Como Ter Uma "Ruptura" De Idéias

How To Have Breakthrough Ideas

You can learn to cultivate great ideas. That’s the bold promise of The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking, by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack. Cabane is the author of The Charisma Myth and both she and Pollack used to work at Stanford University’s start-up accelerator; the two now consult variously for prominent companies and organizations ranging from Google, Airbnb, and IDEO to Deloitte and even the U.S. Army Special Forces. The Net and the Butterfly is filled not only with anecdotes describing the births of famous ideas, but also with a series of practical exercises aimed at improving your ability to generate them. The edited excerpts that follow examine the states of mind that are most conducive to creativity along with a few examples of how to achieve those states. The final passage explores how idea “creation” often consists as much of idea modification and combination as of the original spark.—Fortune

THE YEAR WAS 1965. The place was Clearwater, Fla. In his motel room—the Rolling Stones weren’t yet famous enough to afford hotels—Keith Richards woke up on a hot, humid morning to find his guitar and a tape recorder on the bed beside him. Groggy and hungover, Richards rewound the tape and pressed play. The hourlong tape contained 59 minutes of his own snoring. But the first 30 seconds held the opening bars and first lyric of what became the Rolling Stones’s most iconic hit, the song “Satisfaction.” 

He didn’t remember even touching the tape recorder.Believe it or not, Richards’s breakthrough moment follows the very same pattern as Albert Einstein’s discovery of the special theory of relativity. It’s the pattern we heard again and again when we interviewed some of the world’s greatest innovators for this book. And it’s the same pattern you’ve experienced if you’ve ever had a sudden epiphany in the shower.

Whenever you have a “shower moment,” chances are something was on your mind, like a problem at work or an issue in a relationship. You’d probably been mulling over the problem, trying to work it out in different ways. Then you stepped into the shower. Your mind wandered off as the water poured over you. You were no longer focused. Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, the answer came to you. 

What do your shower moments have in common with both Keith Richards’s and Albert Einstein’s discoveries? When you got into the shower, you unknowingly switched brain modes. Previously, you had been consciously focusing on the problem. But in the shower, your mind was probably drifting, idly daydreaming or seemingly “thinking about nothing.” Neuroscientists have recently discovered that the secret to breakthroughs lies in our ability to switch between these two modes, the focused and the meandering.

The focused mode is one you are already familiar with, because it’s the one you have been consciously using all your life. You can think of this mode as the “executive mode”: it’s the one you use to execute, to get things done. Goal oriented and deadline focused, it’s a champion at making lists, following timelines, and coming in under budget. The part of your brain responsible for this mode is called the executive network, or EN.

The EN is a group of brain regions near the front of your skull that help you focus on a task and accomplish a specific goal. You’re very well versed in the use of your EN. You did, after all, spend at least a decade in school specifically training those brain regions. As a matter of fact, you’re using your EN right now to read this sentence. With your EN you are (we hope) a functional, responsible, and productive member of society.But your EN alone can’t create breakthroughs. It needs help from the more meandering network, the one that creates shower moments. This is our creative network, the default network, or DN. 

You can think of the DN as a network or council of breakthrough geniuses inside your brain. The geniuses talk and exchange ideas, half-baked theories, and wild speculations.The DN is the source of all our creativity, all our invention, all our genius—and it hasn’t gotten nearly enough recognition. What has the DN accomplished throughout history? A better question would be what great discoveries hasn’t it played a role in. 

If the EN gives us the ability to focus and accomplish a task, the DN gives us the ability to look through the complexity of the world to see the patterns underneath.The DN is a vital component of your brain: Research has made clear that this part of your brain is as essential to your survival as your heart or your kidneys. It’s so important, in fact, that we could have written this entire book all about the DN. We would have said, “Here it is! Here’s how it works, here’s how you can access it, here’s how you can turbocharge it.” But in fact, that’s not enough. The DN, alone, can’t create breakthroughs.

Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein Photos by Paul Sakuma/AP & Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images 

It’s the ability to use both modes, to switch from one mode to another, that enabled Keith Richards to come up with “Satisfaction” and Albert Einstein to discover the special theory of relativity. In fact, it’s what enabled most discoveries in human historySo how can you access your genius mode? One way is to sleep on it. (Yes, really.)Adam Cheyer is the creator of Siri, Apple’s artificial intelligence iPhone voice assistant. Building Siri was a Herculean design and programming task. 

