Sounds for the Theatre Stage

• Applicant: Dr. Julia H. Schröder
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398625117

Off-stage sounds and sound design form an important element in theatre productions and theatre performances. As such they have not yet been studied comprehensively. If we understand off-stage sounds as a cultural practice, these designed theatre sounds form a counter tradition to music. As part of this practice, instruments have been developed, i.e. noise effect machines like the ones to produce acoustic imitations of rain or thunder. They have been continuously employed in the theatre for at least four hundred years until electro-acoustic equipment entered the theatre stage in the twentieth century. The instruments for theatre sound design changed from mechanical to electroacoustic and digital. This change will be focused on in the proposed research project because it demarcates a shift from imitation of sounds like thunder to the acoustic reproduction of a thunderstorm via a sound recording. The research project will be divided in three parts, starting with a historical overview of the instruments whereby the hypothesis shall be tested that there was continuity in sounds for the stage. The second part concentrates on the change from the mechanic to the electroacoustic sound production in the explicitly technical theatre productions by Erwin Piscator in Berlin around 1927. In the last part sound as part of theatre dramaturgy as well as the relationships of theatre sound design and music will be analysed systematically.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants