Sound effects.

Sounds and noises, primarily percussive, included in dramatic or musical performances. They range from sounds made off-stage in theatre, film and television productions to the many uses by composers of noise-making objects that would not normally be regarded as musical instruments.

1. Dramatic sound effects.

2. Musical sound effects to 1950.

3. Musical sound effects after 1950.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HUGH DAVIES

Sound effects

1. Dramatic sound effects.

Off-stage sound effects have been employed since drama began, but their complete integration into theatrical forms is comparatively recent. In the Japanese kabuki theatre (popular since the early 17th century) off-stage music (geza-ongaku) is played behind a curtain or screen to one side of the stage (see Japan, §VI, 3). The concealed musicians play, sing and make sounds to create a sense of location or mood appropriate to the drama; the large ōdaiko drum, in particular, is used to evoke natural sounds such as wind, waves, rain and thunder. In Western theatre from the same period until the 19th century the principal sound effects were also those of weather, produced by specially constructed devices such as the Wind machine; some old theatres still have a sloping wooden ‘thunder run’ or ‘thunder gallery’ with irregularly spaced transverse ridges, down which heavy balls are rolled; a more portable machine, the ‘bronteron’, consists of a hand-operated revolving barrel containing heavy balls. From the 1890s various devices for creating sound effects formed part of the ‘traps’ (contraptions) of the percussionists in many theatre orchestras.

Since the beginning of the 20th century sound effects have come into their own with the advent of recorded art forms such as the (originally ‘silent’) cinema, radio and television. A number of elaborate machines were constructed to create sound effects, but humbler devices (coconut shells for horses' hooves, bells, creaking doors etc.) have been and continue to be used. Percussion instruments were first used for such purposes as long ago as the 1790s: large automatic instruments of the Orchestrion type, which imitated the instruments of the orchestra, included percussive sounds, and ‘Janissary’ effects in the form of a drumstick striking the base of the soundboard, cymbals and tuned bells, were added to some pianos in the early 19th century. But it was not until around 1910 that special machines and instruments were made in any numbers. The Allefex, invented by A.H. Moorhouse and manufactured in Britain from 1909 by A. & H. Andrews, produced some 50 different effects (many operated by crank handles); it was followed slightly later by a machine for the cinema, the Kinesounder, and in the 1920s by another, invented by R. Effner in Berlin. From the same period many keyboard instruments incorporating sound effects were produced for use in the cinema with silent films and in the theatre; many of them were automatic instruments such as the player piano and mechanical organ (they included the Biorkestra, Cinechordon, Cinfonium, Clavitist-Violina, Filmplayer, Fotoplayer (fig.1), Movieodion, One-Man Motion Picture Orchestra, Orchestrion and Pipe-Organ Orchestra), but devices were also added to cinema and theatre pipe organs in the 1920s and 30s. The effects these instruments could produce ranged from the sounds of pistol shots, flames, wind, waves, thunder, breaking china, steam engines, trains, cars, chains, animal cries and horses' hooves to conventional percussion, whistles, bells and Morse code buzzers.

Parallel to the development of special machines, percussionists and later sound-effects men (often working in teams) used a great variety of objects and materials to create realistic sounds for films (both silent and with soundtracks) and radio shows; by the 1940s the Walt Disney sound-effects department had assembled 8000 objects and musical instruments. From around 1930, in the early days of sound film, film makers and musicians explored creative applications of the newly available resources in the cinema: early sound collages on film included Walter Ruttmann's Weekend (c1930), a film without visuals, in Arthur Honegger and Arthur Hoerée's soundtrack for Rapt (1934), and in several Russian films, such as Dziga Vertov's Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbasa (1930). Musical sound effects were also used: a night-club scene in the film Balls of Fire (1941) features the jazz drummer Gene Krupa playing on heating pipes and drumming with matchsticks on a matchbox.

After World War II commercial gramophone recordings increasingly replaced other methods of producing sound effects. Several electronic instruments were devised that could be used for the purpose, including the Singing Keyboard (c1936) and the Mellotron (1962–3), which used respectively lengths of pre-recorded film soundtrack and magnetic tape; the Kantaphon (c1934), invented by Brandt, in which a microphone placed against the throat picks up the operator's humming and passes it to filters and volume controls; the similar Sonovox (c1939), by means of which human vocal quality could be imparted to any sound; and the Shumofon (c1955), which synthesizes a wide range of natural and man-made sounds. Synthesizers can also be used to produce sound effects, though not specifically designed to do so.

