied through, sound’ (2016: 2). Thinking through
improvised sound practices that take place on gendered,
sexed, raced, classed, disabled and technologized bodies, they
argue that these practices make ‘negotiations of (material
and discursive) subjectivity audible’ (2016: 3). Rather than
thinking about sound as a discrete category within theatrical
performance, then, we are challenged to understand it multi-
modally and interactively.
Affective theatres of embodied

sound
While the innovation of Walkman technology literally allowed
for the development of a new performance genre (the audio-/
video walk), the evolution of wireless sound technology has
been a boon to a broader range of theatrical work. The invention
in 1994 of Bluetooth by Dutch engineer Jaap Haartsen and
its application in wireless communication between a mobile
phone and a hands-free headset set in motion the possibilities
of headphone theatre. The two case studies examined in this
section take up quite different topics (brain injury, global arms
trade) but both performances deploy headphones to create
what Hosokawa called a mise en oeuvre in the body.
Shannon Yee’s Reassembled, Slightly Askew (2015) and
Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms (2013) require their
audiences to wear headphones that relay oral histories to
evoke bodily responses generated by the act of listening.
These two works are exemplary test cases, through the
expectation of the audience’s participatory role, for Irigaray’s
question: ‘how am I to listen to you?’ Intended, then, to
inspire ethical listening, Reassembled and Situation Rooms
deliver oral histories of their subjects to the listeners’
headsets. As a historiographical method, the collection of
oral histories has challenged the composition of traditional
history-making and, at the same time, been an important
strategy in recording the experiences of peoples who have
otherwise been absent from that history. As Patricia Leavy
suggests, oral history has been crucial as ‘a way of accessing
subjugated voices’ (2011: 5). Reassembled and Situation
Rooms are invested in having ‘subjugated voices’ heard and,
moreover, both structure their sonic texts to work with and
respect the practices of this methodology:
Ontologically, oral history is based on a conception of

research as a process, not an event. The practice of oral
history assumes that meaning isn’t ‘waiting out there’ to be

discovered, but rather that meaning is generated during the
research process. (Leavy 2011: 7)
In other words, the audience receives the histories aurally but

the performance requires their listening participation to create
meaning. Like Cardiff’s walks, these performances are co-
compositional.
Case study: Shannon Yee’s Reassembled,

Slightly Askew
Reassembled, Slightly Askew is a ninety-minute, immersive
headphone performance that tells the story of Belfast artist
Shannon Yee’s falling gravely ill with a rare brain infection,
her subsequent experience of a medically induced coma and
multiple neurosurgeries and the impact of the long, slow
process of rehabilitation with ‘an acquired brain injury’
(Reassembled). It invites the listener to encounter a sonic
interrogation of Yee’s brain illness and injury – an acoustic
experience of the traumatized body. The performance takes
the form of an interactive soundscape that asks listeners to
experience Yee’s medical history sonically and to occupy that
narrative ethically, affectively and, above all, compassionately.
Reassembled was co-created over a five-year period with an
interdisciplinary team of artists: playwright Yee worked with
a director, a sound artist, a choreographer and a dramaturg
as well as in collaboration with the neurosurgeon and head
injury liaison nurse who oversaw Yee’s treatment and recovery.
Initially she had considered the possibility of making a radio
play about her experiences in hospital and met with Anna
Newell (who would later become Reassembled’s director) to
explore working in this genre. Yee had conceived of a radio
play since she was still struggling with visual perception and
Newell recommended that they work with Paul Stapleton,
based at Queen’s University Belfast, because of his interest in
site-specific sound creation using binaural technology. After

the five years of collaborative development, Reassembled,
Slightly Askew had its first performances in 2015 and since
that time has toured in the UK, Ireland and Canada.
As part of the 2018 programming for Calgary’s High
Performance Rodeo festival, Reassembled was staged at the St.
Louis Hotel – a 1914 building no longer serving its original
purpose but conserved as one of the city’s heritage sites and
now chiefly occupied by offices. Ticket holders were instructed
to arrive at least thirty minutes before the advertised start
time and were asked to complete ‘admission forms’, providing
generalized demographic information and requiring a sign-off
on several warning clauses. All belongings (wallets, phones,
coats, shoes) were left in care of the ‘hospital reception’. Steven,
Reassembled’s only live actor, attached a plastic hospital bracelet
to the wrist of each participant as we waited in the building
foyer for an available bed. The high-ceilinged main room of
the hotel’s ground floor was transformed into a hospital ward
for the performance: neat rows of narrow hospital beds, each
immaculately made with white sheets (showing off properly
tight ‘hospital corners’) and a white-cased pillow. Small
metal tables stood at the sides of the beds. Each performance
member was directed to a bed and instructed to lie and wait
for the ‘nurse’ to fit headsets and an eye mask. We were told
to raise a hand if we had any concerns or problems during the
performance, and we would be assisted in leaving the room.
Crucial to the performance of Reassembled, Slightly
Askew were its sensory parameters: stillness, darkness and
sound. The narrowness of the bed meant that lying more or
less motionless on one’s back was the only viable option and
the blackout eye mask effectively eliminated any light. Even
before the soundtrack began, the performance experience
was unavoidably sonic. Deprived of sight and movement, the
immediate environment comprised only the faint murmurs of
the nurse as he equipped other participants one-by-one and the
sound of one’s own breathing. I thought of Beckett’s ‘Breath’,
at least until the show proper began.
Yee’s story – unlike Beckett’s – is expressed as a totally

interior experience, both for her as the speaker and for the
listener through the headphone delivery and in the focus
created by the absence of other sensory stimuli:
The audio technology makes the sound three-dimensional,

causing listeners to feel they are inside Shannon’s head,
viscerally experiencing her descent into coma, brain
surgeries, early days in the hospital, and re-integration
into the world with a hidden disability. It is a new kind of
storytelling, never done before about this topic, that places
the listener safely in the first-person perspective to increase
empathy and understanding – it’s one step better than
walking in someone’s shoes, it’s living in someone else’s
head. (Reassembled)
Yee is an able storyteller, but her narrative is only part of what

we hear. ‘Living in someone else’s head’ involves listening to the
experiences she endured: doctors and nurses, her partner and
family members all talking to her at different stages of the illness,
coma and recovery. We not only eavesdrop on questions that
repeat over and again, both as part of medical monitoring and
as expressions of concern from understandably terrified loved
ones, but also find ourselves empathizing with Yee’s frustrations
in not being able to respond or intervene. Her enforced silence
is replicated in our bodies as we listen to her story.
This is what happened to Yee: in December 2008, she was
admitted to the acute Neurosurgical Ward of Belfast’s Royal
Victoria Hospital, only later to discover that she was likely
no more than one hour away from death from a subdural
empyema. We listen in on her experience of a craniotomy that
involved, among other things, the removal of a bone flap from
her skull that was then stored in a subcutaneous pouch in her
abdomen for safekeeping. A few weeks later she has a second
neurosurgery. Reassembled’s soundtrack often concentrates on
Yee’s attempts to forge some logic from what seemed to her at
the time so illogical and bizarre. She shares the raw distress of
her situation, especially in failure after failure to communicate

