Inaugural Season Technical Direction, Sound Design, Additional Music + Executive Producer
After over twenty years in the theater as a sound designer and composer, Ms. Shaw is excited to be exploring the world of scripted audio drama. Other projects include Faith, Hope, and Charity adapted as a radio play by Peter Hackett. Theatrical work in New York includes designs at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, Mint Theater, Theatre for a New Audience, National Black Theatre, Repertorio Español, New York Theatre Workshop, Cherry Lane, and the COOP. Regional work includes projects with Hartford Stage, ART, Old Globe, Mark Taper Forum, Two River Theater, Asolo, Williamstown Theatre Festival, ACT, and Northern Stage. Awards: Drama Desk, Connecticut Critics Circle, Henry Award, Bessie Award, Meet the Composer Grant, NEA-TCG Career Development Grant recipient, nominations for Lortel and Elliot Norton awards. Member: USA 829, TSDCA (Theatrical Sound Designers and Composers Association). Training: Harvard University, Yale School of Drama. Ms. Shaw was born and raised in Kansas and lives in Brooklyn.
Interview w Jane Shaw
So the first question is: who are you and what do you do?
My name is Jane Shaw, and I'm a sound designer. Normally I design for theater with a live audience, but the pandemic gave me the opportunity to explore audio drama.
Global tragedy notwithstanding, this presents actually some amazing opportunities for sound people. I feel like this skill set is suddenly really in demand.
Oh yeah, no question. In someways we were luckier than our fellow visual designers - we had opportunities to design digital online productions, audio dramas, and podcasts. There was a steep learning curve.
Totally, as a performer, I'm still adjusting to the mic because I'm used to having to self-amplify. So it's a different kind of energy when you've got this mic right here in front of your mouth, you know, if there's too much energy.
These projects were definitely a silver lining of the pandemic. It was fun to be the lone design collaborator! (Although I did miss my fellow design collaborators.)
Could you describe a little bit of the process of working on this podcast? I'm curious to know what it was like on the non-acting side of the table.
We started from the technical side: where is everybody, and what kind of microphone and recording location do they have/need? I really want to give a big thank-you to the actors for their patience and willingness to work with us to get the best sound recording. It was not only whether or not the mic worked, but also what was the right space to record in, and you know, things like, “What's that weird sound? Can we close that door?"
Our process was a mix of listening thru a site called Clean Feed and recording locally. The actors were so patient with the tech. After recording locally, the file takes space on their computer and they have to remember to upload them so I can access each take. The local recording gave us significantly better quality than a recording that's been squished by the internet - which apparently has no consideration for the timbre of a human voice.
So here's another question for you since we were all women, I've been reading a lot about how microphones and sonic equipment are really designed to pick up resonance based things we know about male voices. So with this cast of all females, were there challenges with mixing or things that you had to do later to kind of correct the balance?
Oh, yeah. There was a whole array of microphones involved.
What kind of mic would you recommend for women?
Well there are so many. The Rode NT1 is lovely. We sent out the ATR 2500, a USB mic, which I also like.
Voices are different. It’s hard to make a recommendation. But there are audio stores where you can go in and listen to what you sound like on the different mics. B & H, Dale Pro Audio, and Guitar Center offer these services.
Maybe when the pandemic is over.
Ha, yes. I hesitate to say definitively this one is the best for women because maybe this person's voice is kind of low in the middle, or if somebody has a high, light voice, maybe a different mic would sound better. [For Herstory], people came in with such different characters, too, which might be served by different mics. Actually what was trickier to match was where people were -- not just their volume, but their room tone.
Noise is a big deal. There are various “clean-up” softwares you can use to get rid of noise, but when it happens during a word, it can be tricky. There is one really great performance that still has a little touch of a motorcycle – it was such a good take we ended up moving forward with it!
During the edit I often had, say, 20 takes, and we had to decide not only what was the best take, but what's the best take within the scene with all these other people talking. It's a bit of a puzzle. The CleanFeed technology allowed the actors to have an experience performing the scene [over Zoom] rather than it being me and the actor recording their lines in isolation.
I did have some people say, Oh, I'm going to just call you. It's just going to be the two of us and I'll do all my lines. That's not how we did it. We got everybody together and recorded over three weekends.
The next step was to put the best takes in the right order.
How long was that process? And for how much of the podcast?
I spent a lot of time on it! We finished recording on January 21st, and by February 19th -- basically a month -- I had done all the dialogue edits for episodes one through eight.
