Dolby Atmos

Friday night I attended a presentation at Dolby Labs to hear about the recently released Atmos sound platform. Their theater is a gem of a room: cozy, grande-dame glamorous, and unbelievably quiet (it floats on its own slab, thus isolated from spaces above and below). Dolby treated us to clips from Brave, Mission Impossible IV, the upcoming Woman in Black, and the just-released Chasing Mavericks. Atmos met my expectations head on, in ways that are often more real than real. Sound effects are magnified from the global level—waves breaking on the California coast—to the local—a single leaf snapping free from a tree branch. Creaking wooden floorboards curl around you from all different heights and locations and, in tandem with the visuals, sound more ominous than they might in a typical surround-sound array.

Disclaimer; I am not a film sound aficionado. I rent DVDs at my local video store and am often content to watch them, propped up by pillows, on my laptop (i.e., not plugged in to the monitors in the other room). In this regard, I sometimes wonder if an improved, multi-dimensional palette of sound is all that necessary. Give me a good story and I’m content, even if the sound is crappy. But here’s what sold me on Atmos: in the Mission Impossible clip, the “extra-real” sounds of wind and sand became a racing, chasing, escape story all unto themselves. I couldn’t help but notice how, in contrast, the music soundtrack fell flat.

Atmos has the potential to demand better music composition for film. I do not mean that music should mimic the spatial, directed quality of the sound effects. No, I imagine that soundtrack music, in order to balance and support such precisely placed and sculpted effects, may need to do the opposite. Keep the orchestration, melodies, and harmonies simple; let music be the centered, grounding “bed” over which sound design takes flight. The challenge for the composer will be to do more with less, to write a great score that doesn’t get in the way.

The soundtrack has its competition now; that much was clear in the clip of a room full of wind-up toys. What begins as a single, local sound (one toy), forms a complex web as other toys are added, one by one, to the mix. The layers of mechanical chiming sounds, in different locations around the room, become a beautiful, standalone composition. Music, per se, would be completely unnecessary. Atmos puts new emphasis on sound design as composition and, in turn, music composition will have to find a way to rise to that level of technical excellence.

The evening was fun and thought-provoking. Big thanks to Dolby for generously opening their laboratory to me and other attendees of the AES convention.

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The Black Glove, Op. 5

August Strindberg’s The Black Glove (at the Exit on Taylor through November 11) is like a two-year-old who, taken to the park for a playdate, proceeds to throw a tantrum, pick some wildflowers, lose a shoe, kiss the new girl, and get stung by a bee, all within an hour of arriving. In other words, it’s a difficult child. Verse, fantasy, and self-reflective monologues coexist in ways that amuse, surprise, tire, and sometimes test your patience. The production feels, at times, “lost and found, lost again, and found again,” (scene 4).

With an “innocent kidnapping” at its core, the work is a study of the lives of people who reside in an apartment building, as well as their reflections on the meaning of childhood. From cellar to attic—realized side-to-side across the stage—the super, the maid, the stricken mother, and the old man perform their individual moments with vigor, but no story compels more than another. There is an even tempo to the pacing of each scene, as well as parity between the characters’ individual concerns, and the shallow, horizontal use of the stage likewise reads flat. Although the characters live in the same building, and their lives intersect by circumstance, they seem disconnected. Their actions are isolated rather than reactive.

That I found it difficult to relate one character’s intentions to those of a character in another scene is not necessarily a fault on Strindberg: as my attention waxed and waned, I was reminded of being a child, where the fascination with an object or game fades as quickly as it is transferred to something new. My adult mind, however, resisted the effort it took to fully engage in each isolated scene. I wanted to relate every detail to some other detail in a perfectly worked out, cause-and-effect narrative, and The Black Glove simply doesn’t work that way.

Director Rob Melrose describes Strindberg’s fifth chamber play as the most “cheerful and redemptive,” and I would add that a thematic undercurrent of childhood helps create those qualities. The mother’s stolen baby is a constant reminder of the promise and hope of being young (each character comments on this), while the set design reminds one of a playroom littered with objects. There’s a table spread with the holiday feast, a candelabra, and a Christmas tree; a toy pony, a doll, and a doll’s chair; a desk and its requisite books and piles of papers. In addition, the two immortal spirits act, themselves, like children, playing with the apartment dwellers as if for their own amusement. The Black Glove, while fragmented and strangely (loosely) held together, is a thoughtful—if patience testing—reflection on the magic of childhood.

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The Ghost Sonata, Op. 3

On a whim, I decided to go see Cutting Ball Theater’s production of August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, one of five chamber plays in repertory at the Exit Theater on Taylor. The venue is the tiniest of spaces (60 to 70 seats), which made for one of the most engaging, up close, and intimate performance experiences I’ve had in a long time. (Two days prior, I was perched away far away in the balcony at San Francisco Opera.) At the Exit, the size of the venue supports Strindberg’s style so well: there is an abbreviated quality to his storytelling, and though the characters do not lack emotional intensity, they seem sketched as if in outline with a dark pencil. There is a creep factor to this: those outlines invite the viewer to step in and become the possessed old man, the young student, the lovely daughter, the crazy old lady.

The structure of the play likewise demands your faith before you’re sure if you’re willing to offer it, and there’s never any going back; the three concise acts march inevitably forward and become more confining, from the street, into the house, and finally, to a special room in the house. Strindberg works the small scale, drawing the audience in, and then–once he’s got you–he provides subtext and metaphor to deepen and enrich the situation. I was immediately captivated and amused by the macabre flavor of the play, but found myself, the next day, thinking more seriously about the characters’ relationships and what it all meant. It wasn’t just a simple spook story to shrug aside.

Things are set in motion from the start by the old man, Hummel, who feels he’s been wronged and wants his just desserts. He enlists the “help” of an optimistic young student. The student falls in love with a young woman (she happens to be part of the family that consumes Hummel’s thoughts), and the old man seizes the opportunity to join the family for a dinner party. Once we arrive in the house, it seems that every character holds fast to a personal agenda or is otherwise hung up on some matter of the past, and no one is capable of moving beyond their situation. Like in Chekhov, the inaction is what does everyone in.

Repeated motifs throughout the play heighten a certain quality that I enthusiastically described afterwards as “twisted.” Strindberg keeps women behind windows, hides people in closets (they “see nothing and [are] not to be seen”), and generally covers things up (people die behind a Japanese screen). When, in the third scene, the young lovers exchange poetic sentiments about flowers, it also rings false. Their dialogue, which should be romantic, is a facade. It does nothing more than echo the nonsensical chirps and caws of the senile old woman (she mimics a parrot, except when—wise fool—she speaks a great truth). The sound design helped connect all the various strange facets of Strindberg’s world: reverberant glass bells punctuated the symbolic moments and lent a dream-like quality to the proceedings.

The Ghost Sonata does remind one of chamber music, where a skeleton crew often creates musical meaning equal to that found in an orchestral work. There can be such intensity in “small” forms. This intensity, as it played out Saturday night, felt like a warning, against stagnancy and against being resigned to one’s situation. I am insanely curious to see what transpires in the other four plays!

p.s. I was initially surprised at the period costume and set design. It was tastefully done, but perhaps my expectations had set off on another course while I waited pre-show in the lobby, watching a video projection of Strindberg Twitter feeds. I may not have been the only one who felt the contemporary resonance of the script: everyone in the theater laughed when the young student quipped, “I don’t care for publicity. … The art of belittling is so highly developed.”

p.p.s. I really wish, too, that he had sung the ending lines of Act 2 and Act 3.

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