The sheer number of variables—the ability to understand varying speech patterns, the ability to search based on the random ways people would request information, the ability to return answers in a useful way—were each a massive challenge. Thankfully, Cheyer had a secret weapon: ready access to his genius mode.Although designing and building Siri was a highly structured task, Cheyer knew better than to try to logically grind out every answer. Instead, he told us, “I sleep on the issues I’m wrestling with.” 

Cheyer, like Thomas Edison, has discovered the incredible breakthrough power of the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, the half-asleep periods just before falling asleep and just before waking. These are times when our genius council runs on hyperdrive.“I go to bed around 11, noodling on a problem as I fall asleep,” he explained. By “noodling” on the problem, Cheyer uses his EN to deliberately and consciously focus his genius council on a question. 

He relies on his genius council to make new associations and deliver breakthroughs while asleep. In the morning he goes to his desk and uses his EN to process the night’s harvest of ideas.Morning after morning while first designing Siri, he would wake up with new insights from his DN. He’d use his EN to integrate them into the prototype he was building. Eventually, he felt that he had something concrete enough to show the rest of the world.

Thomas Edison and Apple's Adam Cheyer Photos by Keystone & Araya Diaz/Getty Images for TechCrunch 

The hypnagogic and hypnopompic states are so fruitful for creativity because our inhibiting frontal lobes—where our EN’s front office is located—are quiet, and our DN is running strong.

PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE: HOW TO ENTER THE HYPNAGOGIC STATE

— Clear the room of clutter and distractions.

—Have pen and paper, voice recorder, your phone on airplane mode and set to take notes, or . . .

—Dim the lights (or wear an eye mask).

—Ensure you’re in a quiet place, or that only white noise is audible.

—Don’t get too comfortable—no wearing pyjamas or getting in bed

—Try to find time at midday, or right after you’ve eaten, when you’re just the right amount of tired.

—Set your alarm for ten to fifteen minutes.

—Take a moment to focus your brain on the problem, and then let it go. Relax and drift off.

As anyone who zones out all the time can testify, simply taking a break will not lead to inspiration: To stoke creativity, you need to perform tasks that allow your mind to wander.

After an “unusual uses” creativity test (“How many things can you do with a hanger?”) students were given a 12-minute break. One group simply rested; one did an easy, mindless task; one did a demanding memory game; and one group took no break.

When the participants reconvened and retook the creativity test, the “mindless task” group performed an average of 41% better. By contrast, participants in the other three groups showed no improvement.

Interestingly, this was only the case for problems that were already being mentally chewed on; doing a mindless task didn’t seem to lead to a general increase in creative problem-solving ability. This makes sense: Our executive has to have set a clear goal for our geniuses in order for them to be productive.

“So what’s the single best mindless activity I can do?” our clients often ask us. If we had to choose one single mindless activity, it would be walking.

In a recent study, participants walking indoors on a treadmill facing a blank wall or walking outdoors in the fresh air produced twice as many creative responses compared to those who were sitting down.

“I thought walking outside would blow everything out of the water,” said the lead researcher, “but walking on a treadmill in a small, boring room still had strong results.” The study also found that creative juices continued to flow even when a person sat back down shortly after a walk. “We know walking meetings promote creativity, but walking before a meeting may be nearly as useful.”

From a cognitive angle, walking demands just the right amount of focus from our executive, without asking too much. Walking is a very complex task: We are taking in constant input from our feet, legs, hips, arms, and, of course, our inner ears, the heart of our balance gyroscope. But our brains are experts at this task. Through long familiarity, the executive can do all this with very little energy.

From a physical angle, walking stimulates your brain. Increased blood flow causes a cascade of wonderful changes in the brain, including the release of brain-

Derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) and other growth factors. BDNF promotes the birth of new neutrons and the formation of new synapses, and it also strengthens existing synapses.

Open offices have strong detractors as well as proponents, but with their few inner walls and rolling tables, they’re at least walker friendly. In fact, according to research out of Stanford, the most important thing these open spaces offer to creativity is the ability to walk. Doing so increased a person’s creative output by 60%, the study found.

Charles Darwin famously had a quarter-mile-long walking path called the Sandwalk that was his place to go and think when working on a problem. “So important was walking to his thought processes that Darwin sometimes described a problem he was working on in terms of the number of turns around his path he would need to solve it.”

Mason Currey, after studying the habits of nearly 200 of the world’s most prolific inventors and innovators over the ages, found that the single common habit of these great inventors and innovators was walking. As Currey reports, Charles Dickens famously took 3-hour walks every afternoon—and what he observed on them fed directly into his writing.