successfully with others and in her crushing frustration with the
process of learning to walk again. The most mundane medical
intervention becomes a sound site of trauma evidenced, for
example, by the dread that Yee’s voice conveys when medical
technicians arrived for what seemed like the millionth time
to take yet more blood from unwilling veins. My listening
body tensed up every time a technician approached Yee with a
needle and responded with involuntary shivers in the hearing
of Yee’s fragmented thoughts as her brain surgeries were
conducted. These events offer the audience plenty of proof for
the vividness of the sonic imagination. They also remind us of
the common injunction that we should ‘listen to our bodies’ as
part of self-care (Rice 2015: 100).
Lyn Gardner, in her review of the show’s performance at the
Battersea Arts Centre (London), describes her listening act as
the sensation of ‘experiencing the world from underwater, or via
a patchy radio signal’ (2016). The dislocation and disruption
in hearing that the sonic environment of Reassembled realizes
is an effect, of course, of the use of binaural recording – a
technique that, as Klich notes, produces ‘an aesthetic of digital
simulation, setting up an encounter for the audience with a
sonic virtual reality that emphasises corporeal sensation,
affect, and embodiment’ (2017: 366). I was surprised and
occasionally a little overcome by the intensity of the whole
body experience that Reassembled stimulated, although that
same intensity (the need, and desire, to pay close attention)
overrode my usual tendency towards extreme squeamishness
in the face of any medical information or representation. In
all honesty, I had not expected to make it to the end of the
performance, but I did. And I was content to lie in silence
for several minutes at the end of the show, even after ‘the
nurse’ had collected the headphones and eye mask. Was that
continued stillness and quiet part of the performance? Was my
self-inflicted silence a necessary re-integration into a world
where movement and light had returned? How do we, as
listening subjects for headphone theatre, move from a single
mode of encounter – sound – to a multi-modal negotiation

of the performance space? And how does Yee’s soundscape,
her memories, transfer to our own? Chris Wenn proposes
that the very design of headphones intends to create ‘a “pure”
listening experience’ and observes that ‘sound does not linger
within the acoustic space inhabited by the listener; its sensory
capture in the memory of the listener is the only existence
it has’ (2015: 244). (Wenn’s essay on headphone listening
describes his own sound design for a performance of Lachlan
Philpott’s The Trouble with Harry, staged at the Melbourne
Festival, and is an excellent bridge between theoretical
concepts and practical strategies.)
The freakishness and severity of what happened to
Yee – a woman of barely thirty, an illness that started
with a sinus infection and almost caused death, demanded
extraordinary determination to recover from partial paralysis
and challenged her with the re-learning of simple everyday
tasks – required of its audience an aghast attentiveness, the
attempt to experience headphone listening as the conduit to
getting inside Yee’s head. Her sounding body was rendered as
the audience’s acoustical theatre, to be viscerally experienced
and ethically heard. Binaural sound technology is what
makes this relationship possible and, in this context, Klich’s
analysis of its production-reception structure is helpful. She
explains that the technology creates an ‘environment [that]
unfolds around the individual audience member as a sonically
rendered narrative or sonic-scenic poem, with a dramaturgy
that is reliant on the audience’s intersensorial processing of
the mediated score’ (2017: 368). The provision of an after-
show to Reassembled suggested that Yee and her collaborators
wanted the opportunity to debrief their audiences on their
experience of this ‘intersensorial processing’.
Ahead of the performance, audience members had been
invited to stay and watch ‘Behind the Story’, a twenty-five-
minute video documentary about the interdisciplinary
creation process for Reassembled. This was, Steven assured
us, an optional extra and if we didn’t want to attend the
screening, we could sign up for a link to the documentary

on the company’s YouTube channel that would be emailed
to us at a later date (a link to ‘Behind the Story’ is available
on the Companion Website for this book). On the night I
saw Reassembled, only some of the audience, perhaps five or
six people, moved to another room to view the company’s
documentary; I chose to sign up for the emailed link, mostly
because I wanted to take time to see how the inside of Yee’s
head stayed, as it were, in the inside of my own, to think
through the sensory impact of her experiential body on mine.
Beyond its theatrical tours, Reassembled has also been
performed for professional audiences such as the British
Association of Neuroscience Nurses and delivered as a
component of medical training. In ‘Behind the Story’, Yee’s
neurosurgeon expresses some initial scepticism about the utility
and relevance of creative examinations of illness but confesses
that Reassembled’s first-person perspective gave him and his
team access to information that he could not have acquired
any other way. This was a provocative example that suggested
possibilities for pedagogically based and therapeutic theatre
practices to work more specifically with ‘sounding the body’ to
address specific social, medical and educational issues.
While Yee’s drama worked to restrict the audience-
participant by inhibiting motion and removing light, the next
case study – of Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms – explores
how sound delivered via headphones works as a prompt for
participatory action on the part of the audience.
Case study: Rimini Protokoll’s Situation

Rooms
Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel are a team
of author-directors who have worked together since 2000. They
took the name Rimini Protokoll some two years later and since
2003 have been based in Berlin. Their Situation Rooms was
first performed at the Ruhrtriennale (Germany) in 2013, and
this performance has toured internationally in the years that

followed. A fully participatory experience, Situation Rooms is
driven by sound-based autobiographical narratives that foster
in its audiences the active examination of both individual and
large-scale political ethics in a globalized theatre of war.
Described by the company as a ‘multi-player video piece’,
creators Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel have also adapted the audio
component of the performance as a radio play for public
broadcaster WDR (West German Broadcasting Cologne).
The starting point for the project’s development had been a
striking image from a real-life theatre of war: the photograph
seen across the globe of President Obama, Hillary Clinton (then
serving as Secretary of State) and other members of the Obama
Administration crowded into the White House Situation Room
where, on 1 May 2011, they watched the live performance of
‘Operation Neptune’s Spear’, an action that would culminate
in the assassination by US Navy SEALs of a sleeping Osama
bin Laden. The photograph’s stage was one of the most iconic
centres of global power, and the image was surely captured
with a worldwide audience in mind. But, as a photograph, it
epitomizes familiar ocular-centrist interpretation. Situation
Rooms set out, then, to deconstruct the authority created
and disseminated by this single-perspective and aesthetically
impressive portrait. To this end, the Rimini Protokoll team
researched the global arms trade and collected the real-life
stories of twenty people whose lives had been shaped by and/
or entangled in this industry. The first-person autobiographical
narratives of these twenty found subjects informed the
audio track of Situation Rooms. Some of the occupations
represented in these stories are predictable, given the subject
matter – a drone pilot, a weapons expert, a human rights
lawyer and a child soldier; others less so perhaps – a computer
hacker, a surgeon for Doctors Without Borders, a cafeteria
manager at a Russian arms factory.
Audience-participants for Situation Rooms receive an iPad
mini and Bluetooth headphones to equip them for a multi-
continental journey through a network of fifteen scenes in
rooms linked by doors, elevators, stairs and corridors. Twenty

