For The Least Offensive Play in the Whole Darn World, a sound effect was needed for the machine that renders all objectionable content out of scripts. I talked with the show’s director to get an idea of what he was looking for. He wanted it to sound computerish, only last a few seconds, and to sound like something was happening.

So I first looked around the house to simply brianstorm ideas for what could make appropriate sounds. Simply go into a room, and close your eyes and listen. Or look at an object, and have it make noise. (Closing your eyes is important, because the sound will be used in a different environment. If you tell the audience they’re hearing a machine cleaning a playscript, that’s what they’ll believe. They don’t need to know it’s actually your vacuum cleaner.) I tried a shredder, but it didn’t sound quite right. Nothing in my home quite worked out the way I thought it would, so I turned to the web looking for the equivalent of clip art: sound effects.

I searched the web, and found many collections of sound clips. I tested a lot, but couldn’t find one that was exactly what I was looking for. I did find two though that if I put together would be a nice effect. I started with a computer sound, plus a nice sound effect.

I decided I simply wanted to add the “effect” to the end of the “computer” sound. I used the free Audacity Sound Editor for this project. Then In Audacity I opened both files.

The sampling rate for each clip is to the left of each clip, as the first line of text in the largest gray box. Notice that the sampling rate of the two files is slightly different. What that means is if I were to combine the two files by simply copying and pasting, you would end up with a squeeky sound, or chipmunks, since the combined file would be playing at different rates. For example, here’s the computer sound from above when pasted into a sound clip with a rate of 22.050Khz. And here’s the computer sound when it is incorrectly pasted into a clip at the rate of 8Khz, when the original flie was 22Khz.

To change the sampling rate of an audio file, open the file in Audacity. Then look in the lower left corner of Audacity’s editing window. You should see “Project rate” then a number. Simply click on the number and you’ll get a list of choices. Then choose the rate you’d like the file to be. Finally, choose the File menu, and then “Export to AIFF…”. Enter a filename and press the Save button. You can then close the file.

So I now have two audio files, one a computer beeping noise, the other a cool sound effect. Open both of them in Audacity. The “computer” file I want to be in front of the effect sound. So I highlight the computer file waveform, and choose Copy from the Edit menu. Then change to the other open document and position the cursor just at the beginning of the waveform for the effect. Once the cursor is in the correct place, choose Paste from the Edit menu.

Now look at the waveform, especially where the two different sound effects have been joined. Zoom in if you need to (Apple-1 or click on the zoom-magnifying glass in the toolbar). Is there a flatline between the two sounds? The flatline is silence. If so, you can highlight the silence and delete it by pressing the delete key (Apple-K, or Edit menu, Delete). You may want to have the end of effect fade to silence, simply select the last quarter second or so, and choose the Effect menu, and “Fade Out.” If you’d like a few seconds of silence at the end of the track, simply position the cursor and choose Silence from the Generate menu.

When the entire track sounds good, save the project (File menu, Save project As…). Then you can Export it as AIFF or MP3. Listen to the final sound effect.

If you have any questions or suggestions for articles on sound in theatre, just leave a comment here or email me.

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I used several applications on my PowerBook to grab, tweak, and prepare the effects and music we use for the shows:

• iTunes from Apple (free, Mac, Windows). For playing the sounds during performances, and as a source for music (see below).
• Audacity (free, Mac, Windows, Linux). Open source software for recording and editing sounds.
• QuickTime Pro from Apple. ($30, Mac, Windows). For converting sound file formats. I use to convert bit rates to 44.100kHz.
• Perian (free, Mac). A QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats, notably Flash.
• Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba ($32 for hijackings longer than 10 minutes, Mac). Used to grab audio from video clips that wouldn’t allow the audio to be exported.
• MP3Gain (free, Mac, Windows). Analyzes and adjusts mp3 files so that they have the same volume.