Tchaikovsky made do with a 2-hour walk, but wouldn’t return a minute early, convinced that cheating himself of the full 120 minutes would make him ill. Beethoven took lengthy strolls after lunch, carrying a pencil and paper with him in case inspiration struck.

Soren Kierkegaard is quoted as saying “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” He is also reported to have often rushed back to his desk and resumed writing, still wearing his hat and carrying his walking stick or umbrella.

Walking, when used for mind-wandering, works well in quiet, peaceful places; less well when you have to be aware of cars, traffic lights, joggers, and so forth, because your executive mode has to stay active. Whether to meander or to walk with purpose is up to you: Judah is comfortable walking aimlessly, but Olivia needs a route and a destination.

Here’s the thing: you don’t just take a walk and magically have a breakthrough. Walking is a wonderful way to set the conditions, but there is more to it than simply meandering along. Putting it into practice involves multiple steps, including defining your problem—the act of verbalizing what you’re looking for can get you started on finding the answer—and setting a goal. You’ll also need to carry a notebook so you always have a way to record your thoughts. And then there are the more unexpected techniques: Keep something in your hand. A coin, a stone, a paperclip, a Star Wars figurine—we won’t judge. Our hands send massive amounts of information to our brains, and keeping those channels open keeps our brains in a more associate state. Adam Cheyer of Apple always keeps a Rubik’s Cube on his desk to play with while thinking.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. . . . That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Henry Ford driving his Quadricycle, 1896 Photograph by Apic—Getty Images 

What Steve Jobs is describing is called “associative thinking,” and is essential for breakthrough thinking. Too often, we make the mistake of assuming breakthroughs are freestanding ideas, something never thought of before by anyone in any context. The truth is that almost every breakthrough is a combination of ideas that already existed

Henry Ford’s breakthrough of the assembly line came when he made an association between the Chicago meatpacking industry’s use of mechanized hooks and bakeries’ use of industrial conveyer belts. He put the two together, applied them to the building of the automobile, and the assembly line was born.

A breakthrough in gun accuracy came when gunmakers looked to the bow and arrow. The feathers on the back of arrows cause the arrow to spin, and the spin makes the arrow fly straight. In the same way, a football flies straight when thrown in a spiral. To make their bullets spin, gunmakers carved spirals inside their gun barrels. Accuracy increased fivefold. Because putting feathers on arrows was called rifling, these guns became known as rifles.

One of Thomas Edison’s least successful inventions was the electric pen, patented in 1876, to help make copies. People just weren’t that into it. In 1891, a tattoo artist named Samuel O’Reilly saw the pen and had a breakthrough. He invented the modern tattooing machine. Instead of ink writing language on paper, he applied ink to skin to create images.

He saw how to substitute it for what he was using. And when the Southern Pacific Railroad built a series of microwave towers to facilitate an intercontinental network of telecommunications, they were just focused on improving their trains’ efficiency. But this also became the foundation for the telecom company Sprint (Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications). The new use in this case became the breakthrough.

"Desamarrando" Um Album - O Negócio De Lançar "Single Songs"

Unbundling the Album: A Business Case for Releasing Single Songs

First of all thanks to Frank Woolworth for this article.

There are many examples of the benefits of working in harmony with nature. When first venturing out beyond home a child is taught to walk with traffic. A carpenter achieves a cleaner result by going with the grain rather than against it. In sports a team succeeds by taking advantage of what the defense gives them, and there are countless other examples that express why it is better to work with the flow rather than push against it.  For the past ten years the recorded music industry has ignored this strategy, and stubbornly clung to a business model that is no longer in harmony with they way people consume music by predominantly releasing albums in a single song economy.

According to Nielsen Soundscan, in 2011 there were 1.374 billion digital transactions last year. Of those only 103 million or 7.5 % were for albums. This means that approximately 1 out of 14 times a consumer went to buy music online last year they were purchased an album. First with Napster and MP3s, then iTunes and the iPod, and now with streaming services like Spotify and Turntable.fm–the music consumer has repeatedly demonstrated that they prefer single songs to albums. Despite this fact, nearly 77,000 albums were released last year.

Rather than change strategy to work with this reality, most people in the industry just complained that it wasn’t fair, and continued the status quo.  I believe there are several reasons for this.  The first reason is that labels believe they can make more money selling albums. The second, is that marketing and sales processes were built for the album system and that makes it difficult to change. The last reason is because artists believe they are supposed to make albums either as a musical statement or as validation of their professional status.

This essay will attempt to prove that all three of those reasons are not necessarily true, and that selling single songs can be better promotionally, artistically and financially for artists and labels.

Layout of the Song Based Release Strategy

There are three key rules to the successful execution of the song based release strategy.

1. Every song is given a reasonable amount of time to stand on its own.
2. Every song receives its own unique marketing plan.
3. No song is available before it is promoted.

After that there are limitless ways to release the music. An artist can release a song every week, every month, every day, or every third Monday. It doesn’t even have to be uniform.  It really doesn’t matter how the music is released, as long as the philosophy that every song is important in its own way is embraced.

Why this strategy works promotionally

Not only do consumers prefer music in a single format, but the outlets for music promotion are all focused on single songs as well.  Some of these formats are:

Radio: The bread and butter of radio is singles. Album Oriented Radio died when radio started hiring consultants in the 1970’s.

Blogs: Blog posts are usually about one or two songs.  The biggest aggregator of blogs, The Hype Machine, focuses on songs instead of albums.

Club Promotion: By definition the DJ at a club or bar will provide a steady mix of songs. It is quite the rarity to hear a whole album played in a club with the exception of a listening party.

Synchs for Commercials and TV: For reasons of time, cost, and artistic expression, individual songs are usually featured as synchs rather than albums.

Music Videos: Music videos are primarily made for one song. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are few and far between.

The two promotional avenues that focus on the whole album are preview streams, which have the drawback of lasting for only one or two weeks, and album reviews. Album reviews have come to mean less and less each year as newspapers and magazines cut space and syndicated their copy.  They have also lost their main purpose of previewing an album when consumers can decide for themselves whether they like an artists on streaming sites. The editor in chief of Spin Magazine recently cited that exact sentiment as justification for why Spin would be relegating the majority of their album reviews to 140-character tweets.

In addition to working in harmony with the promotion outlets currently available for music, there are several other benefits of the song-based release strategy in terms of marketing.

The first is always having new assets to promote to the media.  One thing that occurred because of the digital age is content has a much shorter shelf life. The Internet is a voracious beast and is always hungry for more content. Importance is placed on newness and exclusivity.  In a song-based system there is always something new to engage the media. If an album of songs is released you lose that newness factor when pitching for placement.

The second is that it creates a platform to consistently engage fans. In the current media landscape, attention is the most valuable commodity. By consistently releasing new material, an artist has an opportunity to engage their fans much more often than the year or more that commonly occurs between album releases.

The third is that it gives consumers a chance to know what they are buying.  This eliminates the feeling of betrayal or trickery when buying an album based on a single song and finding out the rest of the songs are either poor quality or just not their cup of tea. The best analogy I can use to explain this is the DVD compilation release of a TV show. Fans buy a DVD of a show after having seen the complete season. If DVDs of television series were marketed the way music albums were, a 12-episode season would have one show picked to be played on television repeatedly in the hopes that it would drive people to retail stores to purchase the whole series DVD. It is not an exact comparison, because of the variety of differences in how the two are monetized, but I still think it illustrates how bizarre the current album-marketing paradigm is.

Why this strategy works artistically

First, I want to be clear that this method doesn’t mean that an artist can’t create a full album of songs, or even a concept album. It only changes the order and format in which it is released. This results in the album not being fully experienced until all the songs are released and collected by a fan.  The baseline question that needs to be confronted when evaluating this method is “Is it absolutely necessary that the first time a fan hears my album is in its entirety?” If the answer is no, then a song based strategy can work artistically.

After that hurdle is cleared — and there should be very few bands that should answer the above question with a yes — there are several reasons why this method can lead to better artistic expression. First it forces artists to step up their game. This method puts every song on a pedestal or under a microscope. The temptation to phone it in on an “album track” is eliminated. It might be a little hyperbolic but I hope that it could usher in a new golden age of songwriting.

The next advantage is release flexibility and the opportunity to be timely. Presently, there are a number of obstacles to releasing a song about current events in the middle of an album cycle. No matter how relevant or great the song is, there is a tendency to not put full promotion behind it, because the song will not drive album sales. With the song based method there is greater flexibility to interrupt the release schedule with a timely or important song, because there is less financial disincentive.

The last advantage is counterintuitive in that it allows great albums to stand out. The true concept albums become something worth noting. If song based release strategy becomes the dominant model, and some group has another Sgt. Pepper or The Wall in them, then it will stand out. If they don’t, and have just another average album, then they will have given up their shot at sustained revenue.