Sound effects

2. Musical sound effects to 1950.

While instrumental and vocal imitations of non-musical sounds may be found in music of all ages, the introduction into the orchestra of special instruments to create sound effects occurred only rarely before the 20th century. One of the earliest examples is in Marc-Antoine Charpentier's music for Molière's Le malade imaginaire (1673), which makes percussive use of apothecaries' pestles and mortars. The first widely-used sound effects instrument was the anvil, found in Western music from the early 16th century; it appears in several 19th-century opera scores, including Wagner's Das Rheingold (1853–4), and is featured in anvil choruses by Verdi (Il trovatore, 1851–3) and in Riccardo Zandonai's I cavalieri di Ekebù (1923–5). Leopold Mozart included rifle shots in his Sinfonia da caccia, and Johann Strauss (ii) featured both gunshots and jingling spurs in some of his dances. In Rossini's overture to Il Signor Bruschino (1813) the violinists are instructed to tap the tin reflectors of their candlesticks with their bows. In 1840 the conductor Louis Antoine Jullien added a ‘rattle’, consisting of dried peas shaken in a tin box, to performances of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony to imitate the sound of hailstones; he also used sound effects extensively in his own compositions and in arrangements, including rattles, crackers, fireworks, cannon, muskets and revolvers. Thunder and wind machines have become comparatively familiar in dramatic works (for illustrations see Thunder machine and Wind machine). Other musical sound effects are related to folk traditions of banging kitchen utensils in celebrations and protests, and many such found or home-made instruments feature in Swiss folk music.

From about 1900 burlesque orchestras and American comedy ‘corn bands’ often made use of sound effects, and this style of playing may still be seen in humorous cartoon films, using instruments such as a galvanised iron washboard with attached car horns, saucepans and lids and a Swanee whistle. Early in the century street organs made by Gasparini incorporated a xylophone-like ‘bouteillophone’. Musical sound effects were also exploited by popular bands: in the 1920s British music halls Edward Stanley De Groot, a trained musician, presented his Horn Orchestra of Stanelli, consisting of two dozen car horns; and from the early 1940s the drummer Spike Jones made prominent use of unusual and jokey instruments, including tuned car horns, based on his experience as a session musician. Special effects, such as train noises and animal and bird sounds, have been produced on the Hawaiian guitar and on the pedal steel guitar, particularly models with multiple necks.

From around the beginning of the 20th century many composers were inspired by new industrial sounds. In 1913 Debussy wrote of ‘the incredible sound’ of a steel mill; similar sentiments were expressed by Ravel in an article ‘Finding Tunes in Factories’ (1933). Among other composers, Michel Brusselmans composed short works for chamber orchestra in 1927–8 with such titles as La foule, Dans la jungle, Bruits d'usine, The Railway and Bruits d'avion. The Italian futurists fiercely advocated industrial sounds; from 1913 Luigi Russolo constructed an ensemble of intonarumori (‘noise intoners’), and around 1919 he developed a method of controlling the volume and timbre of an aeroplane engine for use in Fedele Azari's futurist ‘aerial theatre’. In the 1920s Russolo developed four versions of the rumorarmonio, which combined elements of his earlier individual noise instruments. Two motorcycles accompanied one of the futurist Balletti meccanici of Ivo Pannaggi in 1922. Two dadaist works from 1919 featured kitchen utensils, Jef Golysheff's Antisymphonie (Musikalische Kreisguillotine) and Hans-Jürgen von der Wense's Musik für Klarinette, Klavier und freihängendes Blechsieb. In 1918–23 several open-air performances in the Soviet Union commemorated the October 1917 revolution with ‘noise symphonies’, for at least one of which Arseny Mikhaylovich Avraamov composed his Simfoniya gudkov (‘Symphony of Factory Sirens’, 1922), which included a calliope-like steam-whistle machine. In the same period the theatre director and choreographer Nikolay Mikhaylovich Foregger introduced his Machine Dance, featuring his Noise Orchestra, which combined drums, jew's harps and vocal sounds with broken glass, packaging, scrap metal, etc. Similar noise ensembles played in a variety of theatrical productions and in concert works such as Grigory Smetanin's symphonic poem Fabrika (‘The Factory’, ?1923), the collectively composed oratorio, Put' oktyabrya (‘The Path of October’, 1928), by the group Prokoll, and in Vladimir Mikhaylovich Deshevov's opera ‘Lyod i stal'’ (‘Ice and Steel’, 1930). In films, factory hooters and klaxons accompanied a scene featuring Lenin's funeral in Plan velikikh rabot (‘Plan of Great Works’, 1930), factory klaxons and the whistle of a steam turbine appeared in Vstrechnyi (‘Counterplan’, 1932), similar noise makers in Dela i lyudi (‘Men and Jobs/Deeds and People’, 1932), and six ship's klaxons in Desertir (‘Deserter’, 1933).

