As a theatre educator, the concrete assignment which we completed last week in class was quite useful. I have my bachelor's degree in theatre arts, and in my theatre tech course we reflected briefly on how to achieve effective sound design, whether for a specific setting or a more abstract scene.
I began thinking about how I myself would utilize this assignment. For example, it would be easy to mix several different nature sound effects to make two actors invest further in the reality of a scene. Say the students are playing a scene on the beach, I could mix wave sounds with seagulls and a fire crackling to create a bonfire on the beach. By taking sound files of birds chirping, children playing, swingsets squeaking, for example, a student may blend them into single .wav file to establish a playground setting for a scene they are producing.
Often music is an effective means of making abstract work more tangible in effect. For less realistic settings, distortion effects such as inversion, echo, and reversals, can help support the other-wordly qualities. The students would be asked to make strong directing decisions, as well as acting choices - for example, a character may hear or may not hear particular sound effects. Simply put, this assignment would be an easy tool to utilize for elementary students to increase the production value; for secondary students, it would be great to ask them to design music for their own scenes.
Sounds like I have a new unit on my hands!
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