Why this strategy works financially

This leads to the most important questions for whoever has invested in the music. Is the sustained revenue of singles equal to or greater than the lump sum of album shipments and sales? In terms of pure revenue from recorded music there is a relatively simple equation to determine how many singles an artist would need to sell to equal the money generated from the current combination of album shipments and individual track sales. This is:

((Album $ + Track $ ) / # Tracks ) /Single Wholesale =  Average Sales Per Track

Using hypothetical sales figures it would look like this:

Traditional album release A

10-track album

50,000 albums   x $6.50 wholesale = $325,000

200,000 tracks x $.70 wholesale = $140,000

(($325,000 + $140,000 ) /10 ) /$.70 = 66,428 average sales per track

Traditional album release B

12-track album

1000 albums x $6.50 wholesale cost = $6,500

13,000 tracks x. $70 wholesale cost =  $9,100

(($6,500 + $9,100) / 12) /$.70 = 1,857 average sales per track

After doing this initial equation for either previous or projected album sales the next step is to look at how the track sales were divided on previous releases to determine the possibility of meeting or exceeding the target average sales per track. As this is a subjective process there is no exact mathematical formula that will work every time, but I have two formulas that will give a rough idea of how a release will fare with this strategy.

Formula 1

(Sales of the promoted singles + average of all other singles) / promoted singles + 1

If that number is greater than the average sales per track needed, then a singles based release strategy is probably a safe bet.

Formula 2 (which is really not a formula and only for veteran artists)

Average first two week albums sales = core audience.

If the average of first two weeks of all an artist’s album sales is greater than the average sales per track needed then a singles based release strategy is likely worth pursuing. This method does not work for artists with one album that experienced great success after a slow build ala Mumford and Sons.

If, after running the numbers, it is still not clear what release strategy is best, there are two other financial incentives to the song based release strategy to consider. First it eliminates the phenomenon of putting all your eggs in one basket and in turn spreads out risk when developing an artist. In this case the basket is the single.

There is nothing worse than the process of picking a single. In my experience it is usually a bunch of music executives sitting in a conference room listening to two or three tracks with their most intense faces, maybe with a couple of head bobs to let you know that they really feel the music.  It is very funny to watch people try to indicate that their sense of hearing is working.

Then comes the debate. There is a discussion of what is currently on the radio and how the potential songs fits in with rest of the music landscape. There is sometimes research brought in to show what test audiences have thought of the songs.  After that it is gut feel and a bit of magic to reach consensus and a single is picked. That is it. A half hour in a conference room determines the trajectory of an entire album campaign in both focus and budget allocation.

If that single doesn’t work it doesn’t matter how many people would have liked the other songs the artist created: they will never get exposure, because of a lack of marketing funds. The majority of the budget was devoted to creating awareness for that one single, and this does not seem like a very efficient use of resources.

The second benefit is for business arrangements where there are income streams that are not directly related to recorded music, namely touring. One of the big issues that bands have is making sure there is something new to promote around a tour. Song-based release strategy makes it possible to always have something new for fans and to either be considered for tour packages or have a story for promoters. By spreading out the release of new material, the artist will increase the demand for their other revenue streams.

The last benefit is better management of manufacturing expenditures. For labels, one of the toughest costs to predict is the amount of physical albums to manufacture and ship. For developing artists, manufacturing their first run of CDs will usually cost several thousand dollars. The song-based release strategy helps determine what the demand is for the project and consequently physical product.

Conclusion

This article shows that a song based release strategy has promotional and artistic benefits, and that it is feasible financially. There are many factors for why certain artists or albums succeed and others fail. The release strategy is just one of those factors and will never be fully responsible for either the success or failure of an artist. There will be times when it won’t work out, but the album release system doesn’t always work either. Nothing works all the time, and nothing is the perfect solution for every situation. The premise was that it can work, and I believe this shows how it can. Of course, this can never truly be proven until artists and labels take the plunge and start releasing their music as individual songs. I hope they take that chance.

Common arguments against this theory and my responses

When writing this essay I floated the concept out to many people both in and out of the music industry. I received several common responses:

1. This will never make enough money if music moves to streaming as a dominant listening habit:  If streaming makes no money, then whether music is released as an album or as individual songs will be irrelevant. At that point other revenue streams become more important, and I would argue that the ancillary benefits of always having something new to promote and to engage an artists fans still makes the song based release strategy the more attractive option.

2. It is easier to record as an album: Agreed, but his strategy does not preclude an artist from recording a whole album at once, which I know is a much more efficient and cost effective way of creating music. It is focused on how that music is released after it is recorded.

2a. But what if all the tracks leak?: This is definitely the weak point of the strategy. A leak is much more detrimental to song based released system as it effectively destroys the advantages of letting each song stand on its own, and the newness quality when promoting. The only counter I have is that music most commonly leaks when it is submitted for manufacturing. As manufacturing is delayed or eliminated in this model, perhaps it would curtail the practice of music leaks. I am not certain of that though, and it is a risk.