audience-participants are admitted for each performance. Like
the digital camera used in Cardiff’s video walks, the iPad of
Situation Rooms contained filmed scenes in each of the rooms
the participant might visit. Each tablet housed a selection of
ten stories from the available twenty (these are pre-loaded and
organized without an overarching explanation or a capacity for
the participant to intervene in either the selection or the order
in which the specific vignettes are engaged). In the cramped
spaces of the ‘situation rooms’, each participant must perform
tasks described in the first-person narratives and follow
instructions that require fast-paced movement in and between
the various locales. In short, the audience member’s task is
to convert hearing into acting. This is what Karen Collins,
in her theory of video-game playing, would call ‘kinesonic
synchresis’ – the fusion of sounds with actions (2013: 32). In
describing Situation Rooms as a ‘multi-player video piece’,
creators Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel acknowledge the influence
of and alignment with gaming and draw on the likelihood of
their audiences’ familiarity with the genre as players.
The geo-political contexts of the individual scenes that
comprise Situation Rooms are remarkably diverse: they range
from a weapons fair in Abu Dhabi to a schoolroom in the South
Sudan via a conference room in Paris. Throughout the seventy
minutes of the performance, participants are given orders to
‘perform’ for the people whose stories they have been assigned,
and they must exercise careful listening skills to stay on track
and fully comprehending of what’s required in and between
individual scenes. Sometimes a participant might criss-cross
a single situation room so that she hears and plays different
roles and perspectives within that one setting. In other words,
Situation Rooms works best when participants demonstrate a
proficiency in kinesonic synchresis – drawing on a repertoire
of practices familiar from well-rehearsed habits and skills in
video-game playing. The show’s objective, as Nikolaus Hirsch
writes in the curatorial essay to the Situation Rooms text, is to
avoid any obvious moralizing about the arms trade: ‘Rimini
Protokoll shows that “for” and “against” isn’t quite so simple,

but that increasingly the terrain of ethics itself is a minefield’
(15). (All quotations from Hirsch’s essay and the audio script
are taken from the Situation Rooms text sold by the company
at their performances.)
I participated in Situation Rooms when it was programmed
as part of the 2016 Luminato Festival in Toronto. These
performances took place at the Hearn Generating Station,
a vast, decommissioned power plant some distance from
downtown (a shuttle bus took audiences at regularly
scheduled times from the city centre to the Port Lands area,
a brownfield industrial site). The space was dark, dank and
isolated – cold rather than inviting and amply populated by
Luminato volunteers who made sure that no visitor strayed
into off-limits areas of the Hearn. The exterior of multi-room
structure built for Situation Rooms revealed nothing to a
pre-performance gaze: it appeared to be a large plain box
with a selection of doors, each bearing a different number.
All belongings had to be divested ahead of the performance
(deposited into secure lockers), effectively triangulating the
individual body with its technological prosthetic eyes and
ears (the iPad and the headphones).
When ticket holders were told to begin, the first audio
instruction required each participant to enter the space
through a specifically numbered door and from that
moment, Situation Rooms becomes a personal, sonically
driven engagement with the ten people you ‘meet’. Of
course, as a participant, you regularly stumble into (and
sometimes over) the other nineteen people taking part in that
performance time slot. The intense concentration required
to process the density of information from the audio track
distracted from normal patterns of spatial management with
participants frequently bumping into walls and into each
other. Sometimes instructions involved watching another
participant perform an action, only to find oneself in that
role and repeating it a few minutes later. As Vicky Frost
wrote of her experience participating in Situation Rooms at
the Perth Festival, ‘for more than an hour you are so busy
living this piece of extraordinary art that that you do really
become it’ (2014) – a sense of the migration through the
performance from hearing-acting (kinesonic synchresis) to
becoming the other.
Like Shannon Yee’s Reassembled, this project laminates
another’s first-person perspective onto the participant’s body
through sound. The parameters of each story heard inform
the actions the participant undertakes. We only listen and
never speak: we cannot converse with the people whose lives
we perform nor do we engage with our fellow performers.
Sometimes, two or more participants are co-performers in
a single scene, but we only hear our individual ‘lines’ in the
headset. Yet, in principle at least, participants act out the
idea that openness to the other requires a making available
of oneself: a performance of passive listening but requiring
active embodiment and the goal of ethical becoming. In the
programme for the Toronto performances, Jutta Brendemühl
(programme director at the city’s Goethe Institut) described
her response to Situation Rooms:
The piece has not left me to this day. I remember holding

my tablet, unsure how to navigate the huge container we
entered, how to react to shifting situation rooms with their
respective stories and cast of characters, how to move with
the other participants in communal silence while interrupted
by gun shots over my headphones. (I flinched or ducked
more than once)
One of my most vivid experiences in the Situation Rooms

was, in tandem with Brendemühl’s recollection, the sound
of gunfire – extreme and terrifying noise that could destroy
any pretence of safety in a split second. I suspect that this
sound cue stays so emphatically with those of us who never
hear gunshots as part of our day-to-day lives and because of
its involuntary translation into bodily response (‘I flinched
or ducked’). Among the ten stories I was assigned was that
of ‘the Marksman’, a German police officer named Andreas

Geikowski. In this scene the participant enters a room set up
as a shooting range, listening first to Geikowski describing
in detail the gun he owned for sports (he has been world
champion more than once in ‘dynamic high caliber shooting’
[24]). But the description of Geikowski’s passion for sport
shooting soon migrated into an instruction to perform:
I assume that you’ve never fired a gun? To shoot, stand with

your legs spread, a bit wider than your shoulders. Pick up
the weapon with your strong hand, which is usually the
right. Now check if the weapon is loaded. To do this, pull
this lever forward and swing the barrel out. The strength
comes only from your lower arms. (23)
His monologue continued, detail after detail, until the

command to ‘pull the trigger slowly backward until it
shoots’ (24). I have no interest in ever firing a gun but his
instructions felt coercive and I hesitated at ‘failing’ the
performance. Was this an effective strategy to have me
listen to, and then embody, a different perspective than my
own? To act out something I would avoid at all costs in real
life? The company suggests that Situation Rooms ‘offers
the listener the chance to adopt the different positions as if
they were character masks, trying them on and seeing how
it feels to be inside a particular individual’s skin and inside
their logic’ (Rimini). I don’t doubt the affective power of
character masks and the efficacy of a crafted soundscape
as a prompt to learn through action, but the tension I felt
in whether or not to do Geikowski’s bidding was every bit
as powerful as the anxiety I felt for Yee when she struggled
to communicate at all as she emerged from a medically
induced coma. And, like Cardiff’s audio- and video walks,
Situation Rooms relies upon sound to create and maintain a
condition of anxiety in the listener.
Since I have made the claim for ‘experiential sound’ as a
watershed moment – marking the entry, finally, of women’s
voices into this study of the theories of theatrical sound – I