John Cage was particularly eclectic in his choice of instrumentation for his works. From 1939 he used all sorts of percussive devices in pieces such as First Construction (in Metal) and Imaginary Landscapes nos.1–3 (1939–42); the last of these was the first work to use a radio receiver, and Cage extended the idea in Imaginary Landscape no.4 (1951) and later works (see Table 2 below). The earliest studies by Pierre Schaeffer in what he later called musique concrète (see Electro-acoustic music) were produced in 1948 as an attempt to compose a noise symphony (Symphonie de bruits) and were presented under the title ‘Concert de bruits’. Table 1 shows some of the unconventional ‘instruments’ used to create sound effects in concert works before 1950; other works featured a Siren.

Sound effects

3. Musical sound effects after 1950.

Since 1950 the range of unusual sounds introduced into their works by composers has grown enormously, especially in the area of percussion. The sounds produced by all sorts of objects – from radios and typewriters to motorcycles – and materials – both natural and man-made – have been added to those of conventional instruments. Many of the objects listed in Table 1 have continued to be used, including the typewriter (by Krzysztof Penderecki, Peter Maxwell Davies and others), the siren, and the metronome (in works by William Russell and John Tavener; a set of four metronomes in works by Davies and David Bedford, in Per Nørgård's Unendlicher Empfang, 1998, and, on tape, in Alfred Schnittke's Lebenslauf, 1982). Car horns, which are of two types: staccato (operated by squeezing a rubber bulb) and sustained (electromechanical), continue to be used, for example in Ennio Morricone's music for the ‘spaghetti Western’ film Il mio nome è nessuno (‘My Name is Nobody’, 1973), in which they play a version of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries or in Wendy Chambers’ performances on a specially-constructed car horn organ. An ‘anvil effect’ may be obtained by striking a length of railway track, as in three works by Penderecki from the early 1970s and Giya Kancheli's Symphony no.4 (1974), while other composers call for a large metal bar such as a length of scaffolding (Davies and Mark-Anthony Turnage). A wooden cube is struck in Galina Ivanovna Ustvol'skaya's Composition no.2 ‘Dies Irae’ (1972–3) and Symphony no.5 ‘Amen’ (1989–90), and in all three parts of James MacMillan's Triduum (1995–7). Stones are struck in works by Jón Leifs, Xenakis, Bedford, Alberto Ginastera and Tan Dun, and feature, with whistles, güiro-like scrapers and other small percussion devices, in Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning (1968–70). Other noise makers include clickers, gun shots, chains (used earlier by Schoenberg, Havergal Brian and others), a bursting paper bag (György Ligeti) and many different types of whistle. Toy instruments and similar simple instruments, such as the kazoo, swanee whistle and bird whistle have also been specified by a number of composers.

R. Murray Schafer's orchestral work North/White (1973) features a snowmobile (as a protest against its extreme noisiness), while a motorcycle appears in Ferde Grofé's Hudson River Suite (1955), Simon Desorgher's The Infernal Clanking of the Chains and Cogs of Beelzebub (1982), which includes amplified sounds played percussively, and, on tape, in Jan Sandström's A Short Ride on a Motorbike (1989). Stockhausen's Helikopter-Streichquartett (1992–3) features the members of a string quartet aloft in four helicopters, the amplified sounds of both elements being mixed together for listeners on the ground. In Misha Mengelberg's Methwelbeleefde groet van de kameel (1971–3) the orchestra plays while the composer saws a wooden chair into several pieces, which are then reassembled in the form of a camel. Broken glass is rattled in a tin in works by Peter Maxwell Davies, glass fragments are crushed while others are dropped into a ‘bottle tree’ in Annea Lockwood's Glass Concert (1966) and crockery is smashed in Ligeti's Nouvelles aventures (1962–5) – which also includes the destruction of a plastic cup, a tin can, a wooden lath and large sheets of paper – and in his opera Le grand macabre (1974–7). A selection of sound effects is called for in Wilhelm Killmayer's opera Yolimba (1964), and a vocal ‘sound effects chorus’ is specified in Bedford's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1975–6). Cars are played percussively in Robert Moran's Titus No.1 (1967) and Hans Werner Henze's Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer (1971), while in Mathias Spahlinger's Ephémère (1977) and the percussion consists largely of ‘veritable’ instruments (household objects such as saucepans and bottles); other composers have specified that the performer be a ‘bruitiste’ or noise maker, as Julio Estrada in ‘Mictlan’ from his opera Pedro Páramo (1992). Several percussionists have specialized in ‘junk’ percussion, including Donald Knaack, Roger Turner and the Zero group in Leningrad. Comparable examples are found in lighter music. On a record album made in 1973 the singer Barbra Streisand is accompanied in the song The World is a Concerto by over 20 domestic (mainly electric) appliances, including orange juicers, electric toothbrushes, a pop-up toaster and a kettle. Tom Waits has employed in song accompaniments the humming of a sewing machine, a squeaking door and a spinning washing machine.

