Room Tone
As I understand it, when you are collaborating on producing sound for moving images, it is important to record what is called ‘presence’ or ‘room tone’. Once the actors have delivered their lines, the set is cleared of its human inhabitants and the microphone is set to work recording the ‘silent’ atmosphere of the studio or the external location. The room tone recording can then be used in the soundtrack as a plausible underlay for any dialogue that needs to be re-recorded in the soft padded confines of a sound-proofed booth. Without this underlay, the voices – and more specifically, the gaps between them – would take on a strange interiority, as if they were heard inside the head rather than spoken in any real world environment with all its acoustic foibles.
I visited the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery on a day it was closed to the public armed with various microphones. I wanted to record the room tone in the galleries I had identified as potential places to direct the headphone listener of “Noli Me Tangere”. I had in mind the idea that if I relayed the recorded sound of the empty rooms back to the listener who was walking through them, I could give them the reassurance of a certain presence. This would allow me the freedom to leave gaps between sounds without these being perceived as awkward and to play with juxtapositions that contrasted what was heard and what was seen.
As a way of connecting the two spaces – the real, live museum through which the visitor was navigating and the virtual space assembled in software and then delivered through the headphones – I’m thinking about allowing the listener just half a headphone (one speaker for only one of the two ears) or limiting the playback volume or the insulation in the earpiece. Using such strategies might ensure that external events bled through into the composed soundtrack and everything becomes nicely porous. Not removing the listener from the Museum but drawing them closer.
The reality of the room tone recording experiment was very different from my expectations. In one sense, it was a disaster. The Museum refused to offer up its quietness to me. Rather than the anticipated pin-drop tranquillity, no amount of changing microphones or recorders, or scrolling through the various audio settings, could give me what I had been after. Even when all was still, light bulbs buzzed and air conditioning units made their presence felt. But stillness was a rarity, even in a Museum that was ostensibly shut. People moved – quite rightly – from place to place, creaking the floorboards or clicking the tiles with their heels and soles. They talked and whistled, rattled keys and polished, washed and vacuumed. But however far this was from what I had originally wanted, it was the Museum that I was listening to and recording and I think I can do interesting things with what filled up my little storage cards.
In a different sense, the morning spent recording was a great success. For one thing, I was able to spend an extended and undisrupted time close to the exhibits. For another thing, I got to talk at length with two of the curators and learned a great deal from them. Speaking to the curators was particularly inspiring in the sense that this little project took on an undeniable reality: having to explain what I was up to allowed me to understand what I was up to; realising how little time remained before I had to get everything together pushed me to move from thinking to doing. Finding a particular door closed only intensifies the struggle to find and then wrench open another.