3. This would kill record stores: There are many factors at work in the decline of physical music retail. Song based release strategy is meant to work in harmony with the existing trends, it did not initiate them.  The one positive is that after a little while record stores would have a lot more data available to gauge demand. There are many instances of something that was available online first finding a successful second life in music retail for latecomers to the band. Radiohead’s album, In Rainbows, is the best example. After the pay what you want experiment the band released it in stores and still had a #1 album. This method could ensure that only the albums with the most demand are in stores eliminating the phenomenon of shipping platinum and returning gold.

4. This won’t work if you want to go to radio: The question that needs to be answered here is whether the network effects of radio play of one or two songs will result in enough artist affinity to drive sales of the non-radio singles. When coupled with the other promotional methods for those songs, I think they will. The other possible benefit of this method would be that radio might go back to playing a diverse group of songs, as singles will no longer be dictated to them. Every song is promoted, and radio can once act as a filter instead of a megaphone.

Information that could make this article better

There are several pieces of information I do not possess that would make this article better. These are:

Exact sales numbers: With the Soundscan artist history (including track sales) of a large sample of artists I can run the formulas to see if there are trends between album releases and single sales.

My ideal major artist data subset would consist of a complete artist history including track sales for a selection of artists across a variety of genres.

Katy Perry
Black Eyed Peas
Kanye West
Little Wayne
Adele
Norah Jones
Mac Miller
Jon Lajoie
Zac Brown Band
Jason Aldean
Foster the People
Civil Wars
Train
Hinder
Disturbed
Pearl Jam
The Rolling Stones

Albums vs. Singles revenue from Tunecore: With this information it would be possible to go beyond the Soundscan data and look at the trends of independent artists.

Album streams vs. single song streams from Spotify, Mog, RDIO or Rhapsody: With this information I would be able to determine if listening habits change from singles to albums when streaming. Anecdotally I don’t think they will, but I do not have empirical evidence of that.

A case study – An artist who has released their album as a selection of individually promoted songs is the best way to prove the theory works.

Efeitos Sonoros É Uma Disciplina Criativa - Uma Entrevista Com Pete Malkin

Sound Design is a Creative Discipline: An Interview with Pete Malkin

Pete Malkin is a sound designer whose most recent productions include the huge hit Harry Potter: and the Cursed Child and Complicite’s award-winning The Encounter, in which audience members are immersed into an innovative soundscape, watching the stage-action whilst wearing headphones. leoemercer talks to him about being a sound designer today.

What does being a sound designer involve?

I’m freelance, so one week I might be in rehearsals for a show, then the next week I might go into technical rehearsals. In the last show [Harry Potter: and the Cursed Child], we were in tech for around 4 weeks, but normally it’s closer to just one.

I tend to be drawn to the collaborative side of sound design: going into the rehearsal room with the rest of the company – actors, the creative team – and through working with them, get ideas, give ideas. For example, when working with a company like Complicite, this means being present throughout the entire rehearsal period, being part of the creation process of a new piece of work, and although this doesn’t happen with all theatre companies, it’s useful to come into the process as early as possible, even if it’s to start creative discussions with the rest of the team.

During the rehearsal period, depending on the show, I’ll usually enter with a palette of fairly generic sounds and musical ideas based on initial discussions with the director, they may or may not get used in the show, but it’s good to have a starting point. As we go through rehearsals, I’ll try playing these sounds along with the text or action, and once structures start to form, refine those ideas, whilst also responding to what’s happening in the room. I have a notepad with this quote on the cover: ‘a writer should write with his eyes, and a painter should paint with his ears’. It’s a good reminder to keep all my senses open to inspiration.

How did you get into sound design?

I started out with an interest in music, playing guitar in a band, and then went on to study Music Technology at college. After that, I studied Theatre Sound at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. In my final year I was lucky enough to have a placement with Gareth Fry. I’d emailed him to ask if I could observe his working process, and he happened to be starting rehearsals for a new Complicite show. That placement and the experience of working with the Collaborative and Devised Acting students at Central led me down my current path.

Gareth seems to be pretty big in the world of sound design. What makes him so notable?

He’s very collaborative and has a huge amount of experience in all sorts of theatre and non-theatre too, performances, exhibitions, events, film, you name it. For example he recently sound designed the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A. He’s also extremely kind, and happy to give advice and share his experiences with other designers.