Not only have composers combined sound effects with ordinary instrumental sounds, they have composed works scored solely for noise-making devices and objects (though in some cases voices are included). Table 2 shows some of these. A simple list of objects used in this way does not, of course, give any clue as to how fully the work is notated and structured, or the degree of imagination exercised by the composer. In many instances it is impossible to distinguish between an array of such devices assembled for one composition and a newly invented instrument. Where a single sounding object may produce a noise or sound effect, several like objects of different sizes or tuned to a scale may become an instrument (a set of tuned coconut shells or anvils, for example); the same is sometimes true of groups of heterogeneous objects. Some of the new instruments and sound sculptures described elsewhere in this dictionary are borderline cases, as are certain examples of Cage's work.

Several successful theatrical shows in the 1990s were based on choreographed highly energetic group percussive music performed on stage. Tap dance (which dates back to the mid-19th century and derives from earlier stepping dances such as clog dance) is the main element in the Australian group Tap Dogs; the British team Stomp (formed in 1991 by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas) by 1998 consisted of five eight-member groups, performing on metal dustbin lids and buckets, metal and plastic dustbins and larger barrels (up to 50-gallon oil drums), broomsticks, rattled matchboxes and assorted crockery in water-filled steel kitchen sinks worn around the performers' necks, as well as clapping and foot-stamping; the latter two, as well as body percussion, are prominent in performances by Gumboots, from South Africa.

Many humorists have produced versions of familiar instruments that are made from everyday materials, have an unusual appearance, are outsize or miniature (favoured by the clown Grock), or are played unconventionally. Some acts are formed around music played on such instruments. The Argentine group Les Luthiers, for example, uses a tin violin (‘Latín’), the ‘vibromatófono di amore’, and the ‘cello leguero’ (the body of which consists of a bombo leguero: a type of drum audible up to three miles away), as well as a typewriter for a keyboard, a cardboard trombone on wheels and a hosepipe trumpet, all constructed by Carlos Iraldi. Three musical humorists have specialized in adapted and invented instruments and sound effects. The band of Spike Jones, which first became popular in the early 1940s, used such ad hoc instruments as washboard, doorbells, cowbells, anvils, saws, tyre pumps and toy whistles. Gerard Hoffnung realized some of the unusual instruments he had depicted in cartoons at two concerts in London (1956 and 1959); they included rifles, three vacuum cleaners and an electric polisher (in Malcolm Arnold's A Grand Grand Overture), a length of hosepipe (on which Dennis Brain played a movement of Leopold Mozart's Concerto for alphorn), tuned stone hot-water bottles and the hiss of compressed air. Peter Schickele has invented a number of instruments for the works of his imaginary composer P.D.Q. Bach; they include the Hardart (consisting of strings, balloons, shotguns, whistles, bicycle horn, blown and struck bottles and a cooking timer, all mounted on a frame), ‘showerhose in D’ and ‘lasso d'amore’ (one of the corrugated whirler tubes sold as toys during the 1970s).

The human body has been used to make many percussive sounds, from the tongued glottal click of the Xhosa language (made famous in the singing of Miriam Makeba, and borrowed by Stockhausen in Refrain, 1959) to whistling, hand-clapping, finger-snapping, foot-stamping and knee-slapping found in flamenco and other folk music and dance (and included by Stockhausen in the earliest sections of Momente, 1962–4). Hand-clapping is the only sound source used in Yasunao Tone's Clapping Music (1963) and in Steve Reich's Clapping Music (1972) for two performers, and is often used by singers and audiences in light music – so much so that some Electronic percussion devices include a synthesized hand-clap facility. Percussionists who have specialized in body percussion include Nana Vasconcelos and Knaack; Vinko Globokar's Corporel (1984) is performed by a percussionist on his own body. Sounds produced by the body have also been used for humorous purposes: in the French music halls between about 1891 and 1914 Joseph Pujol, ‘Le Pétomane’ made farting melodious; melodies have been played by creating an air pocket with a wet hand held under the armpit and squeezing with the free arm; and a number of entertainers (sometimes ensembles) have tapped out tunes on their teeth, or, by blowing through them strongly (often making use of gaps), have imitated musical instruments.