Other tools that should be a part of your audio toolbox, but I didn’t need for this project:

• VLC (free, Mac, Windows). Another multimedia player. I use it because it supports the Ogg Vorbis audio and Ogg Theora video format, which you’ll stumble across occasionally.
• Fission from Rogue Amoeba ($32, Mac). Allows you to copy, paste and trim audio, as well as split files, all with no quality loss. I tend to use Audacity for similar functionality, but Fission is a bit easier to use. (You can buy Fission with Audio Hijack Pro for $50, save $14).

Here are a few of the places you can get music and sound effects:

• Freeplay Music Lots of music samples in many genres.
• iTunes Store for Music 99 cents a song, very convenient for late night sessions when the director says “How about….”
• EMusic Inexpensive monthly plan to collect music. A lot of smaller labels.
• Pacific Digital Video Free Sound Effects Short everyday sound effects, mostly in .wav format.
• YouTube Videos of every sort. Simply download the .flv file that makes up the video, then use QuickTime Pro with Perian to extract the audio.
• Open Source Audio An enormous amount of materials, almost too much to look though, including presidential speeches, limited run CDs, podcasts, etc.
• LibriVox Free readings from public domain books. Could be useful for maybe a voiceover at the beginning of a program.
• Opsound A project to make new music available for free.
• Garage Band Independent musicians.
• SoundTaxi Royalty free music, after paying one license fee.
• And of course don’t forget your own music collection. If you have time, ask your cast and crew if they have any music that would be appropriate for the show.

Make sure you stay legal with the licensing of music you play. Non profit organizations, educational theaters, and commercial groups will have different licensing concerns. For example, see the AACT/ASCAP License Agreement for Community Theatres. Some licenses, notably many of the Creative Commons licenses, require that the artist or performer is attributed in your show’s playbill or program.

Later this weekend I will share the process I used to prepare the sound effects of the ScriptCleaner5000. And then I’ll go through the setup I used in iTunes to run the sound and music. If you have any questions or suggestions for articles on sound in theatre, just leave a comment here or email me.

If you found this article useful, please subscribe to the free ShowBizRadio mailing list, or our RSS feed.

Laura: This is the ShowBizRadio.net podcast. Mike and I shadowed To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday. We are going to kind of do a wrap up and talk about our thoughts and impressions of the whole experience.

Mike: To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday was Port City Playhouse‘s Fall production and they graciously allowed us to shadow the process from the auditions all the way through closing night. We went to the auditions. We interviewed the cast as well and some of the crew. I learned a lot about the theatre and a lot about that show. It was really cool watching that whole thing evolve.

Laura: Mike and I attended the opening night performance. They did a good job. You could still see some hesitancy. They still had not quite meshed together yet. We then saw the closing night performance on Saturday evening. The growth of the actors and the rapport, it was so much fun. They were much more comfortable with each other. The jokes flowed and it was like a whole different performance.

Mike: What I kept saying on Saturday night after the show as I was talking to the different performers was that there were lots of subtleties that were not there on opening night. The audience laughed at totally different spots, including one spot where as they told us, no one had ever laughed before. That’s really kind of funny and I think they did a great job with the show. It was a lot of fun and I’m very thankful that they let us tag along and and be the fly on the wall while they were working on it.

Laura: Throughout this process we did interview all of the cast, the director and the stage manager. We also interviewed the president of Port City Playhouse, Ron Fields. This is Port City’s 30th anniversary and therefore this is kind of a special season for them.

Mike: He did tell us at the cast party on Saturday night after closing that their next show, Wonder of The World, is a hilarious show and we are looking forward to that. It will be opening sometime in 2008.

Laura: And now, on with the show.

The state instead said there’s no “free speech” without the speech.

That mere suggestion drew snickers at Monday’s hearing, but guess what? The judge agreed. So all you actors who thought you were conveying meaning through body language or a gesture, guess what? A small group of bureaucrats, none of whom have likely set foot in a theater but have full authority to set public policy, don’t get that. As a result, the individual constitutional freedoms the government has been chipping away at for the past five years just lost another chip.