Also – and this is true of many designers, such as Tom Gibbons – he has a close working relationship with directors. Gareth has worked with Simon McBurney [actor, director, and the founder of Complicite] for many years now, so understands what he expects in the rehearsal room, and how Simon likes to work with sound. The same goes for Katie Mitchell [a director whose work is notable for her experiments with technology]. The trust between them is key to allowing the sound designer enough freedom to explore different elements in the production, whilst keeping the director’s vision in focus.

What are you exploring as a sound designer – what technologies do you use, what questions do you ask?

My next production is The Tempest at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Phyllida Lloyd. She’s already directed two Shakespeare plays set in a women’s prison, and this will be the third. We’re unlikely to just have thunderstorm sound effects – we’re not in a naturalistic ship to start with. Instead, perhaps we’ll experiment with the elements that are part of a prison to allow the actors to create soundscapes themselves.

I do find it interesting to use different technologies in different productions: this one will look at the actor-interaction with sound. They are telling the story in their habitat: the prison. So they have what they have in a prison: basic microphones that will probably look really battered and bruised, and we’ll try to turn them into a theatrical presence over the course of the show, maybe becoming more magical as the story progresses, forgetting that it’s a technical element. Technology-wise, something like The Encounter works well because you’re not thinking about the technical aspect of wearing headphones after a while: it’s not a gimmick, it’s there because it’s the best way to tell that story. I think a good approach to bringing certain technology into a piece is not to ask what technical element can I force into this story. Instead, it’s about listening to that story and trying to find the best way to tell it – that could end up being highly technical, or not.

Do you have an internal catalogue of things you’re secretly excited about using?

Basic things include: sound effects, ambiences, drones, music. I love to create Soundscapes and unique sound effects by layering these elements together, it can give a sound more meaning. For example, the simple sound of a door closing can quickly transport you to a new location, layer this with a café bell, a reloading of a gun, a snare drum, they all give the audience a different context for the new location very quickly. It’s a simple tool, but a dynamic microphone (SM58 or similar) on a stand can change the way an audience hears text, they’re great for making quick voice over recordings on stage or adding vocal effects. In Beware of Pity, the actors all wear radio mics, so we can control the mix of their voices with the sound/music. But at times we used stand mics to help create the effect of listening to the internal monologue of the main character. We use them for vocal effects too, telephone voices, pitching up and down live, in fact, one character doesn’t speak with her own voice until the end of the piece, she is miming her dialogue, which is provided by a second actress on a pitched up mic.

Are there any notable new developments you can see happening in sound design?

Outside of theatre, there’s a lot of interest in VR (virtual-reality) for sound designers, in gaming especially. I’m interested to see how VR might be able to integrate into theatre. How might audience members react to wearing a headset and headphones, being isolated as such? There have been a lot of successful theatre shows using headphones now, and it offers a way for an isolating technology to be used in a large group, which seems to work.

I used an Oculus Rift for the first time a few weeks ago, and there’s so much exciting potential for sound tied in with visuals here. I played on a flight simulator game, and just looking out the window was creepy to me, it’s an amazing experience: your brain seems to react in the way it would if you were really in that position. The audio helps with that: it follows you around in the situation and so helps to immerse you in that world. In theatre you have to cue a lot of events live; sound, lighting, video, automation etc. And although it does happen occasionally, it’s very difficult to record a stable 45 minutes of cues and let it run on it’s own. You would usually make sure an operator has the ability to respond to the live nature of a theatre show: go a bit slower/faster here depending on how the actors are performing on the night, go with a visual movement, it’s all very live. I’m not sure there is technology that allows such a live response in the VR world yet – perhaps it’s a crossover into gaming technology, which could be interesting.

You’ve designed for both operas and theatre productions. Is there a difference between the two?

My first opera was as Associate Sound on Complicite’s Magic Flute, working with Gareth. I soon learnt that opera and theatre are very different: in terms of the sonic world, the conductor usually leads everything that is heard, whether that’s an instrument/voice or anything else. In rehearsals, with Complicite I’ll usually offer sounds that could work with the action on stage during rehearsals. You have to be particularly sensitive to the music in order to work with the conductor’s interests in mind, so had to be cautious with this. It’s another relationship to have, similar to the director. For an opera, there’s a lot of dialogue in The Magic Flute, so we used sound effects and atmospheres with those scenes – the challenge was transitioning from those into the music without it jarring. We did some quite cool stuff with a live Foley Artist (Tom Espiner originally and, more recently, Ruth Sullivan): we spent 2 months in Amsterdam creating that show, and every time it’s been on tour (it was at the ENOearlier this year) it’s had to change and develop, it’s been sung in a few different languages, with different casts.