Then there was a round of revisions and a few pickups -- moments we re-recorded. At this point we are listening to just dialogue - no sound effects, no music. We then spent another month doing the first round of music and sound for each episode. In early April we had a great series of meetings. People can email notes, and obviously they had given me notes on that first pass over email which I had addressed. Maybe it's because I'm a theater artist, but I like to listen to the stuff together and then talk about it. I think it's useful because we're all listening to the material in more or less the same mental space, and can then riff off of each other's responses. This took about a week of daily meetings.
Life happened -- and I got sucked into another project. Finally in May and June we did another round of the music and sound versions, and then it went to a Josh Horvath, who works with our director Donya at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to do the mastering.
Wow.
It's a lot of steps after those initial January recording sessions!
That’s so different from what my understanding of what sound designers do in a theater.
Exactly. It's all fascinating to me! But no, it's not what I was accustomed to doing for the previous 20 years of my life as a sound designer.
What has been the meat and potatoes of your career before this year?
When I first got to New York City, I worked with Big Dance Theater. Most of my work recently has been regional plays in theaters like Cleveland Play House, Asolo Rep, the Old Globe, and the Guthrie.
All right. This is awesome. So now let’s get a little political, since this is a political podcast and we are at this crazy inflection point in our culture. As someone who is working in the theater today, what is something practical thing that you could see the theater world implementing that would move the needle towards empowering the labor end?
I thought you're going somewhere else with that question! I thought you were heading towards the fact that all of this digital or online work makes theater accessible to so many people, who either can't leave their homes, can't get to the theater, or the theater is not in their budget. And I think that's really good.
I think having intimacy directors everywhere in the theater is essential, especially after 18 months of no one touching anybody. It seems to me that the next few generations have a different set of values and accepted norms. There’s confusion and people are upset, and I think that intimacy directors are going to play a really great role in trying to ease all that tension.
I also think there needs to be someone in the room to make sure no actor or single person has to bear being called upon to explain to others the weight of being who they are in the space, or the weight of explaining an entire culture's experience to everyone else in the room.
I wonder if we need some generational round tables. Young leaders in the theater could meet with older leaders and hear, “This is how it was for me.” Or “This is why your drama teacher probably said this to you.”
Are there any projects that you want to plug, or something upcoming that you want to talk about?
I'm working on Bedlam Theater’s production of Persuasion in September. At first I was asking -- Why do an Austen piece coming out of this pandemic? After spending time with the script and the story, I've realized that Anne Elliot gets a second chance, and it comes out of nowhere. She has a failed romance, and has no expectations of meeting her beau Wentworth again. But she's given a second chance! That's what we've been given, as an industry: a second chance.
My name is Jane Shaw, and I'm a sound designer. Normally I design for theater with a live audience, but the pandemic gave me the opportunity to explore audio drama.
Global tragedy notwithstanding, this presents actually some amazing opportunities for sound people. I feel like this skill set is suddenly really in demand.
Oh yeah, no question. In someways we were luckier than our fellow visual designers - we had opportunities to design digital online productions, audio dramas, and podcasts. There was a steep learning curve.
Totally, as a performer, I'm still adjusting to the mic because I'm used to having to self-amplify. So it's a different kind of energy when you've got this mic right here in front of your mouth, you know, if there's too much energy.
These projects were definitely a silver lining of the pandemic. It was fun to be the lone design collaborator! (Although I did miss my fellow design collaborators.)
Could you describe a little bit of the process of working on this podcast? I'm curious to know what it was like on the non-acting side of the table.
We started from the technical side: where is everybody, and what kind of microphone and recording location do they have/need? I really want to give a big thank-you to the actors for their patience and willingness to work with us to get the best sound recording. It was not only whether or not the mic worked, but also what was the right space to record in, and you know, things like, “What's that weird sound? Can we close that door?"
Our process was a mix of listening thru a site called Clean Feed and recording locally. The actors were so patient with the tech. After recording locally, the file takes space on their computer and they have to remember to upload them so I can access each take. The local recording gave us significantly better quality than a recording that's been squished by the internet - which apparently has no consideration for the timbre of a human voice.
So here's another question for you since we were all women, I've been reading a lot about how microphones and sonic equipment are really designed to pick up resonance based things we know about male voices. So with this cast of all females, were there challenges with mixing or things that you had to do later to kind of correct the balance?