think it is important to record the role of women’s voices in
the headphone theatre of Situation Rooms. Of the twenty
perspectives available to audience-participants, only three
are women’s: Barbara Happe, a German environmental and
human rights activist; Irina Panibratowa, a Russian ‘nutritional
engineer’ who worked for more than a decade in the cafeterias
of a weapons factory near Perm before leaving Russia to live
in Germany; and Aziza, the wife and mother in ‘Family R’, a
family of five, refugees from war and other dangers, who had
eventually settled in Germany. It is perhaps not unexpected
that a performance about the global arms industry would be
primarily a drama about men, but the ‘terrain of ethics’, to
use Hirsch’s phrase, was a minefield strewn with gendered
decisions for the participant.
Among the few women’s voices in Situation Rooms, I
encountered only Aziza (she shared with her husband the
narrative of ‘Family R’). The couple were born in Darfur
but both had left to study in Libya where they had well-
paid jobs and comfortable professional lives. When rumours
spread that all Sudanese in Libya were in fact mercenaries
working for Colonel Gadaffi’s regime, Aziza and Rushwan
fled the country in a boat and spent the next eight months
in a refugee camp in Italy before getting themselves and
their three children to Germany. Their story is narrated,
in a matter-of-fact style, in a room that represents their
apartment home: Aziza speaks from her place seated on the
room’s sofa (the same one, except empty, that the participant
is instructed to face while listening). Her backstory reminds
the participant that behind the appearance of an ordinary
domestic life, there can be an exceptional history that
requires our willingness to hear (‘Listening to you requires
that I make myself available’, in Irigaray’s words). But
Situation Rooms allowed no time or space for reflection
within the performance event. Where Reassembled stage
managed conditions of reception to afford the primacy of the
ear (no external distractions to mediate the injunction to get
inside Yee’s head), Situation Rooms drives the action by ear

but requires the participant to keep moving as she hears. As
participant-performer, I juggled many external distractions,
often in the actions that must be completed, that undermine
the authority of the spoken texts.
Ten oral histories disseminated in little more than an hour
speaks to the company’s goal of insisting participants engage
many different points of view and, at the same time, recognize
that an action in one part of the world can have devastating
effects on lives elsewhere. The simple mathematics of time
allocation dictated that these stories inevitably resembled
the sound-bite documentaries typical to nightly news
programming rather than an immersive learning opportunity.
Without the opportunity for reflection, the scenarios seemed
over-determined and mostly hopeless. In a reaction much
like my own, Frost summarized her experience: ‘I wondered
at times whether the balance between interactivity and
storytelling was a bit out; the impact of these important stories
reduced because one is given so little time to really consider
them. They become another element in the experience, rather
than the driving force behind it’ (2014). Nonetheless, the
soundscape of Situation Rooms is premised on the value of
oral histories enacted by others. The juxtaposition of stories
from those accustomed to power and authority with those
whose lives have been subject to and subjugated by the
arms industry builds a performance environment that seeks
an ethical listening practice. As Leavy notes, ‘[O]ral history
connects biographical experience with the social/historical
context in which biographies are played out. In other words,
oral history allows researchers to make links between micro-
level experiences and macro-level environments that shape and
contain those experiences’ (2011: 16). In Situation Rooms, the
twenty participants act out those links to translate the sonic
script into embodied performance.
Experiential sound is thoroughly theatrical in both its

production and reception; it has expanded both theory and
practices into more participatory, inclusive and democratized
modes. Janet Cardiff’s early adoption of personal sound
technology (the Walkman) opened up performance installation
to a new kind of mobility and to the enabling of the audience
as co-creator/participant – and to do so not particularly or
necessarily collectively but from the perspective of private
space: a ‘secret theatre’ between her and her listener. The
other examples in this section all explore the authority of
history. Andrea Hornick’s appropriation of the museum audio
guide undermines both the institution’s control of the critical
narrative and visitors’ assumptions about the production of
interpretation and their own place outside it. Reassembled
and Situation Rooms show the potential of oral histories to
teach. All of these examples suggest how ‘headphone theatre’
exploits the private space of the audience-participant’s ear and
how that particular condition of reception almost inevitably
encourages affective responses on the ‘sounding body’.
Michael Bull has suggested that headphones transform ‘the
users’ relationship to the environment’ (2013a: 529) and while
contemporary performances such as Reassembled, Slightly
Askew and Situation Rooms utilize headset delivery to bring
oral histories to life in audiences’ experience of them, the
impact of Bluetooth technology extends well beyond projects
that seek to create and inform politically and ethically nuanced
listeners. Think here of the enormously popular genre of
‘Silent Disco’, a performance practice where the body signals
the sounds that individual listeners hear. The pleasure of
headphones in a crowd, Wenn suggests, derives from the fact
‘we are each individually in control yet in uncontrolled space’
(2015: 247), a reminder, again, of how sound can reconfigure
the spatialities of performance and of bodies in performance.
But despite what might be seen as value-added elements
for a theatrical soundscape, these examples provide yet more
evidence that modes of sonic performance and the theories
of sound through which they might be understood remain
resolutely Western. Cardiff’s walks, Yee’s Reassembled and

Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms have all found enthusiastic
audiences internationally, but almost exclusively in English-
speaking and continental European countries. The proliferation
and popularity of ‘experiential sound’ theatres begs the question
as to how might we engage with performance soundscapes
created in other places in the world and by artists for whom
there may well be different and contradictory cultural histories
of sound and practices of sound technologies? How would the
theories reviewed in this book work to explicate other orders
of cultural expression and, moreover, to promote different
ways of thinking about the dramatic potentials of sound?
Asian theatres, indigenous practices in Australasia and North
America, religious rituals across Latin America – all of these
performance forms, among many others, would challenge the
ideas the Western narrative has developed.
Coda: Sound across the world

If scholars in theatre and performance studies have been
virtually silent on the subject of non-Western sound, it is true,
too, that other disciplines offer us few pathways to follow.
The field-defining anthologies of Sound Studies – the Oxford
Handbook of Sound Studies, Routledge’s The Sound Studies
Reader, the four volumes of Sound Studies – turn only very
rarely to non-Western topics (the Oxford Handbook not at all)
and, in step with much theatre and performance studies writing,
typically limit discussion to specific case studies conducted in
a single locality. The Sound Studies Reader is perhaps the most
diverse: three contributions, among the book’s total of forty-
five, look at ‘the voice of Algeria’ (Frantz Fanon’s 1965 essay),
Islamic revival in Cairo and ‘the aural public sphere’ in Latin
America, respectively. The lack of any expansive knowledge
base for non-Western sonic traditions suggests that there
is much work to do in order to address the methodological
problem of opening up our disciplinary practice to pay more

attention to the production of sound across the globe and to
do so with a mindfulness towards ethical listening.
A rare prolegomenon to the study of sound worldwide can
be found in the review essay ‘Soundscapes: Towards a Sounded
Anthropology’ where the authors begin by suggesting that it is
time to resituate recording technologies from the place of tool
into a subject of scholarly interrogation:
How might the discipline of anthropology develop if its

practitioners stopped thinking of the field recording only as
a source of data for the written work that then ensues and
rather thought of the recording itself as a meaningful form?
What if discussions of recording moved beyond inquiries
about the state of the art in recording technology to how
best to present and represent the sonorous enculturated
worlds inhabited by people? (Samuels et al. 2010: 330)
In the absence of widely available performance histories for