I also sound designed a new opera with Annabel Arden as Director, who is a co-founder of Complicite. The composer wrote sounds into the score, things like ‘footsteps’, ‘sawing of wood’ etc, and that was interesting. They were part of the music and there was a very open approach to trying to find interesting sounds that worked with it.

How do you make a new sound?

There are lots of different ways and everyone has their own approach: you could record specific props, locations, vehicles or even actors and layer them with other sounds. Sometimes we use sound effect libraries – and there are some really great independent companies coming out with all sorts of libraries. Depending on the sound, for me it’s usually a process of re-sampling sounds, layering up those initial pieces of audio, reversing them, slowing them down, until you have a whole new set of sounds and can layer them with other sounds again. I tend to create a lot in the rehearsal room because scenes are constantly changing – the sound effect you made yesterday may not work today because a scene has been reworked, and that’s great. The show is growing and so you’ll react to that. In comparison to film, our process from start to end is short, normally a 6-week process. Recording specific sound effects can be tough in that time, especially with the constant evolution of scenes, so you have to be quick at using your library of sound effects and be able to quickly record them too, manipulating and integrating them to work in context.

Finally, how do you feel about the recent retraction of the Tony award for sound design?

I feel it’s simply a step backwards for the recognition of sound design as a creative discipline. There’ve been people who consider sound as a purely technical craft. Sound design is, and has to be, an immensely technical role, but when you’re amongst it everyday, and see so many different aspects of it, it’s very clear that it’s an art form in itself. It’s ultimately a collaborative process, the experimentation it allows, the emotive and imaginative experience it can give to an audience, makes it difficult for me to call it anything other than an art form. Sound designers have been part of core creative teams working closely with Directors for years, though there’s definitely less recognition of sound design in comparison to other creative elements in theatre, all deserving of their own recognition of course, it’s often completely overlooked.

It’s rumoured that the Tony award was dropped due to a lack of understanding of how sound design works. Abe Jacob said in an interview, “You don’t have to know how stitches are done on a costume or what color gel the lighting designer has used or how many nails went into the piece of scenery, but that’s still design”. Understanding the intricacies of sound design isn’t essential to enjoying its contribution to a show.

Could The Encounter change this, by putting sound at the forefront?

Hopefully. It allows your imagination to supply a sense of the world the story is in, through the soundscapes that Simon and our operators build during the show. It’s going to New York later this year and if anything, it would be great if it opens up more conversations about the important contribution sound designers make in theatre, especially that which the amazing sound designers working on Broadway shows deserve recognition for.

leoemercer

For more information about Pete Malkin’s work, please visit his website.

Documentário Sobre Eric Clapton Nos Cinemas E Na TV

Eric Clapton Doc Set for Theatrical, TV Debut

Eric Clapton is getting the documentary treatment. Showtime Documentary Films has boarded Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars, described as an unflinching and deeply personal journey into the life of the legendary musician. Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, the doc will screen at domestic and international film festivals later this year, and be released theatrically in the U.S. and Canada this fall. It will then air nationally on Showtime in 2018. John Battsek is producing for Passion Pictures. Chris King is editing the doc.

A Life in 12 Bars zooms in on the life and legacy of the 18-time Grammy winner and the only artist ever to be inducted three times into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It charts his roots from a traumatic childhood through his difficult struggle with drugs and alcohol and the tragic loss of his son, and contextualizes Clapton’s role in contemporary music and cultural history. It also features archival materials like classic performance clips, on- and off-stage footage, iconic photos, concert posters, handwritten letters, drawings and personal diary entries, as well as extensive interviews with Clapton himself and his family, friends, musical collaborators, contemporaries and heroes, including late music icons B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and George Harrison.

"Clapton’s music is the foundation of our film -- his commitment to the Blues, its traditions and originators is absolute from his earliest days,” says director Lili Fini Zanuck. "His personal life conveys the emotional spine of the film -- his damaged emotional psyche threads throughout his life, informing his art, and causing many abrupt and surprising shifts along the way. The film traces all the key junctures: his prodigious talent, obsessive impatience, perfectionism and musical 'mission.' Mining inner strength and spiritual resolve, he somehow maintains sobriety, finding healing in music. He reflects on his newfound domestic happiness and a magical, meteoric journey which has secured his place in the rock pantheon. Despite the fact that his path is strewn with tragedies, addiction and loss, he never fails to regain his bearings and continue to serve what he holds dearest: his music."