Instruments based on animal sounds have been described and illustrated since the time of Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century; in several instances they have been realized with trained animals. Several 19th century newspaper reports, as well as earlier illustrations, describe instruments, primarily with keyboards, that consist of cats, pigs, mice or other animals ordered inside separate compartments according to the pitch of their squeals when they are hit or picked or their tails are pulled; a sequence in the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus showed such an instrument in which white mice were struck by mallets. Since the early 1950s an ensemble of trained canaries – some specially bred for the lower voice parts – has existed in Kharkhov in the Ukraine; its repertory consisted of over 80 works of classical and light music. Training of a far humbler order is required to teach mynah birds and members of the parrot family to mimic human speech, or domesticated canaries, blackbirds, bullfinches, curlews and parrots to sing; various types of mechanical bird organ (see Bird instruments) were invented for this purpose in the 18th century. Wild birds are still taught to sing in certain parts of the world, such as China.

Sound effects

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Avraamov: ‘Gudki’, Gorn, no.9 (1923); Eng. trans. as ‘The Symphony of Sirens’, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 245–52

Carol-Bérard: Instrumentation par le système des bruits enregistrés (n.p., n.d. [?Paris, c1925])

A. Rose: Stage Effects: How to Make and Work Them (London, [1928])

‘Eine moderne Filmorgel’, Neue Universum, no.51 (?1930), 153–7

R. Foort: The Cinema Organ: a Description in Non-Technical Language of a Fascinating Instrument and how it is Played (London, 1932, 2/1970)

R. Whitworth: The Cinema and Theatre Organ (London, 1932/R)

M. Ravel: ‘Finding Tunes in Factories’, New Britain (9 Aug 1933); repr. in A. Orenstein, ed.: A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews (New York, 1990), 388–90

F. Napier: Noises Off: a Handbook of Sound Effects (London, 1936, 4/1962)

N. Slonimsky: A Thing or Two About Music (New York, 1948); repr. as Slonimsky's Book of Musical Anecdotes (New York, 1998), 284–93

R. Low: The History of the British Film, 1906–1914 (London, 1949/R), 268–9

R.B. Turnbull: Radio and Television Sound Effects (New York, 1951)

F.K. Prieberg: Musica ex machina: über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik (Berlin and Frankfurt, 1960), 48–75

W.P. Malm: Nagauta: the Heart of Kabuki Music (Rutland, VT, 1963/R), 108–13

G. Avgerinos: Handbuch der Schlag- und Effektinstrumente: ein Wegweiser für Komponisten, Dirigenten, Musiker und Instrumentenbauer (Frankfurt, 1967)

J. Nohain and F.Caradec: Le Pétomane, 1857–1945: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1967; Eng. trans., 1967, as Le Pétomane, 1857–1945: a Tribute to the Unique Act which Shook and Shattered the Moulin Rouge)

J. Blades: Percussion Instruments and their History (London, 1970, 2/1992)

D. Robinson: World Cinema: a Short History (London, 1973, enlarged 2/1981), 157–9

D. Schory: disc notes, The Magical Music of Walt Disney, Ovation OV5000 (1978)

D. Collison: Stage Sound (London, 1976, 2/1982), 89

C. Armengaud: La musique verte (Le Puy, 1979, 2/1981/R, 3/1984 as Musique vertes)

G. Eberle: ‘Die vermenschlichte Maschine’, Für Augen und Ohren (Berlin, 1980), 31–4 [festival programme book]

B. Bachmann-Geiser: Die Volksmusikinstrumente der Schweiz (Leipzig, 1981)

J.R. Young: Spike Jones and his City Slickers: an Illustrated Biography (Beverly Hills, CA, 1984)

B. Bergman and R.Horn: Recombinant Do Re Me: Frontiers of the Rock Era (New York and London [as Experimental Pop], 1985)

J.M. Vivenza: Le bruit et son rapport historique (Grenoble, [c1985])

N. Strauss: ‘Crash Course: a Noise History Primer’, Ear: Magazine of New Music, xiii/7 (1988), 10–13 [see also xiii/10 (1989), 8–9]

E. Brown: ‘Something from Nothing and More from Something: the Making and Playing of Music Instruments in African-American Cultures’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, viii (1990), 275–91

D. Samper Pizano: Les Luthiers de la L a la S (Buenos Aires, 1991)

D. Goode, ed.: The Frog Peak Rock Music Book (Lebanon, NH, 1995)

R. Brunelle: ‘The Art of Sound Effects’, Experimental Musical Instruments, xii/1 (1996), 8–13; xii/2 (1996), 24–31