‘sonorous enculturated worlds’ beyond the West, it is useful,
at least, to think at least of those places where we have been
encouraged to hear ‘foreign’ sound – that is, in the global
circulation of intercultural performance.
In this context, Marcus Cheng Chye Tan has looked
specifically at ‘acoustic interculturalism’, an articulation of
‘the performative function of sound and music in intercultural
performance’ (2012: 21). His case studies – examinations of
dramatic works by Ariane Mnouchkine, Yukio Ninagawa and
Ong Keng Sen – elaborate how ‘sound works to interrogate
cultural boundaries’ (2012: 49) and Tan suggests that these
intercultural theatres challenge received expectations for
auditory reception. He suggests that ‘what is communicated
becomes less certain and the “meanings” of such an aural
experience become complicated and bewildering’ (2012: 49).
We might look here at one of Mnouchkine’s best-known works
Les Atrides (a four-play, ten-hour performance cycle where
Euripides’ Iphigenie at Aulis precedes Aeschylus’s Oresteia)
for which the production’s composer, Jean Jacques Lemetre,

provided a soundscape. Lemetre’s music for the adapted Greek
dramas was delivered in performance from ‘a rustic bandstand
containing more than 140 exotic instruments’ and careened,
as Frank Rich put it, ‘from eclectic Eastern folk improvisations
to Kabuki percussion to recorded Indian music’ (1992). This
repertoire of sound borrowings worked, as more traditional
theatrical music so often does (think of the aulos in the first
Greek theatres), to create atmosphere and tension in the plot as
well as to shape emotional response in the audience. But it was
never made explicit as to why this predominantly non-Western
soundscape was crucial to Mnouchkine’s re-imagination of
canonical Western drama. The appropriation of sound forms,
in both Les Atrides and other Mnouchkine productions, has
not surprisingly generated extensive criticism. Sound (along
with costume and acting style) has been justifiably labelled
‘Orientalist’.
Linking the soundscapes of intercultural theatre with the
global marketing of ‘world music’, Tan suggests that audiences
willingly engage in sonic tourism, even as these performances
(both musical and theatrical) have played a part in increasing
knowledge of and appetite for work from elsewhere. At the
very least, we need to better account for, locate and historicize
sound selection in all theatrical productions. At the same time,
we must ethically weigh the appropriateness of working to
create soundscapes that borrow from cultures other than our
own. Moreover, we must remember that what we think sound
is and how we think it works comes to us from theories that
have evolved within Western intellectual traditions. Sound is,
as Sterne describes it, ‘an artefact of the messy and political
human sphere’ (2003: 13) and undoubtedly we need to
understand it more inclusively. With such a goal in mind, there
is potential in Tan’s argument that when ‘sounds of various
cultural traditions are juxtaposed, adapted, hybridised and
reinvented’, ‘the acoustic texts disclose cultural contestations
and conversations’ within the intercultural performance
(2012: 198). In other words, he suggests that if we take up
the opportunity to listen more carefully to the sounds of

intercultural performance not just as exotic re-framings of
Western theatrical practice, we might find vital entry points
into an expanded and more comprehensive attention to sonic
cultures.
Across its three sections, Sound records the theories and

practices of Western performance culture from the Greeks
to headphone theatre, but it ends with the acknowledgement
that there is much work still to be done in opening up this
area of study to ‘sonorous enculturated worlds’ elsewhere.
What ‘aural sensibilities’ (Samuels et al. 2010: 339) might
we bring to understanding sonic environments beyond the
West and how would an expanded sound archive inspire new
methodologies for a more thoroughly global theatre history
and newly diverse theatrical practices? Moreover, even within
Western traditions, there are absences and omissions in the
theorization of sound. Adrian Curtin has warned against
‘making assumptions that are transhistorical, universalist or
ableist’ (Curtin and Roesner 2015: 121), even as many of the
theorists and theatre makers discussed here have done exactly
that. How do we as performance scholars determined to follow
Irigaray’s injunction to ethical listening and move beyond the
reverberations of these previously held sonic assumptions?
If this is indeed the age of ‘ubiquitous listening’ (Kassabian
2013: 40), we still have a very many more places and peoples
to hear from.
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Stadler, Gustavus (2010a). ‘Introduction: Breaking Sound Barriers’.
Social Text 28.1 (102): 1–12.
Stadler, Gustavus (2010b). ‘Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and
Phonographic Modernity’. Social Text 28.1 (102): 87–105.
Stein, Gertrude (1957). Lectures in America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Stern, Tiffany (2013). ‘“This Wide and Universal Theatre”: The
Theatre as Prop in Shakespeare’s Metadrama’, in Tiffany Stern
and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres and the
Effects of Performance, 11–32, London: Arden Shakespeare.
Stern, Tiffany (2015). ‘“Before the Beginning; After the End”: When
Did Plays Start and Stop’, in M. J. Kidnie and Sonia Massai
(eds), Shakespeare and Textual Studies, 358–74, Cambridge:
Sterne, Jonathan (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Sterne, Jonathan (2012). ‘Sonic Imaginations’, in Jonathan Sterne
(ed.), The Sound Studies Reader, 1–17, New York and London:
Routledge.
Stoever, J. L. (2009). ‘The Grain of the Voice or the Contour of the
Ear?’ Sounding Out! 15 September. Accessed online: https://
REFERENCES 141
soundstudiesblog.com/2009/09/15/the-grain-of-the-voice-or-the-
contour-of-the-ear/
Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye (2012). Acoustic Interculturalism:
Listening to Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thompson, Emily (2002). The Soundscape of Modernity:
Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tubridy, Derval (2007). ‘Sounding Spaces: Aurality in Samuel
Beckett, Janet Cardiff and Bruce Nauman’. Performance Research
12.1: 5–11.
Van Drie, Melissa (2015). ‘Hearing through the Théâtrephone: Sonically
Constructed Spaces and Embodied Listening in Late Nineteenth-
Century French Theatre’. Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Sound and Sound Experience 5.1: 74–90.
Van Kampen, Claire (2008). ‘Music and Aural Texture at
Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-
Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment,
79–89, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vitruvius (1999). Ten Books on Architecture. Eds Ingrid D. Rowland
and Thomas Noble Howe. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Voegelin, Salomé (2010). Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a
Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum.
Walraven, Maarten (2013). ‘History and Its Acoustic Context:
Silence, Resonance, Echo and Where to Find Them in the
Archive’. Journal of Sonic Studies 4.1 (May). Accessed online:
http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a07
Warden, Claire (2015). Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Weingust, Don (2014). ‘Authentic Performances or Performances
of Authenticity? Original Practices and the Repertory Schedule’.
Shakespeare 10.4: 402–10.
Wenn, Chris (2015). ‘Headphone Listening in Live Performance:
A Phenomenology of Sound Design’. Theatre and Performance
Design 1.3: 236–55.
Wilson, Peter (2002). ‘The musicians among the actors’, in Pat
Easterling and Edith Hall (eds), Greek and Roman Actors:
Aspects of an Ancient Profession, 39–68, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
FURTHER READING
If you would like to explore further, here are some key texts to
help you make a start.
Sound and theatre

