Theatre & Sound Dramaturgy
- In theatre, sound serves the fiction — the best spatialisation is the one no one notices.
- Build the world off-stage (the hors-champ) around the seen set.
- Reverberation constructs a fictional place — a change of acoustic is a change of location.
- Intelligibility of the text overrides every spatial ambition.
In theatre, spatial sound is rarely the subject; it is in service of something else — the text, the action, the fiction. This subordination is not a limitation but the discipline of the form: the most effective theatrical spatialisation is the one the audience never consciously notices, because it is doing dramaturgical work rather than displaying itself. This chapter is about that work — building fictional space around an audience so that a story feels located, and using reverberation not to describe a real room but to construct one that does not exist.
Sound in service of the fiction
The governing question in theatre is never "how spatial can this be?" but "what does the drama need this sound to do?" Space serves the story in a few recurring ways:
- Locating the action. Placing sounds so the audience feels where they are — a market to the left, a sea behind, a room enclosing them. The spatial arrangement builds the fictional place around the seated audience.
- Directing attention. A sound from a specific direction turns heads and focuses the audience, a spatial equivalent of a lighting cue — used to lead the eye to where the drama wants it.
- Building tension and presence. Something approaching from behind, a whisper that seems to come from beside a spectator, a threat that is heard before it is seen — space as a tool of suspense and unease.
Because the audience is seated and facing a stage, the base logic is frontal-plus-surround (see Diffusion Logics): the stage anchors the seen action, while the surround and height carry everything the fiction needs that is not on stage. As in staged performance, the eye leads — but theatre exploits the off-stage, the unseen, more than any other practice.
The off-stage acoustic field: composing the unseen
Theatre's distinctive spatial resource is the hors-champ — the off-stage, the sonic world that exists beyond what is visible. Film theory (Michel Chion) calls this the acousmatic dimension of the soundtrack: sound whose source is not seen, which the imagination must place. On a stage it is enormously powerful, because it lets you build a world far larger than the set.
- A city exists because we hear it around and behind the single room we see.
- A crowd, an army, a storm can be offstage — placed in the surround field, felt as pressure from beyond the visible, without a single extra on stage.
- A character can be present as a voice from a direction before — or without ever — appearing, the disembodied voice that theatre and radio drama have always known is uncanny.
Composing the unseen is a spatial act: you decide where the fictional world sits relative to the audience, and how the seen stage is embedded in a larger heard space. This is the figure/ground thinking of Thinking the Sound Space applied to narrative — the visible stage is the figure, the composed off-stage world is the ground.
Reverberation as the construction of a fictional place
This is where theatre asks something of reverberation that concert practice does not. In Thinking the Sound Space reverberation was material — a way to give a sound distance and envelopment. Here it does something stronger: it builds a place that does not exist.
A line delivered dry is in the theatre. The same line given a long stone reverberation is suddenly in a cathedral; given a tight, dead ambience, in a small closed cell; given a vast diffuse tail, in a canyon. The reverberation is not describing the real room the audience sits in — it is constructing a fictional acoustic space and placing the audience inside it. The technical means are in reverberation, and the crucial independence — that you can set a room's character separately from a source's position, as tools like IRCAM's Spat~ make explicit — is exactly what makes this dramaturgical: you can move the fiction from a cell to a cathedral between two lines, without moving a single loudspeaker or performer.
Used this way, reverberation becomes invisible scenery — a set built entirely of acoustics:
- A change of reverberation is a change of place. The scene moves from an interior to a canyon because the acoustic does, even if the lighting and set stay put. This is one of the cheapest and most effective scene changes available.
- Reverberation characterises the unreal. A memory, a dream, the voice of a god or the dead — states with no real acoustic — are given impossible reverberation precisely because it signals this is not the ordinary world. The acoustic marks the ontological shift.
- Dryness is intimacy. Pulling a voice completely dry and close, against a reverberant world, is a way to bring the audience inside a character — the whispered aside, the private thought, present and unspaced while everything around it has a place.
The discipline is restraint. Because a reverberation change reads as a change of world, it must be motivated; gratuitous reverberation is the theatrical equivalent of purposeless panning, and it muddies both intelligibility and meaning. Reverberation in theatre is a dramaturgical statement, so make it only when the drama means it.
Intelligibility first
One constraint overrides all spatial ambition in most theatre: the text must be understood. Spatial and reverberant treatment that compromises the intelligibility of speech is almost always wrong, however beautiful. This sets a hard boundary the concert practices do not share — the diffuse and heavily-reverberant logics that create envelopment are exactly the ones that smear consonants and blur words. The practical order of priority is: intelligibility of the essential text first, then spatial dramaturgy in and around it. When the two conflict, the words win, unless the production has decided, deliberately, that this moment is about texture rather than sense.
Working method
- Start from the dramaturgy, not the system. Ask what each cue must do to the story; let that dictate the spatial and reverberant treatment, never the reverse.
- Build the world off-stage. Use the surround field for the unseen — the larger place the visible set sits inside — and treat the hors-champ as composable space.
- Make reverberation a scene element. Decide the fictional acoustic of each location and each unreal state, and change it as deliberately as you would change the set or the light.
- Protect the words. Check every spatial and reverberant choice against speech intelligibility, and resolve conflicts in favour of the text unless texture is the explicit intent.
- Keep it invisible. The measure of success is that the audience believes the world, not that they admire the sound design. In theatre, the best spatialisation disappears into the fiction.
Bibliography and references
- Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
- Chion, Michel. Le son au cinéma. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma / Éditions de l'Étoile, 1985. (On off-screen sound and the acousmatic.)
- Smalley, Denis. "Space-form and the acousmatic image." Organised Sound 12, no. 1 (2007): 35–58. (On source-bonded and constructed spaces.)
- Kendall, Gary S. "The Artistic Play of Spatial Organization: Spatial Attributes, Scene Analysis and Auditory Spatial Schemata." (On how listeners parse and believe constructed auditory scenes.)
- See the guide's technical treatment of reverberation in reverberation and of room character versus source position throughout The Sound Field & the Room.
A note on sourcing: this chapter draws on well-established sound-design practice and film-sound theory rather than a single canonical text; the references above are entry points rather than a definitive bibliography.