No, this isn’t about Snoopy: I’ve been working at a theatre here in London that has a long history, dating back to the 18th century. While idly browsing through the theatre’s timeline, I found that Money, a play that I worked on many years ago, was premiered at this particular playhouse in 1830. It was written by a man called Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who also wrote a novel that began with those much-parodied words, “It was a dark and stormy night…” The full opening sentence of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford runs: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
There’s now a competition that takes his name in which contestants strive to produce the worst opening lines for a novel, but I think Bulwer-Lytton needs to be remembered for a few other things as well. He’s responsible for “the great unwashed,” “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and “pursuit of the almighty Dollar,” so I guess he can be forgiven for the rather florid prose of that opening sentence, which has now become a universally recognized cliché.
And cliché is what this month’s column is concerned with, in entertainment in general and in sound design in particular.
I was being interviewed for a documentary about a stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children some years ago, and the interviewer asked how I avoided cliché in my sound designs: “How about that old graveyard-at-midnight effect? You know, clock strikes 12, wind whistles in the trees, an owl screeches, and a distant dog howls. You hear it all the time.” My reply was along the lines that, if that’s what the script demanded, then I’d go for it, but I’d try to put my own spin on it, and, in fact, some time later, finding myself overnighting in a small village with a really characterful chiming clock, I ventured into the graveyard at midnight to record it and found myself recording not only the clock, but the wind rustling the branches of surrounding trees and a distant dog barking. No owl, but three out of four ain’t bad. The owl in the accompanying sound file was actually recorded in the middle of the night outside our apartment in central London, but it’s no less atmospheric for that, I think.
Churchyard At Midnight
Clichés abound in film and television sound, of course, and sound editors deliberately use some, like the Wilhelm Scream, as a sort of trademark, Ben Burtt famously being one aficionado. Others are common enough to make me squirm when they turn up, including assorted pitched and panned versions of that dreadful BBC thunderclap that I’ve mentioned before, which has an American counterpart, known as The Castle Thunderclap, due to its use in numerous horror movies.
BBC Thunderclap
The Castle Thunderclap
And, of course, animal sounds are a particularly fine source of cliché. In the UK, I can spot “single dog barking in the night, good bouncy street echo” a mile off, and that red fox call that pops up all over the place is, as I have may have mentioned before, a familiar old friend. Cicadas buzz and chirp, almost regardless of season or location, but hardly ever in the way that I recorded them in Florida a few years ago.
Intense Cicadas
Similarly, frogs always go “ribbit,” despite the fact that there are multiple species of frogs and toads, all of which make distinctly different sounds, like this one, Romer’s tree frog, recorded in Hong Kong, which sounds uncannily like a cricket chirping.
Romer's Tree Frog
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More Musical Clichés
Dogs, cats, insects, and birds are also used to presage some nameless dread to come, both by their presence, but also by their sudden absence. “It’s too quiet; I don’t like it…” is often the line uttered just before a knife wielding maniac leaps from the bushes and unleashes murderous mayhem to the sound of a dozen tortured violins. Bernard Hermann has a lot to answer for, which brings us neatly to musical cliché.
In the days of the silent movie, musical clichés abounded, as quickly and easily recognizable signposts to the emotion being conveyed by the actors, as an adjunct to the eye-rolling and hand-wringing in evidence on the screen. Classical scores were plundered for chase sequences and battles, popular songs were shoe-horned into love scenes, and the ubiquitous “Hearts and Flowers” stirred the audience’s hearts as surely as the doe-eyed heroine’s tears, as her lover/husband/child/dog went off to war, got run over by a truck, died an agonizing death, or withered away from an incurable disease.