Ross Brown’s Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) offers an excellent introduction
to thinking about sound in a theatre setting, with particular
interest in elements of sound design practice. Another key volume
on practical approaches to sound design is Deena Kaye and
James Lebrecht, Sound and Music for the Theatre: The Art and
Technique of Design (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2009 – 3rd
ed.).
David Collison’s The Sound of Theatre: From the Ancient Greeks
to the Modern Digital Age (Eastbourne: Plasa, 2008) is chiefly a
discussion of sound recording and amplification, but the author
precedes that work with a brief and introductory history of
mechanical sound effects and a chronology of those inventions
that made sound recording and amplification possible.
Lynne Kendrick’s Theatre Aurality (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017) is concerned with the theories and phenomenologies of
sound, explored through a series of case studies of contemporary
performances. Students interested in more phenomenological/
philosophical approaches to thinking about sound will also
benefit from Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2007) and Peter Szendy’s Listen: A History of
Our Ears (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) – both
translated by Charlotte Mandell.
Ranging across theories from phenomenology to post-structuralism,
Andrew M. Kimbrough’s Dramatic Theories of Voice in the
Twentieth Century (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011) connects
FURTHER READING 143
this multiplicity of perspectives with diverse theatrical examples

of voice from Artaud to the Wooster Group.
Adrian Curtin’s Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic
Modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) is an important
and engaging monograph that provides a theoretically
sophisticated study of the importance of sound in experimental
performance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The book has an extensive bibliography that would prove useful
to anyone thinking specifically about performance in the Modern
period.
Theatre and Performance Design (Routledge) publishes essays
that often work between critical and practical perspectives.
Volume 2, issues 3–4, edited by Adrian Curtin and David
Roesner, specifically addresses sound (‘Sounds Good’) and
has a rich collection of essays with thought-provoking case
study examples. Performance Research 15.3 (2010), edited by
Catherine Laws, is titled ‘On Listening’ and examines the topic
in the context of performance, performativity and embodied
process. A CD is included as part of the issue.
A special issue of Critical Stages/Scénes critiques on ‘sound/Theatre:
Sound in Performance’ (volume 16, December 2017), available
online and edited by Johannes Birringer, offers eleven essays
on a range of sound practices across performance disciplines.
Embedded videos make this a particularly rich collection.
Interdisciplinary sound studies

David Novak and Matt Sakkakeeny’s edited volume Keywords in
Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) is a useful
resource for further study on terminology and to locate related
bibliography: ‘This book is a conceptual lexicon of specific
keywords that cut across the material and metaphorical lives of
sound’ (2015: 2).
Sounding Out! is an online interdisciplinary Sound Studies journal
(https://soundstudiesblog.com/), indexed by the Modern
Language Association. The journal is key term searchable
(includes ‘drama’, ‘soundscape’, ‘soundwalk’). They also publish
a regular podcast that covers sound walks, sound art, lectures
144 FURTHER READING
by leading scholars and other sound-related topics (https://

soundstudiesblog.com/episode-guide/).
Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound
Experience (https://www.soundeffects.dk) is open access and
online.
Other resources
The Sound Book Project, performances created by a collective of
artists and musicians using books as instruments (https://www.
soundbookproject.com/).
Centuries of Sound (https://centuriesofsound.wordpress.com/about/)
aims to produce an audio mix in MP3 format for every year of
recorded sound, from 1859–60 to the present. As of October
2018, the project is completed only until 1907 but the plan is to
release a new year on the first of every month (free to subscribe
as a podcast). While most of the material is not surprisingly
period music and songs, there are also scenes and speeches from
plays, lectures and everyday sounds. The mix for 1890 includes
Edwin Booth (from Othello) and 1892 an extract from the
Peking Opera. The project’s ambition to be global in its sweep is
impressive, evident even in the materials chosen to represent the
first years of recorded sound.
The website of the American Professional organization TSDCA
(Theatrical Sound Designers and Composers Association) has
a wealth of educational materials as well as news of upcoming
events. There are key materials on equity, diversity and inclusion
that deserve attention, viewed alongside Elizabeth Freestone’s
report on UK theatres (see page 111).
INDEX
Academy of Ancient Music 29, Aristophanes 11, 21

31 The Frogs 11, 21–3
acoustics 4, 15, 24, 32–3, 103 Aristotle 15, 17–18, 20–1
acousmatic experience 81 Poetics 15, 17–18
acousmatics 6, 79, 81 Attali, Jacques 9, 10
acousmatic voice 91 audience 5, 8, 17, 55, 57, 61,
acoustical science 16, 26 65, 67, 72, 76, 77, 79, 95,
acoustic archaeology 6, 9, 97, 101, 106, 109, 118,
51, 89 121, 127
acoustic consciousness 59 audio and audio-video walks
acoustic ecology 99 63, 70, 102–7, 110, 113,
acoustic environment 120, 124
97, 98, 112 (see also audio guide 107–12, 127
environment; sound, aulos 20, 21, 130
sonic environment) aura 87, 88
acoustic interculturalism 129 aurality 4
acoustic properties 36 aural architecture 24–6, 36,
Actors Company, The 21, 23, 50
51 aural attention 5
Ader, Clément 64
Aeschylus 19, 21–3, 129 Bacon, Francis 27, 32–5, 99
Agamemnon 19 Sylva Sylvarum 27, 32–5
Eumenides 19 Barenaked Ladies 41
Suppliant Women, The 21, Barnes Foundation 108–11
23, 29, 51 Barthes, Roland 9–10, 19–20,
affect 3, 11, 59, 86, 87, 91, 106, 21, 51, 67, 68–9, 70, 73–4
114, 117, 124 Battersea Arts Centre 117
ancient Greece 6, 15–24, Baugh, Christopher 94
49, 51. See also Greek Beck, Julian 75
tragedy Beckett, Samuel 6, 11, 77, 78–9,
anechoic chamber 73, 77, 101 81–4, 90–3
architecture 27, 105. See also All That Fall 81–4
aurality, aural architecture ‘Breath’ 77–8, 115
146 INDEX
Endgame 84 ‘The Missing Voice: Case

