Hearing is believing
June 29-30, 2019
A new production celebrates the craft of live sound artists. By Nicholas Adams-Dzierzba
The most renowned example of a live radio drama that sounded “real” is Orson Welles’s narration of The War of the Worlds, adapted from the HG Wells novel for his Mercury Theatre on the Air series. On October 30, 1938 regular programming on CBS radio, aired across the US, was seemingly in- terrupted with a series of news alerts from New
York about an alien invasion:
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the Earth with enormous velocity.
This “news broadcast” gave few disclaimers that it was, in truth, a radio performance. All hell broke loose among the station’s listeners, who mistook the drama for reality, according to the front page of The New York Times the next day: “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact. Many Flee Homes to Escape ‘Gas Raid
From Mars’”. (In fact such newspaper coverage of the incident was later found to have radically inflated the hysteria.)
How could fake news be so visceral? Although the script had been written to resemble a regular news broadcast, it was probably the associated at- mospheric noises that made the prank so con- vincing.
Live field recordings, or atmos — radio-speak for atmosphere — are often preferred by sound engi- neers over digital recreations, which can some- times sound fake. An efficient way of recreating sounds, where it’s not possible to take a recorder out in to the field, is by manipulating objects in a controlled setting, a process known as the Foley technique, named after the founder of the cus- tom sound effects trade, Jack Foley.
A Foley artist works in a flurry of frantic ac- tivity with a mad scientist’s array of props in their sound lab — the Foley studio. Their kit includes leather gloves (flap them together to mimic a bird’s flight), coconut halves (knock a pair against each other to emulate the clip-clop of horse hoofs), and an abundance of shoes (use high heels to emulate a woman’s footsteps). If they do their job well, they are out of sight, out of mind.
Real sounds are essential in movies, but most are recreated in post-production by Foley artists who re-record the effects to enhance the sense of realism, leaving the production team to focus on the dialogue during shooting.
Take, for example, Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 sci-fi film Arrival, where UFOs land unexpected- ly on Earth. The linguistics professor who heads the team of scientists designated to communicate with the beings is met by aliens who sound so pri- mal and unnerving that Sylvain Bellemare won an Oscar for his sound editing.
“The simple approach was that all the sounds in the film needed to come from really natural, organic sources, instead of going to electronic or processed sound,” Bellemare told the Los Angeles Times.
His team layered the sounds of whales, birds, camels, pigs and even a Maori flute to create the voices of the aliens.
Hearing the scientists panting in their hazmat suits as they come into contact with the aliens fills the first contact scene with fear and anxiety, an aural claustrophobia achieved by Foley artist Nicolas Becker by manipulating the hazmat suit inside a sound recording studio.
A new production at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre seeks to demystify the work of the Foley artist by
placing the live creation of sound effects in front of the audience.
Murder on the Wireless is co-written and di- rected by the company’s artistic director Mark Kilmurry, who traces his fascination with Foley back to his time acting in radio plays in Britain in the 1990s.
As he recorded his scenes on-air in the studio, he watched the Foley artist at work and “thought how theatrical that looks. They would actually have these physical props. I thought that would be great to actually see ... [and] it would work par- ticularly well with detective fiction.”
Murder on the Wireless is set in a radio studio in 1959, when Foley artists were an essential part of live radio drama. There are two plays within the production — Kilmurry’s own The Dead(ly) Wives Club and his adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Solitary Cyclist.
As well as directing, Kilmurry acts alongside Daniel Mitchell and Georgie Parker; all three play period radio actors across multiple roles.
The other cast member is actress Katie Fitch- ett, 41, whom Kilmurry approached to play the Foley artist because he wanted a performer who could create the soundscape while conveying emotion.
Fitchett had never worked as a Foley artist be- fore, but after a period of devouring videos on YouTube she was ready to learn on the job. On stage she can be seen darting between props be- hind the actors.
“It’s such a dance between the actors and the sound and the script and the storytelling,” Fitch- ett says. “It all has to be in synch.”
She executes simple recreations such as open- ing a door in miniature frame, and slamming it shut to signal a change of location. Pebbles are dropped as an antagonist dangles on a precipice and add gravity to a life-and-death ultimatum. She also generates a macabre thud when she throws a rolled-up carpet to the floor to indicate the disposal of a body.
Repurposed bric-a-brac has become her part- ner in invention. A fishing reel imitates a female cyclist pedalling. A vintage egg-beater conjures a foreboding figure chasing after the woman on his bike.
“I’m a bit of a collector-hoarder and I love going to markets,” Fitchett says.
“I picked up the egg beater and (thought) it sounds like a squeaky bike.”
Fitchett’s graceful movements between her acoustic obstacles can be credited to her time at the Australian Ballet School, where she studied before deciding she wanted to act.
“I have a different stage understanding than quite a lot of actors.
“I found when I went to the Victorian College of the Arts to study drama, stagecraft is quite em- bedded in me from dance. And that’s been quite great for this ... I am literally dancing around these props.”
Sometimes it’s easier to show people what a Foley artist does, rather than explain it.
“When I speak to people, they’re like, ‘oh, hil- arious, you can drop things’ [on stage],” Fitchett says with a laugh. “But Mark was very clear right from the beginning he wanted this to be a true representation of what a radio play would be like in the 1950s.”
Murder on the Wireless runs at the Ensemble Theatre until July 13.