Thankfully, composers like Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred Newman, Franz Waxman, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold found their way to Hollywood and, eschewing cliché, set about producing brilliant and evocative film soundtracks which, quite rightly, remain classics of the genre today. Check out Korngold’s Academy Award-winning score that helped Errol Flynn to buckle his swash in The Adventures Of Robin Hood and Alfred Newman’s epic score for The Greatest Story Ever Told for a couple of prime examples. And if you’re feeling flush, buy a copy of Hollywood Holyland by Ken Darby—$56.58 from Amazon—for an insight into the filming and scoring of that equally epic movie.
Canny composers writing for comedy have great fun with cliché. Elmer Bernstein’s brilliant score for Airplane! parodies almost every movie music cliché that there is, from the opening Jaws-inspired threatening ostinato to the ever-ascending heavenly choir of countless sugary romances. The fact that Bernstein also wrote the dark, jazz-influenced score for The Man With The Golden Arm (itself plundered by many other far less able composers, turning the style into a genre cliché all of its own) and the anthemic main theme for The Great Escape, among many others, highlights his somewhat underrated versatility (14 Academy Award nominations, but only one win).
Although it’s easy to laugh at the manipulative simplicity of the silent movie score, it’s also not too difficult to spot the modern-day equivalent in some music scores from even the most well-respected film composers and, increasingly, I feel, from those composing scores for straight plays as well. Here a drone, there a whine, everywhere a drum-beat. I’m not a huge fan of underscore in plays, but I recognize that it can have its place in heightening the atmosphere for some productions, and I’m not averse to using it when the occasion seems to demand it, but wherever possible, I’d rather let the text and the acting do the emotional heavy lifting, rather than having an ominous drone tell me what I should be feeling.
But there are other, less obvious clichés that we often take for granted and which, on reflection, we really ought to avoid. A recent question on a theatre-related mailing list involved how to mic a small band to make it sound as though it was coming from a radio in the 1940s. My response was to ask whether it should actually sound like a 1940s radio broadcast or what the director thought a 1940s radio broadcast might sound like. Various suggestions were made about crackle, hiss, fading in and out, bandwidth limitations, and the like, all of which might be thought reasonable, but most of which I profoundly disagreed with. To the best of my knowledge—and although I’m old, I’m not that old—the average radio set in the 1940s had a large loudspeaker mounted in a well-constructed wooden cabinet and had a warm, rich sound, which may have lacked a little in the high-frequency range but didn’t sound as though broadcast transmissions were being delivered through a faulty bullhorn at the height of some serious sun-spot activity. In fact, I suspect that they tended to sound rather a lot better than the compressed mess that we’re now much more used to, coming from tiny speakers in plastic boxes. Obviously, there’s a place for the distorted sound that has come to characterize “old-fashioned” sound, but most of the time, it’s inaccurate and anachronistic.
Similarly, any period production that features an old-style gramophone will almost always have some sort of grunge filter applied to the modern recording to make it sound old. Why? Since the early 1930s and the introduction of the Western Electric-based Victor Orthophonic recording system and assuming that the owners of said gramophone are reasonably well-off and careful, the music issuing from the sound-box or horn may well have had a surprisingly full frequency response, a fact that can be checked by listening to the recordings made at the Wyastone Leys headquarters of Nimbus Records, where reissues of old 78s are made by playing carefully cleaned original recordings on well-preserved original equipment.
There are plenty of other sound clichés, and I’m sure that you’ve got a few of your own, but there’s one that really should be avoided at all costs: bringing a stand-microphone on stage and having an actor tap on it or say, “Is this thing on?” followed by howling feedback, may have been funny once, but it really isn’t any more.
So the next time you’re putting together a soundtrack, why not check yourself for the dreaded cliché, think a little differently, and invent some brand new ones of your own?
John Leonard is an award-winning designer who has been working in theatre sound for over 40 years. In his spare time, he records anything that makes an interesting noise in high-definition surround sound. He is also almost certainly the only sound designer in the world to have piloted a Spitfire. His sound effects libraries are available online at www.asoundeffect.com.
For more from the February issue of Live Design, read the interactive PDF.