This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of ‘noise’ which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust. Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and ‘aerodynamic’ signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance. ‘Theatre noise’ is a new term which captures a contemporary, 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. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to ‘noise’ in this book – by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book explores the critical field of theatre sound and the sonic phenomena of theatre. It draws together a wide range of related topics, including sound design and sonic sonographies, voice as a performance of sound, listening as auditory performance, and audience as resonance. It explores radical forms of sonic performance and our engagement in it, from the creation of sonic subjectivities to noise as a politics of sound. The introductory chapters trace the innate aurality of theatre and the history of sound effects and design, while also interrogating why the art of theatre sound was delayed and underrepresented in philosophy as well as theatre and performance theory. Subsequent chapters explore the emergence of aurally engaged theatre practice and focus on examples of contemporary sound in and as theatre, including theatre in the dark, headphone theatre and immersive theatre, amongst others, through theories of perception and philosophies of listening, vocality, sonority and noise.

Sound experimentation by avant-garde theatre artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is an important but ignored aspect of theatre history. Curtin explores how artists engaged with the sonic conditions of modernity through dramatic form, characterization, staging, technology, performance style, and other forms of interaction.

Brown explores relationships between sound and theatre, focusing on sound's interdependence and interaction with human performance and drama. Suggesting different ways in which sound may be interpreted to create meaning, it includes key writings on sound design, as well as perspectives from beyond the discipline.

Sound Effect tells the story of the effect of theatrical aurality on modern culture. Beginning with the emergence of the modern scenic sound effect in the late 18th century, and ending with headphone theatre which brings theatre's auditorium into an intimate relationship with the audience's internal sonic space, the book relates contemporary questions of theatre sound design to a 250-year Western cultural history of hearing. It argues that while theatron was an instrument for seeing and theorizing, first a collective hearing, or audience is convened. Theatre begins with people entering an acoustemological apparatus that produces a way of hearing and of knowing. Once, this was a giant marble ear on a hillside, turned up to a cosmos whose inaudible music accounted for all. In modern times, theatre's auditorium, or instrument for hearing, has turned inwards on the people and their collective conversance in the sonic memes, tropes, clichés and picturesques that constitute a popular, fictional ontology. This is a study about drama, entertainment, modernity and the theatre of audibility. It addresses the cultural frames of resonance that inform our understanding of SOUND as the rubric of the world we experience through our ears. Ross Brown reveals how mythologies, pop-culture, art, commerce and audio, have shaped the audible world as a form of theatre. Garrick, De Loutherbourg, Brecht, Dracula, Jekyll, Hyde, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, James Bond, Scooby-Do and Edison make cameo appearances as Brown weaves together a history of modern hearing, with an argument that sound is a story, audibility has a dramaturgy, hearing is scenographic, and the auditoria of drama serve modern life as the organon, or definitive frame of reference, on the sonic world.

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of ‘musicality’ in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres. Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.