In Arnold Ridley's 1923 play The Ghost Train, the climax was the sound of the ghost train itself passing through the station. With no facilities for playing back recorded sound, this effect alone took eleven people to operate it and involved pulling garden rollers across wooden slats nailed to the stage floor.
A modern production would use a single sound operator to play a recorded sound effect through strategically-places loudspeakers, but the original method – which would have caused the stage, the scenery and even the audience's seats to vibrate noticeably – must have produced a far more visceral effect on spectators at the height of a ghost story.
Live v Recorded Sound Effects
Recorded sound effects have a huge number of advantages over the old ways. Recordings can be used for sounds that simply could not be created live in a theatre, giving the sound designer many more options (in fact the job of 'sound designer' has only arisen due to the use of the new technologies).
There are other advantages, such as being able to blend sounds in new ways and send them to speakers in specific areas of the theatre, plus the cost savings of not having to employ eleven people to create a single sound.
So why would anyone want to go back to using live effects? Whenever new technologies are brought in, there is always a danger that the older methods will be lost completely, often countered by groups who want to abandon the new methods as 'the old ways were the best'. None of these approaches is ideal as both methods have something different to offer and combining them can present possibilities that neither technology can offer alone.
Live sound effect creation has a visual element that add to the stage picture for a non-realistic production if the audience can see the sounds being made. There are advantages to actors create their own sounds associated with their actions; the sound will synchronise better with the action and the actor will feel more part of the action.
Finally, there are some sounds that just don't sound right when recorded. A dull-sounding door slam or telephone ring sounds awful and can snap an audience out of the reality of a scene, but even the highest-quality recordings of some sounds, particularly sharp sounds like gunshots, played through a perfectly-tuned PA system never sounds like the real thing.
Weather Sounds
Some of the most common sounds required in plays are associated with weather. Thunder was at one time produced by rolling cannonballs down a wooden chute or pushing a weighted wooden cart with oddly-shaped wheels around the backstage area. A more convenient alternative is the thunder sheet, a large (the larger the better to produce the really deep rumbles) sheet of thin metal, hung up and shaken from the bottom.
A wind machine is a strip of canvas wrapped tightly around a wooden wheel with slats and a handle which, when turned, would cause the slats to rub against the canvas and make the sound. This could be accompanied by the creaking of a sign or gate, created by rubbing together two files or rusty iron rods.
For the sound of rain, dried peas or metal shot can be emptied into the top of a tall box with partitions fixed inside it to create a zigzag path for the peas to follow. Alternatively, a rain box is a closed long box filled with dried peas with rods fixed inside it on a spindle with a handle, which is turned to rotate the box and create the noise.
Bangs, Crashes and Slams
Various types of machinery have been used to create offstage crashes. A simple way is to fix together several thin, wooden boards with a gap between them to look like a Venetian blind and rope the whole thing over a pulley, so that when the rope is released the boards crash against the floor and one another.
Glass smashes have sometimes been created with a similar arrangement of thin metal plates, or a simpler method is to fill a box with broken glass or china and drop it or hit the china with a hammer, taking suitable handling and eye protection precautions.
Gunshots can be created with a blank-firing gun or starting pistol, although in countries like Great Britain there are strict restrictions on the use of even imitation firearms. An alternative is to hinge together two thin pieces of wood and slam them together quickly, being careful not to trap your fingers in-between.
Door slams and other door effects have been created with a tiny replica door complete with full-sized locks and chains. These can be locked and slammed backstage to give very similar sounds to a full-sized door without a trace of tape hiss.
Using Amplification
Live effects can utilise modern technology for even more varied possibilities. The rustle of sweet wrappers is usually an annoyance in the theatre, but do it gently in front of a microphone and it can sound remarkably like the crackle of a fire. Effects can be added – a door slam can sound as though it is in a cathedral with reverb added – or live effects can be layered on top of recorded effects to create a rich soundscape.
Any of these manually created sound effects plus others that you go out and find can be used to create recorded effects, which is far more satisfying than copying a track from a sound effects CD or downloading a sound file from the Internet. These new recorded effects can be manipulated and combined in myriad ways to tailor them to exactly what you have created in your imagination.
A lo-tech approach to sound effects can give a production a quirky or a more authentic feel depending on how the effects are used. However lo-tech doesn't have to be no-tech, and so combining old and new technologies can create new and more interesting worlds of sounds for your productions.
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