Oh, yeah. There was a whole array of microphones involved.
What kind of mic would you recommend for women?
Well there are so many. The Rode NT1 is lovely. We sent out the ATR 2500, a USB mic, which I also like.
Voices are different. It’s hard to make a recommendation. But there are audio stores where you can go in and listen to what you sound like on the different mics. B & H, Dale Pro Audio, and Guitar Center offer these services.
Maybe when the pandemic is over.
Ha, yes. I hesitate to say definitively this one is the best for women because maybe this person's voice is kind of low in the middle, or if somebody has a high, light voice, maybe a different mic would sound better. [For Herstory], people came in with such different characters, too, which might be served by different mics. Actually what was trickier to match was where people were -- not just their volume, but their room tone.
Noise is a big deal. There are various “clean-up” softwares you can use to get rid of noise, but when it happens during a word, it can be tricky. There is one really great performance that still has a little touch of a motorcycle – it was such a good take we ended up moving forward with it!
During the edit I often had, say, 20 takes, and we had to decide not only what was the best take, but what's the best take within the scene with all these other people talking. It's a bit of a puzzle. The CleanFeed technology allowed the actors to have an experience performing the scene [over Zoom] rather than it being me and the actor recording their lines in isolation.
I did have some people say, Oh, I'm going to just call you. It's just going to be the two of us and I'll do all my lines. That's not how we did it. We got everybody together and recorded over three weekends.
The next step was to put the best takes in the right order.
How long was that process? And for how much of the podcast?
I spent a lot of time on it! We finished recording on January 21st, and by February 19th -- basically a month -- I had done all the dialogue edits for episodes one through eight.
Then there was a round of revisions and a few pickups -- moments we re-recorded. At this point we are listening to just dialogue - no sound effects, no music. We then spent another month doing the first round of music and sound for each episode. In early April we had a great series of meetings. People can email notes, and obviously they had given me notes on that first pass over email which I had addressed. Maybe it's because I'm a theater artist, but I like to listen to the stuff together and then talk about it. I think it's useful because we're all listening to the material in more or less the same mental space, and can then riff off of each other's responses. This took about a week of daily meetings.
Life happened -- and I got sucked into another project. Finally in May and June we did another round of the music and sound versions, and then it went to a Josh Horvath, who works with our director Donya at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to do the mastering.
Wow.
It's a lot of steps after those initial January recording sessions!
That’s so different from what my understanding of what sound designers do in a theater.
Exactly. It's all fascinating to me! But no, it's not what I was accustomed to doing for the previous 20 years of my life as a sound designer.
What has been the meat and potatoes of your career before this year?
When I first got to New York City, I worked with Big Dance Theater. Most of my work recently has been regional plays in theaters like Cleveland Play House, Asolo Rep, the Old Globe, and the Guthrie.
All right. This is awesome. So now let’s get a little political, since this is a political podcast and we are at this crazy inflection point in our culture. As someone who is working in the theater today, what is something practical thing that you could see the theater world implementing that would move the needle towards empowering the labor end?
I thought you're going somewhere else with that question! I thought you were heading towards the fact that all of this digital or online work makes theater accessible to so many people, who either can't leave their homes, can't get to the theater, or the theater is not in their budget. And I think that's really good.
I think having intimacy directors everywhere in the theater is essential, especially after 18 months of no one touching anybody. It seems to me that the next few generations have a different set of values and accepted norms. There’s confusion and people are upset, and I think that intimacy directors are going to play a really great role in trying to ease all that tension.
I also think there needs to be someone in the room to make sure no actor or single person has to bear being called upon to explain to others the weight of being who they are in the space, or the weight of explaining an entire culture's experience to everyone else in the room.
I wonder if we need some generational round tables. Young leaders in the theater could meet with older leaders and hear, “This is how it was for me.” Or “This is why your drama teacher probably said this to you.”
Are there any projects that you want to plug, or something upcoming that you want to talk about?
I'm working on Bedlam Theater’s production of Persuasion in September. At first I was asking -- Why do an Austen piece coming out of this pandemic? After spending time with the script and the story, I've realized that Anne Elliot gets a second chance, and it comes out of nowhere. She has a failed romance, and has no expectations of meeting her beau Wentworth again. But she's given a second chance! That's what we've been given, as an industry: a second chance.
This interview was conducted by Kyra Miller, 2021.
* This interview has been edited for clarity and cohesion.
* This interview has been edited for clarity and cohesion.