Krapp’s Last Tape 11, 84, Study B’ 105
88, 90–3 ‘The Telephone Call’ 12, 70,
Bell, Alexander Graham 86, 89 105–7
Benjamin, Walter 60, 87–8, 101 Cecchetto, David 2
Beyoncé 70 Chamber, Iain 101
Bijsterveld, Karin 1, 8 Chion, Michel 6
binaural recording 105, chorus 18, 20, 21, 22, 43
114–15, 117, 118 Chow, Rey 5
Blackfriars Playhouse City Dionysia 17, 21
(Staunton, VA) 27 Cocteau, Jean 11, 65–70, 76
Blocker, Jane 91 The Human Voice 11, 65–70,
Bloom, Gina 37, 45 76, 84, 92, 105, 107
Bluetooth technology 113, 120, Collins, Karen 102, 121
127 Collison, David 26, 52, 63
Booth, Edwin 90 Comédie-Française 64, 65, 85
Booth, Michael 51–2 Cornford, Tom 30
Borelli, Lydia 61–2 Corr, Bruno 55
Bovy, Berthe 65 Corsetti, Giogrio Barberio 45
Brendemühl, Jutta 123 La Tempesta 45
British Broadcasting Crook, Tim 78
Corporation (BBC) 63, Crystal, Ben 30–1
78–9, 81, 82, 83, 84, 90 Crystal, David 30–1, 50
British Museum 107–8 Cunningham, Merce 76
Brown, Ross 5, 7, 73 Curtin, Adrian 53, 57, 62, 67,
Browne, John 21 131
Bruitism 62
Buchelius, Arnoldus 37 Dada 62
Bull, Michael 1, 12, 95, 127 Davenant, William 48
Burdett, Samuel 85–7 Dean, Tacita 76
Declercq, Nico F. 15–16, 24
Cage, John 11, 62, 70–8, 98, de Forest, Lee 64
101 Deleuze, Gilles 100, 108, 111
‘4’33”’ 71–4, 76, 102 Dekeyser, Cindy S.A. 15–16, 24
‘Water Music’ 71 Derrida, Jacques 92–3
Cangiulio, Francesco 55 De Witt, Johannes 37
‘Detonazione’ 55 Dionysus 21–3
Cardiff, Janet 12, 70, 102–7, Doctor Who 83
109, 114, 121, 124, 127 Dolmetsch, Arnold 28
‘Forest Walk’ 12, 102–5 Dryden, John 48
INDEX 147
echea 26 Greenblatt, Stephen 45

Ehrick, Christine 111 Griffith, Mark 17, 22
embodiment 2, 7, 101, 112, Grimshaw, Mark 3, 11
116, 117, 123–4, 126 Guattari, Félix 100, 108, 110–11
environment 7, 41, 50, 55,
57, 71, 72, 76, 98, 104, Haartsen, Jaap 113
105, 118, 127. See Hall, Edith 16–17
also acoustics, acoustic Handel, George Frideric 71
environment; sound, Harvard University 73
sonic environment Haug, Helgard Kim 119, 120,
Epidaurus 10, 15–16, 24 121
ethics 120, 122, 125, 130. headphones 1, 10, 12, 63,
See also listening, 99–100, 105, 113, 117,
ethical listening 119, 120, 122, 123,
Euripides 19, 21–3, 129 127
Expect Theatre 1 headphone theatre 63, 84,
Expressionism 62 87, 97, 102, 107, 114–19,
125, 127, 131
Fanon, Frantz 128 High Performance Rodeo
Finer, Ella 66 festival (Calgary) 115
Folkerth, Wes 36 Hirsch, Nikolaus 121
Freestone, Elizabeth 111 Hirst, Damien 78
Freud, Sigmund 63, 65, 68 Home-Cook, George 5–6
Frost, Everett 83 Hornick, Andrea 107–12, 127
Frost, Vicky 122, 126 Hosokawa, Shuhei 100–2, 113
Futurism 11, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, Husserl, Edmund 80, 81
62, 66, 71, 75. See also
Italian Futurists Ibsen, Henrik 75
intonamuri 11, 57–8, 61, 62
Gardner, Lyn 117 iPad 120, 122
Garrick, David 48 iPod 1, 70, 95
gender 111, 112, 125 Irigaray, Luce 107, 112, 125,
Goehr, Lydia 31 131
Goldenthal, Elliot 47 Irving, Sir Henry 90
Goldhill, Simon 19 Italian Futurists 11, 54–62, 69
Gough, Orlando 41
gramophone 54, 78. See also Jones, Gwilyn 39, 42
phonograph Journal of the Acoustical
gramophone record 81 Society of America, The
Greek tragedy 16–19 15
148 INDEX
Kaegi, Stefan 119, 120, 121 reduced listening 81, 84

Kane, Brian 81 role of listener 3, 24, 65, 79,
Kassabian, Anahid 2 104
Kaye, Deena 7 ubiquitous listening 2, 131
Kean, Charles 48 liveness 64, 105
Kendrick, Lynne 4, 94 Living Theater, The 75
kinesonic synchresis 121, 123 Lucy, Martha 109
Klich, Rosemary 97, 117, 118 Luminato Festival (Toronto)
Kyd, Thomas 35 122
The Spanish Tragedy 35
machines 52, 58, 61, 64, 71
Lane, Nathan 23 sea machine 42
Law, Arthur 52 wind machine 42
The Judge 52 Malina, Judith 75
Leachman, Silas 86 Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso
Leavy, Patricia 113 54–62, 63, 66, 72
Lebrecht, James 7 Il Tamburo di Fuoco 62
Le Figaro 54 ‘The Founding and
Lehmann, Hans-Thies 4 Manifesto of Futurism’ 54
Lemetre, Jean Jacques 129–30 ‘The Futurist Synthetic
Lennon, John 78 Theatre’ 55, 56
Lewis, Wyndham 56 Zong Toomb Toomb 56
Ley, Graham 17, 18–19 Marling, Laura 41
Linley, David 29, 38–40 masks 16
listening 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 20, Maverick Concert Hall 71–2
33–4, 44–5, 58, 67, 68–9, McWhinnie, Donald 82, 84
70, 73–4, 81, 86, 90, 93, Meier, Paul 29
94, 99–101, 111, 113, memory 3, 11, 80, 93, 117–18
117, 121, 123, 125 Merce Cunningham Dance
akroasis 16 Company 75
concentrated listening 99, Mirren, Helen 47
101 Mnouchkine, Ariane 129
deterritorialised listening Les Atrides 129–30
100 modernity 53–4, 60–1, 63, 76
ethical listening 112, 114, Morin, Emilie 84
118, 129, 131 Morley, Thomas 41
focused listening 62 Muller, Julie 48
headphone listening 1, music 1, 4, 7, 8, 10, 17, 19–21,
99, 112, 118 (see also 28–9, 32, 40–1, 43, 46–8,
headphones) 52, 58, 69, 71–5, 82, 98
INDEX 149
echo music 48 Punchdrunk 57

music gallery 27–8 Sleep No More 57
musique concrete 81, 98 Pythagoras 79
world music 130
Radcliffe, Allan 21
National Museum of American radio 64, 71, 75, 78, 79, 81
History 89 radio play 78, 81–4, 114, 120
National Theatre (London) 41, Radiodiffusion-Télévision
64 Française 82
Neumark, Norie 104 Rauschenberg, Robert 76
Newell, Anna 114 Rawley, William 32
Night at the Museum 110 realism 52
Ninagawa, Yukio 129 Reijn, Halina 69
noise 1, 4, 8, 42, 46, 47, 49, 53, resonance 4, 26, 49, 50
57, 58, 60, 71, 75, 76, rhythm 7, 17, 22, 95
94, 98. See also Russolo, Rich, Frank 130
Luigi Rimini Protokoll 12, 113
notation, musical 74 Situation Rooms 12, 113,
119–26
ocularcentrism 9, 53, 69, 120 Royal Court Theatre 84
O’Farrell, Mary 83 Royal Shakespeare Company
Ovadija, Mladen 4 30, 41
Russolo, Luigi 11, 57–62, 63, 98
pantomimi 34, 44 ‘The Art of Noise’ 57–61
Pavis, Patrice 7, 8
Pentabus Theatre 111 San Francisco Museum of
Pepys, Samuel 48 Modern Art 105, 106
Petralia, Peter Salvatore 107 Schaeffer, Pierre 6, 78–81, 82,
phenomenology 5, 80 91, 98
Philpott, Lachlan 118 Schafer, R. Murray 76, 97–100,
phonograph 52, 63, 85. See also 102, 112
gramophone Scientific American 54, 63
phonograph records 87, Scott, A.O. 47
89–90 Sellars, Peter 3–4, 94–5
Pinch, Trevor 1, 8 Sen, Ong Keng 129
‘PlayMe’ podcast 1, 84 Settimelli, Emilio 55
Poel, William 28 Shakespeare, William 4, 11, 19,
Porter, Jeff 83 23, 47, 59, 75, 90
Pratella, Balilla 58 As You Like It 41
pronunciation, original 29 Cymbeline 23
150 INDEX
Hamlet 29, 35, 38, 40, 63, 89 sonic scene-setting 39

Julius Caesar 39 sonic tourism 130
King Henry VI, Part 2 38 sonic turn 2
King Henry VI, Part 3 38 sonorous object 80–2, 83
Macbeth 38 sound effects 4, 10, 43, 52,
The Merchant of Venice 40 62, 82, 94, 106
Othello 38 sound poem 56, 109
Romeo and Juliet 30, 40 sound recording 52, 54, 63,
The Taming of the Shrew 39 77, 78, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88,
The Tempest 4, 11, 33, 41–8 98, 129
Titus Andronicus 38 soundscape 6–7, 11, 12, 36,
Troilus and Cressida 30 42, 44, 57, 69, 75, 82,
Twelfth Night 38, 90 97–8, 100, 103, 104, 107,
Shakespeare’s Globe 10, 27–31, 114, 118, 124, 126, 128,
50, 99 129
Shaw, George Bernard 23 soundtrack 1, 2, 4, 29, 62,
Shepard, Sam 78 109, 116
Siddall, Gillian 112 Stadler, Gustavus 9, 85–7
silence 4, 49, 67, 71, 73, 76, 77, Stapleton, Paul 114
79, 93, 94, 112, 116, 117 Stein, Gertrude 2, 12, 76
Silent Disco 127 Steintrager, James A. 5
Smith, Bruce R. 6, 9, 28, 36–8, Stern, Tiffany 37–8
39, 49, 51, 59, 99 Sterne, Jonathan 8, 9, 48–9, 65,
Sondheim, Stephen 23 85, 87–9, 93, 108, 130
song 4, 17, 19–21, 41, 43–4, 47 Stoever, J.L. 6
Sony Walkman. See Walkman Stowe, Harriet Beecher 86
Sophocles 19 Stratford Festival (Ontario) 41
sound Streep, Meryl 23
archive 49, 84, 85, 88–90, Stroman, Susan 23
104, 131 surveillance 10
definition 3, 35
sonic adaptation 20 Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye 129,
sonic environment 130
48, 49, 53, 76, 117 tape recorder 11, 63, 78, 84,
(see also acoustics, 90–3
acoustic environment; Taymor, Julie 47
environment) telephone 11, 63–70, 78, 85,
sonic flâneur 60 105–6
sonic history 7, 29, 31 mobile phone 76, 106, 109,
sonic imagination 10, 113, 115
48–52, 65, 117 Terry, Ellen 90
INDEX 151
théâtrephone 64, 85 Walkman (Sony) 12, 100–3,

thunder 26, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 113, 127
48 Walraven, Martin 12, 49–50,
Toneelgroep Amsterdam 69 51, 90
Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 90 Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff
Tudor, David 71 Centre 102, 104
Turbidy, Derval 93 Wanamaker Theatre 27
Tynan, Kenneth 77–8 Warden, Claire 56
O! Calcutta! 77–8 Waterman, Ellen 112
Watson, Thomas 85
Van Drie, Melissa 64–5 Weaver, Sigourney 23
van Hove, Ivo 69, 70 Weber, John S. 106
van Kampen, Claire 27–8 Weingust, Don 31
Vaughan, Alden T. 42 Wenn, Christ 117–18
Vaughan, Virginia Mason 42 Wetzel, Daniel 119, 120, 121
Versweyveld, Jan 69–70 Williams, Tennessee 75
visuality 2, 9, 31, 69 Wilson, Peter 20–1
Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius World Soundscape Project 98–9
Pollio) 24–6, 36, 49
De Architectura 24–6 Yale Repertory Theatre 23
Vivian Beaumont Theatre 23 Yee, Shannon 12, 73, 113, 114,
Vogelin, Salomé 74 116, 124
voice 4, 7, 17, 19, 24–5, 34–5, Reassembled, Slightly Askew
36–7, 54, 68, 70 12, 73, 113, 114–19, 123
152
153
154
155
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Theory for

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BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Susan Bennett, 2019

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute

Series design by Louise Dugdale

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4646-0

Series: Theory for Theatre Studies

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

New technologies for sound performance 53

Prosthetic performance and deterritorialized listening 97

I start with warmest thanks to Kim Solga, my co-editor

Theory for Theatre Studies (TfTS) is a series of introductory

Section Three looks ahead, as our authors explore important

Susan Bennett (University of Calgary, Canada)

Sitting on the bus, walking across campus to class, travelling on

of ambient sound, part of a contemporary experience of

While this book will explore critical discussions of the

The definition also stresses the importance of perceptual

Theatre director Peter Sellars, like Grimshaw, ties sound to

inside our heads. It is our greatest experience of intimacy. It

Sound in the theatre also implies – indeed, requires –

(through a discussion of French theorist Pierre Schaeffer’s

soundscape: in effect, we would need to comprehend and

More recently, however, there has been much more interest

Sound Studies with the observation that ‘sound is no longer

to resist: ‘no law is in a position to constrain our listening:

Sound follows a three-part structure that moves

theory or of sound design, but rather it looks at the theatres

The final section will examine ‘experiential sound’, a

follow are intended to help with what Gertrude Stein saw as

Theatres in ancient Greece

theater’ and how this might explain such an exemplary capacity

of vocal techniques with which to paint … sound pictures’

any further account of how exactly music might incite such

A prologue is everything in a tragedy that precedes the

Theory in the Poetics therefore suggests that the action of

The vocal map of ancient

ancient Greeks certainly did not want’ (1985: 88). As outlined

ranking of music as the least important of his six elements

Case study: Aristophanes’ The Frogs

the first Greek drama – finds himself unhappy at the state of

both the traditionally styled lyric compositions of Aeschylus,

is not so much lost as ready to be reimagined in new ways for

Vitruvius on acoustics: De Architectura

It seems that the transverse aisles of theaters should

like this: if a line is extended from the lowest step to the

De Architectura describes the variations in construction

The voice is a flowing breath of air, and perceptible to the

Here Vitruvius returns to ‘the architects of old’ (1999: 66) –

Chapter 4 offers a description of the principles of Greek

Shakespeare’s Globe and Francis

The music gallery, or ‘room,’ being placed directly above

present Globe reconstruction, the music gallery completes

Interesting, indeed, that the most expensive seats in the

Internationally recognized, the Academy of Ancient Music